Lately the algorithm has bored me. I walk in feeling as if I already know the sermon I am about to hear. People are getting engaged, often in fields. They are going to Mexico City and Reykjavík. They are making cocktails, having babies. I visit the algorithm curious about how other people enact their lives, but by now I know it will not teach me happiness. It will only tug my gaze toward sea-moss eye cream and Spanish boots.

And still I go, expecting revelation. The other day I drank a whole coffee while parsing the sudden break up of a couple whose relationship I had thought was rock-solid. Scrolling through their past photos, I searched for crumbs of discontent. How long had they been on the rocks? Did he leave, or did she? And wasn’t it obvious why I needed to know? I had to inoculate myself with their unhappiness. I did not want the same thing to happen to me.

If the Church is a place to revere God, the algorithm is a place to glimpse what, culturally, has replaced Him. With the secularisation of love in the 19th century, “love of God was replaced by love for a specific human being as the most exalting experience of life,” writes biographer and literary critic Phyllis Rose. That explains why the algorithm seems most impressed by photos of romantic partnership, and why reality dating shows consistently top television-viewing charts. We primates thrive in a state of devotion. It is a seductive social myth: that our problems will be solved if we just commit to the right being. The soulmate becomes the silver-bullet for our modern ails. But if religious love is challenged by its ethereality, romantic love is challenged by the corporeal reality of coexistence.

I began reading Rose’s group biography, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983), in August. I had decided to spend the month offline, eating stone fruit and preparing my house for my boyfriend to move in. In a recent Granta interview, headlined “A Good First Marriage is Luck”, Rose said she hoped Parallel Lives might help young people “make th[e] transition” from being individuals to being part of a couple. Wary of self-help, I liked the idea of learning by osmosis.

Parallel Lives is a group biography of five renowned Victorian partnerships, from John Ruskin’s to John Stuart Mill’s. Whether unspooling the creative nourishment of George Eliot’s relationship or the maddening infidelity of Charles Dickens, Rose parses the romantic dynamics of each couple with empathic curiosity. In considering the couple as the smallest political unit, Parallel Lives not only gives us permission to peer, it normalises the impulse. As Rose writes in her introduction: “Gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry… We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.” I thought of an ex — richer and older than I, with a philosophy degree — who once shamed me for talking about “people, not ideas”. Yet Rose incisively proves that one cannot be peeled from the other. Every relationship becomes a core sample for wider social dynamics — of gender, class, age, beauty, ambition — that shape who we are together, not only in the Victorian era, but today.

Every couple in Parallel Lives includes at least one author or critic. Writers are prone to over-analysis — perhaps stymieing their own contentedness, suggests Rose — but at least they show their work along the way. Years before marrying John Stuart Mill, for example, Harriet Taylor tasked him with writing a position paper on marriage, so they could share them with one another. At the time unhappily wed to someone else, she wrote that few marriages have “any real sympathy or enjoyment or companionship between the parties”. Mill wrote that one problem was unhappy people expecting marriage to miraculously fix them, then blaming their partners when their baselines remained the same. Both believed heartily in divorce.

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Though they shared these words in the 1830s, I would not have flinched had I overheard them in a bar in 2024. All summer my friends and I had been reading new, bestselling novels and memoirs by Gen-X and millennial women disillusioned with heterosexual marriage — books like All Fours by Miranda July, Splinters by Leslie Jamison, and Liars by Sarah Manguso. Over happy hour drinks, we discussed these accounts of how challenging it was to be a contemporary working wife and mother, then went home to unwind with Love is Blind. Sure, “heteropessimism” was in the air — gender and sexuality scholar Asa Seresin had coined the word in 2019 to describe a performative “regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience” — but we still believed in romance, of course we did. We were just hungry for it to be better. More equity. Less rage.

Parallel Lives is a reminder of what, in the face of this appetite, people have tried. Nearly 200 years ago, for example, Mill wrote a document refusing both the property and sexual rights of marriage that would be granted to him if he were “so happy as to obtain [Taylor’s] consent” to marry. It worked. She married him; their union was marked both by his deference and her authority.

In a world before easy divorce, the Victorians in Parallel Lives coped with unhappy marriages in creative, sometimes cruel, ways. They contorted partnerships into lopsided triads, and embarked on don’t-ask-don’t-tell sabbaticals. Today, as the “divorce memoir” boom reminds us, we’re free to leave: to reevaluate our desires, to clean the slate and start again. But rather than liberating the institution of marriage, Rose sees the ever-glowing Exit door as a muddying force. “What does the promise of a permanent commitment mean when everyone knows it’s provisional?” She doesn’t think the answer is less divorce, just less traditional marriage, which “displaces too many other possibilities in our culture”.

Rose doesn’t elaborate directly, but I kept wanting her to break through the decades and weigh in on today’s cultural surge toward non-monogamy, or the “living apart together” trend. Her hunger for new narrative shapes also made me think of another 2024 book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center, in which Rhaina Cohen writes that we expect too little from our friends and too much from our romantic partners. What if one key to marriage is knowing when to tilt away from it? And when to invest in the web of surrounding community instead?

It is perhaps no coincidence that arguably the happiest couple Rose surveys, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, are childless and not legally married. “Treated as sinful lovers, they remained lovers,” Rose writes. Free of expectations to socialise with one another’s friends or co-host dinner parties, they pursued their own needs instead of following societal scripts. “Being happy in each other, we find everything easy,” Eliot wrote to a friend, smugly. Good for you, I thought, but I meant it. Had Rose’s book offered too neat a formula for happy coupledom, I would have been sceptical. Instead, she showed the varied scaffoldings behind both betrayals and mutual support.

At some point I realised that reading Parallel Lives was scratching an itch my algorithm could only dream to reach. Here was the zoom-lens I wanted into other people’s relationships, fed not by public performance but by diaristic and epistolary insights. Biography, writes Rose, always finds its energy in comparison. A reader glimpses their own life through the cracks of the subject’s, asking: “Have I lived that way? Do I want to live that way?” These were the same questions I asked myself wandering the halls of Instagram.

But where the algorithm left me dead-eyed, Parallel Lives left me breathless. Rose writes with an intoxicating authority and aphoristic command. Love, for her, is the “momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power”. And marriage? Nothing less than the “primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults”.

She won me over on every point. By the time I had finished the book, my boyfriend had moved in, and Donald Trump had been re-elected president. America’s “gender war” was no longer rhetorical; it was confirmed by the polls. By then we had thrown parties, tussled over dish-washing rituals, and splurged on a secondhand persimmon-coloured velvet sofa and chair. The day after the election, though, I could barely speak. I felt aflame. Trump’s victory hadn’t surprised me, but the magnitude of it had. Mid-afternoon, I told my boyfriend I might have to stay in a hotel, not because of him, per se, but because of it. Because sometimes the gap between how we occupied the world — him a man; me a woman — felt like the biggest, muddiest ditch.

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“In using the word parallel…I hope to call attention to the gap between the narrative lines as well as to their similarity,” wrote Rose. Two eyewitnesses to an event will almost always describe it in different terms. And how many events do a couple witness together in a day? A year? A marriage? Relationships are, at root, narrative. We each spin an “I” into a version of a “we”. Rose does not believe unhappy marriages are the product of two people fighting, but two versions of reality clashing. In happy marriages, each person “agrees on the scenario they are enacting”.

I did not go to the hotel. Instead, we stepped lightly around each other, until, a few days later, it felt easy again. Meanwhile, my algorithm filled with news articles about the “boysober” and “4b” celibacy movement. The hotel fantasy played to its highest key. Still, I agreed with scholar Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family (2022), who said in an interview that to believe men were “unredeemable” amounted to “a terribly nihilistic worldview”. However nice an apocalypse bunker with all my girlfriends sounds, I don’t want to resign myself to a future of separatist politics. I’d rather fantasise about a world where we can communicate better, together, rather than one where we exist solo, apart.

At the end of her book, Rose clarifies that her point has not been to prove that men like Dickens were “bad husbands”, just to reveal the “examples of behaviour generated inevitably by the peculiar privileges and stresses of traditional marriages”. To call Dickens a bad apple, after all, is to let a rotten barrel off the hook. She compares marriage to a windy tennis match. Power, like wind, will go undetected until it is working against you. And yet I left the book feeling that the answer was not to quit the court, but to normalise “perpetual resistance [and] perpetual rebellion” upon it. How grateful I am that Parallel Lives exists so that we can see, with such startling archival intimacy, how many ways there are to face the net.

Or take divorce. Even high-profile advocates for stable romantic relationships such as Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan have spoken about the breakdown of their marriages. Both writers disagree about a number of issues, gay marriage chief among them. But they both celebrate marriage, based on romantic love, as a stabilising force in a fraying society. Accordingly, it seems highly valuing love in one’s personal life, and even promoting it as a political force, is not enough to guarantee long-lasting desire. Romantic love, clearly, demands reconsideration.

There is no better guide to this urgent task than Eva Illouz, the world’s leading sociologist of love. Her first study of the topic, Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997), explores how, over the past century, Westerners have tried to reconcile their characteristic jumble of conflicting wishes and goals: to “fall in love” and be swept away by passion, to meet a proper spouse and share a stable household, to be equal to and independent of one’s partner while preserving certain eroticised elements of the older inegalitarian system of gender (we may expect men, for example, to ask women out, and initiate sex, while punishing awkward or ill-timed advances as masculinist aggression). We put incredible, even impossible, demands on love — and on our lovers.

Our pre-modern ancestors would have found it odd to imagine romantic love as the basis of stable relationships in which children are raised and property transmitted. They tended to see passion as a force that was perhaps exalted, even divine, but certainly out of the ordinary, and most probably a threat to the rational management of such important matters as marriage. We, in contrast (and with some self-contradiction), often consider love to be both a powerful, disruptive emotion that falls on us out of the blue and also a connection between well-suited individuals who can build a common life. We think of families no longer as lineages that perpetuate themselves through alliances, but as small units founded on love. Love is now expected to accomplish a lot.

But many individuals do still manage to have reasonably happy romantic relationships today — especially in the middle and upper classes. The class character of contemporary romantic success — that is, the collapse of marriage among the working classes —suggests that the ability to fulfil romantic aspirations, like economic ones, is increasingly dependent on “soft skills” from which too many individuals are excluded. Sustaining relationships despite the multiple, contradictory demands that we place on them, requires that romantic partners have a sophisticated capacity to recognise, articulate, and respect their own and other people’s emotions. Perhaps the central skill transmitted in couple’s therapy is the ability to say “I’m feeling” this or that.

Illouz’s cautious optimism about contemporary love, tempered with a Leftist critique of satisfying relationships becoming the privilege of the well-off like steady work and healthcare, has collapsed over the following decades. Across hundreds of interviews conducted throughout the world, she has studied the effects of the internet on dating and desire, and come to troubling conclusions.

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In this she is hardly alone. A number of contemporary philosophers, such Byung-Chul Han and Alain Badiou criticise online dating. They take the popularity of apps like Tinder to be symptomatic of the loss of concrete, particular forms of attachment in an increasingly atomised and virtualised world. They observe that people on such platforms encounter each other, and present themselves, as commodities.

Illouz echoes some of these concerns, but goes beyond the backward-looking lamentations of critical theorists. Her first sustained analysis of internet-based romance, appearing in Cold Intimacies (2007), points to the ways that dating online resembles shopping. More originally, it also attends to the disillusioned resignation of her interviewees about the “dating market”, which they saw as simultaneously hopeless and inescapable. As she said, “this cynicism marks a radical departure from the traditional culture of romanticism”, and seems to arise, in part, from “the routinisation produced by the sheer volume of encounters”. After flipping through 500 profiles on Tinder, one is naturally cynical about love. And one keeps flipping.

In her next sustained study of how the internet is changing practices and ideas of contemporary romance, Why Love Hurts (2012), Illouz took her thinking a step further. Our desire today is shadowed not only by cynicism, produced by the predictable, endlessly re-iterable character of online dating, but also by the internet’s lure of information. Whether we match with someone on an app, or fall for them first by encountering their social media profile, we can gather a great deal of information about them without ever meeting them in person.

In the past, falling in love with a stranger would mean first seeing a beautiful body, which would incite idealisation and fantasy. For some famous lovers, like Dante or Petrarch, such a vision of the beloved might be an end in itself. In more ordinary cases, the lover could, with effort, learn more about the person whose beauty had so dazzled him or her, and gradually that knowledge would allow the sometimes overwhelming passion of love to become a stabler foundation for a lifelong match.

Today, however, we can accumulate a great deal of knowledge about someone prior to seeing them as an embodied person. It is easy, and common, to “cyber-stalk” a crush, or to become a “simp” fixated on a person whom one has never met, but whose tastes, travels, friends, etc., one knows in apparently intimate detail. Illouz argues that when we do this, our “emotions are largely self-generated… anchored in technological objects that objectify and make present the virtual person”. Rather than being directed towards the person with whom we are apparently obsessed, this form of internet-based romantic imagination allows us to manipulate a series of virtual objects (profiles, posts, information gleaned from searches) to sustain pleasurable feelings in solitude.

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Much like the consumption of pornography, these practices do bear witness to desire, but desire in a peculiar form, one that Illouz argues is poorly suited to be a foundation for the pursuit and continuance of romantic connection. Where thinkers such as Han and Badiou see our increasingly internet-based society as an emotional wasteland from which desire has been banished, Illouz perceives that the internet fuels an intense, unusual kind of desire that we struggle to integrate into our traditional ideas about love.

Quasi-pornographic, self-generated desire, like pervasive cynicism, arises almost inevitably out of our experience of encountering other people through the internet. Both, in different ways, disrupt the possibility of moving successfully from an initial idealisation of the other person to a real, sustainable relationship with them. This strange form of desire incites us to see the other as a set of data points to be manipulated for the purpose of private fantasising; while cynical thinking leads us to see the other as one of a vast number of interchangeable such sets available online, behind none of which is a real person to love us. Gooner-ism and doomer-ism go hand-in-hand, combining a pornographic form of yearning and a pessimistic vision of the world to reinforce already lonely individuals’ isolation from each other.

The mismatch between our historically unprecedented experiences of internet-driven, self-generated, cynical desire, on the one hand, and, on the other, our received ideas about how erotic longings can connect us to other people, seems to be confirmed in, for example, the writing of literary critic Becca Rothfeld. In a disturbing essay, she describes her cyber-stalking of an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend as a paradigmatic case of falling in love, and a lesson on the apparent impossibility of truly knowing another person — rather than, as Illouz might help us see it, a peculiarly recent form of playing with one’s own feelings, a kind of emotional and intellectual masturbation, against which critics might do well to start their own “No Fap” movement.

Taking love seriously as a political issue, as something critical to private and collective life that is over-burdened with conflicting demands, eroded by economic inequalities and perverted by the internet, demands more than the wankery of personal essays or the impotent exhortations of Dreher and Sullivan. It would require a new ethics of erotic life. While therapists can teach us how to name, regulate and govern our emotions, and moral traditions teach us to channel our sexual desires, we are now entering an uncharted territory in which our feelings and longings increasingly orient us away from, rather than towards, other people.

But, amid all the morbid aspects of internet-based pseudo-sociality, people do, in some cases, meet online and successfully transition into real relationships. Some people are, in spite of everything, still happily in love — and all of us have a stake in understanding how they manage to do it. If we build on Illouz’s work, adapting it to an extremely online era, we can ask what skills (management of emotion, desire, and perhaps especially, attention) permit love to survive, and how they can be taught to the seemingly growing and large number of people who lack them.

I was moved. By the end, I teared up, though I couldn’t discern whether my sorrow was solely a tribute to the artistry of the film. My older brother also staggered around with the help of canes and a walker. My brother also suffered from congestive heart failure. In 2009, my brother also died from the medical complications of morbid obesity. To say that I likewise approach this subject matter with intense sympathy is an understatement.

Still, I could have warned Aronofsky that he’d get stick. I channelled the loss of a sibling I loved and admired into my novel Big Brother, which similarly riled the “fat acceptance movement”. (Predictably, none of my aggrieved correspondents read the book.) No amount of sympathy cuts it with these people. I did not have the qualifications to address this topic. I wasn’t fat.

For what it’s worth, my own minor criticism of the film is stylistic. It’s adapted from the eponymous play by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the screenplay. Occasionally, stilted dialogue and stagey acting keep one foot in the theatre. Otherwise, scenes where Charlie jerks off to gay porn while having a heart attack, or joylessly crams his mouth with doubled slices of pizza topped with ranch dressing, do entail an element of spectacle and voyeurism. But all film viewers are voyeurs, and these scenes are supposed to be painful. Charlie is sad, and his confined, shame-drenched life is meant to make us sad, too. That is the naysayers’ real primary objection: Charlie’s weight is tragic. Charlie’s weight is bad.

Stigma has been on the way out for a while. In the early 20th century, divorce was at last a legal option. But as novels such as Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence demonstrate, that didn’t make the dissolution of a marriage acceptable in the drawing room. Divorce was a scandal. Even as breaking one’s solemn vows at the altar grew more common, into the mid-Sixties the iconic female “divorcee” was a wanton loose cannon often preying on the happy marriage. Come to think of it, we seldom use the word “divorcee” anymore, since an identifier is pretty useless when it applies to nearly everyone you know. Nowadays, having been divorced multiple times barely raises an eyebrow.

But this is not the most momentous eradication of stigma during my lifetime. Facilitated by the Pill, that would be the abruptly permissive attitude towards sex outside marriage — although (lucky me) I had morally conservative parents who exposed me to the scathing repudiation and hysterical disgust to which earlier “fallen women” were subject. When I announced that I planned to live with my boyfriend at 18, my mother screeched that I was a “harlot” and a “kept woman” whose “shacking up” would ruin me for the purity of Christian marriage. (Both my parents claimed to be virgins before they wed, and I don’t even think they were lying.)

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Spitting parental disavowal didn’t stop me from having a good time in my young adulthood, but it did give me a taste of stigma at its most effective; in my mother, my transgression triggered a visceral revulsion that she couldn’t control. Yet these days the only debate is whether to have sex on a first date, if we bother with dates.

Once unmarried sex became no big deal, the “out-of-wedlock pregnancy” followed suit. Presently, single parenthood can prove an economic challenge, and that’s about it. Yet not that long ago unmarried pregnancy was such a social horror that young women rushed to marry men they didn’t love or sometimes committed suicide. One of my mother’s college classmates starved herself for nine months to conceal her disgrace.

Homosexuality was next, and to be fair the exoneration of same-sex attraction (which, though she later pretended otherwise, my mother also found revolting) was a long slog. But now the stigma attached to same-sex relationships has so evaporated that being gay or lesbian isn’t even interesting anymore. As for cross-dressing, once a deep dark secret hidden literally in the closet, it is now so reputable that drag queens are reading stories to children in public libraries, and the furtive, old-school habit of struggling into your wife’s frock while she was out shopping seems to have been swallowed by the transgender movement. All that time you weren’t excited by dressing as a woman. You were a woman.

The rehabilitation of masturbation may still have a way to go, though, especially for older generations, since post-hoc mortification and an urge to concealment are instilled so early and run so deep. Yet masturbation must be the most ridiculous of no-nos. This free, universally available entertainment has no dire social consequences. The killjoy demonisation of harmless self-stimulation springs from a puritanical discomfort with sexual pleasure.

On balance, all these historically recent permissions probably make life better. Men and women aren’t stuck married to spouses they detest until death, mercifully, parts them. Having been around the sexual block meant that when I hooked up with my husband, I knew we were a good fit. I’m glad homosexuality is boring now, so gay friends and I can talk about something else. If I still feel a residual sheepishness after getting off in private, at least I know, abstractly, that I shouldn’t feel sheepish.

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But even the hunky-dory-ness of divorce and casual sex is a mixed bag. Marriage is not as meaningful; both parties know they can always get out of it. If I’m relieved divorce is possible, I’m also relieved my own parents didn’t get one; the cost of divorce for children is well known. And thanks to what we used to call promiscuity, sex is less meaningful as well. The much-lauded sexual revolution has produced more kids with only one parent to turn to, more children in care, and more venereal disease.

My point being that stigma isn’t always bad. It can attach to particular conduct for good reason. Collective disapproval is a powerful tool for encouraging behaviour that’s in the collective interest. More recent campaigns to remove the stigma clinging to overtly destructive conduct are therefore questionable. That includes the crusade to embrace “fat pride”, which wages a two-pronged war on conventional assumptions about both aesthetics and health.

On the aesthetic front, alas, what qualifies as attractive cannot be imposed by cultural fiat. No number of Dove models spilling from their underwear in Tube adverts can make riders on the Circle Line yearn to take them to bed. Standards of beauty are stubborn; we don’t find certain bodies beautiful because we ought to. On the health front, advocates for “people living with obesity” — an expression that suggests they’re not overweight but have simply taken in a flat mate — like to claim that one can be “healthy at any size”. Yet the NHS estimates that obesity costs the service £6bn every year, a figure projected to rise to over £9.7bn by 2050. Matthew Crawford, who at 55 stone once earned the title of “the UK’s fattest man”, requiring four adjacent hospital beds to lie down, died last year from sepsis and organ failure. Purportedly quite nice fellow, he was only 37.

Far too many people make themselves miserable over their weight, sometimes anguishing disproportionately over a few extra pounds. Nevertheless, is it in our communal interest for obesity to become broadly condoned? Already, especially in the US, television presenters and commentators are growing ever portlier. What qualifies as a standard build has risen several sizes. That’s good news for bigger people, who may feel more socially at ease, but bad news for any nation’s medical bills.

The drive for alleviation of stigma doesn’t stop at fat. We are henceforth to spurn the word “prostitute” and substitute the less loaded “sex worker”. This linguistic tweak is intended to convey that selling sexual services is no more degrading than attorneys selling legal services. “Sex work” is merely a career path, as deserving of respect as accounting or interior design. If specialists in desire wish to perform certain physical acts for a price, that is literally their business.

The world’s oldest profession is never going away. Personally, I support decriminalisation of prostitution. Yet most of the prosperous progressives who advocate this new open-mindedness would never themselves trade intimate access to their bodies for money in a million years. These are the same people who, if their daughter announced that instead of studying Economics at UCL she aspired to become a “sex worker”, would be horrified and would probably send the kid to a therapist. These are the same people who, should their daughter indeed end up walking the streets at 2am in fishnets, would regard her as in some ways lost and themselves as having failed as parents.

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Expunging stigma is not so simple a matter as wiping down a sticky marble counter with Cillit Bang, job done. Stigma is more like the black mould on the wall of the loo, which has an exasperating tendency to grow right back. Moreover, any society that pushed its young to pursue “careers” in prostitution would either be very desperate or deeply disturbed. I know of nowhere in the world where selling one’s body for sex is a neutral option. It’s reliably a last resort, and no new terminology can make the experience of turning tricks any more agreeable or raise the status of the sex trade a jot.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are now subject to the same brisk Left-wing housecleaning. Enlightened social services have rechristened an addict or drunk, “person struggling with substance use” — we no longer say “abuse” — or “person with substance use disorder”. The most extreme manifestations of this new moral detachment are in San Francisco and LA, whose downtowns are now covered with tented encampments of homeless people — whom we’re now meant to call “the unhoused”, the grammatical inference being that their circumstances are wholly the responsibility of some delinquent outside party. These denizens of faeces-strewn pavements are almost all drug addicts or alcoholics who may also be mentally ill. The city provides food, pocket money, drug paraphernalia, and safe, sanitary venues for getting high, because consuming meth, fentanyl, or a bottle of vodka every day is merely a defensible life choice. Behold, no stigma. What’s an addict not to like? Big surprise, the population of substance users in these cities continues to soar.

California has also effectively destigmatised theft, by demoting shoplifting of goods worth less than $950 to a misdemeanour, which police ignore as inconsequential. Ravaged by losses, businesses are closing retail outlets. If everybody does it — if stealing is normal and never punished — California’s shoplifters have no reason to feel contrite. Likewise, in the riots following the death of George Floyd, the wholesale ransacking of shops was justified as a “mass protest against our dominant conceptions of property”, as the sociologist Russell Dynes put it. Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting, commended widespread commercial theft because it “gets people what they need for free immediately”. Looting also, she says, “attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy”.

Yet this takes the biscuit: the serious campaign to make paedophilia respectable. Apparently, the stigmatisation of “Minor Attracted Persons” is unfair, because Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs) are just doing what anyone sexually drawn to children would naturally do. This MAPs business so crosses a line that it makes the prospective rehabilitation of a range of other once-villainous behaviours short of fanciful. Rapists could soon become “people with a coercion disorder”.  Burglars might be reclassified as “people living with other people’s things”. Perhaps we’ll simply see “Murder Attracted Persons” as “being themselves” — and who are we to interfere with their sanguinary self-expression?

For the consistent pattern here is an accelerating, positively demented refusal to make judgments. The stigma that once attached to socially unacceptable conduct has shifted from the transgressor to the adjudicator. If you use the word “addict” and ever suggest that maybe getting clean would make this person happier and more productive, you’re the problem.

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Furthermore, the language of mindless moral neutrality — “people living with obesity”, “people with substance use disorder” — distances people from their own decisions and deprives them of agency. The plight of alcoholics, drug addicts, and the life-threateningly overweight is medicalised, ascribed to having innocently contracted a disease. For erstwhile outcasts, the price of acceptance is helplessness, if not hopelessness. If your behaviour played no role in determining your current circumstances, then presumably behaving otherwise won’t improve those circumstances, either. You’re stuck.

Stigma has its place. We’re not obliged to celebrate everything our neighbours get up to. For the sake of a liveable country, we should fiercely discourage addiction to substances that turn people into stupefied dependents on the rest of us. Stealing, looting, prostitution, medically burdensome obesity, and sexual predation on children don’t make the world a better place. We should want thugs who break into our homes to feel shunned. For shame, guilt, and remorse also have their place. AA’s classic “hitting bottom” often involves self-disgust, which can finally motivate folks to pick themselves up.

If not all stigma is bad, some stigma is still both poisonous and unjustified, and it remains the case that pariah status can be whipped up with a vengeance almost overnight. Not long ago, one group was singled out as homicidal, delusional, and stupid. Pundits and politicians alike urged us to spurn their company; complex bureaucracies sprang up to keep the scum from restaurants, cinemas, and planes. Social media’s pitchfork brigade demanded this subhuman dross be denied access to healthcare or brazenly hoped they’d all die. That’s right, the unvaccinated. Stigma at its most ferocious. (For the record: I am triple jabbed.)

Clearly, stigma is a powerful force — for ill or good — which, having been firmly planted in a collective psyche, is not necessarily subject to top-down control. Stigma is sticky. Once a population is stigmatised, it’s hard to take the stigma back. When most of us watch Charlie showering his infeasible naked bulk in The Whale, no number of lectures from fat activists or censorious comment pieces in the New York Times can mitigate an unsettling sense of revulsion — which, even if tinged with a vertiginous sympathy and sorrow, still rivals my mother’s disgust at her daughter’s “shacking up”.

Felix Dennis was also always involved; the late publisher of Maxim and Bizarre never tired of talking to journalists about the Oz obscenity trial, you see, and how he and his chums had changed Britain forever by depicting the nation’s second favourite bear in a state of tumescence.

The establishment was outraged! There was a trial! That guy who wrote Rumpole of the Bailey got involved! He defended the right of Dennis and co. to publish images of children’s characters with great big boners: you can’t stop progress, after all.

So it was that in those halcyon days of Blair’s Britain it seemed that the social, sexual and cultural revolution which had begun in the 1960s was complete, with only a few loose ends remaining to be tied up. The defeated establishment now existed only in grainy, black and white footage in which everyone, even children, dressed like your grandparents. Mary Whitehouse, the last survivor of this epoch, still turned up on TV; young presenters would bait her like a bear, and one that was soon to be extinct at that.

Yet if she had just hung on, say, until she was around 110 years old, Mrs Whitehouse would have lived to see a sea change in attitudes. At today’s universities, the left-liberals that once mocked her have established fornication codes requiring young people to seek permission for each stage of the sexual act. It’s not quite waiting until marriage, but it certainly makes getting it on much more complicated, while getting it wrong can result in public shaming or permanent career destruction.

And though all the porn and hook-up apps would have met with her disapproval, Mrs Whitehouse could at least have taken solace in the fact that young people just aren’t doing it all that much anyway. I suspect that she would also have enjoyed the downfall of all those Hollywood types who did so much to lower standards.

The world is always changing, of course, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this sexual counter-revolution; yet most of us, I think, were caught napping.

However, decades of narcissistic Boomer propaganda celebrating cultural milestones such as Rupert Bear’s boner have obscured the fact that our sexual revolution was not the first, nor even the first to be challenged. In fact, the USSR beat us to the punch on both points by half a century.

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The Bolsheviks, like many radicals before and since, regarded the family and the institutions that supported it as hideously oppressive obstacles to the arrival of a new and more perfect world. Determined to do away with the old, they began their social revolution almost immediately after the October Revolution.

Before 1917 was out, the regime had replaced church marriage with the civil variety, and also established a no-fault divorce law that required only a brief court hearing if both parties agreed to end the union. Divorces could still go ahead even if only one person wanted it; it just took a little more paperwork. The other party would receive a postcard letting them know. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1917, and the concept of illegitimacy was abolished; all children were legitimate.

Zhenotdel, the Women’s Department of the Central Committee, was established in 1919, its mission to “refashion women”. Headed by Lenin’s alleged lover Inessa Armand, and then the prominent female Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the Zhenotdel lobbied for the legalisation of abortion, which duly followed in 1920.

Kollontai wanted to liberate women from the “servitude of marriage” entirely: experiments in communal living were run, and attempts were made to encourage/enforce new models of the family via the reimagining of what “home” should be. One famous example is “Narkomfin“, a six-story communal apartment building in Moscow where the flats had no kitchens, as everyone was supposed to eat together in shared dining areas. Communal creches, gyms and laundry rooms were also part of the grand design. Women would be liberated to work and would build the socialist future alongside men.

Thus it was that by the 1920s, laws and ideas that would take a further half-century to emerge in the West became lived reality in the USSR. Still, there was much further to go, and some members of the communist elite expounded ideas that would not have sounded out of place on a hippy commune in 1960s San Francisco. Kollontai, famous for her relationships with much younger comrades, was a believer in free love who advocated “erotic friendships” between men and women.

Lenin disapproved, but she was not alone in her views. Nikolai Krylenko, the Soviet public prosecutor and an important Soviet legal thinker who would ultimately rise to the position of People’s Commissar for Justice, stated that free love was the “ultimate aim” of a socialist state and was indifferent as to whether this might lead to instances of polygamy or polyandry.

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Yet once these revolutionary ideas were put into practice, things got messy very quickly. The communists thought that their reforms would eliminate prostitution, but in the town of Saratov women were instead “nationalised” and men were allowed to satisfy their animal urges in legal brothels. In the ancient city of Vladimir, a “Bureau of Free Love” was established among the cupolas of the churches; women between the ages of 18 and 50 were told to register so that a sexual partner could be assigned to them — whether they liked it or not.

Divorce on demand also came with drawbacks. The divorce rate skyrocketed and was 26 times higher than in Europe; by the mid-1920s, meanwhile, half of all registered marriages in Moscow ended in divorce. Men were considerably more likely to initiate divorces than women and use it as a ploy to escape their responsibilities.  There were reports of serial marriage, and “summer brides” swiftly abandoned, and women left alone to support their children, and all of this happened as huge numbers of children were made homeless as a result of the Civil War.

New ways of living that seemed so attractive on the page — and radical writers such as Alexander Bogdanov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky had explored many of these ideas in fiction before the Bolsheviks put them into practice — had unintended consequences once applied to the real world.

One completely unexpected consequence was strong opposition to the new laws, and this came from both above and below. The turning point came in 1926 when a bill was introduced that proposed to remove the distinction between registered and unregistered marriages, so giving everyone the same legal rights and which would have effectively abolished the institution entirely.

Several senior communists disapproved of the idea and opposed it openly; more striking, however, is the vehement and very public opposition of many working class people and peasants who attended meetings across the country to express their dismay at the chaos that the new rules had brought to their communities, resulting in dystopian social scenarios of the sort Theodore Dalrymple used to describe in his columns, only magnified.

One fascinating eyewitness account from the period contains tales of teenage divorcees, abandoned peasant women, boys “changing wives with the change of seasons” and much more. One phrase in particular, strikingly appropriate to our own time, stands out as the author describes an “atmosphere of torment, disgust, and disillusionment that pervades sex relations”.

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This popular backlash was a harbinger of a major shift in attitudes that lay just around the corner, and which would be imposed from above by the Stalinist regime. So it was that in 1934 homosexuality was re-criminalised, while abortion was outlawed in 1936. Divorce remained legal but the law was revised to combat “frivolous attitudes to the family and to family responsibilities”.

The Young Communist League, whose members had been in the vanguard of the sexual revolution, switched to policing morality, and shaming those who indulged in sex before marriage or who otherwise violated the new conservative norms. The Narkomfin building was not completed as planned; its inhabitants added private kitchens to their apartments. As for the advocates of free love, Nikolai Krylenko was purged in 1938 and executed under the legal system he had helped create, while Kollontai lived out her years as a diplomat in various Scandinavian countries, completely silent as Stalin revoked the laws she had fought for and murdered her ex-lovers. The sexual revolution was over.

But revolutions leave their mark, even when they are confronted with counter-revolutions; ideas once thought cannot be unthought. Abortion was re-legalised in 1955, and although divorce rates retreated from the astronomical levels of the 1920s, they remained high into the late Soviet period. Homosexuality was legalised after the USSR collapsed, in 1993.

As for today’s Russia, it is led by a self-proclaimed defender of traditional values who wears large crosses and was recently re-baptised in an ice hole, but that did not stop him from getting divorced while in office. Abortion is also legal, as is homosexuality, although the notorious 2013 law proscribing the “promotion” of homosexuality among people under 18 remains in place.

The USSR’s experience tells us that wherever our ongoing counter revolution takes us, the final destination is unlikely to be what anyone expects, nor all that final, as the messy reality of living will always undermine the ideals of every true believer. Mary Whitehouse 2.0: This Time She’s Woke will not, in the long run, have it all her own way. I do, however. suspect that the days of celebrating Rupert Bear’s phallus are pretty much over.