ART AND EROS
SIR,-I think many would agree that the touches of violence in such a film as Ben-Hur give the audience of that film sadistic responses which they had better be without. These effects are 'sadistic' and 'sexual' as Katharine Whitehorn says, but their perverseness goes unnoticed by the censor and the public.
I think, however, there is a fallacy in her argu- ment on the other hand that `Bardot is clean sex,' and 'it is only what goes on in ordinary heads and beds anyway.' This shows a fallacy which occurs, too, in your other correspondent's recent remarks on strip clubs-that 'there is no evidence that businessmen are corrupted by such clubs' Eroticism in folksong is an expression of sexual vigour, and is carefully suspended in a social- cultural code of sexual nururs. as James Reeves has shown. This is true, too, I think, of Hindu erotic sculpture-it expresses the wonder of sexual creativity, in forms of great beauty. Even though Hindu erotic sculpture shows gods in the act of copulation the effect is to fill the observer with awe, for the primary purpose is to celebrate the wonder of life. It was this kind of celebration which Lawrence attempted in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which is now the subject of public prosecution. In these cases the erotic power is suspended in the medium of poetry, or sculpture, or poetic prose, the art being more important than the display or description of parts of the body or physical union.
At the utmost extreme from these works of art are the displays of actual rape which, I believe, the Romans enjoyed in their forums. To this category belongs the strip club—the man dressed as an electric plug uniting with the girl dressed as an electric socket : and the films of Brigitte Bardot, surely? The point of these displays being not the
extending of our awareness of human experience through the sensitive delineation of it by the artist, but the kick we get from watching certain forms 3f sexual display.
The strip club owner says to himself: give my audience a kick.' So does the maker of a film such as Ben-Hur, or the exploiter of Brigitte Bardot's charms. Everything is directed at tease—hence the cult of 'sex-kittenishness.' The sex in question may be 'normal' to the extent it is not sadistic or homo- sexual—but it is inevitably the sex of the voyeur, because the audience is in public seats, watching other people make love in pictures twenty feet high.
Visual eroticism is only properly `normal' when it is part of the love-making of two people, alone, and in secret, one with the other. It is no argument in the discussion of the very subtle problems of public taste, censorship, and art to say of film exhibitionism 'this is clean sex' or 'it is only what goes on in ordinary heads and beds anyway.' Unfortunately we are confused because sexual appeal today is every- where used to make us buy clothes, cosmetics, cigarettes, beer, or cars, and we regard the eye-greed for bosoms, cleavage, and women's limbs as normal. It isn't—it is really part of our immaturity and our sickness: and it is deliberately inculcated to give us 'the wants,' by commercial sources.
Between lovers 'the wants,' the exploitation of looking at the body, and all the strange and beautiful manifestations of sexually exciting behaviour are magnificent aspects of life's potentialities. In any public show, unless there is a governing high purpose, either of art, or, as in the circus or certain forms of dance, of entertainment, exhibitionism is degrading. it is debasing to sec a human being willing to exhibit the naked and lovely body for cash return. Far from being normal, it possibly makes eroticism for the lover in secret less rewarding. The special condition of film, theatre, and other spectacles must not be forgotten—there is always an audience, and thus always a movement towards the lower common denominator of taste and interest, at worst the tendency to gloat or sneer. The lover does neither. In private 'ordinary beds' there is, thank God, no audience.—Yours faithfully, Ducidake, Ash well, Baldock, Herb
DAVID 1101.1ROOK
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