We have no image of ourselves as sexually differentiated creatures possessing higher reasons for mutual respect. Here I will quote Nina Power, who wrote last week on the Unherd website that 'our socially 'liberated' culture has provided absolutely no roadmap for understanding the different virtues of the sexes. But it is an argument that we threw away some sensible rules without coming up with anything better. Anyone who lived through it knows it was not. This is not a claim that the Britain of 60 years ago was perfect, or that it was a Golden Age. More pornography has meant more misery.Īnd then all the old rules were torn apart, with amazing speed, in the name of freedom and a thing called 'equality', which was of course nothing of the kind. No claim has been more totally exploded than the common Sixties' liberal belief that if we all became franker and more open about sex we would become healthier and kinder. Pornography was a despised perversion and those who pursued it were pitiable. Yes, we boys and men were actually supposed to get up from our seats when women entered a room, give up our seats for them on trains and buses, open doors for them and give way to them. And this was a rule respected just as much in pit villages as it was in the comfortable suburbs. Women had to be respected in all things – certain behaviour and language were simply unthinkable in their presence. Men of my generation were still taught a fairly strict Christian morality which would astonish most people under 40 if they met it today. Most especially, it demolished the ancient belief that a man who fathered a child was responsible for that child and for its mother. Whenever I look at the outcome of the sexual revolution so far, it looks to me to have been a charter for unpleasant, selfish men. The Labour leader now says he wants schools to 'bring about cultural change' and put a stop to the loutish mistreatment of girls and women by coarse boys and men (pictured on April 27)
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