We need grown-up thinking on morality
IT WAS scientist Isaac Newton who told us in his Three Laws Of Motion that each action has an equal and opposite reaction. One could say the same about the behaviour of human societies. Glance at history and you will see what I mean.
The Regency period, with an example of a randy slob who later became George IV, was a time of loose morals and widespread immorality. Then after a brief incumbency of William IV came the Victorian era. This we are told was a time of rigid prudishness.
It may be (and probably was) the case that the extreme upper classes had their affairs and the men visited bordellos but they could afford it and it was all extremely secret. For the middle and working classes, collectively the huge majority of the nation, the requirement was straitlaced respectability at all costs. That lasted for more than a hundred years. I recall it as a provincial shopkeeper’s son in the 1940s.
Back then respectability was all. A girl’s life could be destroyed by an out-of-marriage pregnancy. Hence the shotgun wedding to cover up the sin of a banned intercourse. When did the dam break? When did British society revert to its natural preference for randiness?
It was the early 1960s, now looked back on as the era of sexual liberation. There were three impulses. One was the arrival of The Pill. Suddenly the horrors of an unwanted pregnancy were banished.
Another was the arrival in the mid-1950s of pop music. I recall the utter horror of the older generation as teenagers jived in the aisles as cinemas screened Blackboard Jungle, the forecasts of the end of civilisation and teenage girls swooning (literally) at the wildly gyrating hips of Elvis Presley. The pop fraternity was king and the pop stars “screwed around”.
The third impetus was the arrival of marijuana. Drugs remove inhibitions and one of those is sexual self-restraint. So the era of behaviour-liberation swept a generation off its feet and it has continued until now. But I think another dam has broken.
Because of yet another selfadoring slob – no crown prince but a fat film producer – a veritable army of angry ladies has risen in revolt demanding career destruction for even a fondled knee 15 years ago. But I suspect the ladies are demanding a move from extreme to extreme, demanding non-tactile behaviour taken to the ultimate. It is a simple fact that scantily-clad young women, waving their corporeal charms around like soft fruit in the tropics, will eventually provoke selffancying middle-aged men, of which there are a lot about and have been for about 10,000 years.
If you go to Pamplona in the season of the running of the bulls, dress in a red cape and dance about in front of the leading bull, when you come out of hospital you might complain to the mayor of Pamplona: “One of your bulls charged me.” To which he will reply: “Si, señorita, issa what they do.”
And I’m afraid it is what middleaged financiers with a skinful of wine tend to do at daft parties when a silly girl dressed like something out of the Parisian red-light district circa 1950 cavorts in front of them. The only thing sillier is for the Great Ormond Street Hospital to hand back the cheque when there are hundreds of sick children to take care of.
In short I wish the sudden legion of moralists (where have they been all these years of Playboy and Penthouse?) would put two short words on their bucket list of chores to accomplish before they drop off the perch.
A simple resolution: Grow Up.