Put What Where? (18 page)

The paranoid pioneer William Chidley was a bearded, earnest-looking man who believed he could best set a living sexual example to the people of Australia if he walked around dressed in a toga.

He set out his ideas in a 1911 pamphlet entitled
The Answer.
Australians should change to a life of nudity, a diet of fruit and nuts and a ‘correct’ method of sexual intercourse, Chidley declared. He apparently based his theory on observations of the sex life of horses. Yet it wasn’t his ideas on intercourse that got him repeatedly arrested, but his silk toga-like tunic which the authorities considered indecent. He wore it because he believed that heavy clothing caused erections. And erections would lead to sexual overexcitement, ill health and an untimely death, as well as being ‘ugly things’ of which ‘we are all ashamed’.

Chidley’s erectophobia was stark proof that Victorian guilt was alive and thriving in early 20th-century Australia. He believed his erection-free scheme would some day save the world ‘from all its
misery, disease, crime, and ugliness’. Conventional sexual intercourse was killing us, he warned in
The Answer:
‘Our present coitus is a perversion and a shock. Any protoplasm that receives a shock contracts, and the brain actually becomes smaller as time goes on, through the repeated shocks of coition and becomes distorted in shape. The blood supply is perverted also, and this contributes towards the injury.’ To assist his case, the pamphlet contained line drawings showing married couples steadily deteriorating under the continual strain of lovemaking: ‘The delicate network of muscles on face and the eyes show it more plainly than any other part of the body’

Chidley had been born in 1860 in Victoria and was adopted as an infant by a toyshop owner who, it seems, belonged to an early free-love sect. But that did not stop the adolescent Chidley suffering torments of guilt and fear over his frequent masturbation: he had read a pamphlet by ‘a medical man in Melbourne’ which warned how his habit would lead to insanity and dissolution. Indeed, he grew up to become a photographer, painter and illustrator, living a rock’n’roll life of sex and drink. In 1882 he was in court on manslaughter charges following a street brawl. He was acquitted and soon afterwards met an actress, Ada Grantley, with whom he sporadically lived and travelled until she died in 1908.

Her death hit him hard and Chidley became convinced that she had been killed by sexual overindulgence, a belief he felt was supported by contemporary advice books, which warned against
excessive intercourse. When, as a teenager, he had visited the public library to learn about sex, a manual had warned him, ‘There is little or no difference between the results of excessive coition and those of self-abuse.’ At the age of 50, he decided to go public with his theory of healthy sexual technique and in 1911 took his pamphlet on to the streets of Melbourne, explaining ‘natural coition’ to anyone prepared to be ranted at by a sex freak dressed as an Ancient Greek. To avoid the debilitating effects of erections, his system involved maintaining a flaccid penis that was sucked by vacuum force into the vagina. Weird, yes, but a logically distorted result of all the sexual-restraint propaganda flying about.

The authorities did not see it that way. Trying to sell these ideas on the streets of Sydney between 1912 and 1915 got him jailed repeatedly for indecency. Eventually he was confined in a mental hospital. His sanity was even debated in the New South Wales Parliament, not least because Chidley had managed to line up a series of eminent mainstream medics who agreed in court that intercourse could damage the nervous system because orgasm caused a ‘brainstorm’ and ‘nervous shocks in high degree’, and that ‘nerve disturbance consequent upon coitus might lead to heart trouble’.

He was not without support from high society either. Australian intellectuals formed a Chidley defence committee to spring him from incarceration. He also exchanged letters and ideas with the English sexologists Edward Carpenter and Havelock
Ellis. Chidley sent Ellis an account of his sexual experiences, which the latter used in one of his studies. His greatest influence in the end, however, was in helping to create a backlash against censorship. Popular support for Chidley’s right to speak about sex grew, to the point where it embarrassed the state government. After Chidley died in 1916, his strange beliefs lived on for a while with a small band of followers continuing his oddball campaign through the 1920s.

Marie Carmichael Stopes is further proof, if any more were needed, that you don’t need relevant experience to become a leading world expert on lovemaking.

Quite the opposite. Although she was married and in her late 30s when she wrote one of Britain’s best-selling and most enduring sex guides,
Married Love
, she was also still a virgin.

Stopes was exceptionally bright – and a frighteningly difficult egotist. Born into a middle-class family in Edinburgh in 1880, she was the first woman to join Manchester University’s science department as a lecturer. She also gained three degrees in botany and obtained a doctorate, becoming Britain’s youngest doctor of science. She was also an authority on the composition of coal. But she was neither lucky in love nor in bed. During a sabbatical from Manchester University to perform geological research, she had gone in pursuit of a Japanese professor who responded to her advances by running home to Japan. Soon after, she married a gentle Canadian called Reginald ‘Ruggles’ Gates
who, sadly for him, is best remembered for failing ever to get ‘effectively’ rigid. It was a while before Stopes thought there was anything wrong with her marriage, but eventually she got worried that she had not become pregnant and went rummaging in the British Museum’s private cupboard, to which she had access as a scientist. This led her to conclude that her marriage had never been consummated.

‘I had never been fully penetrated by a normal male organ,’ she recalled five years later in the divorce court. ‘I only remember three occasions on which it was partially rigid, and then it never got effectively rigid.’ Perhaps, though, Gates was simply too terrified. But Stopes had some idea of what she was missing; she had subsequently read all there was to read on sex education, particularly the books of Havelock Ellis, whose work she ungratefully described later as ‘like breathing soot’.

Married Love
was dedicated ‘to young husbands and all those who are betrothed in love’ – and to that vast majority of people who are ‘nearly normal’. She turned the Gates experience to her advantage, as a special plea for publishing the book, writing: ‘In my first marriage, I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance that I feel that knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity.’ Stopes proved she had some political smarts, too, by claiming heavenly authorization to cover this salacious subject. She later claimed that her mission had come as a holy revelation one day when she was walking naked in the yew woods behind her home.

While publishing
Married Love
, Stopes went through the process of divorce and also became engaged to her second husband. Nevertheless, she wrote that remarriage was not a good idea: ‘Many think that merely by loosening the bonds and making it possible to start afresh with someone else, their lives would be made harmonious and happy. But often such reformers forget that he or she who knows nothing of the way to make marriage great and beautiful with one partner, is not likely to succeed with another.’ Perhaps this is why she obliged her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, to sign a contract releasing her to have sex with other men. Roe was a Manchester manufacturer who had tried, but failed, to establish a family-planning clinic for his female workforce. It was not an essentially intimate relationship. She thought married men and women should sleep in separate bedrooms.

Married Love
hit the shelves early in 1918 and outsold the best-selling fiction of the era by a huge margin. It ran through five editions and 17,000 copies in the first year alone. By 1925, sales had passed the half-million mark and achieved the million in the 1950s – not counting books sold in America or the Commonwealth. It was translated into French, Dutch, Swedish, German and Danish. Stopes sent a copy to the future Queen Elizabeth on her wedding, though there is no indication that she read it. Marie’s best stylistic trick was to make sex sound full of beauty and rapture, rather than guilty and mechanical. Her main innovation was to
popularize the idea of a rhythmic female ‘sex tide’ that dictated the ebb and flow of feminine desire. In normal women, she wrote, this reached its peak once a fortnight (we can probably guess this simply reflected her own libido). And woe betide the man who got it wrong: ‘A husband who desires lasting and mutual happiness in his marriage will carefully study his wife, observe how far she has a normal rhythm ... He will then endeavour to adapt his demands on her so that they are in harmony with her nature.’ Failure will leave him with ‘the tragic figure of the loving woman whose love tide is at the highest, and whose husband does not recognize the delicate signs of her ardour’.

Stopes had, she claimed, discovered this tide through scientific study of women whose husbands were frequently away: ‘Such women, yearning daily for the tender comradeship and nearness of their husbands, find at particular times an accession of longing for the close physical union of the final sex-act. Those I have asked to keep note of the dates, have, with remarkable unanimity, told me that these times came specially just before, and some week or so after, the close of menstruation, coming, that is, about every fortnight.’

QED. Happy wives – and happy husbands too, apparently: ‘Many men, who can well practise restraint for 12 to 14 days, will find that one union will then thoroughly satisfy them; and if they have the good fortune to have healthy wives, they will find that the latter too have the desire for several unions in a day or two ... Expressed in general
terms, my view may be formulated thus: the mutually best regulation of intercourse in marriage is to have three or four days of repeated unions, followed by about ten days without any unions at all.’

Not only did the happy new husband have to wait ten days for sex – and any unnatural emissions in between were firmly banned – the poor chap had to ensure he didn’t shoot prematurely. ‘It is, perhaps, hardly an exaggeration to say that 70 or 80 per cent of our married women (in the middle classes) are deprived of the full orgasm through the excessive speed of the husband’s reactions,’ declared Stopes. ‘So profound are woman’s complex sex instincts, as well as her organs, that in rousing them the man is rousing her whole body and soul. And this takes time ... as much as from ten to 20 minutes of actual physical union to consummate her feeling, while two or three minutes often completes the union for a man. The majority of wives are left wakeful and nerve-wracked.’