Another voice
On sexual ethics
Auberon Waugh
Somewhere along the line, Dennis Nilsen seems to have got it all wrong. So, of course, did Peter Sutcliffe, but he was born a Catholic, and I shall be return- ing to his particular problems later. Nilsen, at least, was not a Catholic. He was a victim of the alternative dispensation. His father, a Norwegian soldier stationed in Scotland, moved off at the end of the war leaving his mother to cope with three children, of whom Dennis was the youngest. From his earliest years, his memories are those of a client of the welfare state. By the time he had moved on from two forms of government employ- ment — in the army and the police force — to a third, in the Manpower Services Commission, he had emerged as such a boring and unpleasant person that nobody could bear to spend time in his company. He was a homosexualist, of course, but even with the opportunities available to him for making new acquaintances of similar persuasion through his post in the Charing Cross Road Job Centre, people found him so stupendously boring that nobody would spend more than an evening in his company. Like so many social and emotional cripples, he drifted into left- wing politics and became branch organiser of the Civil Service Union, but even there his boring self-righteousness failed to se- cure the warmth and comradeship which he sought. So, if we are to believe Brian Masters's study (or at any rate John Carey's excellent review of it in the Obser- ver) called Killing for Company (Cape L10.95), he was reduced to seeking the company of corpses as being the only people who would not walk out on him.
Other people, in the same sort of pre- dicament, become prison visitors, but Nilsen kept his corpses under the floor- boards, retrieving them from time to time to sit them in an armchair and harangue them with his boring left-wing opinions, his grudges and grievances and the catalogue of his self-pity. Then, when the natural processes of decomposition made the corp- ses unacceptable company, even by his own undemanding standards, he boiled their heads, put them down the lavatory, and started looking around for a new companion. In this way he disposed of 15 young men in the course of five years, before being brought to book as a result of blocked drains in the house where he lived.
Nilsen obviously provides an extreme example of what used fashionably to be called urban alienation — the loneliness which rootless town-dwellers suffer who are too boring, too unpleasant or too unattractive in other ways to make friends. He also, perhaps, offers a paradigm for the relationship between personal inade- quacies, left-wing views and bureaucratic sadism. Although I have no particular reason to suppose that Nilsen was such a sadist as one is liable to meet in the course of any dealings with a government ministry or local authority, a glance at his face assures me that he almost certainly be- longed to that group. I have often specu- lated about the private lives of people behind desks who spend their working hours making things difficult for other people. It would be tempting to think they all have corpses under their floorboards and return home, of an evening, to haran- gue them. But Nilsen, as I say, is an extreme example. His problem was loneli- ness, and the traditional solution to that is within the marriage bond. No man is so boring, or so unpleasant, or so unattractive that he cannot find an equally boring, unpleasant or unattractive woman to be his life's companion if he sets his mind to it and I have no doubt that the same must be true in the homosexual world. But Nilsen's only attempt at a homosexual marriage ended in mutual disgust; obviously he is better off in prison.
So, we must all agree, is Peter Sutcliffe, but I wonder if he might have been saved from his worst attacks of homicidal lunacy if the Catholic Church had softened up on sexual matters a little earlier. No doubt it is a coincidence that Dom Raphael Appleby, a former headmaster of Downside who now runs a small residential centre for young people, should publish his new sex education book (Dear Church, What's the Point? Kevin Mayhew Publishers £1.95) in the same week that the Dail allowed condoms to be sold to unmarried Irish persons of 18 or over. According to Dom Raphael, who says it took him a long time to learn the meaning of sexuality, it is now permissible for an unmarried Catholic to fondle the breasts of a lady when courting. After 34 years as a monk, he feels that the fondling of breasts can provide 'a meaning- ful and loving moment, one of real signifi- cance and sharing', but only when it is 'significant and not trivial'. It has to be recognised by both of them that it is 'the furthermost intimacy that is or can be legitimately true of a relationship before marriage'. Genital contact of any kind is forbidden because, outside marriage, it becomes 'an isolated act of pleasure, not a physical expression of love and commit- ment'.
It is one of the joys of a celibate clergy that they feel free to pronounce on such subjects as How Far One Can Go with little danger of being contradicted and a blithe disregard for the likelihood of any- one paying attention. Dom Raphael, who owns up to teenage 'struggles in backs of cars, trying to get bras off girls' seems to have forgotten whether any degree of sexual arousal was involved in these epi- sodes, or what was the likely consequence of such arousal.
Perhaps the Catholic Church finds itself in the same position as the Labour Party, with rapidly diminishing appeal to the young. Gerald Kaufman, addressing him- self to this problem in the Sunday Times, advised that since few, if any, of the Shirley Williams generation of teenagers had the faintest idea who Hitler was, the only way for Labour to appeal to the young was to forget all about the past. The Catholic Church seems to have been involved in a similar exercise for the last 20 years. Where the error in Mr Kaufman s approach is easy to point out — the electorate is in fact getting older, flat younger — the error in Dom Raphael 's is more complicated. It rests on the assump- tion that Catholic doctrine was ever observed in the bedroom (or in the back of a car) and it ignores the traditional virtue of Catholic hypocrisy, which was to per- suade young people to marry and to stay married. Any weakening of the old hYPn" critical pretences weakens the whole struc- ture, with the result we all see that fewer and fewer young persons of intelligent or independent outlook are getting married. I bore on about this because it seems to me a recipe for unhappiness, turning us into a nation of Nilsens, to a greater or lesser extent. The latest edition of Social Trends (HMSO £.19.95) reveals a dramatic increase in the number of people living alone — from 11 per cent of the population in 1961 to 24 per cent in 1983. Add to this the proportion of people living in one- parent families, which has doubled from two and a half per cent in 1961 to five Per cent in 1983, and one sees that the institu- tion of the family is under serious attack.
Where abortion and contraception .le- are freely available, the dramatic rise ille-
gitimate gitimate births — from six per cent of live births in 1961 to 16 per cent in 1983— must be seen either as a deliberate flight from the institution of marriage or, more prob- ably, a logical response to government incentives. Under the ghastly Mrs Wil- liams's education system, children of the poor are no longer taught the old- fashioned disciplines of plasticine mOd.el" ling, or how to make the longest plasticme worm. Apart from Reasons for Not Smok- ing, they are more or less exclusively taught How to Claim their Welfare .Be- nefits. The first lesson in this course is to have a baby and become a single parent. There are now a million or so of them. Add to them the four and a quarter million now living completely alone, and one is plainly Just beginning to be allowed a glimpse into the Nilsen millennium.
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