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Bombshell called Venus
There were people who wanted to douse this conflagration
There has been a lot of fashionable chat recently about the famous phrase in Racine's play Phedre: "Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee", or (more or less ) "Venus completely latched on to her prey". Diana Rigg is playing Phedre in a new production, and somehow this phrase, once known to every child who learnt French the old-fashioned way, has hit the imagination of writers of letters to The Spectator and others. Why is it so famous, people have wondered, and what does it mean? I agree that it is difficult to translate, but I think its meaning and its fame, even when quite out of any context, is only too easy to understand. It is a wonderful expression, and wonderfully condensed, of the tragic compulsion of love or, more precisely, of desire.
Love is not necessarily the sweetest thing; Venus is not necessarily a beautiful and langourous creature attended by a chubby putti. She can be a beast of prey, perhaps a wild animal, perhaps a spider, or even a cancer, intent only on destroying her victims, and indifferent, like any predator, to pain and squalor.
This might seem an unduly glum view, and much more to do with the extremes of classical tragedy than with ordinary life. But I don't think so. I was reminded of this image by watching Channel 4's documentary series Sex Bomb, which is a history of the past four decades of sexual revolution in this country. The final two episodes, on the Eighties and Nineties, will be shown this week. The story it tells is the democratisation of sex; the freedoms and pleasures and bizarre practices that were once only available to the rich or the secretive become openly available to everyone.
Most of what is shown expresses the excitement and the fun and the sense of liberation, which I felt myself through much of the time. But in retrospect I think they are really about something profoundly tragic. The title Sex Bomb itself expresses something of this, of violence and destruction, of explosive change and explosive emotion which must lead, partly, to devastation.
There were people along the way - and I disagreed with almost all of them - who wanted to douse down this general conflagration of desire, seeing something very dangerous in it. Victoria Gillick was one, with her campaign to prevent underage girls getting the pill without their parents' knowledge. I disapproved of her campaign; it seemed to me that since underage girls were having sex anyway, they ought at least to avoid having babies, and there was something very unpleasantly moralistic about her too.
All the same I couldn't help being touched by a scene in the television series in which she wept on ITN news at the failure of her long campaign; her husband put his arm round her and said "Calm down darling. It's not that important. It's only history". That seemed to me a very touching snapshot of a good marriage; insofar as there can be any protection against history, it must be found in a witty and consoling husband or wife, and in that rare thing - married love.
However it was really very important, as he knew. I don't mean the failure of her campaign. What was important was the enormous power of the forces against her, the forces of biological destiny, or of the cynical and amoral Venus.
It seems to me quite understandable that the ancient Greeks should see as a malevolent god or goddess - incidentally, I wonder why she had to be female - a force the drives people to such terrible and ridiculous extremities, which appear again and again in the series.
It led the Conservative MP Stephen Milligan to speak up on Newsnight, rather bleakly, for his Government's family values campaign, only days before he died in an auto-erotic accident involving fish net stockings and a tangerine. It led girls to abandon all sense of self-protection, and have sex with anybody. It led a boy in Aylesbury to have 200 gay lovers, starting in the public lavatories in the market square; "I didn't think there were sexually transmitted diseases in Aylesbury". It led all kinds of ordinary men and women to flock to fetish clubs, dressing up in insane combinations of spikes and chains and rubber, in black masks, cripple boots and nappies. "I could get used to being adored," said one apparently sensible young woman, talking about having her boots licked in an S&M club by a naked man on all fours.
It led people to group sex, and caring massage sessions; a sequence of flabby, overweight people lying about fondling each other was to me one of the most depressing. It led one man, among others, to be buggered by a stranger at a crowded bar, while no one around him seemed to find it odd or unusual, and to talk about it on television as a wonderful liberation.
Almost all the people in this series talked about sexual liberation. Most of them remembered a sense of joy and exuberance in these new freedoms. And that was there. But actually the consequences for many people have been a different kind of imprisonment, in poverty, single parenthood, and terrible disappointment. It is because Venus can be so destructive that civilisation has set so many constraints upon her. Without those constraints she can turn into a monster, and often does. And so far from liberation, there seems to me in retrospect to have been a miserable kind of compulsion underlying the sexual revolution.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 18, 1998
