On Monday last opened the trial of “Fanny Hill,” a woman of pleasure, under the Obscene Publications Act. On the same day the Oxford University Students’ Council published a report which said “although a man’s sexual behaviour may be a matter for college responsibility, it is not a matter for college discipline. Breach of the rules concerning visiting hours is no more criminal than any other offence against the college regulation”. Between them, the trial and the report illustrate the continuing conflict between the opponents and exponents of the “new morality”.
The opponents of the “new morality” are by no means down and out. They are putting on a valiant fight. They compare Britain with Rome in the grip of moral decline. They cite figures of the rise in the number of cases of divorce (30,000 a year), venereal diseases and illegitimate births (one in seven in London and one in 14 in the country) to illustrate the magnitude of the threat. Only, not many people particularly among the youth seem to heed the warning. The dash towards hedonism or paganism, if you prefer that word, continues headlong.
New Morality
Anyone who followed the trial of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” will recall that the Bishop of Woolwich had then gone into the witness box to compare her affair with the gamekeeper as an “act of communion”. Even the fact of perversion did not seem to bother him. This is the “new morality” in a nutshell. Canon Rhymes of Southwark has elaborated on the same theme. His sermons which created an uproar have now been published under the title, “No New Morality.” (Constable, 12s. 6d.)
Canon Rhymes makes the case that St. Paul twisted Christ’s message of freedom and love and imposed on the Church the idea of sex as something shameful. “Without this view of sexuality, perpetuated through the centuries by so-called Christian teachings, would there still be the peculiar embarrassment that still embarrasses many parents in teaching their children about sexual facts? Would there have been the sense of guilt that still besets much sexual feeling?’’, he asks.
Canon Rhymes, of course, represents a climate of opinion. Readers of this column will recall that the book “Towards A Quaker View Of Sex” which was published a year ago not only approved extramarital relations but also homosexuality. One should no more deplore homosexuality than left-handedness.
Loudest Cries
About six months ago, the well-known Dr Alex Confort of London University said on the BBC, “We may eventually come to realise that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition”. In the course of the Reith lectures earlier, Prof Carstairs had said charity was more important than chastity. He called Saint Augustine, after St. Paul the worst offender in his view, a reformed libertine and said: “It has always been those whose own sexual impulses have been precariously repressed who have raised the loudest cries of alarm over other people’s morality”. The corrosion of the traditional concept of sex has, it is common knowledge, been going on since the 18th century. What is notable about post-war Britain (it is true of the Western world as a whole) is that the long-term changes have now reached a stage where a new frame of life is beginning to consolidate. Also the combination of the psychologists, socialist anthropologists, statisticians and the vast machinery of mass communications have accelerated the pace of change. For instance, while it took 40 years for Havelock Ellis’s pioneer studies to become available to the public, Dr Kinsey in 1948 became a household word overnight.
The way the British press treated Dr Kinsey’s report is itself a fabulous story. “The Sunday Despatch” illuminated successive Sundays with extensive selections from the report. “The Daily Mirror” introduced the report with a three-inch-high headline “Women” on the front page and continued inside with double-page spreads accompanied by photographs to make sure that readers understood the text. The more restrained papers employed doctors and even clergymen to review the report at length.
The “K-bomb”, as the report was called, was however not the only explosive to be exported from across the Atlantic. The assault of the American theatre was reinforced by American war novels. Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” was a best seller here just as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were popular theatre.
If Britain’s particular brand of Puritanism was really dependent on insularity it could not survive now. Along with American plays and novels came continental films portraying love and sex in all their graduations with realism and there have been many other external influences that have helped to crack the old puritan crust. Our own “Kama Sutra” and less known “Koka Sastra” have been best sellers.
Divorce Case
The reporting of the divorce case of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll and the trial of Stephen Ward last year was illustrative of the change of climate. Nothing of that complex and curious code of euphemisms which characterised reporting only a few years ago was in evidence. In fact there was a wealth of detail. It is also notable that unlike the frankness of the intellectuals in the twenties, this present frankness is unforced and matter of fact. There is no defiance or daring about it and it embraces a sizable part of society.
This change in intellectual climate could well have been reversed if woman’s economic independence was not consolidated in the meantime. Nine million women had been mobilised during the war. The acute shortage of labour in the post-war period ensured that they stayed on. Today eight and half million women hold jobs. Now the extension of contraception became inevitable. The Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops went on record for the first time in favour of birth control in the early ’fifties. The bishops ruled: “The procreation of children is not the only purpose of marriage”. Couples walked in American style hand-in-hand and not arm-in-arm to symbolise the equality of women. When Sir Anthony Eden became Prime Minister the fact of being a divorcee could no longer be said to be a social handicap.
Worst City
One facet of this remarkable change has been commercialised sex. The systematic exploitation of the cult of vital statistics is a post-war phenomenon. The cult itself is older. The cult has underpinned the film business, nourished the popular press and advertisement agencies and brought a fantastic boom to the “foundation garment” industry. Most hoardings which greet commuters as they ascend or descend the escalators of the London Underground carry one and the same message. London has often been called the “worst city in Europe”. Whether there are more public women than before the war or not, it is widely believed that there are more “semi-amateurs” who have extended their operations from traditional beats to respectable residential areas.
In 1931 was published Dr GJ Remier’s book, “The English: Are They Human.” It became celebrated for its chapter on repressions. In a post-war edition, the author explained that he had left the text unchanged because to adjust the subject to modern England would have required rewriting the entire work. Today it is difficult to believe that the book related to this country.
The Times of India, 26 January 1964