A Wellcome Collection exhibition on 100 years of sexology shows how the scandalous gradually becomes mainstream
Le vice anglais? A scene from the film of Fifty Shades of Grey
'Go back to your own country and preach your dirty methods there. Decent
English people are disgusted at your filthy suggestions … Sexual
gratification is not the only thing that makes life worth living, as you
seem to think.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking these trenchant sentiments were flung at an
American porn baron – Hustler’s Larry Flynt, perhaps – following a campaign
to open a sex shop next to a nunnery in Tunbridge Wells. But, no, this is an
extract from a letter sent to contraception pioneer Marie Stopes after her
sex manual Married Love was published in 1918. (I presume her “own country”
is Stopes’s birthplace of Scotland.)
What finer demonstration of how yesterday’s sex scandal becomes today’s
orthodoxy? For now we live in the post-Alex Comfort world, where the Joy of
Sex has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide – a million in Britain
alone. But, as Thomas Babington Macaulay observed: “We know no spectacle so
ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits or morality.”
It will be interesting to see if anyone has a fit of the vapours this Thursday
when the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition, “The Institute of Sexology”,
opens on the Euston Road. This is Wellcome’s first year-long exhibition, in
a new gallery.
Curator Kate Forde promises it will “evolve” but to begin with visitors will
browse an extensive range of erotic artefacts and photos, showing the human
body in all states of arousal and inventive copulation, as they journey
through the lives and methodologies of the great sexologists.
The exhibition takes its title from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für
Sexualwissenschaft, which opened in Berlin in 1919 and sought to free people
to express their true sexuality. Hirschfeld’s theories on sexual
indeterminacy were welcomed by intellectuals such as Christopher Isherwood
and André Gide, who flocked to Berlin, but proved a flagrant affront to
National Socialist sensibilities; in 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power,
the institute was ransacked by rioters.
The Wellcome exhibition pays tribute to Hirschfeld’s vision of “Per Scientiam
ad Justitiam” (“through science to justice”) by mustering the great pioneers
of sexual intimacy, from Sigmund Freud to Alfred Kinsey, Masters and
Johnson, through to anthropologist Margaret Mead and, finally, the intrepid
women scientists who devised the UK’s National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes
and Lifestyles (Natsal).
This is the tale of how sexual research over the past 100 years was intensely
personal. If the narrative of the 19th century involved extraordinary feats
of global conquest, via the march of imperialism and industrialisation, the
tale of the 20th often seemed relayed through more intimate geography. What
is the self and how does sexuality inform it?
Developments in medicine, psychology and anthropology, not to mention the
upstart discipline of psychoanalysis, meant the sexual being was the focus
of investigation. From the close confines of the consulting room to the
medic’s lab (where Masters and Johnson innovated techniques to measure
sexual response) to the emerging discipline of large-scale data gathering
and randomised research, boffins were trying to winkle out the secrets of
our desires.
The exhibition even has a replica of Wilhelm Reich’s notorious Orgone
Accumulator, or “Sex Box” which, according to its inventor, could cure
society’s problems by affording users more frequent orgasms.
Not that sexologists were always in favour of sex. Alfred Kinsey, whose survey
scandalised America, and would never ask a man “if” he had had a homosexual
experience, rather “when”, didn’t drink or smoke, sent his children to
Sunday school and urged his daughters to refrain from sex before marriage.
But then a walk round the Institute of Sexology’s display serves as a reminder
of how wed we Britons also are to a curious brand of hypocrisy. We don’t
mind sex when it’s educational, but are outraged if it erupts on TV before
the 9pm watershed. Politicians are still forced to resign for sexual
misdemeanours – witness the recent sexting scandal involving Tory MP Brooks
Newmark – but if the politico is funny, posh and charming, such as the late
Alan Clark, he may well escape censure.
The rule steadfastly remains don’t frighten the horses. In other words, stay
under the radar, because the real shame is not the misdemeanour, so much as
being caught in the act of transgression. Max Mosley wasn’t sorry about his
penchant for dominatrix sex, following a News of the World sting, so much as
outraged that his activities were exposed to his devoted wife and children.
Forget, “No sex please, we’re British!” This exhibition also reminds us that
not all the letters addressed to Marie Stopes expressed outrage, by any
means. There were nervous wives-to-be seeking erotic advice and a missive
from “a happy husband and father” expressing concerns about “the narrow
separate beds which have been introduced in England from Continental
countries; I don’t see how they can allow of comfortable positions.”
I am sure Stopes heartily agreed. After all, it was her experience of a
miserable, unconsummated first marriage that led to her impassioned
proselytising for sexual know-how – just as her observations of the damage
and exhaustion of women undergoing multiple pregnancies led to her campaign
for proper birth control. This brand of British female doughtiness puts you
in mind of Jean Johnson and Shirley Landels of the Hampshire WI, who flew to
Nevada, New Zealand and Sweden in 2008 to research the best legislation for
sex workers.
The same indomitable spirit is also evident in the team of women who pioneered
three Natsal surveys in response to the Aids panic of the 1980s, when
leaflets dropped through every UK door warning: “Don’t Die of Ignorance”.
Margaret Thatcher cut off funding in 1989, saying Britons would find the
questions too intrusive (although political opponents said the true reason
was the government’s fears it would be tainted by association).
The Wellcome Foundation stepped in with a grant and by 1991 19,000 adults had
been interviewed. The demure social scientists were in turn grilled by
hyperventilating journalists. In 1994, Ysenda Maxtone Graham wrote in The
Sunday Telegraph: “They had an intriguing gracefulness about them, these
lady scientists. And when they said, speaking into the microphone, things
like 'oral sex, in particular …’ and 'Heterosexual anal intercourse does
remain an uncommon practice,’ the words flowed smoothly and elegantly from
their clean mouths.”
The words still flow: one of the survey’s key architects, Anne Johnson,
Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at UCL, explains in the
exhibition’s book that “the first Natsal came about primarily from our need
to understand how far HIV might spread. But HIV also legitimised the
scientific study of sexual behaviour, and the three Natsals have informed
public policy and practice in many more areas than HIV.” The data is now
used for sex education, sexual health and contraception programmes and
legislating for the age of homosexual consent.
Indeed, if one thing strikes you, as you ponder the exhibition’s multifarious
content, it’s how the most striking evolution in British sexual attitudes
(and western moral values in general) concerns same sex relationships.
Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey’s attempts to place homosexual
expressions of love on the scale of normalcy have blossomed in to the 21st
century’s legislation for gay marriage.
Similarly, le vice anglais (spanking and flagellation, keep up at the back!)
is no longer an unspeakable perversion, but the backbone of bestselling
British novels such as Fifty Shades of Grey. As for sex education, we no
longer fret about what we should tell our children, so much as how we
protect them from the most extreme and distorting images of online
pornography.
Meanwhile, the modern focus for society’s outrage and disgust is the
long-ignored and suppressed scandal of child abuse. How slight our
historical objections to poor old Marie Stopes seem, in the light of Jimmy
Savile’s assaults on vulnerable minors and Rotherham’s grooming scandal.
Another measure of such social change will be in our reaction to this
exhibition. Will visitors complain that the displays are obscene, or will
the punters moan that, in this age of celebrity sex tapes, they are too
tame? Perhaps they will conclude, as they peer at erotic netsuke and an
Ancient Greek pot decorated with rutting couples, that, where the erotic
arts are concerned, there is nothing new under the sun.
Or perhaps, in the finest tradition of British hypocrisy, we will all express
a little indignation and a smidgen of ennui, before forming a long and
orderly queue to see exactly what form of sexual enlightenment is on offer.
