‘The sole criterion of frigidity is the absence of the vaginal orgasm’
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Just as it did not start with her ascension to the throne, the constipated ‘Victorian’ attitude to all things sexual across the whole Western world, and the substantial tracts of the rest of the globe that were its colonial subjects, did not die with Queen Victoria. Almost every progressive step forward in the new twentieth century was accompanied by one step backwards in deference to the ways of the old era. There was frequently more the echo of Victorianism to be heard in the brave new Edwardian age than there was the shrill cry of modernity.
The puzzling old obsession with masturbation, for one thing, showed scant sign of being superseded by even a slightly more enlightened view. The founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Baden Powell, then one of the most pervasive new influences on young men worldwide, wrote of masturbation in Scouting for Boys (1908): ‘It is called in our schools “beastliness” and this is about the best name for it … should it become a habit, it quickly destroys both health and spirits; he becomes feeble in body and mind and often ends up in a lunatic asylum.’
He explained his theory further in his Rottering to Success (1922): ‘[Masturbation] cheats semen getting its full chance of making up the strong manly man you would otherwise be. You are throwing away the seed that has been handed down to you as a trust instead of keeping it and ripening it for bringing a son to you later on.’
Baden Powell’s beliefs on the matter may be fairly predictable, but you would not expect the founder of the Boy Scouts and the leading lights of radical Women’s suffrage to have much common ground. Yet both are clearly the wagging tail of Victorian values at the beginning of the twentieth century. Melanie Phillips, in her study of the suffragist movement, The Ascent of Woman, maintains that the essence of the ‘Suffragettes’, as the Daily Mail dubbed them at the time, was that men’s rampant sexuality – as evidenced more than anything by prostitution – was ruining the world, both through their immorality and the spread of VD. Female sexuality, which was more restrained and controlled, was the antidote, and by women getting the vote, the whole world could attain new, spiritual heights.
The suffragists, Phillips argues, were hugely impressed by Charles Darwin, whose idea that mankind was on a trajectory from animalism to a superior, spiritual, state of being in which sexuality was almost nullified, struck home particularly. With their belief that women were intrinsically more spiritual and superior to men – many agreed with Mary Wollstonecraft from a century earlier, who held that women pursuing sexual pleasure were selfish – they would have horrified when mid-twentieth century feminists re-conceptualised sexual equality as meaning that they could be identical to men in the sexual area as well as elsewhere.
The Suffragettes had some bizarre theories, Phillips recounts. One, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, believed that even menstruation was the result of unrestrained male lust. Another, Frances Swiney, believed that men were only ‘rudimentary females’ and their sperm was ‘a virulent poison’. She was particularly opposed to cross-racial and cross-class breeding, a theme taken up with relish by the female founders of the modern birth control movement.
Victorian suspicion of sexuality extended its tendrils well into the sexually liberated middle of the twentieth century. Laws against oral sex, even between married couples, remained theoretically in force, and in some US States have yet to be repealed. In a 1961 book, Sexual Behaviour: Psycho-legal Aspects, Frank Caprio and D. R. Brenner recount this sad twentieth-century case: ‘A husband was performing cunnilingus on his wife in the privacy of their bedroom. One of three children in the family, unaware of the sexual activity of the parents, opened the door and observed what was going on. The child, frightened by what he had seen, ran to a neighbour with the story. The police were called and the husband arrested. He readily admitted the act and stated that he did not see anything wrong with it. He further said that the wife did not object to what he was doing and that, in fact, she encouraged him. Armed with this confession, a conviction was obtained and the man sentenced to prison for five years.’
Victorian sexual attitudes and their accompanying strand of hypocrisy extended to the upper reaches of American society. The passionately anti-homosexual FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, said publicly in the 1950s, ‘I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.’ Hoover might have passed for a conviction-driven moral campaigner and ultimate family man were he not at the same time as making such stern pronouncements having a long-term gay affair with his deputy, Clyde Tolson, and attending Washington parties in women’s clothing; at one, according to a fellow reveller, Hoover wore a red dress with feather boa.
In a sense, even turn-of-the-century radicals like the artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) were still dancing to the Victorian tune. Schiele painted self-portraits of himself masturbating as a protest against the conservatism of Austrian society. It would have been pointless had masturbation not been taboo. The same small but glowering Victorian storm cloud might still be said to have been hovering seventy years later over John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they staged their bed protest in Amsterdam – or even Richard Branson, who gave an entire business empire the name Virgin in the 1960s because it was still considered a slightly daring word to use amongst a public still influenced by Victorian moral values.
As in any age, in the mid-to late twentieth-century, radicalism was a minority view. More in tune than a Schiele or a Lennon with the establishment consensus during most of the century were the sentiments of Dr O.A. Wall. He wrote in 1932: ‘A well-bred woman does not seek carnal gratification, and she is usually apathetic to sexual pleasures. Her love is physical or spiritual, rather than carnal, and her passiveness in regard to coition often amounts to disgust for it; lust is seldom an element in a woman’s character, and she is the preserver of chastity and morality.’
But evidence that Victorian sexual repression was finally crumbling, or perhaps never existed for the less ‘well-bred’ at least, can be found in the charming reminiscences of Laurie Lee, describing his sexual debut before World War I in Cider With Rosie – or the franker boyhood recollections of Harry Daley, a policeman originally from Lowestoft, who had an affair with E. M. Forster and published his reminiscences in a 1986 autobiography, This Small Cloud:
Another boy took out his large cock, the first I’d seen with hair round it, spat in his hand, and started to masturbate in the proper manner. After a minute or two he said he was tired and asked me to do it for him, which I did with pleasure. Thus began one of the happiest periods of my life; the real beginning of my happy life, the first awakening to knowledge of the pleasure and warmth in other people’s bodies and affection; the realisation that physical contact consolidates and increases the pleasure and happiness to be got from mutual affection … It was all open and uncomplicated … Whenever in our wanderings we came to a secret place, a wood, a shed or a deserted building, we would merrily wank away … Nowadays, for some reason or other, this traditional experience is thought to be undesirable … We continued happily and unworried for a long time, until the sort of people one finds in the fringes of church life, noticing the dark rings under our eyes, warned us that boys who played with themselves went mad and had to be locked away. This was a typical mean, dirty-minded trick, for they had been boys themselves and knew it was not true. In any case it didn’t stop us. Henceforth we wanked and worried, whereas formerly we had experienced nothing but satisfaction and contentment.
Then we have Frank Harris (1855-1931), a poor boy from County Galway who went to America, came back to England, became a sub-editor on the London Evening News, an editor of literary journals and a notorious Edwardian rake. This passage is from his 1923 book, My Life and Loves:
The next moment I was with her in bed and on her; but she moved aside and away from me. ‘No, let’s talk,’ she said … To my a
mazement she began:
‘Have you read Zola’s latest book Nana?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know what the girl did to Nana?’
‘Yes,’ I replied with sinking heart. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘why not do that to me? I’m desperately afraid of getting a child, you would be too in my place, why not love each other without fear?’
A moment’s thought told me that all roads lead to Rome and so I assented and soon I slipped down between her legs. ‘Tell me please how to give you most pleasure,’ I said and gently, I opened the lips of her sex and put my lips on it and my tongue against her clitoris. There was nothing repulsive in it; it was another and more sensitive mouth. Hardly had I kissed it twice when she slid lower down in the bed with a sigh whispering: ‘That’s it; that’s heavenly!’
For an earthier confirmation still that orgasmic pleasure was alive and well, Victorianism notwithstanding, in the early-twentieth century, we have this First World War marching song, sung by British troops to the tune of ‘Do Ye Ken John Peel’:
When you wake up in the morning and you’re feeling grand,
And you’ve such a funny feeling in your seminary gland,
And you haven’t got a woman, what’s the matter with your hand?
As you revel in the joys of copulation.
While the twentieth-century trend in openness about sexuality generally progressed in a forward direction, albeit principally in the Western world, which was taking the sexual lead at this time, in the case of the vibrator, time ran backwards. From being virtually out in the open in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, the vibrator quite abruptly dived for cover at the start of the 1920s. The reason for this is thought to be its starring role in the first ‘blue’ or ‘stag’ movies, which dictated that the distance between the safely medicalised practice of powered female masturbation and the reality that it was a wholly sexual habit could no longer be maintained.
The earliest known stag film made in 1915 was called Free Ride and was vibrator-free. The film concerned a man picking up two female hitchhikers and having sex with them – both vaginal and anal. Even bestiality made its screen debut before masturbation. In another film from the same period, three girls agree to have sex with a boy but on the stipulation that it is through a fence. They then substitute a goat for themselves. The boy, however, is unaware of the switch and exclaims, as patrons read on the caption card: ‘That’s the best girl I’ve ever had in my life.’
A generally positive, if oblique, spinoff of the Victorian era, meanwhile, was the rise to prominence of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, which became world famous with the publication in 1905 of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud was, like the Suffragettes in Britain, very much a product of his nineteenth-century past, but his techniques, unquestionably informed, and continue to inform, the greater part of today’s psychology and psychosexual medicine.
The young Freud studied ‘hysteria’ under Charcot at the Salpêtrière. As a result of the slightly humiliating interrogations of women that he witnessed there, he invented the idea of the private, sacrosanct psychoanalytical couch, where infantile sexual traumas that caused dreadful symptoms in adults could, through conversation, be gently drawn like a poison from patients.
Freud encouraged women to become doctors, and further shocked the medical establishment by referring to the sexual organs in modern German, rather than Latin, as was the custom. Such iconoclasm drove doctors to form picket lines outside lecture halls in Vienna where Freud spoke.
All this sounds most encouraging, but the problem with Freud is that significant tracts of his work on sex simply fail to resonate with us today. He insisted on the importance of ‘penis envy’ in women; he devised the wholly discredited view that the clitoral orgasm is ‘immature’, that the developing girl must direct her clitoral eroticism and her penis envy into feelings of longing for a child – and that any woman who failed to graduate from clitoral to ‘vaginal’ orgasms – these during intercourse rather than masturbation – was ‘frigid’.
He viewed masturbation as something one grew out of (he advised his sons to refrain), and that led to self-loathing and frigidity. He believed coitus interruptus had a harmful effect on the mind: ‘It is a question of a physical accumulation of excitement – that is, an accumulation of physical tension. The accumulation is the result of discharge being prevented. Thus anxiety neurosis is a neurosis of damning up, like hysteria: hence the similarity,’ he wrote.
Freud tends, therefore, to be more remembered for his methodology than his often over-egged puddings, such as this less than palatable pronouncement on a common cosmetic practice employed by some couples: ‘Pressing out the contents of the blackhead,’ he wrote in The Unconscious (1915), ‘is clearly to him a substitution for masturbation. The cavity which then appears owing to his fault is the female genital.’
While Freud’s talking cure, such nonsense notwithstanding, worked away in one way at restoring the orgasm as a force of Nature for both sexes to enjoy freely, a more practical approach was being taken by the prime movers of modern birth control in the first decades of the century, Marie Stopes (1880-1958) and Margaret Sanger (1879-1966).
Sanger (née Higgins), working initially in the tenements of New York, was the first of the two to agitate and campaign for birth control – a phrase she invented. Sanger was a working-class New York Irish midwife whose mother had eighteen children. Margaret, the sixth, became a Socialist, and, seeing the number of women dying of back-street abortions, started publicly declaring in a self-published newspaper the value of sex and orgasmic pleasure, maintaining that contraception, backed up by safe abortion, was the basis for both sexual and social happiness.
Her campaigning was partly the result of social conscience and partly of her knowledge of women’s struggle to assert their right to sexual enjoyment. In a 1931 book, My Fight for Birth Control, she recounted the story of one of her patient’s attempts to seek medical advice on contraception.
‘Yes, yes, I know, Doctor,’ said the patient with trembling voice, ‘but,’ and she hesitated as if it took all of her courage to say it, ‘what can I do to prevent getting that way again?’
‘Oh, ho!’ laughed the doctor good-naturedly. ‘You want your cake while you eat it too, do you? Well, it can’t be done. I’ll tell you the only sure thing to do. Tell Jake to sleep on the roof!’
Doctors Lena Levine and Abraham Stone, working in Sanger’s birth-control clinics, became aware of the mixture of sexual discontent and ignorance in their clients and began to offer practical sex counselling using a model of the female genitals. Very few of their patients knew what or where the clitoris was. After Sanger’s own rather more helpful advice on sexual satisfaction and birth-control appeared in her newspaper in 1915, she was charged with publishing an ‘obscene and lewd article’, and fled to Britain.
It was in London that she met Dr Marie Carmichael Stopes, daughter of a radical intellectual Edinburgh family. As a child, Marie had announced that she would spend the first twenty years of her life in science, the second twenty working on social projects, and the final twenty writing poetry – and she did precisely that. Stopes became Britain’s youngest doctor of science in 1905. She took a double first in botany (specialising in fossilised plants) from University College, London, and engaged in a chaotic love life. After a string of unsuccessful love affairs, she married a Canadian geneticist, Reginald Ruggles Gates, in 1911. It was as disastrous a choice of husband as she could have made. Not only did Gates hold highly traditional views on women’s role in society and the behaviour to be expected from them, and not only did he vehemently oppose his wife’s membership of the feminist Women’s Freedom League, he was also impotent. Marie had the marriage annulled in 1916 on grounds of non-consummation.
Margaret Sanger ignited Stopes’s interest in contraception, and the firebrand young scientist decided to start a campaign for birth control in Britain. Knowing the relatively recent
experiences of the Carliles (who were persecuted in the 1820s for their sexual and political radicalism) and Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant (prosecuted in 1877 for re-publishing an old birth control manual), Stopes pressed on regardless, and shortly after her divorce published a concise guide to contraception, Wise Parenthood.
The book predictably infuriated both the Church of England and the Catholic Church, but she escaped prosecution. During the First World War she had also started work on a book which, strictly speaking, she was less qualified to write. It was called Married Love, and argued, amidst a doughty early-feminist manifesto, that marriage should be an equal relationship between husband and wife. She declared: ‘I believe it is my destiny, to tell [young married couples] how to make love successfully.’
Which aspect of Married Love - the sex or the politics -was the most offensive to wartime British sensibilities is hard to assess, but finding a publisher for the book was certainly difficult. Walter Blackie, of Blackie & Son, sent her manuscript promptly back with the message: ‘The theme does not please me. I think there is far too much talking and writing about these things already … Don’t you think you should wait publication until after the war? There will be few enough men for the girls to marry; and a book like this would frighten off the few.’
Some of Stopes’s writing was on the florid side (’The apex of raptures sweeps into its tides the whole essence of the man and woman, vaporises their consciousness so that it fills the whole of cosmic space’), but it was the political content that Blackie objected to: ‘Far too often,’ one such passage read, ‘marriage puts an end to women’s intellectual life. Marriage can never reach its full stature until women possess as much intellectual freedom and freedom of opportunity within it as do their partners.’
It was Stopes’s before-their-time beliefs on sexual pleasure that made Married Love such a remarkable book. ‘By the majority of “nice” people woman is supposed to have no spontaneous sex impulses. By this I do not mean a sentimental “falling in love”, but a physical, a physiological state of stimulation which arises spontaneously and quite apart from any particular man. It is in truth the creative impulse, and is an expression of a high power of vitality. So widespread in our country is the view that it is only depraved women who have such feelings (especially before marriage) that most women would rather die than own that they do at times feel a physical yearning indescribable, but as profound as hunger for food.’ (Naomi Wolf has pointed out that almost seventy years later, the writer Sallie Tisdale, author of Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex, shocked modern America by remarking in the book that she sometimes felt a sexual desire as sharp as hunger.)
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