In the summer of 1949, an investigator working for the British social research organization Mass-Observation stopped a man on the street and asked him what he thought was the “most important thing in the news.” The answer was a striking one: rather than choose one of the expected topics—“atom bombs, economic crises, strikes, and droughts”—the respondent was clear that the most important thing was “a series of articles in a Sunday newspaper telling him enlightening facts about the sex question.”Footnote 1 The articles in question were published by the popular paper Sunday Pictorial, under the title “The Private Life of John Bull,” and they ran for five weeks from the start of July.Footnote 2 It is, perhaps, not surprising that this reader believed them to be significant, because they had been given huge publicity by the Pictorial: they were, the paper claimed, nothing less than “the most outspoken and important social document of our time.”Footnote 3 This may have been typical press hyperbole, but the study on which these articles were based was indeed groundbreaking. Carried out by Mass-Observation and dubbed “Little Kinsey” due to the inspiration it took from the recent sexological investigations of Alfred Kinsey in the United States, this was the “first national random sample survey of sex” to be undertaken in Britain.Footnote 4 Unlike Kinsey, Mass-Observation focused largely on attitudes rather than behavior, but its survey nevertheless provided a valuable insight into British mores at the end of a decade of warfare and austerity. This interviewee, “quite unaware that the investigator to whom he was talking was a Mass-Observer,” offered evidence that it had captured the imagination of the public as well as experts in the field.Footnote 5
The “Little Kinsey” findings were not published in book form at the time, and they remained in the relative obscurity of the Mass-Observation archive until their publication by the sociologist Liz Stanley in 1995.Footnote 6 Since then, the survey has received considerable attention from those—both academics and journalists—seeking to explore British sexual culture in the period.Footnote 7 Despite this scholarly interest, however, one of the most significant aspects of the survey, namely, that it was commissioned and serialized by a popular Sunday newspaper with more than 10 million readers, has been consistently overlooked. The Sunday Pictorial turned the “Little Kinsey” research into an “important social document” that constituted sex in particular ways for public consumption—and hence contributed to a broader process in which social science reshaped ideas about everyday behavior and the relationship of the individual to the national community.
As Sarah Igo has argued in her recent study of social investigations in mid-twentieth-century United States, the public dissemination of survey results “would come to bear profoundly on how Americans understood their society and themselves.”Footnote 8 The Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953, she observes, transformed notions of “normal” sexuality and gave individuals new ways of comprehending their own sexual practices.Footnote 9 For John D'Emilo and Estelle Freedman, the surveys “propelled sex into the public eye in a way unlike any previous book or event had done.”Footnote 10 Reflecting in 1998 on Kinsey's historical significance, the pioneering British sex researcher Michael Schofield agreed that while “it is not difficult to query Kinsey's methodology and results … the really important aspect of the first report was that it sanctioned public debate.” Schofield's conclusion that “it was the impact, not the findings, that turned to be important” seems difficult to deny.Footnote 11 But if the reception of the Kinsey reports in the United States and in parts of Europe has now been studied in some detail, we still know relatively little about the impact in Britain of either Kinsey's work or the research he inspired, such as “Little Kinsey”; we are still some way from understanding why publicizing “enlightening facts about the sex question” could make an impression like it did on the man stopped by Mass-Observation.Footnote 12
This article seeks to contribute to this task by examining the ways in which the British national press discussed the findings of the two Kinsey volumes (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953), Mass-Observation's “Little Kinsey” survey, and Geoffrey Gorer's 1951 study of “English character.” It argues that certain newspapers, such as the Sunday Pictorial, the People, and the Daily Mirror, used the prestige of social science to legitimize “modern,” more explicit styles of writing about sex for a mass-market family audience—styles that differed markedly from the court reports and moralistic crusades that typified the press's usual approach to sex. Deploying influential public discourses of the early welfare state era, these newspapers suggested that active citizens in a modern democracy required access to the latest expert knowledge about sexual attitudes and behavior, so that ignorance could be eradicated and social problems overcome. The Pictorial's “Private Life of John Bull” series in 1949 marked an important turning point in this process: it was probably the most detailed and explicit discussion of sexuality yet published in a British popular newspaper, and it emboldened other papers to follow in its footsteps. A year later, the People commissioned the social anthropologist Gorer to investigate attitudes to love, sex, and marriage as part of a broad study of national character, and when Kinsey published his Human Female volume in 1953, the coverage in the British press was far more extensive than it had been five years earlier. These developments provoked a major controversy about the limits of acceptable public discourse about sex—many critics derided the high-minded rhetoric used to justify the coverage of these surveys and accused newspapers of seeking profit by exploiting the prurient research of pseudo-scientists, but ultimately this opposition could not prevent Fleet Street from establishing the everyday sexuality of ordinary citizens as a subject for its news agenda.
This controversy was intensified by the claims of social science to reveal truths about national character—claims that were, as Peter Mandler has noted, at their most strident in the immediate postwar period.Footnote 13 For many British observers, Kinsey's project itself, based as it was on scrutinizing behavior that was normally private, was characteristic of the dangerously informal and uninhibited American society; his results, meanwhile, indicated a degree of extramarital sexual expression unimaginable in the more restrained people of Britain. For British champions of Kinsey's work, however, understanding its significance meant accepting that British behavior might not, after all, be so different from that of the Americans. The findings of social science could lead to critical reflections about British sexual culture, and even studies that did support cherished notions of British restraint—such as Gorer's—also highlighted serious problems of ignorance, marital discord, and female frustration. At the heart of many of the debates about the legitimacy of these early sex surveys lay a battle between competing versions of British identity.
The press's role in commissioning, financing, and publicizing sex surveys in the late 1940s and early 1950s challenges us to reconsider some of the conventional narratives of these decades and to rethink chronologies of the emergence of “permissiveness.” Most historians continue to emphasize the cautiousness of public discussions of sexuality in this period. David Kynaston has recently observed that “in fiction, films and plays there was an almost systematic lack of frankness in approach to sexual matters” and that “the British through the 1950s remained ill at ease with the whole subject.”Footnote 14 Similarly, Simon Szreter has argued that Britain adhered to the Victorian code “of euphemism, silence, ignorance and confusion on matters of sex and sexuality” until the early 1960s: only after 1963 did this code meet its “public nemesis.”Footnote 15 But the tendency for most accounts of permissiveness to adopt as their starting points either the late 1950s or the early 1960s results from the privileging of certain cultural forms: theater (the “Angry Young Men”), cinema (the British “new wave”), fiction (the trial and publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960), and broadcasting (the changes ushered in at the BBC by Hugh Carleton-Greene).Footnote 16 In such narratives, and in many of the collections exploring the culture of the period, the press is almost entirely absent.Footnote 17 These accounts underrate the significance of national newspapers and ignore the diversity of their contents. The national press was, after all, right at the heart of popular culture: indeed, it was at precisely this time that newspapers reached their peak circulation in Britain, with national dailies achieving a combined circulation of 16.6 million copies per day and Sundays selling just over 30 million copies per week. The market was close to the saturation point, with some 80 percent of the population reading a paper every day; the British, furthermore, read more newspapers per capita than any other people in the world, almost twice as many, for example, as Americans.Footnote 18 These newspapers contained an increasing variety of different types of sexual content—trying to educate and inform, as well as to entertain, titillate, and scandalize—and they were a more significant source of information and imagery about sex than other comparable media forms.Footnote 19 Radio broadcasting may have had a similar cultural importance, but the conservatism of the BBC, still shaped by the Reithian ethos, ensured that programming continued to shy away from discussions of sexual issues. Television broadcasting was just as cautious, and, at least before Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 and the breaking of the monopoly in 1955, television ownership had not penetrated throughout society.Footnote 20 The press was not, moreover, subject to the same kind of close regulatory scrutiny as the theater or the cinema; as long as newspapers avoided outright obscenity, they had little to fear other than public disapproval. In this period, then, editors and journalists were able to respond to a perceived demand for a more explicit treatment of sexual issues, and these sex surveys, legitimized by the authority of modern social science, gave them one of the best opportunities for doing so. As a result, popular newspapers changed the nature of public debates about sex and paved the way for the “permissiveness” of subsequent years.
The First Kinsey Report, 1948–49
The publication of Kinsey's Human Male generated such waves in the United States that it became a journalistic cliché to liken its impact to an atomic explosion.Footnote 21 An expensive hardback edition soon sold around 250,000 copies, while a cheap (unofficial) summary for the mass market sold a further 750,000.Footnote 22 Newspapers and magazines produced a flood of articles and features, while Kinsey himself became a national celebrity and was mentioned in numerous jokes and songs.Footnote 23 In Britain, by contrast, there were only modest ripples of interest outside specialist circles. Sales of the book were far from spectacular—some 10,000 copies were sold in the first two years—and most British media outlets were reluctant to provide any detailed coverage of it.Footnote 24The Times and the Manchester Guardian neither reviewed it nor summarized its findings, while the two market-leading popular dailies, the Express and the Mirror, included only passing mentions.Footnote 25 Some of the main medical publications were not much more enthusiastic. The Lancet provided a brief review, but the British Medical Journal was content to list the report in its “Books Received” column.Footnote 26 A year after the report's publication, David Mace, the general secretary of the Marriage Guidance Council, expressed his surprise that “so little attention” had been paid to it by the British press.Footnote 27
Explanations for this lack of attention are not, however, hard to find. Most mainstream newspapers and magazines remained very evasive about sex unless it could be packaged in certain accepted formats, such as the moral crusade against “immorality” or the mild titillation of euphemistic court reports. Kinsey's study of everyday sexual behavior was a novelty that editors and journalists instinctively treated with caution.Footnote 28 Such evasiveness was reinforced in this case by deep-seated anxieties about the influence of American culture on Britain. In the interwar period many commentators had expressed fears that the overt eroticism of American films, jazz music, and pulp fiction magazines might undermine British morality; stories about the behavior of the American GIs stationed in Britain during the Second World War further consolidated the association of the United States with dangerous sexuality.Footnote 29 Many viewed Kinsey's study as a distasteful and intrusive study typical of this brash and emotionally unrestrained society. The results, meanwhile, seemed to tell a story, one journalist noted, of “almost incredible sexual laxity” that “will certainly not be taken as applying to this country.”Footnote 30 Talking to the American author and social commentator Russell Lynes, Kinsey summarized the reaction of the British press to his survey as follows: “No doubt this is all very true about Americans, but we aren't interested. The British don't behave like that.”Footnote 31 This British assumption of their own greater sexual conservatism was by no means characteristic of the wider European reaction to the reports: Dagmar Herzog notes that many European observers focused on the inhibitions and dysfunctions revealed by Kinsey's evidence.Footnote 32 The climate of opinion in Britain ensured, therefore, that the “K-Bomb” failed to ignite in Britain, at least at the first attempt.
One of the few papers that did seek to engage with the Kinsey findings was the Sunday Pictorial. The Pictorial was the sister paper of the Daily Mirror, and, with sales of around 5 million copies per week, it vied with the People for second place in the Sunday market behind the all-conquering News of the World.Footnote 33 The Pictorial was squarely aimed at a working-class readership, and it maintained a left-of-center political position; its editor, the young Welshman Hugh Cudlipp, sought to produce a modern, irreverent publication that would challenge old-fashioned social conventions.Footnote 34 Since Cudlipp became editor in 1937, the paper had adopted what it portrayed as a “franker” attitude to sex: this was evident both in the audacity of its pinups and its unusual willingness to discuss issues of sexual welfare. In the immediate postwar years, the paper championed the cause of sex education, providing a platform for campaigners such as Dr. Norman Haire and serializing a pamphlet entitled How a Baby Is Born.Footnote 35 In February 1948, two weeks after the conclusion of How a Baby Is Born and less than a month after the publication of Human Male, the Pictorial invited David Mace to explain Kinsey's work to its readers. Mace took the opportunity to highlight the significance of the research in bold terms, applauding Kinsey's resolve “to crack open the shell of secrecy which has surrounded human sexuality since the dawn of our civilisation.” Having submitted himself to questioning about his own sexual history, Mace declared that Kinsey's “skill as an interviewer” was “superb”: the professor was able not only to put his subjects at ease but also to expose any inconsistencies in their evidence. Mace was also entirely confident about Kinsey's impartiality and scientific rigor, because “he had no axe to grind, no theory to bolster up, no commodity to sell.” He accepted that the work would provoke intense debate, but his faith in the power of education led him to declare that “nothing but good can come … knowledge of the truth will set us free from false values.”Footnote 36 Mace's rhetoric was characteristic of what Chris Waters has described as “a post-war world infatuated with the potential of modern science.” It introduced the themes that would become increasingly prominent in the press coverage of sex surveys, namely, that science was able to uncover the “truth” about sexuality and that knowledge of this truth would liberate individuals from sexual unhappiness and frustration.Footnote 37
Despite the relative lack of British interest in the Kinsey report, Mace was perceptive enough to recognize that its real importance lay in its potential to transform the popular understanding of “normal” sexual behavior. Those—like himself—“who have had the confidence of men and women about their sex lives will not be surprised at what this book will tell us.” Experts “already know that masturbation among men is practically universal, that homosexual practices are far more common than is generally known. … We know that the variations in individual sexual patterns are so great that it is almost impossible to define what ‘normal’ sex is.”Footnote 38 But information about this diversity of sexual practice had not yet spread to the majority of the population. “When these and other facts, backed by irrefutable scientific evidence, become widely known,” he predicted, “there is no doubt that they will create a sensation. Some people will be relieved, others bewildered, yet others infuriated.” In particular, he suggested that “many who have suffered agonies because they thought themselves exceptional and abnormal will have a great burden lifted from their minds.”Footnote 39 Most popular newspaper journalists writing about sex in the first half of the twentieth century either slipped quickly into euphemism or reached for the languages of moral outrage or coy humor; Mace's matter-of-fact discussion of everyday sexual behavior, employing modern, scientific terminology, was, therefore, particularly striking. (Indeed, this may well have been the first use of the word “masturbation” in a modern mass-market newspaper.)Footnote 40 Equally challenging was his questioning of common assumptions about sexual “normality”: the press was, after all, used to condemning “deviant” sexualities without reflecting on the “normality” it expected its “ordinary” readers to share. Mace's article demonstrated clearly the unsettling implications of Kinsey's brand of sexual science.
The Sunday Pictorial's interest in the subject was confirmed the following year in another substantial article on the report. This piece reiterated Kinsey's key finding that “sex habits which are commonly regarded as ‘abnormal’ are practiced more widely than most of us might expect,” and Mace defended him against the common accusation that “publication of the details of such habits and of the numbers who indulge in them will encourage others to take them up.”Footnote 41 On the contrary, the paper concluded that this information would benefit the “excellent men and women who are doing so much to find and stamp out the causes of unhappy marriages.”Footnote 42 At a time when many policy makers and commentators were deeply concerned about the stability of families, this was a powerful argument in support of social science.Footnote 43 By early 1949, therefore, the Pictorial had identified itself as a rare press champion of the sex survey. It had in the process made some bold claims about the ways in which such research had the potential to transform individuals' self-understanding and also remedy social problems.
The “Little Kinsey” Survey, 1949
In this context, paying for a British sex survey was a bold, but natural, next step for Hugh Cudlipp and the Pictorial. There were both commercial and political rationales for it. It would allow the paper to outflank rivals by satisfying what the editorial team believed was a growing public appetite for sexual content—the efforts of both the Mirror and the Pictorial in pushing back the boundaries of acceptability in this area had, after all, been rewarded with steady circulation growth. At the same time it would also contribute to the Pictorial's stated social democratic mission of spreading knowledge to a readership often lacking anything more than a hazy knowledge of many sexual issues. Profit was certainly at the heart of these calculations, but this does not mean that the paper's educational rhetoric was entirely lacking in sincerity.Footnote 44 Mass-Observation had “for many years” been keen to conduct a proper exploratory survey on this subject but had lacked the funds to do so and had not found an organization willing to foot the bill. Tom Harrisson, one of Mass-Observation's founders, was therefore “deeply grateful” when the Pictorial offered to buy newspaper rights for the findings of a national sex survey.Footnote 45 The Pictorial paid £1,200 for the material—a considerable investment for the paper, but only enough, Len England noted, for a “few” of Mass-Observation's many ideas to be implemented—and it took the precaution of checking with solicitors that the questionnaire to be used was legal.Footnote 46
After consulting with an advisory board (which included Mace, the psychologist Clifford Allen, and the noted biologist and sex educator Cyril Bibby), Mass-Observation designed a project with four main strands: street interviews with a national sample of 2,052 members of the public, who were asked for their opinions on sexual issues; a study of sexual behavior, completed by 409 members of Mass-Observation's largely middle-class National Panel, as well as a small number of those stopped in the street in the original survey; a postal questionnaire sent to 1,000 clergymen, 1,000 schoolmasters, and 1,000 doctors; and “penetrative observation and fieldwork” conducted in a western cathedral city (Worcester) and a northern steel town (Middlesborough).Footnote 47 This combination of techniques reflected the sense of flux within Mass-Observation at this time, as the organization moved from its radical origins toward becoming a more conventional market research agency.Footnote 48 The investigation was not, as Mass-Observation was keen to point out, anywhere near the scale of Kinsey's herculean endeavors; nevertheless, it was, by far, the most ambitious survey of its kind conducted in Britain. The design was, moreover, Mass-Observation's alone. Harrisson noted that the Pictorial “left us entirely free to do the survey in any way we liked” and—in contrast to a number of other publications—provided “an object lesson of editorial good manners” by not attempting to distort or exaggerate the results.Footnote 49 Mass-Observation sent full reports to the Pictorial “for their own staff to condense into a form suitable for its own readership,” and the final versions of the articles—including pictures and headlines—were returned to the organization and its assessors for comment before publication. England confirmed that “in every case all suggestions made by Mass-Observation and the assessors were incorporated without question in the articles.”Footnote 50 Whereas Kinsey often complained about the way the American media sensationalized or distorted his findings, Mass-Observation found the Sunday Pictorial, despite its reputation as a racy tabloid, to be a serious and reliable partner. The result was a credible, indeed pioneering, piece of research; it was driven not by the news values of the popular press but by the intellectual agenda of Mass-Observation.
The Pictorial’s confidence in the public demand for this material was demonstrated by the efforts it took to ensure that its serialization would make the maximum possible impact. The paper was not merely disseminating Mass-Observation's results; it sought to create a media event out of them. The publicity campaign began more than two weeks before the articles were due to begin with an advertisement in the Pictorial's sister paper, the Daily Mirror, by then the market leader, with a circulation of around 4.5 million copies per day.Footnote 51 Under the headline “The Truth about British Morality in 1949,” the advertisement suggested that Mass-Observation's report was “likely to create as big a sensation in Britain as the intimate Kinsey Report created in America.”Footnote 52 If the claims about the report's impact were bold, some editorial caution was evident in the use of the code words “morality” and “intimate” rather than “sex.” Two days later, the Pictorial took over the baton, with a substantial preview article reaffirming that the “plain spoken survey of public and private morals” would “undoubtedly arouse great controversy.”Footnote 53 The following week the Pictorial's front page was dominated by another advertisement announcing that “the most outspoken report of our times” would start seven days later.Footnote 54 At every stage the publicity campaign emphasized the impartiality and academic credibility of the research, in terms similar to those used by Kinsey when publicizing his work in the United States. Mass-Observation was described as an “independent scientific social research group.” Its survey had “been conducted scientifically throughout Britain.”Footnote 55 The advertisements also claimed that the findings would be presented neutrally—“Neither Mass-Observation nor the Sunday Pictorial will attempt to draw any conclusions from this survey”—while the articles would be “frank and factual” and “printed without comment,” allowing readers to decide for themselves.Footnote 56 The predicted “sensation” and “controversy” would be caused by the incendiary nature of the “facts” themselves rather from any journalistic skill in packaging them; indeed, they were so powerful that putting them in the public domain “will undoubtedly influence our standards of moral behaviour.”Footnote 57 The series would not only reveal “the truth,” it would alter society.
The particular skill of the Pictorial, evident both in the publicity and the subsequent serialization, was to present the report using an accessible but idealistic tone rooted securely in some of the most resonant public discourses of the early welfare state era. A key theme was the power of scientific expertise to combat ignorance and to solve social problems. “Modern,” “rational” ways of thinking could be used to reform harmful customs and practices rooted in the past. The press had long viewed prostitution, homosexuality, and venereal disease as “problems” that required social action; these surveys now presented the everyday sexual frustrations, confusions, and miscommunications of “ordinary” people as social “problems” that could be tackled by the application of professional expertise. The language of social science was combined with the press's traditional campaigning rhetoric to produce a hybrid form of reporting that would appeal to the wider public. When the Pictorial finally printed the first installment of the findings on 3 July, for example, it celebrated the fact that the report “tears away the veil of false modesty which, for so long, has hampered frank discussion and recognition of certain facets of our way of life.”Footnote 58 This well-worn rhetoric was reminiscent of W. T. Stead's investigation of child prostitution in 1885, the infamous “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” series. Such styles continued to be used to frame the presentation of the “Little Kinsey” research.Footnote 59
The Pictorial used another powerful contemporary discourse—that of the active citizen participating in a responsive democracy—to encourage readers to consider the findings carefully and thoughtfully. It was the “duty” of the “thinking men and women who are concerned with the future of the community,” the paper wrote high-mindedly, to read the report and to pass judgment. The Pictorial was, in short, facilitating science, democracy, and progress by giving the public “the fullest opportunity to study it”—and certainly not trying to titillate readers with revelations about sex.Footnote 60 In reality, of course, it was not possible for the paper to shake off its well-established reputation built up through years of daring pinups and confessional journalism, and we can reasonably assume that readers came to the series with a variety of different motivations; the Pictorial's rhetoric did, however, give these readers a way of justifying their curiosity to themselves and others.
In its five weekly installments—four of which were text-heavy double-page spreads—the Pictorial recorded Mass-Observation's findings at some length.Footnote 61 The details of the research, and what they reveal about the British sexual culture of the time, can be found elsewhere; of more significance here is the general picture presented to the reader and the style and explicitness of the reporting.Footnote 62 The central theme of the report, identified in the first extract, was the existence of “considerable individual confusion in a world of rapidly changing moral values.” “Clear divisions of opinion” were evident both between churchgoers and nonchurchgoers and between men and women, while “unconventional” attitudes could be found “in every social group” and were no longer restricted to “progressive” or “cosmopolitan” circles. Traditional Christian morality remained important, but Mass-Observation detected “a move away from the Church's teachings towards greater sexual freedom.”Footnote 63 Further installments fleshed out this interpretation, demonstrating that there was “more tolerance or passive acceptance of practices which were vehemently denounced by our grandfathers.” A third of respondents, for example, were prepared to “give approval to some form of sexual relationship outside marriage,” particularly those in which the partners were engaged or living together; the researchers suggested that a similar proportion, “and probably more,” had actually engaged in such extramarital intercourse.Footnote 64 There was a “general feeling” that divorce was “often a regretful necessity” and should be available on grounds of incompatibility rather than just infidelity, cruelty, or desertion.Footnote 65 About two-thirds of respondents were in favor of birth control, and four-fifths supported sex education.Footnote 66 There was, in short, evidence of a diversity of opinion on moral issues that the existing structures of regulation were struggling to contain: early signs, perhaps, of the pluralism that would emerge so clearly in the 1960s.
The trend to “greater sexual freedom” appeared to be confirmed by the study of the sexual behavior of 450 members of Mass-Observation's panel of volunteers. Although careful to point out that these respondents were overwhelmingly middle class and “cannot be claimed as a typical cross-section of the community,” the paper noted that “there is little evidence that this group is distinctly out of the ordinary or anxious to prove itself eccentric or particularly virile.”Footnote 67 In particular, they confirmed that despite social disapproval a significant amount of extramarital sex was occurring. A quarter of husbands and a fifth of wives admitted to being unfaithful, while 49 percent of unmarried men and 38 percent of unmarried women claimed to have had intercourse. One man in seven had slept with more than four women, and a quarter had slept with prostitutes.Footnote 68 Overall, the report seemed to provide overwhelming evidence—just as the Kinsey report had in the United States—that the attempts of churchmen and moralists to confine sex to marriage had failed miserably; the British, it seemed, were not so different from the Americans after all.
The language, style, and scope of the Pictorial's articles were as significant as the findings they described. The Daily Mirror's wartime crusade against venereal disease had challenged the euphemistic culture that held sway in interwar Fleet Street, but with this series the Pictorial introduced new levels of explicitness to the popular press.Footnote 69 Newspaper readers were, after all, still accustomed to coy and moralistic references to “intimacy,” “illegal operations,” and “grave offences”; the repeated and casual use of “intercourse,” “abortion,” and “homosexuality” would have made an impression on many of those consuming these columns. The article examining sexual behavior was even more striking and arguably lived up to the front-page advertisement claiming that it was “the most intimate report ever published in a British newspaper.”Footnote 70 It discussed levels of sexual satisfaction with marriage—noting that women were less physically fulfilled than men—and found that 64 percent of respondents had had intercourse within the previous week and that half believed that contraceptives interfered with their sexual pleasure.Footnote 71 The Pictorial's boldest editorial decision, however, was to include figures concerning homosexuality, masturbation, and sexual fantasy. Although an underlying moralism was evident in the subheading “Perversions,” the text itself was relatively neutral and nonjudgmental. It recorded that 12 percent of respondents had experienced “homosexual relations” at some point in their life and that a further 8 percent “had known milder homosexual relations.” It also revealed that only 5 percent of men and a third of women never masturbated, while half admitted to having daydreams about “love-making or other sexually-exciting situations.” Two percent believed themselves to have abnormal “sadistic and masochistic inclinations or fetishes.”Footnote 72 Addressing such subjects, particularly in such a direct and matter-of-fact way, was highly unusual in the British press: most editors in Fleet Street would have deemed this material unsuitable for a “family newspaper.” By including it, the Pictorial significantly increased the potency of the article. The figures about masturbation and homosexuality would surely have raised some eyebrows among the Pictorial's many readers; some might well have felt a lifting of the “burden of guilt” that Mace had predicted for members of the public exposed to the findings of sex surveys. This section of the survey made clear that there was a diversity of sexual behavior to match the previously established diversity of opinion.
The presence of such explicit material, unsurprisingly, provoked complaints—there usually were complaints whenever the press pushed back boundaries in its reporting.Footnote 73 One of the most prominent reactions came three days before the series reached its conclusion, during the House of Commons debate on the recently published report of the 1947-49 Royal Commission on the Press.Footnote 74 Stanley Evans, the Labour MP for Wednesbury (West Midlands) and chairman of the provincial newspaper the Birmingham Town Crier, denounced the “Private Life of John Bull” articles as “real stinkers” and lamented that his daughter, still at school and a regular reader of the Pictorial, had been exposed to such inappropriate material: “Who went to bed with whom and how many times, is no sort of Sunday morning breakfast reading for young girls and boys.” Evans believed that the Pictorial had betrayed its self-proclaimed status as a “family newspaper,” and he speculated that if the press did not discipline itself, the Press Council, the self-regulatory body recommended by the Royal Commission “might well do something useful in that line.”Footnote 75 Yet such complaints were far rarer than the Pictorial's editorial team must have feared. Len England, who carefully monitored the public reaction to the survey, expressed his gratitude that there had “certainly been no outcry of any description”; this was, he noted, “perhaps remarkable in view of the very popular circumstances of its first appearance … and of its lack of the academic background of the Kinsey Report.”Footnote 76 On the contrary, the steadily rising circulation of the Pictorial, combined with the anecdotal evidence collected both by Mass-Observation and by newspaper circulation teams, suggested that there was a significant public appetite for this type of material. The Pictorial's £1,200 gamble had paid off handsomely, and the paper had paved the way for the British press to adopt a bolder approach to its coverage of sex.
The Gorer Report, 1951
Far from meeting Stanley Evan's challenge to “discipline itself” and halt such “pernicious nonsense,” Fleet Street in the years that followed demonstrated an increasing enthusiasm for the sex survey. The People, the Pictorial's closest rival in the Sunday market, was the first to signal its interest in 1950 by commissioning Geoffrey Gorer—a critic of Kinsey—to conduct a survey of English “character” by sending out questionnaires to its readers.Footnote 77 Gorer was close to the celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead, and he adopted many of her insights about culture and personality; as Mandler has noted, his questionnaire was based on “a fairly circumscribed set of neo-Freudian assumptions.”Footnote 78 The investigation was therefore very different in style, and its remit far broader, than Mass-Observation's “Little Kinsey” survey, but attitudes to love, sex, and marriage were a key element, and the paper was evidently seeking to cash in on the interest generated by the earlier reports. Gorer noted afterward: “The editors of the People had very clear ideas of the subjects which would interest their enormous audience.”Footnote 79 Gorer was ultimately persuaded to undertake the project by the resources placed at his disposal: not only was he able to use the paper's substantial research department to process the results, he was given money to conduct field surveys to test the representativeness of the sample.Footnote 80 As with “Little Kinsey,” the financial power of the popular press was used to support research beyond the scope of the usual funding bodies. Gorer received over 10,500 completed questionnaires, of which 5,000 were coded to produce the final results; he was well aware that “even if some learned institution were to consider undertaking parallel research, it would not (in England) have the clerical staff nor the machines to analyse such a volume of responses.”Footnote 81 He analyzed the findings in a series of eight articles that were published in the People in August and September 1951; a fuller discussion was later released in book form in 1955 under the title Exploring English Character.Footnote 82
Despite the differences in the style and technique of the two surveys, the People's publicity for “The Gorer Report on the English” was very similar to that used for “The Private Life of John Bull.” The central theme was the ability of the impartial techniques of social science to reveal “the truth” about the English people. A preview article declared that this was the “first great scientific investigation ever undertaken by a newspaper.” It highlighted the study’s modernity by describing the machinery used in the coding of the responses; the result was “a document whose authenticity cannot be challenged.”Footnote 83 In an attempt to lure curious readers, the initial three installments focused on sex and personal relationships, and the advance publicity was clearly intended to generate associations with the Kinsey and “Little Kinsey” research. When Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the Daily and Sunday Express, saw an advertisement for the series with the headline “Are We an Immoral Nation?” he asked E. J. Robertson, one of the Express Group's directors, “What is wrong with The People? Have they decided to go in for pornography, or have they got a falling sale?”Footnote 84 Robertson replied that the series was a reflection of the People's “very lively fight with the Sunday Pictorial for the position of the Sunday paper with the second largest sale” and was “clearly … an English version of the Kinsey Report.” Having read the first article, however, he believed that it would “disappoint people who bought The People in the hope of getting some salacious reading.” After all, he added, the “answer to the question asked in the advertisement seems to me to be that young people today are not immoral.”Footnote 85
Readers looking for a series like the Pictorial's may indeed have been disappointed. Although the first three articles covered the development of “sex interest” in young people, attitudes toward premarital sex, and levels of sexual satisfaction within marriage, the writing was noticeably less explicit and there was little about actual sexual behavior. Gorer's intentions were to illuminate the nature of English character rather than to study sex itself. Gorer had, nevertheless, been restricted by the People's editorial team, who were more cautious about the use of scientific terminology than the Pictorial. To Gorer's regret, a specific enquiry about women's “sexual climax” became a more general one about women's enjoyment of “the physical side of sex” to avoid the possibility of causing “unnecessary offence.”Footnote 86 The People remained sufficiently nervous about this material to insist on the judicious use of euphemisms.
Gorer's central aim was to reestablish the significance of the national differences that had been implicitly questioned by Mass-Observation's research. Gorer shared Mead's view that the English and Americans had distinctive cultures, and he believed his results confirmed that the English were characterized by an unusual repression of aggression and emotion.Footnote 87 Criticizing “censorious elders” who filled newspaper columns with laments about “lax standards,” he declared that he had “impressive evidence that young English men and women have a very high standard of morality.” He found, in particular, a widespread disapproval of sex before marriage, and he noted that two-thirds of men and half of women married the first person in whom they were seriously interested.Footnote 88 He insisted that “this strict code of sexual conduct is maintained in adult life,” even though some two-fifths of the husbands in his sample admitted to “straying” after marriage. He was more impressed by the fact that few men or women placed “glamour” or “sex appeal” high in their list of desirable attributes for partners, and he concluded that the majority of English marriages were “calmly happy, with passion in a very subordinate place.”Footnote 89 Such conclusions were reassuring to the many people committed to the view that the English/British were exceptional in their sexual restraint and that their behavior was certainly not comparable to the Americans.
Yet if Gorer emphasized the resilience of traditional mores, his material did pose some notable challenges to existing practices. He highlighted, in particular, that a lack of sexual knowledge and an inability to communicate sexual needs and desires could have serious repercussions on personal relationships. “Many marriages,” Gorer argued, “are wrecked from the start simply because the bridegroom is woefully ignorant on sex matters.” That, he maintained, was “a serious thought for all social workers”: he contributed, therefore, to the ongoing process in which “ordinary” sexuality was transformed into a “social problem.”Footnote 90 Far too many husbands were ill equipped for what Gorer saw as their duty of initiating their wives into a pleasurable sexual relationship, just as they were failing to ensure the contentment of their partners in other ways. “Very many English wives suffer from boredom, from the monotony and loneliness of their daily lives,” he argued, further noting that “many wives whose sexual life is unsatisfactory regard this as just one more aspect of their husband's selfishness.”Footnote 91 Gorer, like Mass-Observation, thus provided powerful evidence of the need for more sex education if British society was to achieve the marital stability and happy family life that was such a high priority for so many postwar policy makers.
The Second Kinsey Report, 1953
It is not surprising that it was the Sunday, rather than the daily, press that took the lead in commissioning and publicizing the sex survey in Britain. Sunday newspapers were different in tone and content to their daily counterparts and had a long tradition of including more explicit sexual content: the success of the News of the World, in particular, was due to the unrivaled salacity of its court reporting.Footnote 92 A Mass-Observation readership survey published in 1949 found that “Sunday papers tend to be read with a totally different purpose to that of the weekday reader; their development is towards feature and gossip rather than more serious news.”Footnote 93 The Pictorial and the People may not have been able to compete with the News of the World's court coverage, but they could carve out a different niche and demonstrate their more “modern” approach to sex—the moralistic court reports, while still prominent, were a rather tired and dated genre by mid-century—by featuring the findings of social science. It was a significant moment, therefore, when the dailies decided that it was time to follow suit and report on sex surveys themselves. This milestone of acceptance by mainstream culture was definitively achieved on the release of Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Female in August 1953. Newspapers, both daily and Sunday, that had looked askance at the previous volume now scrambled to provide their readers with all the latest revelations; the acres of newsprint devoted to the report provided a useful measure of how far the climate of opinion had shifted since 1948. At last the “K-bomb” exploded in Britain.
Indeed, such were the efforts of Fleet Street to whip up interest in Kinsey's research in advance of the official publication date of 20 August that there can have been few newspaper readers in Britain unaware of the fireworks to come. One disgusted commentator feared that the “publicity drum” had been beaten with such energy that it had left “a high proportion of our adolescents and erotics in a fervour of anticipatory excitement.”Footnote 94 As the day approached, speculation about specific findings intensified: the competition for leaks and informed conjecture was almost as ferocious in Britain as it was in the United States. The Daily Sketch, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Pictorial, the Sunday Dispatch, and the People all produced substantial articles before publication day.Footnote 95 This was the first time that British newspapers had fought for scoops from a sex survey, and they did so with a vigor usually reserved for the secrets of a Hollywood star or the confession of a notorious murderer; one journalist later claimed that he knew of a national paper who would have “happily paid a cool £500” for a prepublication copy.Footnote 96
The lifting of the embargo on 20 August brought a flurry of front-page headlines, feature articles, and editorials across the spectrum of the daily press. Reporters summarized Kinsey's findings, experts were invited to assess them, and columnists considered the morality of the whole exercise. The general tone was one of surprise at the extent of sexual activity that Kinsey had uncovered; the expectation that women had stricter standards of sexual behavior than men made the statistics shocking to many. Particular attention was paid to the high levels of “petting” (practiced by four out of five eighteen-year-olds), premarital sex (nearly half of brides were not virgins), and marital infidelity (more than a quarter of wives admitted affairs).Footnote 97 The popular dailies highlighted Kinsey's evidence about the problems caused by male insensitivities and ignorance. Under the headline “Men Don't Know Women,” the Mirror explained that women were as sexually responsive as men but were often turned off by their partner's poor technique: “Female ‘frigidity’ is a man-made situation. … They [men] go far too quickly and offer a variety of love-making that may mean little to a woman.”Footnote 98 Sexual activity without men was also prominently discussed: “62% had engaged in self-stimulation, 58% to the point of climax,” noted the Daily Herald, while a fifth “had had sexual contacts with other females.”Footnote 99 If lesbianism was still viewed with suspicion, masturbation was increasingly accepted: the Mirror was careful to include Kinsey's reassurance that this practice was neither physically nor morally damaging and that indeed that it could help women “to respond to marriage relations.”Footnote 100 Fresh momentum returned on Sunday as the weeklies provided their own perspectives. No fewer than eight of the main eleven national Sundays featured Kinsey—the News of the World, the Sunday Times, and the Observer stood aloof —and all printed extra copies to meet the expected demand.Footnote 101 The Empire News secured a coup by inviting Marie Stopes to offer her views on the report. This flood of reports served to expose the differences of opinion within the public. There was clearly a great deal of curiosity: a circulation report for the Sunday Express found “considerable public interest” in the articles but concluded that because “the subject was so well catered for” no particular paper gained an advantage.Footnote 102 Others told Mass-Observation of their disgust at this material: “Not very nice reading. Enough said,” remarked a fifty-three-year-old railway platelayer's wife.Footnote 103
It was at this moment that the simmering debate about the differences between British and American behavior bubbled over. Many conservative critics held fast to the conviction that Britain remained a far more moral and restrained nation than America. “Is one of every four wives in the City of Birmingham unfaithful to her husband?” asked “Candidus” in the Sketch, concluding that “the thought is just too fantastic for any reasonable man and woman to believe.”Footnote 104 Mary Brown, writing in the Mirror, suggested that in Britain one unfaithful wife in fifty might still be too high, based on the “thousands of letters” she had read as an agony aunt.Footnote 105 Although rarely stated, it is difficult not to read such statements as a desire to protect a sense of British moral exceptionalism at a time when the United States's geopolitical and economic superiority over Britain was increasingly clear; the intensity of these debates suggest that this remained an important component of British identity for many. Medical professionals, though, were often less convinced about such national disparities. The “Herald Doctor,” for example, accepted that Kinsey's results probably applied “to many other women in many other countries.” He certainly agreed that the overall trend was that “younger women have a more complete, more enjoyable, less inhibited sexual life today than their mothers ever knew.”Footnote 106 In this alternative reading, claims of British distinctiveness were based on the kind of unsubstantiated generalization that modern social science was trying to sweep away.
The desire to obtain further evidence to settle the controversy about “national character” prompted some journalists to make enquiries of their own. The Mirror reporter Eric Wainwright, for example, interviewed twelve youth leaders, visited ten youth clubs, and “talked to scores of teen-agers”: he found plenty of evidence that petting was indeed as widespread as Kinsey suggested, although he noted that pregnancy was “a rare occurrence” in these circles.Footnote 107 More ambitiously, the People sent a questionnaire to a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 women that addressed many of the issues raised by Kinsey. Although the methodological differences between the surveys made direct comparisons difficult, the People confidently asserted that its results indicated that British women were “much more moral, more conventional and more faithful to the marriage bond than the American women of the Kinsey Report.” Whereas more than a quarter of Kinsey's respondents admitted infidelity, for example, only one in nine of the People's sample did so. At the same time, the People's survey did find evidence that “the sexual urge of women is greater than is commonly supposed, that it is strongest among mature women and is not entirely satisfied inside the marriage convention.” Many women expressed discontent with their sexual relationships, with the average respondent satisfied by intercourse less than half the time—compared with three times out of four for American women—and four in ten remaining faithful “not because of conviction but because of ‘the lack of opportunity’ and ‘the fear of discovery.’”Footnote 108 If the People gave succor to the defenders of British morality, its survey also raised awkward questions—just as Gorer's had done—about the realities of British sexual culture. If levels of fidelity remained higher in Britain, this did not necessarily reflect widespread fulfillment among married women, and it seemed that the quality of married sexual relationships was inferior to those in the United States. It was difficult to be too self-congratulatory on the basis of such results.
The press coverage of the report also prompted a heated and long-lasting controversy about the limits of acceptable public discussion of sex. The main left-of-center daily newspapers all employed democratic and educationalist rhetoric to justify their reports, declaring that the public not only had the right to know about the report but also that it would benefit from learning more about sex. The prominent Methodist minister and theologian Leslie Weatherhead, writing in the liberal News Chronicle, argued that by improving public understanding of sex, the report would increase marital happiness and lessen delinquency. “The place where evil most flourishes,” he contended, “is in the shadows of ignorance, half-knowledge, false values and distortion.”Footnote 109 The Labour party–supporting Daily Herald agreed that “lack of information about sex has caused immense mischief and misery” and concluded that “Dr Kinsey's work brings into the open facts which ought to be known and frankly discussed.”Footnote 110 And although it gave space to critical voices, a Mirror editorial outlined the paper's conviction that Kinsey had produced a “serious and important book” and that the public was “entitled to know what he says and discuss what they think about it.” Opponents of the report, the paper declared, were living in the past: “We thought the stuffy Victorian attitude that sex mustn't be mentioned was dead by now. It should be dead.”Footnote 111 All three papers emphasized the respectability of Kinsey's project by associating it with the prestige of science and modernity: forward-looking papers, they implied, had a duty to report its contents. But this was also about countering outdated paternalistic attitudes that sought to shield potentially “irresponsible” people—women, the young, the working classes—from sexual knowledge. Being informed about sex, they contended, was an essential component of modern citizenship. “We do not treat the public as babies,” argued the Mirror. “We do not want to censor their information.”Footnote 112
Several notable Fleet Street titles suggested nonetheless that such rhetoric was merely a self-serving attempt to justify the exploitation of Kinsey's research for commercial gain. The Times, still the most influential paper in elite circles, made no mention of Kinsey's research at all until the end of August, when it reported an attack on the use the press had made of it.Footnote 113 The Manchester Guardian, an important liberal voice, restricted its initial coverage to a single editorial and shared its doubts that the “sensational treatment” provided by “newspaper scientists” had any educational value. “The flaming advertisement of moral laxity is as likely to produce more laxity as to check it,” the paper warned, although it admitted that such sentiments might be “old-fashioned” and “behind our scientific times.”Footnote 114 A more positive, albeit brief, review of the report did not appear until December.Footnote 115 But perhaps the most significant paper to stand aloof was the Daily Express, the second most popular British daily paper, with a circulation of around 4 million copies per day. It produced an editorial on 20 August explaining that it did not intend to publish “a word” on the “preposterous” findings. The paper ridiculed Kinsey's scientific claims, arguing that the survey's respondents fell into three categories: “They were exhibitionists. Or they were just boasting. Or they were pulling the doctor's leg.”Footnote 116 The Express had spent several years cultivating a reputation for being a “clean, wholesome newspaper, of a standard that would bring neither shame nor moral anxiety into any decent home”—during the war it had been unwilling to accept Ministry of Health advertisements warning of the dangers of venereal diseases—and its editorial team believed that almost any coverage of sexual issues was “sensationalism” designed to appeal to the base instincts of the reading public.Footnote 117 In the days prior to the release of the report, the directors of the Express Group recorded with evident disgust the coverage it was receiving from the Express's rivals. The Sketch's preview series was described as further evidence of that paper's continued “downward editorial appeal”; after the People's revelations the following Sunday, meanwhile, E. J. Robertson declared his “feeling that our papers should give the minimum amount of space to the book when it is published on Thursday.”Footnote 118 The Express's determination to keep some sections of the public realm from explicit sexual content was part of a wider defense of a version of British identity that prioritized traditional virtues of “decency” and restraint alongside a commitment to empire.Footnote 119
Yet, for John Gordon, the veteran Scottish journalist who had recently stepped down as the Sunday Express's editor and who was now its leading columnist, silence was not sufficient. So while its rivals summarized Kinsey's research, the Sunday Express's main feature page was dominated by a vehement article from Gordon headlined “Our Sex-Sodden Newspapers—It is Time to Speak Out against this Degradation.”Footnote 120 Gordon believed the reporting of the Kinsey survey marked a dangerous new phase in the British press's coverage of sex and that certain papers had indulged in “a sexual orgy beyond all their previous exhibitions.” As a relatively expensive book, he argued, the report carried little moral danger, but “spread across the pages of newspapers with its salacities highlighted, it is deliberate, calculated pornography.” By the “skilful handling of type, headlines and layout,” furthermore, Gordon claimed the press gave “salacity an emphasis and a glamour which may well convince young and impressionable minds that morality is old fashioned and immorality the right thing in this new age.” He concluded that “a considerable section of our Sunday Press, and a smaller section of our daily Press, has become a menace of some considerable gravity to the moral standards of the nation.” He called on all responsible citizens to take a stand by putting “direct personal pressure” on the “owners, shareholders, editors, and managers” who were “making a rich harvest out of brothel journalism.”Footnote 121 Proud of the success he had overseen at the Sunday Express with a distinctive brand of “wholesome” journalism, Gordon's diatribe reflected the anxiety among the paper's editorial team that the increasing prevalence of sexual content in the press would ultimately render such an approach unsustainable. These concerns were part of a broader sets of fears about the moral corruption of the nation: two months later Gordon would call upon the nation to “sanitise itself” from the “plague” of homosexuality.Footnote 122
Gordon's article, Robertson told Beaverbrook, “produced the biggest response from readers for many years,” with the paper receiving a total of 575 letters commenting on the column (and all but two, according to Gordon, were supportive).Footnote 123 Rarely were Fleet Street's divisions so publicly exposed, or its policies so forcefully questioned, by such a senior figure: as well as editing the Sunday Express for over twenty years, Gordon had recently served as the president of the Institute of Journalists, and his words carried considerable weight among journalists and politicians.Footnote 124 Accordingly, the trade paper World's Press News judged this “vigorous verbal assault” to be the most serious attack on Fleet Street since Aneurin Bevan's notorious claim that Britain had the “most prostituted press in the world.”Footnote 125
Gordon's article heralded weeks of public debate about the standards of the British press. Sir Patrick Hannon, honorary treasurer of the Public Morality Council, and Christopher Hollis, Conservative MP for Devizes, both wrote in to support the Sunday Express's campaign.Footnote 126 At the end of August, Reverend Joseph Christie complained in a sermon delivered in Westminster Cathedral—and pointedly reprinted in The Times—that the press, driven by the “profit motive,” had transformed a scientific inquiry into “cheap pornography.” He castigated those proprietors who were “prepared to invade the sanctuary of young souls and encourage them to viciousness.”Footnote 127 Christie's sermon was then publicly applauded in The Times by Launcelot Portsmouth, chairman of the Church of England Youth Council.Footnote 128 A number of religious bodies and citizens' organizations, including the British Council of Churches, the Free Church Federal Council, the Mothers' Union, and the National Women Citizens Association, sent complaints to the Press Council, the newly established body to maintain press standards. Discussing the matter in its second ever meeting, the council concluded that it was necessary to respond to the public unease and issue a warning to Fleet Street. While “defending the right of the Press in the contemporary world to deal in an adult manner with matters of sex,” the council declared that it was “deeply concerned by the unwholesome exploitation of sex by certain newspapers and periodicals.” It recorded its view that “such treatment is calculated to injure public morals especially because newspapers and periodicals are seen and read by young persons.”Footnote 129 The council was chaired by Colonel the Hon. J. J. Astor, the proprietor of The Times, and this statement was essentially a signal of the council's intention to speak out against excessive sensationalism in the popular press.Footnote 130 The statement was welcomed by many of the press's critics, although several urged the public not to rely purely on the self-regulatory system to solve the problem. The bishop of Exeter, for example, applauded the council's intervention and accepted the need to avoid “external control, censorship or regimentation,” but he still maintained that it was the “duty of every Christian to refuse to buy papers of which he knows his moral principles force him to disapprove.” The trouble was, he admitted, “many of us church-people also enjoy the titillations which these newspapers supply and persuade ourselves that we do no harm in reading them.”Footnote 131
This public curiosity was the press's ultimate weapon. Whether they sought titillation, as the bishop assumed, or information, as the papers claimed, or both, there was plenty of evidence that millions of people were interested in reading about patterns of sexual behavior. And while this public appetite remained, editors and proprietors were content to ignore the brickbats that were hurled in their direction. Although the Press Council had been established to safeguard press standards, it lacked any punitive sanctions with which to enforce its rulings, and it was soon clear that it was unable to change the fiercely competitive and circulation-driven culture of Fleet Street. Its statement on the Kinsey coverage was, in any case, imprecise and confused, and it offered little genuine guidance for the future. The council did not identify when and in what ways the discussion of a serious piece of sex research had drifted into “exploitation.” The council merely highlighted the ambiguity of the popular press's position by imploring it to write in an “adult manner” while still remaining conscious of its younger audience. Unwilling and unable to force newspapers to address this ambiguity, the Press Council watched powerlessly as the press moved on to a new era of more explicit discussion of sexual issues. For the first time, “normal” sexuality had been placed firmly on the press's agenda, and the findings of social science were warmly embraced. It was no surprise at all when the next major British sex survey, Eustace Chesser's investigation of The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the Englishwoman, was serialized by the Sunday Pictorial over seven weeks in early 1956.Footnote 132 Sex surveys had become “news” as surely as a Hollywood divorce or the latest football results.
Conclusion
It is not difficult to understand why historians have tended to view the 1950s as a conservative decade characterized by a cautious and evasive public discourse about sex—in the words of Callum Brown, a “deeply old-fashioned era.”Footnote 133 The censorship regime remained strict for films, plays, radio, and television broadcasting. Prosecutions of “obscene” books were at a considerably higher level in the mid-1950s than twenty years previously, and even prestigious publishers such as Secker & Warburg, Heinemann, and Hutchinson were not immune.Footnote 134 Donald McGill was successfully prosecuted for his saucy seaside cartoons, and new legislation was passed to control the threat of comics.Footnote 135 As Marcus Collins has observed, the church, the government, and the censors “ceded little ground to permissiveness” in the 1950s.Footnote 136 Yet within the confines imposed by these institutions, significant changes could still occur. Fleet Street's ability to enshrine the value of the “freedom of the press” had ensured that it had avoided statutory regulation, and the weakness of the self-regulation imposed by the newly formed Press Council was immediately exposed.Footnote 137 During the 1950s, popular newspapers were therefore able to shake off many of the self-imposed constraints that had restricted their journalism: they pushed back the boundaries of acceptable discussion and found new ways of writing about sex. Old patterns of euphemism and evasion did not disappear entirely, of course, but coverage of sexual issues became significantly more direct and explicit, and journalists became far more accustomed to using the languages of sexology, social science, and psychology. In particular, the interest in the sex survey ensured that the everyday sexual attitudes and behavior of the general public were placed under scrutiny as never before. The frantic competition in Fleet Street to reveal the secrets of Kinsey's research in 1953 demonstrated very clearly that sex had become a “central part of mass, popular culture” well before the 1960s.Footnote 138 The confidence gained in reporting the Kinsey research fed through very quickly into greater boldness in other areas: in the more aggressive coverage of homosexuality, as discussed by Patrick Higgins, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters;Footnote 139 in the greater publicity accorded to contraception and family planning services from the mid-1950s; in the growing debate over the abortion laws; in the flowering of the pinup culture; and in the intensification of the search for stories about the private lives of celebrities.Footnote 140 The press, in short, both altered the style and expanded the range of its coverage of sex, and in so doing it prepared the way for many of the wider discursive shifts of the 1960s. These changes need to be added to narratives of “permissiveness” that are currently preoccupied with fiction, drama, film, and broadcasting.
At a time when other media forms in Britain remained wedded to narrowly defined notions of decency and propriety, the popular press, led initially by leading Sunday titles such as the Pictorial and the People, grasped the importance of the early sex surveys and propelled them into public consciousness by funding, publicizing, and debating them. Despite the accusations of sensationalism and irresponsibility, much of this reporting was serious and thoughtful, and it provided considerable amounts of information to readers hungry to learn more about sex. They unsettled complacent notions of British restraint and posed challenging questions about traditional sexual regimes. Many of the surveys may have been designed around models of male heterosexuality, but women's dissatisfactions and disappointments were frequently highlighted, as was the ubiquity of sexual outlets outside marriage; the impatience with sexual ignorance and the strong demand for better sex education was an equally powerful theme. Different people reacted in different ways to this material, of course, but perhaps its main impact was to encourage a greater self-reflexivity about sex. Individuals were invited as never before to think about the quality of their own sexual experience, to compare themselves to others, and to learn how to “improve” their relationships. These press debates may have encouraged women in particular to take greater control of their sexuality: Kate Fisher has suggested that the “more frequent and open public discussion of sexual ethics and practices” in the 1950s and 1960s helped to undermine the entrenched sexual culture in which women were reluctant to demand sexual pleasure or be responsible for managing their fertility.Footnote 141 Over time, after a wave of further research and a wider sexualization of society, sex surveys lost their novelty and radical edge; arguably, the constant repetition of statistics about sexual activity, accompanied by advice about seeking fulfillment and improving technique, encouraged anxiety about whether or not one was meeting rising standards of pleasure and performance.Footnote 142 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, though, they provided a rare opportunity for ordinary people to satisfy their curiosity about the sexual attitudes and behavior of others like themselves. It is little wonder that, for one man at least, this was more important than “atom bombs, economic crises, strikes, and droughts.”
