Whenever I see an unusually coloured car, I stare. Especially if it is pink. Recently, one particular vehicle did not startle me simply due to its garish paint job, but the slogan plastered across its door: “Unleash my big vagina energy”. 

That someone chose to adorn their most public belongings with nonsense I am embarrassed to even type, reveals a lot about how our culture’s boundaries are on life support. Equally does one of its new, likely fleeting heroes: the so-called “Hawk Tuah Girl”. 22-year-old American woman Haliey Welch was dubbed so after uttering the eponymous catchphrase to a YouTube vlogger, it being an onomatopoeia for expectoration on a man during oral sex. The clip later went viral on TikTok.

To Welch’s credit, she appears to be far more switched on than many an internet star before her, rejecting many crude requests for her to launch an “Only Fans” account. Attempting to push her pervert-fuelled rise aside, Welch now has a manager and a team and plans for both a podcast and music career. She should not be judged forever or wholly for one passing, semi-sober comment, but I do think it is curious that such an uncouth remark can instantly be rewarded with money, fame and media requests. 

The more crass and public displays of sexuality become, the more privately sterile our society seems to wind up. The percentage of young adults not having sex was rising even before Covid. Thousands of young women are being persuaded to avoid natural puberty and remove their breasts. Young men are experiencing erectile dysfunction at unprecedented degrees as crippling porn addiction dulls them to the real world. In the Western world at least, these are rarely devout believers waiting for marriage nor that once prominent class of celibates, so crucial to building Europe’s intellectual empire, – Priests and Nuns. These are people who, in most circumstances, have retreated to the internet rather than pursue real-life romance. But like “Hawk Tuah Girl”, many of them are simply responding to the incentives that surround them.

First, there was the loss of the “third place”, defined by Ray Oldenburg as a venue that was neither home nor the workplace where people could mix with people who were not necessarily their colleagues or family, namely a place of worship or a public house. The reasons for this are complex, atheism, deindustrialisation, automobiles, town planning and television. Nevertheless, it has happened, and we are living with the consequences: fewer young people interacting deliberately or by chance, and fewer of them building lasting ties to others outside their biological family, romantic or otherwise.

Then there is the proliferation of lewdness, not merely propped up by new media. Several mainstream British publications recently permitted prominent columnists to indulge in sexual fantasies about our new Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. No doubt this gave even the most libertarian among us a newfound respect for the obscenity laws of yesteryear (P.S. Many are still on the books should anyone want to enforce them). The highly centralized music industry constantly pumps up ever-pornified lyrics and music videos, fuelling our societal desensitization to sexuality. Where once Stevie Nicks inspired legions of devoted followers by wrapping herself in shawls and gossamer, so many of today’s stars are themselves products rather than artists and are commanded to record strip videos and leak sex tapes and nudes at the behest of their money-hungry management. 

There is some truth to the claim that civilizations experience cycles in their approach to sexuality. Repressive Victorian sexual morality can partly be seen as a response to the licentiousness of the Georgian gentry, of which Hannah More sharply complained. This does not mean all scenarios are equally desirable, however, nor does it negate the sharp break with the past wrought on by post-war technology. At least the latter option generally relegated porn access to seedy Soho semis and dusty hidden annexes of video shops. In the internet age, people may view, often immediately and for free, virtually any sexual act, from every possible angle, with every possible sort of person, in any time and place. The world that made “Hawk Tuah Girl” is not so much an excessively sexualized one, but an artificially sexual one.

In his damning 2018 post-mortem of the Lady Chatterley trial which finally gave way to the permissive society journalist Peter Hitchens lamented:

Nowhere in this sad history [the aforementioned novel] can you see anything but a long, dull, grey monotonous chain of days, lightened now and then by a sexual bout. I can’t hear any music, or poetry, or the voices of friends, or children. There is no wine, no food, no sleep or refreshment, no laughter, no rest nor quiet—no love. I remember then that this is the fevered dream of a dying man sitting under his umbrella pines in Italy indulging his sexual fantasies.

This “sad history” long ago became a motif of our sad present and no doubt sad future. It is now the rule rather than the exception that our media contain gratuitous and forensic portrayals of sex. 

In his “Four Loves” atheist philosopher turned Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, who also knew a tad about fiction writing- addressed the dangers of sexual obsession and the cultural tendency to overemphasize it, which he worried could detract from more profound and enduring forms of love. 

While the current tendency is to treat individuals as if we were autonomous islands, we all know that Lewis was correct that such a nosedive in decorum impacts those around us, and therefore our society. The Narnia author often highlighted the difference between genuine love and mere lust. He believed that true sexual love involves commitment, self-giving, and respect for the other person. This is a “Gift” love rather than a “Self” love and aspires to the selfless love the God of the Bible has for his creation. Sadly, this form of affection does not seem to be popular among those behind our media, politics nor the “grey monotonous chain” of our social media algorithms.