Made In America - Bill Bryson [203]
The difficulty of course is that acceptable behaviour, not just in sex but in all things, is a constantly changing concept. Just consider the matter of beards. In 1840, Americans had been beardless for so long – about two hundred years – that when an eccentric character in Framingham, Massachusetts, grew a beard he was attacked by a crowd and dragged off to jail. Yet by the mid-1850s, just a decade and a half later, there was scarcely a beardless man in America. From 1860 to 1897, every American President was bearded. Or consider hemlines. In 1921, when hemlines began to climb to mid-calf, Utah considered imprisoning – not fining, but imprisoning – women who wore skirts more than three inches above the ankle. Virginia, shocked at the other extreme, introduced a bill that would make it a criminal offence to wear a gown that displayed more than three inches of throat. Ohio decided to leave women unmolested, but to go to the heart of the matter and punish any retailer found guilty of selling a garment that ‘unduly displays or accentuates the female figure’.32 Such outrage wasn’t reserved just for female attire. As late as 1935, any male venturing on to the beach of Atlantic City with a bare chest faced arrest for indecency.33
In short, standards of acceptability constantly change. A period of repression is almost always followed by a spell of licence. The ferociously restrictive age of Anthony Comstock, which drew to a close with his death in 1915, was immediately followed by a period of relative abandon. Not only did hemlines climb to shocking heights, but young people, made suddenly mobile by the availability of cars, took to partying until all hours, drinking bath-tub gin, and engaging in heavy sessions of necking and petting – activities that had always existed of course but had only recently acquired such explicit labels. Other newly minted terms of the period – bedroom eyes; playboy; tall, dark and handsome – betray a frankness that could not have been expressed ten years earlier.
Nothing better captured the new spirit of sexual boldness, or the inevitable backlash against it, than the movies. After their cautious start, movies in the period 1915-20 became wildly daring by the standards of the day. Studios cranked out a succession of pictures with provocatively enticing titles like Virgin Paradise, Red Hot Romance, The Fourteenth Lover, Her Purchase Price, Flesh and the Devil and White Hot Stuff.34 One lurid poster promised viewers a motion picture featuring ‘neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure-mad daughters, sensation-craving mothers ... the truth – bold, naked, sensational’.35 Even historical epics got the treatment. Helen of Troy was advertised as ‘an A.D. Mamma in a B.C. town’.36 A very few, like the 1918 movie A Man’s World, did contain brief nudity, and others certainly implied rampant sex, but for the most part the hottest thing was the poster.
In 1921, with Hollywood rocked by scandal – it was the year of the Fatty Arbuckle case and the death in sexually questionable circumstances of a director named William Desmond Taylor – and with thirty-seven states and hundreds of municipalities threatening to come up with a confusion of censorship codes, Hollywood acted. It formed a body known as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., and appointed Will H. Hays, Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding and a former chairman of the Republican Party, as its first head. Hays was a non-smoking, non-drinking Indiana Presbyterian whose pinched face had extreme moral rectitude written all over it. (Though, like many others in the Harding administration, his probity did not extend to financial dealings. He was happy to receive and adroitly launder hundreds of thousands