Sexual Values Revisited

Abstract

The question of ‘values’ has for the past decade been seen as part of the ideological baggage of the New Right. When referring to issues of sexuality it has become a code term for challenges to the changes that have shaken the sexual world: deep and visceral hostility to changes in family life, the impact of feminism, the rise of lesbian and gay politics, and passionate opposition to open sex education, changes in lifestyle, and in the United States in particular, to women’s access to abortion and the ‘right to choose’. When the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher spoke of the need to return to ‘Victorian values’ in the early 1980s, few had any doubt what she meant, even if her history was a little shaky. Similarly, when her successor John Major spoke of the need to go ‘Back to Basics’ it was not hard to detect a moral agenda, even if, typically, it soon disintegrated when faced by the realities of most people’s (including politicians’) lives.