A great article and once more I’m profoundly grateful to have grown up outside the USA. Europeans and Antipodeans (at least of my age and thereabouts) seem to have escaped the weird sex-negativity that pervades most of US culture (“Remember kids, sex is for selling product, not for enjoyment!”).

A quick anecdote: many years ago a European friend of mine was doing a world tour with his Australian wife. They came to stay in California with my then-wife and me and over dinner I happened to mention I’d bought my wife a sex toy (vibrating rabbit dildo) she wasn’t interested in. The young Australian woman asked to see it, then went into their bedroom to try it out. She emerged an hour later, flushed and happy, and asked, “D’you have any more batteries…?”

And none of us thought anything of it at all.