Playing with fire: Our mishandling of sex may send society backwards
by Gavin Ashenden:
The discovery of fire, and more importantly learning to manage fire, was the moment when civilisation took a leap forward. The discovery of sex for its own sake and the mishandling of sex, may send our culture toppling backwards.
Fire and sex share much in common. Used well they work to warm and create; used badly they destroy.
Judaism and Christianity offered a clear moral code for sex. However much fun it may be, it is best contained within marriage and for making children. Outside marriage, uncontained, it has the capacity of a forest fire to burn out of control and lay waste.
In the 60’s the overthrow of this ancient morality was presented as the promise of ‘Free Love”. Like so many progressive moves it wrapped an immoral outcome in a moral packaging. In this case the trouble was it wasn’t free, and it wasn’t love.
The cost of this swapping of old morals for new ones is only just being calculated. We have learnt a bit more of it from the University of Chicago’s recent General Social Survey. Young Americans are not ‘loving’ each other any more. Move beyond the euphemism, and what it really means is that there has been a large increase in the number of people aged between 18 and 29 who have had no sexual intimacy for the whole of the last year. Amongst men in particular, the number has tripled.
Much of recent American manhood, badly served by a feminised education system and an assault on masculinity, is stuck in its parents’ basements, addicted to the fake make-believe world of pornhub.
On the other side of the sexual chasm, there is the ‘me-too’ movement. It has turned exploratory flirting into a prospective criminal charge of near-rape.
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