Disturbing the peace: on the inalienable right to "excessively noisy sex".

• Author: O'Neill, Brendan

"UNLIKE WINSTON, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship."

So wrote George Orwell in 1984, his dystopian vision of a future where mankind's every thought, desire, and bodily tingle would be policed by the powers that be. Orwell imagined a Junior Anti-Sex League that spied on kissing and cavorting adults, and a ruling Party that sought to squash the "sex impulse." The heroes of his nightmarish tale had to sneak off to a wood in order to explore each other's bodies in a bit of peace and quiet.

It turns out that Orwell was suffering from premature speculation. It was not in 1984 that a major Western government made the "sex impulse"--the grunting, groaning sex instinct--into a police matter; it was in 2009. Here in the U.K., to add to our existing panoply of Orwellian measures--5 million closed-circuit TV cameras that watch our every move; "speaking cameras" that warn us to pick up litter or stop loitering; the government's attempt to recruit child spies to re-educate anti-social adults--we now have the bizarre and terrifying situation where a woman has been arrested for having sex too loudly. In modern-day Britain, even the decibels of our sexual moaning can become the subject of a police investigation.

At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the northeast of England, was remanded in custody for having "excessively noisy sex." The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her "shouting and groaning" and her "bed banging against the wall of her home" Cartwright has, quite reasonably, defended her inalienable right to be a howler: "I can't stop making noise during sex," she told The Daily Mail. "It's unnatural to not make any noises, and I don't think that I am particularly loud."

Pleasurable groaning and bed banging are common noises in crowded towns and cities across the civilized world. Most of us deal with them by sticking a CD in the stereo. Those who complain are normally told to stop being prudish or to have a discreet chat with the creators of the offending sex sounds. So how did Cartwright's expressions of noisy joy become a police case, scheduled...