Letters on Liberty: Freeing Sex from Libertines and Puritans

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Saturday 19 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the twenty-first century.

In her Letter – Freeing Sex From Libertines and Puritans – journalist and speechwriter Jenny Holland argues that the liberal adjustments of the Sexual Revolution might no longer be fit for purpose. The internet, with its small group of ‘sexual radicals’, regularly exposes the masses to new, desensitising levels of exposure to explicit acts. Meanwhile, she argues, young people are having less sex than ever, and chasms are widening between men and women. Sexual freedom is not without its consequences, Jenny writes, and while excessive promiscuity can be physically and mentally harmful, extreme reactions from modern-day puritans don’t help, either. Instead, Jenny urges us to restore healthy levels of sexual inhibition, freeing the sexual landscape from either extreme.

Join Jenny and respondents to discuss whether modern society has a sex problem. Has our explicit online culture forced us into a sterile social scene, or are people simply redirecting desires that would never have been fulfilled? Could we make material change – should pornography be protected under the banner of free speech, or regulated to prevent real-world harm? What separates the Victorian libertine from the modern sex-positive activist? And with all this adult material floating about, do we all need to grow up?

SPEAKERS
Jenny Holland
writer and critic; former assistant, New York Times; author, Saving Culture (from itself) Substack

Fraser Myers
deputy editor, spiked; host, the spiked podcast

Nina Power
writer and philosopher; author, What Do Men Want? Masculinity and its Discontents

CHAIR
Eve Kay
award-winning factual TV producer