As You Sow, So Shall You Reap :

Part Two.
Philip Jones 1st May 2009.

Infertility and Loneliness: The price we are now paying for treating sex as a recreational sport.

It is a modern article of faith that sexual freedom spells greater happiness. Repression is bad for your
health. Modesty is for dinosaurs. Anyone who dares suggest a downside to sexual incontinence is more
or less accused of wanting to introduce Taliban-style morals police into the bedrooms of Britain.

Instead, as the British Government gears up to produce yet more initiatives to combat teenage
pregnancy, we are told that there’s nothing wrong with the sexual free-for-all. Promiscuity soaring
upwards? Welcome evidence of greater openness, tolerance and honesty, says a Lancet study.

More and more people who don’t think marriage is a necessary prelude to having children? Proof that
cohabitants should get the same rights as married couples, say researchers for the British Social
Attitudes survey. An increase in under-age sex? No problem, say government advisers on teenage
pregnancy. Just dish out the condoms.

Sex is now Britain’s major recreational sport. The message is, have fun but be careful - a bit like telling
people to avoid going off-piste on the ski slopes. The Labour government insists that every relationship
is just another lifestyle choice. Sex is approved of as long as it happens within the context of a ‘loving
relationship’, a concept as elastic as it is fragile.

The trouble is that this sexual freedom is being bought at severe cost to individuals and to society. Far
from the Brave New World heralded by the Lancet’s authors, their study suggests a rather more
troubled landscape.

‘Openness’ and ‘Honesty’? On the contrary: the new promiscuity has meant more two-timing and
betrayals. The Lancet says one in seven men and one in eleven women had overlapping or concurrent
relationships in the past year.

‘Tolerance’ - but what are we all tolerating? One in ten adults now has a sexually transmitted disease,
risking their lives and their fertility. New cases of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia more than
doubled between 1995 and 2008. Last year there were more than 3,600 cases of HIV, the highest ever
annual figure.

To the official mind, though, the main danger from the sexual free-for-all is teenage pregnancy —
which is, of course, nothing to do with sexual freedom, perish the thought. The reason we have the
highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe, apparently, is the unavailability of contraception and the lack
of sex education.

So the great and the good who advise the government’s Teenage Pregnancy Unit are suggesting that
children below the legal age of consent should get the Pill and condoms at school, and that sex lessons
should become a compulsory part of the national curriculum.
So much for respect for the law; so much for the idealism that invented the age of consent to protect
children from sexual harm. There’s an unshakable belief that more contraception and sex education
mean less pregnancy. But they don’t. The British Medical Journal reported last year that most pregnant
teenagers had previously obtained contraceptive advice; they even visited their GP more frequently
than other young people to get it.

Young people hardly lack sex education or access to contraception. The more these have been made
available, the more sexual activity has increased among the young. Government advisers serve up the
old chestnut that the Netherlands has an open attitude to sex and few teenage pregnancies. But the
Dutch are in fact highly responsible about family life, and many of their Calvinist schools put across
the very opposite of a free-wheeling approach to sex.

Sex education and contraception are beside the point. It’s our culture which produces young women
who, inadequately parented - often in broken families — and left in huge emotional need, think a baby
is a passport to a life of independence and emotional fulfillment.

The terrible irony is that the people who kidded themselves they had most to gain from sexual freedom,
women, are the ones who have lost out the most. It’s not just the wretched teenage mums trapped in
their council flat with a couple of toddlers and a packet of Prozac.

As the Lancet study revealed, the vast majority of women who have had early sexual experiences regret
it. Even among those who lost their virginity between the ages of 18 and 24, as many as one in five
regretted it. Is it any wonder? For they have thrown away their trump card.

Women, including those who are promiscuous, overwhelmingly look for faithfulness, commitment and
marriage. But men increasingly fail to see what’s in it for them. Women used to hook men into
permanent commitment by their sexual unavailability. Now they behave sexually in the same way as
men and then they wonder why men aren’t interested in sticking around.

Instead, more men look for sex with no commitment. Twice as many men now pay for sex as they did
ten years ago. This may seem odd, since so many women are now sexually available. But paying a
prostitute frees men from the commitment which women crave and which is now so lacking in our
society. The result is a huge increase in solitariness and loneliness and the progressive destruction of
our social ecology.

Our governing class assumes that nothing can be done to turn this tide. But that’s not true. Young
people often want to be helped to resist the enormous pressure for early sexual activity. In the United
States, abstinence education programmes have had extraordinary success in bringing down teenage
pregnancy rates.

These are far from joyless, finger-jabbing schemes. The Washington-based Best Friends programme,
for example, creates a club that girls love to join because they do fun activities around the notion of
respect for their bodies. In that context, they learn three things: no sex till the end of high school, no
alcohol till the lawful age for drinking and no drugs ever. And they are taught ways of resisting the peer
pressure. The result is not only minimal rates of teenage pregnancy and alcohol or drug use, but their
educational achievements soar.

Mention abstinence programmes to British government advisers, however, and they run screaming
from the room. Instead, our local authorities are dreaming up more goodies to bestow upon unmarried
mothers, thus giving girls every encouragement to join their ranks.

Of course, sexual license is a huge cultural shift. There can scarcely be a family in the land that isn’t
touched by its ramifications. But as America shows, it is possible to change the national conversation.
People there are slowly coming to realise that the sexual free-for-all may not be in their best interests.

Politicians shouldn’t preach or hector. But they can educate people to realise that their own best
interests lie in behaving differently. Signals from the top are crucial. At the moment, these are all
pointing in precisely the wrong direction. It would take courage and leadership to turn them round -
qualities which, when it comes to our governing class, somehow don’t quite spring to mind.