The Price Of Sex

Burn your kaftan - there is no such thing as free love. It turns out that Jane Austen was right after all. Sex, you see, is all about supply and demand, hard cash and market exploitation.

So says Dame Joan Bakewell - once styled the thinking man's crumpet - now washing her hands of the sexual revolution.

In an interview with the Radio Times she says: "....we all hoped girls would grow to handle the new freedoms wisely.

"Then everything came to be about money: so now sex is about money too. Why else sexualise the clothes of little girls, run TV channels of naked wives, have sex magazines edging out serious stuff on newsagents' shelves? It's money that's corrupted us and women are being used or are even collaborating.

"I never thought I would hear myself say as much, but 'I'm with Mrs Whitehouse on this one'."

A posthumous victory for the guardian of decency Mary Whitehouse then. But it's all too late. The damage has already been done by a creed based on some of the most self-indulgent, wrong-headed, life-destroying hogwash ever to seize the commanding heights of intellectual respectability in this country.

And it's not just that it was always garbage. Not just that those transgressive values were always something which the middle and upper classes could painlessly dabble in, but which have destroyed respectability among our working class (who were encouraged to kick away the props offered by religion, temperance and graft).

It's the fact that the principal beneficiaries of the sexual revolution have been men. If you are a young man now, sex is more available than ever before, with none of the inconveniences (marriage, social opproprium, illegitimate offspring) which were once the price paid for a quick shag.

And the money is being made by men too. The grunt mags are not being edited or published by the sisterhood. The lap-dancing clubs are not owned by high-powered feminists.

The Spice Girls might think they are an expression of girl power - but who really got rich? And the next time you see a teenage girl, skirt hitched, bottle clutched, weaving her way drunkenly down your high street on a Friday night, try wondering out loud whether she has been well served by the sexual revolution. You are likely to get a Bacardi Breezer over the head if you raise your voice too loudly.