Consent? Try respect and decency too

ONE evening the Dooleys were eating dinner. Our eldest was telling us about a person whose story I found rather interesting. Naively, I said: ‘I should very much like to meet her.’

‘You can’t say that, Dad!’ exclaimed my embarrassed son. ‘What?’ I said. He replied: ‘You can’t say you’d like to “meet” someone!’

It transpired that, for those of my son’s generation, to meet a person is – how to put it? – well, to have an amorous encounter with them.

To my shock and horror, he explained that young people no longer ‘go out’ with each other. They meet, which means bypassing all customary norms surrounding sexuality.

It is no longer necessary to know someone’s name, and you can forget about a romantic prelude over dinner. Gone for good are the days when you might court a person. Today, as in every sphere of life, delayed gratification has given way to immediate satisfaction.

Wasn’t it WB Yeats who poignantly asked: ‘How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?’ Without custom and ceremony, we reduce life to a coarse husk that is lived for pleasure but rarely for love. We live our days as though the radiance of civilisation had never dawned.

If any area of human life should be surrounded by custom and ceremony, it is that of romantic attachment. For people are not commodities but those from whom the light of life shines most powerfully. We are not dealing with another object, but with another will, spirit or soul.

When I was growing up, there was still something of the Jane Austen approach to love. Even the young approached each other cautiously and modestly, seeking the other’s consent with customary respect. They dressed up, dined out and danced in ways that, by today’s standards, seem singularly quaint.

I do not say that I grew up in some sort of romantic utopia. What I do say is that there was still something beautiful in the way couples got together. And that was simply because we still attached importance to custom and ceremony.

But now, all of a sudden, we are being told that our children require lessons in ‘consent’. Yesterday, we learned that Education Minister Richard Bruton has ordered a review of the Relationships and Sexuality Education programme, because, as he says, we need to take into account ‘the needs of young people today, who face a range of different issues to those faced by young people in the late 1990s’.

If my son’s generation face ‘a range of different issues’, it is because we, as a society, have casually abandoned the old norms and customs that put beauty and respect at the core.

If we must teach them consent, it is surely because the very idea has been undermined by our ‘progressive’ social attitudes.

But what is progressive in thinking that we can simply dispense with customs which demanded that we earn, and not grab, another’s attention?

In the late 1990s, we didn’t have to teach people consent because it was still a pervasive moral principle. Yes, there were violations and transgressions, but we viewed them with revulsion and dismay. That, however, was before the young took online pornography as their standard for how sexual relations should be conducted.

We abandoned custom and ceremony and we lost innocence and beauty. And now, when the damage of this, our dark age, has been laid bare, we rush to restore what we so casually discarded. Now we see the value in things that we once dismissed as ‘prudish’, ‘repressive’ and ‘outdated’.

THERE is nothing prudish or repressive in seeking to win another’s affection. To do so is the foundation of respect and, ultimately, of love. It is the only way to ensure that human dignity is not plundered and polluted.

As I see it, the argument that we now must teach consent is not a laudable innovation. If anything, it is a tragic indictment of a society that is fighting a rearguard action against its own moral failings in respect of the young. It is a belated attempt to restore those timehonoured safeguards against abuse and exploitation.

And who, having witnessed the carnage caused by this loss of custom and ceremony, would not wish for some beauty and innocence?

Who, as this tormented age reveals its terrible secrets, does not long for a time when people instinctively knew what it meant to win another’s heart?

Who wants a world where no-one is prepared to pay the true price of love?