We've become too lazy to bother with sex

Given half the chance, the English are contented to take life at an easy, undemanding half-speed

One of the more melancholy themes running through the final volume of Alan Clark's diaries is his preoccupation with his own declining powers.

As he grows older, he fears that he is becoming, as he puts it, "desexualated". In the early pages of the diary, he is enjoying a hot affair with a woman he calls "X" and is even considering leaving his wife, BLJ ("Beloved Little Jane") – "If I were younger, I could hold both these women without trouble," he writes. Now, what with desexualation, holding even one has become a worry.

There will be differing schools of opinion about this. While some readers may identify with Clark's insecurity, the majority will probably reflect that people in their seventies should have outgrown this sort of thing, that those who live by the sword should not bleat too loudly when the blade gets a bit rusty. Desire can be a terrible distraction – "like being chained to a lunatic", as someone once described it – and, it might be argued, Alan Clark would have achieved more of his many ambitions if he had managed to keep himself zipped up just now and then.

The idea that sex is a somewhat over-rated activity is quietly gaining ground, it seems. At a recent conference held at the London School of Economics, the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach caused quite a stir by suggesting that countless thousands of people – young, old and middle-aged – are ignoring the blandishments and stimuli of an increasingly sexualised society and are living together in a condition of comfortable, discreet celibacy.

Of course, the evidence is anecdotal. In this great age of the survey, in which people will own up to almost any intimate peculiarity if asked by a researcher with a clipboard, not having sex as a matter of choice remains something of a taboo. Now and then a celebrity – Cliff Richard, maybe, or Stephen Fry – will own up to celibacy, but these moments quickly pass. On the whole, celibates are not proud of themselves, according to Orbach. "Sex, along with food, is the idiom of our times. As a result, people are under tremendous pressure to have fulfilling physical relationships, and when they don't, they feel a sense of shame and keep it secret."

I suppose that a grown-up and generous response to all this is to bemoan the vulgarity of contemporary life, the influence of the tawdry marketeers of sex who work in advertising, TV, journalism or publishing. The pressure to conform in a culture where sex is at the heart of everything causes every bit as much frustration and happiness as its icy polar opposite.

On the other hand, I can't help wondering whether, in this area at least, Alan Clark was not a better role model – a more alive role model – than the many thousands of talkers, cuddlers and single-bed merchants who have given up on sex entirely. Susie Orbach argues, interestingly, that one of the problems is that, if you are in a long-term relationship, your partner not only becomes a sort of version of you but, horrifyingly, that version can represent your own self-distaste. "You dislike your partner for the things you dislike in yourself."

It sounds plausible, but there may be another explanation. The British, or at least the English, are a somewhat lazy nation, and given half the chance are contented to take life at an undemanding half-speed. It is for this reason that they put up with traffic jams or delays on trains in a way that other nationalities would not. It is why, as yet another survey has discovered, we spend longer in our offices, and to less effect, than the people of any other country in Europe. Visit almost any workplace in the early evening and you are likely to see a few pasty-faced types whiling away the time at their desks rather than having to face the outside world and do something – talk, act, think, make love.

The idea that these fuddled individuals are under pressure from an erotically obsessed media is only partly true. The truly lonely might be brought to a state of simmering frustration by TV adverts, programmes about randy holiday reps in Ibiza or the latest scandal to be described in clammy detail by the soft-porn tabloids; but for many couples, sitting together chastely at home, they have become a substitute for the real thing.

"I like to watch" – the words of Chance, the gardener in Being There – have become the unwritten motto of a slobbish age. Rather than having to make the effort – or even take the risk – themselves, the no-sex gang content themselves by catching up on Ulrika's love life, by being pleasurably scandalised by the evening's fly-on-the-bedroom-wall documentary, maybe even by reading Alan Clark's diaries.

Susie Orbach is almost certainly right about this problem, but takes too soft and sympathetic a line. It is time for less slacking at home, more modernisation of intimate working practices, before the national habit of desexualation sets in.

terblacker@aol.com