A WITTY SPEECH

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 33, 2 November 1929, Page 31

A WITTY SPEECH

' BERNARD SHAW ON SEX REFORM

At the thirtl International congress of the World League for Sex Reform Mr. George Bernard Shaw addressed the delegates on “The Need for Expert opinion in Sex Reform.” Mr. Shaw first qualified himself as an expert on the subject because, he said,'' as a playwright he had to be. Then, after a half-hour’s tun with sex appeal in oldfashioned clothes, and the lack of it in- dresses of to-day, he warned the audience against ever expecting sex reform from a modern democracy or popular government, and said the best they.could look for was class morality.

Mr. Shaw said: “I am not going to beg the question of what sex. reform means. Everybody is a sex reformer. That is to say, everybody who has any idjjas on the subject'at all; The PopCj, for .instance, is a sex reformer, ar;d the Austrian nudists —if I may call them so—are also.

_“The consequence, is that if you had a general congress of all such reformers. not merely members of a particular society, but all the .people, who are demanding sex reform—if you got them together there would be a curious cross-party organisation. Probably the Pope would find that on nine points out of ten he was warmly in sympathy with Dr. Marie Stopes. And all. of them would probably, disagree on ..such a question as the 1 age of consent. ... .■ “My point really is that no matter what people’s views are on the subject, it is desirable that they take expert opinion, as to the practicability and probable practical.effect of the particular measures they are advocating. "There are two effects to be considered in any definite measure of sex reform. There - is. the psychological effect and there is the political effect Now it is on the psychological side that I wish to speak, because I am speaking,, of course, as an expert. “I do not in the least, know why that remark of mine excited laughter, but as a matter of fact I am an expert in sex appeal. What I mean is that I am a playwright. lam connected with the theatre. The theatre is continually occupied with sex appeal. It has to deal in sex appeal exactly as a costermonger has to deal in turnips, and a costermonger’s opinion of turnips is worth having. He is an expert, and in the same way the opinion of a playwright is worth having, or that of people connected with the theatre, because they knok how tbe thing is done and they have to do it.

“One vOry important function of the :heatre is to educate people in matters jf sex. It is not only people in the thelitre who have .that idea and wish to •eally educate the people, but also, those vho simply want to exploit sex appeal —they all have to know how to do it >ecause if their sex appeal fails they 3se a very great deal of money, and ou can hardly call a man a real exert if he loses a great deal of money nless his practice happens to be wrong. “The curious thing is that in matters f sex appeal nobody ever calls, in a laywrigbt. . Although he is a very obious person to call on the subject, they ever think of doing it. On. the other and, a priest always rushes in and emands to be accepted as an authority a the subject., “Unfortunately, or fortunately, just s you choose to look at. it, there is o such person, but there is a chief >rlest, which is, perhaps, the reason he priest's opinion gets heard, whilst he other opinion is riot heard; Thereore, I prefer myself as being the next est thing to that —that is to say, of ourse, the playwright. . “I find myself up against two sets of eople. One set seeks to minimise sex ppeal by a maximum of clothing. The thers seek to maximise sex appeal by minimum of clothing. I come in as a expert and tell them they are both ipelessly and completely wrong in leir methods. They do not underand the matter at all. If you want x appeal raised to the utmost point, ere is only one way of doing it and at is by clothes. Probably the geual adoption of clothing in many cliates had for its object sex appeal ther than protection from the weaer. . “I want • to give a few illustrations, me years ago I was at a place in rrnstiy called Kissingen. I did not Se a mud bath, but went in the evenj to one of those little garden places lerc they have entertainments, and I w a lady who was both singer and robot. She first went-through a per•manee on a trapeze in simple tights >ni head to foot. Except that there is some fabric all over her person, she is exactly as if she had’no clothes on all. and one felt that was perfectly 1 right. It sifted a performance-on horizontal bar. Then she retired for moment before coming out to sing a ildly naughty little song. Ar*l what * d she do? She felt that the costume ■ which she had performed on the horintal bar,- somehow or other, would be [possible in which to sing a naughty ng. She came out with a little skirt and, of course, she immediately; heme indecent. She knew it and she • t on the skirt for that purpose. She t that in some way the little skirt d sex appeal. ‘Well, if a priest went behind the nes of a theatre and made such a im we should say, 'Mind your' own

business. This evidently, is the one subject about which you, as a celibate, know nothing, arid if you attempt to meddle with it you prpbably will' make, literally. an unholy mess of it.’ “However, there always is a certain attraction about the wrong kind of expert, about going to a man who knows nothing about it, because you are afraid if you get a genuine expert bis opinion would go against you,- as indeed it very often would. “The I'ope represents the priests in this matter. The Pope is the chief priest of Europe and speaks very strongly on the subject of sex appeal. I, of course, should never dream of appealing to the chief priest of Europe.” • Mr. Shaw then said if there were a person representing the opposite extreme "I- should go to her immediately. I should say, here clearly, is a person who deals professionally in sex appeal, who will lose her livelihood if her method is Wrong,■.if she is not really scientific in thematter.- ’ “I wish the Pope had been there. It 'would'have been a very instructive lesson for him, just exactly the sort of lesson a priest wants. “Being an ar'ist myself; I have always been very impressionable in the direction of sex. My first impressions were derived from Vidtbrian women. The Victorian . woman wa.k a masterpiece of sex appeal, . She was .sex appeal from the fop'of her head to the soles oi; her feet. -It was amazing how. she did it. She was clothed^, of course, from head to foot. Everything about her, except her cheeks and Bose, was a guilty secret, .something you had to guess at. . . “You found in the Christmas pantomime, for exarnple, the call boy always played the old woman part, and the one unfailing job, the one thing that had to be in every harlequinade, was that the old woman had to scramble over a wall and show-her legs-and white stockings tip to the knee, and the whole house shrieked with laughter. I do'not think they would do'so now. Not Dressed, Upholstered.. “I want to give you an idea. of how completely this clothing business produced sex appeal. They did not dress the Victorian lady. They upholstered her. All her contours, to take tbe principal, ones, all four of them, were ail* emphasised. When the lady herself could not. emphasise them sufficiently by her own person she used artificial aids. “I really think if I exhibited here, one of the ordinary pictures of a woman of that day you would, be'shocked. “The result was that the Victorian age was an exceedingly immoral age, an age in which there arose a sort of disease which modern psychiatrists, I think, call exhibitionism. You had a tendency on the part of some ladies to do something dreadful, to show their ankles, for instance. Hardly the most desperate or abandoned of them ever dreamed of showing their .knees', or anything like that. You had, on the one hand, this tremendous sex appeal produced by clothes, and on the other hand the tendency to defy it or exploit it by making a little revelation of some kind. “We have been getting rid of all that. We have had a tremendous spread of nudism, not carried to the extreme they carry it in Austria, where, in communities and clubs, people have the extremely wholesome habit of meeting one another without having anything on at all. But the unpopularity of that really is due to the fact that people cling to sex appeal. They do not want to get rid of it. - “When the nudist points out that the moment you get to the point when you are perfectly nude, it would be. a very delicate situation if you were with only one other person who was nude, but this would not be the case .if you were among 100 nude persons. Y’ou would no longer feel nude. There is nothing in it. But when you tell an ordinary man there is nothing in it, he at once says: Then do not let us have any of it, I prefer sex not- going to judge whether it is .more desirable to live as I did in the nineteenth century, where the whole place was saturated with sex appeal for under, existing conditions, where •- the women at least have taken a large step toward nudity and sex appeal has vanished to an amazing extent. . “I need not point a moral to what 1 have been paying. I simply am giving an expert’s opinion. If you want sex appeal, clothes; if you want to minimise sex appeal, get rid of as many clothes as possible.” , , ... Mr. Shaw concluded with a brief comment on the political phase of the questlO“Modern democracy.” he said, “has become associated with ideas on liberty because it has abolished certain methods of political oppression, and as we allow ourselves to be actuated too much by association with ideas, we are apt to think that what makes for liberty in one thing makes for liberty in all things. Make no such mistake about modern democracy and popular government. The more people .at large, have to_do..yvith .government, the more we will have to fight for our ! lives and for our ideals.

“The mass of people,., brought up as they , have been, have no idea of liberty in this direction. On the contrary, they are ,the most ferocious opponents of it and you will have to fight, I will not say for .superrinorality because, it will appear to them to be sub-morality, but in the end we will have to have really class morality The very name is abhorrent to democracy, but certain circles of people in different degree? of-, spiritual 'development will have to have moralities of their own in. their own Circles and will have to tolerate other circles with their particular degrees of morality.' That is the utmost you;can hope for. Do not think your own particular morality can be imposed on the whole nation and do not. for Heaven’s sake, dream that it can be imposed on a democracy. That will be the greatest mistake you can possibly make.”'