You are approaching the end of the sexual revolution

Please proceed with caution

At Belfast’s Aldergrove Airport, in the 1980’s, there was an automatic message that came over the tannoy warning people: “you are approaching the end of the moving walkway, please be ready to push your trolley over the ramp.” As if travellers could not see what was directly in front of them, or navigate the space without clear and crisp direction from the disembodied voice. My father would never miss the opportunity to make a joke about it, about boobytraps or trip wires or car bombs — it being the time known as the Troubles, and he being in possession of that famous Belfast black humour. 

This morning over coffee, my husband said to me “we are at the end of the sexual revolution.” The remark struck me as quite profound.

We are approaching the end of the sexual revolution. It is in front of our face, made evident by a sudden and extreme degradation of sexual behaviour and a frightening disappearance of boundaries. Unfortunately for us, we cannot see what comes next. There is no helpful voice coming down from on high, telling us what to do. We must figure this one out for ourselves.

We are at a dismal point in the history of humanity, from a sexual point of view. With something as complex as sex, a perfect time has never existed. And I don’t want to make the mistake that most conservatives make, which is to extrapolate that since our current time is full of awfulness, the past must have been better. Since we live in a time of secularity, it must have been better when we lived under stricter moral codes derived from religion. I know that is not the whole truth.

However. Our modern way has produced a series of horrors that were predicted by conservatives, and those horrors are multiplying. It’s important for formerly left-liberal people like myself to recognise that. 

I grew up in an environment that had nothing bad to say about the sexual revolution that broke out in the late 1960’s. It was assumed to be wholly good. It was assumed that it liberated women from a variety of shackles. I think there is strength to that argument still, or there would be if we were still living in the 1980’s and 1990’s. 

In 2023, four generations on, not so much. Our reality is now a sexual arms race where the end game really could be the end to natural human reproduction, and an end to intimacy and love itself.

The ever-valiant Meghan Murphy is soldiering on in her fight against this forward march into a dystopian future, specifically by critiquing prostitution and porn to a society that seems addicted to both. This week, she argued with some blue haired soy boy who I had never heard of, but who is a well-known left-ish YouTuber called Destiny. He presented his side of the case as follows: if a man enjoys watching pornography and a woman enjoys creating pornography, who am I to stop that? And the corollary argument: a woman having sex with a man she would not want to have sex with if he wasn’t paying her, is the same as woman working a job she does not enjoy in return for a few bucks an hour. 

The internal logic of these positions is sound. It’s the assumptions upon which they rest that are off, and monstrously so. Sexual liberals (if that is the right word) like Destiny and Aella have deliberately — and manipulatively — chosen to hide vice behind logic, harm behind data, and abuse behind science. 

Using Destiny’s logic, you could make an argument for any extreme transgression, as long as you find a person willing to consent to it — and you will, because people be crazy. You could say, “this person enjoys being my slave, and I enjoy enslaving! So what’s the harm?” You could say, “this person has fantasies about being eaten, and I want to eat human flesh! So who’s to stop it?” 

The point is not consent. We’ve become a consent-obsessed society, which would have been an ok idea if we hadn’t simultaneously done away with the ancient concept of sex being a unique, profound act between two people. The sexual revolution has thrown these two concepts together, in a car-crash fashion. 

The point is that sex is not an activity like any other. It is a multifaceted act that blends biology, chemistry, emotion, aggression, receptivity, power and pleasure. Sex is an act that has driven men and women insane, and simultaneously brought life’s greatest joys, and kept our species alive for all of human existence. And these clueless young people who’ve been around for, like, 3 seconds think they can rewrite the rules? That they are in possession of some special knowledge that gives them that authority?

The sexual liberals who equate sex with shift work are committing an act of aggression against human patrimony. They want to sever us from the entire human experience of sex, since the beginning of time — where there has always been prohibitions of one form or another around sex, to ring-fence what has always been understood as the powerful nature of sex. Their argument rips that patrimony out from the root, it rips it out of our souls, our psyches, our very reality. 

And here we are. In a world where a beautiful woman like Aella, who seems bright enough to know better, is also so deranged by the ultra-permissive culture she lives in that she thinks incest, wound-fucking (see her talking about it in minute 4.38 of this clip), and rape porn are just a matter of personal taste, of brain orientation. Not abominations deserving of total condemnation and thorough exclusion. Everything is on the table because nothing is sacred. Nothing is special.

These people are dangerous. They are bad actors, not a sincere debaters. Yet this attitude is so prevalent, it may be the dominant cultural stance at this point. 

Since we are at the end of the revolution, the fun part is over. All that is left is the bureaucratic management of the horror. Destiny, Aella and their fellow travellers are not revolutionaries, but rather apparatchiks carrying out the work of the new sexual regime. 

Earlier this week, I took my own advice from my last Substack and started a comment war on a post about trans “care” for children, in a deeply liberal/progressive/establishment private Facebook group of media professionals, of which I’m a member. I posted that the term trans is a cover for a multitude of harms against women and children. The people arguing against me were almost all men. Their tone was mostly: “how dare you contradict us!” One demanded to know what my “qualifications” to comment were. I enjoyed the fight very much, because poking holes in the crappy arguments of pompous old men is fun for me.  But not a single one of them had a word of response to the evidence of harm. They could only reiterate their assumption of the virtue of the trans cause,  the closest thing we have to a religion these days, and accuse me being right-wing.

The men arguing with me are also the pencil-pushers and functionaries for the new sexual regime. Though they would think of themselves as wise gatekeepers of information, they are the same as the Destiny’s and Aella’s of this world. They are just working away in a different department of the same sexual horror state. 

The only remaining question is: what comes next?