Less sex please, we’re British

Jeer if you will, but I was shocked by the latest Bridget Jones book, Mad About the Boy. I was shocked by the sex. No, honestly. Compared with its predecessors, including a one-off series about how Bridget got pregnant but wasn’t sure by whom, this latest book ratchets up the raunch quite markedly. Granted, Bridget is having it off with a boy of 29 (to her 51), but there weren’t any passages from her previous diaries like this: ‘Oh God. What was I thinking having sex all night? The whole makeup/breakup thing somehow whipped Roxster and me up into a sexual frenzy and neither of us could stay asleep. Was actually hanging upside down from the side of the bed with Roxster holding both my legs in the air whilst thrusting in between them when suddenly —’. That’s not the half of it. There’s a bit about the tribulations of her friend Jude who is meeting men from dating websites and has ended up with a bloke who is into sexual humiliation. Gross. Now, you can find far more graphic stuff than this via any search engine. But what’s unsettling about Bridget’s new candour is that this is mainstream stuff. We all know about society being sexualised and dimly grasp it’s to do with online pornography but it’s only when sort-of respectable, everyday, institutional, middle-class elements start talking dirty and dressing like tarts that you realise that the rot really has set in and that, as cancer doctors say about the spread of a tumour to the extent it’s inoperable, it’s in the grass. There are other things that bring home to you that our sensibilities have coarsened, that what once seemed like perversity has been normalised. I’m still trying to get my head around Channel 4’s Sex Box, in which people — disabled, ethnic minority, gay — go into an, er, box in a TV studio, have sex in the presence of an audience, and then come out to talk about it with Mariella Frostrup.