The damaging sexual degradation of the young

There is absolutely nothing “positive” about any of this

The Romans of the Decadence, Detail of the Central Group; Thomas Couture, 1847

Recently, I came across a development called “sex positivity”.

Maybe you already know about it? I had never heard of it, and nor had the journalist Amanda Platell who wrote about it here in the Mail.

In a nutshell, it makes promiscuity seem old hat. “Sex positivity” involves unfettered sexual licence among the single — but without any residual sense of commitment to another person that might be involved, let alone shame, modesty or regret. There is no self-disciplined benchmark from which such behaviour departs. Platell writes:

I discovered there's a whole sex-positive movement that encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation and regards all consensual sex as fundamentally healthy. No moral distinctions are made among types of sexual activities — that's regarded as a matter of personal preference.  

According to one expert, “instead of having two or three or even half a dozen sexual orientations, we should be thinking in terms of millions”. They're not suggesting a million sexual partners but that no sexual preference and no amount of partners is out of bounds, or should be judged. So, essentially, it's a case of sleep with whomever and however many you like — there are no consequences.

Oh but there are, even though these young people can’t see them. For there’s a glaring contradiction in this happy state of sexual licence which doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them, and which illustrates the shallow self-centredness, ignorance and self-destructiveness at the very core of today’s western culture.