There are very few things left in society that can still produce genuine surprise.

Yet every few years, a major newspaper rediscovers—often with biblical awe—that women possess not only an inner life but a sexual one as well.

The latest entry in this recurring cycle is Lucy Denyer’s piece in The Telegraph, in which the revelation that a woman watches pornography is presented with the startled tone usually reserved for rare meteorological phenomena.

The entire article reads like someone has just stumbled upon a secret civilization.

Apparently, women have both desire and internet access. Who knew?

Everyone, of course. Except the Feed.

Every generation invents new words for sex—not because desire is changing, but because we’re finally honest enough to name the patterns we used to pretend were accidents.

The old categories weren’t built for actual humans. They were built for forms, surveys, and the kind of public conversations that depend on polite fictions.

The 2020s have no patience for polite fictions. And that’s how almondsexuality entered the room.

Almondsexual didn’t crawl out of academia or a think tank.

It was born in the digital commons—the LGBTQ+ corners of the internet where people do the real labor of naming their inner lives.

These communities have always been ahead of the curve, inventing vocabulary long before institutions realize their glossary is 40 years out of date.

If you want to understand what’s happening to American sexuality, don’t bother with marriage statistics or dating questionnaires.

Look at the “most viewed” section of Pornhub.

That’s where the erotic imagination of the country is being shaped, standardized, and exported in real time.

And according to a new long-range study in The Journal of Sex Research, what people are watching today looks markedly different from what they watched 25 years ago.

Visible physical aggression in mainstream pornography hasn’t crept upward; it has tripled.

Not because all of America suddenly became leather-friendly, but because online porn now runs on an economy of intensity rather than intimacy.

The dorm light flickers. A cracked phone leans against a coffee mug. She snaps another shot, widens her eyes, shrinks her chin, and waits for the algorithm to smile back.

A new study in Telematics and Informatics — by Yao Song, Qiyuan Zhou, Wenyi Li, and Yuqing Liu of Sichuan University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University — analyzed more than 13,000 pairs of edited selfies from Rednote, one of China’s most popular lifestyle apps.

The researchers wanted to quantify what beauty means when filtered through class.

They discovered that as regional income falls, faces grow softer. Eyes widen, noses shrink, jaws narrow, skin brightens. The lower the GDP, the younger the face looks.

We talk about beauty as personal expression, but Liu’s dataset reads more like economic confession.

Once upon a time, luxury meant imported marble and a concierge with a memory for faces. Now it means airplane mode.

“Offline is the new luxury” began as a meme on Instagram—a joke about burnout chic—but somewhere between irony and exhaustion, it became a social ideal.

In a world where attention is currency, silence has become the new status symbol. You’re not rich because you’re visible. You’re rich because you can vanish.

Bestowed attention is the rarest form of modern affection — rarer than silence, rarer than truth, and almost regarded as impolite.

To bestow attention is to notice someone deliberately.

Not because you are bored or virtuous, but because you have decided that, for one moment, they are the only thing you see.

It isn’t the attention of commerce or crisis. It costs nothing, which is probably why it’s so undervalued.

We live in a world that can broadcast a wedding to a million strangers but can’t sustain eye contact across a table.

Attention has become a traded commodity. Everyone wants it; no one treasures it. We count its clicks but ignore its meaning.

Bestowed attention refuses that economy. It isn’t exchanged or extracted; it’s offered.

We used to whisper our marriages into each other’s ears.
Now we broadcast them to strangers and call it connection.

A client told me recently, “Our marriage is fine—until I open my phone.”

The algorithm, she meant, has become a third partner in the relationship—seductive, judgmental, and always awake.

It knows what kind of spouse you should be, what kind of house you should own, and which couple on TikTok has already out-loved you.

Once upon a time, privacy was romantic. Now it’s suspicious.

He began every morning with a monologue.

At seventy-three, Napoleon Hill still wore a suit that hadn’t been in style since Eisenhower, dictating into a battered Dictaphone as if God were taking notes.

From his scratched oak desk, he delivered the secrets of success between calls from creditors. America had moved on to television; Hill was still peddling faith like it was a growth stock.

Years earlier, he’d claimed to be Franklin Roosevelt’s secret adviser—the invisible hand behind “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He repeated it so often that others began to believe him. Hill never needed convincing.

He didn’t invent self-help. He informed its performative art—the solemn theater of certainty. The first American to turn conviction itself into a product. Confident bullshit, sold at full retail.

“Nice guys finish last.”

It’s a phrase that lives rent-free on Reddit threads and TikTok captions, usually next to screenshots of men lamenting why women always choose jerks.

A new study in the Journal of Research in Personality backs up the complaint—at least partly.

Researchers surveyed 3,800 adults across Australia, Denmark, and Sweden. They found that agreeable men—those who are kind, patient, and cooperative—were slightly less likely to be in relationships.

By contrast, extroverted men did better, and anxious men struggled most.

For women, agreeableness made no difference, shyness wasn’t a penalty, and being a little neurotic actually helped (Fors Connolly et al., 2025).

Here’s the twist: once a couple forms, the very qualities that slowed men down in dating predict greater relationship satisfaction.

Ted Bundy got marriage proposals in prison. Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker,” had fangirls camping outside the courthouse.

And today? TikTok is the new courtroom balcony, where millions publicly swoon over killers in slick edits set to sad-girl audio.

There’s a word for this: hybristophilia — sexual attraction to criminals. It sounds like a rare orchid, but psychologists use it to describe a very old phenomenon: finding danger desirable.

A recent study confirms TikTok is fueling it, showing that actively engaging with videos that romanticize criminals predicts higher hybristophilia scores among young women.

Personality traits like psychopathy and Machiavellianism were the strongest predictors (Treggia et al., 2024). Simply scrolling past Bundy edits doesn’t count. Clicking “like” does.

Social media once felt like the mall on a Saturday — crowded, noisy, fluorescent, alive.

Today it feels like a mall in decline: the lights buzz, the escalator groans, and the only kiosk left is an AI screen trying to sell you sunglasses no one wants.

In 2025, Meta and OpenAI doubled down on this ghost mall.

Meta launched Vibes, an AI-powered short-video feed. OpenAI rolled out Sora, a TikTok-style platform where every single clip is synthetic.

If that sounds less like “social media” and more like a novelty conveyor belt, you’re catching on.

And just as they flooded the feed with auto-generated spectacle, people started slipping quietly out the side door.

Taylor Swift has long been the poet laureate of American romance.

She has sung about heartbreak (All Too Well), revenge (Reputation), and dreamy reflection (Folklore). But in 2025, she gave us something refreshingly different.

“Wood”, from The Life of a Showgirl, is her boldest and cheekiest track yet—a song laden with innuendo, humor, and joy.

With its images of black cats, unlucky pennies, redwood trees, and “magic wands,” Wood celebrates the confidence Swift has found in her relationship with Travis Kelce.

It’s playful, raunchy, and surprisingly tender. And, like much of Swift’s best work, it’s also bigger than itself: the song taps into mythology, ritual, and the way Americans create meaning from love stories.