News, views and top stories in your inbox. Don't miss our must-read newsletter Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Two thousand years ago, some idiot wrote this: “If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her… and say… I found her not a maid… Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.”

In 2013, a teenage girl is reportedly sedated in hospital after pictures of her having oral sex with a boy at an Eminem concert went viral on the internet. Police are investigating the incident and the internet is awash with people who think sharing pictures of sex they weren’t involved in is the height of wit.

Two thousand years, in which we have moved from taking instructions from a mad bloke on a mountain who swears blind the sky pixie carved them in tablets of stone, to the world wide web, attacking cancer with lasers and sending robots to Mars.

Two thousand years which, as a species, has been a total waste of time if despite all our advances we are still treating one another with the same ignorance and stupidity found in the Book of Deuteronomy.

We live in a time where every woman is expected to behave like a porn star behind closed doors but if any of it becomes public she is shamed as a slut.

Sexual liberation, amazing as it is in many ways, has become nothing but a list of sexual demands.

If there is something he wants to do that you don’t – well, you’re tight, or frigid, or a hopeless lay. If you want to do something that he doesn’t then you’re a raddled old slag with something resembling the Royal Albert Hall between her legs.

It starts when we’re children and it goes on all our lives. ‘Don’t you know how to kiss?’ someone once asked me behind a bike shed, so of course I was compelled to prove that, no, I didn’t and OH MY GOD TONGUES ARE INVOLVED THAT’S DISGUSTING.

As you get older it’s ‘Have you done it yet?’, ‘I’ve done it’, ‘If you haven’t done it yet there’s something wrong’, through to relationships where you’re required to experiment wildly to avoid boredom and old age in which you are bombarded with news stories telling you the other pensioners are all at it like knives.

If you choose to be celibate at any point – because of your faith, values or lack of opportunity – you’re sad, empty, wasted.

If you say ‘Do you know what, you’re absolutely charming and all that but ferrets and fish hooks are not what I really want in my bedroom’ you’re too prim and proper, and when you meet someone new you’re compelled – male or female – to perform the kind of sexual acrobatics which would frankly put a strain on an Olympic athlete.

Do you groom? Do you prune? Do you look like everyone else down below? Is something wonky, does it make schloopy noises, are your abilities lesser or greater than Linda Lovelace and Ron Jeremy?

I’ll tell you what I reckon – I reckon everyone talks about it because they worry everyone else is better at it than they are and is getting more of it. And nobody is, not really.

Everyone makes schloopy noises. Everyone thinks, sometimes, ‘Really? Must I?’

And everyone, or just about everyone apart from very stupid religious dickbiscuits, thinks sex is great fun and pretty harmless so long as there’s no ferrets involved.

Is there anyone who truly cares a girl went to a concert and had sex? Is there anyone who shared those photos and promoted a biblical shame that girl has no reason to feel who seriously believes they’d never be drunk, young or stupid enough to do something similar?

#Slanegirl was stupid, the young man she was pleasuring was an oaf who won’t be getting another blow-job from anyone for a while, and the person who took and shared those pictures online in the first place is a jizzstain of the highest order.

But at what point does any of that necessitate the people of the internet gathering around to hurl stones and allegedly hospitalise the silly girl at the heart of it?

We demand our women be sexually attractive – that their faces be youthful, their downstairs well-tended, their bodies slim and their breasts full.

Yet if they enjoy that attractiveness, if they exploit it or revel in it, have fun or shout ‘WHOO HOO LOOK WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I JIGGLE THESE!’ they’re decried as whores.

Spend your lives trying to have sex – but heaven forfend you should enjoy it, ladies.

We cannot have it both ways. We either veil our women and keep them ignorant of all sex, in which case you can wave goodbye to blow-jobs, the reverse wheelbarrow and a lot of niche activities, or we allow them to live the same as men and have fun learning about sex and no-one thinking any the less of them when they do.

#Slanegirl’s learned – she’s learned to avoid young irks in fluorescent clothing and keep a wary eye out for camera phones. But whoever she is, her brain and her character are greater than a sex act in a field with some twonk who needs a clip round the ear from his mum.

And that’s the problem with treating females as virgins or whores – we forget there’s a hell of a lot else going on in there too.

Pretty or ugly, experienced or novice, they are not beasts of burden, repositories for semen or trophies to carry on your arm or post online. They are as human as those who mistreat them.

It’s been 2,000 years since we last accepted rules which ignored that fact. Perhaps it’s about time we developed some new commandments of our own.

‘Thou shalt not overshare online’, for example. ‘Thou shalt put thyself in others’ shoes’, or even ‘Thou shalt think before thou tweeteth’.

But oh, how I wish Moses had come down from the Mount bearing a stone which said ‘If thou are not nice to women thou shalt have to suck thy own dick.’

COMMENTS: What new commandments would you write? Tell us below