PERSONAL COLUMN

The sex obsession

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER

Every age delights in deriding the mores and social pretensions of its predecessor, but I doubt whether many have built up quite so devastating and prolonged a con- tempt as we in the twentieth century hive shown towards the 'respectability' of our Victorian forebears. Particularly in sexual matters, not only were the Victorians, by the standards of our new twentieth century orthodoxy, repressed, prudish, puritanical and inhibited almost to the point of perver- sion, but above all, as we have been re- minded by a number of recent books, they were arch-hypocrites. Behind their latade' of respectability and high-mindedness, they showed a private obsession with sex that was all the more unhealthy for being so self-righteously disguised.

This knowledge has undoubtedly given their immediate successors an enormous amount of rather complacent comfortr, but I wonder whether it might not also give us pause to speculate, by the same token, upon how future generations will come to view the mores and pretensions of our own time? Will they in fact regard us, as so many people do now, as the most un- hypocritical generation that ever lived, having thrown off the repressions and pre- tence of the ages, and standing at the thres- hold of an unprecedented age of sexual freedom and honesty?

Certainly what the historians of the future will observe, as they look back first to the nineteen twenties and then to the 'fifties and 'sixties, is the sudden rise (thanks to the new engines of publicity) of the most concentrated bout of public obsession with sex that history can record. As they visit the British Museum, to turn the yellowing pages of the Observer or the Sunday Times, they will find there recorded all the great and historic engagements by which the last forces of Victorian prudery were overcome.

They will read, for instance, of the great campaign against the tyrannical Lord Chamberlain for the_ right of every English- man to watch an actor carrying a ladder 'at a provocative angle' across a stage. They will find the brave story of how a Christian bishop single-handedly defied all the forces of reaction by describing sexual intercourse as an 'act of Holy Communion', and how the finest minds of the day proclaimed Lady Chatterley's Lover as a great and sensitive work of art—followed by the even more moving story of how two million sensitive and cultured citizens then rushed to the bookshops to share in this rich artistic experience for themselves. They will gaze in awe at the advertisements of publishers and film companies, each pro- claiming its product to be more 'candid', 'frank', 'honest' and 'unashamed' than the last. In the teachings of Professor Ayer, the collected works of Dr Alex Comfort, the meditations of Kenneth Tynan, the philosophical disquisitions of Hugh Hefner, they will find painted a glowing vision of a new world, in which all the old hypo- crisies about sex had been stripped away, and in which a new shining generation of fearless, vital, alive young people eagerly seized without any sense of guilt their in- born right to do what they liked, almost where they liked.

Surely, from such visions, they will con-

dude that nothing could have been more dissimilar to the dreary shams and self- deceptions of Victorianism that these new Olympians had buried?

And yet, as they look deeper, our re- searchers may be struck by certain pecu- liarities about this golden age of sexual freedom. The first might be the extent to which its preoccupation appeared to be not just with the reality of sex—after all, many ages have fortunately been concerned with that, otherwise we should none of us be here—but simply with the idea of sex, the image of sex: the written image, the visual image, the image proclaimed in 'shocking' novels and 'daring' films, in 'provocative' fashions and 'sexy' magazines, in thousands of striptease clubs and millions of advertise- ments. Other ages may have been notorious for their licence, even elevated promiscuity into a 'new morality'—but surely none had ever been quite so fascinated simply with the omnipresent Idea of Sex?

The second thing our historian might observe was the extent to which all this deluge of sexual imagery was concerned not with extolling the traditional delights of marriage, ordered normality or the repro- duction of the species, but almost solely with self-gratification (or as they called it, `self-fulfilment') and with every conceivable `forbidden' or perverted variation on normal love. Many societies had carried their communal phallus in procession to invoke the fertility of themselves and their crops. Many had made sculptures, or even held formalised 'orgies', to the same end. But no society had ever given itself over on such colossal scale to a preoccupa- tion with imagery of everything except normal married love—homosexuality, adul- tery, lesbianism, prostitution, abortion, sadism, masturbation. And yet the even more curious thing our researcher would also observe would be the constant, almost shrill insistence with which these twentieth century folk continually proclaimed how their obsession with sex was more 'healthy', `mature' and 'normal' than that of any of their ancestors.

The third thing our historian might re- mark about these pursuers of the image of sex was their extraordinary restlessness. Their contemplation of naked bodies on the stage, or their reading about sexual per- versions and violence, never seemed to be quite an end in itself, unless it could also be regarded as in some way an act of de- fiance, a `pushing back of the frontiers', some kind of novelty or other (despite the dreary repetitiveness both of the number of basic variations on one theme available

to contemplate, and of the self-congratula- tory language used to describe them). In- deed, as he dug further into his files, he would begin to suspect that for all their declarations of 'emancipation' and 'free- dom', the most blatant characteristic of these progressive-minded people of the 'sixties seemed to be their enslavement to the need to 'shock' someone. He mould find literally acres of newsprint devoted to the 'battle against censorship', to attacking the prudes and killjoys. until he might even begin to wonder whether some of the figures regularly wheeled on for this ritual abuse, such as 'Mrs 'Whitehouse' or `Alf Garnett', were not actually invented by the progressives of the day, to provide them with an object for their hatred and derision.

Each new 'breakthrough', each new `victory' over the reactionaries, was not so much the final triumph, but only the spur to ever more desperate striving after 'shock and 'freedom'. And even then, it never seemed quite clear on just what grounds the progressives were fighting their un- ending battle. Indeed, if our historian should by any chance fall on a document entitled 'Report by the Working Party set up by a Conference on the Obscenity Laws convened by the Chairman of the Arts Council May 1969', he would be more be- mused than ever, for he would find a dif- ferent argument for the abolition of cen- sorship on almost every page—one man arguing that pornography was essential to learning the facts of life, another that it acted as catharsis for the sexual neuroses of society, a third that it was justified on the grounds that 'much of the greatest art of all ages was directly concerned with sex and violence', a fourth that, without it, men would grow up 'immature, mentally and physically' and a fifth, a bookseller, claiming that 'the law must be changed, so that a bookseller is regarded as being a member of a fine profession and not as a purveyor of pornography, an image which, I am afraid, he is rapidly gaining'.

And yet, for all this, he would find the report itself concluding that if all porno- graphy was legalised, it might wither away altogether, like Marx's state (although surely, if all these eminent witnesses were to be believed that it was not only harm- less but actually beneficial, then the work of the pornographers should have been not merely legalised, but subsidised, and even made compulsory?).

So what, at the end, would our future historian make of it all? Perhaps he would not even be appalled at the hypocrisy of an age in which millions of magazines could be sold to supply the imagery for solitary vice, under the guise of 'art studies' or 'he-man' sexual liberation—a hypocrisy beside which anything in the Victorian age pales into complete insignificance. Perhaps he would in retrospect merely despair—at the thought that any collection of human beings could have so deluded themselves. led on by their gigantic illusion of sexual nirvana, while, beneath the dream, mounted ever higher the human wreckage of guilt, unwanted children, abandoned wives, ab- ortions, and all the misery and despair of

a galloping sexual instability. c

Perhaps he might conclude that the whole sex obsession had been nothing more than a form of violent collective psychosis, which had come over a society trapped and made rootless by its increasingly technological environment, like rats in an electric maze. a And he could, of course, be right.