Sex and Sin.

Those of us who are Christians will agree that all our troubles began with the fall, or original sin. For reasons that we have no time to discuss our Victorian grout-grandparents got horribly mixed up between sex and sin until the two became practically synonymous. And so there came about a social system in which sex became tabu and children were imported from stork-land. The human body became an object not to be gazed upon, and beauty something not to be sought after, not merely physical beauty, but all beauty, in art architecture and the daily objects of living. Repression was considered virtuous and just as female bodies were strangled with whale-bone, so male and female emotions were strangled by the demands of society. The founders of modern psychology, at the beginning of this century, and writers of European fiction who began to understand them, made known the disastrous effects of Victorianism. However in that puritanical attitude of one hundred (and less) years ago there was much that we must admire, strength, self-discipline, hard work and courage . . . the qualities that our pioneers brought to these shores and with which they built the nation we live in. Their virtues they put to good use; even the faults of their age they, turned to good ends by establishing a stable and economically sound society. That society we have inherited its virtues and its faults. However, in the process of inheritance we have largely lost the virtues. For the faults the pioneers ore hardly to blame. Their Victorian background stood them in good stead in creating a society necessarily based on utility. They had no understanding of aesthetic ideals nor would they have had time to cultivate them. They built houses to live in not avenues of villas to stroll through in the moon-light, utility structures to worship in, not cathedrals to glorify God in the beauty of holiness. Their morals stood them in good stend they had little time to entertain their feelings.

" . . . . . not to be gazed upon . . . . ."

However no society can remain a pioneer society. Nor did ours. Yet the standards of a pioneering community were the only ones we had to fall back upon. Europeans have been able to build on Victorianism by going back to a history" rich in culture-patterns and "Weltan-schauungen" (ways of life). Even their success in recreating harmonious social living is very dubious, and in the light of that, our failure is hardly surprising. As a community we have practically no aesthetic standards or artistic feeling. Our rows of wooden box-houses or brick (government) doll-houses stand as ample testimony. Our ghastly monotonous drawing rooms are rivaled only by our stolid social conformity to what our neighbour does. Our barbarous attitude to alcohol is rivaled by only one thing . . our attitude to sex. All this constitutes our Victorian hangover.