Really Not Rivals    A. F. Harrold

Silently stared at by sixteen steers in a field, as if they know what I've got in my trousers, as if I'm responsible for what's not in theirs. When the cows bat their eyelids, when thick lashes flutter and lascivious lows echo back from the hills, these boys feel their lack, that absented swinging sack of nothing, but they've really got nothing...  more

Editorial    Jamie Maclean

Just before we went to press Transport For London reversed a decision to censor a poster of Lucas Cranach the Elder's 1532 Venus. It was for the Royal Academy's exhibition of the artist that opens this month. Apparently they have grasped the extent of cock-up they were making. Their ban was on grounds of the possibility that a 500-year-old German...  more

It's Just a Cunt    Hazel Davis

It's 2008. Sexuality has ceased to become a moral issue or a social concern. Sexual practice has become a lifestyle choice with all the relevance of wallpaper-choice or preferred coffee brand. So why haven't our attitudes to acceptable sexual terminology moved on since the middle ages?  We feel able to discuss more or less any sexual...  more

Fucked-up Shakespeare    Jonathon Green

Three generations of the Bowdler family, of English country gentry stock, were concerned in the business of literary expurgation. The most famous, Thomas Bowdler, M.D., gave his surname to the language, in the form of 'bowdlerise'. Thomas Bowdler's parents, Thomas Bowdler Sr. (1727-1800) and his wife were both adept at expurgation. The squire...  more