An Incomplete History of the "No Sex Please, We're British" thing

Silent Porn Star's call for submissions for the 14th Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy got me thinking about the way that sexual censorship, both in the media and in people's lives, have developed in British culture, and how it compares with our near neighbours in geography and in language (that is, Western Europe and the USA in particular). Now, I am a long way from being an expert on any of this, and may very well be talking bollocks for much of it, but these are my impressions based on what I've read:

I don't know much about sexuality in Britain in Celtic or Anglo-Saxon times, I'm not a historian at all. I know that Chaucer was fairly bawdy with his writings in the Middle Ages, but the Middle Ages were also the heyday of the authoritarian Roman Catholic church. I know that gender was always an issue: Joan of Arc was charged with being a crossdresser (in contravention of St. paul's injunctions against wearing the clothes of the opposite sex) and that was one of the charges that led to her being burnt at the stake. However, in Shakespeare's time, no women were allowed to perform on the stage (theatres were deemed to be far too unsavoury for delicate females!); all the female parts would have been played by prepubescent boys (for higher voices) or by small-framed men speaking falsetto. The BBC had a drama or movie based on this fact, in the time when a Royal Decree banned men from playing female roles and allowed women to act instead; the movie's story focused on an actor who had been trained from an early age to mimic femininity (we'll leave aside for the moment Susan Brownmiller's observation that these days all women are trained to do the same...) and consequently found himself unable to work (since he had been trained away from any kind of performative masculinity).

It is interesting to note that in contemporary culture, crossdressing on stage has a very clear role in children's entertainment: in pantomime. It is now traditional that the young hero (e.g. Dick Wittington, Peter Pan, Jack (he of the beanstalk), etc) is played by a woman; equally the Dame (e.g. Widow Twankey) is played by a man dressed in drag. I don't know if these are left over from the 17th Century or not.

My awareness of British folks' relationship to sexuality and to sexual media really only starts to take shape with the arrival of the Victorian era. As I understand it, the term "pornography" was coined when the erotic art of Pompeii was discovered by Victorian archaeologists, who were cshocked by the "lewd" nature of the artwork. As I understand it, erotic art had existed as a sub culture before then, but it was obviously not something that confronted people openly. (Incidentally, this is why I struggle when people try to draw a distinction between 'erotica" as "art" and "pornography" as "pure sexual gratification" - historically, this distinction just doesn't hold up to any type of scrutiny).

In general, my reading is that British attitudes to sexuality have always been of the "don't ask, don't tell" type of approach, where you can get up to what you like, but just don't let anyone else know about it. indeed, one British government minister went so far as to say something along those lines when talking in favour of the proposed "extreme porn" legislation. And this has characterised a lot of what has happened since those Victorian archaeologists were so scandalised by their discoveries. Very often, it has been backed up by a "Think of the children!" plea, from Joynson Hicks' infamous remark in the 1920s, "If it would make the littlest child blush, it should not be fit for publication" to the modern-day attempts to control and censor the internet.

The 1920s, as I understand it, also saw the "Bloomsbury Set" being hauled in front of magistrates on charges of publishing obscene literature, or appearing as witnesses to argue against the censorship of other writers - I am fairly sure that James Joyce's "Ulysses" was one such work (I think an Oxford professor was jailed because he wanted to use it in his classes and ordered copies from mainland Europe for his students to read, but I could be wrong).

In general, it seems to me that censorship was slowly but surely marched backwards during the early-to-mid 20th Century, not just here but in Europe also. Europe was always more relaxed in its attitude to erotic art, and has always been the Britishers' main source of sauce (geddit!!??) that they couldn't get at home. Erotic prints and photographs from Paris in the 19th Century; banned literature from Paris in the early 20th Century, up to hardcore porn movies from Holland and Germany in the late 20th Century and early 21st Century. The attempts by the British government to keep this "tide of filth" from overwhelming us have been spectacularly unsuccessful in the main, and yet, the filth really and truly hasn't overwhelmed anyone.

the 1960s saw the famous trial of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" that pretty much did for censorship of the written word (although modern erotic literature publishers are still cautious about it, and basically have their main protection from the Obscene Publications Act only by the fact that they are well-established and sell quite a lot of books every month, so a prosecution would not stop them anyway). It also saw the first major step in the relaxing of laws that censored human sexual interaction with one another: homosexual sex was decriminalised, so long as it was "between consenting adults in private". The current law still stands that any anal sex where a third person other than the participants is present, is considered illegal because it is not "in private". As I understand it, this was one of the charges involved in the Spanner trial, and it is certainly something that makes it hard to get British porn of a similar type to that which can be imported from mainland Europe, or via the internet from the US. Once again, this "in private" part highlights that British "don't tell!" attitude.

The 1970s were probably the heyday of the "erotic horror" genre, both in Britain and in Europe. We laugh nowadays at the special effects of a Hammer Horror movie, but it was an excellent excuse to show sexualised acts without being classified as "porn". The same goes for the early Jean Rollin and Jess Franco movies from mainland Europe, where despite more relaxed laws, there was still at that time censorship based on sexual content. Rollin, Franco and their contemporaries were largely done out of business when those censorship laws in France, Holland, Spain and the rest were lifted - their films no longer could attract the hungry-for-sex-imagery viewers, because they now turned to full-on pornography instead. As a sadomasochist, I tend to find those "Eurotica" genre erotic horror movies more arousing than the full-on porn, so in a way I am thankful for that past of sexual censorship!

However, in Britain, the tide had turned: when Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party took office in 1979, they commissioned the Williams Report to investigate what measures should be taken to control film media and pornography. The Williams Report concluded that there was no evidence one way or the other as to whether "extreme" pornography could be considered harmful, and recommended that there should be no outright censorship, but that the BBFC classification scheme should remain in place; that is, that no films should be totally banned, but that some should be restricted by age group. This did not match what Thatcher and her ministers wanted to hear, so they ignored these recommendations.

Instead, in 1984, the "Video Nasties" scandal broke, and with it came more rigid control over what films could be made or shown in Britain; as I understand it, some movies were named individually and banned (all of which have since been released with 18 certificate classification from the BBFC).

Culturally, however, talking about sex became a deliberate weapon of "shock", which at once eroded the cultural injunction of "don't ask, don't tell" but at the same time did nothing to undermine the basic inhibitions surrounding sex. instead of making sex a suitable topic for discussion, sex talk became a tool of rebellion and aggression. Essentially, "don't ask, don't tell" remained in force, it was just that transgressing that became a symbol of "cleverness" or coolness. I'm thinking in part of the way some of the comedians in the 1980s used sex, and sexual swear words, in their acts.

We're now getting to the parts where I have personal experience, and not just snippets picked up from reading, seeing repeats on the telly, and so on. I think I have seen in my adult lifetime (just over a decade) a process by which in order to "shock", it has been necessary to go further and further with the types of sex talk one uses; to some extent this has meant that some of the ground behind the "shockers" has been claimed by more measured and reasonable talk about sex and sexuality; but at the same time, it seems to involve normalising an attitude of "needing her to say no", that Figleaf wrote about:

My own feeling is that the increase in violence coincides extremely well with the advent of sexual autonomy in 3rd-wave feminism which autonomy, by the way, was made possible in large measure by Andrea Dworkin's work on consent. The problem being that if, as I contend, the dominant male paradigm is that women are the "no-sex" class.

And if men remain largely unreconstructed and trapped inside the paradigm, then to the extent women find newer and more adventurous ways to enjoy themselves sexually we're going to see men working harder and with greater desperation to extract the "no" their/our paradigm expects and demands of women.

Similarly, if sex is there to shock, and it becomes less shocking, then people have to go further to achieve the same effect. Too often, there is a pull to make some of the less shocking things be more shocking again, rather than an attempt to understand that some people like those things not in order to be shocking, but just because they like it for what it is (hello Ren!)

And that pull backwards is at least a part of what the reactionary movement of the last 10-20 years has been about. While the BBFC has revised its guidelines for 18 and R18 material to be more liberal, the approach to anything without a BBFC certificate has been much more draconian, and any attempt at open discussion of sexuality that doesn't conform to social norms is much more restricted; I'm thinking of the way that "objectionable content" warnings are applied based on someone feeling a bit icky about seeing X, Y, Z on someone's social media (youTube, blogger, whatever); I'm thinking of the way eBay and PayPal have a thing against any business that is overtly sexual; I'm thinking of the way in which Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" resulted in a huge overreaction by the (US) media. These are all in line with the prevailing winds in the UK.

In mainland Europe, there are some whispers (Holland had some legislation concerning bestiality porn that may have wider implications - although I honestly can't complain too much about it because a) I don't know a lot about it and b) I'm not that keen on animals being treated in that way anyway) but in general, there just isn't the same hard-on for censorship as we're seeing from USAian regimes and the British government. We Brits are still expected to think of sex as something that happens, and can be quite a lot of fun, but we really mustn't talk about it without tittering and sniggering and making snide comments about other people's pecadilloes.