When you look at your favourite superheroes, they’re all wearing tights. Men in tights have been around forever, and you saw them on actors in the theatre or sports. So to me, it’s not even new. It just feels like it’s been there [all along].” Among the topics covered will be "consent, intimacy and mutual pleasure" and how to identify abusive or violent relationships.

T he concept of “Asian values”, once championed by leaders across the region, went out of vogue after the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The idea that East and South-East Asia’s disciplined governments had a unique economic edge over the decadent West suddenly seemed less compelling. Today in prosperous East Asia a different facet of those ballyhooed values is looking even more parlous. In China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Asians’ supposed commitment to conservative family life is collapsing. As we report in our Asia and China sections this week, millions of young people are opting for looser, often lonelier and— in the East Asian context—less male-dominated arrangements. In a region that is home to over a fifth of humanity, the socioeconomic and demographic consequences will be vast, potentially destabilising and will shape millions of lives.Also called chronophilia (and sometimes ageism), the fetishization of age is a hotly debated topic in gay culture. The term swings both ways: this fetish applies when someone older fetishizes the specific age of someone younger, and when someone younger fetishizes the specific age of someone older. The fetish doesn’t require a significant age difference — just the fact that someone’s age itself is a turn-on. Governments should try to complete this lopsided revolution. Even if social change is not entirely within their grasp, and does not happen overnight, they can at least stop resisting it. To make family life more attractive, they need to deal with its gender imbalances as well as its costs by, for example, making paternity leave routine. They should look beyond heterosexual marriage, as their citizens have, and extend legal recognition to cohabiting, gay and other non-traditional arrangements—and afford them the support married couples now enjoy, especially over child-rearing. It is self-defeating and outrageous that China prevents single women from freezing their eggs, or that Japan makes it nearly impossible for gay couples to foster children. Let them not wed Traditional values are hard on women at work, too. East Asia has some of the world’s best-educated women, yet its overall record on female empowerment is poor and in some ways worsening. On the World Economic Forum’s gender-equality ranking of 153 countries, China—where women are said to “hold up half the sky”—slipped from 63rd in 2006 to 102nd in 2022. South Korea has the widest gender pay gap in the OECD. I thought these guys must be buying them for their wives or their girlfriends or moms,” shares Chen on our call. “I soon realized that these men were actually just buying for themselves.”

Catholic Bishops have previously approved distinct RSE lessons for Catholic primary schools in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.I can understand why you were upset. You had already taken things to the “next level” in your heart—you were thinking of this guy as your boyfriend—you just hadn’t gotten around to informing him about the upgrade. And you assumed that when you did get around to letting him know, he would be delighted. Because he was the one who wanted a relationship at the beginning, right?