Whitehouse’s long battle with the BBC was also indicative of the class dynamics at work. She was a suburban housewife from the self-consciously upright provincial middle class — the same background as that other hate-figure of the progressive intelligentsia, Mrs Thatcher. Whitehouse’s bete noire Hugh Greene, liberalising Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969, was an archetypal liberal elite figure, born into a well-off upper-middle-class family and educated at private school and Oxford (his brother was the novelist Graham). Mrs Whitehouse knew a simple truth, which Greene either didn’t know or didn’t care about, namely that the prosperous, well-educated and well-connected are insulated from the damaging consequences of radical social experimentation in a way that others are not.
For example, being left to raise three children by an unreliable partner is bad for any woman, but an intelligent, well-educated woman with strong support networks is much better placed to make the best of such a situation than a woman with few qualifications and little social capital. Similarly, middle-class students who develop serious drug problems do not always escape their addictions and the attendant dangers, but they have a much better chance of doing so than those lower down the income scale.
We almost all rely to a greater or lesser extent on the norms of our surrounding society to give us “scripts” for our behaviour. The lifestyles and behaviours celebrated in popular culture are a key part of those scripts, so it is entirely reasonable for people to be concerned about the values promoted in TV, film or music. It’s easy to cry moral panic over these concerns — about, say, sexual content or bad language or the portrayal of married families as hotbeds of misery and abuse — but they come from a deep and honest, if inchoate, sense that good and enduring norms are under attack. The taboos that exist in a society act as philosophical signposts. They tell us what is sacred, what we ought to value and work for.
For a long time now, transgression, liberation and novelty have been valorised in the arts above all else. Épater la bourgeoisie, as the radical French poets of the late 19th century had it: scandalise the respectable people. And pushing boundaries has its place. JMW Turner is now firmly domesticated in the popular imagination, but caused great controversy in the second half of his career when he abandoned normal figurative painting. Prints by Monet and Manet adorn many a conservative living room, and yet in their day the Impressionists were widely perceived as avant garde radicals. Nevertheless, what we have not seen until relatively recently is sustained public advocacy by artists for moral and social transgression as an end in itself, and widespread approval for that stance from institutions, critics and the media.
The problem with a society that valorises transgression for its own sake is that it provides highly effective cover for people who want to do genuinely bad things, rather than just shock. This was certainly true of numerous figures from the world of music and entertainment who have been exposed as serial exploiters of women, if not outright abusers. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones notoriously told the judge at a 1967 drugs trial that “we are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals”. To which one is tempted to reply that petty morals might have kept a lot of young women – and young men – safe from the dubious attentions of rock stars, DJs and producers in the years following the sexual revolution.
We might think of Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious. When the Sex Pistols used the f-word on TV in 1976, it no doubt provided a thrill of vicarious rebellion for plenty of viewers. But Vicious lived up — or rather down — to his stage name in private life, at the very least badly beating Spungen more than once, and quite possibly stabbing her to death in a drug-fuelled haze. Rock ‘n’ roll, man. So edgy.
Some people ventured to suggest that the Marilyn Manson revelations were not perhaps the most surprising news they had ever heard, and were in turn chided for having a “round up the usual suspects” approach to oddballs and weirdos.
Don’t judge a book by its cover, as the saying goes. Lots of performers have grotesque or edgy stage personas but are perfectly charming and pleasant in private life, and lots of respectable people turn out to be murderers and child abusers. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.
No-one is suggesting that we should invariably judge by appearances, or by initial impressions. But we do need to confront the reality that wrongdoers and predators will exploit our celebration of boundary-breaking, our reluctance to be seen as boring or conventional or part of a moral panic, to get away with their crimes. And often these individuals will be hiding in plain sight — think of Jimmy Savile, or Gary Glitter. Sometimes floorboards that look fine turn out to be rotten; that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tread carefully on the ones that actually look like they’re falling to bits.
Deriding people’s intuitions and instincts about dangerous people and corrosive trends, by labelling their expression as a moral panic, amounts to little more than the avoidance of serious discussion. Fundamentally, we need boundaries for ordered liberty that do not simply leave people at the mercy of their own impulses and weaknesses. We regulate gambling and alcohol sales and restrict the amount of paracetamol you can buy at one time; on the same principle, it seems quite sensible to think that we can and should take an interest in the cultural climate in which individuals form their habits and desires and manners, and their expectations of how they should interact with others.
As any parent knows, you can relax much more easily, and allow your children much more freedom, when they are playing in a carefully fenced park. It’s not moral panic to get upset if you see someone breaking down the fence.
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