But If You Try Sometimes, Well, You Might Find You Get What You Need

Keith Richards is 80 today, and therefore also 40 years married to Patti Hansen. Terrifyingly to some of us, Brad Pitt is 60. Congratulations all round. It's Keith's band. Mick is lucky to be allowed in it. One of the great dilemmas of my life is that I love the music, a very wide range of it, while hating the drugs.

Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse are dead, but the considerably older Richards and Ozzie Osbourne are still alive. Just as women have an emotional strength, a sheer mental toughness, that is rarely or never quite found in men, so the male body is simply more resilient physically and physiologically. That is just the way that life is.

Women have been and remain the overwhelming victims of the Sexual Revolution, and they are now the overwhelming victims of the Chemical Revolution, which in our own case began in earnest with the reclassification of cannabis, the point at which the party of the Fabian and the Christian Socialist pioneers finally died.

"What about alcohol?", children are now taught in school to parrot. Quite so. Those boys falling down in the gutter are probably doing themselves long-term harm. Those girls falling down in the gutter are certainly doing themselves long-term harm, and probably opening themselves up to short-term harm as well. It was women who enforced the taboo against female drunkenness, just as it was women who enforced the taboo against female promiscuity. They need to resume doing both, as a matter of the utmost urgency.

Alcohol is too embedded in Western culture to be able to eradicate. Tobacco has turned out not to have been; within my adult lifetime, anti-smoking measures have had a transformative cultural effect. Anything else definitely is not. But alcohol is. We cannot get rid of it. But we can and must control it. 

The victims of our failure to do so, like the victims of our failure to enforce the drug laws, like the victims of our removal of standards of sexual behaviour, like the victims of our genocide of Gaza "because rapes", and like the victims of our withdrawal of welfare provision and other essential public services, are overwhelmingly women and their children. Whatever happened to feminism?