In March 1918, Stopes finally found a small publisher willing to take its chances with Married Love. It turned out to be an inspired gamble. The book was a global sensation, selling millions of copies by the mid-1920s. It was published in America but declared obscene and banned. Marie was the first feminist media star, revelling in every awkward turn of a flat-footed establishment’s attempts to silence her. A Catholic doctor, Halliday Sutherland, called for her to be imprisoned via an article in the Daily Express. In fact, she was never even prosecuted, but two of her supporters, Guy and Rose Aldred, a prominent anarchist couple who published a pamphlet by Margaret Sanger, were found guilty of selling an obscene publication.
In 1921 Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control, with financial backing from her wealthy second husband, Humphrey Roe, a philanthropic Manchester manufacturer who was an enthusiast for contraception, having seen the sufferings of the female workforce from having too many children. Marie also opened the first of her birth-control clinics at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London, in a converted house between a sweet shop and a grocer’s. It was designed by Marie to be homely and welcoming ‘to mothers or fathers’, but still only attracted a handful of women for many months; those who came were often afraid to give their name.
The letters Marie Stopes received, 40 per cent of which were from men, provide an eloquent grassroots statement of ordinary people’s sex lives in her time. One, dated 1921, read: ‘So many Englishwomen look upon sexual intercourse as abhorrent and not as a natural fulfilment of true love. My wife considered all bodily desire to be nothing less than animal passion, and that true love between husband and wife should be purely mental and not physical … Like so many Englishwomen she considered that any show of affection was not in keeping with her dignity as a woman and that all lovemaking and caresses should come entirely from the man and that the woman should be the passive receiver of affection.’ Another letter, from an elderly man, recounted how when he was a young husband in 1880 and his wife had an orgasm, he ‘was frightened and thought it was some sort of fit’.
There was just one unfortunate and hugely embarrassing area where these pioneering sexual reformers let their Victorian petticoats show. A clue to this is to be found in the full name of the Society for Constructive Birth Control. A point mysteriously missing from the website of today’s Marie Stopes International Global Partnership, and very likely unknown to the readers of the Guardian newspaper, who in 1999 voted Stopes their Woman of the Millennium, is that the radical organisation she founded was actually called the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.
Sadly, Marie Stopes’s views on class would make her an intellectual leper, a consummate hate figure, in today’s world, and her attitudes to racial issues would render her liable to immediate prosecution. In 1920, for instance, she wrote: ‘Society allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, inferior infants … a large proportion of these are doomed from their very physical inheritance to be at best but partly self-supporting, and thus to drain the resources of those classes above them who have a sense of responsibility. The better classes, freed from the cost of institutions, hospitals, prisons and so on, principally filled by the inferior racial stock, would be able to afford to enlarge their own families.’ Stealing a march from Scrooge, who at least conceded that the poor had the right of being fed, albeit in prison or the workhouse, Stopes advocated that ‘the sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood [be] made an immediate possibility, indeed, made compulsory’.
Marie Stopes’s inspiration, Margaret Sanger was no more sound on these difficult matters. Her ‘mission statement’, according to one biography, was: ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit’. She opined that birth control can be ‘… nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, or preventing the birth of defectives’. Sanger’s medical views were equally creaky at times. We all acknowledge today that lack of orgasm is a great sadness and frustration for billions of women, but few go quite as far as Sanger who, in her 1915 pamphlet Family Limitation (ten million copies sold in thirteen languages) declared that failure to give a woman an orgasm would lead to the ‘disease of her generative organs’.
Even D. H. Lawrence considered one of the early-twentieth century’s standard bearers of liberated sex, carried the burden of the nineteenth-century’s core anti-sex attitudes. Of masturbation, he wrote in 1929: ‘Instead of being a comparatively pure and harmless vice, masturbation is certainly the most dangerous sexual vice that a society can be afflicted with, in the long run … in masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening.’
Lawrence was also, much more importantly, caught in the mantrap that most characterises the first seventy years or so of twenteenth-century progressive thinking on sex. This is the idealistic, but wrong-headed and naïve, notion that the only form of orgasm that ‘counts’ is when man and woman climax simultaneously, and do so exclusively by the mechanism of penetrative sexual intercourse.
Lawrence, like so many other sexual liberators, had his heart in the right place. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written in the mid-1920s, one character, a parson, says to Clifford Chatterley, ‘My good man, you don’t suppose for one moment that women have animal passions like ours?’ It was clear that Lawrence did not accord in the least with this view. Here is a typical account from the book of a glorious, if slightly implausible, mutual orgasm:
… she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries … He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie’s hand in silence. She turned and looked at him. ‘We came off together that time,’ he said. She did not answer. ‘It’s good when it’s like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know it,’ he said, speaking rather dreamily. ‘Don’t people often come off together?’ she asked with naive curiosity. ‘A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.’
It is hard, with the best will in the world, to escape the conclusion that enlightened authors penning such accounts, as well as progressive doctors and sexologists endlessly promoting simultaneous orgasm late into the century, had either never had sex as they describe it – or, in the case of men like Lawrence, were mistaken, or even gulled by a well-meaning conspiracy among women by which they would attempt to please their men (or at least appear modern) through the skilful faking of orgasm to look something like Lawrence’s fanciful description.
Marie Stopes idealised mutual orgasm as ‘the co-ordinated function’. Dr Eustace Chesser in Love without Fear (1939) stated, ‘Both parties should, in coitus, concentrate their full attention on one thing: the attainment of simultaneous orgasm.’ But the greatest and most passionate twentieth-century advocate of the simultaneous orgasm fantasy was the most outspoken, radical, influential and successful (though long forgotten) sex manual writer of the period, a Dutch gynaecologist called Theodore Hendrik van de Velde.
Van de Velde’s extraordinarily explicit book was called Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique and first appeared in Holland in 1926, in the days, or so we are assured by a lot of elderly people today, when most people knew as much about orgasms as they did Microsoft Windows. The real extent to which sexually active people in the early twentieth-century were ignorant of the potentiality for both sexes to enjo
y sexual pleasure is impossible to gauge; there were no surveys on the matter, no magazines urging women to demand the Big O every time.
At best, assessing this important matter is a judgement call. The only empirical evidence is that sex was not discussed in public, that it did not figure in the mass media, that literature which dealt with sex was marginalised and banned – and that activists like Marie Stopes gained the strong impression that both women and men were, for the most part, sexually ignorant. It is credible – and some literature, diaries and letters support this – that there was a body more substantial than we smugly acknowledge today of ‘underground’ knowledge and experience of sex, especially among the middle class and members of the intelligentsia who had secreted away copies of the Kamasutra and Married Love. But the dour decades that led Philip Larkin to conclude, however facetiously, that ‘sexual intercourse began in 1963’ cannot be said to have seen a democratisation of orgasmic pleasure to compare with that which unfolded in the mid- to late-twentieth century.
Unlike with Married Love or Lady Chatterley, there was no public fanfare or attempted prosecution when Ideal Marriage slipped out in the UK in 1928. The ostensibly low profile of the Dutch book was accounted for by its being an import published by Heinemann’s medical books division, which made it nominally an obscure textbook for doctors. It had barely any illustrations, and was therefore unlikely to appeal to or fall into the hands of schoolboys. And as a further safety measure, in case the book, with its deceptively bland title, might yet attract the wrong sort of reader, it was emphasised inside that the author’s observations and advice applied solely to married people. For good measure, the author came close in his introduction to apologising for the book’s very existence. Like the early researchers on female sexuality mentioned previously, he found it prudent to publish his book when he was old. In a notably downbeat personal introduction, he explained from his retirement home in Switzerland that he was only able to write it because he was close to the end of his life.
News of van de Velde’s book nevertheless travelled quickly. It was reprinted forty-three times in English alone, as late as 1960 – when it was still the only manual of its kind, with the comparable (but in many ways more inhibited) The Joy of Sex still some years away. In 1928, Ideal Marriage was the only modern book to date by an authoritative male to endorse cunnilingus and fellatio. Van de Velde advocated monogamy, but believed the way to make fidelity work was for husbands to learn to satisfy their wives in bed.
Van de Velde left nothing to the imagination. Neither Lady Chatterley nor, for that matter Fanny Hill, written in 1749 (neither of which could be read uncensored by the general public before the 1960s), had much to say, for instance, on oral sex – there was one fleeting allusion in Cleland’s work and none at all in Lady Chatterley.
Here, then, is Dr van de Velde in the midst of a scholarly medical discourse on vaginal lubrication; the language may be dated in parts, yet it is far too fruity for a modern tabloid newspaper: ‘… the most simple and obvious substitute for the inadequate lubricant is the natural moisture of the salivary glands … and during a very protracted local or genital manipulation, this form of substitute must be applied to the vulva not once, but repeatedly. And this may best, most appropriately and most expeditiously be done without the intermediary offices of the fingers, but through what I prefer to term the genital kiss, by gentle and soothing caresses with lips and tongue … Lack of local secretion ceases to be a drawback, and even becomes an advantage … The acuteness of the pleasure it excites and the variety of tactile sensation it provides, will ensure that the previous deficiency is made good – i.e. that sexual excitement and desire reach such a point that -either by these means alone or aided by other endearments -distillation [orgasm] takes place, heralding psychic and bodily readiness for a sexual communion successful and satisfactory to both partners.’
Van de Velde’s was an evangelistic, and also a remarkably humane work. If a wife, the doctor wrote, ‘chooses not to give access to the husband’s caressing hand’, and consequently that, ‘there is not the necessary excitement and desire on her part to cause swelling of the labia, dilation of the vulva and erection of the clitoris, then, as these manifestations are both normal and desirable before coitus, it is both stupid and grossly selfish of the husband to attempt it if they are absent’.
Yet even in this astonishing early textbook on orgasm, for Ideal Marriage was no less, the most fundamental premise was quite hopelessly incorrect. In van der Velde’s book, not only was the importance of simultaneous orgasm paramount, but some women (supposedly) quoted claimed they could only have an orgasm once they had felt their partner’s seminal fluid released. One elucidated in what was a startling explicit manner for the era: ‘Then, I feel the liquid torrent of the ejaculate, which gives a perfectly distinct sensation, as gloriously soothing and refreshing at the same time.’
This is odd in the extreme. While a very few women in other studies have occasionally confirmed, or believed, that they can just about make out, as if it were a distant radio signal, their partner’s ejaculation, the idea of a woman’s orgasm being dependent on the sensation is so unusual as to prompt the modern reader to wonder whether Dr van de Velde made it up – that it was his own fantasy.
A lot of the work for even mid-twentieth-century sexual pioneers consisted of a simple naming of parts. Helena Wright, a British gynaecologist, published The Sex Factor in Marriage in 1930, and then revised it in 1947 to take up the cause of the clitoris with even greater precision. The earlier instructions, she had realised, were simply not encouraging enough for women whose socialisation had forbidden them to touch themselves at all. ‘Arrange a good light and take a mirror,’ Dr Wright instructed: ‘The hood can be gently drawn backward by the finger tips and inside will be seen a small, smooth, rounded body … which glistens in a good light.’ Then touch it, she advised. (’Any small, smooth object will do.’) She promised that ‘the instant the clitoris is touched, a peculiar and characteristic sensation is experienced which is different in essence from touches on the labia or anywhere else.’
Even with such specific anatomical information becoming available, however, the old propagandists for synchronised mutual orgasm were still not quite dissuaded. In the same way as Freud’s view persisted among Freudians for fifty years, as recently as the 1970s, old-school doctors and newspapers articles on sex were still reassuring men that a woman who failed to achieve orgasm with him was suffering from a physical or a psychological problem. It was not until the emergence of Dr Alfred C. Kinsey in the late-1940s and early-1950s that the reality was finally laid bare that penetrative sex rarely, if ever, produces female orgasm – and that simultaneous orgasm is a myth.
15
The Orgasm Comes of Age:
From Kinsey to the
Swinging Sixties
‘There cannot be many who would hesitate before admitting that the present age is, in the sexual sense, a period of freedom’
Burgo Partridge, The History of Orgies, 1958
Alfred Kinsey’s name is practically synonymous with the post-Second World War liberation of sex in the West. His achievement at the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, the painstaking delineation and mapping of a generation’s and a culture’s hitherto unknown private sexual beliefs, experiences, predilections and practices, was a landmark in social science. Yet Kinsey was by training a zoologist who had taught in his core discipline and biology at Harvard and, by the age of thirty-five, was the world’s foremost authority on the gall wasp.
His first book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male appeared in 1948 in a welter of publicity. It ran to eight hundred pages of tinder-dry statistical and scientific material and commentary, with not a line of unseemly passion or a tendentious remark that strayed beyond commentary on the evidence. Yet ‘the Kinsey report’, as it was called by a sex sensation-hungry media, sold half a million hardback copies in the US, even at the price of $6.50 – the same as ten or fifteen paperbac
k novels. A single copy reputedly found its way to the Soviet Union, where there was a room in the Kremlin in which authorised personnel could study the decadence of the West. Even books about the Kinsey report sold in hundreds of thousands. The subject patently lit a fuse with publics far away from America; even reading at an ocean’s distance about the behind-the-drapes goings-on in American bedrooms seemed to titillate. Kinsey’s follow-up, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, came out five years later. It did not sell as well, but only because huge excerpts were published by newspapers and magazines whose editors knew from the experience of 1948 that the very word ‘Kinsey’ in a headline could guarantee extra sales.
Kinsey appeared to approach his research entirely free from moral bias. Like Desmond Morris in the next decade, he regarded Homo sapiens as just another species which, in the case of the male, seemed to display as a primary behaviour the pursuit of orgasm. In a decade of evidence-gathering for their two books, Kinsey and his team interviewed (unlike Shere Hite in the 1970s, who sent out questionnaires) over 12,000 men and women on 200 separate areas of their sexual history. The interviews could take several hours, after which the numbers were processed by a punch-card-reading computer.
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