But there is another image of English sexuality – summed up in the humorist George Mikes’s line that ‘continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.’1 And there is another, more humdrum story of fumbling initiations and cautious abstinence, repression, folklore and the skulking sharing of information.
In other cultures, sex has been at the heart of medicine. In Han Dynasty China, roughly 2,000 years ago, Taoist doctrine regarding health and hygiene emphasized the benefits of sex and the possibility of achieving longevity or even immortality through the diligent pursuit of fang zhong shu (the art of the bedchamber). The Kama Sutra, a Sanskrit text compiled at about the same time, weaves a web of philosophy around matters that the English tend to treat with either trepidation or humour. For the record, the Kama Sutra isn’t a sex manual and doesn’t contain saucy illustrations, though it does mount a defence of the important role sex plays in civilized existence.
That may strike us as a modern attitude. It is fashionable to say that in Britain modern attitudes to sex were born in the eighteenth century. It was a feature of that period that men, who had long been assumed to be no more sexually excitable than women, were represented as more libidinous and less able to control their amorous urges. Libertinism was a way of life for many, and could be an asset for a man with political ambitions (like the radical John Wilkes) or a philosophical commitment to pleasure (in fact best embodied by Rochester in the previous century). Furthermore, at that time homosexuality began to be thought about in terms that we would now recognize. Sex was openly discussed and often celebrated.
Yet attitudes to sex have always tended to oscillate, with each surge in sexual self-expression answered by an attempt to smother it. The historian Lawrence Stone, examining the records of sex offences in sixteenth-century Essex, found a society that was sexually lax and decidedly inquisitorial. There was a great deal of extramarital sex, but at the same time a great readiness to denounce other people’s transgressions.2 The eighteenth century differed from the sixteenth not so much with regard to sexual attitudes as with regard to the media through which those attitudes could be broadcast. In the later period there was a large, inexpensive literature of sexual pleasure, which included erotic prints; previously, works of that kind had circulated in manuscript and had been consumed in secret.
The movement to smother sexuality is most famously embodied by those zealous busybodies the Puritans. Sustained movements of this kind had been launched before and would be revived many times. But Puritanism was strikingly intolerant and coercive. Its agenda was at once religious and economic. The Puritan spirit persists in the desire – often understandable, but in many cases reeking of paranoia – to interfere in the behaviour of our neighbours.
A notable Puritan tract of the 1580s was Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses. Stubbes complained of the prevalence of earrings, dyed hair and make-up. Instead of going to church, citizens went in for dicing, bear-baiting and football (‘a friendly kind of fight’). They visited banqueting houses and descended into filthy amusement, living beyond their means and sporting silly hats and expensive shirts with curious stitching. Dancing stirred up lust. Women dressed like men and as a result resembled hermaphrodites. Of all the things that corrupted people, Stubbes thought none worse than the theatre; he worried that the relaxed socializing that happened there was likely to send people home on unusually friendly terms to ‘play the sodomites, or worse’. The productions his contemporaries watched were either tragedies stuffed with ‘cruelty, injury, incest, murder, and such like’ or comedies full of ‘flattery, whoredom, adultery’.3
Stubbes’s attitudes were echoed by many commentators in the century that followed. The clergyman Thomas Tuke published in 1616 an entire treatise against the wearing of make-up, and William Prynne in 1628 published one that damned women’s ‘mannish’ and ‘unchristian’ hairstyles, before moving on to write a pamphlet denouncing actors – especially female ones, who were in the table of contents described as ‘notorious whores’. Sexual legislation abounded. Bills requiring stricter punishment of sexual offences were passed in 1601, 1604, 1606–7, 1614, 1621, 1626, 1628 and 1629.4 At this time it was common to use the word folly as a euphemism for immoral sexual behaviour, and the records of church courts often used uncivil and rude as terms to connote gross sexual offences. Sexual misconduct was associated with low intelligence and even madness.
The campaign against vice was invigorated at the end of the century by the Society for the Reformation of Manners. Founded in London in 1690, and backed by the new king and queen William and Mary, it vigorously prosecuted brothel-keepers and homosexuals as well as insufficiently moralistic playwrights. Related societies sprang up in other parts of the country: not just in cities, but in towns such as Alnwick, Shepton Mallet, Kidderminster and Tamworth. Crucially, they did not address crimes that had victims (such as burglary), preferring to focus on the causes of crime. Up till 1738, when all such societies were formally disbanded, their influence was strong – and unpopular. In the 1750s they resurfaced, and the spirit of the original society has since been revived at intervals under different names, from the National Vigilance Association, established in 1885 to monitor the ‘moral welfare’ of young women, to Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, set up in 1965 and still active under the name Mediawatch-uk.
All the while, there were countercurrents of rebellion. Sex manuals proved essential to this, informing readers about techniques and necessary precautions, albeit without exactly dispelling their worries. One of the most notable was Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a guide to reproduction published in 1684 and popular well into the nineteenth century. It celebrates sex as something natural and pleasurable, and is in many respects surprisingly accurate, but there is room for folk wisdom and odd ideas: the notion that the size of a man’s nose is an indication of the size of his penis; the assertion that pubescent girls, ‘desirous of copulation’, exhibit a ‘weasel colour’ and ‘short breathings, tremblings, and pantings of the heart’; and the claim that women who live ‘near the seaside, being restless and troubled in copulation, bring forth misshapen embryos’.5
Today information about sex is far more scientific. It is plentiful, too, and sex education is provided in schools. But strange ideas persist, and so does ignorance. Practical knowledge of sex – what goes where – is often treated as if it is a subject devoid of emotional, moral and ethical implications. Sexual liberation is acclaimed. But really one kind of angst has replaced another: instead of feeling guilty about having or wanting sex, we are now made to feel guilty if we aren’t at it like polecats.
Changes in behaviour have been brought about by the contraceptive Pill, improved rights for women and widespread internet access. The last of these has enabled new ways of locating a partner, and with them come new problems. A piece in the Guardian in January 2009 noted that ‘for the resolutely polite, searching for a partner online can become very time-consuming’, and as a result there is ‘an unwritten rule in the internet dating world that it is acceptable to ignore mail from people who don’t interest you’.6 This is the discreet end of what internet daters consider ‘necessary rudeness’. Veterans of the online romantic and sexual marketplace complain that its much vaunted efficiencies are offset by new forms of anxiety and a new rhetoric of rejection.
The abundance of free internet pornography also means that many young people embarking on sex lives have seen footage of sex acts that previous generations might never have imagined. Notions of what’s sexually orthodox and of polite sexual behaviour have relaxed. Yet there are still many conservative ideas about codes of courtship, acceptable forms of flirtation, same-sex relationships and the virtues of abstinence. Tunde, a thirty-two-year-old street sweeper in Camden, speaks for many when he says that ‘Respectfulness is important. Sometimes that means not doing what you want to do – waiting, or never doing it.’ Teenage skateboarders Connor and Ben, whom I meet on London’s South Bank, agree. Connor says
that you ‘can’t have sex with a girl straightaway. She’s got to make you wait.’ Ben explains, ‘That’s why people get married. It’s like saying in public that you’re ready to play by the rules.’
The persistence of conservatism is noticeable in the way most of us talk about sex. It is not just a case of the kind of façade that throws George Constanza off the scent; except when telling jokes, we find sexual frankness unsettling. Although this isn’t peculiarly English, sex is an area in which we deploy a wealth of euphemisms, some of them very obscure. Among those I heard, when I canvassed examples for this book, there were many familiar ones (‘They were getting down to it’, ‘Oh, he’s been doing it with her for a while’), but also many that struck me as bizarre and not entirely successful (‘He got a bit of jam’, ‘They’ve been making feet for children’s shoes’). We are accustomed to the way the words inappropriate and unfortunate stand in for odious or terrible (‘His joke about disabled children was inappropriate’, ‘The defendant made some unfortunate choices’), yet one acquaintance surprised me, in the context of talking about her sex life, with the information that a lover had been ‘good at first – enjoyably … inappropriate – but then he seemed to lose interest and was just a little unfortunate’.
The evasive ways in which we refer to sex are often delightful, examples of verbal play at its most dextrous. In Shakespeare’s Othello, for instance, Iago says that the lovers Othello and Desdemona ‘are now making the beast with two backs’, and in a dictionary of slang dating from 1811 we learn that two overweight people who have been doing the same thing might be said to have savoured ‘melting moments’. Such inventive phrasing is a reminder of the anxieties that surround sexual pleasure, sexuality and sexual effluvia. Even banal conversation can resemble a diplomatic tête-à-tête: the parties involved are negotiating their levels of power, intimacy and entitlement, and may well be exploring ways of saving face and indemnifying themselves against liabilities.7 But it is in our sexual relationships, and especially in those inchoate relationships we would like to become more sexual, that we are most likely to simulate feelings, feign curiosity, compliment what we consider average, solicit agreement and sympathy, make gestures of deference and delicately phrase our requests, while also going to elaborate lengths to make it look as though we are doing none of these things.
Few writers have tapped into the male side of this experience more successfully than Neil Strauss, whose book The Game is an investigation of the techniques used by men who dedicate themselves to the art of the sexual pick-up. Strauss’s chapter titles are sufficient evidence of the nature of their behaviour: ‘Disarm the Obstacles’, ‘Isolate the Target’, ‘Blast Last-Minute Resistance’. There is something comically un-English about this. Yet if the language Strauss uses is military, the techniques are more in line with the book’s title: playful, manipulative, evasive and conducive to a certain amount of immature cliquiness among those who practise them. Even in the realm of the pick-up artist, sexual intent comes cloaked.
Neil Strauss’s antecedents include Francis Osborne, the man Samuel Pepys called ‘my father Osborne’. In Advice to a Son Osborne portrays monogamy as the result of law, custom and man’s ‘stupendous folly’. The real business of a man, he suggests, is his own pleasure. He advises against consorting with notable women, who may even make ‘your desires subject to theirs’, and against celebrated beauties, ‘unless you are ambitious of rendering your house as populous as a confectioner’s shop’. He equates love with ‘whining’. Lust promises nothing ‘beyond the repetition of the same again, which after a few enjoyments grows tedious’. Children are dismissed, too; at their worst they are the product of ‘the tedious commerce and loathsome sheets of a silly woman’, and in any case they are ‘no more ours, than the curls of our hair, or the parings of our nails’.8 For Osborne, sex is a game and relationships are pitfalls; one must learn to be a master strategist.
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The elephant and the bad baby
the everyday language of manners
Euphemism, so disconcerting for Seinfeld’s George Costanza, masks not just real filth but also matters we consider filthy or indecent, matters that we would prefer others to think we condemn, and matters that we know others consider taboo. It is a species of good manners, hardly unique to English. Chinese thrill-seekers can buy qingqu yongpin, ‘interesting love products’, while in France an autodidacte is someone who did not have the benefit of higher education. In Portugal someone who is fat will be described as forte (‘strong’); in Poland the equivalent is puszysty, which means something more like ‘fluffy’ or ‘puffy’. But English euphemisms seem to be everywhere, and many of the words we feel the need to avoid were euphemisms in their time – vagina and excrement, for instance. What’s more, many English euphemisms speak loudly of the conspiracy into which they are urging us. Obituarists make bold use of their favourites: someone who did not suffer fools gladly in fact had a volcanic temper, a person described as convivial was a heavy drinker, and someone said to have been a raconteur was really a bore.
Propriety influences plenty of other linguistic choices. It can take the form of inclusiveness (‘Let’s get something to drink’, meaning ‘I want something to drink, and you’re coming’), forewarning (‘I’m afraid this is going to be a touch dull, but let’s go over the details again’), asserting common ground or shared experience (‘Yes, isn’t it terrible the way that always happens!’) and moderating one’s complaints or criticisms (‘You’re sort of not with it today, aren’t you?’, ‘That’s not technically true’). Deference, which should stop short of servility, is another such choice. So is avoiding language that feels coercive. ‘Is it me, or is it cold in here?’ will often softly do the work of a less gentle ‘Shut the door, please.’
The desire to find common ground is interesting. English has an unusually rich vocabulary with which we can establish rapport. When I was a student, a friend of mine, while being mugged, managed to allay the violence by pointing out to his attacker that they were wearing the same brand of trainers – ‘but I think yours are a bit newer than mine’. Where else in the world would this happen? That almost parenthetical ‘I think’ is an example of a quirk of English that native English-speakers are not necessarily able to recognize: the prevalence, when compared with other languages, of little phrases (epistemic phrases) that show my stance in relation to what I am saying – ‘I think’, ‘I gather’, ‘I imagine’, ‘I would suggest’, ‘I would have guessed’, ‘I take it’, and so on. These can be used to express caution about opinions, but also to express caution about facts – a reluctance to declare what can instead be put more discreetly and with a stronger air of the personal. Many adverbs do the same: presumably, conceivably, arguably, probably. Of these the last is the most common, suggesting measured thought and reflectiveness even when neither has been practised.1 Probably is a word of genial, reasonable, unintellectual hue, and is far more common than its foreign equivalents such as the German wahrscheinlich or the Spanish probablemente.
Hints, hesitation and vagueness can all be strategies for avoiding rudeness – for showing sensitivity to another person’s vulnerabilities, or perhaps for shielding from view one’s awareness of such vulnerabilities. Yet we tend to recognize them as such, and the rudeness is thus not fully out of sight. Hinting can be a test rather than a tactful indication. I can remember as a child discovering that when a glacial relative asked me if I wanted some more salad (the answer was definitely ‘No’), what she really meant was that she would like some more. I was supposed to infer this and give her a second helping. When I didn’t, my error was explained to me at length. Then there is the propriety of apology: ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance, but could you turn your music down?’, ‘I wouldn’t normally ask this, but have you got change for a pound?’ That but only pretends to be deflective and smothering; the substance of the sentence is what follows it.
Polite language can be an attempt to have (and show) consideration for others, or it can
be a form of self-interested display. Obviously, vulgar or profane language is also a display: people object to it because it smacks of excitability, pain or menace, and because it seems an attempt to force an unpalatable thought upon them. But often deeper offence is caused by poor choices of language that are inadvertent. Verbal gaffes can spark diplomatic incidents. In 2010, offering thanks for Germany’s help in the rescue of a group of trapped Chilean miners, President Sebastián Piñera wrote in the German President’s official guestbook the words ‘Deutschland Über Alles’, a slogan strongly associated with Nazism. The verbal slips of George W. Bush were condemned by his critics as insults to the American electorate. Sometimes they slid into other kinds of faux pas. In May 2007 Bush appeared to suggest that Queen Elizabeth II had visited his country in 1776; he tried to compensate for this by winking at her, a gesture received frostily. The Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, has plenty of form in this area: observing of the Nigerian President’s national dress, ‘You look like you’re ready for bed’; saying that a poorly installed fuse box looked ‘as if it was put in by an Indian’; and enquiring of Cayman Islanders, ‘Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?’ Such blunders are perceived as failures of restraint and sensitivity, and in Prince Philip’s case especially they are at odds with the putative dignity of his position. In some cases, they are the result of too much clarity, of people saying precisely what is on their minds, rather than self-editing.
In conversation, clarity is generally desirable, as are relevance and succinctness. But when clarity and politeness are in conflict, politeness usually wins. Consider, for instance, the difference between the following: ‘If you don’t start a pension now, you’ll be poor when you’re old,’ and ‘You know, a lot of people would say that making a monthly pension contribution is a very tax-efficient way of saving for retirement.’
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