White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties by Dominic Sandbrook

Author:Dominic Sandbrook [Sandbrook, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349141282
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2015-02-05T08:00:00+00:00

Religion has also given rise to a great deal of unnecessary suffering and misery, wherever it has become over-formalised in its application, and whenever the professional ‘assistants’ of the god figures have been unable to resist the temptation to borrow a little of his power and use it themselves. But despite its chequered history it is a feature of our social life that we cannot do without.

For modern man, ‘experience and understanding’ were the new gods, schools and universities the new religious centres, and ‘libraries, museums, art galleries, theatres, concert halls and sports arenas are our places of communal worship. At home we worship with our books, newspapers, magazines, radios and television sets.’103

The longest chapter of The Naked Ape, and probably the one that most people read first, concerns sex, and Morris here is no less uncompromising. Not only does man have the biggest penis of all the primates but he is ‘the sexiest primate alive’.104 Morris goes on to describe sexual contact in close detail: there are several explicit paragraphs discussing ‘kissing, licking and sucking’ before we get to copulation, all of which no doubt titillated and appalled its readers in equal measure. Sex is natural and healthy; sexual repression is not. We have changed the way we sit, the way we groom ourselves, even the way we smell, to disguise our own sexuality, using commercial deodorant as an ‘anti-sexual’ control to suppress our natural odour. But, says Morris, ‘the naked ape’s evolution as a highly sexed primate can only take so much of this treatment. Its biological nature keeps on rebelling.’ Monogamy is unnatural: ‘the pair-bonding mechanism’ frequently breaks down, and more basic sexual urges inevitably emerge.105 Promiscuity, infidelity and adultery are therefore biologically natural, while pornography is ‘comparatively harmless and may actually help our species’, allowing us to satisfy our sexual curiosity without embarking on relationships that might threaten the pair-bond.106

In an especially provocative passage Morris even explains that homosexuality is comparable with devoting one’s life to God:

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