Sex without tears
Simon Raven Madonnas and Magdalens: The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual
Attitudes Eric Trudgill (Heinemann £6.50)
Promiscuity Michael Schofield (Gollancz £6.50) Erie Trudgill's aim, as announced in the Preface to Madonnas and Magdalens, is to explain sympathetically the sources of Victorian sexual attitudes and in particular the Victorian view of women.' (My italics.) The Victorians, Mr Trudgill wishes us to understand, were not all of them or even most of them fools or hypocrites: when they praised ,P.urny and denounced sexual irregularity "e any form of sexual congress outside the marriage bed), they meant what they said and they had excellent reasons, given their time and their condition, for saying It. For in the Victorian view, Mr Trudgill argues, sexual licence offered a definite threat to far things which they very sensibly valued lar higher than sexual pleasure, illicit indulgence in which endangered hearth, health, career and bank-balance. On top of these Practical considerations came those prompte`! by Christianity (still a powerful factor with thefeeling middle classes at least), by moral (still strong even in those who had rejected Christianity), and, not least, by the aesthetic sense—for if looseness might sometimes be found venial in men, in women it struck a brutal blow at the ideal concept, Very dear to the Victorians, of woman as Mother and Saviour, the Madonna. th But here, of course, we come to a hitch. If ,Madonna must never pollute herself, tr:1,tner Must she be polluted. If you happen „7e Married to her, therefore, although it is duty to impregnate her and hers to be ninregnated, the thing must be managed
with the minimum of pleasure on your side and none at all on hers. She, being the Madonna, needs none; but how are you, a mortal man, to satisfy your still rampant appetite? You cannot masturbate, because Victorian medical opinion (mistaken but unshaken) affirms that you will become a drooling idiot if you do. You cannot even enjoy wet dreams with equanimity, since these (known as spermatorrhoea) are almost as debilitating. Nothing for it, then; you must go to a whore or else go off your head.
The old paradox now presents itself. As Mr Trudgill's nicely argued if scarcely original exegesis makes very plain to us, the sublime pretensions of the Madonna absolutely depend on the ready availability of the Magdalen. And I mean Magdalen. Victorian notions of life did not comprehend the calm and competent prostitute who made a neat professional job of fornication and retired comfortably on the proceeds; Victorian susceptibilities required and relished the thirteen-year-old virgin who had been seduced by a treacherous baronet and transformed overnight into a bedizened harlot, doomed to swift decay, contemptuous rejection by erstwhile clients, a suitable interval of misery and repentance, and an early, squalid grave. Yet in all of this, as Mr Trudgill insists, though there is much perversity, there is little hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is to preach what one does not believe; it is not hypocritical, merely human, to fall short of sincere professions. The Victorians genuinely believed, from earnest motives both of economics and religion, that their homes must be kept pure and that sexuality must be contained. To achieve the first they set up their wives and womenfolk as compulsive saints; and to ensure the second they must fain connive at suitable provision for compulsive sinners. While they worshipped their Madonnas, therefore, they also tacitly accepted their Magdalens. True, their mental attitudes to these unhappy females ranged unwholesomely between the callous and the lurid, with occasional and particularly smelly excursions into the sentimental ; but when one comes right down to it, Victorian whores were destroyed by the exigencies of a perilous vocation, not by the hypocrisy of their clientele.
The Victorians got themselves so knotted up about sexual questions, first because sexual entertainments outside marriage were condemned by Christian doctrine as wicked, secondly because—in an age which knew little of contraception or prophylaxis—sexual consequences could be so damnably awkward. Nowadays, of course, no one cares about Christian doctrine, not even the Christian Church, and we all know everything there is to know about condoms and evasion of the clap. So that's finally put sex in its proper place, says Michael Schofield in his recommendation of Promiscuity: it's free, it's fun, it needn't have anything to do with dreary old love; and never mind being unfaithful if you want to be, we all need a change from time to time. Just explain politely to the wife first (in case she gets worried about where you've got to) and amuse her by telling her all about it afterwards in order to make you both horny. • Mr Schofield's book puts me in mind of two remarks : Norman Douglas's observation that 'the only infallible aphrodisiac is variety'; and one by an old girl friend of my own, to the effect that she rated copulation as roughly the equivalent, for pleasure, of 'a nice cup of tea'. Myself, I set it a shade higher —somewhere round a good cigar, though less reliable and more cursory. You will understand, then, that I entirely agree with my old girl friend and with Norman Douglas, and therefore, of course, with Mr Schofield's general drift. But I have one point to pick with Mr Schofield : he seems to think that the tax-payer should foot all the bills— for contraceptives and lewd apparatus, and also for effortless abortions and luxurious VD clinics in case things turn sour once in a way. Now, whatever the Victorians may or may not have got wrong, they got one thing absolutely right : one must pay the price of one's own pleasures. I'm all in favour of Mr Schofield's doctrine of letting the joy be unconfined (and would blithely follow it myself had not years of brandy and baccarat rendered me almost impotent) but I do draw the line at stumping up for other people's amusements. Anyway, all the lovely young rompers would enjoy their games much more, would spin them out with much greater care and appreciation, if they had .to fork out themselves, so to speak, for their own hot cockles.
Come to that, they might enjoy their goodies yet more again if they still thought they were wicked. There's nothing like a little hell-fire to flumber any dish of pleasure —another thing to be said for the Victorians.
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