The sexual revolution is unravelling. The battle of the sexes is intensifying.

The Sun newspaper’s exclusive that Michael Fallon lost his job because of lewd suggestions to Andrea Leadsom, vigorously denied by him, will have the usual secular comment without any significant Christian comment.

This is another stage in the sexual revolution. For several decades I have noted that the sexual revolution, which began in the 1960s with the development of the oral contraceptive pill, Roy Jenkin’s ‘permissive society’ promoting the decriminalisation of homosexual activity and David Steel’s 1967 Abortion Act, is a lengthy social experiment which will damage many people along the way.

It may be that this revolution is beginning to peak as journalists making a living out of ‘kiss and tell’ stories turn to political correctness as their new tool to make a living, under pressure from competition by social media. ‘Trial by social media’ is highlighting more effectively the already well-known battle between the sexes.

The laissez-faire and ‘live and let live’ attitudes of the 1960s have given way to a secular puritanism with its thought police and lie detectors. Princess Diana’s suggestion a few decades ago that people need ‘a hug’ is now judged to be a new form of sexual assault – and people buy into this shifting secular morality.  This is secular repentance in action.

The jokes and slandering of ‘puritanism’ is coming home to roost because puritanism is as nothing compared to the new shifting standards of secular morality, with its retrospective application of its ever-shifting political correctness.  Relativism and situation ethics has left secular society with no standards by which to judge actions other than the current political correctness, determined by the opinion formers of the current age.  It reminds us of the arbitrary rule of despots in former ages, from which Christian principles delivered us and gave us rule under the law of God.

Male vulnerability to female sexuality is a new tool in the armoury of the battle of the sexes. The secular world is slugging it out trying to find the new morality – and celebrities and people in public life are discovering that secular morality shifts the goalposts every few decades so that their former behaviour is judged adversely and retrospectively by the current generation’s new secular morality. There is poetic justice in this because they have done the very same to others in former generations whether it be 16th-century Reformers or Old Testament figures.

Possibly a longing for former standards will develop in place of the shifting sands of moral relativism, which has been used for so long to introduce and promote the sexual revolution. The pendulum could swing only so far and now it appears to be swinging back again. How far it will swing is anyone’s guess in a society with ever-changing moral relativism as its ‘standard’.

Ever so slowly, worldly behaviour is being forced reluctantly to conform to biblical standards. It has a long way to go, for we are only halfway through the sexual revolution. Gender fluidity and trans-sexualism is the latest phase of this fad.

Update:

1 Mar 2018: ‘the new Puritanism’ was discussed in the 15th-anniversary edition of the BBC’s This Week programme.

10 Oct 2018: the mayhem caused by secular puritanism, over one kiss.  The ‘Strictly Curse’ is recognised as a real problem.  Instead of calling a halt to the cause of temptation, sensuous promiscuous dancing, secularists will not repent but show their purity by loudly condemning  transgressors of the new political correctness.

28 Dec 2018: gender fluidity and gender inclusiveness is a new phase in the sexual revolution; it has a long way to run.

22 Feb 2021: the battle is heating up between feminists who do not want recognition of men who self-identify as female. Chest-feeding is the new term for breast-feeding among those who have been short-changed in their education. The language battle has spilled over into a row among senior SNP politicians over Transgender legislation. Those who have ignored the redefining of language are slowly discovering the agenda behind it.

16 Mar 2023: secular moralists afraid that “the death of religion” in society, education and public life may lead to a theocracy! Secularism is a poor and worse imitation of Christianity, trying to replicate its values without its teaching.