Class, Sex, Etc.

I read somewhere that the British aristocracy are often uninhibited and promiscuous. Such a proposition is difficult to substantiate or research, for many reasons. A statistical project could only be subjective and thus unreliable (asking people about their sex lives does not guarantee a truthful response), and the terms ‘uninhibited’ and ‘promiscuous’ are relative, questionable and difficult to define. Descriptions, in fact, which would require a study in themselves. ‘Uninhibited’ and ‘promiscuous’ in relation to which values, and are those values the necessary or authoritative benchmark, and can such a thing exist? In repressed British society – as DH Lawrence and many others have said – more relaxed attitudes to sexuality may be a more healthy reference point. The term ‘aristocracy’ also presents additional problems. Defining it is one; agreeing how and to what extent it exists in 2003 is another.

Despite these difficulties, I suggest that class stratification remains (sadly) an inherent part of British society and on this basis, we can say that it is likely that different ‘classes’ have different attitudes to sexual activity. Defining what the different ‘classes’ are is a further topic of enquiry which I acknowledge, but do not wish to pursue here. My premise is simply that in a general sense, there are different sectors of society which we can characterise as working, middle and upper class or aristocracy. They concern not only economic and vocational factors (selling your labour or otherwise, for example), but more elusive and subjective factors concerning attitudes and aspirations. Sociologists have often used the concept of ‘deferred gratification’ as a middle class index, concerning positive orientations toward both personal education and long term financial outlook. The working class pattern is – stereotypically – like that portrayed in Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: you work hard all week in a factory or shop, and then compensate for this drudgery by spending your earnings at the weekend.

The aristocracy – quintessentially those who inherit wealth and never have to worry about financial security – have a third orientation towards work and aspiration. Like the Windsor family, they have access to vocations which are interesting (publishing, the army) partly because of their nature (books, creativity; travel, strategy and comradeship), and partly because they are not subject to their real perils. The Windsors are cushioned against financial ruin if a publishing venture fails, and they will never serve in a real war and understand the moral ambiguities of army life. They work because they need to do something, and what they do has to vaguely fit conservative and establishment values. Publishing and the army are thus reduced to interesting hobbies which – in the case of the latter – raises serious moral objections.

The current so called monarchy are – despite their attempts to be less frosty and inaccessible – conservative in their attitude to sexuality. Who really cares if Charles Windsor was shagging Camilla when he was married to Diana, or if she was shagging anyone else? These are facts of contemporary life – morally dysfunctional or otherwise, depending on your attitude to marriage and relationships. Royalty hasn’t always been frosty and reserved – witness the love life of Queen Victoria – and isn’t always like this, when you consider foreign royalty. Some might say Princess Grace – as an example – does not compare to the UK monarchy; that they are not ‘proper’ royals by having the full gravity and significance of British royal tradition. You could also argue that - as with other aspects of British life – we are stuck with outdated, stuffy and conservative institutions.

The royal family are a separate case, not representative of general aristocracy, but nonetheless illustrating the distinguishing factors of privilege and security. In previous eras, the sexual behaviour of upper class England was shamefully aligned with colonial imperialism and autocratic privilege: the natives of the overseas Empire, and the servant girl made pregnant by the master of the house. This also applied to the middle class strata. Laudable as Charles Dickens’ social conscience was, his interest in redeeming the lives of street prostitutes may have had a less noble dimension. One or two people have suggested this, but as far as I know there is little actual evidence. Maybe he was just an old fashioned good guy.

The 1987 film White Mischief depicts an expatriate aristocratic community in Kenya, who enjoy wild sexual intermingling. The Christine Keeler scandal popularised in the 1989 film Scandal anticipated fairly widespread sexual naughtiness, aligned with political personalities supposedly representing moral virtue. Clinton, Major…who really cares what these people get up to? These examples are an index, however, of the hypocrisy and nonsense of stage-managed politics. White Mischief, while it is a specialised example of aristocracy (bored, enclosed, ex-pat. community avoiding the war) does, I suspect, accurately portray aristocratic sexual attitudes. For some of them, at least.

Sexual behaviour is undoubtedly linked with economic circumstances, hence the objection to the extreme example of patriarchal inequity: women who have to sell their bodies to feed and clothe themselves and, often, a child or two. At the other extreme in all possible ways, you have the wealthy aristocratic male who regards work as a hobby and pleasure as fun, divorced from all considerations of responsibility and commitment. A prime example here is the odious Marquess of Bath, who supports and enjoys numerous women who he calls “wifelets”. (Then again, is this very different from the lifestyle of (rich) working class playboy, Peter Stringfellow?). The ‘European tour’ that wealthy young men enjoyed in Victorian days was supposedly part of their education, replacing or supplementing a few idle years at university – probably Oxford or Cambridge. Academics and historians now recognise the ‘education’ they enjoyed may have been carnal as much as cultural. And as a precursor to modern ‘sex tourism’, it would have probably involved exploitative circumstances.

Working class attitudes to sex are easier to document, because they are depicted on television. The Five Birds Go Mad In Ibiza is a successful TV formula. They do go mad, together with their working class males, and millions of viewers enjoy watching how for example – in one episode I saw of Ibiza Uncovered – a young woman told the camera how she had just taken two lads back to her room for a threesome, which was something she had wanted to do for a long time. It lasted about thirty minutes, she was not planning to see them again, and she spoke rapturously about how exciting it was. A few days later a (stuffy) Sunday Times columnist criticised these programmes, stating that the women were behaving like prostitutes. There are two possible interpretations to this. First, that when women enjoy wild and free sex they are sluttish and reprehensible (only men are allowed to do this, presumably). Second, the women are subject to and performing within moral and sexual codes not intrinsic to their own nature. That is, the ‘new ladettes’ have lost their female prerogative of selective attraction, and by imitating male patterns of wild promiscuity they effectively become prostitutes, different only because there is no payment involved. My example is extreme and therefore not widely representative, but the point still applies.

On another TV programme I saw about teenagers, AIDS and the use of condoms, one barely-adult male told us that “there’s no such thing as romance in Openshaw”. The latter is a deprived Manchester suburb, where teenagers indulge in uninhibited and unprotected sex – the males, characteristically, boasting of a large number of conquests. For both males and females, where work opportunities are grim and aspirations are very low, sexual indulgence is an escape. There is no “romance” because the economic facts are so depressing; but sexual urges still exist and offer transitory satisfactions. The 1986 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too depicts this kind of situation.

Strange as some of his ideas were (and dreadfully boring as he is), DH Lawrence is to be commended for his analysis of stuffy British repression. We are stereotyped abroad, apparently, as a nation known for (sometimes) strange sexual predilections. Smacking on the bottom may relieve earlier, unhealthy circumstances like the boarding school, where the lifestyle would today be regarded as abusive – sexual or otherwise. The British public school-Oxbridge tradition was supposedly designed to create future leaders. As with army brutality, you endure a breaking-down process which firmly locates you in a fiercely stratified system where you ‘know your place’ and ‘do as you are told’. It was called ‘discipline’, assaulted your sense of personal autonomy, and calloused your sensitivity so you could then order other people about, or perhaps kill other human beings while ‘defending your country’. Clumsy, random and unpredictable, this desensitising sometimes failed, as with poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915). Brutalising and desensitising people inevitably affects their sexual nature because psyche and sex are linked. And if that wasn’t enough, the system often incorporates overt sexual bullying: the intimidation tactics of the parade ground (“are you a man? Fall into line you fairies!” etc.), and the informal initiation rites perpetrated within the ranks, where men taunt, goad and abuse each other about their masculinity.

Class, money and power are related to patterns of sexual expression. Controlling a population’s sexual activity has long been a form of political control: Chinese leaders still do this. The other extreme is a nation like Africa, where the AIDS crisis has been described as a catastrophe of “biblical” proportions. No one censures or controls sexual expression in Africa, apparently; for whatever cultural/sociological reasons, sexual activity is practiced with notable abandon. This is partly explained with reference to economic conditions. Poor people exercise their personal expression and capacity for fun in the only way they can by using their bodies, which they will always own regardless of how much money they have, and how little they otherwise own.

Sadly, class remains a fact of British society. The US love the history and traditions of this little island, and I can understand that. Bill Bryson once said there were more historic buildings in his tiny little Yorkshire town than the entire US. It is a country dense with historic identity, and although the class system is less distinct (money makes anyone middle class), the tradition still exists. And as with other aspects of social life, sexual behaviour varies according to what class of society you associate with.