A WITTY SPEECH.

Otago Witness, Issue 3954, 24 December 1929, Page 83

A WITTY SPEECH.

BERNARD SHAW ON SEX REFORM At the third 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 fun with sex appeal in old-fashioned 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 ideas on the subject at all. The Pope, for instance, is a sex reformer, and 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 10 he was warmly in sympathy with Dr Marie Stopes. And all of them would probably disagree on such a question as the 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. I am 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 way the opinion of a playwright is worth having, or that of people connected with the theatre, because they know how the thing is done and they have to do it. “ One very imporant function of the theatre is to educate people in matters of sex. It is not only people in the theatre who have that idea and wish to really educate the people, but also those who simply want to exploit sex appeal—they all have to know how to do it be cause if their sex appeal fails they lose a very great deal of money, and you can hardly cal] a man a real expert if he loses a great deal of money unless his practice happens to be wrong. “ The curious thing is that in matters of sex appeal nobody ever calls in a playwright. Although he is a very obvious person to call on the subject, they never think of doing it. On the other hand, a priest always rushes in and demands to be accepted as an authority on the subject.

“ Unfortunately, or fortunately, just as you choose to look at it. there is no such person, but there is a chief priest, which is, perhaps, the reason the priest’s opinion gets heard. Therefore. I prefer myself as being the next best thing to that—that is to say, of course, the playwright. “ I find myself up against two seta of people. One set seeks to minimise sex an peal by a maximum of clothing. The others seek to maximise sex appeal by a minimum of clothing. I come in as an expert and tell them they are both hopelessly and completely wrong in their methods. They do not understand the matter at all. If you want sex appeal raised to the utmost point, there is only one way of doing it and that is by clothes. Probably the general adoption of clothing in many climates had for its object sex appeal rather than protection from the weather.

“ I want to give a few illustrations Some years ago I was at a place in Germany called Kissingen. I did not take a mud bath, but went in the evening to one of those little garden places where they have entertainments, and I saw a lady who was both singer and acrobat. She first went through a nerformance on a trapeze in simple tights from head to foot. Except that there was some fabric all over her person, she was exactly as if she had no clothes on at all, and one felt that was perfectly all right. It suited a performance on a horizontal bar. Then she retired for a moment before coming out to sing a mildly naughty little song. And what did she do? She felt that the costume in which she had performed on the horizontal bar. somehow or other would be impossible in which to sing a naughty song. She came out with a little skirt on and, of course, she immediately became indecent. She knew it. and she put on the skirt for that purpose. She felt that in some way the little skirt had sex appeal. "Well, if a priest went behind the scenes of a theatre and made such a claim we should say. ‘Mind your own business. This evidently G the one subject about which you. as a celibate, know nothing, and if you attempt to meddle with it you probably 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 his opinion would go against you, as indeed it very often would. “The Pope 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 i wrong, if she is not really scientific in the matter. “ 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 artist myself, I have always been very impressionable in the direction of sex. My first impressions were de rived from Victorian women. The Victorian woman was a masterpiece of sex appeal. She was sex appeal from the top of her head to the soles of 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 nose, was a guilty secret, something you had to guess at. “You found in the Christmas panto mime, for example, 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 up 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. Thev did not dress the Victorian lady. They upholstered her. All her contours, tn take the principal ones, all four of them, were all emphasised. When the lady herself could

not emphasise them sufiieienty 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 my 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 person who was nude, but this would not be the case if you were among 100 nude persons. • You 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 appeal. “ I am not going to judge whether it is more desirable to live as T did' in the nineteenth century, where the whole place was saturated with sex appeal, or 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 I have been saying. I simply am giving an expert’s opinion. If jou want sex appeal, clothes; if you want to minimise sex appeal, get rid of as many clothes as possible.” Mr Shaw concluded wift a brief comment on the political phase-of the question. “ 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 11 things. Make no such mistake about modern democracy and popular government. The more people at large have to do with 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 super-morality 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 degrees 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.”