Stranger Than We Can Imagine (26 page)

D.H. Lawrence understood the change that occurred around the First World War in a way that suddenly irrelevant aristocrats never could. For all that the novel was portrayed as a threat to the social order due to its sexual frankness, the real threat came from its discussion of the upper classes’ inability to comprehend they were finished. Many novels attempted to come to terms with the irreversible change that occurred to the British ruling classes after the First World War, from Ford Madox Ford’s
Parade’s End
(1928) to L.P. Hartley’s
The Go-Between
(1953), but they were not as brutally blunt as
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. The aristocracy’s attempts to carry on as before, in Lawrence’s eyes, made them into a form of zombie. They may have physically existed and were still moving, but they were quite dead.

In order to escape the living death of life with her impotent aristocrat husband, Lady Chatterley begins an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Despite Lawrence’s frankness and the socially taboo nature of the relationship, the emotional heart of the affair was not dissimilar to the ideal Christian union described at length in the books of Marie Stopes. Lady Chatterley needed to be fulfilled sexually in order to become physically, emotionally and spiritually alive, just as Stopes advised. That fulfilment could only come by the shared willingness of her and Mellors to give themselves to each other entirely and unconditionally. Giving up their individuality allowed the pair to achieve a sense of union akin to the ideal spiritual love that was the focus of so much of Stopes’s poetry. Stopes would have been appalled by their marital status, but she would have recognised that the relationship between Chatterley and Mellors was loving, tender and emotionally intelligent – in a way that the coming sexual revolution would not be.

The idealised spiritual union promoted by Stopes and Lawrence was no match for the incoming tide of individualism. A more typical attitude to loosening sexual mores can be seen in the work of the American novelist Henry Miller, whose first novel
Tropic of
Cancer
(1934) was, as mentioned earlier, influenced by the sexual openness of Dalí and Buñuel’s surrealist film
L’Âge d’or
. This semiautobiographical modernist novel records the aimless life of Miller as he drifts penniless around Paris, failing to write his great novel. Like
Ulysses
and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, it was the subject of numerous obscenity charges before a 1964 US Supreme Court decision found that it had literary merit and could be freely published.

Tropic of Cancer
is a link between the novels of the early modernists and the Beat writers and existentialists to come. While its stream-of-consciousness approach and lack of interest in plot recall Joyce, the nihilism and self-centredness of the main character is emotionally closer to Sartre or Kerouac. Miller writes from a deeply misanthropic perspective. ‘People are like lice,’ he announces early in the book. As Anaïs Nin explains in the book’s preface, ‘Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium.’ It was this delirium that made
Tropic of Cancer
an important book, especially in the eyes of the Beats. But, as Nin warns, the overriding tone is cold-hearted.

Despite occasional epiphanic moments, such as one triggered by the lack of self-consciousness of a Parisian prostitute, Miller has no interest in any romanticised notion of spiritual union. The sexual encounters he details are motivated more by anger and disgust than by love and affection. Lady Chatterley would have been deeply unimpressed by Miller’s performance as a lover. After having sex with his host’s maid Elsa, Miller remarks that ‘Somehow I feel sorry as hell for her and yet I don’t give a damn.’ It is a line with all the emotional intelligence and lack of self-awareness of a teenage boy. For Henry Miller, sex was about what he wanted. The needs of the other party were of little consequence. He originally considered calling the novel
Crazy Cock
.

The sexual revolution that Miller wanted became mainstream with the arrival of the oral contraceptive pill in 1960, which made
birth control easier and more reliable. Because the Swingin’ Sixties celebrated free love and is associated with great strides in civil rights, gay rights, vegetarianism and environmentalism, it is often assumed that it was also a period of female liberation, but this was not the case.

The feminist movement of the 1970s was necessary in part because of how women were treated in the 1960s. Women were significant players in the hippy movement and enthusiastic supporters of the relaxed sexual climate, but they were largely viewed, by both genders, as being in a supporting role to their men. Women who were following their own path, such as the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, were treated with suspicion.

In an era when any form of restraint on another’s individuality was deeply uncool, men were quick to view women as objects to do with as they wished. As Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead reassured us in their 1971 song ‘Jack Straw’, ‘We can share the women, we can share the wine.’ Or, as Mungo Jerry sang in their 1970 pro-drink-driving anthem ‘In the Summertime’, ‘If her daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal / If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel.’

Watching British television from the 1960s and 1970s reveals the extent to which the objectification of women became normalised, at least in the minds of the producers of comedy and light-entertainment programming. A common trope was an older amorous man running after one or more younger women in a prolonged chase. This was considered funny, even though the fact that the women were running away demonstrated fear and a lack of consent. An example of this can be seen in a 1965 edition of the BBC family science fiction programme
Doctor Who
. The time-travelling Doctor (William Hartnell) was in ancient Rome where he witnessed Emperor Nero chasing a woman he intended to rape. The Doctor, not realising that the woman was his companion Barbara, smirks and waves his hand to dismiss the incident. The ‘chasing women’ trope became so normalised that comedians like Benny Hill were able to subvert it by having young women chase the old man. This didn’t alter the fact that young women in Hill’s programmes rarely spoke,
and existed only to be ogled, groped and to undress.

Perhaps the nadir of the early 1970s objectification of women was the song ‘Rape’ by Peter Wyngarde. Wyngarde was a famous actor, best known for his portrayal of the womanising spy Jason King. With his bouffant hair, large moustache and flamboyant clothes, Jason King was a key inspiration for Mike Myers’s comedy character Austin Powers. Wyngarde signed to RCA records and released an album in 1970. This included a song where he suavely discussed the differing pleasures of rape that resulted from raping women of different ethnicities, over an easy-listening musical background and the sound of women screaming. This was a song released by a major record label and performed by a famous celebrity at the height of his fame. It highlights how different the period around 1970 was to the present day, and indeed to the rest of history.

What made that era’s portrayal of women unique was that extreme objectification was placed front and centre in popular culture, while sexual abuse, though rife, was hidden. Old hierarchical power structures meant that powerful men could abuse their positions with little danger of prosecution or public censure.

In the early 1970s many power structures from previous centuries were still in place, but they now existed in an individualist culture where women could be painted as voiceless objects. In this atmosphere, and within these structures, extreme institutionalised networks of sexual abusers were able to flourish. The extent of organised abuse of children within the British establishment is only slowly coming to light, but the open existence of the campaigning organisation Paedophile Information Exchange, which was founded in 1974 and received funding from the Home Office, gives some indication of the situation. Child abuse on a horrific scale by members of the Catholic Church was prevalent in many countries, of which Ireland, the United States and Canada have done the most to publicly investigate this dark history.

These institutionally protected networks of child abusers, clearly, had little concern for consent. They were not interested in the impact they had on their victims. The sexual life they pursued was
a long way from the spiritual union sought by Marie Stopes or D.H. Lawrence.

These are extreme cases, but there is a pattern here. From the abusers in the Vatican and the British establishment to the attitudes of musicians and light entertainers, the sexual revolution during the 1960s was frequently understood through the perspective of individualism: get what you want, it was only your own concerns that mattered. People were finally free to live a physically fulfilled life, but focusing on the self caused many to choose an isolated, soulless form of sex.

Of all the key feminist texts that appeared in this atmosphere, the one that had the greatest impact was
The Female Eunuch
by the Australian academic Germaine Greer. Published in 1970, it has sold millions of copies and was translated into eleven languages. A scattershot mix of polemic and academic research delivered with more humour and plain speaking than many other feminist texts, it found an eager audience and became an immediate bestseller.

Greer recognised that the direction the sexual revolution was taking was not in the interests of women. ‘Sex must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral, to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people,’ she wrote. The alternative was the empty sexuality of the age, where ‘we are never more uncommunicative, never more alone.’

The title of the book recognised that even though women had never been more objectified, they were not seen as fully sexual objects. They were like Barbie dolls, expected to be pretty and passive, but not possessing any genitals of their own. ‘The female is considered as a sexual object for the use and appreciation of other sexual beings,’ Greer wrote. ‘Her sexuality is both denied and misrepresented by being identified as passivity. The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity.’ Betty Friedan had similar concerns. ‘Sexual liberation is a misnomer if it denies the personhood of women,’ she said. ‘The first wave of so-called sexual liberation in
America, where women were passive sex objects, was not real liberation. For real liberation to be enjoyed by men and women, neither can be reduced to a passive role.’

Greer argued that the way forward for women was to recognise their innate self-worth and become fully sexual creatures. This would grant women ‘freedom from being the thing looked at’. It would also, she noted, be a great gift to men.

The female liberation movement, which had been ignited by Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
, was kicked into the mainstream by the success of Greer’s book and became known as Women’s Lib. Feminism had been on the back burner since the arrival of universal suffrage, but votes for women had not proved to be the magic bullet that the first wave of feminists had hoped. The ability to cast one vote every four or five years turned out to be a blunt tool for dealing with complex institutionalised bias. Gender equality in many areas, particularly pay equality, was stubbornly refusing to materialise. In 2015, this is still the case, but Women’s Lib did make significant strides in many areas. The female objectification of the 1970s would not be accepted now.

Writers like these remind us that our culture is not as sexualised as it prides itself on being. The emotional intelligence needed for the individuality-shattering, full and committed relationships argued for by Stopes, Lawrence and Greer is frequently absent. For all the tits on display, a culture without communion will always be more masturbatory than sexual. When Philip Larkin wrote that ‘Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)’, he may have been mistaken. It’s possible that, on a cultural level, we’re still waiting.

Young fans outside Buckingham Palace as The Beatles receive their MBEs, 1965
(Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

ELEVEN:
TEENAGERS

L
ittle Richard’s 1955 single ‘Tutti Frutti’ began with a cry of ‘Wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!’ Then came drums and twin saxophones, and the hammering of a piano. Little Richard was a twenty-five-year-old dishwasher from a poor town in Georgia, but on that song he announced himself, all hair and attitude, as a force of nature. Who had ever sounded that alive before?

It was a cultural year zero. Nonsense words were commonplace in music, but Little Richard screaming ‘Wop-bom-a-loo-mop-alomp-bom-bom!’ was entirely different to Perry Como singing ‘Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo’. The record itself lasted little over two minutes, but its impact still echoes. When
MOJO
magazine produced a ‘Top 100 Records that Changed the World’ chart, ‘Tutti Frutti’ had to be number one.