Human sexuality, who’d have it? Nasty, inconvenient as it is, leaking and oozing into inappropriate corners of lives, leaving a trail of super injunctions, broken careers and indelible stains in its wake. It’s the reason Bill Clinton failed to be the most powerful man in the world, the reason our king-in-waiting is still embarrassed by Tampax adverts, and the reason my friend Catherine ended up breaking off her engagement to an accountant and took up with a spot welder. And that’s the grown-up stuff. Teen sexuality? That’s a whole other world of confusion, but, stepping up to the plate to deal with it… Nadine Dorries, MP.
I read about her ten minute bill proposing the teaching of abstinence to girls aged 13 -16, last month and have been having sleepless nights ever since. In the early hours I heard her name, accompanied by images of high heeled shoes. Bewildered and confused I sat up in bed.
“Is Nadine Dorries having a lesbian affair with Theresa May?” I asked my husband, once I’d poked him into consciousness. He didn’t answer, but I took his weakly raised eyebrow as a cue to continue.
“Why am I haunted by images of Nadine Dorries and Theresa May’s kitten heels?” I demanded to know.
“High heels ban. TUC. She campaigned against it.” He mumbled before turning over and resuming his open mouthed sleep.
Aha! Campaigning for high heels but against sex? The woman is a mass of contradictions and must not be taken seriously. The trouble is, she has been taken seriously and her proposed bill is due a second reading in January. The credence her proposal has been given by its passage to the next stage frightens me in the same way that I am frightened whenever I hear Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. How have we arrived at a place where people of such limited intellect are offered influential public platforms? If it’s incoherent ramblings the man in the street wants, I’m so much cheaper and I won’t fiddle my expenses. Or set up home with my best friend’s husband. (Oh, it’s all on Wikipedia). And I know more about the music in the Radio 2 playlist, too.
Dorries’ proposal stems from a position of such misogyny and ignorance that it defies belief. That she is a woman herself compounds the outrage, but, happily for her, plays to the middle-aged, socially conservative men she woos with her perfectly-legal-in-the-workplace high heels.
At its heart is a traditional, age-old fear of female sexuality. When Eve said ‘yes’ back in the Garden, she couldn’t have known what she’d set in motion. But she said yes. Why? Because she was a bloody sight more spirited and intellectually curious than Adam, who like every man ever after, would wait for the woman to make a decision and then go along with it, only later explaining to God/his boss/his mother that it was her idea and he felt helpless to resist.
Let’s face it, Eve was a proper girl. She coveted the teeny weeny, green, fig-leaf bikini and relished regular dealings with the forked tongue (all this before Sex and the City!). As for the Garden of Eden, well that was Someone Else’s project. She’d get the decorators in herself, little knowing what a curse they would prove to be. But I digress. The point is, Eve as the original sinner continues to be cited by men (often with beards, flowing robes and a host of other unpalatable views) as the reason for man’s flawed and fallen state. And it is to Eve that Dorries returns with her, at best naïve, at worst openly discriminatory, abstinence proposal. In directing it solely at our teenage girls she makes them the gatekeepers of sexuality and burdens them with the responsibility that I thought we’d finally started asking our boys to have a share in.
Sex education has come a long way in the past twenty years. Remember The Period Talk, when the boys were summoned away from class by a member of the PE department for extra running around, while we girls were forced to sit through an excruciating lecture about ova and womb linings? Who can be surprised that men of that era believe that the appropriate response to conversational overtures of an intimate nature is to bugger off to the football; that, after all, is their template.
What I (officially) learnt about ‘sex’ at the two secondary schools I attended could barely be termed ‘education’. We were offered a purely biological understanding of our bodies and reproductive capacity as if that was the difficult bit. Nothing of emotions or of the terrifying hormonal impulses to which we were to become enslaved; nothing of the false friend that is the post-coital oxytocin surge that makes it look like they actually love you, and absolutely nothing whatsoever about female orgasm.
I can vividly remember the diagram of the female genitalia in the text book we all stared at in grim, embarrassed silence. There was the vulva, with a line and a label; there the urethra, similarly labelled; the labia – both majore and minore and the clitoris, for that too, had a tag. Thing was, none of us had the foggiest what its function was and at no stage did any teacher ever enlighten us. It was just there. Like the appendix, one presumed. An evolutionary relic.
I was in the sixth form before the son of the school doctor put me out of my misery. We were studying a poem which featured the phrase: ‘the button of all her desires’. I must have looked blank, because he was prompted to ask if I’d discovered mine. Let me tell you, aged seventeen, being told by a fellow student what had been rigorously omitted from biology lessons in front of a class full of sixth form boys remains for me, the definition of humiliation.
I will forever be thankful to him, however, for, having discovered it, tried it out for efficacy and finding it not to be wanting, my relationship with the button of all my desires has been deeper and more enduring than any other relationship I have had.
Abstinence is already taught ‘as an option’ in schools, but most educators of young people accept that it isn’t likely to work as a strategy for most because, at some point, those young people, male and female, are going to want to do it. Just as they’re going to want to try all the other things that presage adulthood, only more so, because there’s a biological imperative behind this one.
By telling girls (and indeed boys) that they should ‘just say no’ the message we send is that adults don’t want to talk about young people’s sexuality or worse, that it shouldn’t exist. Abstinence might seem like the most straightforward way of dealing with something terribly complex and uncontainable, but it comes with lashings of guilt and generous helpings of fear, denial and repression. And that only covers the heterosexual sex with which Ms Dorries concerns herself.
Difficult as it might be, we need to be a culture which celebrates teen sexuality, legitimises it, and takes it seriously. It’s important that all kids have access to the same, high quality information that will help them make safe, confident choices about who they sleep with and when. As I used to say to my Year 11 tutor group, you only get to lose your virginity once, and you have to live with the memory for the rest of your life, so better to have a fond recollection than a hazy, drunken regret.
The developing sexuality of a young person is a rite of passage to be acknowledged as we acknowledge all the others. I’m not saying treat it like the passing of exams, with a cash bonus for every satisfactory performance, but I do think openness would help. When teenagers become sexually active they begin a private journey away from their parents. Sometimes that journey is going to take place in the back of a Ford Focus and sometimes it might pass through fields and woods and disused buildings, and that’s all part of growing up. Nadine Dorries would do better by her own teenage girls to accept that it will happen and there is nothing she can do about it except let them know she’ll be there when they discover that thing about oxytocin.
Our sexuality is part of our identity and as such, is undeniable. Learning to deal with it is a life-long task, at times onerous and other times a joy. Dorries knows this even if she can’t bring herself to admit it; after all, what brought her into the relationship she currently enjoys with her mate’s former husband? (If you say ‘bell ringing’ I won’t believe you unless you’re using it as a euphemism).
Let’s help our young people to enjoy better relationships and better sex in a non-judgemental culture of tolerance and mutual responsibility. When Dorries replays her proposal in January she’ll show herself and her socially conservative backers for what they are: out-of-touch, illiberal wankers. And I mean that most sincerely.
