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The Misfits: a study of Sexual Outsiders
by COLIN WILSON
(grafton books)
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This books attempts to
trace the development of pornography from De Sade down to the Victorians and
Edwardians. It also provides a theory of sexual perversion, claiming that the
19th century was the great age of "sex in the head", when
transference of the act to fetishistic objects - whips, underwear and other
accessories - really took hold. While it is true that the 19th century was the
age of growing self-consciousness in these matters, one cannot really draw
strong conclusions about the sexuality of earlier periods like the Middle Ages,
when it might have assumed the warped forms of ducking stools, stocks and
whipping posts. It is obvious that modern man is capable of extending and
diffusing his sexual nature over an increasing diversity of objects. J.G.
Ballard, in his appalling but inspired novel CRASH, blended sexuality with car
accidents.
Wilson links modern
sexuality with the Romantic Movement in literature and music. He provides
potted biographies of the great perverts of yore, including Byron, Swinburne,
the aimable necrophile Sergeant Bertrand and the detestable Walter, author of
MY SECRET LIFE. The shy, self-torturing Nikolai Gogol would be horrified to
find himself sharing the same pages with these monsters, but Wilson's books
usually err on the side of epic inclusiveness. He has performed a useful task
in providing brief summaries of such salubrious epics as JUSTINE and MY SECRET
LIFE - works capable of daunting and exhausting even the most putrid
sensibilities.
What I found most
disturbing about this book was the way in which the famous and distinguished
are constantly being dragged down by their sexual quirks. One wants to believe
that there are people somewhere who will not betray their principles the moment
their erotic nerves are triggered. But this book is full of evidence to the
contrary. The socialist theologian Paul Tillich is exposed as a seducer, liar
and reader of pornography; once more we are treated to the pathetic ruses
resorted to by T.E. Lawrence in order that he should receive his regular quota
of thrashings from a naive young Scot called John Bruce.
The comic figure in the
book is Charlotte Bach, a deep-chested woman of Hungarian extraction who won
Wilson over with the boldness of her sexual theory, postulating that each man
wants to become a woman and each woman wants to become a man. The aquatic world
comes into play at this point - ten-spined sticklebacks helping to prove that
the driving force of evolution is the unrealised sexual potential of man-woman.
Unfortunately, it seems that Bach was merely spelling large her own trauma.
When she died, she was found to be a man with foam-rubber breasts. Not that
such evidence should totally negate the value of her theory. But sex,
particularly when it is frustrated, has a tendency to distort out of all
proportion as this grand anthology of misfits demonstrates.