Dialogue: Coming to terms with new morality

I am intrigued at the kerfuffle over the topless strippers at a firm's Christmas party and the mammarian mermaids on the tables at a television awards night.

What intrigues me about the Vodafone do is that the objections recorded in the Herald were not about the tawdriness of a bunch of young women being paid to flaunt their boobs and bums before all and sundry, but that all the strippers came from Thailand.

And at the TV Guide Television Awards, the objection wasn't that live, semi-naked women were paid to pose as table settings for all to ogle, but that their positioning was an affront to Maori protocol and, for some, degrading to women.

In the case of the Vodafone event, four (out of 1400) people complained to the Herald, which means that the other 1396 were either too shocked to speak or - and this is more likely - simply accepted the display of rented female flesh with equanimity.

But what the female complainants were outraged about was that, as they saw it, the display promoted exploitation of Thai women. While one told us she had complained to the Human Rights Commission (No, I kid you not), another, who naturally declined to be named, said the strip show appeared to legitimise Thailand's prostitution problems and sent out the message that it was all right for men to go on "sex tours" to Thailand.

Now that is drawing a very long bow indeed. What if the women had been Kiwis, or Aussies, or Americans, or whatever, as well they might have been in this city, where female bodies of every age, shape and hue are on sale day and night?

"The fact is," she said, "that the sex industry in Thailand is really out of hand; there's nothing glamorous about it."

So what? The sex industry is out of hand in this city, too. Did we not read just the other week that schoolgirls as young as 12 and 13 are selling their bodies on the streets of South Auckland, often to men three and four times their age?

Nor is there anything glamorous about the sex industry in New Zealand, where in certain streets in every city the reek of spilled booze, cigarette butts and stale sex wafts from nearly every doorway.

One irony of the whole thing is that whoever organised the "One Night in Bangkok" event for Vodafone considered it necessary to use almost naked young women as part of the theme. Apparently, as one partaker told us, when you think of Bangkok you think of the nudie bars.

Yet in our Travel Section on Tuesday there is a whole page devoted to Bangkok, written by a New Zealander who spent four nights there and loved every minute of it, and nowhere is there any reference to prostitutes or nude bars.

Perhaps it is significant that the only one of the four with a rational complaint was a male. He told us that most partygoers accepted the strippers, "but I thought it was tacky and in bad taste ... " Right on.

The fascinating thing about all this is that it confirms in my mind two things: that traditional Judaeo-Christian morality has largely ceased to exist in our society; and that it has been replaced with a whole set of new strictures, which parade under the generic title of political correctness.

The vast majority of the generation that are now in their 20s and 30s, who are the movers and shakers of any generation, seem to have no conception of morality - sexual morality in particular - as we who are in our 40s, 50s and older were taught to understand it.

The breakdown of sexual mores has been going on at least since the 1960s, which spawned the hippie generation and the birth-control pill. Today we seem to have reached the stage where anything goes and our senses are assaulted day in and day out by sexual images and innuendo - on television, in movies, in magazines, on street billboards, in newspapers, and now at social events.

All this is not to say that the traditional morality that proscribed such things as adultery, fornication, homosexuality and abortion is any less valid than it ever was. The morals that came to us through the Bible were never intended to spoil our fun. Rather, they were given to us by a loving God for our protection, well-being and happiness.

Thus it is that we have been seeing the unhappy results of our disobedience for a long time now - in such things as more and more broken marriages; increasing illegitimate births in spite of a huge annual number of abortions; epidemics of virulent venereal diseases, including the fearsome and fatal HIV/Aids; domestic violence, child abuse and paedophilia; and tragic rates of youth suicide.

We are indeed reaping what we have sown - and be assured that the harvest has only just begun.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz