Parlez-moi d'Amour
BOOKS about sex—those offered for public sale, at least—have several possible justifications, They may make us laugh, an important service, for in the present state of sexual philosophy excessive seriousness is at least as harmful as frivolity. They may have interesting things to tell us, all the way from apparently unrelated oddities of custom and belief to observations which may increase our understanding of ourselves and our neighbours, and thence of our society and literature. (Kinsey was not too bad on some of these, especially the first.) They may go so far as to propound some , theory of human sexuality, and thence of human behaviour in general. None of these functions is performed by Dr. Henriques.
The section on aphrodisiacs is a natural focus of attention in works of this kind, but since the recipes of highest repute call for a spoonful of, powdered lava or a specific part of a Jamaican water-frog that has spent thirty-two days in an ants' nest, I have little of moment to pass on. Perhaps, though, you could liven up the odd cock- tail party a bit by introducing among the canapds a few slices of May sausage from Sfax—made from the entrails of a lamb killed in May and seasoned with burnt mouse. (I'm sure that little place in Soho . . .) If this falls flat, there's always the old drink; Dr. Henriques has noticed, and' records here, that 'sexual advances are more likely to be made and well received When alcohol is consumed.' But you would be well advised to lay off those stinging nettles you were thinking of giving a whirl; they are condemned most memor- ably in Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs, an early work of John Davenport's published in 1869.
One would not have taken this line if Dr. Hen- riques's survey had much more to impart than that you never know what people will be getting up to next, if he were better informed about Western society (he thinks that the Beat Generation arc adolescents—in age, that the Wolfenden Report did 'a great deal" to liberalise our attitudes to homosexuality), if he merely wrote with less pom- pous woodenness. Further, his subtitle is mis- leading: his interests are less in sociology than in what the popular mind, at any rate, normally dis- tinguishes as anthropology. The Pacific islands, South-East Asia, Africa are combed for rituals and routines while the West gets some highly de- batable generalisations. There is more about ritual prostitution in eighteenth-century India than about adultery in modern Britain and America. more about the Swazi than the Swedes. We learn very little about what courtly love, Restoration licence or Victorian respectability actually meant, , less still about how our sexual behaviour ties up with our religion, economics, class-structure, dress,
literature, entertainment, attitudes to alcohol—
how many evenings at the local will ,fire off as- many seductions as how many sherry parties? Dr. Henriques doesn't know, or anyway isn't saying. Our changing ideals of female beauty are 'depen- dent upon factors which are inherent in a par- ticular society at any given moment of time.' What factors?
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