O (47 page)

The sixties were swinging, in London more than anywhere in the world. The city's moribund Soho was springing up as a sex
quartier
, and Kenneth Tynan was saying ‘fuck' on prime-time TV. (To be precise: ‘I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word fuck would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.') Even the Church was loath to be left behind as the bandwagon departed: the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Coggan, was interviewed on the BBC's
Meeting Point
programme in January 1962 by a hip young pop star called Adam Faith: ‘I'm one of those people who think sex is a thoroughly good thing, implanted by God,' said Dr Coggan. ‘I'm not one of those who belong to the generation who thought it was a sort of smutty thing that you could only talk about hush-hush.' The phenomena, in short, were in train that would impel the religious thinker Malcolm Muggeridge towards his immortal conclusion in 1966 that, ‘The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfilment.'

The Sixties images of the genie of orgasm emerging from its bottle and the birth of ‘the permissive society' – Ann Summers
sex shops, the musical
Hair
, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin singing ‘
Je t'aime … moi non plus'
and so on – are so familiar to everyone today that they barely need repeating. All branches of the mass media pushed and pulled at boundaries in a concerted attempt to dislodge and demolish them for ever.

The literary colossus, Penguin Books, became an unlikely agent of sexual revolution when it tried to bring out the first unexpurgated edition of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
and found itself in court. The Bishop of Woolwich, in evidence, declared: ‘What I do think is clear is that what Lawrence is trying to do is portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred … as in a real sense an act of Holy Communion.' The prosecution counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, managed to sing in three sentences the swansong of the entire Victorian age, even though he was only fifty-four at the time of the trial, having been born in 1909. ‘Ask yourselves the question: would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around the house? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?' Penguin was found not guilty of obscenity in November 1960. The public besieged the bookshops, buying two million copies of the Penguin edition in a year, thus vastly outselling the Bible. A flood of sexually explicit books such as
Kamasutra, The Carpetbaggers
, the first unexpurgated
Fanny Hill, Last Exit to Brooklyn
and
Portnoy's Complaint
subsequently came out one after the other.

There were inconsistencies and injustices in the Swinging Sixties. Although
TIME
magazine observed in March 1963, ‘On the island where the subject has long been taboo in polite society, sex has exploded into the national consciousness and national headlines', and the
Daily Herald
asked at the same time, ‘Are We Going Sex Crazy?', the 1960s in Britain (and no less elsewhere) were sexually speaking still very much a ‘boys' party'. Men could every night enjoy the unrestrained orgasmic bliss of unprotected sex, an enjoyment their fathers
might only have experienced once or twice in their lives when they were actively trying to conceive. Another
TIME
reporter, John Crosby, in a 1965 piece on Swinging London, became quite excited as he typed, enthusing about ‘young English girls who take sex as if it is candy and it's delicious'. Soft-porn magazines also introduced the previously unseen sight of female pubic hair to innocent men who might never before have seen the stuff in photos or in real life.
Penthouse
magazine was introduced in London in 1965, but its mould-breaking crotch shots did not reach US newsstands until 1968. It was November 1974 before
Hustler
first showed what it termed a ‘pink shot', with the interior of a model's vagina exposed as near fully as possible.

Not everything about the Swinging Sixties was what we would recognise today as sexually progressive. The Freudian fixation with the vaginal orgasm, for example, was still widely accepted orthodoxy. Stephen J. Gould wrote: ‘This dogma of transfer from clitoral to vaginal orgasm became a shibboleth of pop culture during the heady days of pervasive Freudianism. It shaped the expectations (and therefore the frustration and often misery) of millions of educated and “enlightened” women told by a brigade of psychoanalysts and by hundreds of articles in magazines and “marriage manuals” that they must make this biologically impossible transition as a definition of maturity.'

Everyone was caught up in the vaginal orgasm fad. Here is Doris Lessing in her 1962 novel,
The Golden Notebook:

Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to, was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her … A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalised sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral
orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc, but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants all her response. But when she told him she had never experienced what she insisted on calling ‘a real orgasm' to anything like the same depth before him, he involuntarily frowned, and remarked: ‘Do you know that there are eminent physiologists who say women have no physical basis for vaginal orgasm?'

‘Then they don't know much, do they?'

A stubborn belief also persisted in the possibility of routine simultaneous orgasm despite what must have been the routine disappointment of real life, if only from the frequency with which people liberated by the Pill were now having sex. L.J. Ludovici, a radical former RAF Squadron Leader who wrote passionately in the sixties on women's right to sexual equality, gave a good summary in a 1965 book,
The Final Inequality
, of what might be called the enlightened, but non-hippy, view of the orgasm's progress to the date when he was writing.

‘While great changes are now taking place, it still remains true that our cultural values expect from women a passive role, especially in sexual intercourse. Husbands tend to regard their wives as the instruments of their pleasure and demand coitus of them as a “right”, but few would concede that their wives have any “right” to demand coitus of them. Investigations show that the participating wife, as distinct from the passive wife, actually offends many husbands who are conditioned socially to regard a wife's sexuality as “indecent”, or “wanton”, or even as positive evidence of past “sinfulness” which she may be prone to repeat in the future. In extreme cases husbands diagnose the sexuality of their wives as a malady bordering on nymphomania. Many wives on the other hand still admit that they would rather die than show sign of sexual desire.'

Yet within a few paragraphs, Ludovici is back in the wishful-thinking 1930s: ‘It is Woman herself who is able to effect simultaneous orgasm by postponing acceptance of her partner, however eager, until she is sure that she is herself verging on climax which she will reach by the time the man begins to ejaculate. Thus, Woman is the determinant of properly-fulfilled sexual intercourse and not Man as is too widely believed. If a man falls into the rhythms and tempo set by her, and if she times her acceptance of him correctly, they are unlikely to be disappointed. They will achieve true mutual sexuality and equality in the act of love which will set the tone for equality in other departments of their lives, for it is the subtle balance of sexual realities between them which lays the foundations of all their harmonies.'

Thus women were still not generally treated to an equal automatic upgrade of their sexual experience – only of their safety from pregnancy. The feminist movement worked hard at getting women a better deal from the new, freer atmosphere of sexual expression. Commentators like Sally Cline had a valid point when they made such frequently derided observations such as hers that orgasms are a ‘form of manipulated emotional labour which women worked at in order to reflect and maintain men's values'. It was quite true to say that women's sexual satisfaction had not kept pace with the sexual revolution.

William Masters and Virginia Johnson were allies of the new women in this regard. The central tenet of their work was that women should enjoy sex. Their 1966 classic
Human Sexual Response
was a powerful plea for understanding of the role of the clitoris. Masters and Johnson cemented the notion for good that a woman's ability to have an orgasm was every bit as developed as a man's, and reinforced for a generation born after the Kinsey hoo-hah that clitoral orgasms could, should and would be much more likely to be gained by manual stimulation and masturbation than penetrative sex. The clitoris finally became
the undisputed gold standard of female orgasm. Men were incessantly advised in magazines and newspapers that the way to sexual harmony was to ‘find the man in the boat'.

We have omitted thus far in this account of the orgasm's progress in the first two-thirds of the twentyith-century the role of the entertainment industry in promoting and popularising the democratisation – for such it was – of orgasmic pleasure. Simulated orgasm on film and stage was actually quite rare, not surprisingly given the power of the censors. Mae West served eight days in jail for obscenity in 1926 after the New York City authorities closed down a play,
Sex
, that she had written and starred in for 375 performances. Valentino's last film,
Son of the Sheik
, in the same year, contained a scene showing him seducing Vilma Banky in which his face looked vaguely orgasmic even after the censors had their way with it. A 1933 Czech film,
Ecstasy
, starring one Hedy Kiesler (later known as Hedy Lamarr), had its nude scenes savaged by the censors, but they allowed a close-up of her face in orgasm to remain; since she was a woman, there is every chance they did not realise what was supposedly being portrayed.
And God Created Woman
, featuring Brigitte Bardot as an eighteen-year-old nymphomaniac and directed by her husband, Roger Vadim, was an orgasmic on-screen tonic for 1957. Vadim said of his work: Tor the Americans, it was the first declaration in a film that love for pleasure is not a sin. After
Et Dieu
, they accepted the idea that love could be filmed erotically without being pornographic'

Rock and roll, with all those phallic guitars and crashing chords following endless drum solos, was the forum in which orgasmic messages were more regularly pounded out to a highly receptive young public. As Burgo Partridge observed in the age of Bill Haley, when he was writing: ‘Now a new form of worship has appeared and quite recently, in the shape of a sequence of new varieties of music forms – skiffle, rock
‘n'
roll, etc which, particularly in the case of the latter, involve a rhythm and movement which individually, but more particularly
in combination, produce an impression suggestive in the extreme. The “deities” of this new cult appear to be exclusively male, the outlet being provided for members of the opposite sex. The surplus energies of the males seem to be exuded in different forms, sometimes in activity punishable under the criminal law.'

Even the relatively wholesome offerings of the Beatles were orgasmically imbued for those with an ear to hear it. The nightly hysteria of screaming female fans peaked interestingly as the Fab Four (and plenty of other groups) shifted into a frantic falsetto climax at the end of many songs. ‘You don't have to be a genius,' said a consultant at a London hospital to Christopher Booker, author of
The Neophiliacs
, a seminal book on the pleasure-seeking fifties and sixties in Britain, ‘to see parallels between sexual excitement and the mounting crescendo of a stimulating number like “Twist and Shout”.'

The pop idols' personal lives, understandably, were the epitome, as well as the best-documented examples, of the primacy of orgasm in the post-war world. This is not strictly a rock and roll reminiscence, but it is still very illuminating of how the cult of sex had exploded in fifty years or so. The Beatles as teenagers, Sir Paul McCartney has recounted, had a friend called Nigel Whalley who was in the original band out of which the Beatles grew, the Quarrymen. Nigel's father was a Chief Superintendent of Police, which meant that his son was often alone in the house at night. ‘We used to have wanking sessions when we were young at Nigel Whalley's house in Woolton,' Sir Paul says. ‘We'd stay overnight and we'd all sit in armchairs and we'd put all the lights out and, being teenage pubescent boys, we'd all wank. What we used to do, someone would say, “Brigitte Bardot … Oooh!” That would keep everyone on par, then somebody, probably John, would say, “Winston Churchill” … and it would completely ruin everyone's concentration.'

Another friend of the band, Pete Shotton, also mentions the communal masturbation in his book,
John Lennon In My Life:
‘…John and I got into the habit of tossing off in the bushes on the way home from school. We also enlisted our entire gang in a few mutual masturbation sessions, giving us all the opportunity to compare sizes and shapes. Lest any reader get the wrong impression, our fantasies, at least, were strictly heterosexual/Shotton went on to describe again Lennon's Winston Churchill joke, ‘as we furiously pommeled our hard-ons', and how it ‘rather deflated the proceedings'. Lennon, it might be noted, later exploited this group masturbation as the basis for a sketch, Tour In Hand', in Kenneth Tynan's
Oh! Calcutta!
Tynan, however, substituted the Lone Ranger for Winston Churchill, as well as not quite getting round to taking up Lennon's suggestion that the actors should masturbate for real on stage.