Gisele Pelicot's brave daughter highlights threat that we need to talk about

Gisele Pelicot was drugged and raped as she slept by dozens of men including her husband, their facilitator, Dominique. Their daughter Caroline Darian attended the Hay Festival to publicise her book I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again and answered an audience member who asked how men can “step up” and be part of breaking cycles of abuse, saying “you need to talk between guys about pornography” because it is “part of the system” of misogyny and violence.

Caroline’s brave, blunt and right. She believes there is “no way” her mother would have been mistreated so monstrously if it were not for pornography websites. These depraved hubs normalise the use of women as tools for male sexual gratification. They degrade, demote and dehumanise women, reducing us to no more than sex dolls with a pulse: without hearts, souls, personalities, dreams or feelings.

What passed for pornography in the 1960s and 70s was censored and embarrassing to get hold of. Newsagents kept saucy magazines on top shelves, guarding customers’ morals and stopping teenage boys getting near them. Sexy films were tame tales of naughty milkmen, rampant housewives and chaps who arrived to mend broken cars. Most people probably had sex without ever having watched anyone else do it.

We did what came naturally. There was no rule book or template. None of us could have imagined a titillating ganders at Confessions Of A Window Cleaner morphing a few decades later into a slick, sick multi-billion dollar industry available to all at the flick of a smartphone, peddling perversion in a manner designed to drive social media traffic, and bearing almost no recognisable relation to what used to be real sex in real bedrooms.

Porn now involves half-choking, virtually inanimate women who pretend they are enjoying the painful process. Climax cannot occur in the traditional manner, because it wouldn’t work on camera, exaggerated bizarre orgasmic throes are now portrayed as the norm.

The nature of pornography is that it must be more and more explicit to retain its jaded audience. It is essential that we alert our young people to the manipulative games being played with their sexual arousal and behaviour and the dire obstacles impeding their paths to intimacy.

We must not flinch from this discussion. This is no time to be shy. Let’s not stand by while our descendants are callously robbed of all chance of tenderness.

Sarah Jessica Parker and her pals, minus Kim Cattrall’s raunchy Samantha, are back in for series three of the grown-up Sex And The City sequel, called And Just Like That... Critics have mellowed, cooing that the grating wokeness of the first two series has calmed, and the plotlines and performances finally gelled.

I switched on longing for a laugh and an oasis of intelligent escapism. I found Miranda fumbling through a one-night stand with a virgin nun, Carrie, below, sending postcards to Aidan with whom – for no cogent reason – she has decreed she’ll endure a five-year longdistance relationship while he rears his offspring just a short plane hop away, and Charlotte’s dog being mistaken for a predator by a short-sighted stranger.

Only one ingredient transfixed me: Carrie’s romantic pink organza rosetrimmed dress and matching diaphanous coat. She looked exquisite, but far too fairy-like and ethereal for any terrestrial occasion. Try the far punchier Sirens on Netflix instead.

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Quick. Someone give Sir Chris Hoy his own motivational TV series. The man is coping simultaneously with his terminal prostate cancer diagnosis, his wife Sarra’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis, raising two children, nine and seven, working his socks off, cycling fiendishly and, as he puts it “making hay while the sun shines”. Hoy’s radiant positivity is dazzling.

Every time he utters the word “cancer”, he insists he robs it of its power: “The more I talk about it, the easier it gets.” Obviously, he is self-disciplined, resilient and quite remarkable. Sarra sounds as if she’s cut from the same cloth. The rest of us can only benefit from exposure to his unique perspective.

As Chris said about being stuck on a delayed flight the other day with unhappy fellow passengers, “It was hot and busy, and it was frustrating... and I was just thinking, you’re alive, this is great, this is life.” More Sir Chris Hoy if you please.

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Dame Jacinda Ardern, former New Zealand PM, is still only 44. She’s revealed when attending the Commonwealth Summit in 2018, she asked the late Queen for advice on raising children in the public eye and Her Majesty replied, “You just get on with it”. Was this a considered reply to all questions? How do you cook an omelette? You just get on with it. How do keep a happy marriage? You just get on with it.

Perhaps it was her stock answer to all questions, like putting your best foot forward and keep on keeping on. Could the Queen have been a bit more helpful and offered a few more bespoke pointers, or is “just getting on with it” truly the acme of all advice in all circumstances? How do you survive childbirth? You just get on with it. On reflection, Elizabeth II was probably spot on.

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Mischievous does not rhyme with previous. There is no I after the V. It is pronounced miss-chiv-ous, not miss-cheevey-ous. To insert a rogue I is wrong. It shows you have not bothered to read the word as it is written. It is slovenly. Susie Dent, of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner, says she no longer cares.

So many mispronounce “mischievous” that the mistake might as well be correct. It’s fine. Just roll with it. I disagree. I don’t want to be asked which of two people wore a dress best. There are two and one wore it “better”. I don’t want to be told someone is “sat” or “stood” in front of the Palace of Westminster. They are “sitting” or “standing”.

I don’t want the letter H to be pronounced “haitch” when it is called “aitch”. This stuff matters. Teachers must leap upon grievous (not grievious) errors and teach. While we’re on the subject, decimate means to destroy one in every ten. It isn’t a synonym for devastate. And refute means produce proof of evidence that something is incorrect, not merely to say so.