Our attitudes to sex and swearing show how very modern it is to be Victorian

Bans on foul language and the politics of Metoo are a rejection of the permissive values of the Sixties

Is our society becoming ruder or politer? This may seem an absurd question. Obviously ruder, many will say. Look at internet trolling, celebrity culture, reality television and the coarseness of public discourse. In a week when Donald Trump out-satirises satire by calling for greater civility, they would seem to have a point.

I am not so sure. I detect a growing interest in issues of respect for others. Take two small stories this week. The annual Wireless Festival in London makes a tremendous noise, upsetting residents with amplified bad language coming through their windows uninvited. Now its licence from Haringey Council insists that performers use no “vulgar” or “obscene” lyrics and must not wear “attire which exposes the groin, private parts, buttock or female breast(s)”. On the same day, it was reported that Google now forbids the use of sexually explicit words in work files.

I am just old enough to remember a culture where obscenity was deeply disapproved of, and how this changed while I was a boy in the Sixties. Once my parents went away for a week and hired a late-middle-aged woman to look after us. I said to her, for reasons I now forget: “I’m bloody well not going to do X.” She went pink with disapproval and embarrassment. “You should never use that word.” “My mother does,” I answered, disloyally. “Well, she shouldn’t,” came the undaunted reply. She was probably also reflecting the traditional view that it was particularly awful for a man (or boy) to swear in front of a woman.

Soon the word “bloody” became innocuous, and it was not long before Sir Peregrine Worsthorne became the first person to say “f---” on television, thus ruling himself out of the editorship of this newspaper. Fourletter words moved, over less than a decade, from being banned to being permitted to becoming virtually compulsory. Luvvies like the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan hailed this not only as an increase in freedom, which it clearly was, but also as a wonderful thing in itself, which was debatable.

It was fun, in a way. I remember playing football at school and – rather like the Hackney residents – hearing very clearly the amplified lyrics of a pop concert a couple of miles off. “I can see your pubic hair,” bellowed a band called Brewer’s Droop (which briefly included Mark Knopfler). We all loved it because of the evident discomfort of the housemasters on the touchline.

The trend seemed unstoppable. About 10 years later, a band horribly named Dead Kennedys produced a song called “Too drunk to f---”. By this time, respectable society was too browbeaten to organise serious protest.

It is not quite like that now, I think, though of course there is endless obscenity available on the net. If Brewer’s Droop or Dead Kennedys were to start life today they would be challenged – particularly by the young – about alcohol awareness. In this age of woman-power, they would be accused of threatening vulnerable girls. The point would be made – which was not thought by liberals at the time – that the culture of obscenity is an aspect of male aggression, a verbal version of assault. Almost all the foul-mouthed bands were male.

Something similar applied in drama. All those plays, such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which attacked the stuffy old establishment, were by men. They typically featured brilliant, discontented, working-class young males who sat around in bedsits savagely condemning the rottenness of our society while their wives or girlfriends ironed their shirts. These “Angry Young Men” took it for granted that they could help themselves to submissive young women.

As a result, such plays are now much more out of fashion than the more subtle “conventional” work they displaced. Modern audiences are more interested in Terence Rattigan (who turned out to be gay) than Osborne or Arnold Wesker. The world of John Mortimer QC (creator of Rumpole of the Bailey), who was forever defending obscene works such as the film Inside Linda Lovelace, now seems almost as distant as men in spats and top hats. Linda Lovelace, by the way, later revealed how terribly she had been abused by her filmdirector husband, and became an anti-porn campaigner. We began to hear from Angry Young Women.

In the world of fiction, publishers who used to have to take the “dirty bits” out started ordering authors to stick them in. This is rather running out of steam today. Indeed, for male authors, it has become problematic, since their depictions of sexual acts are now scrutinised for their implied attitudes to women.

From the Sixties to the Eighties, the leading opponent of what she called “the tide of filth” was Mrs Mary Whitehouse. It is hard now to convey how utterly unfashionable she was – bustling around in her perm, hat and horn-rimmed glasses, being treated with contempt by the director general of the BBC, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene.

Mrs Whitehouse was indeed narrow-minded, literal-minded and uninterested in artistic liberty. But the strongest point she made was that obscenity, explicit sex and violence in art, drama, literature, education, and the public space were forms of exploitation of the young, particularly of young women. She was surely right. Mrs Whitehouse approached the question from an explicitly Christian standpoint and a conservative political position that the #Metoo activists would repudiate, but she was their sister under the skin.

She did something that the Angry Young Men thought they were doing but weren’t, much. She bravely challenged the powerful elite who, by the Sixties were no longer former Army martinets, but louche, mediasavvy, soft Leftists. She stood up for the casualties of permissiveness – the women in situations which made them too weak to refuse permission. That makes her look quite modern.

It has become quite modern, indeed, to be Victorian. We are returning to an age when people are preoccupied with virtuous behaviour. In particular, Victorians recognised that the relations between the sexes were a minefield where a misunderstanding or a moment of weakness could destroy a reputation. They required strict rules.

That is so today, with the difference that the man is now more at risk of ruin than the woman. At its worst, our humourless modern puritanism produces the equivalents of Victorians covering piano legs. The search for “micro-aggressions” in matters of sex or race, for example, can produce true madness and shocking false accusations. Nevertheless, questions of manners always involve small things standing for bigger ones. A society that brushes manners aside is a crude and cruel one.

Our society is thinking harder than it did about manners. There is a sustained attempt to understand better how the world seems to people who are mentally handicapped, disabled, blind, deaf, old, gay or from a different culture. There is closer attention to how people with power (still most often men) tend to treat the powerless (still most often women).

I predict that within 10 years, swearing at work will be treated much the same as smoking at work – if you want to do it, you will have to go outside. Little knots of swearers will lurk in the doorways of office blocks turning the air blue. I shall feel about it much as I feel about the smoking ban – that it should have been voluntary, not compulsory, but that workplaces are mostly the better for the change.