Without Comment

Here is a transcript, without comment,  of an exchange on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme which took place at roughly 7.36 a.m. on Tuesday 26th November 2013. It will be available on the Radio 4 iplayer for a few hours here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03j9ypd, but not after that. I believe it to be accurate.

 

After a series of anonymous interviews with young women at South Bank University about women’s changed views on promiscuity,  John Humphrys introduced Professor Kaye Wellings, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to discuss her report on more relaxed attitudes to sex. After some preliminaries, the following exchange took place at roughly 7.36 a.m.

 

Professor Wellings: ‘We’ve got a major change in the status of women over the last 20, 30 years which you would expect to carry through into their sexual lifestyles. You have also had in the last half-century a severance of sex from its reproductive consequences And then of course there’s the …

 

JH ‘Well once the Pill came along, obviously that changed everything…

 

KW: ‘Yeah, sure.  And other things, assisted reproduction, medical abortion and so on. But as your young women at the South Bank said,  it’s also about the media and social representations of women’s behaviour so that the old divide, the old double standard between a man as a super-stud and a girl as a slag is eroding’

 

JH: “Oh, that’s interesting, yeah and, and good…. …I mean that.. that... hardly necessary to make a value judgement on it, but , but quite encouraging in a sense, but if that is what’s happening women it means that women are no longer being regarded in the way they were once regarded, which, which had to change.’