This Happy Breeding

Besides the fact that there will always be one, cliches about England are almost infinite in variety. It rains all the time; the cooking is miserable-- nothing but mutton, tea, suety puddings--and, good lord, the beer is served warm. Then there is the stereotype British male: a stoical, pipe-puffing, baggy-tweeds type who eschews sex for a rousing game of darts in the local pub, and when he does indulge is awkward and passionless. British women are, for lack of practice, frigid. None of these things has ever been very true. But nowadays, as far as sex is concerned anyway, Britons are shattering the world's illusions about their propensities and prowess. In the bargain, they are shocking themselves.

"Are Virgins Obsolete?" On the island where the subject has long been taboo in polite society, sex has exploded on the national consciousness and into national headlines. "Are We Going Sex Crazy?" asks the London Daily Herald. "Is Chastity Outmoded?" asks a school magazine for teenagers. "Are Virgins Obsolete?" is the question posed by the sober New Statesman. The answers vary, but one thing is clear: Britain is being bombarded with a barrage of frankness about sex and flooded with a public questioning of the long-established Victorian moral standards. Wrote the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a recent Sunday Times article, "Today there is in our society an immense outbreak of preoccupation with Venus. There is a dwelling upon sex: the sex problem, the adjustments of sex, instruction for sex, adventures of sex, stories of sex, what to do with sex, brighter and better sex." And the candor with which the once forbidden subject is being explored is positively astonishing.

It is the decorous British Broadcasting Corp. that leads the discussion these days. BBC programs have included a lecture on the arguments for premarital intercourse, a discussion of homosexuality (known on the Continent as le vice anglais), a drama about an abortionist, and another play about men reminiscing about their past sex life ("Her breasts could fill champagne glasses"). On the popular satirical show That Was the Week That Was, the young Establishment types poke a kind of sexual fun that would make America's FCC Boss Newton Minow turn pale. Taking off on a government report that one baby in every eight born in London is illegitimate, TWTWTW's brassy singer Millicent Martin lamented as she rocked a cradle:

Don't you weep, my little baby 'Cause you haven't got a dad.

Go to sleep, my little baby, Things aren't really quite so bad.

There's no reason any longer Why you ought to feel so blue.

The world is full of bastards Just like you.

A Debris of Convictions. Fact is, both on and off the air waves, the British are deeply concerned with their search for what some call "a new morality" to fit the hushed-up facts of life. "The popular morality is now a wasteland," said Dr. George Morrison Carstairs, 46, professor of psychological medicine at Edinburgh University, in a recent BBC lecture. "It is littered with the debris of broken convictions. A new concept is emerging, of sexual relationships as a source of pleasure, but also as a mutual encountering of personalities in which each explores the other and at the same time discovers new depths in himself or herself."

In a violently controversial report, a group of The Religious Society of Friends attacked the onus attached to "a great increase in adolescent sexual intimacy" and premarital affairs. "It is fairly common in both young men and women with high standards of conduct and integrity to have one or two love affairs, involving intercourse, before they find the person they will ultimately marry," said the report. This, concluded the Quaker report, is not such a sin. "Where there is genuine tenderness, an openness to responsibility and the seed of commitment, God is surely not shut out."

A Blessing. All the hubbub over sex has, to be sure, caused a lot of misgivings, and few churchmen share the Quakers' liberal view. But most experts agree with Writer V. S. Pritchett that "allowing for its crudities, the sexual revolution has been one of the few blessings in the life of this century." They attribute the new sexual tolerance and the lessening of Victorian shame to a wide variety of combined causes: the heavy impact of both world wars on the old morality, the emancipation of women from the hearth, a gradual increase in coeducational schooling, and even the fact that more Britons travel abroad for holidays. But exactly where the present orgy of introspection will lead not even the experts can predict. What seems certain, however, is that the typical Englishman of a thousand cliches is doing no more than he ever did; he is merely hiding it less.

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