Education: Sex

In school, our drugs education consisted of a parade of corpses. Sex education in early 2000s Glasgow was approached in a similarly morbid fashion. Our principal instruction came from a dragon lady, jaundiced — perhaps by experience — into the conviction that sex was men’s way of ruining women’s lives, of taking their pleasure and leaving her alone to tend a screaming cot. Sex positive, her lessons were not.

Apartheid principles applied. The separate development of men and women required knowledge of the vagaries and contours of your own anatomy only. Cloistered away from the womenfolk, our painfully self-conscious biology teacher was obliged to fumble a rebellious prophylactic around a boiling tube for the assembled boys. Observing her uncertain technique, one piped up: “You clearly haven’t got a lot of experience at that, miss.” The room choked with laughter. The poor teaching trainee, living out her nightmare, turned beetroot...

There is a stock character in literature who embodies the old fatalism. The cold solitaire, a gay stoic who lives his life untouched, unconfessed, unexpressed. Spinsterish, resigned to a lonesome fate, to unhappiness, but perversely dignified by his self-awareness and self-discipline, by self-denial and self-disgust. It is time to let this ghastly archetype rot; to let his hauntings end. If schools can help exorcise these old frustrated ghosts, so much the better.

Our world is saturated in more than enough grief. The map already tracks too many roads not taken.

The Times, part of their Time For Inclusionary Education Campaign, by Adam Tickell (Stop sniggering at the back!)

My sex education - a full half-hour - consisted of a joyless Christian showing us an artiste's impression of a man and ladies' private parts, then she got out a dry condom, and waved it about with some disgust, yet with no obvious point.

Mary Whitehouse could have done better.

Mary Whitehouse: Ban This Filth!

An image of the late Mary Whitehouse, scourge of TV’s moral turpitude, was projected onto the side of BBC Broadcasting House in London earlier this week to mark the 50th anniversary of Mediawatch-UK (formerly the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association), the group she founded to campaign for “socially responsible media”. Monkey is not quite sure what Whitehouse would have made of the anniversary being marked with a PR stunt previously employed by FHM to project a naked image of Gail Porter onto the Houses of Parliament, but there you go. Mediawatch-UK also marked the anniversary by publishing a survey in which, when asked “Have you ever seen anything on television that you felt was inappropriate prior to the 9pm watershed”, every single one of the 2,009 respondents replied in the affirmative. So that’s a 100% yes vote – the sort of poll result more usually associated with places like North Korea. Did Mediawatch-UK employ Sir Humphrey Appleby to set the survey questions, per chance?

Guardian MediaMonkey.

Mediawatch-UK's website is a constant source of mirth.

Thought For The Day: Jerry Barnett, Sex & Censorship

When the formidable anti-filth campaigner Mary Whitehouse died in 2001, she arguably left behind a country that was far more relaxed in its sexuality than at any previous time in history. It seemed that her crusade for ‘traditional’ (i.e. repressive) moral values had failed. But the morality movement regrouped and reinvented itself for the new millennium. It abandoned the outdated language of Christian puritanical outrage and instead presented itself as a form of feminism, protecting the rights of women who - they claimed - were victims of the sex industries.

Jerry Barnett - founder of Sex & Censorship writes for Independent Voices.

A rare counter voice to the new puritans and sex police usually found on Independent Voices.  

Obviously, in the name of balance they've printed alongside it an article, Stop Porn Culture, about how watching porn makes you go blind or something.

Image from Ben Thompson's mirth-inducing Ban This Filth!: A Warning From History.

Sex On TV: More People Up For It

Ofcom’s annual survey of consumer attitudes towards broadcasting charts the changing public opinion towards media issues.
The latest survey also shows that the proportion of adults saying there is ‘too much’ sex, violence or swearing on TV has fallen by about a third since 2005.
In 2011, one in four (25%) adults felt there was ‘too much’ sex on TV, and just over one in three felt there was ‘too much’ violence (36%) and swearing (37%). This compares to 36% of adults saying there was too ‘too much’ sex on TV in 2005, with 56% for violence and 55% for swearing. 
Last year, 19% of adults said they had been offended by something they had seen on TV in the past twelve months. In 2005, 32% said they had ever been offended by something on TV.

Ofcom. 

This not very revealing survey prompts Mark Lawson to ponder why people seem less offended, even though there is more sexual content on TV.
"Much of the outrage of [Mary] Whitehouse and her attendant press was based on the idea that television arrived uninvited in people's houses and so was under obligation to behave well. Through a combination of "health warnings" (as they are known in broadcasting jargon) and targeted networks and time-slots, it is now much harder to claim to have "stumbled on" something you find unsavoury."
Yeah, whatever!

Pornification: Ban This Filth!

Dianne Abbott, pictured recently.

No idea where she's going with this, but the Daily Mail are loving it.
But I guess that's who this sex panic is meant to appeal to.
Those who hate the supposed pornification of our culture might like to count the tits and ass, and bulge shots on Mail Online.
In summary: Sex? Boo!
And please accept our sincerest hypocrisy.

Mary Whitehouse: Making Britain A Gayer Place

Whitehouse, Thompson suggests, was 'an artist who found her voice in trying to silence others'. For instance, when she prosecuted Michael Bogdanov for "procuring persons for an act of gross indecency in a public place" in directing the National Theatre production of Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain, this led to an 18-month drama of a court case improvised by Whitehouse. That drama involved a media circus, a QC's crisis of conscience, bitter recriminations and the verdict that turned on a thumb being misidentified as an actor's penis. All of this, Thompson suggests, was "little short of a masterpiece" – something he couldn't say of Brenton's leftist agitprop with its homosexual rape scene. The puritan in horn-rimmed specs, here and elsewhere, made Britain even gayer (possibly in both senses of the word) than it would otherwise have been...

From Stuart Jeffries' Guardian review of Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive edited by Ben Thompson.
Book of the year?

Update: Great piece by your actual editor, Ben Thompson, in FT Weekend, that claims Mary was inadvertently "the godmother of gay liberation". 

Mary Whitehouse: Nothing Like a Dame

A sinner repenting always makes a good story, so 70something former 60s swinger Joan Bakewell hit a few headlines when she wrote an article for Radio Times headed; "I Agree With Mary Whitehouse".
The Daily Express was predictably pleased "that Joan Bakewell, the pin-up of trendy 60s liberalism, admits sex and vulgarity has harmed society."
As was the Daily Mail, where Sandra Parsons bemoaned how kiddies watching MTV this half-term might see "footage of the pop star Rihanna, in teeny shorts, provocatively pushing her bottom towards a man's crotch as she sang her hit Rude Boy, with its catchy chorus: 'Come here rude boy boy, can you get it up, come here rude boy boy, is you big enough?'"
The Mail helpfully illustrated this tidal wave of filth by printing a still from the video showing Rhianna with her tits out.
Problem is that's not really what Dame Joan meant.
In a documentary she has made for BBC Radio 4, The Mary Whitehouse Effect, Bakewell argues that Whitehouse was a "cultural vandal” and “dogmatically against ­tolerance”.
Indeed, her words in Radio Times were so twisted by the press that Bakewell had to clarify what she meant in an article for The Daily Telegraph; "Sorry, Mrs Whitehouse – I still disagree."
Bakewell stresses that she still believes that the sexual revolution was a very good thing. "And far from seeing the Sixties as a mistake, we should celebrate them as something that desperately needed to happen. The Fifties were dull, repressed, even cruel. I remain thankful for the swathe of new laws – against censorship, legalising homosexuality, abortion, easier divorce – that led to the tolerant society we have today. Mrs Whitehouse wanted homosexuals "cured": the idea was disgusting then and it remains so today.
"Mostly, it was sex that upset her, and the Sixties celebrated sex. The revival of the musical Hair exemplifies it all: a group of hippies throwing off the restraints of their parents' generation with innocent glee. Once the fun had run its course, it left a society of men and women enjoying sex, treating each other as equals, able, thanks to the Pill, to avoid unwanted pregnancies. All this was – and remains – good."
Joan Bakewell thinks Mary Whitehouse was right about one thing - and one thing only. "For me, what has actually corrupted us is money – and this is where I think Mrs Whitehouse was right (which is a sentence I never imagined myself writing). The conspicuous consumption of exchanging sex for money is now in our faces. In every newsagent's, young children see at eye level images of women seeking male approval through their distorted bodies; clothing chains think it proper to sell ludicrous bikinis to little girls who won't have breasts for another four years.
"Yet there is still resistance in some quarters to explicit sex education for children. No wonder young girls get mixed messages and grow up to make bad decisions. Sex as glamour – good. Sex as normal behaviour – dodgy."