St. Valentine's Day came and went with the usual hoopla, the same as last year's and years before. It seems that St. Valentine's Day is the great excuse for the highbrow telly and radio talking heads to belabour the terminally belaboured topic of sex. Why do they do that? What may have made that sort of television program titillating in 1950 is now as exciting as a lecture on the Carnot cycle of the steam engine.

Sitting with Mrs. Mudgeon in front of the telly on the evening of St. Valentine's Day, cocktails in hand and a tin of chocolate truffles within reach, I switch on the box just in time for a talking head to start her show. The subject is guess-what, for which she has assembled a panel of specialists. One is an overly jovial rabbi who can say more words per second than an Ingram M11 can shoot bullets. Another is a serious young woman who wrote a book about a serious subject, the kind that has to do with serious women, liberation, how tough life is nowadays, and such. The third panelist, another young woman, looks a little more cheerful, but I miss the reason why she is on the panel. Grandma Helen Gurley Brown is the fourth member of the team of experts. Helen has had so much plastic surgery that she just looks weird. There is so much of that stuff that a septuagenarian can take and still look normal, let alone an advocate of feminine seduction. Helen seems to have just emerged from a long illness, the kind that would have eaten away all her skin fat and shed most of her facial epithelium. This eerie appearance is so distracting that I miss the beginning of the discussion. The rabbi, who cannot stop talking at breakneck speed, makes it clear that he has figured out everything there was to figure out about sex, among which that sex is fun. Along the way he slips in a few jokes that make him laugh. The serious woman tries to interject contrived trivialities. The other woman gets my cheers when she hints that there is too much talk about sex. Then, Grandma Helen cleverly suggests that sex is fun when you combine it with champagne and a bubble bath. That does it. Mrs. Mudgeon and I agree to stop this self-inflicted torture and we click off the box to return to the undisturbed enjoyment of our drinks.

Some fifty years ago, the mainstream media started a "truth" crusade about sex in the names of liberation, honesty, knowledge, and happiness against puritanical obscurantism, Victorian hypocrisy, and other such Anglo-Saxon bad habits that were poisoning our society. Kinsey, a pervert of the worst sort and a quack, provided most of the crusade's "scientific" basis. A new industry was thus born, and its first objective was to persuade as many people as possible that all the fun they had found in sex so far was ridiculously inadequate and that they had to do better. The fear of ridicule and the Anglo-Saxon concern for achievement were enough to seed many minds with enough insecurity to guarantee a living for hordes of sex psychologists, sex counsellors, sex therapists, and all the improbable sex experts paraded on the telly to advertise their trade and keep it alive. Within a decade, the subject of sex was all over daytime and nighttime radio and television in discussions that pretended to be clinical only to allow for increasing levels of crudeness and aberration. Predictably, an ever wider acceptance of crudeness and aberration set in as a desirable manifestation of enlightenment. Crudeness and aberration have become "progressive," interesting, and even artistic.

It is high time to reintroduce some Victorian modesty in matters of sex and to stop the clatter. Modesty entailed an appealing aura of mystery that the "truth" crusaders and other sex mechanics have destroyed. I am tired of the boring movie love scenes with background of saxophone music, heavy breathing, and fake orgasms. Is it so difficult to imagine what happens on the other side of the bedroom door? Remember Scarlet O'Hara's next morning breakfast after Rhett carried her up the stairs. That was sexier and funnier than cliché sweaty antics through soft lenses and studied lighting. I am also tired of the shows that parade self-centered exhibitionists too eager to spill the details of their sex lives. Contrary to the propaganda broadcasted by the sex industry, Victorian modesty was not rooted in ignorance and self repression, and women's diaries of the times attest to that. It is just that one would not speak of these matters in public, and that was entirely proper. What was going on in private was another story, and to call that hypocritical is just silly if not voyeur opinion.

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful, as Mae West is reported to have said. I believe that she was right, but I also think that talking too much about a good thing can only be crass. Let's just enjoy too much of the good thing and keep it private.