“What everyone’s doing, apparently,” my boyfriend said last night, in a conversation about heating bills, “is buying an electric heated hoodie from Aldi,” and that was when I knew it had arrived. The anti-sex backlash was here.
It’s been murmuring for a while now, the threat of a zipped-up reaction to recent decades of sex positivity, and to mainstream relaxing of attitudes towards sex and sexuality. It culminated last month with a number of headlines asking, “Was Mary Whitehouse ahead of her time?” The thoughtful emoji comes into its own here, its yellow face and furrowed brow doing the work of a thousand think-pieces. With its contemplative finger it considers the claim: morality campaigner Whitehouse was forthright on the dangers of pornography.
