Nobody wants to be a fogey, resenting and disapproving of the age they live in. But there is something unnerving about waking up in a world where the vice-chairman of the Conservatives’ 1922 committee has to apologise for sending compromisingly intimate pictures of himself to a total stranger who demanded parliamentary phone numbers. Especially when his fellow grandees offer no reproof or surprise but praise his “courage”. Mornings like that make you reflect that we are genuinely in the throes of a tech-driven revolution in sexual behaviour, one which makes the 1960s feel downright prudish.
Certainly it feels that way if you grew up in the last century, welcoming the new freedoms, provided they didn’t involve cruelty, deception, or carelessness about children. It was high time to loosen up a bit: I am of a generation whose mothers infuriatingly kept letting down their hemlines and whose school banned even Manfred Mann (the depraved lyric in question being “if you gotta go, go now, or else you gotta stay all night”). Rules continued to relax, lovers straight and gay were smiled upon, language saltier. By the millennium I was resignedly accepting that Santa Claus had to buy CDs whose deplorably ripe lyrics were, the recipients condescendingly explained, essential to the culture of breakbeat techno, whatever that is.
Those of us especially anxious not to be fogeys now try to understand the next stage: the 21st-century approval for uncommitted recreational hook-ups, once called promiscuity. Even traditionalists can suppose that window shopping for dates on Tinder/Hinge/Grindr is no different to our generation hanging around in bus shelters, or perhaps a democratic variation of debs doing the Season or Jane Austen’s girls eyeing up the militia at the Assembly Rooms, albeit with more chlamydia.
So far so good: but there’s a line between liberal acceptance and boggling astonishment, and William Wragg MP has helped us draw it. Some of us remain baffled by the normalisation of “dick pics” and the whole idea of “sexting”, gay or straight. Porn is reprehensible but merely a general performance: personal stripping or unzipping with a phone in the other hand feels too bizarre and recent for sense.
Smartphones are barely 20 years old: as a cultural shift the behavioural changes they bring are far bigger and faster than the coming of the motor car or television. Eighty-four per cent of us have one, in younger groups 98 per cent. It took over twice as long for even clunky portable radios to be so widely owned, but smartphone cameras arrived like a tsunami and became increasingly essential. And what is truly extraordinary is their invasion of sexual behaviour.
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Before the portable internet, even in the most orgiastic circles the convention prevailed that the contents of your underpants were reserved for either private or furtively commercial display. But sexting rapidly followed texting. It is odd enough to be told by resigned educators that schoolchildren routinely send one another compromising nudes and portraits of their genitalia (though wise girls send artful closeups of their thumb-crease, to fool demanding boys). But children have always been prone to immodest excesses, from toddler ruderies to teenage mooning out of car windows. So maybe cyberflashing was always going to be a youthful phase? But no: when the overlord of the public administration and constitutional affairs select committee gets himself in a blackmailable muddle after using his phone to let a faking stranger get “stuff on him”, you boggle.
That MPs get lonely, a bit vain and short of honest intimacy is an obvious problem. But they’re adults, painstakingly selected to attain the pinnacle of public life. They’re so far past the forgivable nonsenses of puberty that you can be revered as “senior” in the ruling party at the age of 36. Yet when those whose numbers Wragg gave out to the mischievous or potentially hostile “Charlie” and “Abi” were targeted, it seems one or two at least replied suggestively. Some straight people say, patronisingly, “Oh, it’s a gay thing”, but that’s a slur. Sexting covers all orientations, and being homosexual does not make you stupid, immodest, or recklessly indecent.
What might do so is the curious magic of the smartphone: an intimate companion in bed or lavatory yet open to the global noticeboard. It’s an unprecedented hybrid: intensely private yet enabling you like an autocrat, superstar or sovereign nation to click out to the world your opinions and emotions and private images and desires. The cybersecurity expert Dr Dominik Wojtczak of Liverpool University puts it baldly: “It is easier to catch someone off guard when on a mobile device.” So now schoolkids, dating adults and now senior parliamentarians consider that using a phone as sexual lure or stimulus is normal. It is worth saying how astonishing, culturally, this is: you hear intelligent and mature adults cheerfully admitting that they have sent intimate or naked pictures to strangers. They wouldn’t have posted them.
Smartphones won’t go away or primness return. I suppose it can go one or two ways. We might reach a stage where sending pictures of your privates is considered as normal as a handshake, in which case a future Wragg would no more fear blackmail by foreign agents than if he was spotted buying a cafetière in John Lewis. But maybe the reverse will happen and sexting become unthinkable. After all, the Georgians used to pass a chamber pot under the dinner table for chaps’ convenience, and drink toasts to spillers as “Admiral of the Narrow Seas”. Nowadays even the Garrick doesn’t. Cultures, like individuals, can grow up. Let’s hope.
