Revellers standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a lit-up swimming pool. Young people crowding round a bar, waiting to be served. A couple kissing on a packed dance floor. All these activities are currently illegal in the UK. But pictures from Wuhan offer a tempting glimpse of our future. Despite 2020’s resurgent puritanism, hedonism is going to make a comeback.
Lockdown has disorientated everyone’s social life, with the indefinite suspension of the night-time economy — pubs, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, theatres and music venues. Of course, some pleasure-seeking inevitably has to be sacrificed temporarily for the sake of arresting the spread of the virus and protecting those most vulnerable. But the sacrifice has hit singletons and voluptuaries particularly hard.
The last year has been a puritan’s wet dream: social distancing has devastated all the industries that facilitate casual sex; some countries have imposed alcohol restrictions; the film industry even consulting the old priggish Hays Code for filming intimate scenes; universities restricting parties and hooking up on campus in the interest of public health. And now a third lockdown has once again cancelled all opportunities for us to go out and enjoy ourselves.
Worse, it’s felt as if the risk of spreading the virus has been exploited to bolster an old prejudice: that spending time in these places is inherently immoral. The stench of puritanism, which H.L Mencken summarised as “the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy”, has risen to the surface to pollute the nostrils of society. Official Western morality — whether represented by Plato, Christianity or Kant — has always regarded hedonism as fundamentally bad. The new Puritans, like the old ones, like to police the way other people get their pleasure.
You don’t need to have broken any rule to earn their ire: to even complain about what it feels like not being able to date or party, or even socialise with friends over a drink, is regarded as inappropriate, dismissed as inconsequential, in comparison to the noble goal of saving lives.
And so no one protests that the lifestyles of the lustful, the promiscuous, the sluts and fuckbois (“libertine men and scarlet women” as The Music Man refers to them) have been turned upside down. Some hopeful young romantics gave e-dating a go; others tried out “Zoom nightclubs”. The use of online porn has increased and OnlyFans has risen meteorically. But the pleasures of the flesh have been out of bounds.
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