The Press Saturday, November 26, 1927. Sex in Art.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19168, 26 November 1927, Page 14

The Press Saturday, November 26, 1927. Sex in Art.

When Mr Bernard Shaw says that "movie" exhibitors are obsessed by what they call sex appeal he opens up a vast subject. The first comment that will come to the mind of many is that Mr Shaw, a declared enemy of romantic love, and apparently by temperament unable to understand that impulse, is hardly the best judge of sex appeal. Mr Shaw, however, could reply with considerable force that he himself has shown that other subjects besides love between the sexes are proper themes for the stage. In Saint Joan, for example, which is one of the greatest of modern plays, there is no sex appeal at all. It is one of the achievements of the modem British drama that it has so widened the scope of the theatre that sex occupies relatively a less important place than it did. One dramatist has gone so far as to -write a play—and apparently quite a good play—with no woman in it. Dramatists have realised that though sex is a tremendous fact that moves the world, there are many other things worth writing about—war and peace, hate, ambition, self-sacrifice, meanness and virtue, economic facts and political fallacies. Mr Shaw, however, is hardly at his best in his argument. "Where," he asks, "is the sex appeal about Dean "Inge's sermons? Yet crowds go to "St. Paul's to hear him preach. "Crowds also listen to lectures and "political speeches." So they do; and crowds also go to music-halls to hear Harry Lauder, to football grounds to watch football, and to inns to drink beer. Most of the people who do these things are also very susceptible to the appeal of sex in fiction, on the stage, and on the screen. They go to church, or to games, or to inns, to satisfy other parts of their nature. Men and women enjoy love stories for the most part in a recreative sense. They want to be entertained. Possibly some of them go to hear Dean Inge for mere entertainment, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that most of them have a higher purpose. The appeal of sex in art is powerful because sex is powerful and universal in life; it is something that awakens a response in everybody, something that everybody can understand. It is not everybody that can respond to a discussion in book or play of the sweating evil, or pacifism, or justice. It is t rue __ an d the truth is worth emphasising—that great art can describe or discuss life and yet leave sex out of account or give it a subordinate place. In fiction Bobinson Crusoe and Les Miserables are conspicuous examples. There is hardly any sex, in the ordinary sense of the word, in [Macbeth, or in The Trojan Women, that most poignant of dramas. History may be interesting without sex, a fact which film-makers should note. There is a love interest in Mademoiselle from Armentieres, a British war film recently shown in New Zealand. There is no such interest in Mons, but as a picture of the greatest of wars Mons is the more impressive. Protests against Hollywood's over-emphasis on sex are timely, for this over-emphasis produces a false sense of values and leads to intellectual and moral flabbiness. We have in a certain school of novelists a movement that is afflicted with a similar kind of obsession. Everything in life is made to turn on sex, until—paradoxicallyall the real sex seems to be driven out of life. Both of these states are the falsehood of extremes. Human nature will never be persuaded to ignore sex in art, or even to regard it as less than a subject of primary—if not of unequalled—importance. What the artist should do is to strive after proportion and teach the public to value his ideal.