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| Aug 14, 2006 @ 8:48 AM |
a British study I never knew about
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kinglouis2005
Posts: 856
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Damn they were pervs back in the day!!!!!!!!!!!!
[QUOTE]Britain's secret sex survey
By Jonathan Duffy
BBC News Magazine
The Kinsey Report of 1948 famously lifted the lid on American sexual behaviour. But when a similar study was conducted in Britain the following year, the findings were so outrageous they were suppressed. Only now have they been revealed.
The late poet Philip Larkin, who could always be relied on to expose some awkward home truths about British life, once declared that "sexual intercourse began in 1963".
His poem Annus Mirabilis famously links the start of the sexual revolution with the "Beatles' first LP". But the results of a survey into sexual attitudes and behaviour, conducted 14 years earlier, reveal the British had developed a hearty lust for sexual experimentation. Only, no one would openly discuss it.
In these liberated times, when sex is almost a constant undercurrent of everyday life, it's hard to imagine how much of a taboo sex once was.
Yet when a group of young researchers set out to probe British sexual behaviour in 1949 their findings were considered so outrageous they were instantly swept under the carpet; banished to the archives of a university.
Only now, more than 50 years on, have the results come to light, revealed in a new BBC programme. The findings show that the prim and proper façade of post-war Britain hid some remarkable truths about sexual attitudes and experience.
Rose Hacker: "Many men were impotent, seeing their wives as pure"
One in four men admitted to having had sex with prostitutes, one in five women owned up to an extra-marital affair, while the same proportion of both sexes said they had had a homosexual experience.
Dubbed Little Kinsey, after the groundbreaking Kinsey Report into the secret sex lives of American men in 1948, this was the UK's first nationwide sex survey. And it went a step further than its American counterpart by including women among its respondents.
The study was the idea of a group of young social anthropologists called Mass Observation. Ten years earlier, in 1939, they had begun secretly recording the sexual behaviour of Northern mill workers by snooping on them during their week's holiday in Blackpool.
It was highly invasive, but all part of the group's plan to document and understand ordinary people's lives.
The 1949 study was vastly more ambitious, employing 24 full-time observers and 450 volunteers. But before they could get to asking the awkward questions, they first had to win the confidence of potential interviewees.
One of the original Little Kinsey questionnaires
Enlarge Image
Each had their own tactics, but it could start with striking up a friendly, innocuous conversation with a stranger in the High Street.
"It was very difficult in those days to talk about anything at all," recalls Rose Hacker, one of the researchers. Now 99, she is Britain's oldest sex therapist.
"I remember a woman coming to me again and again... for a weekly meeting... then she'd go away and at the last minute say 'Well, I haven't told you what I really want to tell you...' She had a terrible phobia about sex."
Although the ideal of the virgin bride pervaded in those days, more than half of those interviewed admitted to having had pre-marital sex.
Yet with only basic contraception such as washable condoms available, and widespread ignorance about sex in general, many women risked getting pregnant. Indeed, Little Kinsey revealed that in the 1940s, one in three pregnancies were conceived before marriage.
Men's reluctance to use birth control - the Pill had not been invented - meant married women often feared their husbands, who saw sex as a marital right.
"My husband accused me of being cold, but he knew little of the passionate longing I felt," said one of the anonymous respondents. "If only he'd made love to me instead of using me like a chamber pot."
People could go on denying pre-marital sex existed, that men had homosexual experiences and went to prostitutes
Dr Hera Cook on the suppression of Little Kinsey
The combination of such repressed attitudes and couples being forced into wedlock, led to many long, unhappy, or at the very least, "sufferable", marriages.
Men and women resorted to adulterous affairs and men to prostitutes, with whom they could act out the sort of fantasies they could never tell their wives about.
Many men had become accustomed to using prostitutes during the war - one in four questioned admitted to having had sex with one.
"In some ways it's a good thing," said one interviewee, a married RAF pilot. "You get people who are not suited but can make a happy family apart from the matter of sex so he goes somewhere to satisfy his lust."
Rose Hacker believes the stifling reticence about all things sexual meant "a great many men were impotent" in marriage.
They saw their wives as pure, but could have sex with a prostitute who would fit any bill they wanted to design for her, she says. "They could abuse her or they could have any kind of kinky sex or use bad language and that was the only way that they could be potent."
Researchers tested women's virtue by chatting them up at dances
The war too is thought to have contributed to the high number of homosexual experiences logged in the survey. One in five respondents - male and female - had had one, a higher number than today
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| Aug 14, 2006 @ 4:39 PM |
a British study I never knew about |
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Solitaire
Posts: 1,359
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What a facsinating article, KL. It does show much of the prevailing view of sex within the marriage as a "marital right" and the implication that many women put up with doing their wifely duty. It also reflects that the attitudes towards prostitutes was, again, to be used, and I choose that word specifically, for what they were uncomfortable doing with their wife. as much as I may see some serious problems with sexualizing our society, I see that gains have been made in the last 60 years. Hoorah! Women have been allowed to step off of the virginal pedestal and jump into shared sexual pleasure. I felt for the poor woman who had to sublimate her passionate desires, "My husband accused me of being cold, but he knew little of the passionate longing I felt," said one of the anonymous respondents. "If only he'd made love to me instead of using me like a chamber pot."
We rally so much information towards adolescents, and preadolescents, about the fear of becoming pregnant and sexual disease, that we have forgotten that in our, or at least my, parents and grandparents, it was married women who regularlly had these fears too. Since birth control and even female reproduction information was so limited, women did tend to be hesitant to be sexually available, if the possibility was to become pregnant, again and again.
As for the homosexual activity, war and crisis, tend to make strange bedfellows... 
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| Aug 14, 2006 @ 10:18 PM |
a British study I never knew about
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RareQuestor
Posts: 2,652
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As for the homosexual activity, war and crisis, tend to make strange bedfellows...
You have to factor in the fact that coed schools were relatively rare in those days. All male schools were practically a prerequisite for military service, for example. Many teenage boys and girls began exploring their sexuality with their own gender simply because the opposite sex was unavailable.
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| Aug 14, 2006 @ 10:49 PM |
a British study I never knew about |
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kinglouis2005
Posts: 856
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Also It goes to show alot of what was being taught to the youngsters back in the day is not always what was done by the "teacher" so to speak.
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