Parentline Plus reports that 'Fathers are refusing to talk to their children [i.e. boys, presumably] about sex in case it spoils the limited amount of time they spend with them', according to The Times.
Bullshit! Men like sex. They just don't like children. End of story!
UPATE: Except of course that it isn't. The old leftwing saw that hatred only leads to more hatred may be hackneyed and cliched, but it is nonetheless true as well. Abused children are becoming abusive children, and they're becoming abusive adults as well - as the BBC reminded us last Thursday. (See here - though it's pretty disturbing stuff.)
And still politicians refuse to "preach" about family values.
UPDATE II: And of course it's not just men either. That most despised of Daily Mail hate figures, the working mother, is contemned most of all, apparently, by working non-mothers. And of course young mothers are still the most discriminated against minority in Britain.
UPDATE III: Well, just to round the week off as it began, The Times today has this story and this story. It's been one those weeks, and I dare say that the first week back at work after a holiday is normally fairly difficult. But this post started as a one-line online snarl about sex education but has been growing and weighing on my mind for several days.
How can I explain it? Men like sex but they don't like morality, and they certainly don't like children. To be honest, I don't think modern men particularly like women, except as completely perverse sexual objects, and women seem to have taken that on board, considering how completely de-feminised most women seem to have become in the last thirty years or so. But the thing that is fundamentally irksome about children is that they're very existence in the first place is an affront to the very principle of "free love" (and what Pope Paul VI perceptively called the "contraceptive mentality").
The overwhelming majority of children born in the world today are conceived as a result of "unsafe" sex. Every child that lives and breathes, whether mewling and puking in the nurse's arms or whining on his way to school with his shining morning face, is a warning to the world that the primary purpose of sex is not recreation, although Larry Flynt and Peter Tatchell would agree in insisting that it is, but procreation. The primary purpose of marriage, moreover, is not love, even though David Cameron and thousands of old ladies who grew up reading Jane Austen or Mills and Boon would say that it is, but rather, and as even the arch-heretic Cranmer himself put it in his Prayerbook, 'the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name'.
And then of course there is more to morality than only the Sixth Commandment, and there most certainly is the real rub. There is a disgusting new television programme in America on CBS called Kid Nation. It's supposed to be a Lord of the Flies-version of Big Brother, and, like everything that is truly vile about American culture, "Europeans" will inevitably want to copy it. Like all "reality television" it is of course no more real than a Blue Peter phone-in competition, but that presumably is part of the programme-makers' ulterior motive. When Auntie did a Big Brother-version of the Stanford prison experiment, the intention seemed to be to prove that "that sort of thing" either "could never happen here" (rubbish!) or "wouldn't happen nowadays" (crap!). The point of this new show, apparently, is to prove that children don't need adult-supervision, that man does not need morality in order to get by, and that all society needs is a bit more "freedom" and things will just be fine.
A good answer to this drivel is of course still William Golding's original fable itself. Since it has first published it has lost none of its grim beauty and very little of its power to shock, and for all its lack of apparent realism its fundamental truth, that men are born with evil in their hearts, is just as brutally striking today as it has always been. I recently heard an interview with Peter Brook, who directed the first of two unsuccessful attempts to bring the work to the screen. (As with Conrad's great short novel about inner human savagery, Heart of Darkness, it is a story that seems to stick in the throat of Hollywood.) Brooks commented on the massively hostile critical reaction his film had received in France, his analysis being that French people believe that children are innocent, and that this is because of French people's terribly old-fashioned, Catholic attitudes to sex. (The thesis here is that children don't like sex, and thus they are "innocent" until they "lose their virginity": the protasis and the apodosis are of course both flawed, although anyone who thinks that French people have old-fashioned attitudes to sex can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that France is a Catholic country.) What is more telling, in my opinion, is the persistent influence in French culture of the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which have thankfully never really caught on in England beyond the warped vision of A. S. Neill.
Another answer is of course the chaos with accompanying misery that is unfolding all around us on an almost daily basis. Hatred leading only to hatred, violence leading only to violence.
"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever."
