Make Sex Sacred Again

Freeing sex from the libertines and Puritans from the Battle of Ideas Festival

Last Saturday, I delivered these remarks at the Battle of Ideas Festival in London, on a panel with Nina Power and Fraser Myers, moderated by Eve Kay. Thanks to reader Daniel Saunders for the excellent additional perspective.

We live in a time of sexual anarchy. Children across the English speaking world are being exposed to explicit sexual content not just on their phones, but in their schools. Girls are being forced into accepting men in their private spaces. In the US, men in dresses have leadership positions in the military and government, and untold numbers of children are being trafficked for sex.  Sexual orientation has become a focus even of foreign policy, with the US Embassy in Kabul, of all places, tweeting a photograph of the Pride flag in June 2021 with the text: “The United States respects the dignity & equality of LGBTI people & celebrates their contributions to the society.”

Putting sex squarely in the centre of places it has no business being — like schools and embassies — has thrown up some very uncomfortable questions for those of us who grew up assuming we lived at the end not just of history, but at the blessed end of the sexual revolution as well, where the highest value was freedom to pursue our own desires without censure.

The three parties currently duking it out for narrative dominance are, as I wrote in the pamphlet, the sexual liberals, the sexual radicals and the sexual puritans. The two on the extremes rather speak for themselves. The liberals, however, are what I want to focus on today. 

The great liberal virtues that defined the world we lived in up until about five minutes ago, were tolerance, self-determination, freedom of choice, and freedom of movement. Scientific as opposed to religious. Urbane as opposed to rural. Youthful as opposed to traditional. 

And, for a brief time anyway, that was all well and good, because it was underpinned by a shared understanding of where the boundaries were, and fundamentally, the adults were still in charge. Both extremes were mostly kept at bay: school curricula had not yet been targeted and the folly of trans kids was far in the future, but moral panics about gays were firmly in the past. For a minute there, we were in the sweet spot. 

To a great degree, I have not just observed this change, but lived it too. I grew up with parents who lived on the border between the liberals and the radicals — they had an “open marriage” long before it was cool. There has always been small groups of sexual radicals — elites and intellectuals — thumbing their noses at established morality, and my parents were of that group. But this is the first time I can think of where the exceptions seek to become the rule. Today, non-monogamous sexual arrangements — even in families — are very much on trend among the progressive left. Back in the ’80’s and ’90’s, my parents were rebels. But not everyone can be a rebel.

The benign liberal worldview created a civilisation which awarded us unprecedented sexual freedoms. But it did not lead to healthy attitudes to sexuality — ones that balanced adult desires with the need for stable families and keeping children — the products of sexual activity —  safe from dysfunction and abuse.

How is this possible? I contend it is because, just as liberalism raised standards and expectations about jobs and lifestyles for many of my generation, it also left us with the misapprehension that the party would never end. Like our Boomer parents, we thought we could keep on being cool and accepting and open-minded, as darker and darker elements crept out into the open. And even worse, in the age of Trump, laissez faire attitudes to sex (with the glaring exception of aggressive male heterosexuality) became entwined with political symbolism — further ensuring that clear-eyed assessments would not be possible.

So we end up with YouTube sexologists with huge audiences praising adults who desire sex with children, and television shows celebrating the castration of a little boy.

Of course most decent sexual liberals would not— if directly asked — defend the worst excesses of the sexual radicals for whom not even children are off limits.

But there there is a blind spot that prevents them from recognising the harms being done in the name of tolerance. That blind spot is at the interface where the sexual liberals and the sexual radicals meet — and that is, there is no wrong way to do desire. There can be no wrong way, because that might put at risk our own pleasures, offend the new religion of diversity, and might require us to exercise self-denial. 

By far the most concerning part of this period has been its focus on children. In the 1990’s people like me used to laugh at the Christians who would cry: “won’t somebody think of the children?” We are not laughing now. 

Both the puritans are the radicals are harmful to human wellbeing, but we were wrong — very wrong — to blithely assume that the path to healthy sexuality went through liberalism. 

So liberals, my question is: How do we keep the “good” freedoms and get rid of the “bad” freedoms? Who gets to decide what those are, now that you have proved yourselves incapable? 

A reader by the name of Daniel Saunders wrote to me from the perspective of a religious Jew: 

 “It seems to me that sex used to be embedded in a set of cultural/religious concepts that gave it greater depth and meaning (marriage, family, love, intimacy) and now is just by itself, where all it can provide is short-term gratification, leading to increased hunger afterward (and often shame too) and a pull towards a sort of “mathematical sexuality” when what matters is the multiplication of partners, positions and techniques and a constant pull to breach taboos rather than anything emotional or interpersonal. It’s similar in this way to food, which used to be embedded in a cultural setting of family or communal meals, prayers before and/or after, religious feast days and fast days, but is now in the West increasingly a solitary activity.”

Yes. This is entirely an internal problem. No institution or ideology can fix our predicament. The good news is that this gives those of us who are neither liberal, radical, nor puritanical, a chance to come into the fore. Those of us who understand that the demimonde has always existed and do not feel the need to punish others for their unorthodox tastes, but who also will be staunch in defending common sense decency and safeguarding children in the public square. 

Instead of reverting to puritanism, what we need is a movement to Make Sex Sacred Again. Or if that’s too much to ask, Make Sex Private Again. 

Organiser Claire Fox delivers the closing remarks at the Battle of Ideas Festival 2024