by Joanna Gray, The Daily Sceptic
The belated performative outrage concerning the Epstein files and the UK rape gangs reeks of hypocrisy and moral whiplash as politicians and influencers have been relentlessly encouraging the sexualisation of society since sex was reputedly invented in 1963. Now, we are all expected to condemn with sorrowful faces these ‘outrageous’ sexual perversions when in fact people in power have been cheering them on for years. When Keir Starmer said recently to the Epstein victims: “I am sorry, sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed you,” his words may actually for once be accurate. Whether he realises what he should be apologising for is another story.
Two differing elements – moral climate and specific government policies – have helpfully signposted the way towards the sexual slurry vat we find ourselves in today. Firstly the climatic winds: they whispered so gradually it was impossible to realise until perhaps this very week that any pretence at a realistic approach to sex and the consequences of sex has been entirely blown asunder.
Some like Larkin finger the 1960s, others the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf recorded Lytton Strachey in company pointing to a stain on Vanessa Bell’s white dress and asking, “Semen?” Woolf wrote, “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve were swept away.” Others reach back further and cite Dickens’s sentimentalising of 1838 Oliver Twist’s mother, or silly Hetty Sorrel in George Eliot’s 1859 Adam Bede. Why all the criminal fuss when all women wanted was a Jilly Cooper-style romp in the woods? National emotions were readied for an eventual liberalising of sexual relations.
Fraudulent doctors Freud, Money and Kinsey also played their parts in moving Western society to the state where to even criticise sex exploration for people of any age would have you immediately called a prude.
This new sexual weather was used as a vaporous foundation on which governments and international bodies enacted a number of laws and policies that embedded sexual freedom as an unequivocal common good. The charge sheet is long, and perhaps in hindsight unwise: The 1959 Obscene Publications Act; the 1967 Abortion Act, the 1969 Divorce Reform Act; the 1967 National Health Service (Family Planning) Act; the 2000 Safeguarding Children Involved in Prostitution guidance created a blind spot whereby police and social workers interpreted underage sex with adult males as consensual.
Read also: The hypocrisy of the Epstein panic by Kathleen Stock, UnHerd