SEX? IT WAS JUST ANOTHER CHORE
DESPITE the efforts of many doctors, scientists and therapists, attitudes to sex remained remarkably entrenched as the decade wore on
By 1953, zoologist Alfred Kinsey had published two weighty and explicit surveys on the sex lives of Americans, which revealed that half of college girls were no longer virgins when they married.
He also promoted the orgasm as a measure of sexual fulfilment, and revealed that women who had pre-marital sex had a two to three times higher chance of a better sex life after marriage.
But although his books were published here, Britain was almost unique in the West in continuing to place a high value on virginity before marriage — for both sexes.
Eight years after the publication of the first Kinsey Report, agony aunt Leonora Eyles was still telling engaged couples to wait. ‘Get rid of your sex urge by swimming, joining a hiking club or a choir,’ she wrote in her book Sex For The Engaged.
After marriage, the consensus was that sex became a wife’s duty. A pamphlet issued by the National Marriage Guidance Council stated: ‘A wife who refuses to give her husband the sex life he needs causes him to be irritable and difficult to live with.’
Throughout the decade, a continuingly high level of sexual unhappiness emerges in i nterviews, l etters to magazines and surveys.
When researcher Eustace Chesser interviewed 712 wives aged 21 to 30 in 1956, just half claimed to be sexually satisfied, 235 were fairly satisfied, while 114 had no satisfaction at all. Older age groups reported even less pleasure from sex.
As the Marriage Guidance Council reported: ‘ Many happily married women have never had an orgasm. Most of them would have done, had their husbands known how to help them.’
A 37-year-old woman from South-East London revealed: ‘My husband made such a mess of it, we ceased relations after the first year.’
Another said: ‘I had intercourse for the first time on my wedding night. I’ve never enjoyed sex — I don’t know what an orgasm is. How could you tell him he wasn’t doing it right?’
Mrs Lester, from Scunthorpe, admitted: ‘It was a horrible duty to me. I didn’t like it. You’d lie there and you’d be looking at the cracks in the ceiling thinking: “Oh that crack could do with filling in; that could do with a bit of whitewashing.” ’
For too many housewives sex had become just a disagreeable and unavoidable task — like the washing or ironing.
Perhaps it even paled into insignificance beside her other household chores, which — as I’ll explain on Monday — could easily take 15 hours a day.