# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1940's Guide to Glamour, Dress and Posture - 1946 Film

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Female Body and its Position in Victorian Society

The Victorian age was one of great change largely brought about by the industrial revolution and the 'historical changes that characterized the Victorian period motivated discussion and argument about the nature and role of woman - what the Victorians called "The Woman Question."' Female writers were able to partake in discourse on their gender and writers such as the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Braddon were challenging conventions as to what constituted decent female behaviour in literature. Their inclusion of passionate heroines into their texts was controversial, the wider, 'respectable' public were offended by these ardent females who disregarded the traditional idea of 'femininity'. By modern standards novels such as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Ruth and Lady Audley's Secret, are considered to be relatively modest in their sexual content. However, for the Victorian period this was as passionate as literature could be and still be allowed to circulate publicly, due to the moral and social codes and the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.

Although this was a time when the rights and opportunities for women were expanding, their representation by males was often contradictory to the increased freedom they were experiencing. The female body has long been idealised, objectified and fetishized and this can be seen particularly in Victorian culture. Social rules and guidelines on how the female body should look, and how it should be dressed, objectified the body and encoded femininity within these rules. This made the portrayal of the female body a space for expression, 'oppression and sexual commodification.'

The convulsively changing Victorian era is traditionally represented as a society that is restrained by strict moral and social codes, yet the Victorians were not as repressed as they have customarily been portrayed. In particular this can be seen in its conflicting views on, and representations of, sexuality. On the one hand there are the 'official views of sexuality' that are substantiated by figures such as William Acton and perpetrate the idea that women have little or no sexual appetite, ostracising the women that do profess desires. On the other hand there is a wealth of literature, pornography and other sources that highlight the fact that the Victorians were not as sexually repressed as they have been depicted.

The Role of Hair in the Characterization of the 'Fallen Woman' in Victorian Culture

Hair is an important symbol in constructing identity; it is 'one of the primary ways we tell others who we are and by which others evaluate us.' In being a truly malleable aspect of the human body its countless ways for different presentation mean that it is 'uniquely suited for conveying symbolic meanings.' Although discourses on hair have always been present in culture, representations of hair in Victorian culture are especially prevalent and symbolic. No other writers have lavished so much attention on the physical properties of women's hair: its length, texture, color, style, curliness. There is scarcely a female character in Victorian fiction whose hair is not described at least perfunctorily, and often a woman's hair is described repeatedly and in considerable detail.

This fascination with hair relates to the fact that 'it was the only female body part - excepting the face - on constant display.' However, the abundant descriptions of hair are not just appertaining to aesthetic characterization, but could portray the social and moral position of the woman. As with many elements of Victorian England, strict social and moral codes dictated rules on how hair should be worn. Women were expected to wear their hair bound after marriage and keep it covered at church, for visits, and in formal situations. If chaste, covered hair was considered to be the epitome of genteel womanhood, then free flowing, loose hair was considered to be unchaste and a characteristic of a morally depraved woman:

A woman's long hair, after all, is the emblem of her femininity. More than that, it is a symbol of her sexuality, and the longer, thicker and more wanton the tresses, the more passionate the heart beneath them is assumed to be [...] Images of 'wanton' tresses abound in Pre-Raphaelite art of the time, and are frequently seen in works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement that challenged 'the Academy-based training with a vision that looked back to medieval and early-Italian art for inspiration' and held the 'aspiration to be true to nature and moral in content.' This morality can be seen in the image of the 'fallen woman' that Rossetti depicts in many of his paintings. The 'fallen woman' is an ideological construct that acts as a direct opposite to the chaste and feminine 'angel in the house'; the term could cover any woman that did not fit the rigorous moral standards of domestic normality.

Fig. 1. Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The painting, Lady Lilith, by Rossetti is an exemplary piece for the representation of a 'fallen woman', in this case taking the incarnation of the femme fatale: 'Engrossed in her own beauty, Lilith combs her lustrous, long, golden hair. Legendarily the first wife of Adam, her expression is cold, but her body voluptuously inviting.' The picture of Lady Audley depicted in the sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Braddon, echoes this cold and seductive painting: 'No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets [...] my lady, in his portrait of her, had the aspect of the beautiful fiend.'

The rich auburn locks of Lady Lilith are reminiscent of another 'fallen woman' in Victorian culture, 'Ruth', the title character of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel of the same name. Ruth is a fallen woman 'too sublimely innocent to understand the fact of her own fall' and through her naivety Gaskell creates sympathy for this eternally humble character, challenging social conventions on what constitutes as 'decent' female behaviour and content for literature. The transformations Ruth's hair undergoes directly relate to her fall and eventual rise in the novel. Her Pre-Raphaelite 'long waving glossy hair' which is a 'rich auburn' is indicative of the idea of the time of associating 'luxuriant hair with a luxuriant sexuality'. Ruth is viewed by many of the characters, and by readers of the time, as being a sexual deviant. Sally, the housekeeper, furthers this view through her castration of Ruth's hair upon discovering her status as a fallen woman:
I've lived with the family forty-nine year come Michaelmas, and I'll not see it disgraced by any one's fine long curls. Sit down and let me snip off your hair, and let me see you sham decently in a widow's cap to-morrow, or I'll leave the house.
In castrating the hair Sally has removed the visual representation of Ruth's sexual depravity. These are just a few examples out of a wealth of representations of hair in the Victorian time, yet they are indicative how hair could be utilised as a means of expression. The fetishization of female hair elucidates the wider objectification of Victorian women by both male writers and the 'social grammar' of the time. However, female writers like Gaskell were increasingly using descriptions of their heroine's hair to allow them to partake in a wider social discourse upon this fetishization of their bodies. The uncovering of hair symbolises the 'growing cultural, political and personal concerns with the difficulties of controlling, managing or channelling women's vigour.' The unruly locks are mimicking the unruly women who were beginning to turn the tables on their objectification.

The Wasp Waist: The act of Tight Lacing in Victorian Sexual Power Relations

The corset was a key underpinning of female attire in the Victorian era; the 'majority of middle-class women and large numbers of working-class women' wore corsets on a regular basis. It was vital to the creation of the ideal feminine shape, cinching in the waist but remaining 'desirably plump in other areas of the body [...].' This aspired silhouette was [...] enmeshed in larger constructions of femininity that emphasised the need for women's self-regulation and the regulation of appetite and that, further, linked the small waist to affluence and high social standing.

It is this link to self-regulation that led people to see the corset as the ultimate symbol, and indeed instrument, of female oppression. In Victorian Britain, the male and female spheres were polarized between the working male and the domestic female and these roles are furthered by the 'obvious definitions made by dress.' Groups such as the Rational Dress Society (1881) advocated a move away from the restricted and restricting female fashions that enslaved their wearer into delicate femininity, yet no real progress was made until a considerable amount of time after this point. However, questions were raised about the role and implications of 'this lowly piece of underwear' and debate upon the topic 'burned steadily throughout the nineteenth century.'

The corset could be seen as a garment of conflicting morals; on the one hand it created the fashionable silhouette that marked out the wearer as a delicate, feminine creature and on the other hand, the lady that denied the corset was often tarred with charges of 'sexual promiscuity or moral laxity' - which led to the use of the term 'loose morals', referring to their lack of corset. Although corsets deemed the wearer to be the ideal of demure femininity, it conversely also had the effect of emphasising two erogenous zones: pushing up the breasts and flaring out over the hips and genital area. In fact, the pressure that the diaphragm and chest underwent due to the shape of the corset created the 'peculiarly feminine heaving of bosoms so lovingly described in popular novels.' This enhancement of feminine sexuality can also be seen in the connotations that having a slender, delicate waist would have. A slender waist suggests that the woman has not borne children yet, implying virginity and pureness - and the virginal female was idealised by Victorian men.

In spite of all this, corsets remained popular and widely accepted in Victorian society and it was the somewhat more controversial act of tight lacing that was a more disputed topic. As the picture below shows, tight lacing is as the name suggests, a strict tightening of a rigid corset, or 'stays', that allowed the wearer to create the shape of a smaller and more circular waist. How widespread the practise was is widely disputed, yet the fact that it had such a large discourse around it denotes that it was a real concern of the time and as data from primary sources at the time show: 'while average corseted waist measurements varied between 20 and 23 inches, waist sizes of 18 to 16 inches were not considered exceptional [...].'

The negative effects of tight lacing were numerous; they displaced the organs from their natural positioning, made their wearers listless and weak, constant wear meant that the muscles underneath wasted away and they were cited as the cause of consumption, amongst other illnesses. The diagram below stresses the bodily deformation that women would undergo in order to pursue the desirous feminine proportions.

The arguments for and against tight lacing raged in the pages of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine between 1867 and 1874; they were reputedly sent in by tight lacers themselves, women opposing tight lacing, 'doctors and dress reformers [...].' However, many of these letters were written with a 'pronounced sadomasochistic tone' which suggests that these prurient letters may have been fraudulent and say 'more about the obsessions of its devotees and its opponents than about actual practice.'

If the corset in it its usual sense highlights sexuality, when it is tight laced it highlights it inexorably more; the virginally small waist provides erotic appeal through being a symbol of 'physical weakness and vulnerability, especially when juxtaposed with man's strength.' This highlights the 'submissive-masochistic role symbolized by the corset' that haunts the Victorian female; it represents 'both the sensual female body, and the chaste virgin; the female control over male desires, and the male's control over the female body [...].' The corset can be seen as one of the most apt symbols for the Victorian woman, oppressed by society and sexualised under male dominance.

The Female Genitalia as a Metaphorical 'Purse' and its Representations in Literature

In 1857, William Acton stated that 'Prostitution is now eating into the heart' of Victorian society. The prostitute is the 'fallen woman' personified, often pushed into this profession through the inability to gain work, poverty and circumstance, she is made into a social and moral pariah by society. However, whilst the prostitute was seen as morally depraved, for the Victorian man the use of prostitutes was widely acknowledged as a way to vent their animalistic sexual desires that they would not be able to express with their chaste wives. This double standard can be seen through the passing of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and its amendments in 1866 and 1869. The act 'legalised prostitution but entailed legislation enabling police to arrest woman suspected of being prostitutes and the subsequent examination of them for signs of venereal disease', it was hoped that by controlling the prostitutes the spread of disease would be slowed, yet no measures were put in place to inspect or chastise the man.

In light of the focus on prostitution in the Victorian period, it is perhaps unsurprising then that the female genitalia was likened to a metaphorical 'purse' as for the prostitute, it was the lure of the vagina that was proffered as bait to potential customers rather than the proverbial beggars hat. This slang word also correlates to the literal and euphemistic meanings of the word 'spending'. In the first sense the man who pays for the prostitute literally spends money on sexual intercourse, and in the latter sense 'spending' was a term for orgasm and ejaculation. For the two euphemistic terms the fact that the man is dropping his payment into the purse of the prostitute remains true.

In the poem Jenny, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as the narrator describes the sleeping woman, the 'purse' metaphor is used throughout. His cold and misogynistic view towards her is seen when he muses:

Whose person or whose purse may be

The lodestar of your reverie?

He believes that she is a prostitute purely to become rich - disregarding the fact that she may only be in this situation because she has no other choice. However, Robin Sheets suggests that 'given the association between purses and female genitalia, the young man's account of Jenny's fantasies probably represents a displacement of his own.'

Furthermore, the use of the euphemistic 'purse' can be seen in the vitally important text Fanny Hill. Considered to be one of the first pornographic texts, Fanny Hill was actually published mid-eighteenth century, yet it is such an important text in the discourse of sexuality because it was 'revolutionary in its open message to enjoy sex and sexuality [...].' The novel is important due to the controversy it sparked that crossed over the centuries; cataloguer of pornographical material, Henry Spencer Ashbee listed twenty prohibited editions of the book between 1749 and 1845 alone. In a typically voyeuristic scene, the reader garners a graphic view of the character Mrs Brown's genitalia.

As he stood on one side, unbuttoning his waistcoat and breeches, her fat brawny thighs hung down, and the whole greasy landscape lay fairly open to my view; a wide open mouthed gap, overshaded with a grizzly bush, seemed held out like a beggar's wallet for its provision.

Whilst bringing to mind the metaphor of the 'purse', Cleland portrays the character of Mrs Brown through this description; it is not the feminine and delicate 'purse', but a 'greasy', gaping and masculine 'beggar's wallet', evoking an unattractive image of leatheriness. This objectification of the female genitalia into a non-sexualised and inanimate object is a view that endorses the female as a non-sexual being: the vagina here is perpetrated as being used for financial gain only, not for sexual pleasure. 'Respectable' Victorian society largely disregarded the female sexual drive. As science and knowledge of the sexual anatomy was furthered it was discovered that it was the male sperm that chose the female egg, moving the woman from the centrifugal role as creator, to being simply the host for the man's child. In this shift in sexual thinking, the female orgasm was left behind and considered defunct. Significant doctor of the time, William Acton, had stated that 'the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind' and the 'sad exceptions' to the rule were considered depraved or hysterical.

The Virginal Bottom: Flagellation and Pornography in the Victorian era

The Victorian age marked the era when pornography became an industry as the ability for mass printing meant that pornography could be made widely available. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 made distributing this material harder, yet it did not stop the flood, it merely pushed it underground. Of the many sexual practises portrayed in pornographical material, there is one that became so prolific in England that it became known as 'Le Vice Anglais' (the English Vice): the act of flagellation. Although flagellation stems from religious penance, it became entangled with sexual desire and flagellomania was rife in the Victorian era. The significance that flagellomania had can be seen in the existence of flagellation brothels where customers could pay to undertake a flogging for sexual gratification. One brothel in particular held a reputation for flagellation: the brothel belonging to Theresa Berkley. Berkley created a special apparatus, named the Berkley Horse, to assist the flagellation of her customers.

Flogging was not only important in the sexual sense as the issue was also discussed in relation to the ostensibly non-sexual flogging of children for punishment. However, similar to the issue of tight lacing, the discussions within the public forums, such as the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and the Family Herald, were often originating from 'prurient or [...] questionable motives.' These spurious letters were sadomasochistic and pornographic in tone and were often related to the punitive nature of girl's boarding schools.

The idea of the boarding school as an arena for flagellation and punishment can be seen in the flagellatory story The Mysteries of Verbena House. At last the bottom of the Bellasis was really exposed to view. It was a real perfect posterior. It swelled out grandly, properly, and gradually from a sloping small of the back that would have satisfied a Grecian sculptor. There were two lovely dimples just above the top and below a couple of sharply-defined creases, caused by the over powering swelling of the hemispheres, now that the thighs were tightly pressed together. [...] They showed health by their hardness, and terror by the goose-flesh look they had [...] It was a regal bum, yet tough withal. One that would take a fair amount of punishment [...].

Important here is the portrayal of the Victorian female bottom in flagellatory literature. Pornography was based on the pleasures and sensations of the body, as opposed to the realm of the mind seen in Victorian high art. The Victorian age was also concerned with the cataloguing of bodily parts and, disguised as it was by layers of petticoats or crinolines, the female bottom became a shining beacon for flagellation fetishists.

Whilst it is true that being the flagellator or the receiver of the flagellation brought pleasure to both sexes, it is this fascination with objectifying the female body that shines through in much flagellatory work. The Experimental Lecture by Colonel Spanker (1878) is a prime example of this. The Experimental Lecture is an obscene sadomasochistic text that revolves around the fictional Colonel Spanker and his idea that 'the punishment and degradation of a refined young lady produces more exquisite pleasures that flogging consenting lower-class women and prostitutes [...].' Throughout the text the tortured female's bottom is referred to as being 'tight looking' and the desire is expressed for it to '"blush like her face!"' The fetishization of the virginal, white bottom that needs to be tarnished by the rod is all too reminiscent of the position of the female in society. This sexual idea links to the nineteenth century pornographical trope of the masculine breaking in of the horse, exacting power over the female in order to 'tame' her wilder tendencies and turn her into the pinnacle of domesticity.
The Erotic Ankle: The Myth of the Sexualised Piano Leg
The Victorian era has often been termed as repressed both socially and sexually, however this is clearly not the case and the myth of the covered piano legs is metonymic of this fact. The traditional view of Victorian sexuality is that they 'were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt compelled to cover up the legs of their pianos; they obscured signs of the body even where they existed only by inference.' Certainly the strict dress codes of the time denote that female legs and ankles remain covered under swathes of fabric and to bare them is considered wholly indecent. Yet the idea that the Victorians covered the legs of their pianos as they were too provocative and evocative of the hidden female form is a common misconception.

The real sexualities of the Victorians can be seen through the discourse that surrounds them, such as sensational novels, pornography and prurient letters in respectable magazines. One book that is particularly relevant in this sense is My Secret Life by 'Walter'. My Secret Life was an epic eleven-volume text written under the pseudonym 'Walter' and was published in 1888. Although it can never be verified that all of the events in this text really took place, it is one of the most extensive and comprehensive accounts of Victorian sexual experience. Throughout the text he meets and copulates with countless women, and portrays these women as having sexual desires and finding enjoyment in sex. It is clear to see that Victorian sexualities are complex and contradictory, yet the discourse that surrounds them proves their existence - despite the 'official' social and moral viewpoints that would state otherwise. These divergent sexualities manifest themselves upon the canvas of the female body, showing the conflicting sexual status that she holds in society.

Acton, William, Prostitution considered in its moral, social, and sanitary aspects (London: John Churchill, 1857)

' Background ', in Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery) Access date 10th May 2012

Bayles Kortsch, Christine, Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction: Literacy, Textiles and Activism (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009)

Bayles Kortsch, Christine, Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction: Literacy, Textiles and Activism (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009)

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, Lady Audley's Secret (London: Atlantic Books, 2009)

Cleland, John, Fanny Hill (London: Penguin, 1985)

Cooper, WM. M., Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in all Countries from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (London: John Camden Hotten, 1869)

Cunningham, Patricia A., Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850 - 1920: Politics, health, and art (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003)

Etonensis, The Mysteries of Verbena House; or, Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving. (Birchgrove Press, 2011)

Gaskell, Elizabeth, Ruth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Krugovoy Silver, Anna, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Marcus, Stephen, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2009)

Matus, Jill L., Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Ofek, Galia, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009)

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 'Jenny', in Poems (London: F.S. Ellis, 1871)

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Lady Lilith, Access date 21st May 2012

Steele, Valerie, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Sweet, Matthew, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2001)

Wagner, Peter, 'Introduction', in John Cleland, Fanny Hill (London: Penguin, 1985)

Weitz, Rose, Rapunzel's Daughters: What women's hair tells us about women's lives (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Fetishization and Objectification of the Female Body in Victorian Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Female Body and its Position in Victorian Society The Victorian age was one of great change largely brought about by the industrial revolution and the 'historical changes that characterized the Victorian period motivated discussion and argument about the nature and role of woman - what the Victorians called "The Woman Question."' Female writers were able to partake in discourse on their gender and writers such as the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Braddon were challenging conventions as to what constituted decent female behaviour in literature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Lady-Like Elegance of Sitting Gracefully

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The way you move, dress, talk and even sit says something about you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
why do women have to sit ladylike - Google Search

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sitting with good posture and in a modest manner often contributes to a sense of confidence and self-assurance. It reflects inner poise and can positively influence how others perceive and interact with you. Step as close to the front of the chair as you can. Turn and prepare your body for the sitting posture.Sep 17, 2024

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A rigid construct of how "real" men are supposed to behave leaves many feeling trapped, new research we carried out suggests.

While most support gender equality, the young men in the UK, US and Mexico reported feeling pushed to live in the "man box". They feel pressure to act tough, hide weakness and "look good". This can have damaging effects on their health and wellbeing, as well as their relationships with each other, and with women and children.

Alongside online surveys conducted for this international study, we convened focus groups with men between the ages of 18 and 30 in London and the north of England, representing diverse backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, religion and class.

The men we spoke to were keenly aware of influences - from family, peers, teachers, media - encouraging them to conform to certain models of masculinity. One said: "There is pressure everywhere to tell you what man you should be." Another added: "You have to be a young man who's got a nice house, who's got a nice car, who's got a family with kids, who's got a good job." At the same time, many felt that these images were difficult to live up to and remote from their experience.

The young men in our groups supported gender equality in theory. But many held on to traditional ideas about gender roles. They saw men as "breadwinners" or "protectors" and women as "carers" and felt that societal attitudes hadn't changed dramatically.

"The jobs that society has a higher regard for ... fall to men," one said. Nevertheless, a small number expressed resentment at what they regarded as the more favourable treatment of young women - including young mothers, when it came to custody issues or domestic disputes. "In the eyes of social media, social services and the law, the girl's always right when it comes to the child," said another.

Most of the young men in our focus groups claimed to be tolerant towards homosexuality - "you wouldn't discriminate against a gay person" - while recognising that prejudice still exists in wider society. However, sexuality was clearly a topic that some found difficult to talk about in a group setting.

Under pressure

The young men we spoke with were aware of pressure to "look good". Many had gone through a phase of working out but most had concluded that it was unhealthy and unfulfilling. That said, they thought the pressures on young women to conform to a particular body image were more intense than for young men.

Violence is still a feature of many young men's lives, with some regarding it as a way of maintaining status and an inevitable part of becoming a man. "It shapes young boys into men," said one. But some resented being seen as a threat and felt targeted by the police when out in public simply because they were young and male.

Some saw admitting to emotional problems as a sign of weakness. One spoke of dealing with mental health issues by "disconnecting myself a lot from other people, because I thought that was the manly thing to do". Others admitted that they found it difficult to express their feelings and were reluctant to seek help when distressed. One said: "Men, we just deal with it differently ... we've got other channels of expressing our feelings." Others admitted that if they were having problems they would just "bottle it up and get on with it" or even "turn it into a bit of a joke".

Personal relationships were important for these young men. Many spoke warmly about the support they had from their families. As one put it: "They always had my back." A number had grown up without a father, but many had positive relationships with their mothers and other female relatives.

Friendships were important too, with one young man saying that with friends "you don't feel like you have to put up a front". But others expressed regret at the prospect of losing close male friendships as they grew older, highlighting the risks of isolation and loneliness.

These focus groups have been part of a wider international study, which argues that breaking free from the "man box" is not something young men can do on their own. It concludes that parents, educators, the media, teachers, girlfriends, boyfriends, and others need to be part of the process of reinforcing positive, equitable, unrestrictive ideas of manhood.

Our discussions present a similarly complex picture. They confirm the importance of listening to young men's own perspectives on their lives and demonstrate that they need support in resisting pressures to conform to the expectations and in realising their full potential.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Act tough and hide weakness: research reveals pressure young men are under

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A rigid construct of how "real" men are supposed to behave leaves many feeling trapped, new research we carried out suggests. While most support gender equality, the young men in the UK, US and Mexico reported feeling pushed to live in the "man box". They feel pressure to act tough, hide weakness and "look good".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A rigid construct of what makes a "real man" is putting a strain on real young men, says new research.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
fforts have been made to challenge traditional stereotypes, but there is still pressure on men to be strong, independent, stoical, competitive and tough. According to research published by the American Psychological Association, these "masculine traits" have been linked with mental health issues such as depression and substance abuse.

Joel Wong, who led the research team at Indiana University Bloomington, said: "In general, individuals who conformed strongly to masculine norms tended to have poorer mental health and less favourable attitudes toward seeking psychological help, although the results differed depending on specific types of masculine norms."

The research collated results of more than 70 US-based studies involving more than 19,000 men over 11 years. It focused on the relationship between mental health and conformity to 11 masculine norms. They included a desire to win, need for emotional control, and risk-taking.

The traits most closely linked to mental health problems were playboy behaviour or sexual promiscuity, Wong said.

We asked a group to talk about their own experiences of mental health and what they thought of this new analysis.

Depression feels like there's a fog surrounding me. It is closing in and I cannot see what's in front of me. It's all-consuming and nothing else matters. I can see the fog building but I am powerless to stop it.

I experienced depression for about a decade before accepting what was going on. As a man it's definitely much harder to talk about your emotions. It was my wife who made me go to the doctor. I had been behaving erratically: talking about killing myself, disappearing off for hours and leaving her worried sick. I was eventually diagnosed with clinical depression.

I used to work in a shipyard. Among those I worked with there was an old-fashioned view of being a man

The pressure to uphold the traditional idea of masculinity stopped me getting help earlier. I come from the north and used to work in a shipyard. Among those I worked with there was an old-fashioned view of being a man - we don't talk about our feelings. If you get upset about anything other than football you are considered a "sissy". When people say, "How are you doing?", if you say "A bit crap" the classic response was: "Could be worse."

It was the same with older members of my family, who'd say, "Just get on with it". Don't complain or talk about what's going on with you. It took me a long time to open up. Even going to a counsellor was difficult; talking about feelings was something women did.

But talking was exactly what I needed to do, and I am now training to be a counsellor. I lost a lot of friends, especially male ones, opening up about my depression. There's a huge stigma around it. Doing counselling and getting involved with local charities, people have said talking to me made them feel better. I've had men thank me because it made them realise they are not alone. Men need to accept that talking is good and that the hardest part is showing emotion. Walking around with a smile on your face, telling jokes - that's the easy part. But talking about life and your feelings, rather than how your football team did or how many pints you drank on Saturday night, is much harder.

Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

I have suffered from poor mental health since I was about 16; I remember this vividly because I began to self-harm. It was also around this time that people started saying to me, "You need to talk to someone". It took three years, two failed relationships and one botched suicide attempt for me to finally take this advice.

Looking back now, aged 25, I can see why, like many men, I found accessing mental healthcare so difficult. Masculine ideals of self-reliance, stoicism, sexual promiscuity and dominance over women do not lend themselves to emotional vulnerability. But it's important to realise that this is not a mindset that suddenly appears. Rather, it's instilled into men from a young age. I have personally lost count of the times I have heard parents of young boys admonish their own or other people's sons for being "too sensitive" or "soft". So acknowledging and addressing how we raise boys is vital here.

We must not dismiss the role culture plays in how men view and approach mental health. When I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder there was one clear message my African parents wanted me to understand: you keep this to yourself. For years I was discouraged from getting help and actually felt guilty when I did. For many black communities taboos around mental health undoubtedly exist. But more than this, there is the awareness within these communities that structural racism means black boys, as well as black girls, are already at a societal disadvantage. Higher unemployment rates, longer prison sentences, lack of representation in media, politics and business and numerous other statistics will attest to this. The fear that poor mental health will simply be another stigma for black men to have to fight, coupled with many preexisting taboos, makes for a very tough battle for many.

With all this in mind, I often ask myself what can be done to help. I do not believe any man wants to feel emotionally closed off, lonely and isolated and I know they don't want to be taking their own lives at the rate they are. By looking at the most sacred commandment of alpha masculinity, I believe it is possible to start to allow many men to address what they truly value, ask whether they are living according to their own standards and hopefully in this way begin to form a healthier relationship with their mental health.

Over the years I've had bouts of depression and anxiety. I've experienced severe sleep problems and suicidal thoughts. With years of psychotherapy I now know that all these are symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is like PTSD but instead of being caused by a single traumatic event with flashbacks, it is caused by chronic or long-term exposure to emotional trauma.

My mental health has been helped almost exclusively by strong friendships and professional relationships with women and their empathy towards me. Had I been sexist, I can't see how these important relationships would have developed. So I imagine there is a correlation with sexism and poor mental health, but I doubt that "masculinity" is the cause of poor mental health, rather that classical masculinity, which involves objectifying others, is non-empathetic and perhaps indicates other issues. I would imagine there is a similar correlation with racists and poor mental health. So I would consider the key factor to be one that is not exclusive to men, but affects all people who severely lack empathy and isolate themselves as a result.

In the past I've maybe found it harder as a man to talk to people about mental health, but not nowadays. I used to find it harder, because to talk, you need a support network but with severe mental health problems you can scare people off and have no support. Now I have this and I have different people to talk to. But to have empathetic friends, it really helps to be empathetic too, so you can share problems.

It can be very hard to admit vulnerability. Perhaps being a fairly big guy it's easy to appear manly, to play that role, but the traits of "manliness" leave so little space for other important elements of our humanity. Traits that society might portray as more "feminine," such as compassion, understanding and care, are essential, and sources of great strength.

Men feel they aren't allowed to open up, even to themselves, for fear of being seen as weak or unattractive.
From boyhood we are told to be brave and ambitious, overcoming obstacles on sports fields, battlefields, boardrooms. But we don't see many of the mental challenges we face in this way. They are seen as weaknesses that shouldn't be there, rather than parts of everyone's lives.

We will all face grief, loss, and relationship issues, and these challenges take their toll, so we'd do well to seek to equip ourselves with understanding.

Photograph: Rob Mattingley/Getty Images

Being a man: it's hard to know where to start

Thomas

There's a Leonard Cohen line I often think of, when he went on stage and couldn't perform for some reason. He said he didn't feel strong enough because "somehow the male and female parts of me refuse to encounter one another tonight". I like the idea of acknowledging that both need to combine in an individual for a person to function. The same is true of society. By balancing notions of strength which tend to be thought of in a binary way, as either feminine or masculine, people might be much healthier. A world without sexism would be better for everyone. Not only would women be respected, but men might be better able to appreciate more feminine traits and strengths, in others and in themselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'As boys, we are told to be brave': men on masculinity and mental health

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
fforts have been made to challenge traditional stereotypes, but there is still pressure on men to be strong, independent, stoical, competitive and tough. According to research published by the American Psychological Association, these "masculine traits" have been linked with mental health issues such as depression and substance abuse.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion: As a gay man, I know how damaging it is to idealise the idea of the ‘twink’

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As I developed dark body hair, I was repeatedly told that this was not desirable on a young, slim man like me. This stung every time, especially as the feeling of rejection was being inflicted by members of my own community

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For the first decade of my life as a gay man, countless older homosexuals branded me as a twink. For those outside the gay world, the term probably conjures up images of those Hostess desserts-vanilla cake on the outside, sweet and creamy in the center. Similar to those treats, twinks are usually white, smooth, and everyone wants to eat their insides. But the word is not really one of endearment. Just as soon as an older gay would jump at the chance to rim the asshole of one of those "hairless manboys," he'd also deride the twink for his over-the-top flamboyancy.

Being labeled a twink is like getting the scarlet letter of the gay universe. The first time I remember being called one was at a grimy, now defunct gay strip club in Oakland, Florida, called Oz when I was 18. A geezer who looked like the Penguin in Batman Returns mistook me for one of the gay dancers whipping their dicks around for dollars and yelped out, "Twink!" The way it rolled off his tongue stung. I could sense his lust and his scorn. And it made me, a young gay man just coming into his own, feel kind of small. From then on, I endured a constant stream of twink-calling-especially when I made the mistake of wearing cutoff shorts or a tight-fitting white T-shirt. It wasn't until last summer that it finally stopped, thanks to a beard and chest hair (which has, unfortunately, earned me another derogatory moniker- otter).

Because many homosexuals have internalized society's hatred for feminine gay men, being labeled a twink means you embody all of their self-loathing, even if you make their dicks hard in the process. The problem is that even though everyone talks about twinks, masturbates to twinks, and wants to fuck twinks, we rarely ever hear from twinks themselves. To figure out what twinks think about the way they are fetishized and criticized in the gay community, I interviewed a bunch of young gay men in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They talked about how they feel about the term and why, as one twink told me, " Twink isn't a four-letter word."

John Tuite, model and writer

VICE: Where did you first hear the word twink?
John Tuite: Porn.

Do you identify as a twink?
Obviously not.

Does it bother you that you look like a twink?
I feel like if you let it bother you, you're letting the word beat you. The fact that the gay community could come up with a word that's so derogatory-and has a negative connotation for being young, thin, and attractive-shows how self-loathing the whole gay community is.

When did you realize twink was a bad word?
Just from people's tones and the kind of things that they would say when anyone says stuff like, "You're a twink." It's always looking down on someone.

Do men objectify you because of your twinkiness?
Not only gay men-but straight women, too. If anyone tries to touch me or talk to me like that, I'm walking the fuck away.

Do you worry about the day when you will no longer have a twinky body?
I lift weights all the time, but no matter how much I work out, I weigh the same.

Does aging scare you, though?
Kind of, actually. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I'm like, Holy shit, I look like my dad. That's scary, but that's something everyone deals with.

Do you feel like gay culture both idolizes and hates youth?
I think they're just jealous. I'm tall and lanky, and I have no ass. If that makes me a twink, then so be it. But I think the important thing is that there's nothing attractive about a 30-year-old twink. You can't be a twink forever-that's just kind of messed up.

Do you think people want to be twinks forever?
Yeah, once they're old, they're desperate and clinging on to this stupid concept of twinkdom. The only people who would call themselves twinks are old and desperate and perverts.

Benjamin Sands, student

When did you first hear the word twink?
Benjamin Sands: When I was realizing I was gay. So 13, 14.

Do you identify as a twink?
Yeah.

Why?
Because that's what I've been told.

Why do you think they call you twinky?
I still fall into that [body-type] category, and I feel like the way that I look [makes guys] expect me to be submissive, so it's fun to play with that.

How do you play with the submissiveness?
That comes through in the sexual arena, and it's more nuanced. I would say that I'm a pretty outgoing, aggressive person. But it takes a while for that to come out. So it's getting to know people and letting them see other, more intense sides of me. I come across as more submissive at first.

Do you think everyone assumes a twink is a bottom?
Yeah, definitely.

Is that fair?
No, I definitely don't think that. I remember one time I was dating a guy-and this was when I was basically just a top-and he made a huge deal about the concept of a twink top and how we're like unicorns.

Do you ever worry about what's going to happen when you age?
I've actually thought about that-the trope of the aging twink. It's viewed as dismal, but I think that just comes with the lifestyle and how you carry yourself and what situations you put yourself into. If you're a 30-year-old twink and still acting like you're 21 and being really sloppy, that's when negative connotations can come to it. But I don't worry at all.

Do you see the word twink as both a compliment and an insult?
I don't think I'd ever be insulted if someone called me a twink-that's lazy. That's a lazy insult. There are so many other things you could come to me with.

Do you perceive it as a loaded term?
I totally understand whatever it carries, but why, like, would you give a fuck about that? Eat my ass.

Victor and Dean, Juilliard dance students

How do you feel about the word twink?
Victor: It's a confusing term because I think there are a lot of people who are considered twinks, but I think it's a word that is used to encapsulate a large percent of skinny young gay guys. Just because you're skinny and young and gay doesn't mean that you're a twink.

Dean: I agree that it's a generalization for a large group of people, and I don't think it's fair to classify a certain type of person just because of a definition of a word. I do also think that it insinuates submissiveness. But I don't completely agree with that either. I like to be dominant and submissive. I like a balance.

Does the submissive stereotype bother you?
Victor: Well, in my case, I think it's true.

Why do you think people automatically assume you're submissive?
Victor: Because we're small.

Dean: Yeah, because we're small.

Are you comfortable with being called a twink?
What I've been trying to get at is I think it's a word that we could very well be [labeled], and I see that often. But I don't want that word to cage us. I don't think it does. I don't think it ends there. Yeah, there are aspects of us that are twinky, but there's much more than just that.

Harry Koepp, student

Do you identify as a twink?
Harry Koepp: I think it would be really gross to self-identify as a twink, but I can definitely see it.

Why do you look like a twink?
I'm skinny. I'm gay. I've been gay for a long time, so I was like a gay child, basically. And I still look like a gay child even though I'm 21.

What's your take on the old men who call you a twink on the street and in bars?
I think they are jealous of us. And I think that they really want to hit it, and when they can't, they get that man-rage thing. It's like the equivalent of straight guys seeing really hot girls that they're never gonna fuck and then getting mad.

Does everyone assume you're a bottom?
Just to set the record straight, I am not a bottom. I think that you can enjoy something without defining yourself as that. It's definitely something I enjoy, but it's not the only thing I enjoy. That would be limiting myself, you know?

Do you worry about what's going to happen when you're no longer a twink?
No. I think that I'm charming enough that even if I get disgusting, people will still want to fuck me.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter, and see more photos by Sam Clarke here.

Makeup by Mara Palumbo, who made these twinks twinkle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Deconstructing the Self-Loathing and Desire Surrounding the Word 'Twink'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Young, thin gay men talk about being fetishized and derided by the larger homosexual community.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gender Norms: What They Are, How They Impact Us And How To Change Them | BØWIE Creators — Home of Queer & Feminist Creators

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As of today, most of us are aware that there is a need for more inclusion of women and the LGBTIQ+ community all around the world. We know that society has certain rules and that they benefit some people more than others. We know that these ‘others’ are people facing discrimination on the basis of t…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
The British Newspaper Archive Blog | Amazing finds and news from over 300 years of historical newspapers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
18th Century Molly Houses – London’s Gay Subculture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this special blog, celebrating Pride Month, we delve into our newspapers and beyond to explore 18th Century Molly Houses - London’s gay subculture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If we really have entered the Age of the Twink, we need to understand the pain the twink body has endured and the pain it helps to perpetuate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Furniture is often overlooked as a mundane feature of the home. But its resonance in our lives is much more profound, writes author Ian Sansom.

Furniture contains numerous traces of what we are and who we are and who we think we are.

Cupboards, for example, contain our past - as well as our regrets and secrets. Keys which fit no locks, pieces of paper with obsolete phone numbers and pin numbers written on them, stray playing cards, inexplicable plastic things and old French francs. Why we keep any of this stuff I do not know, except as something to hand on to our own children, to keep in cupboards of their own - our endless inheritance of waste.

Our wardrobes, meanwhile, suggest who we might have become, and where we might have gone. In 1908 E Nesbit published a story in Blackie's Children's Annual, titled The Aunt and Amabel. In the story, a young girl, Amabel, is punished by her aunt for cutting off the heads of flowers in the greenhouse. Furious, the aunt confines poor Amabel to the spare bedroom, where she discovers a book of railway timetables which list a destination called Whereyouwanttogoto.

"This was odd," writes Nesbit, "but the name of the station from which it started was still more extraordinary, for it was not Euston or Cannon Street or Marylebone. The name of the station was Bigwardrobeinspareroom." And so Amabel embarks on her adventure.

In 1948 CS Lewis wrote to a friend that he was attempting to write a children's book "in the tradition of E Nesbit". The children's book he wrote was, of course, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, published in 1950, and one of the Nesbit traditions he borrowed was the magic wardrobe. Lewis uses his wardrobe to enter an entirely different realm - his destination is the Celestial City.

Like wardrobes, beds act as transports for the imagination also. Writers in particular love to work on the horizontal. Milton's Paradise Lost was mostly written in bed. As was much of Winston Churchill's history of World War Two. Truman Capote claimed that he couldn't think properly unless he was lying down. He liked to start his day in bed with coffee and then move on to mint tea, to sherry and finally to martinis - his bed was a bar.

Furniture also has an emblematic and symbolic function - think of Van Gogh's famous paintings of two chairs, Gauguin's chair and his own, which vividly represent what he imagined to be the difference between him and his friend. Gauguin's chair is a dark brown-red, with generous curved arm-rests, its seat loaded with books and with a candle set upon it, erect and flickering - an image of warmth, wealth, contentment, learning, potency and power. Van Gogh's chair, on the other hand, is yellow, plain and rickety - it looks very much as though it has been made by someone who could do with a little more practice on their mortise and tenon joints. It is a simple man's chair - a poor man, but an honest man.

All furniture communicates meaning - it's unavoidable. It's what things do. A bed speaks of our inner lives, of the body and the soul. Our cupboards and cabinets imply secrets. Wardrobes suggest our dreams of other worlds. And tables invite company.

There are perhaps more kinds of tables than there are of any other type of furniture - kitchen tables, coffee tables, refectory tables, drafting tables, billiard tables, chess tables, table-tennis tables, communion tables, dressing tables, operating tables, library tables, bedside tables, night tables, and side- and end- and sofa tables.

There are innumerable uses for all these tables, but just one thing that unites them, apart from the obvious fact that they all have flat, horizontal surfaces - they are all gathering places, for both people and things. It is significant that the table is at the centre of religious practices - in Judaism, in the home, in Christianity, at the altar - and our language of course is replete with metaphors using tables as proverbial meeting places and negotiating platforms. We put a deal on the table. We drink someone under the table - and then we turn the tables on them. The table is the place where we interact with others - with family, friends, colleagues, rivals - and enemies.

The value of a table, like all pieces of furniture, lies in its history. We might make it, but furniture in turn makes us. It shapes us, defines us, and determines our everyday lives.

Novelist and academic Ian Sansom's week-long series of The Essay: Furniture: A Personal History of Movable Objects runs from Monday 7 April - Friday 11 April at 22.45 BST on BBC Radio 3.

Is there a piece of furniture which holds particular meaning for you?

Send a picture and tell the story behind the furniture using instructions below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The hidden meaning within your furniture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Furniture is often overlooked as a mundane feature of the home. But its resonance in our lives is much more profound, writes author Ian Sansom. Furniture contains numerous traces of what we are and who we are and who we think we are. Cupboards, for example, contain our past - as well as our regrets and secrets.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How the “queer people can’t sit properly” meme rejects strictly defined rules about what we can do with our bodies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Queer culture is not sitting down in chairs the ‘normal’ way - Queerty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sitting in chairs with feet planted on the floor? Ugh, how heteronormative.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

Objectum-sexuality (OS) is a sexual orientation which has received little attention in the academic literature. Individuals who identify as OS experience emotional, romantic and/or sexual feelings towards inanimate objects (e.g. a bridge, a statue). We tested 34 OS individuals and 88 controls, and provide the first empirical evidence that OS is linked to two separate neurodevelopmental traits - autism and synaesthesia. We show that OS individuals possess significantly higher rates of diagnosed autism and significantly stronger autistic traits compared to controls, as well as a significantly higher prevalence of synaesthesia, and significant synaesthetic traits inherent in the nature of their attractions. Our results suggest that OS may encapsulate autism and synaesthesia within its phenomenology. Our data speak to debates concerning the biological underpinnings of sexuality, to models of autism and synaesthesia, and to psychological and philosophical models of romantic love.

Introduction

Categories or continua of sexual orientation are recognised in social, psychological, political and biological sciences. One orientation almost entirely absent from this research arena is objectum-sexuality (OS; also known as objectophilia). OS individuals describe experiencing emotional, romantic and/or sexual feelings towards inanimate objects or structures. For example, Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer has described her romantic attraction towards the Berlin Wall1 and others have written similarly about their feelings towards a range of objects (e.g., a bridge, a fence, a statue, an electronic soundboard)2. Our background in synaesthesia3,4 and autism5,6 led us to recognise potential features of both conditions from anecdotal descriptions given by OS individuals-and these features have also been noted by others7. For example, one survey7 found that a high number of OS individuals (six out of 21) anecdotally reported autism, a set of neurodevelopmental traits that encompass difficulties in social communication, repetitive/routine behaviours, special interests, and sensitivity to sensory stimuli8. Although this earlier survey included no significance tests or baselines, it is possible calculate the prevalence of autism within that OS group (28.57%), and this is significantly higher than the general population estimate of 1.46%9 (χ ²(1) = 16.14, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.09, 0.50]). Another neurodevelopmental trait potentially relevant to OS is synaesthesia10, which affects around 4% of the general population11 but occurs at higher rates in autism6,12,13. Synaesthesia gives rise to an unusual fusing of sensations-for example, experiencing a sense of colour when reading letters or numbers ( grapheme-colour synaesthesia 14). Important for our purposes here, is that some forms of synaesthesia imbue inanimate objects with genders or personalities. Hence people with object-personification synaesthesia 15,16 might feel that their house-keys are female, or that their pocket watch is shy. Other triggers are linguistic sequences such as letters and numbers (e.g., J might feel motherly, 7 might feel selfish; and this is known as grapheme-personification synaesthesia or ordinal linguistic personification 4,17). These synaesthetic personifications have known neurological roots16,18 and are reminiscent of descriptions given anecdotally by OS individuals about the objects they are attracted towards. Given the potential overlap between OS, autism, and synaesthesia, our study is the first to explore the relationship among them, using empirical behavioural testing.

In our study we tested 34 self-identified OS individuals and 88 controls, using questionnaires and objective measures related to OS, autism and synaesthesia. If OS is linked with autism, we predict significantly higher rates of diagnosed autism in our OS group, compared to controls and population baselines9. We will also use the Autism Spectrum Quotient19 (AQ) to measure autistic traits, and predict that the OS group will show significantly higher autistic traits compared to controls. We will also investigate a possible link between OS and synaesthesia, and make several predictions. If OS is linked with synaesthesia, we first predict that OS individuals should describe complex personality traits for their object-partners, similar to those found in object-personification synaesthesia15,16. These complex synaesthesia-like percepts should also be consistent over time, which is the 'gold standard' hallmark of synaesthesia20,21 (i.e., genuine synaesthetic associations remain unchanged when repeatedly probed). We therefore followed widely-accepted synaesthesia protocols3,22 to determine whether OS individuals show the synaesthetic hallmark of consistency-over-time in the personalities they attribute to objects. To do this, we first asked OS individuals whether they felt personifications in their object-partners (i.e., the objects they were attracted towards). We then assessed the consistency of these personifications by giving a surprise retest 30 minutes later. In our test and retest, OS individuals described their object-partners using 44 personality adjectives (e.g. outgoing, conscientious, artistic) which they rated on a 5-point Likert scale from "Definitely disagree" to "Definitely agree". This approach maps personality into five dimensions ( Openness to Experience, Contentiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism 23) based on the Big-5 personality model24. Control participants were asked to invent personifications for their "most-loved or favourite object" via the everyday mechanisms of anthropomorphism (i.e., the common tendency to attribute humanlike characteristics to nonhuman agents; e.g., "I love my car but she's temperamental"). In summary, both groups described personalities for objects in a test and retest, and we compared each group's consistency-over-time (a hallmark of synaesthesia).

If OS is linked with synaesthesia we also predict that OS individuals may show a more general synaesthetic phenotype, and therefore present with additional forms of synaesthesia. Epidemiological studies show that multiple forms of synaesthesia tend to co-occur within the same individual3. For example, synaesthetes with grapheme-personification synaesthesia have significantly elevated rates of grapheme-colour synaesthesia17. We therefore screened our participants for two additional forms of synaesthesia, using objective diagnostic tests for grapheme-personification synaesthesia25 and grapheme-colour synaesthesia26. We chose grapheme-colour synaesthesia because it is the most widely tested and well-understood variant of synaesthesia and we chose grapheme-personification synaesthesia because it shows phenomenological similarities with object personification. If OS is related to synaesthesia, we predict higher rates of these synaesthesias within OS individuals.

In summary, if OS is linked with autism, we predict higher rates of autism diagnosis and autism traits in OS individuals, compared to population and control baselines. If OS is linked to synaesthesia, we predict that OS individuals will experience complex personality traits for their admired objects (as found in object-personification synaesthesia), a high level of consistency when describing these personality traits (as found in synaesthesia more broadly), and a higher prevalence of other synaesthesias (grapheme-personification or grapheme-colour synaesthesia) compared to population and control baselines.

Methods

Participants

We tested 122 participants comprising 34 OS individuals (18 female, 5 male, 11 other; mean age 32.85, range 17-67, SD = 12.88) and 88 controls without OS (63 female; mean age 19.15, range 18-24, SD = 1.18). OS is extremely rare and our study recruited the largest cohort of this population in the scientific literature to date. Power analyses showed that 20 OS participants and 50 controls would be sufficient to detect differences between two independent proportions (e.g., comparing autism diagnoses across groups) with 80% power, using a previous prevalence of autism in OS of 28.57%7. Likewise, 23 OS participants and 59 controls would be sufficient for detecting mean differences between two independent groups (e.g., comparing AQ differences across groups) with 80% power, with a predicted medium-to-large effect size ( d  = 0.7). Here, a medium-to-large effect size is considered reasonable given that we expect OS participants to score highly on tests of autism symptoms, and in consistency for object-personalities (see below).

OS individuals were recruited from online communities of individuals self-identifying as OS (e.g., www.objectum-sexuality.org). Controls were recruited from the University of Sussex community and participated for course credit. The OS group were older than controls ( t(33.21) = −6.20, p < 0.001) but this difference falls in a conservative direction (i.e., the traits we seek in OS decrease rather than increase with age27,28,29,30). Subsets of OS participants (n = 23-34) completed different elements of our study so we preface our methods below with participant numbers for each test. Participants were tested via our online testing portal ( www.syntoolkit.org) accessed via a link embedded within our digital recruitment postings. To avoid recruitment bias neither the advert nor information sheet mentioned synaesthesia or autism. Our study was approved by the Cross-Schools Science and Technology Research Ethics Committee at the University of Sussex and the study was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. All participants provided their full informed consent prior to taking part in the study.

Materials and Procedure

Participants completed the following tests (in the order described further below):

Autism screening

[Part 1] Participants (n = 34 OS; n = 88 controls) were asked whether they had received a " formal diagnosis of a developmental disorder in the past?" with button options given as " Autism, Asperger Syndrome, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Other, None". Participants were also given the opportunity to provide any further details about their autism diagnosis in an optional text-box. [Part 2] Participants also completed the Autism Spectrum Quotient 19 ( AQ; n = 26 OS; n = 88 controls) which is a 50-item questionnaire measuring autistic traits in adults along five subscales: Social Skills, Attention Switching, Attention-to-detail, Communication and Imagination. Example items include " I find it difficult to work out people's intentions", and " I tend to notice details that others do not". Participants respond to each statement on a 4-point Likert scale ( Definitely Agree, Slightly Agree, Slightly Disagree, Definitely Disagree). Approximately half the questions are reverse coded. Items are scored 1 point if the participant records an autistic trait (e.g., poor Social Skill, good Attention-to-detail) using the 'slightly' or 'definitely' response. Scores can range from 0 to 50 with a score of 32 or above recognised as a strong indicator of likely autism19.

Sussex Objectum-Sexuality Questionnaire (SOSQ; n = 34 OS; n = 88 controls) is an in-house measure which first allows participants to self-declare as OS with the question: " Do you feel romantic and/or sexual attraction towards objects?: Yes, No ". Participants answering NO to this question are assigned to the control group and are automatically taken to the next stage of study. Participants answering YES are assigned to the OS group and they completed several follow-up OS-related questions (to be reported elsewhere).

MULTISENSE Test for Object-personification synaesthesia is an in-house synaesthesia diagnostic based on a previously validated methodology25. This diagnostic determines whether individuals experience personifications for non-human objects and whether they show the synaesthetic trait of consistency-over-time (i.e. a high level of consistency in describing the personality of objects over time would suggest their experiences represent object- personification synaesthesia). Part 1 begins for OS participants with the question " Do you think that your current or most recent object partner/attraction has any personality characteristics?: Yes, No". Participants who answer "Yes" complete a personality questionnaire24 consisting of 44 randomly ordered personality traits (e.g. outgoing, conscientious, artistic) which OS participants rated to describe their object-partner using a 5-point Likert scale ( "Disagree strongly; Disagree a little; Neither agree nor disagree; Agree a little; Agree strongly"). Controls were given the same questionnaire but were asked to invent a personality profile for their " most-loved or favourite object" (e.g. a favourite chair). In Part 2, all participants repeated the personality questionnaire a second time (and this took place later within the same session; see below) as a surprise retest. The purpose of this surprise retest was to determine the consistency of participants' responses, given that high consistency is the marker for object-personification synaesthesia15. Twenty-three OS participants and 88 controls completed both parts of this test.

MULTISENSE Test for Grapheme-personification synaesthesia is a validated diagnostic of grapheme-personification synaesthesia and the full procedure is to be reported elsewhere25. As in the test above, this diagnostic determines whether individuals experience personifications (this time for graphemes) and whether they are consistent over time (a hallmark of grapheme-personification synaesthesia). Participants (n = 27 OS; n = 88 controls) began with the opportunity to self-report grapheme-personification synaesthesia from the question " Do you tend to think of letters or numbers as being like people (i.e. do you associate them with specific personalities or genders, and have always done so before today)?: Yes, No ". Participants were then asked to indicate whether their pre-existing personifications were for numbers, letters or both (and if both, which was the strongest). Participants then completed a test of consistency in which they saw either numbers 0-9, or letters A-Z, according to their earlier response: i.e., subjects who responded YES to our self-report question were shown whichever set of graphemes (numbers vs. letters) they reported as triggering personalities, or triggering them strongest; controls were randomly allocated to either set. For the purposes of our study all participants completed this test regardless of whether they indicated experiencing grapheme-personification synaesthesia or not.

During the consistency test, graphemes were shown one-by-one in a random order, and participants were required to rate the personality of each grapheme using an adjustable pie-chart of five personality descriptions ( imaginative, thorough, outgoing, trusting, handles stress well; see Fig. 1, left panel) one for each factor of the Big-5 personality model24. Participants rated the relative contribution of each trait to the overall personality profile of the grapheme (e.g., This grapheme is 40% imaginative, 20% thorough, 5% outgoing, 10% trusting, 25% handles stress well). Participants also rated the gender of each grapheme from "very male" to "very female" on a 5 point Likert scale. Participants could also select no personality and/or no gender if they did not experience a personality or gender for a particular grapheme, although participants were instructed to avoid pressing these buttons as much as possible (because we wanted a consistency score for both OS individuals and controls). Each grapheme was displayed twice in a block design resulting in 20 trials for numbers (i.e., 2 × 10), or 52 trials for letters (i.e., 2 × 26). The test generated two output measures, indicating how consistently participants described the personality or gender of their graphemes. Following validated procedures25, we calculated consistency (for personality and gender scores separately) by regressing participants' responses for their first set of personality and gender descriptions against their second set of descriptions. This indicated the degree to which the first set of descriptions were a predictor of the second set of descriptions (as a measure of consistency). Synaesthetes were diagnosed as those scoring at or above the validated threshold for synaesthesia, which was again computed separately for personality ratings and gender ratings. A diagnostic threshold for synaesthesia of ≥34.97 was used for personality scores, while a diagnostic threshold of ≥82.69 was used for gender scores31.

Left panel shows an example trial from our grapheme-personification synaesthesia diagnostic. Participants adjust the segments of the pie-chart to select the personality of the presented grapheme. Participants also used the Likert scale to describe a gender for each grapheme. Right panel shows an example trial from the grapheme-colour synaesthesia diagnostic. Participants adjust the colour-picker to select the associated colour for each presented grapheme. In both cases (left and right panels) graphemes are presented twice (in a test and retest) and we calculate the synaesthetic measure of consistency-over-time. High consistency is the hallmark of synaesthesia.

MULTISENSE Test for Grapheme-Colour synaesthesia is an in-house version of the widely-validated3,22,32 diagnostic for grapheme-colour synaesthesia. Its procedure is similar to the synaesthesia diagnostics above25 except that it elicits colours for graphemes (rather than personifications). Participants (n = 26 OS; n = 88 controls) first had the opportunity to self-report grapheme-colour synaesthesia given the question " Do numbers or letters have colour associations (i.e. which you've been aware of before now)?; Yes, No". Participants responding NO are classified as non-synaesthetes and are not tested further (following standard testing protocols3,22). Participants responding YES specify whether they experience colours for numbers, letters or both, and in the subsequent consistency test they are shown whichever graphemes they reported. In consistency testing, participants pair each grapheme with a colour, using an interactive colour-picker (see Fig. 1, right panel). Graphemes are each shown twice in a block-randomised design, and test-scores are an indication of the distance in colour space between each presentation of the same grapheme (e.g., the colour-distance between the two presentations of A). Smaller scores represent smaller distances, hence greater consistency-over-time. Scores are averaged across all trials and standardised; following validated methods3,33, synaesthetes were diagnosed as those scoring within the recognised synaesthetic window (i.e., ≤1.4334, where low scores indicate the high consistency typical of synaesthesia).

Order of experimental tests

Tests were presented in the following order: Autism screening [Part 1], SOSQ, Object-personification [Part 1], grapheme-personification synaesthesia test, grapheme-colour synaesthesia test, Autism screening [Part 2], Object-personification [Part 2].

Results

Links between objectum sexuality and autistic traits

In this section, we ask whether OS individuals show higher autistic traits compared to controls. All analyses here and throughout are two-tailed. In our first analysis, a 2 × 5 ANOVA contrasting group (OS vs. controls) and AQ factor (Social Skills, Attention switching, Attention-to-detail, Communication, Imagination) showed a main effect of group in that OS individuals possessed overall stronger autistic traits than controls (F(1,112) = 50.33, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.31; see Fig. 2). In addition we found a main effect of AQ factor (F(4,448) = 35.55, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.24) as well as an interaction between group and factor (F(4,448) = 6.96, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.06). Exploring this interaction further showed that OS participants scored higher than controls in every AQ factor (all corrected ps < 0.05) but particularly so in the social skills factor as indicated by its 'very large' effect size ( d = 1.5534,35 all other effect sizes were 'medium' ( d ≥ 0.5) to 'large' ( d ≥ 0.8); see Supplementary Information Table S1).

Mean AQ scores for OS and control participants. Higher scores represent more autistic-like traits (i.e., poor social skills, attention switching, communication, imagination; good attention to detail). Error bars show standard errors of the means (SEMs). Asterisks indicate corrected significance at *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

The prevalence of autism in objectum sexuality

In addition to heightened AQ scores, 13 out of 34 OS participants (38.24%) but none of our 88 controls reported having an official diagnosis of autism, and this difference was significant (χ ²(1) = 33.75, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.22, 0.56]). OS individuals also had significantly more diagnoses of autism compared to published epidemiological data from the general population9 (1.47%; χ ²(1) = 30.60, p  < 0.001, 95% CI [0.20, 0.55]). Note that all chi-square analyses here and throughout the manuscript are performed with the more conservative Yates continuity correction where expected cell counts fall below five observations.

Given our online methodology, we were not able to perform independent clinical autism assessments. We therefore ran additional analyses showing that even when we use more conservative methods for classifying participants as autistic, our results remain the same. Our first additional analysis classified participants as autistic only if they satisfy two criteria: 1) they self-reported a formal diagnosis of autism (as above) AND 2) they gave further spontaneous information about their diagnosis via our optional text-box (e.g., their age at diagnosis). Following this new autism classification, we continued to find significantly higher rates of autism in our OS group (8 out of 34; i.e., 23.53%) compared to our control group (0 out of 88; χ ²(1) = 18.49, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.10, 0.42]). This more conservative rate of autism in OS was again significantly higher than published epidemiological data from the general population9 (1.47%; χ ²(1) = 14.39, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.08, 0.40]). Finally, we also analysed our AQ data and classified participants as autistic only if they scored above the recognised indicative threshold for autism (i.e. ≥ 32 points). Once again we found a significant group difference: there were 10 out of 34 OS participants classified as autistic (29.41%), compared to 2 out of 88 controls (2.27%; χ ²(1) = 17.42, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.12, 0.46]). Moreover, rates of autism in the OS group were once again significantly higher than published epidemiological data from the general population (1.47%; χ ²(1) = 20.60, p = < 0.001, 95% CI [0.13, 0.46]). In summary, we find higher rates of autism/ autistic traits for OS individuals in all analyses.

Links between objectum sexuality and synaesthesia

We first asked whether OS participants experience synaesthesia-like personalities from objects. We therefore analysed scores from the Multisense Test for Object-personification synaesthesia. During this test, OS participants had rated the personality of their object-partner while controls rated the personality of their 'most-loved or favourite object'. Both groups were then given a surprise retest. We calculated the consistency of object-personalities by regressing participants' responses for their first set of personality descriptions against their second (retest) set of descriptions. OS participants were significantly more consistent over time ( t(109) = 3.63, p < 0.001, d  = 0.92, 95% CI [9.13, 31.11]) in their object-personality descriptions (M = 69.5%, SD = 18.5%) compared to controls (M = 49.4%, SD = 24.8%) supporting the hypothesis that OS feelings might stem from what can be recognised as object-personification synaesthesia.

Next, we investigated whether OS was related to a more generalized synaesthetic phenotype, by looking at whether OS individuals also have other variants of synaesthesia. Here we diagnosed grapheme-personification synaesthesia and grapheme-colour synaesthesia, using recognised protocols and previously validated thresholds22,31,33. We found higher rates of both types of synaesthesia in our OS group.

Considering first grapheme-personification synaesthesia, we found higher rates of synaesthesia in the OS group compared to controls (although only in gender scores, see Table 1; we remind the reader that it is possible to diagnose grapheme-personification synaesthesia either for grapheme genders (e.g., letter A is female) or for grapheme personalities (e.g., letter A is shy)).

Table 1 Rates of grapheme-personification synaesthesia in OS and Control groups.

Since seven of our OS participants left our study before taking this (grapheme-personification) synaesthesia test, we repeated our analysis with the conservative assumption that all were non-synaesthetes and this still resulted in a strong trend for a higher prevalence of confirmed grapheme-personification synaesthesia for gender associations in the OS group compared to controls, χ ²(1) = 3.618, p = 0.057, 95% CI [−0.004, 0.30].

In addition to the above finding, we also found significantly elevated rates of grapheme-colour synaesthesia, which was 14 times higher in OS individuals (15.4% i.e., 4 out of 26) compared to controls (1.1% i.e., 1 out of 88 controls; χ ²(1) = 6.62, p = 0.01, 95% CI [0.02, 0.35]) and 11 times higher than the known population-wide baseline (of 1.4%3; χ ²(1) = 25.34, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.04, 0.34]). Since eight of our OS participants left our study before taking the grapheme-colour synaesthesia test, we repeated our analysis with the conservative assumption that all were non-synaesthetes and our findings remained significant (χ ²(1) = 4.60, p = 0.032, 95% CI [0.01, 0.27]). Finally, we also considered whether OS individuals might have synaesthesia simply because they may also have autism, given that synaesthesia and autism are co-morbid6,12,13. But rates of grapheme-colour synaesthesia were still significantly higher than controls even when considering only OS individuals who did not have autism (14.29%; 3 out of 21; χ ²(1) = 4.99, p = 0.025, 95% CI [0.01, 0.36]).

Further above we have seen that OS individuals give personality traits for their object-partners that are consistent over time. We point out that the high consistency in reports of personalities described by OS individuals for their object-partners were not simply some heightened ability to remember personality traits: OS individuals were no more consistent than controls when attributing personalities to letters or numbers (revealed by a lack of group differences in prevalence for personality ratings during the grapheme-personification test). This suggests that OS individuals are not better memorisers of personalities in general, but tend to have genuine object-personification synaesthesia, as well as elevated rates of both grapheme-personification synaesthesia (for genders only) and grapheme-colour synaesthesia.

Discussion

To date, only one other study7 has addressed objectum sexuality (OS) and our research is the first to take an empirical behavioural approach in studying this form of sexual orientation. We recruited a group of individuals who self-identify as OS and a group of non-OS controls. Our study was motivated by the hypothesis that autism and synaesthesia (i.e., object-personification synaesthesia) might play a role in OS, at least for some OS individuals.

We found a number of significant relationships between OS and synaesthesia. Firstly, we found that the romantic affections of OS individuals towards objects do appear to be driven, at least in part, by object-personification synaesthesia. This was revealed by the fact that OS individuals do tend to sense personality traits in their object-partners, and that these show the synaesthetic hallmark of consistency-over-time (i.e. the OS group were significantly more consistent compared to controls when assigning personalities to inanimate objects). We propose that synaesthetic personalities and genders might increase the anthropomorphic qualities of inanimate objects which could facilitate the development of intimate and romantic feelings over time. Finally, OS was also associated with a broader synaesthetic phenotype in showing significantly elevated rates of two other types of synaesthesia, grapheme-personification synaesthesia and grapheme-colour synaesthesia.

We found too that rates of diagnosed autism were over 30 times higher in OS individuals than otherwise expected (or 14 times higher even with our most conservative estimate). Differences were most associated with the Social Skills sub-scale of the AQ (finding social situations difficult or unenjoyable, with a preference for objects over humans in one AQ question). Poor inter-human relationships may be relevant to why OS individuals develop relationships with objects although it is unclear whether poorer social skills might be a contributing factor towards OS or indeed a consequence. For instance, objectum sexuals experience considerable social stigma attached to their orientation2 which could affect social skills through an avoidance of interactions with other people. Relatedly, anthropomorphizing has been suggested to be a compensatory mechanism when individuals experience increased levels of loneliness36 and autistic individuals report higher ratings of loneliness compared to controls37. Other autistic traits might also facilitate feelings of intimacy with objects: a strong need for routine might be fulfilled more easily in relationships with objects rather than people, while higher attention-to-detail and a tendency for special interests could promote heightened focus on, or appreciation for particular objects7. Finally, synaesthetic personifications may further reinforce this attention since objects with positive synaesthetic personalities are even known to bias eye-movements for synaesthetes15. Nonetheless, we point out that just over one third of OS individuals did not report a diagnosis of autism and did not score above the AQ threshold (although a number of these scored closely). It is therefore possible that autism is not a necessary prerequisite for OS in all cases. Nevertheless, our current data suggests that OS, autism, and synaesthesia are linked at multiple levels and future research could focus on delineating the precise nature of how autism and synaesthesia interact in OS.

An important methodological consideration is the fact that our OS participants were recruited from forums online. We took this approach because it would have been difficult to achieve in-person testing given that OS is rare, internationally distributed, and without any regular real-world meeting place (as far as we are aware). More importantly, our participants were reassured by the protection of anonymity, meaning that in-person testing would inevitably have reduced sample size. Importantly, one might wish to argue that recruiting from online platforms could disproportionally attract people with social difficulties (and thereby elevate AQ scores). However, we point out that the OS group scored higher than controls across all factors of the AQ (Social skills, Attention-switching, Attention-to-detail, Communication, and Imagination) suggesting that our results are not skewed by the social traits of people drawn to online forums. Relatedly, one might wish to argue that rates of autism may be a priori higher on such forums, but we point out that rates of diagnosed autism in OS individuals was almost 40%, a prevalence that is hard to explain away as the result of our online recruitment methods.

In addition to the above consideration, we note that our online methodology did not allow for us to perform clinical diagnoses of autism; we therefore took participants' reports of autism at face-value. Nevertheless, we were careful to ask about " formal" diagnoses, and we replicated our findings on a sub-set of participants whose formal diagnoses were backed-up with substantive details (i.e., when their diagnoses had taken place). We further replicated using AQ scores (based on the autism threshold of ≥3219). Given these conservative approaches, we are confident our classifications of autism are accurate, and we also point out that our findings are replicated by our analysis of autism rates in the cohort tested by Marsh7 (see Introduction). Finally, we address one last concern, that AQ scores in OS participants could be circular, given that one question in the AQ (out of 50) could potentially define OS (i.e., the reverse-coded "I find myself drawn more strongly to people than to things"). If we remove this question from our AQ analysis we still observe the same pattern of results (i.e. OS individuals still score significantly higher on the Social skills factor of the AQ with a large effect size; and 10 OS individuals compared to 2 controls still score above the diagnostic threshold ≥32 on the AQ overall; see Supplementary Information Table S2). Nonetheless, even aside from the 'literal' question described above, it could be argued that high scores on the social factor of the AQ might simply reflect the social challenges of identifying as OS. Importantly however, OS individuals were elevated across all sub-scales of the AQ. We are therefore confident that our results speak to rates of autism, rather than being a circular finding about OS per se.

Our data speak to biological38, psychological39,40 and philosophical41 models of sexuality or romantic love. We inform biological theories by showing that certain sexual orientations can be found at higher rates within recognised neurodevelopmental conditions with known genetic traits10,42 and specific neurological profiles43,44 independent from the sexual orientation itself. Fifty-three percent of our OS cohort was characterised as having either synaesthesia and/or autism (from diagnosis or elevated AQ scores, with a further 9% scoring close to threshold), placing these well-understood neurodevelopmental conditions firmly at an intersection with this sexual orientation. Our data also support one very recent suggestion45 that autism might dictate sexual preference to some extent, and suggest the need for raised awareness among medical practitioners to support and promote inclusion for autistic people regarding orientation. Our data also speak to models of synaesthesia showing synergistic outcomes when synaesthesia and autism co-occur within individuals6 and they speak to the study of anthropomorphism36 by validating the use of detailed personality questionnaires46 for non-human targets. We suggest that this methodology might be further exploited to ask whether personality profiles for objects in OS (or indeed in general anthropomorphism) are random or ordered. For example, our methods could test whether object-personalities reflect the personality traits of those humans making judgements - as would be predicted if object personifications arise from mechanisms within self-other judgements16,47. Finally, our data address psychological39 and philosophical41 models of romantic love which have traditionally been defined around personhood (i.e., a feeling of pleasure derived from an attraction towards another person). Our findings suggest, crucially, that personification rather than personhood may be the necessary pre-requisite for romantic love to arise.

Our study is the first behavioural treatment of OS in the scientific literature. Although inquiry into OS has gained little traction in modern science, wider understanding would be particularly beneficial given that objectum sexuals are often marginalised for their orientation2. In summary, we have shown links between OS, synaesthesia and autism, and propose that increased anthropomorphizing in OS may sometimes occur as a result of differences in social cognition and other autism-driven traits as well as object-personification synaesthesia.

Data availability

The data supporting this study are available via the UK Data Service.

Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. [617678] and the UK Economic and Social Research Council, ESRC (grant number ES/K006215/1). We are grateful to Erika Eiffel for help recruiting participants and for providing valuable feedback on our tests.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. School of Psychology, Pevensey Building, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QJ, UK

Julia Simner & James E. A. Hughes

2. Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, College of Health and Life Sciences, Brunel University, London, Uxbridge, UB8 3PN, UK

Noam Sagiv

Contributions

J.S. conceived the study and wrote the paper. J.S. and J.E.A.H. designed the tests. J.E.A.H. set up the tests, analysed the data and co-wrote the paper. J.S. and J.E.A.H. recruited participants and interpreted data. N.S. provided intellectual contributions.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julia Simner.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Simner, J., Hughes, J.E.A. & Sagiv, N. Objectum sexuality: A sexual orientation linked with autism and synaesthesia. Sci Rep 9, 19874 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-56449-0
Download citation

Received:

Accepted:

Published:

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-56449-0

Further reading

Dimitria Electra Gatzia

Sarah Arnaud

Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Objectum sexuality: A sexual orientation linked with autism and synaesthesia - Scientific Reports

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Objectum-sexuality (OS) is a sexual orientation which has received little attention in the academic literature. Individuals who identify as OS experience emotional, romantic and/or sexual feelings towards inanimate objects (e.g. a bridge, a statue). We tested 34 OS individuals and 88 controls, and provide the first empirical evidence that OS is linked to two separate neurodevelopmental traits - autism and synaesthesia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gender Differences in Sitting Positions of College Students and an Explanation of These Differences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article explores the differences in the sitting positions of college men and women. After conducting unobtrusive observations of 83 students at the University of New Hampshire, we analyzed our data and found that there are differences in the way men and women sit. Men tend to sit in open positions while women tend to sit in closed positions. Differences in leg positions were more notable than differences in arm positions. In regard to arm and leg combinations, the most common combination for men was open arm/open leg. There were no significant differences between arm and leg combinations of women. We explain these differences using the theory of social construction and by pulling from various articles ideas of gender socialization. It is important to understand that gender differences in body movement and behavior are not natural. If we can recognize that these differences are learned, we can begin to eliminate gender inequality and stereotypes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I've always been curious about the nature versus nurture debate, and how it relates to gender inequality. When we look at the gender gap, from how the share of unpaid care is allocated , to the proportion of female MPs in the house of commons it might be easy to argue that there must be innate biological differences between men and women. However, recent research in the neuroscience and developmental psychology field show that the differences in the 'male' and 'female' brain have long been overstated.

In her book, Delusions of Gender, Neuroscientist Cordelia Fine points out the flaws in assumptive studies and demonstrates how very few structural differences exist. She talks about how 'our minds, society and neurosexism create difference. Together they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable and changeable.' Ultimately, the majority of gender differences are not biologically determined but created by social constructs and our environment. Society prescribes the patterns of gendered behaviour we follow - not our genetics.

Why does this matter?

Gender stereotypes, on the surface, may seem like a trivial issue, but it's not just a case of too much pink and blue. If we impose rigid ideas of masculinity and femininity on children, we limit their potential and actually cause real harm in later life.

Gender stereotypes teach boys not to express their emotions, and tell girls to be nice and obedient and to care about their appearance. Coupled with a lack of role models and discriminative attitudes, it is no surprise we do not have enough women in STEM careers (8% of apprentices are women) or a solid representation of men in the care sector.

Aside from career choice, gender stereotypes can affect every part of life, contributing towards poor mental health in young people, higher male suicide rates, low self-esteem in girls and issues with body image ( 1 in 5 14 year olds self-harm), furthermore allowing a culture of toxic masculinity and violence against women to go unchecked.

For those who don't conform to the 'traditional roles' of society i.e. male/female, such emphasis on stereotyping and discrimination can exacerbate their struggle to feel accepted. There are an increasing number of young people who identify differently to the gender assigned to them at birth, and who are often more likely to suffer from poor mental health as a result of suppressing their real self or facing discrimination because they don't fit into the rigid traditional gender structures.

To me, it seems crazy that we still create the conditions for children to trust entirely false ideas of identity when this is preventable. That said, eradicating something so tightly woven into our society (so much so, we often don't even notice them) is no easy feat.

How stereotypes show up

Research shows that children's attitudes towards gender are fully formed by the age of seven. From an early age, they latch onto stereotypes as a way to categorise and make sense of the world. Their social need to belong and fit in with their ascribed gender - along with the constant ways gender roles are reinforced to them throughout society - can be difficult for parents and caregivers to challenge, even with the best intentions.

In the commercial sector, many retailers still market children's toys, books, cards and clothes based on gender. We've all seen slogans on a t-shirt like 'princess' for girls and a 'I'm a monster' for boys. Stereotypes are still prevalent in the media, with films, programmes, and storylines showing outdated and limited representations of gender.

Education undoubtedly has a large influence. The BBC's ' Can our kids go gender free?' followed Doctor Javid Abdelmoneim during a six-week experiment in a Year Three class in the Isle of Wight, as they created a 'gender-neutral' space.

At the start of the experiment, children's behaviour and psychological traits were assessed, from confidence to self-esteem, empathy and social skills, along with their existing opinions of how women and men should live their life. Girls underestimated their intelligence and had lower self-esteem, whereas boys had a tendency to over-estimate their achievements and ability. Girls scored more highly on vocabulary to describe their emotions, whereas boys' results depicted themselves as angry, with low-levels of empathy.

The study also analysed how the classroom was set up, how the teacher addressed and managed the children, and how the children interacted with each other. They found that the teacher differently rewarded boys' and girls' behaviour and segregated the children by gender unnecessarily. To combat this, they attempted to remove any gender-based inferences as far as possible, eliminating harmful language and bringing in non-conforming role models, such as a female mechanic and a male ballet dancer.

The programme also highlighted the influence of parenting and how caregivers unconsciously teach gender stereotypes. Through an experiment where toddlers' clothes were swapped to convey the opposite gender, adults were assigned to choose toys for the children. Naturally, they gave the 'traditionally feminine', fluffy, princess toys to the girl and Thomas the Tank Engine to boys. This may be a simplistic example, but it's easy to see how seemingly innocent acts like this can persistently and repeatedly perpetuate stereotypes through unconscious bias.

Through the documentary, teaching the children to challenge ingrained assumptions about gender improved the girls' self-esteem, and the boys were able to express a wider range of emotions, which was thought to explain the 57% decrease in their disruptive behaviours.

So what can we do?

With such embedded structures, tackling gender stereotypes requires a fully holistic approach. The Fawcett Society's report outlines this, calling for this issue to become a Government priority. From an education standpoint, they recommend that the early years sector should be better valued, including an investment in training for educators, improved salary prospects, funding for inclusive resources, and a whole-school approach taken to embedding gender equality.

People are tackling this at a grassroots level also. Two charities, Lifting Limits and You Be You, have carried out small-scale programmes in primary schools to challenge gender equality and these show promising results.

From a parenting standpoint, this can be tricky but a starting point would be equalised parental leave, role modelling equality, and encouraging children to take part in a range of activities.

We also need retailers to promote inclusive materials and stop marketing their products by gender. The ' Let Toys Be Toys' campaign, all led by a parent, volunteer community, lobbies children's toy and publishing industries to commit to being more gender-neutral.

On a general level, we all need to challenge our own unconscious bias around gender. Even just creating awareness of the issue and working towards challenging stereotypes in whichever arena of life they arise, we can all make a positive contribution to tackling gender inequalities in later life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gender stereotypes in childhood: what's the harm?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article discusses how the perpetuation of gender stereotypes throughout society, particularly in childhood, can have a harmful impact and what we can do to address this

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No More Boys and Girls  Can Our Kids Go Gender Free? 1 Episode 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you don't know the name Allen Jones, you will most definitely recognise his furniture sculptures. Models of pneumatic women dressed in killer-heeled fetish uniforms, posed as a hatstand, table and chair, these erotically-charged ready-to-serve objects are unforgettable works that have entered the public consciousness - and, from their unveiling in 1970, whipped up ferocious feminist debate. Along the way, they have also been heavily referenced, reappropriated and just plain ripped off in fashion shoots, art pieces and advertisements. Not that Jones seems to mind: over the years, he's kept a drawer full of images of these copycat incarnations. He's even turned them into a new book, Allen Jones Copied - From A Higher Priced Original, published by IDEA.

Sat at a small table in his warehouse studio, cup of tea in hand, the 80-year-old pop artist flicks through the pages of Copied. It's the start of an ongoing series: next up a book of "close-up photos of the anatomy of my sculptures, they're quite sexy", he explains, followed by a collection of Jones's obsessive photos of road markings (cue an inspired mini-lecture on the Baroque Period of parking lines). Laid out on a nearby desk are print-outs from a forthcoming film project that, in the grand tradition of the Pygmalion myth, brings his famous Hatstand sculpture to digital life; the original stares blankly at us from the other side of the room, hands still patiently held out, frozen on a white fur rug for almost half a century - next to her, the gold body armour suit made famous by Kate Moss.

Returning to the book in front of him, Jones stops on an image of a dull domestic scene: two women chatting on a sofa, drinking red wine; in front of them, a man on all fours with a glass table surface on his back. The tagline reads: "Curry that helps you get the most out of your husband." It's an advert for Quorn tikka masala. Jones smiles to himself, still incredulous and moves on to the next page...
Ben Cobb: Where did all the material in come from? BC: In particular the Steven Klein shoot from ... BC: Rather than outrage, do you feel flattered by these imitations?
Allen Jones: Half the stuff comes to me unsolicited; people find my address and send it to me. Others are from people who have created something and think I might like it because it's an affectionate take or a parody. A couple of times a year I'll get images from an art dealer because someone has brought in a piece, like an upturned figure, and they'll ask, 'Is this yours?' - some art dealers really should do better research. Most recently, there have been advertisements on the London Underground and high-end glossy magazines do parodies which are actually terrific photos and look quite sexy.
BC: That is very much within the art realm, and there's a strong tradition of artists referencing other artists throughout history. But when your work is borrowed as part of advertising and there's a commercial element involved, do you feel differently? For instance, the Stoli vodka advert in the book...
AJ: With that one shoot, what's interesting isn't that it was influenced by my work in general, but that it's based on such a specific newspaper image of me. I quite like that... but it would have been nice if there had been a small credit in the magazine somewhere. Usually they'll tell you what shoes the person is wearing and since the whole thing was plainly a rip-off of my images, I just thought that showed a lack of style to be honest. Whereas Skin Two, the fetish magazine, has often used my work for ideas, but they usually put a little gesture or acknowledgement to me in there.
BC: Have you ever been tempted to?
AJ: There are three things in the book that are by female artists and all of them plainly make their own statement on the back of my sculptures: that's fine, that's legitimate. I was quite tickled to see Marlene Dumas had based one of her drawings on my table sculpture and includes a little acknowledgement. It's nice to see that your work has entered the fabric of art in that way, that it's used as a sounding board, something to bounce ideas off. I also included a Chinese parody in the book: the artist's original work is about 30-feet long and features all these famous tableaus from the history of art so, of course, it's a bit of a kick that someone on the other side of the world should include it.
BC: What do you think makes a good rip-off?
AJ: Well, with that there is a possibility that they chose to use a man as a table sculpture instead of a woman to play that feminist/chauvinist game. But it could also be that by changing the image they knew that then I couldn't make a case out of it because, so I am told, you cannot patent an idea. You can patent a thing or an object, but not an idea. I think Jeff Koons was taken to court as he did a sculpture of some people sitting on a park bench that he copied from a photograph. The photographer recognised it and took it to court but he didn't win because the simple truth is that his work was a photograph and Koons's was a sculpture. However, I've never tested the idea in court because I've never sued anyone.
BC: And what statement are you making?
AJ: No. Most recently, there was that image of Dasha Zhukova sat on a black version of my chair sculpture. It was Norman Rosenthal who first told me about this Scandinavian artist living in NY who was doing versions of my furniture sculptures but turning the women into black women. Then I saw one in the paper with Dasha sat on it and there was this whole controversy... My take on it was that either an artist adds something to the argument or the original story in which case it's something you take notice of, or it doesn't. To me, it didn't get my juices going the fact he'd made a statement by simply making the figure black. Also, it looks as though they were body casts and that's very different from sublimating the thing into some idealised figure, which is what I do. In the end, I wasn't outraged by it; it just would have been nice if it had been something that I thought was pretty good.
BC: I like the idea that if you put something on your table sculpture or sit on one of your chairs, it immediately stops being art and becomes design...
AJ: I think if it has some humour to it or brings something else to the table, or you can see that someone has done an elegant take on it, then you realise there is some artifice to it. To be honest, I've never really analysed my reaction to all these imitations. But I was obviously interested in these things enough to keep them. The spectrum was so broad that it seemed to me to be an interesting idea to externalise it in a book and make a statement out of it...
BC: In the book, you include a still of the Korova Milk Bar from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange BC: Let me stop you there: Kubrick wasn't going to pay you? ... Was that one of your earliest experiences of being copied? BC: So you just gave him your idea?
AJ: It's a statement about the power of an image. The image of those sculptures I'm sure have been used many times by people who have no idea of my name or what I do. They just might have seen it in a book and thought, 'That's a great image!' And to be plugged into the popular consciousness in that way is... satisfying is the wrong word, it sounds too lofty, but it feels nice to know I must be doing something right. I'm interested in that popular consciousness rather than the ivory tower of the Art World.
BC: You've mentioned before how you got the idea of a figure as furniture from an image you saw in a fetish magazine... Is that maybe why you feel so easy about other people copying your sculptures? Because you took the original idea from somewhere else...
AJ: Yes, exactly and that actually happened at the gallery opening. Everyone was stood around in the crowded room with a glass of wine, and this woman had finished her glass and she was just about to put it on the table sculpture and she suddenly caught my eye and mouthed, 'Is it alright?' I shrugged, meaning that was her call: for me, that was a confrontation, a decision she was having to make. 'Is this an artwork?' So, in that way, I thought it was a successful sculpture because it threw up all those funny questions.

AJ: I never met Kubrick, we only spoke on the phone - he was famous for that. He sent me the Anthony Burgess book and at first his questions was, 'Would I work on the film?' I thought I could do it and did some drawings for the furniture; I wasn't thinking about the table sculpture, I was trying to do something new for him. When it came down to it I said, 'If I do this, it's going to be about three months' work' - I was teaching part time back then and I couldn't afford to work for three months for nothing!
BC: There is also something very timely about this book. On Instagram, there is a rabid culture for naming and shaming plagiarism, calling out references... Do you think that's a positive development?
AJ: No, he thought I would do it just for a credit. Kubrick's words were: 'I'm a famous director and you'll get a lot of work off the back of this.' I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing. In probably my finest moment, I replied to him: 'Yes, but I'm not a set designer. If you get me a show at the Louvre then I'll do it.' In the end, I realised it wasn't going anywhere so I said, 'Listen, you like the idea, feel free'.
BC: What advice would you give to a young artist who has seen their work ripped off?
AJ: Yes, but I've always seen fine art as a laboratory for visual ideas. My design for the waitress uniforms at the Korova with the backside cut out - the costume is in the book too - ended up becoming my Waitress project, so everything gets used.
Allen Jones Copied - From A Higher Priced Original, published by IDEA, is out now.
AJ: Yes, quite possibly - that's an interesting point. The source was a popular non-fine art publication and then the image has fed back into the popular domain.

I'm sure that this is the same for all artists but your only responsibility when you're making the work is to the canons of taste. You just make it as honestly and directly as you can but once it's on the wall, it's open season. The cliché is to say it's like your child: you have some control over a child's environment and how they see the world but once they leave home and they're out there in the world, you're not responsible for them or their actions or how people respond to them... Actually, maybe that's not such a silly analogy.

AJ: I'm an old man so I don't look at Instagram but that's interesting, I didn't know that. The truth is it's a tough world - there's another cliché for you! You know Nobel Prize winners get the prize but there are probably 20 people behind them working away, sharing their ideas with the prizewinner. It's an eternal debate.

AJ: They have to see it as a compliment and see it as advertising... otherwise you'll just go crazy. So I say, take it as a compliment and move on.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Artist Allen Jones: 'You Have to See Copying as a Compliment'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From Steven Klein to Stanley Kubrick - filmmakers and fashion photographers alike have ripped off the work of Allen Jones. Here, speaking to Ben Cobb, the provocative artist shares his feelings on plagiarism and today's 'name and shame' culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Andy Sahlstrom's Website - Interactive Technologist, Kinetic Artist, and Inventor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
designboom | architecture & design magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
in grotto, bart hess drapes a series of hanging columns in latex manipulated to resemble wrinkled skin. presented during dutch design week as part of the robot love exhibition, the grotesque installation takes the form of a living cave in which visitors are invited to contemplate their existence and the contemporary world, and, in the context of the exhibition, question the materialization of robots and the image of the smooth, cold machines we have of them.

elske nissen, all images courtesy of bart hess

grotto is the result of a three-year long process, which started with hess's participation in the vous avez dit bizarre? exhibition during the 2015 design biennale in saint ettienne. somewhere between fascination and disgust, the dutch designer has composed a theatrical cave made of veiny latex skin stalactites and stalagmites, reflecting on the meeting point between the material world and the spiritual.

the transformative installation is created by stretching pink latex sheets onto six-meter-long wooden frames to double its size, followed by a thick layer of liquid latex on which hess has shaped the vein-like line patterns using his fingers. once fully dry, the latex sheets are released from the wooden frames causing them to bounce back to their original dimensions, and resulting in distorted surfaces on which the hand-carved lines maintain their original size.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
bart hess manipulates pink latex to resemble wrinkled human skin in grotto installation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
in grotto, bart hess drapes a series of hanging columns in latex manipulated to resemble wrinkled skin. presented during dutch design week as part of the robot love exhibition, the grotesque installation takes the form of a living cave in which visitors are invited to contemplate their existence and the contemporary world, and, in the context of the exhibition, question the materialization of robots and the image of the smooth, cold machines we have of them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Lynn Hershman Leeson Is Always Ahead of Her Time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The pioneering performance, video, and multimedia artist speaks with the poet Eileen Myles about the connections between technology and society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Autograph is a place to see things differently. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice, sharing how photographs reflect lived experiences and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.

Donate

Join our mailing list

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Race, Sexuality, Spirituality and the Self

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
View photographs by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a prominent figure in the Black British art scene

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
designboom | architecture & design magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
denny priyatna’s furniture series reflects the imperfections of the human body

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
while exploring the interactions between human and inanimate object, product designer denny priyatna presents the ‘appalstered’ collection.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chairs and Gendered Bodies — An Introduction — IMPULSE Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Through chair design, the female form is appropriated, reconfigured, weaponized, and emancipated.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
3. + Objects Year: 2019 Material: Blood from HIV+ donors There are people who are not able to donate their blood because of…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Presenting a hybrid between performance installation and movement analysis, De_sign seeks to an opportunity for the body to experience constructions. These constructions are embedded into the installation and highlight a repeated stylisation of the body which has contributed to the building of gender. The experience is directed by a clothing series and 'a chair', which are collaboratively negotiated by the body. A movement sequence is directed, which augments the behaviour of the body; the body comes out of alignment, is disoriented, skewed, or unbalanced. This disorientation presents a possibility to experience a different type of repetition or a new vocabulary of movement. We look at what it means to be 'oriented' and what it means to take a 'position'.

This work looks into systems of design and orientation as they relate to representations of gender. It considers how design presents a distorted system of gender representation by using the vehicle of the media and contributes to the establishment of gender norms through the production of cultural artefacts. The aim has been to deconstruct the gendered meanings inherent in these systems and explore the condition of the 'mediated body' in design. Our method involves an act of DE___SIGNing, which searches for and pulls apart a complex system of signs related to gender. A reconstruction is inspired by this process. An abstracted visual language of gendered signs is used to present and describe a collection of re-appropriated cultural artefacts. The research and the design come together in performance.

The cultural contrast and stereotype that still exists between differently gendered bodies in the same sitting position was noted as a starting point. The interaction explores the position itself, the space taken up by the position, the object/garment which controls the position and the site of the body. The mark of claimed space is physically stitched into the garment. The body is directed into positions which have gendered meaning. The interaction seeks to reduce the gendering of these positions and reveal them as learnt behaviour.

This garment series is designed to articulate, define and reconfigure ideas about the construction of gender. The design explores constructions of gender through vocabularies of movement. The series is an abstract and symbolic exploration demonstrated through performance and movement analysis and documented through film.

The purpose of this series is to deconstruct the ways in which clothing is used to compose and structure our genders. As such, the garment series alludes to how we read the body, how we divide and dissect it, using visual cues to establish gendered meaning. The aim is to subvert and explore these readings in an abstract way.

Film Produced by Kimon Kodossis, 2014

Movement: Floriane Misslin, Olle Lundin, Naomi Jansen

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Presenting a hybrid between performance installation and movement analysis, De_sign seeks to an opportunity for the body to experience constructions. These constructions are embedded into the installation and highlight a repeated stylisation of the body which has contributed to the building of gende

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The next generation of designers will need to account for a crisis of sexuality and should aim for an asexual design language, French designer Philippe Starck tells Dezeen in this interview.

Speaking at the release of a new collection of furniture for Spanish brand Andreu World, Starck said that his designs have approached a variety of problems from the ecological to the social, but that the biggest challenge for contemporary design is sexuality.
"Asexuality will be the biggest revolution"
Starck's Stories Collection for Andreu World features wooden furniture with soft edges that can be constructed from a pack without hardware, fitting together "like a puzzle".

He said the collection is indicative of a durable minimalism that represents a more "asexual" design aesthetic.

"I have fought all my life against macho products," Starck told Dezeen, which he said has included making designs oriented towards women, but also people "not interested in sex", seemingly in reference to gender identity.

"I have worked a lot to kill the macho side. To make products more woman-friendly and for 15 years, I've made products for gender-fluid."

"I work a lot for the people not interested in sex," he continued, citing his unisex perfume line, Peau d'Amour, as an example.

Philippe Starck covers furniture for Cassina with apple-based vegan fabric

"Asexuality will be the biggest revolution because people today feel very alone," he added. "That's why, when I can, I try to design [...] by taking sex completely out."

"The market of asexuality will be so revolutionary because everything we have produced in the world is driven by sexuality, everything. What will be human production without sexuality? That is very, very interesting."

Starck recently released a design for a skyscraper in Ecuador. Asked about the well-known phallic connotations of the form, he responded by saying that " Dubai is obsolete."

"This type of city was made for bad reasons, made to show power, to show money, mainly to wash money," he added.

Besides his interest in design less influenced by sex and gender, Starck said that he is still focused on ecological and democratic design as demonstrated by his recent work for Andreu World.

The furniture collection is constructed using plywood, with no glues or screws. He insisted that through this design he has arrived at "the maximum of ecology to a piece of furniture".

According to the designer, this line and others, like his series of bioplastic chairs for Kartell, are addressing the problem of affordable furniture that is not made of plastic.
Plastic "not good"
"I have made my career with plastic because it was the most ecological product - because when you used something created by humanity, which comes from fossils, and you don't kill trees, or you don't kill animals, it's super moral," he said. "Now we know it's not good."

Starck said that his drive to keep creating furniture despite questions of overproduction arises from the need to continually solve new problems, of which the sexual, ecological and affordable are just a few.

"You want to make something which you can be proud of - to make things well," he said.

Starck has also recently revealed designs for a school in Qatar and a furniture line for Italian homeware brand Alessi.
The photography is courtesy of Andreu World. Dezeen In Depth If you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"I have fought all my life against macho products" says Philippe Starck

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The next generation of designers will need to account for a crisis of sexuality and should aim for asexual design language, French designer Philippe Starck tells Dezeen in this interview.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For those still reeling from the arrival of "mansplaining" into our lexicon, fear not, this isn't just another catchy portmanteau intended to scathe the male ego.

A recent study showed that 82 per cent of British women have been subjected to "mansplaining", whereby a man "talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of", according to Merriam Webster.

Whilst lesser known, the act of "manspreading" is arguably a far more offensive crime - so much so that it was banned in Madrid.

According to the online Oxford dictionary, "manspreading" describes "the practice whereby a man adopts a sitting position with his legs wide apart, in such a way as to encroach on an adjacent seat'. It is a behaviour that is commonly spotted on public transport.

Now, experts are justifying the act, attributing a man's intrinsic need to spread himself on the physiological differences between men and women.

Many were quick to condemn that "practice" when it first came onto the rhetorical scene in 2014, as representative of a misogynistic patriarchy i.e. a man takes up as much space as possible on public transport in order to assert his authority and subsequently undermine a woman's right to space.

In 2015, Mic released a video showing what happens when a woman "manspreads" ("ladyspreads"?) on the subway in New York, in comparison to when a man does it.

Interestingly, the women attracted more stares and glares then the men.

Then, in 2016, the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York even released an official anti-"manspreading" campaign, encouraging subway riders to exemplify "courtesy on public transport".​

Whilst it's most certainly not the politest of ways to sit oneself, does the act of "manspreading" really legitimise anybody to define space as "inherently gendered", as Mic subsequently did? Is it actually a case of men monopolising a woman's space out of intrinsic entitlement? Or does science play a bigger part than we might think?

Spinal neurosurgeon John Sutcliffe explains that the art of "manspreading" could in fact be a matter of physicality, rather than sheer egotism.

"The overall width of the pelvis is relatively greater in females and the angle of the femoral neck is more acute. These factors could play a role in making a position of sitting with the knees close together less comfortable in men," he told The Independent.

"I suspect most men would suggest the reason for adopting the more spread posture in sitting would be the avoidance of testicular compression from the thigh muscles. The pelvic rotation goes some way to improve compression in both aspects," Sutcliffe continued.

Anatomical distinctions aren't the only thing that might make women and men sit differently.

A recent Vice article points out that the way we sit might be down to something as simple as geography.

Poland is one of the most common countries where people experience hip dysplasia, were one's hips come out of the socket i.e. many a Polish "manspreader".

Similarly those with Celtic hips are more likely to suffer from hip impingement, where range of motion is limited by deeper hip sockets. In other words, it's good news for squatters (the exercise kind, not the homeless kind) but bad for perpetual "manspreaders".

That being said, at the risk of adding "mansplaining" fuel to the "manspreading" fire, let us consider basic etiquette before "mansplaining" commuters everywhere unanimously cry "it's science, woman!"

Whilst us wide-hipped females empathise that sitting with your legs crossed isn't the most comfortable of positions for menfolk, basic physiology doesn't automatically grant every Tom, Dick and Harry a warrant to go spread-eagled on the tube every morning.

Seating is limited and carriages are jam-packed. To leg-spreaders everywhere, keep your hands (and your hips) to yourself.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
There's an entirely reasonable explanation for 'manspreading'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For those still reeling from the arrival of "mansplaining" into our lexicon, fear not, this isn't just another catchy portmanteau intended to scathe the male ego. A recent study showed that 82 per cent of British women have been subjected to "mansplaining", whereby a man "talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of", according to Merriam Webster.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Space invaders: is manspreading only socially acceptable when men do

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Tube is jammed but there’s someone taking up three seats — it’s a manspreader. But what happens if a woman gets involved? Joshi Herrmann and Phoebe Luckhurst go underground

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Don’t Sit With Your Legs Crossed. An Anatomy Expert Explains Why.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are you sitting comfortably? Just pause for a moment and without adjusting, notice your posture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Never heard of "manspreading"? Well, it is exactly what it sounds like. This is when men on public forms of transportation, such as subways or buses, sit with their legs widely spread apart, taking up the seat or seats next to them. Passengers who share this public transportation space are either forced to find another seat or squeeze in, leaving them with little to no personal space. While I don't doubt this can affect men in finding a place to sit, "manspreading" is inherently a gendered issue and something most women have experienced. Due to patriarchal norms in our society about how women and men are "supposed" to sit based on their gender, women are supposed to just deal with this "normal" spreading posture associated with being a man. The problem is that passengers typically don't speak up because we have been conditioned into seeing it as normal behavior, which perpetuates the cycle of men who feel permitted to "manspread" as much as they please. But now that silence has changed.

There is a Tumblr called ' Men Taking Up Too Much Space on the Train' dedicated to calling out "manspreaders" that has finally made the world realize this is actually an issue affecting riders everyday. Because of awareness from social media and internet campaigns, it has finally become a serious enough issue that now the NYC MTA has even invested money into starting a campaign to advertise on subways about stopping "manspreading." But still, "meninists" are on a mission to continue defending "manspreading."

Seemingly, "meninists" have decided that "manspreading" is not something our society should make an issue, as their viewpoint has been constructed by the sexist belief that it is their "right" to sit how they please. According to "meninists," men should be able to "manspread" even if it means disturbing other passengers. In response to this anti-manspreading campaign that "meninists" insist is sexist against men, MIC uploaded a video that had a woman and a man both "manspread" on the subway while secretly filming other rider's reactions. Interestingly enough, Nick is able to "manspread" without anyone saying anything. On the other hand, Liz notes how when she "manspreads" she couldn't help but feel people were looking at her, with some even taking pictures of her "unusual" posture. A group of four people however chose to stand right in front of Nick, who is clearly taking up three seats, rather than question his posture because they accept it as natural.

The most notable takeaway from the experiment is how both Nick and Liz felt afterwards. Liz felt uncomfortable, as she is used to always crossing her legs because she is a woman. On the other hand, Nick felt normal and even felt empowered. This is the reason "manspreading" is not just a transportation issue, but also a feminist issue; it speaks to how women generally feel self-conscious about sitting with their legs spread apart. "Manspreading" is essentially part of rape culture. Women are taught from a young age to keep their legs closed because otherwise men will feel entitled to sex. However, women should not be held accountable to monitor their posture because men will think they are "asking for it," just like it is not a woman's fault for being raped because she drank alcohol or wore certain clothes. Women do not have the freedoms men implicitly possess in a patriarchal society when it comes to posture. Women must continually be conscious and aware of how they sit because of rape culture.

You can look everywhere, not just subways, and see "manspreading" in full effect. For example, I was sitting in UCLA's student area Ackerman just observing the people around me. Men who were at their own chairs were still "manspreading." In contrast, every single woman who had their own chairs and space to spread out either had their legs crossed or took up little to no room. There is a gendering of posture, no question about it. Whether we do it unconsciously or consciously, it shows how women still feel pressure to sit "ladylike" even if they have all the room in the world. While "manspreading" needs to be stopped, at the same time women should be able to sit as they choose. As an experiment, I tried to "manspread" in my own chair, but I still felt weird, emphasizing how much the "correct" gender posture has been ingrained into our heads without us even realizing it. I challenge you to look around and you will notice significant differences. Simply try changing your posture and see what happens.

Nonetheless, "manspreading" is a problem because it perpetuates the notion that it is perfectly acceptable for men to control access to space, reaffirming public space as male-oriented. In the end "manspreading" merely excuses rudeness as a trait of being a man. We need to call out acts of "manspreading" while simultaneously redefining how a "normal" woman is supposed to sit. Woman should not be ashamed or feel a sense of vulnerability for sitting with their legs apart. Rather than the objective being for women to take up all the room they want, the ultimate goal needs to be for women and men to think about respecting each other's space while also making sure that they personally have the space they need.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Never heard of "manspreading"? Well, it is exactly what it sounds like. This is when men on public forms of transportation, such as subways or buses, sit with their legs widely spread apart, taking up the seat or seats next to them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Deep Dive Into The Cure’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ - Our Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this series, we take a deep dive into a significant song from the past and get to the heart of what makes it so great. Today, we revisit the Cure’s second single, a song that exposes the myth of male invulnerability but didn’t become a hit until almost a decade after its initial release. In […]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's a tried and tested ploy by small record labels who have acquired the rights to a chunk of the catalogue of a band with one big song to their name, to whack it all out on an album with that same big song as its title, for maximum marketability. And so, with minimum imagination, the first Cure album to be released in the USA, on the PVC label, was called Boys Don't Cry.

Article continues after advertisement

It's debatable, however, whether Boys Don't Cry counts as an album at all, in the traditional sense. It's essentially a cut-and-shut compilation of extended highlights from Three Imaginary Boys (which had not been released in America first time around) with non-album singles and B-sides.

The songs which survived from Three Imaginary Boys were "10.15 Saturday Night," "Accuracy," "Grinding Halt," "Another Day," "Object," "Subway Song," "Fire in Cairo" and "Three Imaginary Boys." (Those omitted were "Foxy Lady," "The Weedy Burton," "So What" and "It's Not You.") And parachuted in from elsewhere were "Plastic Passion," "Killing An Arab," "World War" and of course "Boys Don't Cry," sitting in classic budget compilation style at the very top of Side 1.

In later years, when Elektra reissued Boys Don't Cry on CD, some tinkering was done with the tracklisting. "Object," of which Robert Smith is not a fan, was removed and replaced by "So What." And Three Imaginary Boys outtake "World War," which Robert deemed "a nonsense," was also removed from most CD releases, "probably (possibly) because I hate it," he told Cure News.

The album was released in the States on February 5, 1980. Its artwork, itself a blown-up detail from the Three Imaginary Boys sleeve, is a vaguely Pop Art approximation by Bill Smith of an Egyptian desert scene, with a pink pyramid rising above three green palms against a bright blue sky, as a reference to the song "Fire in Cairo."

Article continues after advertisement

It's the chorus-pitching Robert's emotional vulnerability versus received ideas of masculinity-that really resonates.
It eventually slipped out in the UK in the August of 1983, Robert's craziest year, allowing newcomer fans of "The Walk" and "The Lovecats" to catch up on some of what they'd missed, but was drowned out somewhat by all the other Smith/Cure/Banshees activity at that time, though it did eventually go platinum (and also went gold in France).

Robert Christgau, originator of the "capsule review," wrote about Boys Don't Cry in his Consumer Guide column in Village Voice. Despite awarding it a B+, he sounded underwhelmed.

The sound is dry post-punk, never pretty but treated with a properly mnemonic pop overlay-I can look over the titles and recall a phrase from all but a few of these 13 songs. Intelligent phrases they are, too, yet somehow I find it hard to get really excited about them. What are we to think of a band whose best song is based on a novel by Albert Camus? Granted, I prefer "Killing An Arab" to The Stranger -the idea works better as a miniature-but that book defined middlebrow for me before I knew what middlebrow was, back when it was holy writ for collegiate existentialists. And the last thing we need is collegiate existentialist nostalgia.

In Rolling Stone, Debra Rae Cohen also highlighted The Cure's adolescent literary pretensions, writing that the record "proves they can transcend their Comp. Lit. 201 (Elementary Angst) scenarios."

Hindsight has been surprisingly kind to Boys Don't Cry. Despite not really being an album, it has twice made it into Rolling Stone's list of the four hundred greatest albums of all time. And, in his book Fear of Music: The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco, Garry Mulholland drily called it "the ultimate in morose sixth-formers, intellectualising their inability to get laid" and "the most fun you can have without ever having a hope of taking your clothes off."

Article continues after advertisement

It emerged in 1985 that the title track was Andrew Ridgeley from Wham!'s favorite song of all time. And if you think that piece of trivia was crudely bolted together with the rest of this entry, with no consideration for sequencing, now you know how Boys Don't Cry was made.
Boys Don't Cry (song)
"Toxic masculinity." A widely understood phrase now, first coined by author Shepherd Bliss and developed via the mythopoetic men's movement of the 1980s and 1990s, but non-existent when The Cure wrote "Boys Don't Cry." The concept is that societally enforced masculine norms of behavior are damaging not just for people of other genders but for men themselves. A strand of toxic masculinity runs through a certain type of Englishness: stoicism in the face of emotional trauma, the "stiff upper lip."

Lol Tolhurst, on the BBC Radio 4 series Soul Music, posited a direct connection between "Boys Don't Cry" and the growth of a healthier attitude towards such matters. "The Cure are totally responsible in my mind for boys being able to get close to their emotions and feelings...As anyone who grew up in 1960s/1970s Britain knows, emotion was not really on the table. It was 'stiff upper lip' stuff...Most teenage boys in the seventies were repressed in lots of ways."

Robert Smith, speaking to Rolling Stone in 2019, confirmed that this emotional repression was behind the song. "When I was growing up, there was peer pressure on you to conform to be a certain way. And as an English boy at the time, you're encouraged not to show your emotion to any degree. And I couldn't help but show my emotions when I was younger. I never found it awkward showing my emotions. I couldn't really continue without showing my emotions; you'd have to be a pretty boring singer to do that. So I kind of made a big thing about it. I thought, 'Well, it's part of my nature to rail against being told not to do something.'"

Article continues after advertisement

The idea of social pressure to suppress tears was not new in pop. The Four Seasons, in 1962, gave it a feminine twist with "Big Girls Don't Cry." In 1975, the breathy female voice of Kathy Redfern on 10cc's "I'm Not In Love" urged singer Eric Stewart to "Be quiet, big boys don't cry..." The Cure took that idea and, as Smith told Rolling Stone, railed against it. At the Reading Festival 1979, before a super-fast, double-speed rendition of "Boys Don't Cry" (as if Lol was dying for a piss and wanted to get it over with), Robert pointedly dedicated the song to "all the macho men in the audience." (He pronounced it "makko.")

"Boys Don't Cry" had been a weapon in The Cure's armory for a long time. It was one of the four songs on the demo tape recorded at Chestnut Studios, paid for by Ric Gallup, that got them signed to Fiction by Chris Parry in 1978. They recorded it as part of their first Peel Session in December that year. And it is documented as the opener of their live set as early as February 9, 1979 at the Nashville Room in London, four months ahead of its single release. At that gig, a gang of skinheads turned up intent on violence, but their leader was pacified by "Boys Don't Cry" and calmed everyone down, proof that The Cure's music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

An irresistible and instantly memorable piece of pop-punk, it was The Cure at their most Buzzcocksian (as Mat Snow of NME noted at the time), but the inspiration went back much further than that: Robert, in Cure News, called it "an attempt at a Sixties pop song."

The song's basic narrative-losing a girl by being a dick, living to regret it, desperately wanting her back-is not exactly uncommon in The Cure's oeuvre, nor in popular music as a whole. But it's the chorus-pitching Robert's emotional vulnerability versus received ideas of masculinity-that really resonates.

The B-side, "Plastic Passion," was based on the same chords as "A Night Like This" but sped up, and included the word "hyoscine" (also known as scopolamine or Devil's Breath, a drug used for treating motion sickness), most likely a leftover from Lol's chemistry studies. It started out, Robert told Cure News in 1991, "as a pastiche of early Roxy Music ('Pyjamarama'-style)."

Article continues after advertisement

The single's artwork featured young soldiers, fear in their eyes, marching off to war. The reverse, to depict "Plastic Passion," featured an advertisement for a blow-up sex doll ("HELGA Never Says No!"). The runout grooves bore the inscriptions "But Bill does" on the A-side (a reference to Parry) and "From the land of a thousand microphones" on the B-side (referring to the number of mics needed to record Lol's drums).

One press ad featured a Vietnam War soldier with the following text printed sideways:

Nowadays, terrorism is a plague happening all over the world. An elite troop, made of commandos, coming from the American army, is training to fight terrorists. The general commandant says "We will be there to kill."

Another ad for the single, with accompanying tour dates, was published in NME and featured an action shot from a boxing match, with informative tickertape up the side:

Red Cross Boxing at the Empress Stadium, Earls Court...2nd round Kilrain retired with split eye...

Warfare and macho (makko) sporting pursuits: it all connected, somehow to the battered and bruised emotions of the song's protagonist.

The single was warmly received by critics on its release in June 1979. Giovanni Dadomo of Record Mirror and Ian Birch of Melody Maker both compared it to the Beatles. Phil Sutcliffe in Sounds called it "their untypical Undertones manque single." Even NME's noted Curesceptic Paul Morley (see Desperate Journalist) wrote "This is magnificent," and his colleague Jon Savage called it "a genuine find" when it appeared on Polydor's 20 of Another Kind, Vol 2 compilation ("Killing An Arab" had appeared on Vol 1). Decades later Bob Stanley, in his book Yeah Yeah Yeah, called it "Palitoy Power Pop" (Palitoy being the manufacturer of tough-guy boys' toy Action Man).

Despite all that critical goodwill, it failed to chart first time around. However, it was to receive a second chance. In 1986 The Cure needed a single to promote the Standing On A Beach compilation, and "Boys Don't Cry" was given a "New Voice-New Mix" reboot.

There are various notable differences between the 1986 version and the original. On the newer version, the four-chord intro is strummed rhythmically rather than struck, filling the gaps. On the second and third choruses, there is no gap between the words "boys don't cry" (as compared to the lagged "boys...don't cry" on the original). At the end of the bridge, on the line "thought that you needed me more," the word "more" is sung once and allowed to hang, given a bit of echo (as compared to the repeated "more-more-more" on the original). The drums are also slightly more prominent.

The 1986 12-inch is more complex than either of the 7-inch versions. It starts with just bass and drums for a few bars, before the guitar intro plays for a few further bars with added guitar embellishments, so that it's almost ninety seconds before the vocals come in. The second verse is Robert's voice and Lol's drums only, then Lol's drums on their own for a while then an echoey chorus, then just the guitar on its own, then the drum comes back in, then the "I would break down" verse, then a penultimate chorus, half of which is just Robert's voice and guitar, then the bridge, then an instrumental section...until the song has become twice as long, but somehow manages to be half as satisfying.

Strangest of all, after going to all that effort, neither the 7-inch nor 12-inch edit of the 1986 version made it onto Standing On A Beach, the album it was intended to promote. For that album, the 1979 original was used intact. (In the US, "Let's Go To Bed" was re-released to promote the album instead.)
As long as toxic masculinity exists, "Boys Don't Cry" will be there to help with the detox.
For the 1986 single's B-sides, no new songs were written. Instead, they delved back into the archives for two songs as old as "Boys Don't Cry" itself. One, on the 12-inch, was the daft disco folly "Do the Hansa" (see Hansa). The other, on the 7-inch, was "Pillbox Tales" (originally called "Listen"), which was recorded in 1979 for Hansa but thus far unreleased. The latter is not, as one might suspect, a drug song but a reference to the time Lol Tolhurst and his girlfriend Sarah snuck out for a midnight tryst in one of the hexagonal World War II machine gun emplacements, known as "pillboxes," built across Britain in anticipation of German invasion, of which there remained dozens in the fields and woods north of Horley. ( Pillbox Tales eventually became the title of a Belgian bootleg compilation of early rarities.) Robert, in a 1991 edition of Cure News, dismissed both B-sides as "a nonsense."

A video, directed by Tim Pope, was made for the 1986 version. The Cure-the original trio, bassist Michael Dempsey having been brought back in for the day-appear in shadow form only, with glowing red eyes, behind a backdrop onto which "The Cure?" is briefly projected, with day-glo gloves popping up at random (in a possible call-back to the socks in "In Between Days.") In front of the backdrop, three young boys perform the song. "We saw these three boys playing football in the school playing field," Robert told Les Enfants du Rock, "and thought they looked remarkably like us at that age." Another version of the story is that various kids were invited to a dance studio to audition, and asked to play drums. Lol picked someone to look like the younger him ("but he flattered himself"), and they each did the same. In any case, the three children make it a brilliantly effective video. Following their moment of fame, the boys often went to Cure shows and met the band. Only one of them subsequently pursued a career in showbusiness. Mark Heatley (the young Robert Smith) went on to star in the 1988 TV movie Infantile Disorders before leaving the acting industry for a successful career in IT, though he made a return to acting in 2020, voicing the character Mavic Chen in a CGI recreation of a lost episode of Doctor Who.

As well as the video, the single was promoted with a round of television appearances, including one in France with the band all wearing dresses (this, apparently, was Lol's idea). And it became a hit at last, albeit a minor one. Chris Parry was convinced the original would reach the Top 10, but "It didn't get there because Polydor stitched us up," Robert Smith, promoting the new version, told The Hit magazine. "In a perfect world, that would have been No.1." It reached No.22. (It made the Top 10 in Ireland, and also New Zealand, where it had already reached No.22 first time around.) Nevertheless, it proved to newcomers that The Cure always did have pop songs up their sleeve, before the hits came. It's just that the world wasn't listening yet.

"Boys Don't Cry" has had a significant cultural afterlife. It's one of The Cure's most-covered songs, with versions by Scarlett Johansson, Miley Cyrus, Hell Is for Heroes, Reel Big Fish and Razorlight among others, plus a truly horrible breathy rendition by Grant Lee Phillips. In 2016 it was sung in a blind audition on the French version of The Voice by Antoine Galey. (He came third.)

The Cure themselves rarely leave it out of their setlist (it is their second most-played song, behind "A Forest"), and as well as the two single versions, recorded an acoustic take for MTV Unplugged. "Right," said Robert with a wry twinkle in his eye, "this is the, um, definitive version of 'Boys Don't Cry'...."

The title has been repurposed many times, including a 2021 novel by Fiona Scarlett, a 2010 novel by Malorie Blackman, a 1999 film by Kimberly Peirce, and a magazine published by Frank Ocean in 2016 to accompany his album Blonde, which was released on his own label, also called Boys Don't Cry. The song has been used in countless films, including The Wedding Singer, 50 First Dates, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, and Friends With Benefits. It has also been used, played backwards, as catwalk music at the end-of-year show at the Antwerp fashion academy. And in 2022 English singer Louis Dunford recorded a song supportive of male mental health issues called "Boys Do Cry."

The song lived on as a touchstone of male sensitivity for the emo generation, and Robert Smith believes it has something to say in the context of LGBTQ+ culture. "I was singing ['Boys Don't Cry'] at Glastonbury," he told Rolling Stone, "and I realized that it has a very contemporary resonance with all the rainbow stripes and stuff flying in the crowd...."

As long as toxic masculinity exists, "Boys Don't Cry" will be there to help with the detox.

__________________________________

From Curepedia: An A-Z of the Cure by Simon Price. Copyright © 2023 by Scott Simon. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Boys Do Cry: How The Cure Helped Mainstream Male Emotion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's a tried and tested ploy by small record labels who have acquired the rights to a chunk of the catalogue of a band with one big song to their name, to whack it all out on an album with that sam...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What gay men’s attitudes to masculinity have taught me about womanhood | Matt Cain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Surprising survey results showed me how complex and troubling society’s ideas about sexuality are – and gave me an increased respect for women, writes Matt Cain, editor-in-chief of Attitude

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Masculine Gender Role Conflict and Negative Feelings about Being Gay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Professional psychologists who work with gay men have noted that traditional masculine ideals play a prominent role in the gay community whereby some endorse these traditional ideals and stigmatize effeminate behavior by other gay men. One…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No More Boys & Girls – Lessons in Equity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As part of my prep for an upcoming talk I’ve been rewatching the BBC documentary – No More Boys and Girls – Can Our Kids Go Gender Free? For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a two part documentary from 2017 which sees Dr Javid Abdelmoneim work with a teacher (Graham Andre) and his class of 7 year olds to, as he describes it, “turn their class gender neutral” . The idea being to see if this can make a difference to some of the attitudes and ideas about what boys and girls and men and women can and can’t do or achieve.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
designboom | architecture & design magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
fyodor pavlov-andreevich’s antifurniture challenge everyday fears at the design museum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
displayed at the london design museum, ANTIFURNITURE invites users to face their fears through uncomfortable interactions with the objects.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Toxic Masculinity And the Demasculinization of Men

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
There’s a Reason Some Men Take Up So Much Space When They Sit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Manspreading: Why We Do It and Why We Need to Stop

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I suspect the reason men do this is very simple: we think we should. Sitting with knees together and legs in tight is a sign of weakness or homosexuality - both social death, of course. So with this overbearing sense of self-consciousness, we have somehow decided that ‘legs akimbo’ is the norm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
14 min read Words Joe Bobowicz

In this interview, Mark Leckey returns to Alexandra Palace Park, where the Turner Prize-winner once had a spiritual awakening

Suddenly, it hits you. A moment of clarity cuts through the fog of skunk and bassline-induced tinnitus, and for the first time, life makes sense. Just like that, from the crumbled floor of a North London bolthole, your existential dilemmas are solved, only to return the next day as you wonder what the fuck happened. This might sound familiar. Indeed, you would be forgiven for thinking this was just another party experience typical of the years Mark Leckey spent squatting. In fact, it's my first encounter with the creative magpie's work.

Shown at Cubitt Gallery in Islington, 'Affect Bridge' was an exhibition exemplary of Leckey's creative approach. Bringing together gritty fragments of Britain, the show took place in a box room, lit with Lucozade-hued sodium lamps. The effect was disorientating, if not trippy, and completely intentional. Homing in on a like-for-like model of a graffitied flyover, the installation was soundtracked with an especially haunting sermon, written by Leckey in the hope of exorcising his stagnant memories.

This cannabis-scented assault on the senses is one of many instances where Leckey invokes power from ephemera by exacerbating their emotional effects. Not surprising, then, that one of Leckey's masterpieces was spawned in the unassuming location of a public park. Granted, it was Alexandra Palace Park, where we find ourselves today for the shoot. It's Victorian, 196 acres in size, and quite conducive to Leckey's interests. Along the lake, anthropomorphic pony pedalos watch over walkers, while the palace towers above its grounds. "It's quite a weird and eerie place in itself," Leckey says.

Speaking a honeyed scouse, the artist appears in sunglasses following a bout of hay fever (it's June, FYI). "My eyes are fucked," he assures me with immediate familiarity. Polite but without façade, Leckey wears his heart on his sleeve, dotting between the profound and downright banal in an instant. I ask about his accent, igniting a tiny fire in his eyes. Raised in Ellesmere Port, an overspill town that skirts Liverpool, Leckey tells me he has always seen himself as an outsider. "They call us 'woolly backs' or 'plastic scousers'," he says. This peeve has long been a source of his artistic output, which revels in the forgotten corners, elevating them to new heights. But why would a man of his stature still be so cut up over regional gripes around authenticity? "It's your identity, isn't it?" he says.

Indeed, it was Leckey's fixation on identity that first captured the art world's attention with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), a filmic depiction of Britain's dance music subcultures that journeys from seventies northern soul to nineties rave. Splicing archival footage from northern England's dance halls and clubs, the veteran raver slurs over scenes like a warped record. Despite the drunken editing, it earned Leckey a Turner Prize in 2008, long before today's YouTubers had ever considered montaging videos from warehouse parties. Since then, he has honed a characteristically creepy style defined by uncanny figures and quick jumps from melancholia to ecstasy.

An example of this, Leckey recently exhibited his film, Carry Me into The Wilderness, a claustrophobic and dark piece inspired by religious iconography. A self-proclaimed obsessive, Leckey had taken a shine to late-Byzantine art. "I found this thing where it described icons as not being representative of the saint. It's you looking through the window at that saint himself," Leckey explains. Beginning inside a hermit's cave, the film climbs to fever pitch with an overlayed recording of Leckey's quasi-holy experience, recorded while walking on these very grounds.

"Like a few years ago - more than a few years ago, Jesus - in the mid-2000s, I stopped smoking and drinking, and started running," Leckey remembers. "On a really good day, I would get this endorphin high. I'd be kind of laughing and crying." Eventually, the effect dissipated, and Leckey stopped running. Years on, walking with his daughter during the throes of lockdown, it came back. "It's like everything's rushing in on you. It's awesome in the true sense of the word. Joyous and terrifying." Where did it happen? Leckey gestures vaguely towards a large expanse of grass. "Somewhere over there."

This ability to sanctify the everyday is a perennial theme in Leckey's work. From slow incantations of sportswear and designer brand names to sentient Samsung refrigerators, bizarre details gleaned from daily trivia are Leckey's bread and butter. Through these symbols, the elusive character examines the world and articulates his hypotheses. Take the flyover motif, for example. Cropping up throughout his films, it references idle evenings spent in an outskirt neighbourhood known as Eastham Rake. Speaking on this, Leckey mentions class and its stain, which became all the more prescient when he entered the art world. "My whole value system had to be reordered. I had to align with a more bourgeois value system."

Eventually, you find yourself back home one day and the way you and they look at the world don't align anymore

Leckey's astute awareness of class - both broadly and within an institutional industry - forms a key theme of Under Under In, a film that debuted at the 2019 Tate Britain retrospective. During, the protagonist (a young Leckey reimagined in modern sportswear), and his friends are seen skulking below the motorway bridge, punctuated with Leckey's lamentations and wishes to escape the provincial flatlands. That is until a changeling whisks Leckey into a supernatural realm. When he returns to the bridge where his friends remain, they barely recognise, let alone understand him. "Eventually, you find yourself back home one day and the way you and they look at the world don't align anymore," Leckey affirms.

It's heavy stuff, but Leckey navigates it with the same ease as he does football rivalries. Throughout our evening on shoot, conversation flows naturally between topics. One moment, he is discussing philosophy and lofty topics like duality, the next, it's David Hockney, gentrification, acid house and all the above. Less a walk in the park and more a dérive, our short time with Leckey highlights an attunement to frequencies, memories and ideas that attach to material culture. In true situationist style, there is no clear connection between our topics bar their open-ended potential.

At least, it seems that way. A moment of clarity: I understand that Leckey's brooding insights arise without warning, and the world seen through his eyes is one in which the mundane becomes significant and the significant mundane. Despite this, or perhaps true to this, Leckey is more than just a long-haired, artistic genius fascinated by nostalgia, class, and subculture. He's also a bloke living a life, not all that dissimilar to yours and mine. Suddenly, his phone dings. A troubling text from his wife, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Serpentine Gallery's chief curator. His blunder? Absentmindedness - a pink in the wash. Visibly concerned, but also inspired, Leckey picks out the park's pink delights. A girl with fuchsia curlers, sports bra and cycling shorts whizzes past. He is visibly excited, adjusting his pose. He notices a pink rose bed and laughs. "We're in suburbia now."

A month on from the shoot, Leckey sits down in his garden for a candid conversation over Zoom. The result is a hotchpotch interview-cum-catchup, clustered with nuggets of SoundCloud rap, West Ham lads, My Little Pony, and an earnest discussion of appropriation.
Joe Bobowicz: Last time we spoke, you mentioned your "dumping ground" hard drive and belief in the longtail theory, where niche interests coalesce online, potentially assembling in progressive moments. You've also started your Abundance Dump show on NTS radio. What's the concept for this, and is it part of these ideas?
Mark Leckey: Yeah, I guess. I've been doing this slot on NTS for like six years and never given it a name. I started doing it casually, and then during lockdown, it was a lifeline. To be honest, I nicked that title. I saw someone put it on Twitter and thought, 'Ah yeah, that's good.' In a way, it does connect to the longtail because there's a bit where I talk about my interest in music, pop culture and trying to find the hidden and obscure, and there was something almost cultish about it at the extreme end. You would be continually looking for rarities, investing almost supernatural powers in them. When the Internet came along, it brought everything to the surface, making it available and visible. The whole dynamic changed. Now, it's more like an abundance dump. They used to have the analogy of crate digging. Crate digging implies an archaeology; abundance dump seems more like it's not worth much - trash, maybe. Which it isn't. Maybe 'abundance dump' isn't a good name. Maybe I've talked myself out of it!
JB: Are you a crate digger?
ML: I would never call myself a crate digger, but I definitely have that impulse. Going into a record shop and fingering through old LPs in a crate doesn't appeal to me. I have the same sort of drive to find forgotten or obscure stuff. I have the mentality, but it's more a knowledge that there is some weird and wonderful stuff out there, so I keep digging.
JB: That makes me think of your lecture/artwork, The Cinema in the Round, which features a lot of weird moments, from the CGI ship sinking in Titanic to that weird Simpsons episode, Homer 3D. Does that tie into this for you?
ML: Yeah, it's about finding stuff. It's funny you say that because I got scolded for the Titanic thing. With a lot of this, it's basically appropriation. There's sometimes a wilful ignorance with crate digging where you'll dig out an obscure soul sample and not pay your respects or acknowledge the original musician. In this desire to find things [as if] they just magically appeared to you, you're not considering their production. And I got caught with the Cinema in the Round. I had heard this idea of the Titanic being a sculpture that goes from horizontal to vertical, and obviously, I stored it in my crate. The person who had originally said it, Jerry Saltz, a New York critic, pulled me up about it, quite pissed off that I had nicked his line and not credited him.
JB: In the film for Cinema in the Round, you do credit him, though.
ML: Yeah, because I changed it. I felt bad. The thing is, at the beginning, in 2000, me and a friend of mine, Ed Baird, had an art band called Donatella and did mashups, singing over the top of other records. It was this idea of deliberately taking stuff - we used to talk about being poachers. That was fine because no one knew who I was. I didn't have any gallery representation. But as I've become more successful, I have to be aware of not nicking stuff from... I'm happy to take stuff from above. It's more taking stuff from below - it's that idea of punching down.
JB: Is that partly because when you started out, you were signing on [for unemployment benefits], and now you're in a very different situation?
ML: Exactly.
ML: Did you need to rethink it?
JB: I have. I don't use as much found imagery as I used to. I had a record out during lockdown, and I used a meme for the cover. It was these West Ham football hooligans calling out Everton fans, but they looked ridiculous. The Everton fans mocked them, drawing on this image. I used that because it so accurately conjured up everything that I felt at that time about where I had come from, having two daughters and the world having this weird, digital, slightly magical realm. Anyway, it was irresistible. I tried to find out who made it and said publicly, 'If you see this, just give me a shout, and I will offer you recompense.'
ML: It described how you were feeling and also your experience in the past?
JB: Yeah. It's a photograph, originally, of four - I call them scallies, you call them road men - and they're trying to look hard. Everyone mocked them by putting on the most ridiculous accessories - really girly things - feminising or sissifying them. It made a sympathetic image. I thought maybe that's more like what boyhood is now. That aggressive, masculine energy I grew up with, it's still there, but not as dominant. I liked that they were drawn with sort of unicorns - my oldest daughter is into that whole rainbow, unicorn aesthetic and those cartoon TV shows, My Little Pony and the rest of it. I have an ambivalence about it: I like it as an aesthetic, but it seems manipulative in how it colonises little kids' imaginations. But maybe it's like any attempt at branding when a corporation tries to exploit young kids; they find a way to make it theirs. You see that with My Little Pony. There are people who form close bonds around watching that programme, which is very long tail. In the long tail, it's full of My Little Pony.

What are you listening to?
There's a particular sort of trap: mumble, SoundCloudy... I love Young Thug and always looking for the more psychedelic end of that. I like it when it gets really fucked up. When they've been doing loads of molly and purple drank, and it gets all strange. I like early-seventies kraut prog-rock, too.
For example?
A German bank called Faust, I really like... Van de Graaff Generator, Tangerine Dream. And I follow a lot of music stuff on social media, so I pay a lot of visits to Bandcamp. If Boomkat put something out, I'll listen to that. I like something murky that's mixed so it's echoey, reverby, pushed right back, with a smooth, almost R&B vocal. I keep listening to the Ghost Pop-Tape by Devon Hendryx. Klein... Stuff on the cusp of experimental and R&B is best. The song I've loved the most is by a British artist called LA Timpa. Because of NTS I am crate digging. This is the way you do it now: SoundCloud, YouTube, TikTok, wherever. I spend a lot of time digging around finding stuff.
Recently, you showed Dream English Kid in a show called Ancient Mews at Conditions, a gallery in Croydon's Whitgift Centre, an old shopping mall. How did that come about?
It was these guys called Theo Ellison and Joe [Moss]. Conditions is a school in Croydon run by these two artists I've known for years, Matthew Noel-Tod and David Panos. They set up Conditions maybe four years ago and asked me to come in - this is pre-pandemic. I did a day's teaching. It's an alternative art school, basically. It's grown a lot since I went. Then, I got this request from them, saying they wanted to show a video of mine. They gave me the show's gist - so I said, 'Oh, Dream English Kid' is best. I liked this idea of ancient mews, and the ancient and the modern. I'm less likely to say no to an overly curated show in some well-known gallery, but if it's just someone trying to do something, I can't see a reason to say no. Most of my stuff is on YouTube. If I'm showing it there, what's the difference?
The show you did recently at Pinacoteca Agnelli looked brilliant. Can you tell me about this?
This is the funny thing about the art world, isn't it? There's the show in an old Croydon shopping centre, and there's showing a work with, basically, Italian royalty - the Fiat family. There is common ground, but they're literally worlds apart. I got asked to do it. They had this incredible venue, the Lingotto, that was the Fiat factory. On top of the factory, famously it has this test racetrack. And it just sits there like a white elephant - they wanted to turn it into a public place. They're modelling it slightly on the highline in New York: there's this garden in the middle and they want public artwork throughout. They facilitated whatever I wanted and managed to hire a jumbotron screen, which is like an outside LED screen. It's that end of the art world where I come away feeling slightly spoilt.
On our shoot, you got a text from your wife saying you'd dyed everything pink.
[Laughs] It was an enormous exaggeration. She has a white shirt that slightly, slightly changed colour. I didn't feel at all bad when I saw it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A quasi-holy experience with Mark Leckey - Plaster Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This profile explores how Mark Leckey is more than just a long-haired artistic genius fascinated by nostalgia, class, and subculture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Harmful Gender Norms Create an Unequal World for Children

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gender norms can cause harm and impact millions of girls and boys around the world, denying them basic human rights like health, education, income equality and a life free of violence.

# data[].attributes.body
Original image used for background.

# data[].attributes.body
Source: Harry Barrington

# data[].attributes.headline
Screenshot of BBC documentary: No more boys and Girls: can our kids go gender free

# data[].attributes.subject
Screenshot of BBC documentary: No more boys and Girls: can our kids go gender free

# data[].attributes.body
Source: BBC

# data[].attributes.body
Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich