Instinctively I back away from the message that society has become limitlessly sexualised. It often comes from very conservative quarters, and they often have a secondary message, which is that, whatever the causal link is, "sexualisation" goes hand in hand with a breakdown in "family values". I will never understand how this assertion passed seamlessly into fact. If, by family values, we mean two parents, getting married, staying married, raising children together, and I can't think what else we'd mean, then, by the breakdown of those values, we mean divorce and separation, yes?
How many divorces do you know that have come about because one or other party wants to have limitless sex with strangers, preferably around a swimming pool? One or two, max. I can think of 100 things I'd blame before I'd reach sexual imagery. And I have yet to be convinced that people staying together when they'd rather be apart is a valuable thing in the first place.
Fear of sexualisation is used, furthermore, to traduce wet, liberal values like privacy, values that I think teenagers themselves would consider more important than whether or not they'd seen an on-screen erection in an unexpected place. They might not necessarily be wrong. New technology is used as a stalking horse to make incursions into an adolescent's personal life that my parents would never have dreamed of.
Claire Perry, David Cameron's adviser "on preventing the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood", told the Daily Mail at the weekend that all parents should go through their kids' phones and emails routinely. You would never scour your kids' diaries and letters (in fairness to Perry, for consistency, she said she'd do that too). But her overall point was that, since sexting (sending a text with a sexual content) went on in "pretty much every school in the country", electronic communication was fair game for scrutiny.
Which brings us to another problem, the true infection of our age: overstatement. There is a lot of handwringing about the exposure of kids to sexual content, but serious inquiry tends to yield the inconvenient truth that the problem isn't as great as we thought. LSE research found that 7% of UK 11 to 16 year-olds have been sent a sexual message (not necessarily with an image), and 4% have seen a sexual message posted online – the numbers at the age of 12 are very small, more like 2-3%; going up to 14% at 16. I don't find this surprising. Did none of us have a conversation with sexual content by the age of 16? Only 2-3% have experience each of the following: seen others perform sexual acts in a message; been asked for a photo or video showing their private parts; or been asked to talk about sexual acts with someone online.
True that it's not "none", so clearly there is more exposure than there was before the internet or mobile technology were invented. Yet our percentages are lower than those in most other European countries. Which may be a good reason to have an in-out referendum, that they are filthpots. But it's not a good reason to rifle through your teenager's personal effects.
Related to the overstatement is a general failure to acknowledge that society does not always change for the worse. Diane Abbott this week delivered a polemic against hypersexualised culture in which she cites the Jimmy Savile affair as revealing "a darker side of British culture, in which the sexualisation of women and young girls is entrenched". I disagree entirely – if the Savile affair demonstrates one thing above all, it's how much has changed. What television presenter now would answer the phone to a journalist saying, "She told me she was 16"?
As Alex Petridis pointed out in the Guardian with aplomb, in Savile's time, "the charts were full of carefree, innocent hits. There was Gary Puckett and the Union Gap's Young Girl: "You're just a baby in disguise / and though you know it's wrong to be alone with me / that come-on look is in your eyes". It would be totally unacceptable now to describe underage girls as fucktoys for any man with the boldness to think he'll get away with it. Victims of abuse still fight to be heard if they're in care, or if they're delinquent themselves, and this rightly disgusts us – but to routinely ignore any girl who makes an accusation of abuse? Those norms are behind us.
Yet the opposite position on the sexualised culture – that nothing's changed, that porn is still a minority product that you need the nuts of a minotaur to get your hands on – that is not true either. Things have changed enormously, irreversibly: there is nobody in the world who knows exactly what to think or do when their six-year-old starts doing all the moves to Gangnam Style and singing "ooh, sexy lady"; nobody looks at teenage girls and thinks: "No pressure, she'll be fine to have a sexual awakening in her own good time."
It's not unlike the drugs panic that parents had in the 1980s – a lot of it was overblown, and most of the kids were all right. But there were also quite a lot of drugs.
Nobody genuinely believes that children can be insulated from the rest of culture, however much they despair of the messages that culture puts across. Equally, nobody would gaily sling their child into the maelstrom of sexual objectification and leave them to eat or be eaten. Everybody hopes they can foster the resilience in their children that would make sexist or degrading images irrelevant; everybody fears that they won't be able to, that culture is stronger than they are.
I think that we would make more progress if, instead of complaining about sexualisation – a divisive and nebulous concept – we fought sexism, which is more easily comprehended and is at the root of almost everything troubling and obnoxious. Underneath what looks like a very polarised battle, I'd be surprised to find much real disagreement.
Twitter: @zoesqwilliams
