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 The Need for Expert Opinion in Sexual Reform

 [Address delivered before the third International Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, held in the Wigmore Hall, 13 September 1929.  Sexual Reform Congress, ed. Norman Haire, London, 1930.  An unauthorized verbatim report, at variance with the official text as approved by Shaw, appeared in Time and Tide, 20 September 1929] 

            I am sorry I cannot read you a paper.  I am constitutionally incapable of doing such a thing.  I must improvise as best I can; and for the sake of others whom you have to hear as well as myself I will try to be concise, though I am not usually so on the platform.
            I am not going tonight to beg the question of what sexual reform means.  Everybody is a sexual reformer:  that is, everybody who has any ideas on the subject at all.  The Pope, for instance, is a prominent sexual reformer; and the Austrian Nudists are sexual reformers.  If you had a general congress of all the sexual reformers, not merely the members of one particular Society, but all the people who are demanding sexual reform:  Nudists and Catholics, birth controllers and self-controlers, homosexualists and heterosexualists, monogamists, polygamists, and celibates, there would be some curious cross-party divisions.  The Pope would find himself on nine points out of ten warmly in sympathy with Dr Marie Stopes.  And it is quite possible that the most fanatical Nudists and the most fanatical homosexualists might have in common the strongest objection to polygamy and divorce.  All of them would probably disagree on such questions as the age of consent.
            My point tonight is that, no matter what people’s views are on sexual reform, it is desirable that they should take expert opinion as to the practicability and probable social effect of the particular measures they are advocating.  I shall not discuss the measures for or against.  I simply put before you the general proposition, that instead of following the usual human practice of inventing your science according to what you happen to desire yourself, and inventing your facts in the same accommodating way, you should make some attempt to find out from people who have practical experience, who are experts in the matter, what they think would happen if the particular measures you are advocating were carried into effect.
            There are two effects to be considered in any definite measure of sexual reform.  There is the psychological effect, and there is the political effect.  Now, it is on the psychological side that I wish to speak tonight, because I am speaking as an expert.  [Laughter]  I do not in the least know why that remark of mine has elicited laughter; but as a matter of fact I am an expert in sex appeal.  I have to deal in sex appeal exactly as a costermonger has to deal in turnips; and a costermonger’s opinion on turnips is worth having.  He is an expert.  In the same way the opinion of playwrights and other theatre people is worth having because they know how the thing is done through having to do it as part of their daily work.
            One very important function of the theatre in society is to educate the audience in matters of sex.  Besides the people who take that duty seriously there are those who only exploit sex appeal commercially.  But no matter, they all have to know how to do it, because if their sex appeal fails, they lose money; and you can hardly call any man a real expert unless he loses money if his practice happens to be wrong.
            And yet when sex appeal has to be discussed scientifically nobody ever calls in the playwright, and he hi8mself does not come forward without an invitation.  But the priest always rushes in and demands to be accepted as an authority on sex.  Well, if he went behind the scenes of a theatre and made such a claim, we should say:  “Mind your own business.  This evidently is the one subject about which you as a celibate can know nothing.  If you attempt to meddle with it you will make literally an unholy mess of it!”
            However, there is always a certain tendency to go to the man who knows nothing about it, because we are always a little afraid that if we consult a genuine expert his opinion will go against us.

            The Pope represents the priest in this matter. The Pope is the Chief Priest of Europe, and he speaks very strongly on the subject of sex appeal.  I, or course, should never dream of appealing in that matter to the Chief Priest of Europe, but if there were such a person as the Chief Prostitute of Europe I should call her in immediately.  I should say:  “Here, clearly, is a person who deals professionally in sex appeal, and will lose her livelihood if her method is wrong.  She can speak to us with authority.”
            Unfortunately, or fortunately, just as you choose to look at it, there is no such person as the Chief Prostitute of Europe to balance the Chief Priest of Europe, which is perhaps the reason that the priest’s opinion gets heard whilst the prostitute’s opinion is not heard.  Therefore it is that I proffer myself as being the next best authority tot the prostitute, that is to say, the playwright.
            I find myself up against two sets of amateurs.  One set seeks to minimize sex appeal by a maximum of clothing.  The other seeks to maximize sex appeal by a minimum of clothing.  I come in as an expert and tell them that they are both hopelessly and completely wrong.  If you want sex appeal raised to the utmost point, there is only one way of doing it, and that is by clothes.  In hot climates the purpose of clothing must have been sex appeal and not protection from the inclemency of the weather, because in such places the weather tempts people to take off their clothes instead of to put them on.
            Let me give you an actual example.  Some years ago I was at a place in Germany called Kissingen, where people go to take mud baths and drink unpleasant radioactive waters.  I did not take mud baths; but I went one evening to one of those beer-garden places where they have a variety of entertainments.  One of the performers had two accomplishments which are usually incompatible.  She was a singer and an acrobat.  That is a rare combination, because an acrobat is very highly trained muscularly, with the curious result that he or she seldom has any voice at all.
            Consequently I was interested in this lady at Kissingen, because I had never seen an acrobat combine a vocal exhibition with a gymnastic one.  Her interest for us here tonight lies in her dress.  She first went through her performance on the horizontal bar and for that she wore skin tights from head to foot.  Except for the artificial color of the webbing she was exactly as if she had no clothes on at all; and this was accepted without question and was natural.  Then she retired for a moment before coming out again to sing a mildly naughty little song.  And how did she dress for that?  She felt that the costume in which she had revolved on the horizontal bar somehow or other would be an impossible one to sing a naughty song in.  So she put a little skirt on, and, of course, immediately became indecent.  She knew it, and had put on the skirt for that purpose.  She felt that in some way that little skirt had sex appeal in it, and therefore she could sing her naughty little song.
            I wish the Pope had been there.  It would have been a very instructive lesson for him – just the sort of lesson that a priest needs.
            I remember the nineteenth century.  People who remember it are now becoming scarce.  But I remember it well, as I was at an impressionable age then.  Being a born artist I have always been specially impressionable by se.  My first impressions were derived from the Victorian women.  The Victorian woman was a masterpiece of sex appeal.  She was sex appeal from the top of her head to the sole of her feet.  She was clothed, of course, from head to foot:  all clothes!  Everything about her except her cheeks and her nose was a guilty secret, a thing you had to guess at.  All young men and boys then thrilled with the magic and mystery of the invisible world under those clothes.  In the Christmas pantomime the call-boy always played the old woman in the harlequinade, and the one unfailing joke was when the old woman, in scrambling over a wall, shewed one leg with its white stocking visible up to the knew.  Then the whole house shrieked and rocked and roared with laughter.  A modern London audience, which sees a hundred thousand stocking every day, would hardly see the joke.
            When you turned from the ridiculous call-boy dressed as a woman to the real lady, the way she was dressed was like the temptation of St Anthony.  They did not dress her:  they upholstered her.  That is the only word.  Every contour, all her contours, all four of them, may I say, were voluptuously emphasized.  When the lady herself could not emphasize them sufficiently by her own person, artificial aids were introduced.  She fitted on her breasts little wire-cages which were called palpitators.  She had, of course, the bustle which gave the Hottentot outline.  I really think if I could exhibit here one of the ordinary portraits of the fashionable woman of that day, you would be shocked.  But if you stopped to think “What is the woman like?” you would see that the idea was to conceal the fact that she was a human being and make her like a very attractive and luxurious sofa.  It was done by clothing, and could not have been done by any other means.  And every woman knew that.  Every actress knew that.  Those actresses of the French stage who made a specialty of sex appeal never undressed themselves in public.  I do not know how many petticoats they wore; but at any rate, instead of exposing their persons, they just gave you a little glimpse of what looked like a dozen frilled pink petticoats round the ankles, and the effect was tremendous.
            The result was that the Victorian age was an exceedingly immoral age:  an age in which there arose the reaction which modern psychiatrists call exhibitionism.  The upholstered ladies felt that they must do something dreadful:  shew their ankles, for instance.  Hardly the most desperate or abandoned of them ever dreamed of shewing anything more.  Thus you had on the one hand this intense sex appeal produced by clothes, and on the other hand the tendency to defy it or exploit it by making a naughty little revelation of some kind.
            Alexandre Dumas pere, in describing the great French actress Mademoiselle Mars, who used to receive people in her dressing room when she was changing, said that she was a wonderful woman because she could change from head to foot and never let you see more than a thumbnail.  That gives you the measure of sex appeal in the nineteenth century.  If only they could have combined the complete concealment of a woman with an insistence on her sex, they would have been perfectly happy.
            We have been trying to get rid of all that.  We have had a significant spread of Nudism, not carried to the extreme that it has reached in Austria, where you have clubs of people who have the extremely wholesome habit of meeting oneanother without anything on at all, for that gets rid of sex appeal altogether, but still enough to keep our grandmothers in a chronic ecstasy of incredulous amazement.  You see, we do not want to get rid of sex appeal.
            The Nudist points out that, though a single human pair could not be innocently nude together, yet if a hundred other nude persons were present they would no longer feel that they were nude:  there would be nothing in it, though a dressed person would feel unbearably awkward.  But when you tell the ordinary man that there would be nothing in it, he as once says:  “Then don’t let us have any of it.  I like sex appeal.  I prefer to be in an atmosphere of sex appeal.”
            I shall not deliver judgment as to whether it is desirable to live as I did in the nineteenth century, where life was saturated with sex appeal, or under existing conditions where women have taken a very large step towards nudity, and the correspondingly reduced sex appeal has become far saner and pleasanter.  My business is not to say which is the more desirable phenomenon.  I simply want to point out to the public and to the sex-reformers how the difference is produced.  The Pope wants to bring back the old clothing, not to bring back the old sex appeal, but to do away with it.  If [clothing] does come back, it will increase sex appeal and defeat the Pope’s good intentions.  There is no doubt about that.  Some people will tell themselves that quite frankly and rejoice in it.  Others will advocate it with graver faces, but will not tell themselves why they advocate it.

            The other day I visited a Jesuit church in Trieste, and I have never been more disgusted than I was in that church.  Instead of the usual notices that you see in churches in Italy that women will not be admitted unless they are modestly dressed (a thing quite simply stated, and meaning nothing more than that a woman who has short sleeves must carry with her a shawl to wrap over her arms as she comes in), there were half-a-dozen different notices in different parts of the church, all elaborately composed and all suggesting some impropriety or other which would never come into the head of a decent normal person if it were not officially placarded.  Every placard pointed out some particular aphrodisiac effect that would be produced on young men if women were not muffled up so that no one could see that they had bodies.
            I should like to have met the Pope in that church.  I can fancy myself saying:  “Look here, your Holiness.  I propose that for the moment we try to imagine ourselves soldiers of the old type.  Absolutely licentious abandoned men, who fought for anybody who would pay them and became soldiers because they wanted to live licentious lives, and occasionally have the glorious experience of sacking a city, one of the great incidents of the sack of a city being unlimited rapine.  Let us honestly and candidly imagine ourselves taking part in such a sack.  We are looking about for women to ravish.  We come upon two.  One is a nun, in a nun’s dress.  The other is a harlot, with as little dress on as possible, roughed and painted and shameless.  I ask your Holiness to tell yourself which of these women you would go for.  I have not the slightest doubt which I should go for.  We should fight oneanother for the piously-dressed woman.”
            Now I have come to the end of my time.  I point no moral.  I have simply given you the expert’s practical directions.  If you want sex appeal, [wear] clothes.  If you want to minimize sex appeal, get rid of as many clothes as possible.
            I hope some other speakers will deal with the political effects of sexual reform.  I will content myself with a warning.  Modern democracy has become associated with ideas of liberty, because it has abolished certain methods of political oppression.  And as we all allow ourselves to be actuated far too much by mere association of ideas, we are apt to think that what makes for liberty in one thing will make for liberty in all things.

            Make no such mistake about modern democracy and popular government.  The more the people at large have to do with government, the more we – now I am talking to the members of this Society – will have to fight for our ideas and perhaps for our lives.   

            I will just take one minute to tell you an anecdote which illustrates the situation.  A friend of mine, the late Cecil Sharp, collected many peasant songs, especially in Somerset.  He began there in the rectory of the Rev. C L Marson, another old friend of mine.  They are both dead.  One day they were walking in the rectory grounds near an enclosed fruit garden.  Cecil Sharp hears a man on the other side of the wall singing a song, to what seemed to him to be a beautiful tune.  He immediately noted it down, and said to Marson, “Who is that singing?”  “He is my gardener,” was the reply.  Sharp insisted on finding out whether he had any more songs.  He went in, full of the enthusiasm of the artist who had discovered something beautiful; and they told the man that they had heard him singing.  He instantly threw down his spade, and called God to witness that he was an honest and decent man who had never sung a song in his life, and was not going to be accused of such debauchery and wickedness by any gentleman.
            They were amazed, because as members of our cultivated classes they did not understand that to the mass of the people art and beauty are nothing but forms of debauchery.  They had the greatest trouble in persuading that gardener that they were both of them just as great blackguards as he was; and then he told them where they would find other songs, and undertook to introduce them to the singers.
            Think of the moral of that!  That is the sort of thing you have to face.  The mass of people, brought up as they have been, have no idea of liberty in this direction.  On the contrary, they are the most ferocious opponents of it; and you will have to fight, I will not say for a super-morality, because it will appear to them to be a sub-morality, but for a class morality and even an individual morality.  Certain circles of people in different degrees of spiritual development will have to claim moralities of their own in their own circles, and will have to tolerate other circles with different moralities.  That is the utmost you can hope for.  Do not think your own particular morality can be imposed on the whole nation; and do not dream that such liberality is inherent in Democracy, for that is the greatest mistake you can possibly make.

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