Put What Where? (19 page)

As for details about positions, though, readers were left to work them out for themselves – though Stopes hinted they should model themselves on sea anemonies: ‘A pair should, impelled by the great wave of feeling within them, be as pliable as the sea-plants moved by the rushing tides, and they should discover for themselves which of the innumerable possible positions of equilibrium results in the greatest mutual satisfaction.’

Stopes also became Britain’s leading popular authority on contraception, having published, eight months after
Married Love
, a ‘practical sequel’,
Wise
Parenthood.
It upset the medical profession and the Catholic Church. The technical advice covered female physiology and instructions for using the Dutch cap, and glossed over methods such as condoms, which she did not favour.

Though Stopes kept her own surname when she married, and flouted conventions of dress by going braless (and she was a well-built girl), she was hardly a model heroine for women’s lib. She remained at heart a puritan reactionary, opposed to abortion and sex outside marriage. A woman’s first baby should be her husband, she wrote: he needs just the simple, loving petting that is demanded by a child. She was 44 when she gave birth to her son, Harry, and became convinced he was an example of the super-race she wanted to help create through Hitlerite eugenic racial hygiene. In common with Havelock Ellis and a worryingly large proportion of her contemporaries, Stopes began to see birth control and ‘proper’ sexual habits as the way to realize a warped vision of a society peopled only by genetically perfect specimens, where the inferior and unworthy had been weeded out by selective breeding. She advertised through her solicitors to find a suitable child companion for young Harry and demanded that it be ‘completely healthy, intelligent and uncircumcised’. She tried out four hopefuls but all were declared ‘unfit to live in a decent household’ with her little
übermensch.
Until he was 12 Harry was taught at home by his mother. She made him wear skirts because she feared that trousers would damage his testicles.

Harry said they became estranged when he grew up and married Mary Wallace, the daughter of the bouncing-bomb inventor, Barnes Wallace: ‘[Marie] said she disapproved of Mary because she was short-sighted and wore glasses, and if any of our children inherited the defect it would make a mockery of her work on eugenics.’ Harry thought that, anyway, his mother simply believed that no woman could ever be worthy of him. There is another odd element in the relationship: Harry’s father had co-founded the aeroplane-maker Avro, which built the Lancaster bomber that successfully dropped Mary’s father’s famous bombs on Germany’s dams. This may not have played well with Stopes who, in 1939, had horrified her friends by sending Adolf Hitler a volume of her own poetry as a gift.

In her later years, Stopes became ever more the monstrous egotist and presumed to tell George Bernard Shaw how to write plays, and Rudyard Kipling how to compose poems. Her second marriage disintegrated; H.V. Roe was left feeling crushed and impotent. In her final years she kept a succession of young men around her, and when she died her male companion was 35 years her junior. Stopes died in 1958 a few days before her 78th birthday, still convinced almost until the end that she would live to be 120.

Stopes not only failed to reach her six-score years, but her best-seller was beaten on the international bookshelves by a disgraced Dutch gynaecologist.
Ideal Marriage
is perhaps the best-selling sex technique book of all time, and was first published in 1926 by Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde
.

He wrote the book in both Dutch and German and it rapidly became an international smash. In Germany alone it was reprinted 42 times, despite being placed on the
Index librorum prohibitorum
, the Catholic Church’s list of banned books. Then Hitler suppressed it in 1933. By the 1970s the English translation had gone through 43 editions totalling more than a million copies. In America more than half-a-million hardcover copies were sold between 1945 and 1970.

The book sprang, once again, out of unhappiness. Van de Velde had been a successful and prosperous Dutch gynaecologist who was trapped in a stultifyingly joyless marriage when, at the age of 36, he scandalized his middle-class world by running off
with a married patient, Martha Breitenstein-Hooglandt. Van de Velde had been raised by a respectable military father and had dutifully worked his way up to being appointed the director of the Haarlem Gynaecological Clinic. The adulterous affair sank him into disgrace and cost him his practice. He and Martha went into wandering exile around Europe until his wife finally granted him a divorce in 1913. The lovers married and moved to Switzerland. Whether it was as a two-fingers to his old life, or an attempt to explain the powers of sex, he began to write his blockbuster.

He was 53 when the book came out. It was dedicated to Martha but written, he said, for his patients, who were ignorant about sex. In Britain,
Ideal Marriage
caught the wave of interest in sex manuals that had been stirred by Stopes’s
Married Love.
His book managed to walk a difficult legal tightrope, too. In 1930s Europe, textbooks that stressed caution and the need to keep sex within marriage would get past the authorities and be modest sellers. From there on, the more explicit they got, the more they sold – but the greater the likelihood of prosecution and pulping. In 1923, for example, copies of a pamphlet called
Family Limitations
were seized by police from a shop in Shepherds Bush, West London. The booksellers were charged with selling an obscene publication. The trouble was almost certainly caused by a drawing of the female genitalia, showing a female finger inserted to locate the cervix. The magistrate asked, ‘Would you put such a book in the hands of a boy or girl of 16?’

Van de Velde was pushing his luck, and he knew it. In the book’s introduction, he declared: ‘I know that it will have many unpleasant results for me, for I have gradually attained to some knowledge of my fellow human beings and of their habit of condemning what is unusual and unconventional.’ In the doctor’s favour, though, he stressed early on that he was prescribing healthy, normal, hetero married sex and wished to ‘keep the Hell-gate of the realm of sexual perversions firmly closed’. Nevertheless, he argued that oral sex was an acceptable form of foreplay – so long as it was done with caution. ‘The husband must exercise the greatest gentleness, the most delicate reverence,’ he warned. He added the wife should not start fellating too early in the marriage – which can hardly have played well with husbands. In addition, he suggested that unsatisfied wives should masturbate after intercourse, and recommended that sex involve love bites and ‘playful’ slaps.

Risqué business, but Van de Velde was at heart a Dutch conservative, declaring: ‘I address myself to married men, for they are naturally educators and initiators of their wives in sexual matters.’ And one of his apparent innovations, the need to spice up long marriages with variety, harks back to the earliest Indian and Arabic texts. Positions? Whatever doesn’t hurt, won’t hurt, he declared: ‘There are numberless delicate differentiations and modifications of sexual pleasure, all lying strictly within the bounds of normality, which can banish the mechanical monotony of the too-well known from the
marriage-bed and give new attractions to conjugal intercourse. What is physiologically sound may also be considered ethically sound.’ He then enumerated and explained ten different positions in such a dull and pedantic manner that they would struggle to reach the same erotic plane as the assembly leaflet for an Ikea coffee table.

Afterplay was Van de Velde’s other great rediscovery. ‘It is an essential and most significant act in the love drama, but unfortunately the most neglected of all,’ he admonished readers. ‘Many men are in the habit of going to sleep immediately after coitus; yes, even men who love their wives do this.’

Unbelievable.