World: Frankness in the Air

Two Labor members of the Birmingham City Council recently had what they considered a bright idea: Why not establish municipal brothels to keep the city’s aggressive prostitutes in one place? The councillors were fully braced for a storm of indignant protest, even though they never seriously expected their measure to pass. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the two councillors were immediately besieged with invitations to appear on TV and state their views. Many Britons wrote to congratulate them for forthrightly raising an important question. The Tories complained only that, if there were to be brothels, they should not be a government enterprise.

Britons may be no more or less interested in sex than most other peoples in an increasingly permissive age, but they certainly express that interest more openly and flamboyantly. The subject seems to be on everyone’s mind. Newspapers and magazines constantly frontpage details of the most lurid activities. The once-staid BBC last summer showed a boy and girl in bed together discussing their sexual history. British newspapers use four-letter words and explicit language that would surprise readers of mass-circulation papers on the Continent or the U.S. Their classified-ad pages frequently serve as arenas for the commerce of sex. British admen have learned to use sexual innuendo with such effect that some ads have had to be withdrawn for their raunchiness, including one two weeks ago by BOAC, the government airline. What was whispered about in one age or snickered at in another is now lustily shouted.

Real Change. Some of the bluntness is a reaction to the euphemisms with which the British gentility, whose conduct has always provided rich material for gossip and journalism, long shrouded matters sexual. But much of it is the result of a very real change in respectable middle-class morality, once considered a bastion against the sexual mores of both the upper and lower classes. Illegal abortions are estimated to be running between 100,000 and 200,000 annually; divorce petitions have risen 50% in the last five years to some 42,000 a year; illegitimate births have doubled in a decade and gone up to some 60,000 a year.

Divorce has long been quite acceptable in Britain, but today there is less effort to conceal its causes. Lord Harewood, the 18th in line of succession to the throne, frequently appeared in public with a divorcee who bore him a son while he was still wed to his first wife. Queen Elizabeth, the temporal head of the Church of England, made a concession to the more relaxed morality by deciding to give him royal permission to marry the woman. Even Parliament now eagerly delves into areas that were formerly taboo. Three weeks ago, Commons passed a bill legalizing homosexual acts in private between consenting adults, and two weeks ago it followed that up with another bill liberalizing the grounds for abortion. Last week a government committee studying the question of lowering the age of majority from 21 to 18 years could not refrain from noting the sexual implications involved: the bill might, said the committee, by reducing the age of consent, “take the cartridge out of the shotgun marriage.” Said the Marquess of Salisbury recently: “Practices that a few years ago could hardly have been mentioned at all in decent society are now taken as a matter of course.”

Glorious Gift. The frankness about sex even seems to carry the blessings of the highest moral authorities. Last October a British Council of Churches study group declined to censure premarital sex. British Quakers, for their part, declared: “Sexuality, looked at dispassionately, is neither good nor evil. As Christians, we have felt impelled to state without reservation that it is a glorious gift of God.” When the British woman’s magazine Nova asked a mother what she would tell her daughter about sex when she reached 16, the mother replied: “Tell her? Probably buy her a diaphragm.”

Author W. H. Auden complains that “it looks as if traditional morality is to be succeeded by fashionable morality” and predicts that “heroin and Sade will be in one year, cocoa and virginity the next.” Matters may never come to that, but if they do, the British will certainly talk about the change candidly. The M.P.s debating the homosexuality and abortion bills at times became so detailed and clinical in their discussion that Lord Boothby, though a supporter of both bills, was moved to predict: “We shall not hear of sex in this house again for a very long time, because the plain truth is that after a while, sex can be very boring.”