— The Australian, 9 January 2016 — Remember when flirting was considered fun? Except perhaps by the blue-rinse brigade and nuns. (The nuns who taught me once switched off a Madonna song at the school disco because they thought Madge’s panting pop might push us frisky 14-year-olds over the edge of decency.) From Shakespeare’s plays, stuffed with sexual banter, to the freshly liberated women of the 1960s who donned miniskirts and insisted sex should be a hoot for women as well as men, saucy exchanges between the sexes long have been seen by normal, pulse-possessing people as a nice part of life. As British psychologist Adam Phillips put it in his 1994 book On Flirtation, flirting — whether with an idea or person — speaks to an “experimental life”. It springs from “irreverence and curiosity”. That was then. Today, this most human and tingling form of social and sexual engagement is in crisis. Flirting has been rebranded as “unwanted sexual advance”. It’s being pathologised, treated as a foul expression of “male entitlement” in relation to women. We’re all 14-year-olds at a school disco now, surrounded by schoolmarmish feminists and hacks itching to chastise us for our sexual bravado and chatter. These days, you won’t be celebrated as “experimental” if you cosy up to someone you fancy and shoot them a lame line; you’ll be exposed, shamed, possibly fined, as West Indies cricketer Chris Gayle discovered. The Gayle scandal — the scandal being that he was fined $10,000 for flirting, not that he flirted — is a scary sign of the times. It points to the creeping criminalisation of the glorious institution of flirting. The punishment of Gayle is a scandal first because it’s really authoritarian to slap a 10k fine on someone for saying something. Gayle’s comments to reporter Mel McLaughlin — “Hopefully we can have a drink afterwards … don’t blush baby” — were at best funny, at worst embarrassing (for him). But they were in no way harmful or inciting. The 10k punishment imposed by his club was in essence a flirtation tax. The great 19th-century liberal John Stuart Mill described unreasonable hikes in the price of booze as a sin tax since they were designed to pressure people away from allegedly sinful, beery behaviour. The flirtation tax imposed on Gayle has a similar effect: it ­instructs us all that unsolicited date-mongering is no longer acceptable. The second grating thing about the Gayle scandal is the use of that soulless, bureaucratic word: inappropriate. He engaged in “inappropriate conduct”, says his joyless club. The same thing is being said of Jamie Briggs’s midlife crisis antics. Briggs lost his ministerial position over what everyone is describing as his “inappropriate behaviour” towards a female employee of Australia’s consulate-general in Hong Kong: he told her she had “piercing eyes” and kissed her on the cheek. “Inappropriate behaviour” is the irritating buzz phrase of our neo-prurient age. It speaks to a climate in which various finger-waggers still have an urge to hector the sexually unstable masses — that’s us — but lack any convincing moral language in which to do so. In this post-religious, morally cagey era, where the cult of relativism means no one is sure what’s right and what’s wrong, the new policers of interpersonal shenanigans can’t denounce us as “vulgar” or “hell-bound”, for that would involve being judgmental. So instead they reach for that PC, frigid term, inappropriate. “That’s inappropriate,” they say, about everything from lads’ mags to rude rappers, with none of the fire-and-brimstone of the priests of old but with the exact same intent: to censure us for doing something that they, the right-minded, consider bad. It is never us who decides what’s appropriate; never people like Gayle or McLaughlin (who didn’t seem especially perturbed by Gayle’s come-ons). It is always them, the secular new priesthood. Apparently we can’t be trusted to negotiate public and sexual life on our own terms; we need better-educated busybodies to chaperone us. This takes us to the third and worst thing about the Gayle scandal: it confirms that we’re entering a new puritanical age, where the censure of people for saying or doing certain sexual things has become the depressing new normal. It’s one of the great contradictions of our time. Our society seems more sexually open than ever. You can’t switch on the television without seeing the likes of Lady Gaga whipping her backing singers with a bicycle chain. Yet it’s hard to recall any time since the famously stiff 1950s that society has been as sexually suspicious as it is today. Only now it isn’t conservatives with blue rinses leading the charge against sex — it’s feminists with purple dye-jobs. Across the West, supposedly radical agitators are demanding clampdowns on sexual images and behaviour. In Australia last year, feminists got Coles to ditch the lad mag Zoo Weekly on the basis that its boobs and banter were “highly offensive”. In Britain, feminists have spent years demanding the quashing of Page 3 in The Sun, claiming its scantily clad models have a terrible impact on “the self-esteem of women” and “encourage negative attitudes” among men. They also want lads’ mags put in “modesty bags”. On campuses in Australia, Britain and the US, there are frantic feminist efforts to re-educate students in the new sexual etiquette and to punish flirtation. More than 30 student unions in Britain have banned Robin Thicke’s sexy ditty Blurred Lines. At an Oxford college it was accidentally played at a student bar, causing a student official to leap up and switch off the sound system — not unlike that old nun who deprived us of Madonna. Sexual-consent classes are now mandatory in many British universities. Sex-suspicious campus activists in the US inform students that sex must always be sober. At the University of Wyoming, students are told that “sex that occurs while a partner is intoxicated … is sexual assault”. This would mean that I and absolutely everyone I know has committed sexual assault. Who didn’t have drunk sex at uni? There are also campaigns, often fear-fuelled, about sexual harassment on public streets. Sometimes “harassment” means little more than being chatted up. The extent to which flirting has been made into a sin is clear from the arguments put forward by SlutWalk, the movement that insists women should be free to dress however they please. (I fully agree.) One journalist supporter of SlutWalk says that “no matter what a person is wearing”, there’s “no excuse for violence, verbal degradation, rape, lewd comments, pinches, touches, grabs or come-ons”. What is terrifying about that statement is its casual conflation of “come-ons” — which most people consider acceptable — with extreme violence (rape) and assault (pinches, grabs). This shows how far the neo-puritanical clampdown on sexual speech has gone. The PC anti-sex culture is demeaning to men and women. It treats men as brutes-in-waiting, a couple of beers from turning into creepy beasts who will make “unwanted sexual advances” (what we used to call “buy someone a drink”). But even worse is that it treats women as weak, vulnerable creatures not cut out for rough, gruff public life. This rehabilitates the very prejudices feminism was meant to blow apart. In Victorian times it was also widely thought that women had to be protected from vulgar images and from what campaigners called the “disagreeableness” of public streets. Nadine Strossen, feminist and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued in the 1990s that the then emerging sex-suspicious climate represented a “throwback to archaic stereotypes”, treating “man as voracious satyr” and “woman as sexual victim”. “Such paternalism always leads to … the loss of freedom and autonomy,” she said. She was right. Today, PC sex-suspicion is far more entrenched, leading to all kinds of corrosions of autonomy: bans, fines, public shamings. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party seeks to control the “sex instinct” because it hates the idea of “men and women forming loyalties which it might not be able to control”. This is the same poisonous fuel to today’s hysteria about the “sex instinct”: an elitist, misanthropic fear of what humans may say to each other, and enjoy together, far from the jealous, authoritarian eyes of those who know better. Gayle is not merely the victim of an over-reaction. His shaming speaks to the ascendancy of a sexless, joy-killing climate of anti-human suspicion. A new expert class has taken it on itself to police everything we do, from our chatter to our come-ons, from the naughty images we look at to the way we have sex. We need a new sexual revolution. Not against priests and prigs this time but against a chattering class that poses as cool and liberal but is in fact cold, severe and in need of a jolly good … well, I’ll let your imagination do the rest, while you’re still free to imagine such things.