Thank heaven for little girls

I’ve just come across the most startling statistic I’ve seen for a long time – and I’m not easily startled by statistics.

According to a private poll conducted by David Shor, a top US analyst, about 30 per cent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT. For the previous generation, women over 60, this proportion is under five per cent.

Reviving the old nature vs. nurture argument, let’s assume that human nature is more or less immutable. Hence, if we went by biological factors alone, the proportion of women who have no time for men should hold more or less stable from one generation to the next. Since that’s not the case, it leaves one explanation only: culture has undergone a cataclysmic change.

This pertains even if we take Mr Shor’s data with a whole shaker of salt. In fact, I’m sure the real proportion is quite a bit lower than he cites. For it’s not only possible but extremely likely that many of Mr Shor’s respondents lied to him. This is a common phenomenon in all polls: people tend to say things they think the pollster wants to hear or, even more often, things they feel will make them look good.

However, in this case their veracity doesn’t matter. It’s immaterial whether 30 per cent of young women actually are lesbians or merely claim to be because they are trying to come across as interesting, progressive and ‘cool’. The cultural catastrophe is just as calamitous either way.

That a steep rise in homosexuality is an omnipresent symptom of decadent societies is true to the point of being a truism. Nor would anyone be surprised if told that, historically, decadent societies tend to be moribund.

Yet the problem that concerns me here isn’t general but specific. After all, even homosexual activists never put the incidence of male homosexuality at higher than 10 per cent, and all the reliable research I’ve seen yields much lower figures. So why are young women different?

One can think of any number of valid reasons. But the overarching factor is an ever-accelerating shift from a Christian civilisation to a post-Christian one, complete with new moral presuppositions.

In Christendom, all such presuppositions derived from the church either predominantly or at least largely. And the church countenanced sex only between men and women, only in marriage and only for reproductive purposes.

That was a moral law, and, like all laws, it was frequently and widely broken. However, the existence of, say, murderers doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have laws against murder. Laws are important because they signpost the boundaries of the permissible, enabling society to guard itself against trespassers.

As Western civilisation travelled towards new havens, sex began to shift from frequently immoral to universally amoral. Long before 1963, when, according to Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse began, Hemingway enunciated this amorality frankly: “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”

That adage could be paraphrased to say that morality, specifically in sex, has become strictly eudemonic, separated from demonic by just two letters. In other words, the moral law can no longer be broken simply because it no longer exists.

Sex gradually lost its erstwhile link to procreation, family, love and eventually any human emotion other than lust. Whenever that link still persists, it’s strictly a matter of individual, and increasingly eccentric, choice.

Shedding the tethers of moral restraints, sex has joined drugs and rock ‘n roll as a prong in the trident piercing the entire cultural history of the West. And even when sex doesn’t function in that lofty capacity, it merely satisfies the biological need to climax.

As ever, language provides a reliable clue. Notice how the mechanical word ‘partner’, which a few decades ago appeared only in annual reports and sex manuals, is replacing emotionally and socially charged words, such as ‘lover’, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. (Only yesterday I was asked in a doctor’s surgery whether I lived with my partner. “No,” I replied, “I live with my wife.” The nice nurse didn’t understand what I was on about.)

This process can only be fully understood in the context of the overall frontal assault on the religious, moral, social and political heritage of Christendom, which, come to think of that, is a workable definition of modernity.

And those in the vanguard of any attack receive most medals. Hence both male and female homosexuals are now screaming that they are proud to practise what only recently was regarded as nothing to be proud of. Yet, though both sexes are coming out of the closet, only the women have more or less ditched that piece of furniture altogether.

Witness the fact that so far not a single male tennis pro (and just one footballer) has come out as a homosexual, while many of their female colleagues have. Male homosexuality must still carry some residual stigma, possibly because of the more invasive nature of the acts involved.

Women, on the other hand, feel they have nothing to hide: they can just as easily achieve an orgasm with another woman, perhaps even more easily. Since it’s all that sex is about, who needs men?

This dovetails neatly with feminism, whose underlying claim is that men and women aren’t just equal but the same, and therefore interchangeable. Men are redundant as providers – either the women themselves or the state can assume that function. Men are redundant as fathers – again, the state can step in and do the job. Men are no longer needed for sex – either other women or sex toys can take care of that.

In fact, men are the historical enemies of women whom they used to subjugate, enslave, exploit and rape. Being ‘into’ men is therefore ‘uncool’, while being ‘into’ traditional family is tantamount to selling out.

Peer pressure crushes women to a point that many find it easier to identify as lesbians than as would-be wives and mothers – even if they happen to be straight. Homosexuality has become aspirational among young women, and young men can’t be far behind.

That’s what Mr Shor’s statistics tell us, whether or not his respondents were perfectly honest. I just hope I’ll be dead by the time homosexuality becomes mandatory.