Do British women really need to get smashed in order to have sex? According to the Marie Stopes clinic, abortion figures rise every year as the annual fall-out from New Year's Eve parties take their toll and this year the figure rose by a staggering 20% extra. If we discount the apocalyptic few who expected the world to end - and didn't think they would live long enough to take a pregnancy test - what was going on in the minds of the others?
Given the hype surrounding the evening in question, there is little doubt that large numbers of people were desperate to get laid. After all, if this was to be the most remembered night in 1,000 years, you would want to be doing something memorable - and there is something rather cheering about that fact that so many people still think that creating their own fireworks is preferable to watching those organised by the government.
But how sad that so many were clearly unable to admit what they really wanted and instead left it all to alcohol and chance. Three decades on since the swinging 60s and the women's liberation movement, we still don't seem to know whether sex is nice, naughty or just something nasty done to women by men.
If sexual assertiveness can be measured by the degree to which women seem to be in control of their fertility, then the English-speaking countries are not doing well. All over the developed world the age of first birth has risen and the number of births to teenagers has dropped as women's rights and educational opportunities have improved. The UK rates dropped just like all the others - at first - but at the start of the 80s they started to rise again. We now have the highest level of teenage births in Europe and even this is better than the situation in Canada, New Zealand and the United States.
Sexual ambivalence is something that seems to be passed on, like a virus, via the English language. This is not a north-south thing. Italy is up there with the Dutch and the Swiss in an unlikely triumvirate of countries that can (with the Scandinavians) boast low rates of teenage pregnancy. Is this just because these teenagers don't have sex, or is it because they have learned that sex is something to treasure, to feel positive about and to prepare for?
We tell girls that they should buy a certain shampoo because "they are worth it". We should be telling them to treasure their bodies in the same way, for the same reason.
There was a time when it looked as though that is exactly what we were doing. In the 60s and early 70s feminism was positive about sex. The Pill and abortion liberated a whole generation from the fear of pregnancy and we hadn't yet discovered a sexually transmitted disease that we couldn't cure.
Women were starting to talk to each other about their sexual experiences and learning the difference between having sex done to you and actually enjoying it. I don't think I had ever heard of (let alone felt) a female orgasm until my friend lent me a book by Mette Ejersen called I Accuse, which explained the function of the clitoris. Then came The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, closely followed by the Hite Report by Shere Hite and Nancy Friday's compendium of sexual fantasies called My Secret Garden.
Women were talking about what they liked and trying it out, too: some with men, some with women, some with both - and some by themselves.
A list of articles in Spare Rib magazine included: Good Vibrations (on the joys of the vibrator); Unlearning Not to Have an Orgasm and Making Changes, Making Love. There were ads for vibrators and "pre-orgasmic therapy". In the first British edition of the women's health textbook Our Bodies Ourselves, there is a section called Learning to Masturbate - commonplace now, perhaps, but so revolutionary then that, when the galleys came back, the section had to be completely rewritten because the typesetter had been unable either to type or to see straight. Or perhaps he (in those steam-driven days before computer setting, it nearly always was a he) had been following the instructions and got carried away.
Then, almost overnight, the mood changed. Out of America came a succession of books about rape, sexual exploitation and pornography, and here in Britain we discovered the nasty secret of domestic violence. The joy seemed to go out of sex and that happy coalition between those who had campaigned for greater sexual freedom and those who wanted more economic freedom began to fray.
Worse still, this new mood coincided with a tide of political conservatism. Anti-sex feminism in coalition with the God squad seemed to set the political and intellectual agenda. Where young women in the early 70s were starting to learn that assertiveness was the best defence against sexual exploitation, now optimism was being replaced with fear and women were once again learning to see themselves as victims. Education authorities went into retreat over enlightened sex education programmes and only the government's fear of Aids, it seems, prevented the anti-sex message from turning back all the advances.
For young people the messages have become hopelessly confusing. On the one hand they are exposed to movies and magazines that tell them sex is the best fun you can have. On the other they are told by politicians and the news media that sex issomething to be feared as a source of disease and shame: teenage mother (bad), sex on a beach with Leonardo DiCaprio (good).
In the middle is a government that, according to its recent report on teenage pregnancies, would like to help but doesn't know where it stands. Does it want to pacify the Daily Mail (by insisting that sex education should teach the importance of marriage and the arguments for delaying sex), or does it want to help teenagers by giving them the confidence to "judge what kind of relationships they want and put that into practice"?
A group of 700 teenagers in Brighton were asked what they wanted by researchers at the town's university and their answers were clear: they wanted to be able to talk about lust and desire, emotions and relationships - not just conception and disease and how to prevent them.
It is in schools that we see just how stuck the British sexual revolution has become. Over 90% of parents and children see school as the best place for sex education and yet 68% of children have learned most of what they know from the media. The policy vacuum of the past 20 years has left young people to the tender mercies of moviemakers and magazines - and the tabloid press, which ensures that we never forget that the truly British expression for sex is the snigger. Boys learn, via soft porn, that women "want to be dominated", girls learn from teen mags that boys "only want one thing", schools reinforce the message by concentrating sex education almost entirely on what boys might "do" to girls that the girls don't want.
In the midst of all this we forgot to tell our children that good sex is the most pleasure that two people can give to each other. No wonder they need to get drunk before they can do it.
