SUNDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2024

We don’t need to go back far in time to find a period when there was almost no open discussion about sex and very little public acknowledgement of its existence. We are not talking about the Victorian age with its alleged covering of the legs of furniture, or the era of the Hollywood Production Code stating that a man and a woman could not be shown on a bed in a movie unless one of them had at least one foot on the floor, or the post-war cause célèbres such as the Kinsey Report or the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Even in the supposedly swinging sixties, when I was growing up as a teenager, the shroud of secrecy still largely rested over everything except conventional sexuality at its most abstract and anodyne, and discussion even of that was buried under layers of obfuscating euphemisms. The post-war period, however, was the time when the ice began to melt and the silence started to crack, and a completely different public discourse about sexuality was ushered in.

Within the last fifty years things have swung full circle and it is hard to avoid sex in contemporary public space. Nudity is now commonplace in mainstream culture and simulated sex is possible in mainstream films. Formerly taboo topics such as female desire and homosexuality are now openly portrayed. So-called dating apps, which are in reality often little more than hook-up apps, mean there are many more opportunities to enjoy a sexual life, both openly and secretly. The internet has made porn an everyday phenomenon and research suggests that most young people in countries like the US and the UK have seen it by the time they are sixteen. It is increasingly normal for people, especially young people, to post pictures of themselves naked online or even videos showing themselves having sex. Clothing for girls aged as young as ten is frequently whorish and slutty. In America there are disturbing beauty pageants where pre-pubescent girls wear outfits which seem designed to feed the fantasies of paedophiles. Sex is ubiquitous and it is loud.

The societal attitudes to sex which existed when I was a child are now seen as prim and puritanical, and sometimes even interpreted as a form of mental disorder or psychological illness. Young people seem to be far more sexually experienced at an early age than in my generation, and those who are not experienced appear desperate to lose their virginity, which is seen as an embarrassment rather than something to be proud of.  I suspect that some of this is the bravado that has always existed, usually among boys, to boast about conquests that never actually happened. And while it is true that there is a counter movement against this sexualisation of public discourse, usually from Christian groups, this is small and rather fringe. Purity rings have become a fashion among some young Christians to show the world that the wearer is a virgin and is saving herself for Mr Right (I don’t think young guys do this very often and say they are waiting for Miss Right). A few people (generally not motivated by religion, but influenced by gay, lesbian and trans identity politics) openly declare that they are asexual and have no interest in sex. But these reactions against modern sexualisation feel like straws in the wind.

In the 1960s, the idea that sex could be a route to happiness, self-fulfilment and even meaning in life began to become widespread. The gay movement of which I was a very small part in the following decade was one of the most important causes of  this, as a minority which had been oppressed and stigmatised for most of history began to identify themselves through their sexuality. The fashion for a half-digested borrowing of Eastern concepts such as tantrism was another major factor. Psychoanalytical theories about the harmfulness of self-repression, especially sexual self-repression, in a profession dominated by Freudian thinking were also incredibly powerful. Among the intelligentsia there was a revived interest in texts like the Kama Sutra or the works of the Marquis de Sade, an idealisation (often based on a misunderstanding) of the dominant sexual values in classical Greece and Rome and in ‘primitive’ cultures, and appreciation of writers like Swinburne and artists like Beardsley. Eliminating repression, or in the more vernacular phrase, ‘letting it all hang out’, became a rallying cry that urged us all to throw off the shackles and embrace our sexuality. Personally, I am very sceptical of a claim that we can find our ‘true selves’ through our sexual behaviour and identity – I feel this is placing too much weight on just one aspect of our human nature – but it has undoubtedly been influential and has rippled out from the counter culture to the general public, as a quick trail through the internet today proves.

For me, one of the worst aspects of this current sexualisation is its objectification of the human body, turning it into a thing that can be commodified. This is most obvious in porn, but sneakier forms of the reduction of the body to an object to be used to make money exist in areas such as advertising and marketing. The argument that porn sets us free from Victorian repression and frigidity is a very convenient one to justify the commoditisation of the human body, and particularly the female body. Porn stars are essentially meat and are not chosen for their cute eyes. So a generation of young people who are growing up watching porn have unrealistic expectations of beauty and physique, feeling inadequate as men if their penis is not as large as the specimens online or as women if their breasts aren’t as pert or as ample. But singling out porn for opprobrium is a little too easy for we are talking about a spectrum here and porn is on the margin. The fashion, diet and cosmetic industries, for example, have similar effects, ones which may be even more harmful in some ways because porn is clearly fantasy and most people realise that. This public objectification of the body beautiful feeds into everyday life, and every young man is now expected to be muscled and buff and every young woman to be glamorous. Meanwhile being average (which logically is what most of us must be) is not acceptable any more. These ideas then trickle down into day-to-day social media and lead to phenomena such as fat shaming and bullying of people who fail to come up to the mark. We are increasingly defined purely by our bodies.

I realise that so far I’ve probably sounded like a stuffy old prude, so I’d like to turn now to some of the benefits of the modern, more open public discourse surrounding sex, and in my opinion they are significant. The first huge plus is increased public availability of knowledge rather than myth, whispers and hearsay. It is hard to overstate the sheer ignorance there was about sex when I was a teenager, as is clear from the time when I came out as homosexual to my mother; she looked at me, puzzled, and asked me what a homosexual was. The number of unwanted teenage pregnancies was sky high if my local area was typical, largely hidden by the fact that there was often severe pressure on the couple to marry; the alternative, of course, was the horror of a backstreet abortion. There was almost no public information surrounding STDs (one of the very few positives to arise out of the AIDS crisis was a need to talk openly and honestly about sexual health). I realise that some opponents of this new openness will argue that it encourages more sexual activity among the young, and therefore a higher rate of teenage pregnancies and STDs, but I find the idea that ignorance is in some way more desirable than knowledge unacceptable and most serious scientific research suggests that this increase in teenage pregnancies is not empirically true. Advocates of celibacy tend to imagine that sex wouldn’t happen if no one spoke about it, but I can assure them that it did and does happen, even under a blanket of silence, and often at a young age when those advocates would prefer it not to happen. For me, an acceptance of reality will always be an advance on wishful thinking.  

A second benefit of the new public openness around sexuality and sexual behaviour is that it makes people realise that, whatever their sexual desires are, they will share them with somebody else. The main beneficiaries of this have been gays and lesbians, who suddenly realised they were far from alone in their desires, and were consequently able to unite into a political force for change. But openness has helped lots of people who have what were once considered to be shameful and very rare sexual perversions – cross-dressing, S&M, foot fetishism, an almost endless list of variations on the missionary position, not to mention something as common and uncontroversial these days as oral sex – to realise that these are far from rare. It has turned the word ‘normal’ from a morally loaded term into what it should be – an expression of what actually happens (there are plenty of censorious alternatives if you wish to make a moral judgement). There is less shame nowadays of what are common and normal practices undertaken by consenting adults and surely that has to be a good thing.

Having looked at what I consider to be clear advantages and disadvantages of our current public openness about sex, I will now turn to some arguments frequently put forward by proponents of traditional silence and discretion in order to evaluate them. The first is that openness places a huge pressure on young people to begin their sexual life too early, before they are emotionally ready for it and able to make wise decisions. This is a substantive criticism in my opinion. For example, when I chat online nowadays I am very aware of young gay men, often barely past the age of consent, wishing to become sexually active as soon as possible or even boasting that they are. The language that they use when they do this reflects the language they’ve learned from porn or seen in chatrooms – sub, slut, fag, bitch, top, dom, and so on – and I fear that they may get involved in real-life situations that they are not equipped to handle. I see no reason to think that the same pressure to have sex at an early age is not also true of young heterosexuals, especially girls who now have to tread a much more careful line between whore and virgin. For all this, though, in terms of what people actually do, I have to question whether much of what seems a real trend is being hugely magnified by greater visibility, and if any actual changes in sexual behaviour are being over-estimated.

Another pertinent argument made by traditionalists against the sexualisation of society is that getting into a habit of one-night-stands and casual hook-ups, now easily available in a click on a dating app, makes people unable or unwilling to eventually settle down in a stable relationship. It’s hard to know whether this idea has any substance in reality; statistics show that people are becoming less keen to marry or are doing so at a later age, but there are so many factors involved in this decision that it’s almost impossible to disentangle them. Even so, the majority of people do still opt for marriage or a settled relationship at some point. It can also be argued that sexual compatibility is a crucial component of a good marriage, and that learning about one’s sexual preferences before marriage is better than discovering a disastrous difference in desires after the wedding.

Finally, I would like to look at the feminist argument that sexualisation has been bad in general for women. Whereas women had been somewhat protected by the concept of gallantry, they are now expected to have sex on demand, condemned as sluts if they do, and called frigid if they don’t. More than ever, they struggle to negotiate the line between whore and virgin. In heterosexual society at least, they are still more objectified than men (in gay culture, men are massively objectified as well, though). Again it is difficult to make confident conclusions about all of this, since we can never know how much that was not gallant happened behind closed doors in the past, or the incidence of unreported rape and assault. My own intuition is that little has changed in terms of behaviour and that the greater openness about sex has at least made women more willing to report sexual harassment and assault, but I’m far from confident about this intuition.

So often when I write these weekly essays my final paragraph ends up being somewhat wishy-washy and inconclusive, and the same is true here; I definitely lean towards greater public openness and welcome, if somewhat unenthusiastically, the present environment of sexualisation compared to what existed before it. The greater personal freedom and choice, the decrease in ignorance and prejudice, and the implications for sexual health are what swing my opinion. I remain uneasy, however, about what often feels like cheap exploitation of human sexuality, done not to make people happy or to benefit the human race but simply to make money, and wish we could find a better balance between the dishonesty of silence and the tawdriness of much of the current public discourse surrounding sexuality.