Taken from the New Statesman archive, 23 August 1963.
Even in 1963, it seems, commercialisation and psychological overcomplication were putting young men and women under unwelcome pressure when it came to sex, and Americans apparently bore a good share of responsibility. The "recent events" which prompted these thoughts, however, were British: the Profumo affair. Priestley (1894-1984) was a New Statesman contributor over several decades.
Selected by Brian Cathcart
The subject is topical at any time, but recent events, reported at great length in the press, and giving many of us an hour's good reading every weekday and three hours on Sunday, suggest that a few thoughts about sex might be timely. I am not of course a sexologist; indeed, I am not sure I would know a sexologist if I ever saw one. These thoughts are those of an elderly male, English of course but not without experience in this field, and dithering from many of his fellowcountrymen in not regarding woman with a strong mixture of contempt and fear.
It has been noticed lately that in addition to an economic and social rat race, we now have a sexual one. Triumphant male sex, with the girls apparently moaning for more, is now being imported from America as a status symbol. They have been worrying about sex in New York for some time now, which has been a nuisance for all concerned, especially the males, because sex dislikes to be worried. It flourishes best in an easy atmosphere. To hurry from books of advice to the bed is not good.
Nothing at first sight could appear to be more platitudinous than the observation that sex involves a relationship. And I am not thinking now about love, just sex. In theory this necessary condition of relationship is accepted, but in practice and in writing and talking and some manipulation of the public mind, it is all too completely forgotten, Naturally, experience and skill are not without value in sexual activities, but the idea of unrelated sex, existing in its own right like an ear for true pitch, and the further idea that some people have a talent, perhaps genius, for sex, again unrelated to anybody in particular are nonsense.
All this 'good in bed' talk (and the 'in bed' is a give-away) confuses sex with playing the piano well, painting in watercolours, cooking, ...something that can be done for anybody or if necessary just for oneself. The now outmoded term ‘sex appeal’ never had the broad meaning it began to claim; Gloria has sex appeal for Smith, Amanda for Brown, and that is all; the generalised sex appeal manufactured by the film industry can be ignored, being remote from flesh and blood.
Sex to be worth having - at least among persons of some refinement and sensibility in our civilisation - demands a certain polarity between man and woman, something about which we seem to know very little, though its absence must have wrecked innumerable marriages. This polarity is part-physical, part-psychological, though I suspect that the psychological factor is the more important. It may have something to do with essential types. I seem to remember Gurdjieff - or Ouspensky quoting Gurdjieff - observing somewhere that men and women belonging to certain types cannot have any real sexual feeling for one another: the necessary polarity is not there. True sexual experience between them is therefore not possible.
Severe churchmen and fulminating public moralists should bear this in mind. When sexual trial and experiment are mentioned, they are apt to begin thundering ‘Bestial!’ But it is they who are taking the bestial view of us. They are assuming that young men and women can be as simply mated as bulls and heifers, boars and gilts. Perhaps they can, just to produce young, but it is hard luck on those young If they are brought up by parents who are profoundly dissatisfied and are contemptuous and bitter about each other. All this too might occasionally be borne in mind by divorce court judges, so fond of denouncing helpless people about whose real private lives they know nothing. But then sex should never have to make any appeal in our law courts, where it is treated as if it were cannibalism. Indeed, I am not sure if a gentlemanly cannibalism, taking a slice or two of the breast or stuffed loin with a sound wine, would not come off the better.
Except in those seaports where single men return from long voyages, after drooling at cabin pin-ups for months, I believe there is far less uncomplicated honest lust about than is generally imagined. The psychological factor soon makes its entrance. The purely sensual aspect of various scandalous affairs may be of little importance. It does not follow that middle-aged men, making fools of themselves, are bewitched by the gay girls' vital statistics. They may be moved by vanity, which the girls have learnt how to flatter. They may want to revenge themselves on womanhood itself by purchasing feminine sexual humiliation, though they must know that the tough girls they pay are having the last laugh. Then again there are men who cannot really enjoy sex with women who are equals on all levels, perhaps their superiors. They may need a girl who is a 'hot little number', not a person.
Then, with the psychological factor completely triumphant, there is the fatal attraction of the woman upon whom an imaginative man has projected his own magical anima image. This is the basis of almost all reckless and seemingly inexplicable infatuations. A beautiful example of this projection can be seen in Hazlitt's sudden mad passion, utterly bewildering to all his friends, for his landlady's daughter, Sarah Walker, a sulky, rather stupid, unattractive girl, who never knew what he was talking about. But to him her face was bright with the anima magic arising from the depths of his own being. So he would stop strangers in the street to rave about her. Any imaginative man who has escaped this experience has been lucky; though he is luckier still if across the breakfast table, in one good year after another, the face smiling at him still carries some trace of his original anima projection, and so is both dearly familiar and yet still magical.
Youngsters today know more about sex that we did 50 years ago, but the boys have to withstand more pressure than we had to do. In the West now, sex has become a kind of super-commodity, boosting the sales of lesser commodities. (In this matter, at least, communist societies are better.) And a gigantic industry has been organised, as it were, to feed the western male so much strychnine. It is as if, having tidied him up and quietened him down, modern society is worried about his virility. Where he was once fenced off, now he is pushed on, though often just to sell him something.
But am I right in thinking that the newest girls, among the young avant garde and the intelligentsia, are not working so hard at immediate sexual attraction as their elder sisters and their mothers did? And, if this is so, may not this fashion, like so many others in the past, rapidly spread among less intellectual and more conventional young women, who may soon no longer arrive at an office or a shop as if bent on sexual conquest, curled and painted and perfumed like Old Testament harlots awaiting their lovers?
No doubt most women and girls intuitively perceive that sex worthy of the the term involves a relationship. They know it is something that works with Bill but not with Joe, who needs Kate. Yet I suspect that many of them have been been pushed off balance, made a little giddy, by this endless male (and trade) insistence upon the 'dish' aspect of the female, upon sex as the super-entree. Seeing another female shining high as a sex symbol, they forget how many managers, agents, big publicity departments have been hard at work, after face surgeons and dentists and hairdressers have done their best and they begin asking themselves what 'she' has got that they haven't got.
And at times perhaps, still thinking in terms of sex and not a love relationship, they must wonder darkly what on earth they are all supposed to have, to justify all this fuss and expense and build-up. And they are right to wonder, for sex, as distinct from love, is now being asked to carry too heavy a load. As one primary satisfaction after another vanishes from our society, sex has to keep taking over.
It is now frank and hot in fiction. I remember when a novel was banned – and there was a storm threatening to break many a teacup – just because a character said 'Balls!' Now anything goes; and I refuse to begin shouting about it, one way or another. (But I also refuse to believe that anything originally published in Paris and confiscated at Dover must be a work of genius.) But sexual candour in the novel is rather trickier than most progressive readers might imagine. If a novel does not want to halt where reticence ends, then he really ought to go on and on, telling all, spilling the lot. But, at a crisis in a love story, readers do not want to find themselves attending a combined anatomical and psychoanalytical lecture. Very well, you say, let him use the lovers' language. Yes, but this is essentially their private language, not yours, not mine; and nobody, at this point in the story, wants to be whipping to and from a glossary. Only the comic shock-tactics novelist (and there is not much shock left) can avoid being wrecked on this snag.
And now a final point, returning to where we began, with all that very full reporting and eager reading of scandal. As one of the eager reading of scandal. As one of the eager readers, there with it day after day, I think we have had too much pruriency attributed to us. I don't think sex was at the root of it, but something quite different. It happens now that we people are saddled with, so have to support, and indeed are asked to admire, a number of overlords who want, and have got, nearly everything – political power, most of the money, all the directorships, the cultural governorships, the academic chancellorships and wardenships, the titles and ribbons and garters, the private boxes and the best mahogany and the old port and free travel and, wherever possible, the hurrahs of us peasants at the gates. Now the reason why we read on and on had little to do with sex; we know about sex, and don't need to buy any. No, what we wanted, in our gawking peasant fashion, was to catch a glimpse of one or two of these new overlords with their pants down.
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