Keir Starmer has announced that under Labour, boys will be taught to respect women and girls. The National Curriculum will now include classes in “Banter: Not Even Once” and “Girls are Great, OK?”

I jest, but to what extent is Starmer’s plan to introduce discussion about the social treatment of women and girls into schools realistic? It’s a sorry sign of things when the sexes have to be taught to treat each other slightly better than a used paper bag.

Labour’s concomitant aim to halve incidents of domestic violence against women and girls within a decade is an admirable one, but telling young men, who already drag behind girls at school and college, that they need to call each other out over misogynistic comments, however jokey, seems doomed to failure. If we can’t engage in cathartic light mockery of each other and ourselves, then the only alternative seems to be to outlaw humour altogether.

Education is of course only one fine sliver of existence competing with the broader culture. The problem is much deeper. Our socially “liberated” culture has provided absolutely no roadmap for understanding the different virtues of the sexes. We have no image of ourselves as sexually differentiated creatures possessing higher reasons for mutual respect. Instead, an amoral, nihilistic individualism, saturated with degrading images of both men and women, prevails.

For men and women to respect one another, we would have to understand in the first place that we are different from one another — a difference that in no way implies a hierarchy, but rather a complementarity. This idea of complementarity, however, does not entail that men and women ought to understand each other only through a sexual lens. After all, the vast majority of our interactions with one another in the mixed, heterosocial world are not sexual. If we thought more highly of ourselves — as awe-inspiring aspects of nature, or fragments of God, depending on your perspective — we might avoid the desire to collectively denigrate ourselves.

Of course, this is beyond any political initiative — it would require a total overhaul of our most fundamental presuppositions. Humanity struggles to live without higher meaning and values. What if we treated our bodies not as vehicles for indulgence but rather as gifts to which we have a higher duty?

The sexual revolution has proved to be a Cads’ Charter, benefitting the most irresponsible of men and leaving women and children without recourse to notions of duty, fidelity and commitment. In a totally liberated world, freedom turns out to be the right to make a mess and move on. For boys and men to respect girls and women — and vice versa — respect itself would have to be central to our entire culture. And who is in a position to put the brakes on now?