Whereas in some bastions of puritanical repression (like, say, France) these age limits would likely be met with incredulity at their laxity, here opponents have reacted as if the Education Secretary had mandated lottery-funded chastity belts for Key Stage 4. “Politicising sex education is unforgivable dangerous & reactionary …This is worst kind of arm-chair politics bigoted & ill-informed” fumed former Greens leader, Caroline Lucas; nicely voicing the perennial fantasy that, whereas conservative initiatives are always highly ideological, going gender-divining with toddlers or discussing sex work with primary school pupils are actions shining with the clear unfiltered light of moral truth. Generally, most responses seemed unnecessarily outraged, talking about an imaginary version of the new guidance or else in complete denial about any existing problem. Not for the first time, I was left musing about why the modern Left is so defensive about attempts to protect tender minds from the adult marketplace of sexual ideas.

More from this author

How a cult captured the NHS

By Kathleen Stock

Various critical commentators wheeled out the gender zealots’ favourite analogy — “It’s like Section 28 all over again” — but didn’t mention that back in 1988, when the promotion of homosexuality in schools was first outlawed by the Tories, few of even the government’s most vocal opponents would have dreamt of insisting that primary school kids should be in the front line for detailed intelligence about what goes where. The difference, I suppose, is the internet, drastically curtailing the age of innocence relative to Eighties standards by potentially exposing much younger audiences to explicit material on a larger scale. Hence the popular protest that if kids don’t hear about it from teachers early enough, they will encounter eye-opening stuff anyway, in a much more direct and less psychologically manageable fashion.

I know that this is a canonical objection; still, I have some doubts about it. For one, the general stance it suggests — that is, relative acquiescence to the colonisation of children’s minds with incomprehensible images of writhing bodies — is a cop out. Other solutions are available; and indeed, many parents already employ internet parental controls or avoid smartphones altogether for those of primary school age. For hundreds of thousands of young children, protected at least temporarily from the excesses of the prevailing sexual culture, sacrificing their happy ignorance about grown-up matters in order to get ahead of the internet traffic for a relative few seems like a social bargain worth reexamining. It also seems possible to teach all young kids about bodily integrity and autonomy, in a way that helps safeguard them from sexual abuse, without going into the nuts and bolts, as it were — indeed the NSPCC already has one such programme.

But really, whether school sex education is successful or not — or indeed too permissive or too strict — depends on the prior question of what it is for, exactly; and I submit that nobody really knows anymore. Whereas once upon a time it was aimed at informing adolescents about basic biological facts, and then immediately persuading them not to put their newfound knowledge into practice until safely within the confines of a Christian marriage, it is now a mishmash of competing purposes and narratives. 

Suggested reading

Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

To establish this, I went looking for an example of a complete RSHE resource currently used in an English school. Though hampered by paywalls, I did find an equivalent Scottish version freely available: described as “developed by a partnership of local authorities and health boards, with advice from Education Scotland and the Scottish Government”, it is presumably widely used north of the border. Here, as in an excavation of some ancient archaeological site used by different tribes over centuries, I found residual traces of various historically fashionable framings of sexuality, with little apparent thought about how they are supposed to cohere.

Shorn of Christian trappings, avoiding unwanted teenage pregnancy is still presented as a clear objective, along with helpful normalisation of ordinary bodily processes such as menstruation and ejaculation. But more recently acquired, less compelling cultural artefacts are also present. One of these is an emphasis on sexual pleasure: for instance, in the somewhat awkwardly named “masturbation activity plan”, recommended for 11-15 year olds. In the Nineties, liberal feminists used to get annoyed about the fact that women didn’t typically experience as many orgasms as men, treating it as an equality issue. Whether or not increasing the amount of sexual pleasure in the world is a serious political objective, it still seems jarring to encounter the ghost of this once-fashionable imperative in the context of a school lesson plan.

For instance, pupils are told that “if you masturbate, you get to know your own body and what you like” and — sounding a bit like an advertising campaign by Sport Scotland — that “masturbation is a good way to reduce stress, relax the muscles, and can often help improve sleep, mood, and self-confidence”. You don’t have to be an unreconstructed Fifties throwback to think that students might be better left on their own to discover these things; that practically nobody is seriously worried about self-pleasure making you go blind or feeble-minded anymore, so there is no need for the enthusiastic overcompensation; and that hearing such points from a teacher might be a bit weird and disturbing. Indeed, as I read this part of the text, I started thinking it might not be a coincidence that asexuality is such a big trend with the kids these days. In the arena of sex education, knowledge is not always power; sometimes it is just TMI. 

Another facet of the resource I found, presumably inherited at some stage from Seventies and Eighties Second Wave feminist framings, stressed that stereotypes about masculinity and femininity should be rejected. One part of a module even had “I understand that how I look, how I behave, or my aspirations should not be limited by stereotypes, my sex or expectations of what boys and girls should do” as a learning outcome. Yet in the next topic was some very 21st century material, in which “cisgender people” were defined as those who “identify with or express themselves in line with gender expectations associated with their sex”, and transgender people were those for whom “the sex they were born does not fit with how they feel inside”. There is no satisfactory way to join up these pedagogical dots.

And there are other tensions in the documents for inquisitive minds to mull over. If consent is the be-all-and-end-all of human relations, then how does this fit with the fact that social pressures inadvertently change our sexual choices? If sex is often just harmless fun between consenting adults, then why — as the teaching resource also intimates — might it be better for young people to wait, and why are some of them reported as regretting it afterwards? If, contraceptive worries aside, choosing between vaginal and anal sex is no more fraught with complexity than choosing between ice cream flavours, why do women prefer the vanilla version much more? Since adult society can barely address such questions, we should not expect those of school age to sort out the answers; but equally we should acknowledge that they are likely to be left deeply confused too.

Ultimately, though, the big problem with a lot of RSHE is that it tends to treat what is essentially a practical activity — namely, learning how to be a fully realised, happy, assertive, suitably respectful sexual being, properly tailored for the modern world and with all the emotional skills this requires — as if it was a theoretical subject like mathematics or history. It is as if we were trying to teach people to cook, only by giving them cookbooks, and then judging our degree of success by how accurately they repeat recipes back to us or describe meal plans, without letting them near a kitchen. Yet as in all “how to” subjects, you can’t really understand a set of instructions until you try to put it into practice. (Equally, nobody responsible would suggest hands-on classroom tutorials here.)  

Devoid of a feedback loop with real-world experiences, for those children who have yet to hold another person’s hand let alone anything more involved, excelling at RSHE will have little relevance to how they end up behaving and feeling in the romantic wild. We can lecture them about appropriate boundaries, consent, partner satisfaction, privacy, trust, and all the rest of it, but until behaviour starts to connect with libido, it won’t mean much. Viewed in this light, anxiously micromanaging youngsters’ budding psyches to make sure they end up parroting all the right opinions looks rather more for our benefit than theirs. Perhaps, then, we might do some healthy boundary-setting of our own, and leave them to their blissful unawareness of contemporary sexual paradoxes for just that little bit longer.

This method of bra removal was part of a larger, elaborate set of rules, unwritten but ironclad, whereby the locker room was a place to be naked as little as humanly possible. Being in your underwear was okay, but only if you were clearly making haste to put on more clothing. The bathing facilities, it was understood, were for decoration only and not to be used; people still talked about the time a few years back when a girl named Katie, a transfer student from some other country, or possibly another planet, actually took a shower after gym class one day — here you would lower your voice to a dramatic whisper — in the nude.

This cautionary tale of Katie revealed the true nature of our shared pathology: it wasn’t just that we didn’t want to be seen naked, or to see each other naked. It was that allowing yourself to be seen naked signified something sinister about you. You had to be some kind of pervert, an exhibitionist weirdo who lacked the good sense to be ashamed of your body — which was, of course, disgusting, and should be hidden at all costs.

Obviously, this was not a healthy way to be. Obviously, we all had eating disorders. Obviously, the kids were not, in this particular case, all right — or right at all. It’s strange, then, that in 2023, the neuroses of a bunch of 15-year-old girls trying to hide their developing bodies from each other in an upstate New York locker room seem to have somehow become the basis for a new Western paradigm. Nudity is now seen as invariably sexual, highly suspicious, and probably dangerous, particularly to children.

In the UK, uproar recently followed the release of a TV series called Naked Education, in which a group of adult educators appeared in front of teen students fully unclothed, as part of a lesson about the diversity of the human form. In Australia, a surf club banned members from being nude in its changing rooms — including in the showers — in the name of protecting children from the traumatic sight of naked adults. In the United States, the principal of a school in Tallahassee, Florida, was forced to resign after three parents complained about students having seen a picture of Michelangelo’s David sculpture during art class, stone penis and all. To be fair, this last incident may be somewhat more complicated than the initial reporting made it seem — but the powerful prudery it implies has form. In 2002, for instance, two statues in the Justice Department’s Great Hall were ordered to be shielded by drapes, because Attorney General John Ashcroft was apparently perturbed by the Spirit of Justice’s stone breast lurking over his shoulder in photographs.

More from this author

Do boobs have to be political?

By Kat Rosenfield

Of course, decompensating over the sight of a naked body — supposedly to protect children — is itself bizarrely childish. It is reminiscent of a scene in Love Actually where an increasingly exasperated Andrew Lincoln instructs a group of giggling schoolgirls that the photograph they’re laughing at — a rear view of several men wearing Santa hats and nothing else — is “not funny, it’s art!” (This job was admittedly not made easier by the fact that at least some of these photos were, objectively, ridiculous.) And there’s something very teenaged, too, about the inability to divorce nudity from its naughtier, sexier contexts — as if nudity which fails to titillate is not just taboo, but actually repulsive. It’s the Seinfeld episode about good versus bad naked (remember: “Naked hair brushing, good! Naked crouching, bad”), all grown up and coming soon to a set of locker room bylaws near you.

It’s not hard to understand how we got here. The mass awareness-raising of the #MeToo movement does not mix well with the ongoing brouhaha over sex and gender education in schools. And with the rare but highly-publicised instance wherein a genuine pervert exploits the availability of clothing-optional environments for his own unsavoury purposes, some people were always going to decide that we’re better safe (and fully clothed) than sorry. But what happens to a society in which the concept of non-sexualised nudity simply ceases to exist? It’s not just art that gets weird; it’s everything.

The importance of non-sexual nudity is less about pleasing the eyes than calming the mind: in this space you can be naked without worrying about what you look like naked. In cultures with fewer sexual hang-ups, nudity can even be an ice-breaker. Among young folk in Stockholm, a friend recently explained, the co-ed sauna can be a first date destination, ostensibly to remove the pressure of wondering if and when you’ll be naked together, so that you can focus on more important areas of compatibility.

I can understand the appeal of this approach, particularly for those who haven’t yet reached that age when going into a hot room naked causes even the normally-supple parts of your body to start melting, Jabba-the-Hutt-like, toward the floor. Even leaving aside the aesthetic benefits of being young, hot and in the nude, there’s also the intimacy of it. Not intimacy as in physical, but the kind where you don’t rush to cover your cellulite with a blanket the second the lights come on. The “I’ll let you see my flaccid penis in a hot room” kind of intimacy. The kind where you are unguarded and unselfconscious, allowing yourself to be seen.

Suggested reading

The shock of the nude

By Sarah Ditum

Meanwhile, the more taboo nudity becomes in America, the more people seem to seek out ever more elaborate pretences for getting naked. Naked yoga classes. Naked dinner parties. Naked bowling nights! (Yes, you can bring your own balls.) Or how about Naked and Afraid, a reality survival series in which the only exciting part of the contestants’ titular nudity is the possibility that one of them, at any moment, might be bitten on the genitals by a venomous snake. Despite the supposedly traumatising nature of naked bodies, it’s almost like we’re aching to be naked, and to see other people that way — in contexts where sex is a distant afterthought.

In a moment when trust is in short supply — not just between individuals in intimate relationships, but on a societal scale — perhaps the desire to curtail nudity stands in for a fear of intimacy, and from the sense that we just can’t tolerate being so vulnerable around people we don’t know well. It’s an irony of our hyperconnected moment that we are more suspicious of each other than ever, more obsessed with catching each other — ideally on video — in violation of whatever social edicts that convey in-group status. Social media has given us an unprecedented window into other people’s heads, only to leave us consumed by fear of all the things we’re sure they’re thinking but not saying. Our most popular social movements, from #MeToo to MAGA, are at least partially premised on the notion that other people are secret sexual predators, or violent bigots, or sneering elites; in any case, they hate you, and wish to do you harm.

But when we set out to “protect” young people from predation by shielding them from the sight of a naked body in any context, what are we really teaching them to avoid, to be afraid of? Just like in that gym locker room all those years ago, the message seems to be not just that it’s dangerous to see nudity, or dangerous to be nude; it’s also that there’s something unseemly about being okay with being naked, be it literally or figuratively. Don’t you realise that your true shape is disgusting? Don’t you know you’re supposed to be ashamed?

Anyway, because teenagers are the way they are, all we’re really doing by shielding them from nudity is allowing their entire education about the normal range of human anatomy to be dictated by the material they seek out on their own — which is to say, by porn. Needless to say, this is a bad way for kids to form a factually accurate understanding of what normal naked bodies look like, never mind what it teaches them about sex. But it also reinforces the notion that the two can’t ever be separated.

Surely this undermines what young people should actually learn about the human body: that it’s not just a vehicle for sexual activity, or an object of sexual desire, but a miraculous machine in its own right, the vessel that moves us through the world and contains everything that we are. And surely what we should strive for is a world in which people can sometimes be naked — not performatively, not gratuitously, but in the unselfconscious way of a person who takes off her sweaty clothes and gets in the shower, because there is a shower, and that is what a shower is for.

This is the thing I’ve realised about Katie, all these years later: she was the only one being normal. The rest of us, nearly strangling ourselves with our own undergarments in our desperation not to be seen naked, were the weird ones.

Nor is paedophilia unique to the progressive Left. Just this week, Tory MP Imran Ahmad Khan was convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, prompting fellow Tory MP and LGBTQ advocate Crispin Blunt to declare angrily that Khan’s conviction was a “dreadful miscarriage of justice” and “nothing short of an international scandal”.

But it’s also true that since the sexual revolution, there has been a knocking on the door of progressive respectability by individuals with an intense interest in assisting the sexual development of children, and sometimes — as in the case of Foucault — questionable motives for doing so. Such activists invariably come armed with the logic of liberalism: using phrases such as “agency”, “consent” and “education”. The resulting queasy blend of pleasure, freedom, education and adolescence burst into flames this week, with news of a theatre production, The Family Sex Show, coming to Bristol that offers “relationships and sex education” supposedly suitable for ages five and up.

Cue public outrage, Mumsnet up in arms, and a petition to scrap the show that at the time of writing has more than 30,000 signatures. It’s a homegrown British version of an increasingly ferocious front in the American culture war in which both sides are entrenched, and convinced of their own righteousness. On one side stand those who argue for ever more extensive sex education in the name of LGBTQ youth and sexual emancipation in general. On the other stand those claiming to defend the authority of parents over their children, which they argue represents children’s best protection against inappropriate adult sexual attention.

So far, this war has raged with characteristically American vigour. Recent examples are legion: Texans in uproar about “pornographic books” in schools; school masturbation lessons for six-year-olds; drag queens on Nickelodeon. American conservatives are now pushing back at this efflorescence of sex chat for children, calling the vanguards of kid-friendly sexual emancipation “groomers”. On a practical front, conservative states have seen a spate of legislation constraining (or seeking to constrain) the nature and extent of sexual content that may legally be delivered to children in schools.

More from this author

Is Jamie Wallis exploiting his trauma?

By Mary Harrington

Advocates, meanwhile, are outraged at the “groomer” epithet. They argue it’s fine to be gay or kinky or non-binary or whatever, and that all sexual expression is acceptable provided everyone consents. For them, content of this kind simply normalises these perfectly acceptable identities, and helps to spread tolerance while ensuring LGBTQ youth feel represented and supported.

This moral standoff is the logical end-point of a tug-of-war as old as liberalism: the question of who is responsible for shaping children — and to what ends. In Roman times, parental — well, patriarchal — authority over children was absolute, to the point of granting fathers the right to kill their children. It was the Christian faith that first ascribed universal personhood and dignity even to children, limiting the scope of this authority.

Christian teaching, though, still held that children should submit to their parents. It was the liberalising thinkers at the wellspring of modernity who began winkling out people from under the authority of the church — and children from under the authority of their parents.

John Locke, one of the original liberal thinkers, argued for the separation of church and state, and it’s no coincidence that he was also the first parenting pundit. His Some Thoughts Concerning Education was published in 1693, and heavily influenced the next smash-hit parenting guide: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, written in 1763.

For Locke, education was essential. In his view, “of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education”. Rousseau, meanwhile, was so convinced of its importance that, after concluding the family of his mistress Thérèse Levasseur wasn’t up to the job of raising the kids he fathered with her, he persuaded her to give them all away to the “foundling hospital”. In Confessions (1782), Rousseau admitted that he “trembled at the thought of entrusting them to a family ill brought up, to be still worse educated”. Presumably Rousseau thought the extremely high risk of his children dying in an orphanage a less fearful prospect than seeing his educational ideas poorly executed by the woman he repeatedly impregnated but refused to marry.

In any case, this left both Locke — who never fathered children — and Rousseau equally free to theorise about education, freedom and human nature, innocent of any hands-on experience with actual children. And this blind spot has cast a long shadow since, for emancipating children is, to say the least, a paradoxical undertaking.

Suggested reading

Disney has always spread propaganda

By Geoff Shullenberger

Locke and Rousseau envisaged humans as autonomous, rational and capable of making decisions. But anyone with practical experience of how helplessly dependent a baby is, or how magnificently unreasonable toddlers can be, knows there’s considerable ground to cover before you can describe your child as in any way rational or capable of making sensible choices. And getting them to the point where they can do this takes decidedly non-liberal methods, including providing direct moral instruction with the aim of eventually producing an independent, self-governing adult. Liberal citizens capable of making the most of freedom don’t just appear in a vacuum; you have to make them.

Emancipating children has another key corollary, too: a reduction in parental authority. This is obviously true at the scale of individual parent-child relations, and is usually a gradual and benign process. As my child grows older, part of my job as a parent is to help her develop independence, which means slowly stepping back from managing all aspects of her life.

What’s perhaps less obvious, though, is that a culture of individual freedom also means defanging parental authority in general. This was tacitly acknowledged by Locke, Rousseau and the innumerable parenting pundits who have emerged by dint of writing books on how to raise ideal citizens. Each parenting manual says, tacitly, that just being the child’s parents doesn’t make you right by definition. As a parent you have to be doing it right as well, where “right” is defined by the larger project of shaping ideal citizens to enjoy freedom.

Yet in the centuries since Locke and Rousseau, the scope of those freedoms we consider our birthright has expanded too. This is usually treated as moral progress, but has also happened in no small part thanks to technologies that extend our strength, buttress our weaknesses or give us control where none existed before. In particular, the contraceptive revolution has extended freedom into the terrain of sexual desire.

By severing sex from its material consequences, reproductive technologies took the danger out of desire, allowing us to reimagine sex as a kind of consequence-free leisure activity. After all, once procreation is an optional rather than near-inevitable side-effect of sex, then on the face of it there seems to be no firm argument for preventing freely consenting adults from pursuing sexual pleasure in whichever form they desire.

Leaving aside the merits of this change, making the best of an emancipated world requires us — as Locke and Rousseau realised — to equip citizens to navigate it. It therefore follows that sex education isn’t just an option but a necessity: if you accept the premise that emancipation is good, then sexual emancipation and the free, consenting expression of desire is also good. And given that children need direct moral instruction prior to attaining full liberal citizenship, good liberal parents have an active duty to provide instruction to their children, from the earliest possible age, in the full range of acceptable modern sexual expression.

More from this author

Sex positivity's hidden victims

By Mary Harrington

From this perspective, filling the heads of five-year-olds with information about polyamory, or masturbation, or non-binary identities, isn’t a precursor to sexual abuse at all — even if it’s done against the wishes of that five-year-old’s parents. Rather, it’s a vital part of preventing such abuse.

This, then, is the objective The Family Sex Show claims for itself. A Q&A explains that the show was aimed at ages five up because “sexual development and behaviour in children starts from birth”, and “it’s important that children are supported in their exploratory development, safely and comfortably”. To this end, The Family Sex Show proposes “an alternative to porn”: that is, a show “offering intersectional, feminist, non-binary, anti-racist and sex-positive [sic] take on Relationships and Sex Education”. This material will, the show promises, “use pleasure as a vehicle for consent”.

I admit I’m less than reassured by the prospect of anyone using “pleasure” as “a vehicle for consent” in material aimed at my five-year-old. For if predatory Tories and Romans tell us anything, it’s that dark desires are an unpleasant constant in (especially male) human nature that no amount of “awareness” can mitigate.

I have no doubt that The Family Sex Show’s erotic evangelism is well-intentioned. But however sincere its objective of helping to educate young people to enjoy modern sexual liberation in a healthily autonomous way, it remains stubbornly true that there is more than one set of reasons why an adult might seek to “educate” pre-pubescent children about “pleasure” and “consent”. Even the best-intentioned “educator” may still be paving the way for someone more predatory.

So while the term “groomer” is unfair in the sense that the intent behind most of this infant erotic proselytising really isn’t initiating sexual contact with those kids, it’s also entirely justified. For this is precisely what preschool porn evangelism enables in practice. By normalising the idea that pre-pubescent children should engage with sexual material, The Family Sex Show in practice carries water for genuine paedophiles.

If we want to push back against the liberal syllogism that got us to the point where “educators” determinedly ignore the obvious slipperiness of this slope, we need to look again at its premises.

Contraceptive technologies are here to stay. But we needn’t accept as self-evident the argument that followed the contraceptive revolution — that all desires are fine provided consent is given. This is simply not true. Not all desires, or expressions of sexual desire, are good. Some need to be repressed, and if necessary oppressed, in the interests of protecting the vulnerable.

We can argue about which desires should be repressed, and the nature of the oppression in extremis. But what we can’t do is offer sex education to children on the premise that education and consent can replace this need for limits. For when it comes to children, there is such a thing as too much information. And when it comes to sex, there really is such a thing as too much freedom.

The overwrought morality play was shown in Sex Ed classes nationwide. And Jeff’s cautionary tale was hardly unique at the time. As Nineties America struggled with lingering anxieties over the AIDS epidemic and the loosening of sexual mores, the teen pregnancy rate was hitting an all-time high. This mix spawned a national purity panic — and with it, numerous after-school specials and made-for-TV movies that warned impressionable young people about the dangers of premarital sex.

While that message was nominally meant for everyone, we all knew who was really supposed to heed these warnings — and it wasn’t the Jeffs of the world. Girls were the ones in charge of saying no to sex, and it was girls who would suffer the consequences if they didn’t — in the form of not just unintended pregnancy but a reputational hit. Sex for guys was a biological drive; for girls, it was a mark of bad character, low morals, and an utter lack of self-respect.

And yet, even as Freddie Prinze, Jr begged the young women of the late Nineties not to ruin his life by sleeping with him, there was something else happening on television that spoke to better (and less prudish) days ahead. The year after Jeff hit screens, Sarah Michelle Gellar made her debut in a very different sort of teen drama — one with more cultural staying power than every after-school special combined. Twenty five years ago this week, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was born.

More from this author

Is Margaret Atwood a coward?

By Kat Rosenfield

At first glance, Buffy was not just an archetype but a stereotype: the ditzy blonde cheerleader who, if she wasn’t ruining her boyfriend’s life by getting knocked up, was always getting stabbed to death within the first 15 minutes of your favourite horror franchise. But Buffy flipped the script: this cheerleader wasn’t slain. She slayed.

It’s important to understand just how shocking this was for the era, and how intentionally absurd. Just the words, Buffy the Vampire Slayer were a joke: when previews for the movie hit cinemas in 1992, audiences exploded in laughter the moment the announcer said the title aloud. And when the TV adaptation arrived in 1997, the whole enterprise still struck everyone as frankly goofy. In a representative review, The New York Times declared, “Nobody is likely to take this oddball camp exercise seriously, though the violence can get decidedly creepy.”

Of course nobody took Buffy seriously: that was not only the point, but the secret to her success. Critics and vampires alike learned to underestimate her at their own peril. Buffy not only broke ground by turning every horror trope in the book on its head, she spawned an obsession with Strong Female Characters that would grip Hollywood for the next decade.

And the show’s gloss of hardcore girl power — including a teen heroine who made no apologies for being sexually active — was subversive as hell at a moment when Britney Spears was vowing to remain virginal until marriage. Not only did Buffy sleep with Angel — her brooding, emo vampire boyfriend — in the second season of the show, but she kept on slaying after the act of love caused him to callously dump her, and go on a killing spree.

Suggested reading

Why are women becoming witches?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Absurd as it sounds, for an audience of young women, this felt not just serious, but resonant. Buried inside the horror story was a real and legitimate fear: that inside every seemingly nice guy is a horny jerk who just wants one thing. And for a show to allow a teen female character to express sexual desire without getting either pregnant or murdered — and to allow her to suffer a broken heart without turning into a broken person — was unheard of in 1998. While the Too Soon for Jeff genre of storytelling depicted sexually active girls as selfish, depraved temptresses who would ruin a good boy’s life by getting knocked up, Buffy’s resolute refusal to shame its heroine was a breath of fresh air.

It didn’t end there. When Buffy finally hung up her stakes after a seven-year run, she wasn’t just personally rejecting sexism, but campaigning against it. Her last battle was against the patriarchy, literally, in the form of a demonic spirit called The First Evil, which had possessed the body of a very Bible-thumping preacher called Caleb — a piquant little plot twist no doubt meant as a jab at religious conservatives, including the one in the White House.

In a final twist, Buffy’s feminism turned out to be not just overt, but intersectional. Rather than dying a hero’s death and becoming a martyr to the cause, she used witchcraft to dismantle the system. “In every generation one Slayer is born — because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule”, Buffy tells her army, before changing that rule. Her legacy: a mass sisterhood of vampire-killers who would fight on after the show’s cancellation.

For a long time, Buffy was one of the few massively popular products of the late Nineties that wasn’t retroactively problematised, which is unusual considering the current cottage industry of middle-aged millennials suddenly discovering that all the stuff they loved as teenagers isn’t nearly woke enough to pass muster. (Other entries from this era, including the 1999 Woodstock revival concert, the raunch comedy franchise American Pie, and the sitcom Friends, haven’t been so lucky.) The girl-power gloss that made the vampire slayer a subversive cult figure by last century’s standards also gave her a pass in this one.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of Britney Spears

By Sarah Ditum

But if Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a feminist hero, she was also, undeniably, a male fantasy: the ass-kicking action hero men wanted to be, dressed up as the feminine archetype they wanted to be with. And, of course, Buffy was literally man-made — by Joss Whedon, whose feminist credentials were unimpeachable, so everyone said. In 2006, he was presented with the Equality Now award for his contributions to women’s advancement by none other than Meryl Streep, and his self-congratulatory speech from that night is something to behold.

Then came poetic justice. After coasting on his Buffy bona fides, the past finally caught up with the director in 2017, when he was #MeTooed for a lifetime of bad behaviour. The allegations included callous and abusive behaviour toward writers, as well as multiple extramarital affairs on set and cruel mistreatment of actress Charisma Carpenter during the Buffy years. Whedon was toppled by a generation of women who had grown up being inspired by the characters he created. But the tragedy is that, when Whedon fell, everything he’d touched — including Buffy — was left tarnished.

For those with complicated feelings about the art vis-a-vis the artist, this anniversary is marked not just by nostalgia, then, but by yearning: for Buffy to break free, a Pinocchio cutting the strings that tie her to her creator. After all, in recent years real women have done it with the bad men who “made” them: Gwyneth Paltrow disavowing Harvey Weinstein, Taylor Swift taking on Big Machine. And Sarah Michelle Gellar, who brought Buffy to life for years, last year drew a bright circle of protection around herself and the vampire slayer, leaving Whedon on the outside.

It’s impossible to separate him entirely from Buffy; he did make her, after all. It’s just that — as in the case of poor, sad Jeff — that doesn’t count for much once the thing you’ve made takes on a life of its own.

School was where I overheard the boys discussing the relative merits of the anointed hot girls outside class (I say “overheard”, but they filled the corridor with their bodies and the air with their newly-deepened voices, so there was no discretion involved at all, and anyway, boys will be boys). School was where I learned to dread the comments which let me know where my slow-to-change body sat in that hierarchy (because boys will be boys). School was where I envied the girls set above me and dreaded the kind of attention they received (because boys will be boys). And school was where I eventually learned to shrink my body defensively when I sensed someone behind me — because boys will be boys.

I don’t know how much this was the thing that drove my own bedroom retreat (it’s never one thing, is it? But it so often is this thing among many). But for whatever reason, I became a committed school-avoider, and I spent my school-avoiding years reading about people having an even crappier time of being a teenager than I was. That meant those twin bibles of angst, The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar; and I don’t know whether I noticed at the time, but it makes a lot of sense to me now that Holden Caulfield’s breakdown involves wandering New York, while Esther Greenwood secretes herself in a crawlspace under her house to overdose — the tiniest chamber it is possible to fold herself into.

I don’t know if it’s really possible to be a school-avoider now. You could obviously just stop going, but I don’t see how you can wholly get away from it like I did. I’ve got two teenagers of my own now, and they are of course constantly attached to their phones. Now, those corridor conversations happen on Snapchat, constantly — you could avoid them, but only at the cost of cutting yourself off entirely from communication with the world.

The other thing that teenagers have now, and I did not, is internet porn. When boys decide to size up the available girl-flesh, their appraisals are informed by a worldly acquaintance with the female body in various states of penetrative duress — an NSPCC study from five years ago found that by the time children were 15, 65% had seen pornography, with boys viewing it more often and more deliberately than girls. And 53% of boys who had seen online pornography considered it to be “realistic”.

One of the things I’ve found consistently through 18 years of parenting two children is that I simply never manage to land my life lessons in time. The moment I realise that some particular horror of growing-up is liable to impinge on them or their friendship group, it’s usually already happened. And how, in any case, is a parent supposed to discuss the grisly realities of the pornified world without, well, discussing the grisly realities of the pornified world? I count myself a pretty honest parent, but even so, it’s hard to envisage having the steely unembarrassability required to sit them down for a Talk about Pornhub.

Adolescents are caught between the inevitable innocence of their age, and a terrible excess of information. It’s impossible to warn them against something they can’t yet imagine; and once they’ve encountered pornography, impossible for them not to imagine that what they’ve seen in some way represents the truth about sex. A truth which, according to the front page of Pornhub, involves “hot stepsisters”, girls who want to be “passed around”, and “horny bitches” who love anal.

Suggested reading

Women already have a Jordan Peterson

By Sarah Ditum

This pervasive, brutalising culture of sex is part of the background to the accounts of sexual assault and harassment collected by Everyone’s Invited — over 11,000 when I last looked, all of which only tell us in more detail something we already knew. The abuse of girls and women is endemic, and schools are no kind of a safe space. A 2019 survey for the National Education Union reported that more than a third of girls at mixed-sex schools had experienced sexual harassment at school, and nearly a quarter had experienced unwanted touching of a sexual nature.

Everyone’s Invited became a story this time because of the names of some of the schools involved. Which raises the bitter thought that if only one girl gets sexually harassed, that’s a tragedy. If thousands get sexually harassed, that’s only statistics. Unless the reports happen to involve some famous British public schools, in which case sexual harassment in schools can become a national crisis for several days and finally receive parliamentary attention. The Department for Education has just announced an immediate review into sexual abuse in state and private schools.

So now we have this moment where we might, perhaps, be able to talk about what we should do. It won’t last long: already, people are starting to worry that all this concern about girls risks doing that most terrible of things and “demonising boys”. You can feel sympathy lurching back to its habitual centre of gravity. Yes, it’s bad that girls suffer these habitual intrusions and humiliations; but how much more compelling it is to imagine the pain of the boy wrongly accused, outcast, ashamed. Boys will be boys! And wouldn’t it be a pity to stop them just so girls could get to be girls.

Suggested reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

How good an argument some seem to find that for shushing the girls and doing nothing. How hard it seems to be to remember that boys are vulnerable too — scattered among the harrowing testimonials from girls on Everyone’s Invited there are a few male voices of distress, reporting terrible things done to them or cruelties they watched their peers commit. Boys do not, on the whole, want this grotesque version of masculinity to be the one they attain; but where will they find a better option?

For schools to intercede against this attitudinal tide is a lot to ask. But many of them are not even trying: 64% of teachers in the NEU survey were unsure or not aware of their school’s policies and practices on preventing sexism. And while the relationships and sex curriculum was updated by the government in 2019, there’s still a tendency to treat it as a discrete component of education that can be dealt with in its allotted periods.

Children have no such respect for the boundaries of the timetable. The beliefs they are acquiring about sex and relationships spill into every part of their lives, and teachers need to be attuned to sexism — and ready to counter it — wherever it manifests. They need to have independently established processes for dealing with incidents of harassment and assault that involve pupils, whether as victim or aggressor; they also need the ability to impose appropriate behavioural management (and where necessary, penalties) on children. They need to find the resources to do all this at the same time that they somehow also deliver an education.

Suggested reading

Confessions of a porn writer

By Tanya Gold

We’ve been here before, with #metoo and #everydaysexism and #hollaback, if your memory goes long. A project like Everyone’s Invited can give us a strong sense of what’s wrong, but it’s not (and never claimed to be) the route to restitution. As feminism seems to be repeatedly in the process of finding out, raising consciousness is the easy part. Moving from the knowledge of collective trauma to the politics that stops it happening again is time-consuming, often expensive and — after the catharsis of revelation — an anticlimax.

Without that move from recognition to reformation, though, all you end up with is a lot of hurt disclosed to ultimately no effect. A lot of hurt, and a hunger for justice. Although given that the criminal justice system is currently failing woefully to prosecute rape, it’s hard to promise that much justice will be forthcoming. What is reported in classrooms only mirrors what happens in the adult world.

We might reassure ourselves that children will grow out of their worst impulses — and many will, though some of the sexual violence described on Everyone’s Invited has the sound of a lifelong habit that a boy will never shake without intervention, if at all. But children must be given something to grow into as well. A promise of not having to live with violence, and not having to see cruelty tolerated, that will give them something worth leaving their bedrooms for.

But we small islanders are never more at home with our own hypocrisy than when it concerns our sex lives. I’ve known married relationship counsellors warn clients against the perils of conducting love affairs, while having a string of lovers themselves. One tale that best demonstrates our wayward attitude to sexual mores involves my publican mother. When I was editing the Erotic Review magazine in the late 1990s (a job that raised eyebrows) my mum bumped into a church-going neighbour while walking in the local woods. In the course of conversation the woman said to mum, “I’m so sorry about Rowan, that all sounds dreadful”.

My mother replied she wasn’t the least bit embarrassed and was happy I was doing what I loved. At which point the neighbour, without missing a beat, said, “Actually, I was thinking of taking out a subscription for my husband.” Most middle-class Brits main concern when discussing sex is to give the appearance of conforming to societal norms. If the rules are suddenly relaxed within a friendly and discreet setting your average upright person may confide eye-popping misdemeanours.

The contradictory messages about sex are also apparent in people’s reactions to the BBC drama Normal People. It was announced this week that there had been 16 million downloads of the series in its first week on iPlayer. The pre-publicity and reviews all focused on the intense portrayal of sexual intimacy, which presumably helped boost the ratings.

Suggested reading

Is this how normal people have sex?

By Zoe Strimpel

Yet a number of comment pieces — and myriad threads on social media – expressed discomfort or shock at the unbridled coupling.  One newspaper headline announced, “The sex scenes in Normal people give me the ick.” Which, in the stubbornly enduring spirit of Mary Whitehouse, is a bit like settling down to watch a dramatisation of The Kama Sutra and declaring yourself astonished there’s so much rumpy-pumpy.

If I hear there’s graphic violence in a film or TV series, I tend to opt not to watch it. Yes these sexually-tormented viewers of Normal People nobly struggle on, through every erotic last erotic frame. (Btw the director Lenny Abrahamson has pointed out the two stars were semi-clad in almost every sex scene, so clever cutting and camerawork gives you the sense it’s more explicit than it actually is.)

What Normal People and the Neil Ferguson debacle show is that we Brits are pretty useless at acknowledging our sexual needs. If this is clear under usual circumstances, it’s even truer under lockdown. When New York first locked down the city, NY Health issued a two-page memo detailing how turned-on citizens could stay safe during the epidemic. With endearing understatement the experts said, “This is not a good time to be having orgies.” Instead their top tip was “You are your safest sex partner,” suggesting you wash hands for 20 seconds before and after use. Try as I might, I could find no similar instructions for Londoners, or anyone in the UK. No official recognition that single people, or couples torn apart, would find sexual frustration boiling up like steam in a pressure cooker as lockdown progressed.

As ever, the inconvenient force of desire isn’t something we really want to talk about in this country. The closest the Government came to issuing advice was telling couples who didn’t live together they’d better “choose now” where they were going to stay throughout the period of self-isolation, then stick to that arrangement. Which didn’t begin to cover the full gamut of sexual ‘arrangements’. There were those in tentative new romances who didn’t want to put them under the strain and accelerated familiarity of living together. There were divorced or separated adults in new relationships, who often had children in different abodes to consider. Then there were those, like Ferguson and his married lover, with more unconventional arrangements – licit or illicit lovers outside their own home. On top of that were millions of lonesome souls continuing the search for love on dating apps. As week after week passed some people were bound to find lust overwhelming caution.

At this point readers are almost certainly dividing into two groups. The ones thinking, “Death-wish morons, I have no sympathy”, have a valid point of view, and the Government and tide of public opinion is with them. I’d hazard a guess a significant number are in stable relationships where parking sex for a bit doesn’t seem like a big sweat if other priorities – work, small kids, Covid-19 and the imminent threat of death – assert themselves and if your best beloved shares your house.

Suggested reading

What sort of sex do women really want?

By Louise Perry

The only problem with that point of view is that it ignores historical precedent and the line of persuasion best used by the metaphysical poets. Writers like Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell knew the most effective tool of seduction was reminding the beloved of their own fragile mortality. When Marvell wrote his famous couplet, “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace,” the bubonic plague was still a very real hazard, with the Great Plague of London (1665-6) sweeping off  nearly a quarter of the city’s residents. If you prized sensible chastity over the chance to seize some rapture, there was a good chance you’d die in any case, but without gathering any rosebuds. Similar reasoning was evident in the Blitz when falling bombs led to increased risk-taking and thousands of brief encounters.

Twenty years into the new millennium, nothing much has changed. Persistent thoughts of death lead to insistent thought of sex and, for that second group of people, a heightened risk of infection is a calculation worth living with. Furthermore, learning to calculate risk is something we glean from the earliest days of maths and use in many everyday scenarios, from giving birth, to driving a car and playing contact sports — as Timandra Harkness detailed so compellingly on UnHerd yesterday. Neil Ferguson had already had Coronavirus and been through quarantine, so I have some sympathy for him reasoning the chance of re-infection wasn’t huge. I suppose all this depends on whether or not you acknowledge how overwhelming sexual connection can be and see it as a driver of the human life-force, akin to hunger and thirst. From my reading and viewing of Normal People I’d guess Sally Rooney believes in that kind of erotic imperative.

What’s notable in my own circle of acquaintance, is how many otherwise sensible, intelligent people have followed all the rules – except the implied one about not seeing a sexual partner outside the home. I’m not talking about cavalier sex-jaunts days into lockdown, but the kind of cumulative longing for human touch, sensuality and reassurance that can make you flout rules and risk social censure. One 50-something friend broke at the six-week point and took an empty train to London (“far safer than my local Co-op”) wearing a mask, where her boyfriend picked her up. Another allowed her partner of a year’s standing to stay twice at her house, but said her teenage children gave her, “such a bollocking it almost wasn’t worth it”. A third moved in with a new man half-way through lockdown, after a flirtation fuelled by long Facetime calls and emails became a fully-fledged romance. You may believe your own circle has behaved more impeccably, but as my anecdote about my mother and the Erotic Review shows, when it comes to sex, people tend to tell you what they think you want to hear.

Suggested reading

Let's make sex education sublime

By Rowan Pelling

I’d like to think we could grow up a bit about sex in this country. That we could applaud a drama like Normal People for showing the most realistically tender love scenes in British TV history without anyone calling it icky. That we could draw up some guidelines for any future pandemic that give more leeway to the realities of adult sexual behaviour. If two adults are reasonably sure they’re not infectious, don’t use public transport and wear masks when out, should they be pilloried for having sex – especially if the married one’s spouse had approved the arrangement? Although of course it wasn’t the shagging that did for Neil Ferguson – it was the double standards. And quite right too. But if our experts were prepared to be more honest about the fact there’s little that’s normal when it comes to sex, there’d be no need for such hypocrisy. As Sigmund Freud once observed, “The only unnatural sex behaviour is none at all.”

Yet how dull “the literary phenomenon of the decade” turned out to be — and what was stranger, how knowingly, coyly dull. I had assumed the almost insolently underwhelming name on the tin — Normal People — was an ironic joke, and that the contents would be abnormally original, with unusually vivacious, insightful writing.

I was wrong. Rooney isn’t into vivacity, as her dour expression and flat, understated style of writing might suggest. What she is into is sex, and most particularly the tears and apologies that seem to surround it for the young erotic adventurers of today. The result is a prose I found hypnotically low-pulse.

But with over a million copies sold worldwide, first prize in the Costa and Waterstones Book of the Year and plenty more accolades, Normal People clearly answered to a global appetite. The TV adaptation was inevitable, and lo, it was released last week to instant roaring success.

More from this author

The hateful heart of Love Island

By Zoe Strimpel

Once again, a dutiful investigator, I found myself glued to the BBC’s version of Rooney’s coolly flat world while also bored. What is it about this story that has captured us so?

Most obviously, it is the sex, which manages to be both ‘hot’ and firmly didactic — just how we moderns like it. Most episodes — and there are 12 — contain what can only be described as great coitus between the lead characters, with emotional intensity driving on the obvious physical urgency and pleasure. At first, in school, the popular Connell (Paul Mescal) is too embarrassed to be associated with the weird and friendless Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), and so their sexual relationship is secret. Though Rooney and now the directors work hard, and successfully, to render this relationship tense and meaningful, they obviously have a keen eye for the plainly arousing.

There is something unsettling, almost dishonest in this. Packaged as the sometimes difficult, vulnerable-making and above all authentic sexual experience of ‘normal people’ (i.e. ‘damaged’ people, of which more later) these are not the kind of sexual experiences I remember from school and university — and there were plenty of ‘normal’ (i.e. ‘damaged’) people in both places. In the first place, their looks and the calibre of their sensual experience for their age are exceptional.

Readers of the book had to infer from Connell’s thoughts that Marianne is in the essentially sexy category of unpopular girl, despite being bullied about her looks at school. By contrast, the makers of the TV programme settle the question of their universal sexual appeal immediately: Edgar-Jones is a knock-out — the sinewy, delicate, quiet and mysterious ying to the big handsome, blue-eyed athleticism of Mescal’s Connell. Both are equally libidinous, so that the production often feels more like high-end pornography than drama, even if the sex escapes gratuitousness by marking the waning and waxing of their relationship. Either way, their goings-on are hardly ‘normal’; nor are they ‘damaged’. They’re enviably perfect.

Suggested reading

No sex please, we're brutish

By Louise Perry

I was discomfited to note the quiet but firm moral running through the production: great, truly hot sex is the reward for beautiful, and above all thin girls with stylish hair — Marianne’s fringe and charcoaled eyes, along with her delicately picked-out clavicles and hip-bones, quite often steal the limelight. The same moral is maintained in the sex scene between Connell and his college girlfriend Helen: here is another toned, fatless woman with long brown locks that sexily tousle with sweat as she enjoys Connell. Meanwhile Marianne’s less beautiful friend Peggy (India Mullen) is sexually invisible, and her best friend — a very overweight, sensible girl called Joanna (Eliot Salt) — is rendered entirely mumsy, a foil. Nothing happens to her.

If the sex in Normal People silently reaffirms the enduring gold standard of female slenderness and the kind of sultry mysteriousness evident in Marianne’s long, dark silences, then it is very explicitly didactic in other ways. All sexual exchanges are peppered with nervy utterances of ‘is that OK?’, ‘if that’s OK’, ‘if you want me to’ and so on. The sex between Marianne and Connell is as much about trumpeting the virtues of constant and enthusiastic consent-seeking — indeed of the softly softly feminist man’s approach to shagging — as it is about raw desire. “If you want to stop or anything we can obviously stop, if it hurts or anything we can stop, it won’t be awkward, just say,” says Connell in the first sex scene, when Marianne loses her virginity. This was an object lesson in smart sex for the woke age — take no steps without express permission, especially where women are concerned.

Marianne and Connell’s virtuous sex scenes gleam with a knowing, seductive touch because they were expertly choreographed, emotionally and physically, by an intimacy coordinator. Since MeToo, as sensitivities around consent have been heightened, intimacy coordinators have become mandatory on most major productions to ensure no liberties are taken filming sex scenes and that the actors feel ‘comfortable’.

For Normal People, the BBC hired the sought-after Ita O’Brien, a former dancer and actor who oversaw the action in fellow teen bonk fest Sex Education. Just as the characters constantly seek mutual assurance of emotional comfort, the intimacy coordinator ensures the actors feel just as comfortable.

The language of intimacy coordination, with its emphasis on constant emotional temperature checks, perfectly matches the ideology of the book and — at last — helps shed light on what is meant by ‘normal’. In a world obsessed with policing violated boundaries and outing emotional discomfort, ‘normal’ means either ‘weird’ or ‘damaged’ — which, therapeutic wisdom has it, are traits we should celebrate (unless they involve holding offensive political opinions). “How I act with [Marianne] is my normal personality,” Connell tells a jealous Helen in response to her question of why he is so ‘weird’ around Marianne. “Maybe I’m just a weird person,” he says, concluding a scene crafted to signify who he really belongs with (Marianne).

Suggested reading

Why is the Left so hypocritical about sex?

By Sarah Ditum

Normal People has been hailed for its relatability, with the inference that we’re all weird, we’re all damaged, and we are all saved only by those who truly and authentically love us. Indeed love and damage go hand-in-hand, and emotional vulnerability has become the ultimate aphrodisiac. The scene in which Connell and Marianne’s love enters a new more serious phase revolves around her tearful musing: “I don’t know why I can’t make people love me.” Marianne hints for the first time at the abuse visited on her by her odious brother, confessing to a shocked Connell that she hadn’t told him yet because “I was afraid you’d think I was damaged”. Magic words. Connell’s love surges, as he tells her none of it is her fault and that she is loved. A rush of lust follows.

Later, following the suicide of a friend back in Sligo, and with frequent panic attacks, Connell himself seeks out counselling, and the therapeutic process lends the final episodes their dramatic thrust, winning plaudits from men’s mental health activists. Tick.

Normal People chimes with the growing consensus — even in Britain — that therapy wins all. Indeed, from Wanderlust to Sex Education, no contemporary British drama is complete now without an extended therapy scene. The therapeutic journey is also the dramatic heart of Dolly Alderton’s best-selling Everything I Know About Love, now being made into a TV series too (Alderton was runner-up to Rooney at the 2018 Waterstones Book of the Year Awards).

Neither the fascination with rendering the ‘true’ self fully transparent nor the belief that only through being vulnerable shall we be free are new. Freud unleashed on a mass scale the conviction that our ‘true’ drives lurk below external presentation, but it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that therapy culture and practices really began to suffuse approaches to everything from relationships to feminism to management. As observers noted at the time, this could yield a strangely closed-feeling, narcissistic system of interaction, in which self-discovery was the end point for all endeavours. By the mid-1980s, a series of new women’s magazines were targeting a readership that was, in magazine historian Anna Gough Yates’s words ‘vulnerable’, ‘self-critical’ and ‘insecure inside’. A fit description of the characters in Normal People.

Normal People is the perfect product for a generation taught to seek out and proudly lay claim to sexual and emotional vulnerability. In the past, sex scenes packed full of the considerate, careful hesitation we see here might have garnered laughter and shrieks of ‘get on with it!’. But today, virtue and the erotic go hand in hand. The message of MeToo seems to have won out: respecting boundaries is as hot as the sex itself.

I’d be inclined to rate my mother’s birds and bees talk as a five out of ten, if it weren’t for one key aspect. When she described the intimate business of making love, we three made the usual protests of, “Yuck!”, “No!” and “I’m NEVER doing that!”, at which point Mum said, “You’re wrong. It’s the most beautiful feeling in all the world.” I was watching her face and, 43 years later, still recall a fleeting moment of ecstatic reverie. It was clear to me she was telling the truth (her truth, in any case) and from then onwards I nurtured the idea that the end game of sex should be rapture.

Which takes us — as all discussions about sex do at the moment — to the Netflix series Sex Education. The local academy my sons attend thought it necessary to send a memo home a couple of weeks ago from their “PSHE Coordinator” (Personal, Social and Health Education) warning parents to be aware that their children were likely to be watching the new season, despite its 18 certificate, “due to its representation of a variety of different teenage issues and curiosities”.

Damn right. My 15-year-old had pretty much inhaled both seasons and was delighted to note that the main character’s mother, a sex therapist and writer played by Gillian Anderson, “is almost as embarrassing as you”. The chat also meant I learnt exactly when his classmates had discovered, courtesy of Google, that I’d edited two erotic magazines and appeared on programmes with titles like, “100 Greatest Sexy Moments”.

The geography teacher who wrote the school’s letter went on to say, “Personally, I will be making sure I watch the series to ensure I know what is being shown and therefore to support questions should I be approached at school by pupils.” Judging by Series 1, I hoped she was braced to discuss rimming, scissoring, alien-themed erotica and how to suppress the gag reflex while performing fellatio. Of course, many of the show’s themes are more universal: performance anxiety, consent, the perils of sexting, body dysmorphia and the pervasive influence of porn culture.

More from this author

Do androids dream of electric sheets?

By Rowan Pelling

There’s no doubt Sex Education has usefully broadened the debate about the kind of sex scenarios we might reasonably expect our teens to encounter. There’s wide acceptance outside religious lobby groups that current sex education provision at UK schools is woefully inadequate. Worse than that, it’s not even compulsory by law. That will change this coming September, and even then “parents and carers may withdraw their children from sex education until three terms before they are 16 in secondary school”.

But even when children do exit school knowing a modicum about consent, the clitoris, gender fluidity, masturbation and full-on intercourse, there are significant gaps. It’s one thing for a teacher to say oral sex is perfectly normal, and quite another to explain how it’s best performed. And they’re certainly not braced to argue whether sex could or should have meaning beyond being a pleasurable horizontal workout.

To return to my late lamented mother’s thoughts on sex, what none of the current educational provision deals with is the beauty. Or to misquote Woody Allen: is sex beautiful? Only when it’s being done right. This erasure of erotic value in our sex ed affects many people, whatever their age or level of sexual experience. If you don’t expect an ecstatic sexual experience, you’re more likely to accept the mundane or disappointing.

Take a friend of mine in her 50s, who’s just exited a long marriage to a stolid businessman who cheated on her with his tennis coach. She has just taken up with a sexy chef and their lovemaking is the stuff of revelation. She told me: “It’s a cliché to say it, but I didn’t know sex could be like this — an out-of-body, electrifying, almost religious experience.” Then her voice became wistful and slightly accusatory: “You knew this, didn’t you?” I had to admit, yes, I did. Not on a constant, smug or failsafe basis, but definitely as something to aim for.

More from this series

Why arranged marriages make sense

By Ed West

Of course, it’s hard to the point of impossibility to talk about the sublime in sex. It either sounds absurd or boastful — just dwell for a nanosecond on Sting talking about Tantra. The forces that have shaped our culture, from Protestantism to the Enlightenment and capitalism, aren’t too wedded to transcendentalism. And then we’re British, so inclined to snigger.

Our natural instinct is not to take sex too seriously. Some years ago the classified ads manager at Private Eye told me the most popular lonely heart in the entire history of the magazine was a woman who described herself as, “Lady doctor, who likes laughing in bed.” It’s a brave person in western society who tries to put sincerity and meaning back into sex. Naomi Wolf had a go in her book Vagina, which took as its starting point the author’s sudden diminishment of sensation at the point of climax. When the full force of her orgasm is finally restored to her she writes:

“Sexual recovery for me was like that transition in The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy goes from black-and-white Kansas to colorful, magical Oz. Slowly after orgasm I once again saw light flowing into the world around me. … I looked out of the window at the trees tossing their new leaves and the wind lifting their branches in great waves, and it all looked like an intensely choreographed dance, in which all of nature was expressing something.”

Cue a chorus of critics cackling like hyenas. To my mind, that passage was the best bit of the book: an unabashed acknowledgement that there’s something about great sex that resets all your dials, knocks twenty years off your face, and — yeah, let’s go full woo-woo — makes you feel at one with the planet.

Suggested reading

Do men want sex more than women?

By Tom Chivers

But wider society often seems far keener to embrace the spirit of porn culture — namely that sex is primarily a frenetic but largely meaningless shag-fest — than to imbue it with some form of greater resonance. Screen depictions of intercourse are almost invariably of the thrusting, pumping, sucking variety. Which is tedious if there’s no counterbalance — no sense that time can seem to slow down when you’re totally absorbed with another person’s heartbeat.

No one seemed perturbed that the first episode of Sex Education — to return there for a moment — opened with a sex scene depicting a young woman having an orgasm from doggy-style sex while receiving no clitoral stimulation whatsoever. I felt compelled to lecture my poor 15-year-old son (“Mum! Shut up!”) on the fact that it’s quite rare for women to experience an orgasm through penetration alone and research suggests that almost 80% of women rarely or never have a climax that way. According to TV drama, around 95% of women achieve vaginal orgasms with no problem whatsoever.

Perhaps I protest too much. Is sex really that sublime? Olivia Fane doesn’t think so: she’s written a book called Why Sex Doesn’t Matter— reviewed for UnHerd by Zoe Strimpel — despite or, perhaps, because of having an open marriage in her twenties. Sarah Vine has written that she values sleep over erotic intimacy, and Suzanne Moore has been bored for some time now.

Suggested reading

Why Incels are the losers in the age of Tinder

By James Bloodworth

I understand their arguments and that it’s the columnist’s art to be provocative. Our culture is over-saturated by tedious images of mindless rutting and ersatz passion. When you’re married for many years — as Fane and Vine have been — erotic hunger fades and companionability is often more highly rated.

Still, it feels like a terrible swizz to complain from your 50s and 60s, when libido has often dampened, that sex is overrated. Imagine spinning that yarn to a younger self back in the days when you yearned for nothing more than to become one with the beloved. No citizen of a Latin American country would every say such a thing — to them it would be like saying you can dispense with food or water (but then they’ve never had to suffer Luther and a cold climate).

To disparage erotic intensity is to disown the most powerful feelings most of us (alright, not nuns and asexuals) will ever experience on this planet. Our love for our children tends to be more steady and steadfast. We would willingly die for our offspring, but we wouldn’t be so cavalier as to risk our livelihood for them. It’s erotic yearning that precipitates moments of madness that bring presidents to the brink — as so strikingly illustrated by Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

Sexual passion is unpredictable, unfettered and often takes on the quality of obsession, which leads to fear and censure. But living without boundaries in a stupor of the senses can give us some sense of the infinite and the unobtainable. The language of rapture belongs equally to lovers and God and it’s a dim-witted vicar who doesn’t acknowledge this. You can be sure they haven’t read the line, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God…”

Suggested reading

Why the young are falling out of love with sex

By Zoe Strimpel

How can I back up any of these assertions? Not with statistics, as they’re notoriously unreliable on the subject of sex. That’s why the topic is such an alluring land-grab for anyone with a theory to pedal. But there’s plenty of persuasive evidence in myth, legend and literature — which is why novels, classic films and art should be employed in contemporary love lessons.

Since the dawn of narrative storytellers have known one thing for certain: sex matters. It really, truly matters. It’s the reason Paris of Troy started a war with the Spartans, having abducted and seduced the Spartan queen Helen. It’s why the Greek and Roman Gods were always quarrelling, finding themselves unable to resist illicit love affairs with stray nymphs, or mortals. Apollo had an impressive array of male lovers for starters. It’s why King Arthur was betrayed by his wife and the knight he most trusted. It’s why Scheherazade told so many erotic stories in the Arabian Nights, knowing few other themes would prove quite as compelling.

It’s why Romeo and Juliet defied their feuding families and why Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina enthral us a century and a half after publication. It’s why we return to Wuthering Heights despite Heathcliff’s barbaric behaviour that we’d now term domestic violence. There’s something numinous that speaks to a profound, hungry part of the reader when Cathy declares of Heathcliff, “he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”.

It’s why Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People met with such widespread critical and popular acclaim and is about to hit our TVs as a drama series. Few writers since Emily Brontë have captured so acutely the sense of jeopardy, ecstasy and narcotic intensity that results from two young people baring bodies, minds and souls.

And it’s why readers of all stripes delight in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty: the recognition that desire transcends gender and heterosexual clichés.

Suggested reading

Could homophobia be on the rise?

By Douglas Murray

There’s something all those bards, storytellers and novelists know as they turn their own experience into fictional narrative — that there are heightened times in most people’s lives when nothing matters more than the desire to drown in the physical perfection of the longed-for lover.

Commentators are always telling us we ask too much from sex, but I think it’s possible we ask too little. Why crush physical connection into a small space and say daft, but socially acceptable guff like, “I’d prefer a cup of tea,” or “Chocolate’s better than sex”? It’s impossibly hard to assert that there’s nothing wrong with seeking profound physical connection that leaves us quivering with rapture.

A good friend calls this uncanny bond quantum entanglement: the sense that if you and best beloved mate are on opposite sides of the planet your atoms will be moving in tandem, twinned across time and space. This may be more poetic than strictly scientific, but at least it transports sex to the realm of the imagination where all the finest human endeavours are nurtured. I can’t help feeling a great metaphysician like John Donne would embrace the concept. This Valentine’s Day, it seems only appropriate to quote the most sublime lines from the most sublime poem in the English language, “To His Mistress Going to Bed.”

Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joys.

This is the erotic education I return to more than any other, because Donne’s sentiments are always freshly minted: reborn in the rapture I glimpse around me and anticipate for my sons when they come of age; relived in the beauty I have sometimes been fortunate enough to experience myself.