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Telegraph Blogs – Ed West: As Joan Bakewell now admits, Mary Whitehouse was right about a lot of things

She wasn’t right about everything, certainly, but as someone who grew up thinking of her as a bogeyman I can see she was right about some of the long-term effects of media sexualisation, and her detractors were wrong. Even Joan Bakewell, a former opponent, has seen the light, as she recently wrote in the Radio Times.

“The liberal mood back in the ’60s was that sex was pleasurable and wholesome and shouldn’t be seen as dirty and wicked,” Bakewell writes. “The Pill allowed women to make choices for themselves. Of course, that meant the risk of making the wrong choice. But we all hoped girls would grow to handle the new freedoms wisely.

“Then everything came to be about money – so now sex is about money, too. Why else sexualise the clothes of little girls, run TV channels of naked wives, have sex magazines edging out the serious stuff on newsagents’ shelves?”…

[W]hat the recently BBC biopic, Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, showed was just how much this was a class conflict. The lower-middle-class housewife from Nuneaton against the Oxbridge smarty-pants media set (Bakewell was at Newnham). It was a common theme throughout the sexual revolution – at the Oz trial the defence team even expressed fears that there were too many “lower-middle class” people on the jury, who might not sympathise with west London schoolboys and their hilarious larks.

Huh.