Pride month: Is culture telling more of the Beautiful Story?

June has been Pride month – a global series of gatherings, begun as a march in the 1970s, that celebrate LGBTQ+ rights.

Interestingly, there have been articles this year suggesting that just perhaps we are starting to reach “the end of the rainbow” – some Reform-led councils have taken down Pride flags from their municipal properties. There are reports that Whitehall has banned civil servants from buying Pride lanyards.

As we edge towards another hot summer, society might potentially have peaked in hypersexualising literally everything. Channel 4 has finally finished its shocking Virgin Island series, a much-talked about show which follows 12 virgins, mainly in their 20s, to a “radical retreat” on a Mediterranean island, where a team of professional “sexperts” will work with them on their issues with intimacy. What comes across watching the first episode alone is the devastating way that our culture now seems to view sex – and virginity.

One in eight 26-year-olds in the UK are virgins, yet the young people on the show are convinced that virginity is shameful; “If I lose my virginity it's one less thing for people to ridicule me over”. There are feelings of failure, a desire to be accepted. One of the “sex experts” observes that “between rom coms and porn there is so much perfectionism … there is so much pressure”. One psychologist warned Tyla (a women’s entertainment site) that there is a risk of the show making sex appear to be about performance when “real intimacy involves vulnerability, trust, and communication, not just physical steps”.

With this perspective of sex as pressured and shameful, it is perhaps no surprise that while reviewing two books by very different queer authors, Times columnist Sarah Ditum noted “being officially asexual acts as a get-out from the unpleasant demands of ‘raunch culture’”. She concluded arguing that “we need a new sexual rights movement for the 21st century: one that argues for the right of sex to be fun again”. Back in 2022, post-liberal feminist Louise Perry published The Case Against the Sexual Revolution arguing that most women find it difficult to divorce sex from emotion, and shouldn’t feel shame for wanting sex to be far more meaningful than a temporary itch-scratching.

As followers of Christ, we may well recognise the war of internal will she describes – the fight between a desire for pleasure and shame is there in Romans too, of course: “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" (Romans 7v15). Oxford-educated barrister and adult convert Bijan Omrani, author of God is an Englishman, suggests that there is “weariness of the young” with what secular society is offering them – and a new interest in the spiritual, the beautiful, the timeless. Is it possible that this weariness will now extend to the hypersexualisation of our culture? Has it reached a peak with Virgin Island?

The Times’s psychologist and sex columnist Suzi Godson’s responded last month to a couple who have been together for 20 years. Their concern was that they had somehow “missed out” by only ever sleeping with each other. Friends had suggested they “open up” their marriage. Godson instead advised that they focus on their emotional connection as a way to enhance their spark. After several paragraphs on how they might reconnect better, she concludes sharing her awe at their relationship – “people change so much and so dramatically between the ages of 18 and 30, yet you have managed to grow up together and remain in sync with each other. That is a rare achievement and something you should celebrate".

God’s good news extends to all parts of our lives – His beautiful story for what sex should look like, this lifelong commitment and love within marriage – is something worth speaking up about in a society filled with shame and confusion. If we are starting to reach the end of the Pride rainbow, we may find it is a message people are relieved to receive.