First published in Column 8 on the 2nd Sept, 1992
My dictionary defines moratorium as an agreed
suspension of activity, and if ever we needed one on a particular subject, the
time must be ripe.
I’d like to see a moratorium for at least a year (if not
until the end of the century) in all areas of the media, on the subject of sex,
and how much we really need to know about it.
One present theory would have it that the increase of sexual
violence in New Zealand is a reaction to the women’s movement – men getting
their own back on women for daring to speak up.
While that theory might have its points, and nicely puts the
blame first on women for arousing men’s ire, and second on men for being beasts
anyway, I don’t think it carries enough weight.
I’m more inclined to think that many of our sexual problems
and general promiscuity arise not, as some would have it, from too little
information, but from too much – sexual overkill, in fact (future historians
may wonder if we thought about anything else.)
I know I’ve written on sex once or twice before, and perhaps
you’ll be thinking if this chap wants a bloomin’ moratorium on sex, why doesn’t
he start with himself? Fair enough, but before the hatches are battened down,
let me have one or two last words.
Even the most sober journalists discuss sex sometimes. The least
sober discuss it all the time. Without wishing to pick on any magazine in
particular, I note in my local shop that one recent issue of a women’s mag had
a sealed section on puberty. They claimed it was to protect other
members of the family from the explicit drawings; those blind, deaf and dumb
ones, that is, and those who find sealed pages finger-proof. Am I overly
suspicious in thinking it’s just another gimmick for promoting their particular
mag? Since then another mag has tried the same approach.
I know I’ll be shot down in flames for saying all this. The
current theory is that if you tell the children everything, emphasising the
biological facts, they’ll be so sure of themselves that no harm will come to
them when they indulge in what is (so the pundits say) a harmless pastime.
Seems to me that telling the children everything at school,
then hammering home the more salacious details in every other sphere of the
media, has hardly had the responsible effect it ought.
If it’s such a good idea, why do we have the highest rate of
teenage pregnancies outside the US and Canada? Why has abortion become
culturally acceptable? (Morally is another story.) If the schools are doing
such a marvellous job, why do magazines need to spread the sex lives of all and
sundry out in full frontal detail, and then give the latest in ‘helps’ at least
once a month?
A return to the so-called enlightened ages, when the facts
of life were kept rather more modestly, might return the sense of mystery to
one of the holiest of human activities. Barraging our kids – and not just our
kids – with something as arousing as sex seems an inside-out approach.
I’d be interested to see the effect a reasonable silence on
the subject would have; our minds and imaginations might get five minutes to
clear in order to think of something else.
Who knows, we might open a magazine in which the sealed
section was on a really interesting subject – the Meaning of Life, perhaps.
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| Blank Photo courtesy of H.F.J.M. Crebolder |
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