Everything you always knew and a bit more
William Leith
SEX AND THE BRITISH by Paul Ferris Michael Joseph, £18.99, pp. 301 It is 1965. Kenneth Tynan, asked on live television whether he would allow sexual intercourse on stage at the National Theatre, replied: 'Oh, I think so, certainly.' Then he said: 'I mean, there are few ratio- nal people in this world to whom the word 'fuck' is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.' This, the moment when a man said a rude word, is a key inci- dent in Sex and the British, and Paul Ferris reports it with his usual downbeat lack of excitement. This is what happened: Tynan swore, Mary Whitehouse said she'd write a letter to the Queen, and that Tynan should have his bottom smacked, and Ned Sherrin said: 'He'd probably -rather have enjoyed that.'
Sex and the British is a book about sex, but it's not a dirty book, or a titillating book, or one of those books that pretends to be scientific when really it is just an excuse to print people's fantasies. No, Sex and the British is sensible, serious, scrupu- lously unhysterical — largely, in fact, a history of people having arguments about rude words. Sex and the British is 301 pages of Tynans and Whitehouses, and, occasion- ally, the odd Sherrin.
In his unexcited, stiffly informal way, Ferris starts at the turn of the century and wades through to the present day, knee- deep in legal documents and yellowing newspaper-clips and court reports and statistical charts. He briefly tells us the story of an early Tynan, Havelock Ellis, who wrote 'scientific' pamphlets about sex- ual deviation and whose 'greatest pleasure was to see his lover urinate'. Ellis' pam- phlet Sexual Inversion, which was sup- pressed by the police in 1897, contained stories about perverts — the man who was obsessed with a broken shoe, the lecturer who enjoyed burning himself with hot wires, the boy who was aroused by the notion of a woman being shot out of a can- non. And then what? An analysis of how pornography dresses up as science? An attempt to understand people who are obsessed with urination?
No, Ferris wades on, stacking up more and more little details. The Edwardian era, like every era, was full of suppressed litera- ture, dirty pictures, imaginative excuses, sad perverts and opportune witticisms — quirky little incidents in the world of rude words.
Ferris tells us a bit, but not much, about Gynaecology, 'a masochist's tale', Genital Laws, a 'medical study', Suburban Souls, a book of pornographic pictures. Then he tells us a bit, but not much, about hundreds of other things — how it was respectable for men to go to prostitutes, how adultery was fine, but sex before marriage not at all fine, how Elinor Glyn was molested in the rose garden at Warwick Castle, and told her husband, who didn't mind, how bishops were always making dull pronouncements. ('Social purity is the arena in which the Church makes its challenge to the standard of the world.') But what does Ferris think? He never really tells you. The same question keeps cropping up throughout the century — it is the question being asked at every censor- ship trial, every porn-busting operation, with every dull clerical pronouncement. The question is: what's wrong with having sex purely for fun? And the answer is never quite the same: it's wrong because of God, or pregnancy, or disease, or because you're letting the side down. In history, the Tynans have always had more publicity, but the Whitehouses have had more success.
Ferris staggers on, telling us about the suffragettes, who would do anything to denigrate men; about H. G. Wells, who had an affair with a woman called Amber Reeves, and got her pregnant in 1909, and didn't leave his wife; about an incident in 1913 in which Violet Grey, a madam, told the police: 'If men want to be whipped, and like to pay me for it, I suppose I can do it.' In the first world war, the army authorities agonised over whether or not to warn sol- diers about VD, in case it might encourage them to have sex. Ferris tells us about the Ulysses dispute, the nasty history of abor- tion, the Chatterley trial, everything you can think of. And you still don't quite know what point he's trying to make.
It is as if Ferris had set out to prove to a particularly sceptical girlfriend that he is not remotely perverted, or even vaguely interested in porn. Towards the end, for the final test, he goes to a sex emporium in Holland, and coldly peers at all the filth — the dildoes and the blow-up dolls and the books full of rude words. The proprietor tells him that, while the English love spank- ing literature, the Germans are 'very big on peeing,' and offers him a free dildo. Uninterested in everything — even the spanking, which he might at least have asked a few questions about — Ferris goes back across the channel to his surveys and clippings. Read this book if you want to know about the tactics of the Whitehouses. But if you want to understand what drives the Tynans of this world, look elsewhere. Virtually anywhere else, in fact.
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