PETER HITCHENS: The sexual revolution? It’s been a charter for loutish men to disrespect women

Wasn’t Sir Keir Starmer taught to respect women during his upbringing?

The Labor leader now says he wants schools to ‘bring about cultural change’ and end the seedy mistreatment of girls and women by rough boys and men.

Everyone will agree with the goal. But will classroom lectures achieve it?

Let’s hope, for example, that this will be more successful than half a century of sex education has been.

We often forget that this project was set up to reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. But it didn’t quite work out as intended.

There are undoubtedly fewer unwanted babies than you might expect given the amount of recreational sex going on right now. But I suspect that the widespread use of the morning-after pill, combined with mass abortion on demand, has caused this. Diseases, on the other hand, remain an undeniable problem.

Whenever I look at the outcome of the sexual revolution to date, it seems to me to have been a charter for obnoxious, selfish men.

Above all, it shattered the old belief that a man who fathered a child was responsible for that child and for his mother.

Men of my generation were still taught a fairly strict Christian morality that would surprise most people under 40 if they encountered it today. The marriage was for life. Sex was a private matter.

Women had to be respected in everything – certain behavior and language were simply unthinkable in their presence. And this was a rule that was as respected in pit villages as it was in the comfortable suburbs.

Yes, we boys and men actually had to get up from our seats when women entered a room, give up our seats for them on trains and buses, open doors for them and make room for them.

Pornography was a despised perversion and those who pursued it were pitiable.

No claim has exploded so completely as the common liberal belief of the 1960s that if we all became more forthright and open about sex, we would become healthier and kinder. More pornography meant more misery.

And then all the old rules were torn apart, with astonishing speed, in the name of freedom and something called ‘equality’, which of course was nothing of the sort.

This is not a claim that the Britain of 60 years ago was perfect, or that it was a Golden Age. Anyone who has experienced it knows it wasn’t. But it’s an argument that we’ve thrown out some sensible rules without coming up with anything better.

Here I will quote Nina Power, who wrote on the Unherd website last week that ‘our socially ‘liberated’ culture has provided absolutely no roadmap for understanding the different virtues of the sexes.

We don’t see ourselves as sexually differentiated beings who have higher reasons for mutual respect. Instead, an amoral, nihilistic individualism dominates, steeped in degrading images of both men and women.’

Mrs Power rightly says that ‘in order for men and women to respect each other, we must first of all understand that we are different’.

Of course, anyone who says this is accused of secretly believing in the superiority of men, but this is tripe marinated in bilge. She objects that the difference between the sexes does not imply hierarchy. The two complement each other.

This belief is now a heresy, which I expect will be perverted into crimes of all kinds by the Social Media Thought Police. But, like many modern heresies, it is the truth.

And in the century to come, I wonder if the young will despise the loud, false liberation of their elders through porn, abortion, and casual cohabitation. And they may wonder if the age-old wisdom embodied in the morality we have discarded might be worth another try.

Sorry, but I’m on the side of the suburbs…

God rest the soul of Barry Humphries and my condolences to his family and close friends.

But I cannot join the outpouring of unalloyed praise that followed his recent death.

There’s this strange process by which people officially become funny, even if they’re not very good, and I think he was a victim of that process (Alexander “Boris” Johnson is another).

I am quite happy to believe the claims of one of his obituaries that he had “a learned knowledge of the literature of the 1890s.”

But I doubt the description of his mother as “a genteel petit bourgeois obsessed with cleanliness and decent behavior.”

I expect all she did to earn this was to get him to tidy up his bedroom. She was supposedly the inspiration for Humphries’ grotesque, bitterly cruel parody character, Edna Everage. Yet it turns out that his supposedly stupid and ignorant parents used much of their wealth to get him an expensive education and his own account at Melbourne’s best bookshop.

His first attempt at mocking his fellow Australians on British TV was “abruptly taken off the air” midway through the segment. His act flopped again at the famous satirical Establishment Club in London.

He was later picked up again by the BBC – and dropped again by them after fooling Dame Vera Lynn, a target that you would have to be very talented to hit. Eventually his Edna Everage act had its first success in Britain. But in that same year it failed badly in New York.

Well, this is – in a way – a tribute to pure determination. But I think his success stems from the aversion to the suburbs, respectability and becoming our parents.

That is why the new cultural elite was so eager to make him a success. My generation suffered terribly from Suburbophobia. As novelist Dame Antonia Byatt put it, “Suburbia, the terror of our generation, the teacup, the nappy, the flowered stair carpet, the click of the latch of the tiny garden gate.”

And that’s why I think Barry Humphries got such a round of applause from the media classes, who feel the same way.

But in a long life in which I have spent much time far from the suburbs, and even further from decency, after many painful experiences I have come to the opposite conclusion.

I’m on the side of the suburbs and respect, and Barry Humphries’ parents.

Send wrong message?

My local authority, Oxford City Council, has started painting the words ‘do good’ on its many expensive vehicles.

It brings two thoughts to mind.

The first is that it is certainly for the rest of us, not the council, to decide whether this is true. The other is a reminder of Tom Lehrer’s satirical and prescient song, The Old Dope Peddler, which contains the lines: “Every night you’ll find him / Around our neighborhood / It’s the old dope peddler / Doing well by doing good.”

No, I’m not accusing the council of selling marijuana. Just laugh at them.