The Jimmy Savile scandal exposes, as is well understood, not just the behaviour of individuals, but the behaviour of other individuals who either turned a blind eye or actively assisted; as well as the general culture of particular organisations, and the general culture of society at the time. Of course at any time there are different currents of culture in different strands of society and these are very often inconsistent and confusing. Amongst these is a pervasive attitude that saw girls and women as fair game, and endorsed the view that men would of course try it on whenever they could. Against the climate of ‘free love’, there was still however a more ‘old-fashioned’ view that it was up to the girl (or woman) to keep up standards and draw the line. In other words, up to the woman to say no. It was as if male sexual drive was a sheer force of nature that men themselves could not be expected to curtail; putting up limits was the task of females. (I recall this being expressed in more academic circles by Roger Scruton who claimed it was up to women to restrain ‘the unbridled passion of the phallus’.) Odd, of course, for many reasons, not least because those charged with the important task of controlling this vast and ‘unbridled passion’ were very often the least powerful in society. And this is of course especially the case with young girls.
However, before we smugly congratulate ourselves on having grown out of this attitude, ask yourself if things are really so different. The fourteen year old son of a friend reported his so-called ‘sex education’ lesson. I hesitate to glorify it with the name of ‘education’. The topic was consent to sex. Great, right-thinking parents will think. An antidote to a part of the culture that allowed predators like Savile to operate. But this is what that fourteen year old boy got from that lesson. The teacher started off by explaining that consent to sex was only an issue for girls, not for boys. This was because, he went on to explain, if a boy has an erection, that means he’s already consented to have sex. The rest of the lesson, from what I could make out, seemed to be about how a boy could tell if a girl was really up for sex.
Put aside, for now, the seriously questionable assumption that a teenage boy ‘really’ wants sex every time he gets an erection. This is utterly nuts, given that boys of this age get erections seeing someone’s knickers on a washing line. More seriously, it also opens boys up to abuse – a sleazy music teacher puts his hand on a boy’s leg and he gets an involuntary erection – ooh , he ‘really’ wants to have sex with his middle aged clarinet teacher, does he? But I want here to point out what message this gives about who sets sexual limits. (What used to be called sexual morality.)
I am sure this was presented as a lesson about telling boys when ‘no’ means ‘no’. The boy in question – who was a sweet kid, young for his age and not yet particularly interested in girls – got the impression that it was about telling when a girl was ‘ready’ for sex. And the bottom line was still the same. Males want sex, full-stop. Females alone have to judge when and whether this occurs. I wonder if the teacher involved even realised this was the underlying message he was giving out. (And it’s a message reinforced elsewhere in schools – the HPV vaccine now given out to children of this age to prevent the spread of a sexually transmitted virus is given only to the girls, as if they alone had to bear the task of sexual hygiene. As my teenage daughter said, ‘It’s the boys who give us cervical cancer. They should have to have the vaccine.’)
We’ve come a long way since the days when the Savile abuse was at its height. But exactly how far have we come?