Many modern intellectuals of the secular mold don't much care for the mores of the Victorian era. "Victorian" is common parlance for stuffy or prudish, and many people not in specialized and intellectual fields share the same general mindset. After all (one may imagine them generalizing), not only were the Victorians prudes who repressed matters of sex, but they were also snooty white supremacists who, even if they didn't have slavery outright, as Britain did not after the 1830s, certainly thought of Africans, Chinese, American Indians, and the like as 'inferior' races. And they whip out something like Kipling's "White Man's Burden" to prove it. A huge amount of effort over the past 40 years or so has gone into eradicating any hint of racism or what one might call monoculturalism from thought, writing, and practice. Some of this has been misguided, some of it likely more politically than morally influenced, and some of it outright ridiculous, but the point of my post is not to delve into that, especially since I'm in no wise prepared to argue about it in depth, should anyone want to. Of course I believe that treating fellow men and women with one sort of physical characteristics as inferior to men and women with a different set is simply ludicrous. In principle, trying to free a culture that was once highly prejudiced from that prejudice is a good and needed thing. I also freely admit that the Victorians had a big blind spot here. Kipling was probably really sincere about the white man's burden, which may prevent one from accusing him of sheer arrogance, but it does not make his position all right.
It's oversimplifying a lot to take the Victorian era alone to task, as if it were the only age to endorse slavery, but it's plain to just about everyone that the majority opinion of the time had a blind spot; a big blind spot that caused injustices and even atrocities to be perpetrated against non-whites.
But a kind of irony emerges when we consider the subject of sex. As much as intellectuals like to repudiate the racism and prejudice of the 19th century, they may even more enjoy rolling their eyes at the lack of "frankness" about sex in a pre-Freud world, and, most of all, finding Freudian elements in a pre-Freud world. I haven't taken the trouble to look at any curricula of the "gender and sexuality" majors at several of the various colleges who've sent me mail, but I don't doubt that many of them involve digging up hidden sexual repressions and veiled references in Austen, Dickens, and the rest.
The Victorians had their Wickhams (whom I realize dwells locked in the Regency era, but had he been real and lived to a ripe old age, he would have died a Victorian) and other unscrupulous types, of course, but even the generalized and caricatured view of this era indicates something that was really there, that is, a general moral sense and reticence that dominated civilized society during that time.
The ironic thing is that modern society, while so vigorously scrubbing out racism, is not only ignoring but encouraging the creeping stain of promiscuity. 
In shredding one of the great blind spots of the Victorian era, we have welcomed the destruction of one of its great virtues. We have exchanged one blind spot for another. We applaud both the abolitionists and anyone who subverted or even seemed to perhaps subvert sexual taboos.
I have already said that racism and prejudice are bad things. But the new blind spot is just as bad, if not worse. Racism is a mindset--an arrogant, misguided mindset, but a private one that can be shelved in public. Shattering barriers around the public discussion and depiction of sex on a graphic level, however, and reinterpreting old art or infusing new art with a kind of frenzied obsession with sex, is more open and immediate in its ill effects. Unhealthy sexuality spawns feminism even as women are more and more being made objects of. It shatters families. It ruins childhoods. It encourages violence, selfishness, dissipation, and inconstancy. It makes a mockery of covenant faithfulness.
Racism may not be gone (although there's far more of it in other countries than here), but there are enough people monitoring it with eagle's eyes that the chance of it breaking out in force any time soon is pretty slim. But promiscuity is with us everywhere: on our billboards, in our magazines, our movies, our books, our operas, our musicals, our plays, our streets, our homes. We need to take some energy away from redressing an old blind spot and start paying attention to the new one that's eating away at our society as we speak. In my mind, it doesn't matter quite so much if a college frat party hires one stripper as opposed to another because of her race. What matters is that we have strippers.
