Zoe STRIMPEL

I’ve been reading my teenage diaries lately, and they’re pretty darn angsty. I worried I was fat. I worried about whether I’d prepared enough for this or that orchestra audition. I worried about the likelihood of achieving academic success sufficient for a future replete with nice food and great swimming options. And boys. I worried a lot about boys, constantly evaluating my chances of success with this one or that one (always nil), and raging at the seemingly unjust relative success of my peers in matters of romance.

One thing that never occurred to me was to be frightened of boys. As far as I could tell, the biggest problem with the opposite sex (and I had plenty of time to observe because I always went to mixed schools) was that they weren’t keen on me. In my diaries, in which I kept careful tabs on the sexual activities of my friends, there is not one mention, or sniff, of any sinister activity. None of my friends, to my knowledge, were victimised, assaulted or coerced. And there were a lot of after-school parties with booze and pot.

I feel bad for today’s girls, for whom it seems that the lack of sexual attention that upset me so much would be a blessing. As the schools sex scandal suggests, their interactions with boys are dangerous, fraught and nasty – and very sexual. Instead of the pretty innocent, often deadly dull passage through school that I took for granted, the claims about widespread sexual abuse from boys at elite schools presage a climate of fear and watchfulness. A culture in which, even if nothing bad has happened to them, girls will be encouraged to be forever vigilant, poised to call out abuse and wrongdoing, and goaded into policing and politicising all intimate interactions. I may have been desperate to be kissed, but at least my teenage sexual frustration had a chance to root itself in actual desire, rather than being blotted out with fear.

It’s not that boys were saintly then and demons now. But something clearly has changed, and as numerous observers have pointed out, it’s probably linked to the fact that boys are growing up on the violent excesses of digital porn. In my day, boys were lucky if they managed to cadge a look at Dad’s Playboy.

There’s also a schizophrenia today that was lacking in the 1990s. Young educated boys are desperate to appear woke, to proclaim themselves “allies” with girls, women and minorities. I have observed this very clearly at Eton, Oxford and Cambridge where I have lectured and debated several times. And yet these same boys seem capable of the most egregious sexual offences against girls. Such hypocrisy is typical of an age in which the moral code has been utterly scrambled by craven, woke ideology.

Girls have changed, too. Their internet exposure is less porn-focused, perhaps, but it is utterly sex-obsessed none the less. Girls’ sense of self is refracted through a million portals pushing the rewards of a perfect, sexy and man-luring appearance. They enter puberty with the instant feedback loop of Instagram likes for cute bikini selfies, inundation by images of dead-eyed, hot-bodied influencers, and adverts for diets and gyms. Being sexy was just one currency girls could pursue in my day. Now it’s the biggest and most powerful one. No wonder the young women coming forward with horrendous accounts of boys at school look so vulnerable: they’re too sexy, too slight, too made-up. They know too much – partly because they’ve been forced to.

Meanwhile, parents and teachers are to blame for transforming teen sexuality into a hostile, overheated political minefield. Regardless of what’s been done to them, girls are being set up to suffer. Instead of letting kids work sexuality out, which they mostly will if left to their own devices, adults are forcing an excessive, politicised sex education on them from a young age. We have seen this to a tragic degree with trans awareness: the number of children seeking puberty-blockers has risen, just as the amount of parental and educational discourse about it, all under the “inclusivity” banner, has, too. I am incredibly grateful that my friends and I could go through tomboy phases with nobody suggesting we ought to consider sex change surgery.

The sexual landscape after MeToo has been perilous enough for adults. Men are paranoid about consent, while women are expected to be constantly on guard. But the climate facing young people is worse, and it’s particularly sad that a whole generation of girls and boys are going to head into adult life associating sex with fear, vigilance and sexual acrimony. Reducing young people’s access to influencer-inspired imagery on one hand and porn on the other would help. So would adults shutting up about sex, sexuality and sexual identity for a change.

Claims of sexual abuse at elite schools presage a climate of fear and watchfulness