What sells wins
From Peggy Hatfield
Sir: How exciting and unusual to see people in the media advising sexual restraint (‘Anyone for chastity?’, 4 March)! As Piers Paul Read reminds us, our culture is up to its eyeballs in sex — in films and also on the high street. But though I’m quite sure that most normal British people could secretly do without a bonking scene in every film, or vibrators in front of children’s noses in Boots, they daren’t say so, even to their friends, for fear of appearing ‘repressed’.
How have we got ourselves into this unsettling state of affairs? Read suggests that feminism and the decline of religion are to blame, but I have a slightly different answer. The ‘market’, it seems to me, has taken the place of religion. Where once we subscribed to values that regulated the market, now, increasingly, what’s good and right is just defined by what sells. Sex certainly sells and so, though our better natures tell us otherwise, we feel almost obliged to keep our distaste under wraps and let it slowly saturate our society.
Peggy Hatfield
Great Somerford, Wiltshire
Falling birth rates good
From Nick Reeves
Sir: It’s high time that governments weaned themselves off the myth, put about by certain economists, that a large population is good and that a declining population is bad (‘Where have all the babies gone?’, 4 March). People are not just economic units contributing to GDP. They all take their toll on the environment.
With water scarcity, an energy crisis and human-induced climate change, we are already in ecological overdraft. If this were a bank loan, the debt would have been called in years ago. A recent WWF report suggested that the optimum population for the UK is 30 million souls, so we Brits are already in serious trouble.
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