Lily Allen: 'I felt I was a vehicle for male pleasure — not my own' The Times Julia Llewellyn Smith Lily Allen: 'I felt I was a vehicle for male pleasure — not my own' new It's been a difficult few years for the pop star Lily Allen, whose marriage to the Stranger Things actor David Harbour fell apart in very public fashion. Now she's riding high again Lily Allen, 41: “If me speaking about desire and pleasure can help women talk about it, that can only be a good thing” Lovehoney Julia Llewellyn Smith Tuesday October 20 2026, 5.00am BST , The Times Listen 0:00 / · 16:58 min Share Share this article Email Twitter Facebook Link Save Today's Quizle Q: Test your knowledge A year ago Lily Allen released her fifth album, West End Girl , and caused an international sensation. The startlingly personal album, which went gold, has been streamed more than 275 million times and was nominated for three Brit awards: British album of the year, artist of the year and pop act. It was a more than triumphant return to form for Allen, the iconic pop sensation of the Noughties, who had released no solo music for seven years. More pertinently, perhaps, it gave the world an intensely voyeuristic — and very relatable — thrill as Allen deployed her unique blend of angelic vocals, jaunty melodies and lacerating, detailed lyrics to relate a torrid break-up that, if not identical, was certainly very similar to the end of her four-year marriage to the American actor David Harbour (best known for Stranger Things ) in early 2025. The Thread newsletter All the big cultural talking points, plus life, career, relationships and more Sign up with one click You've successfully signed up to the The Thread newsletter Explore our newsletters An error occurred. Please use the link below. The Thread newsletter Explore our newsletters She sang about a couple and their children moving to New York and settling into a tasteful brownstone, and about their open marriage agreed — reluctantly on her part — under certain parameters (“Don't be blatant/ There had to be payment/ It had to be with strangers”). Everything blew up when it transpired the husband had been having a three-year affair. (Allen had previously said on her hit podcast, Miss Me? , that she had “kink-shamed” Harbour, refusing to try sexual practices he had suggested.) There were confrontations with other women, then a visit to an apartment where Allen (or her character) believed her husband was practising martial arts, but instead found a Duane Reade bag of “sex toys, butt plugs, lube”. “I don't need to be taken care of any more. There's definitely a sense of liberation in that” Calzedonia. Liberty Floral Top, ￡34.99, and tight, calzedonia.com The themes of betrayal hit a huge nerve with the mainly female audience on the subsequent West End Girl tour , who packed arenas worldwide, singing along passionately to Allen's every excoriating word. Allen had triumphantly seized the narrative, transforming her marital anguish into a new phase of confidence and creativity. Top stories 1 Clodagh McKenna: I always get up at 6am on holiday. I love the calm Inspiration 2 16 of the best safaris in Africa Africa “I certainly find pain easier to articulate creatively than happiness,” Allen says. She wrote nearly all of West End Girl in ten days. “It was completely manic and brutal but invigorating and overwhelming. It was great. It was everything.” Advertisement Lily Allen : 'Some old pictures make me cringe, but I was having a laugh' Still, in the hiatus between the album's recording and release, Allen was understandably nervous. Unable to eat or sleep, she booked herself into a therapy clinic in Nashville. As soon as she was discharged, she had a breast enhancement. Only after West End Girl 's rapturous reception did her confidence begin to grow. During her West End Girl tour in Chicago in April getty images 'I'm a pop star of a certain age' The album's success is especially satisfying because 41-year-old Allen is now an age when many female pop stars disappear, she says. “The music industry doesn't know how to market women of a certain age, myself included. You get to a point and you're like, 'OK, do people really want to hear about perimenopause and the school run and whatever we're going through?' We're scared of going there because there's not much evidence there's a market for it. But there probably is.” She is encouraged by her audience's reaction. “The record has been really significant to them. Women of a similar age really identify with the material. It gives me hope that talking about real things works.” Top stories 1 Prepare now for the inheritance tax mess coming for your pension Tax Allen is speaking to me over Zoom because she is about to head to New Zealand and then Australia to continue the West End Girl tour. Elfin-faced, like an off-duty Audrey Hepburn, she has radiant skin. “I put on a face serum — [it's] not grease,” are her first words to me. On her walls are photos of her children, Ethel, 14, and Marnie, 13, with her first husband, Sam Cooper, whom she broke up with in 2016, four years before marrying Harbour. Occasionally, she turns away to inhale from a green vape. Tori Amos: 'I'm on the other side of menopause — a chill hottie' Advertisement Allen doesn't mention Harbour, 51, once. Today she is reportedly in a new relationship with the writer and artist Jonah Freud, 29, of the Freud dynasty. “I'm not in a position to comment,” she says with a prim but knowing smile. She adds that she prioritises female friendship “over anything else. That's where my lasting relationships and security come from. That's all the connection I need.” With her ex-husband David Harbour in 2023 shutterstock For now, Allen is “just happy, in a good place. I'm living in the day, not planning too much.” She has been sober for seven years. “That [alcoholism] side of my life feels very in the past.” She wants to make another album and is considering buying a place in New York. Most commented 1 Russian strikes 'leave half a million Ukrainian homes without power' Russia-Ukraine war 390 comments “The album and tour having been a success has given me a sense of agency and accomplishment. I feel like I'm here: a single mum supporting two teenagers on my own. I don't need to be taken care of any more. There's definitely a sense of liberation in that. There's always going to be a part of me that wants a happy ending — but also, not really. I'm starting to see through that.” 'My girls are embarrassed' Her girls, she says, are unimpressed by their mother's success. “A friend asked one of them how it made them feel. They were like, 'A little bit proud but mostly embarrassed.' I think that's bang on. If I were a teenage girl and my mother was writhing around on the floor in her underwear talking about butt plugs, I would be a bit embarrassed.” Raye: I don't have to suck up to anyone Advertisement Allen, however, was not. When her album reference to butt plugs went viral, she doubled down and turned them into merch, marketing pretty, blue polka-dotted numbers that matched the padded jacket she wears on the album cover . They sold out instantly, although some buyers were disappointed to discover they weren't actually sex toys but USB sticks (even though not everyone took this on board). “The USB obviously was not intended to be … used,” says Allen, who was then inspired to launch a toy for real. “They're great,” she says, trying to keep a straight face. “They vibrate. They're fun.” “I'm in a good place. I'm living in the day, not planning too much” Calzedonia Allen's friendly and frank but occasionally giggles at the weirdness of discussing, with a complete stranger, not just butt plugs but also wands and clitoral stimulators. Along with a sex toy advent calendar, these feature in a new range for the British company Lovehoney , the world's biggest sex toy brand, with which Allen has collaborated for six years. These “Lily's chosen favourites” toys are being promoted alongside research by the company showing that 40 per cent of women still feel embarrassed about self-pleasure, and that it is still more accepted for men to express sexual desires. Another 20 per cent said they have never spoken to their partner about their own pleasure, and 60 per cent do not discuss it with female friends. “Me and my friends never used to, but we do now,” Allen says. She is keen to change attitudes. “There's nothing to be ashamed of. If I come home from work and I want to feel warm and cosy, I have a cup of tea. If I want to have a wank, I have a wank. It should be as simple as that and it isn't, for some reason. If me speaking about it can help women feel more confident talking about desire and pleasure, then that can only be a good thing.” The joy of sex toys Allen has been a vocal advocate of sex toys ever since she discovered them on her Sheezus tour of America in 2014. At the time she was 29, with two small children at home and still married to Cooper, now 48, who runs an upmarket building and interior design company. She had never masturbated and had previously released a huge hit, Not Fair , about her resentment that she'd never had an orgasm. “I grew up feeling that I was a vehicle for male pleasure,” Allen says. “I never really considered my own needs. My priority has been to make sure I don't get rejected or abandoned. Therefore, I'm prioritising my partner's enjoyment because the first thing I'm protecting is my safety. Maybe it is controversial to say it … You tell some men they're not satisfying you and it's terrifying what the potential reaction could be. Understandably, we avoid that conflict at all costs. I don't think I'm unique. I think what a lot of us are doing when we're having sex is making sure he's OK, because otherwise you're going to be left alone and be some old spinster.” Advertisement Reneé Rapp: Bite Me review — the Joan Jett of modern pop On that Sheezus tour, suffering from severe PTSD brought on by the stillbirth four years earlier of her first child and torn between the demands of career and domesticity, she finally turned her attention to her own repressed sexuality. She slept with some of her female backing dancers, persuading herself that this way she wasn't being unfaithful to Cooper. She still didn't orgasm. But, as she later wrote in her 2018 memoir, My Thoughts Exactly , “Maybe it's time I discovered what this vagina is about … It's done the kids. It's had lots of sex. It's got to be useful for something else.” Allen with Elton John at the GQ Men of the Year Awards in 2007 Getty Images She visited a sex shop and “bought a bunch of stuff and started trying them out. And I really connected with one: the Womanizer.” A vibrator that has sold in the millions, it was invented by a retired German engineer who was horrified to learn of the “orgasm gap”, reflecting studies that show about 30 per cent of women achieve orgasm during intercourse, compared with about 95 per cent of men. “It opened up a new path for me I hadn't accessed before,” Allen says. Allen began introducing toys to new partners. “With some it's gone down well. With others it hasn't.” She starts laughing so much, presumably at the thought of one encounter, that she can hardly get her words out. “I haven't stuck around with [them] because I find [toys] really helpful, really fun,” Allen says. “It makes the whole thing a lot more enjoyable for me. If it makes it less enjoyable for him, he can move on.” Advertisement Read more music reviews, guides and interviews It was her revelation with the Womanizer that led to her first collaboration with Lovehoney. The company was delighted to be able to put a famous face to its brand. It also led to epiphanies for Allen that were about far more than sex. “I needed to … stop faking it. Not just orgasms, but as a woman in charge of her life, her career and her sexuality, her image and her songs.” Stuck in a rut That personal transformation still took a long time. During the brownstone era with Harbour, although she had been successful at acting (she received an Olivier nomination for her role in 2:22 A Ghost Story in the West End, hence the album title), she was in a songwriting rut. “Everything that I was writing felt like it wasn't really me, and I couldn't get to the authentic voice,” she has said of that time. With her first husband, Sam Cooper, at Glastonbury in 2014 Getty Images In both her marriages, she says, she'd focused mainly on time at home, cooking nutritious dinners and supervising homework, things her parents had never done for her but that also left her feeling creatively unfulfilled. She says the tradwife movement “appealed to me in the past. I don't think it does now. There's this myth someone's going to pick you up and make everything OK. I haven't seen much evidence of it.” It is not hard to see why Allen seesawed for years between hedonism and domesticity. Although frequently depicted as a posh nepo baby (because she speaks nicely and spent a term at the boarding school Bedales), she had a far less cosseted childhood. She grew up in west London the daughter of two young, self-absorbed, self-made parents — the actor Keith Allen and the film producer Alison Owen — who divorced when she was four. As her memoir recounts, they largely neglected her and her siblings to focus on their careers and “booze and drugs”. I feared my daughter, Lily Allen, would end up like Amy Winehouse Early in her own career, there were headlines about her being carried out of clubs. She was kicked out of an awards ceremony after taking ketamine; at another, she was drunk while presenting with Elton John. Then, at 24, she became pregnant, although tragically her son with Cooper, George, was stillborn at 28 weeks. Along with the PTSD, she developed bulimia and became addicted to alcohol and drugs. She is forgiving of her mother, who has produced films such as Elizabeth and Back to Black . “Mum had my sister when she was 17. She came to London from Portsmouth, put herself through university, had three children and carved a path for herself,” she says. With her parents and sister Sarah in 2010 getty images At the Stranger Things season four premiere in New York with her daughters, Marnie, left, and Ethel, centre, and David Harbour, 2022 Getty images Yet Allen has also said Owen “gaslit” her about working motherhood, making out it would be easy to have it all. “My mum struggled. She made a lot of sacrifices and I think she feels a lot of guilt and shame around those. She didn't want to talk about the reality of what happened in my early childhood. For her to be truthful about the reality that is motherhood, she would have had to open up about her own experiences, and we weren't ready to have those conversations at that time. I don't resent her for it. She's done amazing things and been a real ambassador for women in film and TV. She got her honorary doctorate a couple of weeks ago from UCL [University College London]. I'm really proud of her.” Owen recently relayed a conversation she'd had with one of Allen's daughters, who announced she might not marry and have children. “Mum was like, 'Well, what are you going to do instead?' She replied, 'Live my life.' ” Allen giggles delightedly. Allen admits she finds it difficult to discuss her sex toy side hustle, and its wider implications, with her daughters. “I'm definitely not having conversations with them about pleasure, even though it's not like they haven't seen [toys]: they're lying all over the house,” she says. “Conversations will come in the future. But I'm nervous about having them.” Does fear of her daughters' reactions ever hold her back creatively? “I can see how some of the topics I talk about could be difficult for them. The payoff is worth it.” What payoff? Allen chortles. “Having a house. Being able to pay for school fees. But also being able to talk about my experiences and be rewarded for it.” The Love Lily range is at lovehoney.co.uk Culture Music Share Share this article Email Twitter Facebook Link Save