SOMETIMES it feels as though we mislaid 50 years, as though in a fit of amnesia Western society had decided to forget half a century of progress and return to older, darker times.

It might also be, of course, that all talk of progress was a delusion.

That can't be quite true. Contraceptive rights, gay marriage, the need to protect children, gender equality, the rejection of homophobia and racism: those who would deny dignity have lost those battles and go on losing. No achievement is perfect, but anyone capable of thinking back even a couple of decades can measure big differences.

The rights of women would be an obvious case. That work is a long way from done. Scandals over pay go on. The campaign for 50-50 representation in politics is still far from won. But men mind their language a little more these days and sometimes, publicly at least, their behaviour. Primeval types might still decry "political correctness", or pretend to mourn the decay of tradition, but most of us have grasped the simple idea that respect is a human right. Haven't we?

Sometimes you wonder. There are days when you could believe that time did one of its science-fiction tricks and returned us all to the early 1960s. Clever young comics pass off rape jokes as "ironic" or "edgy". An otherwise articulate footballer like Ched Evans refuses to accept that a sex crime is a cause for remorse, at the very minimum. Smart folk at ITV can't see why a character called Dapper Laughs and his comedy of sexual extortion is not, for many people, any kind of joke.

True irony, with the real flavour of a Britain long ago, is provided by a 21st-century response: ban it. Otherwise sane, progressive individuals sound like nothing so much as the Daily Mail in one of its fits of self-righteousness. If the behaviour is hideous and the offence great, they want a stop put to it, and the sooner the better. The attitude is, first, understandable; secondly, dangerous; thirdly, daft.

If they ever gave me supreme control of the planet my banning orders would probably fill libraries. It would be one reason, of course, to overthrow me at all costs. We are all benign dictators in our daydreams. We can all list things that, in any decent world, wouldn't be allowed. That's the understandable part: human and - almost - rational.

Julien Blanc, "dating coach", "pick-up artist" and, laughably, "seduction expert", is a character the world could probably manage without. He has made a career from trying to convince one half of the species that sexual harassment and worse is the route to a happy life. His attempts to explain that grabbing a woman by the throat - truly seductive - was just wacky humour gone wrong have been worse than risible. So why not ban him from the country?

The Home Office has done just that. Theresa May's department is not obliged to explain its reasons, but it's a fair bet that an online petition, the demands of shadow secretary Yvette Cooper and international outrage towards Blanc might have had some influence. So we cross a line. It's the line between "public anger and contempt" and "Home Office ban". One speaks well of society, the other ought to worry anyone who pauses to think.

No-one, least of all May, has suggested that Blanc has actually broken a law. There's the remote chance he could be accused of incitement to violence, but he's no fool. He qualifies his statements carefully. Besides, what is his business? His many fans argue that he does no more than help "socially awkward" young men to form relationships with members of the opposite sex. It's almost social work.

Forget that nonsense and wonder what matters most: dealing with an obnoxious character, or preserving free speech? Blanc could be ridiculed, boycotted, subjected to protests wherever he shows his face. In Britain, we remain adept at mocking American chancers and their self-improvement seminars. But we are also the country in which David Cameron talks of confiscating the passports of young Muslims on grounds of his choosing.

That's the dangerous part, a combination of government by petition and ministerial repression. It isn't enough to say that thousands of people find Blanc obnoxious or potentially dangerous. Apart from anything else, we should know by now that bans have a nasty habit of becoming counter-productive.

Those who giggle at stand-ups with rape jokes, who follow Dapper Laughs in their millions on social media, are making a choice. The notion that cruelty is a bit of transgressive fun persists. In fact, it has become almost a derisive response to all our vaunted equality. It's a mark of this deeply "ironic" decade.

To ban Blanc is daft, finally, because it misses the obvious. The classes and videos he provides on behalf of an outfit called Real Social Dynamics are an international phenomenon, presumably a vastly profitable one. Ban the pedlar and the customers remain, hordes of young men on every continent still believing there is such a thing as "a pick-up line", that women are barely human, that sex justifies any behaviour. Can they be banned too?

Obviously not. It's not even clear that they can be explained. Where did they come from? How did they persist through all those supposedly progressive decades in which the rights of the person were held to be common ground for anyone who believed in a decent society? Or was that the biggest delusion of all? At minimum, May's decision is a distraction. It gets us no closer to an answer.

There are theories, of course. One big ­difference between this 21st century and ­society 50 years back is that pornography is these days ubiquitous. One American cliché runs that the industry is bigger, in dollar earnings, than Hollywood ever was. So the argument has it that young men and women have been inundated with absurd sexual fantasies, distorting both their reality and their behaviour. Hence, one way or another, the likes of Blanc. The argument sounds half-plausible. It also sounds like the beginnings of still another moral panic to which the response, as ever, will be still more demands for still more bans on this or that. The young, history suggests, are never done being depraved. It might be more useful to ask about the absence of better influences.

If so many women once had contact with the idea of liberation, how did they wind up with sons paying to hear about tawdry "pick-up lines"? Where have the fathers been during the formative years? Then again, if all that remains is some dull version of "I blame the parents", we really have made no progress since the 1960s.