Libby Brooks wants more for the teachers in Britain’s schools to do.  She wants gender education for our children.

She has, you see, noticed that the sexualisation of society has become white-hot of late - boringly so, in fact.  The aspect of this which she worries about is commercial ... raunchy billboards, company expense accounts at the lap-club, etc.  She worries that the nett effect of this is that our daughters are being enculturated by people interested only in money into giving themselves away meaninglessly in back alleys and nightclub toilets.  The “sexual saturation of modern western culture”, she call it.  A good phrase.

She has half a point here, and if she was more a critic and less a creature of modernity she might have a whole point.  For example, she seems to have realised that sexual liberation has been a liberation for men.  Yet she is no social conservative.  Sex for Libby should be seen as an exercise of the female will rather than, say, a submission to Prospero’s “fire i’ the blood”.

Me, I’m a “fire i’ the blood” man whose thoughts turn every six seconds, or whatever it is, to how to open the tinder box, and whose evil designs thereon need to be met firmly in the negative or all female honour will be stolen.  That makes me a believer in sex as Nature.

Libby - a feminist, of course, as well as a liberal - drags her politics into it and is, therefore, a believer in sex as consumption.  But not, of course, consumerism.  Her lodestar is that fully-human, liberated woman again.  In case you haven’t met this mythical creature yet, she’s the one who is mysteriously capable of:-

celebrating the human freedom that sex embodies

... and who knows:-

how desire can take us to the heart of our greatest potential: that in a moment we might be anybody or anything.

I particularly liked that “in a moment”.  Execrable psychology - pure self-deception - but only par-for-the-course waffle for the Guardian.

So it’s the usual liberal equation.  There is an oppressor: commercial interests.  There is the oppressed: young women who put out inappropriately, as Slick Willy would undoubtedly have it.  There is boundless freedom at the end of the rainbow.  There is the ghastly, backward-looking, Nature-bound political right:-

... do men and women bring the same expectations to sexual intercourse? Most national surveys show that women want sex less often than men, experience orgasm less often and find greater satisfaction in emotional intimacy than in genital sex.

But does this really mean that women are naturally cuddle-centric, finding it impossible to separate sex from love? Some would suggest that the higher male sex drive has a Darwinian rationale ...

There is liberalism (stated but not, of course, demonstrated):-

... I lean towards a more cultural explanation - that young girls are taught from an early age that sex is part of a romantic narrative involving love, partnership and children, while boys are told that it is a discrete act underpinning masculinity. The teenagers I know still find themselves stuck with the slapper/stud convention around promiscuity.

And there is the benign, therapeutic hand of the social state:-

It seems to me that we need gender, as much as sex, education in our schools.

But no, not really.  We need a whole society again.  We need those quietly noble mores which disappeared in Philip Larkin’s 1963.  For they - and not liberalism - are the benefactors of a fully-human woman (who, by the way, is wife, lover and mother but never a sovereign individual).  We need less of people like Libby Brooks, less Guardian, less nurture-ignorance, less rainbow.  Most of all we need to accomodate the nature of woman with the chemical control of her fertility.

And we do not need the state, via yet more teachers-as-social-engineers, encroaching further and further upon childhood.