This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Spectator podcast with Lara Prendergast.

Hello and welcome back to The Spectators podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast. On this week's episode,

we'll be looking into the world of dating and ask whether we're in the middle of a sex recession.

We'll also be looking at the mysterious case of the missing horses and ask, what is the RSPCA up to taking people's horses?

Finally, we'll be looking at neurodiversity and why it's such a controversial subject within the autistic community.

First up, are we in the middle of a sex recession?

Zoe Strimple laments in her article in this week's spectator

that dating apps and online porn have ruined romance.

So, why is dating not as fun as it used to be?

Are smartphones to blame or is something else at play?

Joining me as Zoe Strimple and Dr. Kath Mercer, a lead researcher at one of the largest

national surveys of sexual attitudes and lifestyles in the UK. So Zoe, you say in your piece

that we've never had more choice but the quality and quantity of sex seems to be going down.

What exactly do you think is to blame for that?

I mean, I think that it's the sort of the direction of technology and sort of, you could call

it late capitalism is such that it's sort of natural that we want to turn everything into

a sort of question of choice and so almost a consumer choice and commodify things.

And digital dating has made that possible.

But I think that what we're finding out in very kind of interesting and painful and sort of, yeah,

I suppose just interesting ways is that when you treat the dating market literally as a market,

there are a whole host of sort of bad effects, I think, to do with the quality of the bonds that you're supposed to be forging.

And, you know, I've actually, I did a master's thesis about the sort of the degree to which

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