To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)
It was a rainy evening in November 2025 when journalist Maya Oppenheim found herself cruising down the freeway with a sex addict. The driver, Paul*, was an interview subject in her latest report for VICE—a wide-ranging deep dive into Sex Addicts Anonymous, and the growing but under-discussed issue of sex addiction in the UK.
Historically, sex addiction has flown under the radar due to the absence of an established criteria for diagnosis, lack of obvious symptoms, and pervasive social stigma. Recently, though, there has been an uptick in research “attempting to grapple with the reality, and scale, of what many believe is a hidden epidemic of sex addiction, at a time when novel new tech and social pressures are throwing our relationship to intimacy into disarray,” as Maya puts it.
Spending time with multiple people in recovery, from a young woman based in London who found herself picking up strangers in local chicken shops, to a married man in his sixties who has struggled with some kind of addiction since his teens, Maya was able to learn more about the interior lives of one of the most clandestine forms of addiction. She writes:
“The Travelodge on the outskirts of Bristol is not a particularly glamorous destination. It’s functional and boxy, furnished garishly with random words like ‘relax,’ ‘meet,’ and ‘yummy’ sprayed in jaunty fonts across the walls. Music that sounds like a polyphonic ringtone from 2003 wafts across the foyer, and there are more builders than guests when Paul and I meet on a typically overcast British winter’s day. Before seeking help with SAA, Paul brought women here often. ‘I used to quite like it because I imagined I was on holiday in a separate existence,’ he says. The fantasy never lasted long, though. He only used rooms for an hour at a time, fearing his wife would rumble him.”
You can read her full report, undertaken with the full consent and support of SAA, below:
In far less grave news, popular music has gained an esteemed new genre called UK poo. If you spend more than 90 minutes a day on your phone, chances are you’ve come across a TikTok native video of an amateur British artist, probably a rapper, staring down a phone camera and mostly failing to ride a half-baked drill beat with meandering lyrics that make Ice Spice sound like Proust. X user @cashyams came up with the name as a joke after he and his friends found themselves repeatedly reloading viral tracks that were “funny to the point where there’s no way the person that’s making this isn’t aware that this is hilarious.”
As with all new genres, though, its remit immediately began to expand—being retroactively applied to things like early BBM-era UK rap and BTEC Grime—leading to some confusion about what UK poo actually is. VICE got in touch with @cashyams for his definition, and to get to the bottom of what separates a UK poo track from bog-standard bad music.
“There are ‘genuine shades of musical talent’ in a lot of these tracks—but social media means UK poo artists are taking their baby steps in public rather than in the safety of their bedrooms or a rehearsal studio. ‘Everyone’s heard shit music but there’s something about these songs, it feels kind of harsh to just say they’re shit […] Like, you can see the childlike wonder in the artist’s eyes. There’s something silly about it and that’s why we thought poo was more apt than just shit.’”
Read the full dissection of UK poo below.
Stop Getting ‘UK Poo’ Wrong: A Guide to Britain’s Newest (and Worst?) Music Genre
Emma Garland
Deputy Editor, VICE Magazine
To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)
The post Sex Addiction in Chicken Shops—This Week On VICE: Members Only appeared first on VICE.
