Kinks are no fun without the shame

On hearing the rumors that the boxer David Haye is in a “throuple” — a three-person romantic relationship — with Una Healy from the Saturdays and a model named Sian Osborne, I felt a rare flicker of carnal pique. Apparently Victoria Beckham is off her feed (a prawn and two capers) with worry that her baby boy Brooklyn might be in a throuple with his wife Nicola Peltz and singer Selena Gomez, while Rita Ora is still denying that she and her now-husband Taika Waititi were in one with the attractive actress Tessa Thompson a couple of years back. They were papped having what appeared to be a three-way snog on a hotel balcony. You wait ages for a throuple — and then three come along at once!

Personally, I’m pleased about the rise of the throuple, mostly as a cheeky snub to the dullest sentence in the English language: “As part of a loving and monogamous relationship between two people.” So strong is my mutinous streak that whenever I hear someone say this, I automatically add to myself: “Just be sure to choose the right two people to get between.” Throuples sound “naughty” in the traditional British sense — a throwback to the days of the music hall and the seaside postcard, of Carry On films, Sid James and Hattie Jacques. After a few years of marriage, Hattie moved her toyboy into the house she shared with her husband, so perhaps hers was the original throuple. Sex with a view to having naughty fun is sadly lacking in these woke-scold dog-days. You can no longer call something naughty, as it sounds as if you might be “judging” and we all know where judging ends, because words are literally violence.

Has sex ever been so relentlessly discussed yet so weirdly unsexy? We’ve reached the point where the strangest kinks — adult babies, leather pups, fancying the former UK shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry — are acceptable, so long as no one actually appears to be having an exciting time and everyone makes it look like hard graft. An amazing amount of men these days seem to enjoy crawling about naked in animal masks, sometimes with a ball-gag in their mouths. They have dog names and dog beds and dog toys. But don’t you dare laugh. This is serious stuff.

The younger generation can’t seem to summon up the will to have much sex. As one who grew up in the free-for-all of the late twentieth century, I feel sorry for kids today, hanging on to their virginity the way my generation hung on to the bong. But who can blame them? They’ve been terrified by monstrous regiments of role-playing perverts proudly touting their fetishes all over the internet, and confused by the need to secure the right sort of consent from potential partners.

It has occurred to me that all the very strict rules and protocol around consent could be construed as sexy — an extreme way of talking dirty. “May I do X?,” “Can I touch Z?” and the like — pure filth! But that’s not how the kids see it. You’d have thought, as a backlash to consent, they might have a penchant for mechanical, transactional, insensitive sex. But it just seems to make them even more miserable. Truly, atomized and alienated sex is wasted on the young.

I expect, to an extent, the fun has gone from sex because of the ostentatious violence that’s par for the course in porn. Sexual violence has become so much the norm in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey that choking has even made it into a Harry Styles ditty. In America, one survey found that a third of female undergraduates between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four said they had been choked the last time they had sex. Of that group, 65 percent said they experienced it during their first-ever sexual encounter.

No wonder no one blinks at bondage gear in public any more — as long you’re not too old or fat. Madonna recently accused the world of misogyny because it didn’t go into raptures when she waddled about in skintight leather at the Grammys. But Sam Smith was ridiculed just as much — and last time I looked, they was a man.

I’m not being sizeist or ageist — only to myself, and I’m never offended — but I do think that fetish-wear (much like lovebites and Maoism) should be left to the young. What’s truly sad about Madonna is not that at sixty-four she still likes to get her kit off, or parade about with a whip, but that she does it to get the approval of strangers. It’s this need for “validation,” sex as performance, which has helped make modern sex so unsexy. Po-faced wokers whinge about their right not to be “kink-shamed” — but kinks are meant to be shamed. Shame is part of the thrill.

I can’t help thinking that if the young of today actually practiced their kinks more and wailed for validation of them less, they might cheer up a bit. Which brings us back to the throuple. I’d hate to see it go the dreary way of polyamory, which generally means unattractive and humorless millennials boring two people in bed rather than one. Let the throuple remain something saucy — something which “friends” tell the scandal mags they’re “concerned” about and which they secretly think about longingly from the confines of their loving and monogamous relationships. Because it sounds like fun.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.