Princess Diana's death is generally regarded to have gone hand in hand with the demise of the British stiff upper lip. Other traditionally British characteristics have come under sustained attack since then. A glance at social media, or any 'below the line' comment on an online tabloid article, would suggest that the fabled British politeness is on its last legs. But one thing remains unchanged and that is British embarrassment about sex education.
It is just possible that the excellent Netflix series quite literally called 'Sex Education' indicates that the latest generation of adolescents, Generation Z, will grow up without the merest hint of pink suffusing their cheeks when they broach the birds and the bees with their children.
But there does seem something genuinely steadfast in the determination of British parents not to talk about sex with their children. Indeed one of the cliches of parenting is supposed to be an absolute dread about having 'the talk' or, even worse ,being caught unprepared by an innocent enquiry from junior.
It may be that I too will succumb to this Victorian squeamishness when the time comes but somehow I think not. If my 3 year old were to ask me now I'd tell him. There are other things I genuinely struggle to foresee explaining. Our fiddling while the world burned is going to be Count 1 on his generation's indictment. Trying to explain why people that Trump detested voted for him is a real conundrum. But sex, really?
The last decade has shown us that not only MUST we be ready for this conversation but we must be ready for it much, much sooner than our parents and their parents could ever have imagined possible. Adolescence, forget about it, a child of 8 or even younger is going to be seeing things online that would make any of us shudder.
Every parent's worst fear is something dreadful befalling their child but the second worst fear should always be that they might inflict something dreadful on another child. Something that I fear is my sons growing up to be Incels. For anyone unfamiliar with the growing ranks of involuntary celibates they are young and not so young men coalescing around misogyny as a movement and philosophy.
These men spout bile about women online asserting that their 'right' to sex has been stolen away from them and promulgating absurd conspiracies about 'feminazis'. It is safe to assume that few if any of them are involved in loving and mutually respectful relationships with women. Indeed when you read their rantings the overwhelming inference is that they are not involved in any sort of relationship with women.
One of the features of the vast proliferation of online pornography that gets commented on quite often is how terrible its effect is on men's sexual expectations and behaviour in the bedroom. What doesn't seem to attract so much comment is whether it's contributing to men not even getting into the bedroom in the first place.
A major anxiety of many parents of 15 year old boys is whether they might get a girl pregnant, or at least that used to be an anxiety. There is research suggesting that the age of first time sex is rapidly increasing. Now the concern might well be that 25 year old sons have never even had a relationship.
Navigating early sexual encounters is as likely to be bruising as brilliant and embarrassing as ecstatic. But in times past they were navigated because there was no alternative. Porn removes all the messiness of real human connection but it also removes all the joy of it too.
The noisy hatred of the Incels towards women is of course just a projection of their fears. They fear women because they are other and they have become other because far too many of these young men have had their sexual awakening in front of a screen instead of with a real, live human being. Nothing to be afraid of and certainly nothing to be despised.
Porn may well have its place but that place should never be primary school. But primary school is not too soon to be learning about sex and about consent, on the topic of which no boy should be taught to aim for mere consent when heartfelt longing is available. Ultimately though I believe its the parents' responsibility to make children comfortable with the idea of and ultimately the practice of sex.
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