Wing & a Prayer Productions

(I originally wrote this several months ago; unfortunately I've had major technical problems posting blogs so that's why it's only being published now.  My argument still stands though).

‘As long as it’s between consenting adults anything goes.’

So goes the received wisdom of the age with regard to sexual morality. Yet I wonder if people will be quite so willing to repeat this mantra in the light of the news of the last few months which has seen Messrs Woods, Terry and Cole dragged into the public eye for sexual misdemeanours.

Apart from the immense pain which they’ve caused their spouses, the consequences of their actions have rippled out far and wide. To pick up John Terry as a case in point, not only has his affair cost him the England captaincy but it has cost the England World Cup squad the services of Wayne Bridge who, having been one of the victims of Terry’s philandering, feels unable to play in the same team as him. Some may argue his loss won’t affect the England team that much but that’s not the point: the fact is that one man’s inability to keep his tackle in his pants has had national repercussions.

I’m not saying this to heap condemnation on Terry, Cole or Woods (I must confess though that the latter’s forename now seems like a rather distasteful joke). The consequences of their actions are enough punishment without them being vilified in the press. But they illustrate sharply just why ‘anything’ should not ‘go’ just because it’s between consenting adults.

They also illustrate the limitations of the other argument that as long as someone does their job it doesn’t matter what they do in their private life. Here are three men whose private lives have very dramatically spilled over into their working lives. I do understand that there are different roles that people play in the workplace and the home. Yet to argue that the two are not linked is blatantly false. Why else are the leaders of the three main political parties currently trying to make so much of their personalities in the run up to the general election? Why should I care about what David Cameron is like with his wife and children if that doesn’t have some bearing on what he might be like as a future Prime Minister? And to come back to the topic, if I discover that a politician is unfaithful to his or her spouse, doesn’t that also raise questions about his or her faithfulness to their country?

I know that it’s not always that clear cut. I’m not saying that every politician (or person from any walk of life for that matter) who has an affair is going to be awful at their job; of course not. But we cannot pretend that what goes on behind closed doors does not have a bearing, for good or ill, on the sports pitch, at the dispatch box or in the pulpit.

Sex will not fit into neat little boxes. A recent study highlighted the over-sexualisation of Britain’s children and made several recommendations to the Government of steps to combat this (Factors blamed were the increase of so called ‘lads mags’ and music videos). Most people would decry the sexualisation of children yet we are naïve if we think that we can draw a neat line in the sand and say ‘This is for adults, this is for children.’ Yes, there are limits to what we tell children about the grown up world but though we do not give them the full details, we do give them the basic outline. The values which we hold dear as adults will filter down to our children. If we value people by how sexually appealing they look, that will be picked up subconsciously. And it is. From working with young people it is striking how much girls under the age of ten are not only trying to dress like adults but are already posing and holding their bodies in positions which on an adult might be alluring but for a child are just wrong. No wonder Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy figures in Europe.

Human beings are complicated. We cannot divide our lives up into neat little compartments without expecting some overlap and we cannot expect our actions not to have some effect on someone else. If a man downloads pornography he may think that he’s the only one affected. But, quite apart from the effect on the women posing for the photos (who may or may not be posing willingly), what effect is the man’s action having on other women he encounters? If he is already in a long term relationship or married (or even if he enters such a relationship in the future), viewing pornography will mean that subsequent sexual encounters with his partner will be less sincere, less meaningful, because a little piece of himself has already been given to his pornographic fantasy. They are also likely to be more selfish; having had a pornographic sexual encounter which is all about lust and not at all about intimacy, his real life sexual encounters are likely to be the same.

Anything does not just ‘go’ between consenting adults. There may be no law against it but, if the headlines of the last few months have shown anything, it’s that the consequences of sex, good and bad, go a long way beyond merely the immediate participants.