Table of Contents
Joanna Gray
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
The belated performative outrage concerning the Epstein files and the UK rape gangs reeks of hypocrisy and moral whiplash as politicians and influencers have been relentlessly encouraging the sexualisation of society since sex was reputedly invented in 1963. Now, we are all expected to condemn with sorrowful faces these ‘outrageous’ sexual perversions when in fact people in power have been cheering them on for years. When Keir Starmer said recently to the Epstein victims: “I am sorry, sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed you,” his words may actually for once be accurate. Whether he realises what he should be apologising for is another story.
Two differing elements – moral climate and specific government policies – have helpfully signposted the way towards the sexual slurry vat we find ourselves in today. Firstly the climatic winds: they whispered so gradually it was impossible to realise until perhaps this last week that any pretence at a realistic approach to sex and the consequences of sex has been entirely blown asunder.
Some like Larkin finger the 1960s, others the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf recorded Lytton Strachey in company pointing to a stain on Vanessa Bell’s white dress and asking, “Semen?” Woolf wrote, “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve were swept away.” Others reach back further and cite Dickens’s sentimentalising of 1838 Oliver Twist’s mother, or silly Hetty Sorrel in George Eliot’s 1859 Adam Bede. Why all the criminal fuss when all women wanted was a Jilly Cooper-style romp in the woods? National emotions were readied for an eventual liberalising of sexual relations.
Fraudulent doctors Freud, Money and Kinsey also played their parts in moving Western society to the state where to even criticise sex exploration for people of any age would have you immediately called a prude.
This new sexual weather was used as a vaporous foundation on which governments and international bodies enacted a number of laws and policies that embedded sexual freedom as an unequivocal common good. The charge sheet is long, and perhaps in hindsight unwise: The 1959 Obscene Publications Act; the 1967 Abortion Act, the 1969 Divorce Reform Act; the 1967 National Health Service (Family Planning) Act; the 2000 Safeguarding Children Involved in Prostitution guidance created a blind spot whereby police and social workers interpreted underage sex with adult males as consensual.
Even school children have been roped in. The Education Act 1993 made sex education compulsory in secondary schools and the Children and Social Work Act 2017 made relationship education mandatory in primary schools. At 10 our eldest was taught by his year six teacher that “girls have a button over their vagina that if you press it makes them feel nice”. By 14 at secondary school, that porn was perfectly healthy for a hormonal teenager and there were over 100 genders.
This vigorous approach to children and sex is fully supported by the UN, which suggests “comprehensive sexuality education” should “begin at five”. Suggested teaching materials include such arousing ideas for 12 year-olds as: “Different cultures have different ways of understanding sex, gender and reproduction and when it is appropriate to become sexually active,” and: “Everyone has the right to choose if, when, how and with whom to engage in sexual activity and this should be respected at all times.”
Kant argued that one should “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. Well wasn’t the Prussian badger right about that! We have long been living in the universalised reality of unrestrained sexual freedom: Page three, lads mags, padded bikinis for children, hypersexual PVC clad popstars, Mick Jagger celebrating sex with underage groupies and Rod Stewart crooning about pouring a “good, long drink” to seduce a “virgin child”, twerking as a national past-time, Love Island as family entertainment, hook-up culture, a $100 billion porn industry, the lionisation of heroic shaggers, dick pix, upskirting, Only Fans as a career of choice for four per cent of British women, articles in Teen Vogue about how to have anal sex, Netflix’s Cuties, prostitutes Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips interviewed on podcasts and featuring in the Spectator, prostitutes being rebranded content creators, the once deputy prime minister talking about flashing her “ginger growler” in the House of Commons, drag queen story time, the current prime minister defending appointing paedo supporter Matthew Doyle to the House of Lords, 25 per cent of children raised in single parent families, around 300,000 abortions a year in Britain and young women now being the unhappiest they have ever been in recorded polling history. Within this sex-triumphant climate can we really pretend to shock concerning Epstein, his brutal cronies, the rape gangs and their state-affiliated allies?
I write, not as one who wishes the sour wind of puritanism to blow again across the land, but as one who has been randy as an alley cat since a young teenager. How natural sexual desires are fruitfully channelled has of course been under discussion since Sodom and Gomorrah. Society swings from lauding sexual self-control and celebrating sexual liberation. Which way will the winds now blow? Sententious statements are repeated against “Ending Violence Against Women and Girls”. Consent lessons, misogyny classes, online grooming awareness lectures and the like may well end up returning sex to the constrained territory of the Victorians – the whole subject so forbidding that Ruskin-like young people will recoil entirely.
Or we instead could elevate the pursuit and celebration of love rather than sex, and limit sex to within loving relationships, and see where that gets us?
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
