Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

234 Pages·1990·1.757 MB·English

by  Sheila Jeffreys

Anticlimax Sheila Jeffreys | 1990

ANTICLIMAX

A Feminist Perspective on the
Sexual Revolution

Sheila Jeffreys
1990

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Anticlimax Sheila Jeffreys | 1990
Contents

Acknowledgements 3

Introduction 4

1. The Fifties 7

2. Decensorship 44

3. The Sexual Revolution 67

4. The Failure of Gay Liberation 104

5. Feminism and Sexuality 162

6. Creating the Sexual Future 204

Recommended Reading 225

Works Cited 226

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my friends for the concern and affection with which they have
helped me through the four years of writing Anticlimax. Much of which I have had to
read and work with has been distressing, the demands of my teaching work and
political crises have often intervened and I have needed much succour. Particularly I
would like to thank Alix Adams and Cherry Potts, Rosemary Auchmuty, Elaine
Miller, Margaret Jackson, Lis Whitelaw, Janice Raymond. New friends like Trishar
Butcher and Tracey Kennedy help me keep focused on why all this has to be done. I
have depended on them in the past against the slings and arrows of outraged sexual
libertarians and I know I can do so in the future. The work of feminist and lesbian
scholars like Suzanne Kappeler, Sara Lucia Hoagland, Celia Kitzinger, Janice
Raymond as well as many other lesbian and separatist thinkers has provided me with
inspiration throughout my endeavours.

I am grateful to Cynthia Enloe and Lois Brynes who invited me to be the Fullbright
scholar-in-residence in Women's Studies at Clark University in 1985-86. This gave me
time to think about my project and I was able to gain encouragement and greater
clarity from teaching wonderful students, in particular Stephanie Uluhogian and
Monica Schneider.

I would like to thank Gill Hanscombe for her encouraging editing and her belief in
the project, Jen Green of the Women's Press for making the whole process of
publication painless and Maggie Christie for the indexing.

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Introduction

Historians of sexuality see the 'sexual revolution' of the 1960s as a very positive
development for women. They accept the sexological view that the 'sexual liberation'
offered by that supposed revolution was a necessary component in the liberation of
women. This 'sexual liberation' was the freedom for women to take pleasure from
their own eroticised subordination. Sexologic, this book is designed to show, is the
idea that sex is and should be a way of expressing and maintaining male dominance
and female submission. The sexologists of the twentieth century have been the high
priests who have organised the worship of male power.

Anticlimax takes a very different approach to the sexual revolution. In my first book,
The Spinster and Her Enemies, I showed how the sexologists before the Second World
War believed that they would ensure women's subordination by eliciting a sexual
response to men.1 Compulsory conscription into heterosexuality and the performance
of the orgasm with a man were seen to ensure woman's submission to her husband
and the death of feminism, lesbianism, manhating and spinsterhood. A Freudian
psychoanalyst of the 1920s made this clear when he wrote: 'To be roused by a man
means acknowledging oneself as conquered.'2 Throughout the history of sexology the
focus of concern has been the resisting woman. The incitement of women to respond
sexually to men continued after the Second World War. This becomes clear in a
consideration of the politics of sex in the 1940s and 50s, when the future of male-
dominant marriage was seen to hang on curing women's frigidity. At this time
sexologists showed no self-consciousness about asserting the connection between
woman's sexual response and her subordination.

In the 1960s women were enjoined to respond in more varied positions and situations
and single women were conscripted into active heterosexual sex. The language of
liberation was so loud in connection with the new sexual prescriptions for women that
commentators have assumed some obvious relationship between the 'sexual
revolution' and progress in women's condition. There is no good reason to suppose
that the sexologists changed step and started believing, contrary to all their previous
ideas, that women's sexual response to men would actually liberate women. As we
shall see the rules of sexologic remained unaltered. Behind the baloney of liberation,
the naked power politics of male supremacy were being acted out. The high priests of
sexologic, helped by the pornographers, progressive novelists and sex radicals
continued to orchestrate woman's joyful embrace of her oppression through the
creation of her sexual response. Sexologists have for a hundred years dedicated their
lives to eliciting orgasms from women in order to prevent our liberation. The 1960s

1 Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930, Pandora,
London, 1985.
2 Wilhelm Stekel, Frigidity in Woman in Relation to her Love Life, Liveright, New York, 1926, vol.
2, p. 1.

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was a period when greater opportunities were open to women and the 'sexual
revolution', rather than being liberating, helped to defuse the potential threat to male
power.

Anticlimax is a study of the works of the sexologists and therapists, the pornographers,
novelists and sex radicals who took part in the construction of heterosexual desire in
the period since the Second World War. Their views of sex and women will be
carefully examined so that the political function of sex in maintaining the oppression
of women can be clearly understood.

Heterosexual desire is defined here as sexual desire that eroticises power difference. It
originates in the power relationships between the sexes and normally takes the form of
eroticising the subordination of women. In heterosexual desire our subordination
becomes sexy for us and for men. Heterosexual desire can exist also in same sex
relationships, because women and men do not escape the heterosexual construction of
their desire simply by loving their own sex. We all grow up in the political system of
heterosexuality. A large section of Anticlimax is devoted to showing the extent to which
the eroticising of power difference dominates male gay culture and sexual behaviour.

Considered, too, are the ways feminist ideas about sexuality have developed in the
most recent wave of feminism. It is clear that feminists were influenced by sexologic in
the late 1960s and early 70s. Feminist analyses of male violence and pornography led
to a much more critical and less celebratory approach to 'sexual liberation'. In
response a libertarian backlash developed, of women inspired by sexologic and the
ideas of gay male theorists, which attacked feminists as prudes and puritans for their
failure to embrace a male-constructed sexual liberation. In The Spinster and Her Enemies
I showed how a similar lobby of sexual progressives attacked feminist campaigners
against abusive male sexual practice in very similar terms before and after the First
World War . In both waves of feminism sex has been seen to occupy a pivotal role in
the oppression of women. In both waves of feminism the male apostles of sexual
liberation – psychoanalysts, gynaecologists, sex radicals, male gay theorists – have
reacted with rage and contempt towards a feminist analysis of sex. They have sought
to browbeat women into acceptance of the male view of our 'liberation' and each time
there have been women who have embraced the male sexual agenda and sown seeds
of confusion within the feminist movement. In the 1980s women's liberation has been
hijacked by the sexual libertarians who are devoted to persuading women that the
enthusiastic celebration of our oppression in sadomasochism is the same thing as
liberation. The language of sadomasochism is based upon the inversion of values as in
'only when bound am I really free' and 'slavery is freedom'. Now the practice of that
very bondage and slavery is being interpreted as freedom itself and female power.

The sexologists have traditionally seen heterosexuality as 'natural' and lesbianism as
pathological. The sexual liberals see the choice between lesbianism and
heterosexuality as a matter of simple preference as in a choice between tea and coffee.
In Anticlimax, heterosexuality is seen as a political institution through which male
dominance is organised and maintained. Sex as we know it under male supremacy is
the eroticised power difference of heterosexuality. As a political system heterosexuality
functions more perfectly than oppressive systems such as apartheid or capitalism. In
heterosexuality what we have been accustomed to see as the wellsprings of our
pleasure and happiness, love and sex, are finely tuned to depend on the maintenance

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of our oppression. As a result, a world of freedom beyond heterosexuality cannot be
envisaged because it appears to require the abandonment of 'love' and 'sex'.

The last chapter considers how we can move beyond heterosexuality as a political
institution and the form of desire, heterosexual desire, which derives from it. No
liberation is possible for women in a world in which inequality, and specifically the
inequality of women, is sexy. We need to envision, and start to build, a world in which
the connection of power difference and aggression to sexual feelings will be
unimaginable. The crucial question on which Anticlimax ends is how to construct
homosexual desire. This is desire which eroticises equality and mutuality, a form of
desire not even recognised as sex by many theorists of sexuality in the present. It is
attacked as ‘vanilla’ or ‘bambi’ sex by libertarians, and those who practise it are
derided as anti-sex prudes. When equality is exciting, not just at the level of theory ut
in love and sex, then the liberation of women becomes a real possibility.

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1. The Fifties

Marriage guidance and marital sex illustrate a central premise of Anticlimax: that the
heterosexual couple embodies a relationship of power and control, rather than
representing a consequence of nature, biology or sexual preference. The setting up of
the Marriage Guidance Council, the work of sexologists and the development of sex
therapy are all instances of how men’s power over women was to be supported and
managed through the regulation of marital sex.

Sex, in this scheme of things, was not a natural and spontaneous seeking after pleasure
by men and women, but a regulatory mechanism designed and constructed to enforce
male dominance and female submission. In the 1950s sex was hard work and
sometimes an onerous duty. The job of keeping women in their place was not
necessarily seen as fun. An examination of the 1950s shows the purpose that male-
supremacist ideologues intended for sex without all the hype with which sex has been
surrounded since the 1960s. The sexual revolution was to introduce a new language of
liberation and pleasure which can befog the observer and make the political function
of sexual intercourse less easy to spot. The joy of reading the sexological works of the
1950s is that they do reveal the naked power politics involved in marriage and sex.
The Marriage Guidance Council was an organisation set up just after the Second
World War with the task of regulating the political relationship of marriage and
upholding men's power within it. The writings of its founders are particularly helpful
to an understanding of the political function of marriage.

MARRIAGE GUIDANCE

The Marriage Guidance Council was created in 1938, according to its first Secretary
David Mace, when 'doctors, psychologists, parsons, social workers, teachers and
others' came together because they thought 'there was something going wrong with
marriage'.1 In 1942 Mace became Secretary and in 1943 three rooms were acquired
in the West End of London. It wasn’t until after the war that Marriage Guidance
Councils began to proliferate around the country and marriage guidance as
phenomenon really got off the ground. Whatever concern there had been for the state
of marriage before the war was amplified greatly afterwards. One source of anxiety
was a sharp increase in the number of divorces.

In 1913 there were 577 divorce decrees granted in England, in 1936 4,000 and in
1945 20,000. H. E. Norman, former secretary of the National Association of
Probation Officers writing in the 1949 book Sex in Social Life put together by Sybil
Neville-Rolfe of the Social Hygiene Council, attributed the rise partly to changes in

1 David Mace, Marriage Crisis, Delisle, London, 1948, p. 11.

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the law which had facilitated divorce and separation.2 When we look closely at the
legislation it is clear that these were changes which enabled women to obtain divorce
and separation more easily.

The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act had made it possible for men to obtain a divorce
more easily, i.e. simply on the grounds of the wife's adultery. The Act was no great
help to women, who had to prove bestiality, incest or some other 'unnatural practice
as well as adultery to get a divorce. The logic behind this discrepancy was stated to be
the fact that adultery in woman was more serious than in a man. An adulterous man,
it was argued, would still know he was the father of his wife’s children, but if a wife
was adulterous there was no way of knowing. In 1923 divorce was made possible for
wives simply on proof of adultery and as a result the number of applications for
divorce shot up.

Between 1895 and 1925 what were called the Married Women's Acts gave power to
magistrates to make separation orders and orders for maintenance. In 1937 two
amending Acts widened the grounds and improved the facilities for divorce and set up
special magistrates’ courts with a simplified procedure for hearing applications for
maintenance and separation orders. Every reform was followed by an increase in
applications. It is clear that these reforms allowed women the possibility of getting out
of abusive marriages and that women were swift to take advantage of them. Thus any
lamentation by the male authorities about the breakdown of marriage in this respect
must be seen as anxiety at women escaping the prisonhouse of marriage, and the
resulting threat to male privilege.

But, Norman tells us, it was not just these legal reforms which accounted for the
number of 'broken homes'. There was also an increase in population, and the
unsettlement of the war which led to problems for women and men who had to adjust
to partners they had not seen for years and may even have married in the romantic
flush inspired by posting and never really known. Norman concludes:

. . . a great many marriages are not fulfilling their proper purpose and . . .
family life for a very large percentage of the rising generation must be so
defective that the time is ripe for serious action to prevent further drift and hurt
to the social health and security of the nation.3

The Foreword to Sex in Social Life explained that the conditions of the Second World
War had resulted in a serious breakdown in morality which led to the need for
effective sex education: during the war 'there has been an exhibition of sexual
incontinence and shameless conduct in our streets and lanes which must have shocked
many more than just the old-fashioned Christians.'4 David Mace explained in his book
Marriage Crisis that the war had made 'a havoc of family life'.

It was a pretty painful business – the evacuation of children, the life in the
shelters, the black-out, the separation of husbands and wives, the frantic

2 H . E . Norman, 'Why Marriages Fail - the social aspect', in Neville-Rolfe, Sybil (ed), Sex in
Social Life, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1949.
3 Ibid., p. 405.
4 Ibid., p. 7; Foreword by Sir Cyril Norwood.

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embarkation leave marriages, the have-a-good-time-tonight-because-you-may-
get-bumped-off tomorrow atmosphere.5

Mace's Marriage Crisis is written in what was meant to be a popular style and has the
tone of a friendly vicar giving a fireside chat to rather disillusioned parishioners about
the necessity of keeping up the wartime spirit. It is genial and uses what he probably
imagines to be a working class idiom. His other writings about marriage and
Christianity are far more formal. The genial banter sometimes goes a little too far and
strikes an entirely inappropriate note of levity as in this comment on Hitler, who is
represented as a kind of naughty teddy boy.

Take Hitler, for instance. What a whole heap of trouble and misery he and his
crowd caused! We all knew he was half mad. But why was he like that? . . .
some people say it was his bad upbringing that made him such a fanatic, and
that he might have been a better man if he had been brought up in a normal
happy home. The same thing could be said about all the other little Hitlers who
make life so awkward for many of us.6

This was an appeal hard to resist. The importance of stable marriages was clear if they
could help prevent genocidal dictatorships.

In 1948 the Family Discussion Bureau was set up to do social casework in marital
problems, after an approach to the Tavistock Institute by the Family Welfare
Association. The reasons given for its inception once again stress the disruption caused
by the war to marriage and morals. But even before the war 'the nation was becoming
increasingly anxious about the number of homes broken by separation and divorce'.
This situation was exacerbated by 'wartime stresses' and the answer was an expansion
of the 'national social services' which were concerned with 'maternal and emotional
well-being'.7

Also in 1948 a government body, the Harris Committee, recommended a grant for
marriage counselling services to go to the Family Welfare Association, the Marriage
Guidance Council and the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council. The government
and the burgeoning social services were now to take a direct role in keeping marriages
stable, a task which appears on close examination to mean making sure the wife
remains obedient as a servant and handmaid to her husband and children and does
not think of making a break for independence. The state is here involved directly in
the maintenance of male dominance and privilege at the domestic level.

Through all the sound and fury about weakened morals and marriage breakdown
during and after the war there is a clear note of fear about women's independence. It
was women, after all, liberated from individual husbands while the men were away,
and endowed often with financial independence from war work whether single or
married, who were in a position to exercise their new freedom in 'immorality'. The
theme of hostility to women's emancipation is clear and strong in the early literature
on marriage guidance.

5 Mace, op. cit., p. 14.
6 Ibid., p. 13.
7 Kathleen Bannister et al., Social Casework in Marital Problems, Tavistock Publications, London,
1955, p. 3.

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Joseph Brayshaw of the Marriage Guidance Council cites a great list of reasons for
marriage breakdown such as decline in religious observance, separation in the war
years, shortage of homes, the false values of films, but concludes that there is one
underlying reason behind all of these. The reason is the 'equality' of women.

I shall probably court misunderstanding if I state my thesis bluntly; but in truth
it is the new equality of women with man that has led inevitably to the
disruption, for the present, of stable marriage and family life. Lest this sound as
if I were some old buffer in side-whiskers and drainpipe trousers lamenting that
things are not what they were in Queen Victoria's day, let me say that I believe
strongly in the essential equality of the sexes. It has, however, far wider social
implications than have so far been generally recognised.8

What was it that kept marriage stable in the time before women's equality? According
to Brayshaw it was the unquestioned dictatorship of the husband and father in the
home. Brayshaw invites us to look at 'Grandfather's day' when the father was the clear
dictator in the family and the wife had few choices because she could not just go out
and get a job. The problem for marriage in the 1940s was that women would openly
disagree with their husbands. 'Husband and wife, as equals, must somehow agree
upon scores of matters that were not open to discussion by their grandparents . . .
obviously there is far more chance of disagreement when there are far more things to
be settled jointly.'9 He states that achieving 'a democratic sharing of responsibility' in
place of 'dictatorship' in the family 'can only be achieved by the attainment o f a
certain level of education and responsibility'.10 He proposes a general theory that:
'Whenever you get the equality of women emerging in law or in custom, there you get
increased breakdown of marriage.'11

So what was the solution? If the problem was men being unable to cope with women
challenging their authority then an answer might have been to educate men to their
role as equals – to reconcile them to their loss of power. This is not the solution that
the MGC opted for. To Brayshaw the new equality of women was a fairly
unmitigated disaster as he makes clear in this comment on the Roman Empire.

The only other time in the whole of history when women enjoyed equality with
men was in the later days of Rome; and there it may well have contributed to
their disasters. The rich ceased to have children, and standards of loyalty and
morality decayed. The equality of the sexes may be a means to good or ill; it is
not an end in itself.12

It does not seem that he had any real doubt as to whether good or ill might result.
This fascinating myth, whereby women's equality or sexual promiscuity is supposed to
have led to the downfall of Rome, is frequently reiterated by men who tremble before
the possibility of women's emancipation. They could think of nothing to compare with

8 Joseph Brayshaw, 'The Stability of Marriage', Eugenics Review vol. 44, no. 2, July 1952, p. 85.
9 Ibid., p. 88.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.

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