Maybe it’s because Kinsey had just published his important works a few years earlier. Maybe it’s because Hoggart was ahead of the curve in recognizing that sexuality reflects culture and vice versa. Or maybe it was because he was sexually frustrated. Whatever the reason, sex seems to play a role in Hoggart’s accounts of the working class. Are there such things as lowbrow and highbrow sexualities? Hoggart’s treatment of the working class suggests that maybe there are.
Working-class sexuality is a promiscuous, indiscriminant sexuality. At least, that’s what’s suggested by the colorful working-class speech that Hoggart quotes on the subject of sex. “A slice off a cut cake is never missed,” Hoggart tells us, refers to “the easy sexual habits of some [working-class] married women” (28). “Y’ don’t have to look at the mantelpiece when y’ poke the fire” suggests that “a woman doesn’t need to be pretty to make sexual intercourse with her enjoyable” (28). Obviously promiscuity and indiscrimination when it comes to sex are still to this day associated with “slutty” or “trashy” people, while marital, monogamous sexuality (especially with a patently desirable partner) is upheld as the standard of sexual practice to which we all should aspire. Maybe there are highbrow and lowbrow sexualities.
Working-class sexuality is not a risk-free sexuality: “sin” is always a possible bedfellow. Hoggart explains that working-class people are perpetually concerned with and gossiping about “sin”—and it seems that for “sin” we should read “improper sexual conduct.” Hoggart tells us that “sin” “is any act against the idea of home and family,” but both of his examples have an explicitly sexual dimension: premarital pregnancy and extramarital sex (32). Apparently, then, working-class sex always carries with it the risk of undermining that which, according to Hoggart, is most important to working-class people: home and family. It’s a sexuality that’s desirable but always on the verge of being destructive.
Working-class sexuality is characterized by clearly delineated (and unequal) gender roles. In the domain of working-class sex, men hold all the desire and women hold all the obligation and responsibility. That’s what Hoggart says, though he says it without the outrage that many of might have wanted to read. Sex, we’re told, is the final obligation of the day for the harried working-class mother: “she will cook, mend, scrub, wash, see to the children, shop and satisfy her husband’s desires” (38). In other words, sex is just one of the working-class woman’s chores. Another chore for her is birth control—Hoggart asserts that “the wife is often expected to be responsible for contraceptive practice” (41). Why is it the woman’s job? Because their husbands are too shy or else don’t care: “The husband’s shyness and an assumption that this is really her affair often ensure that he expects her to take care of it, that he ‘can’t be bothered with it’” (41). Hoggart almost seems to be on the side of husbands here, too—did you notice his rude comment that birth control “requires a rigid discipline, a degree of sustained competence many wives are hardly capable of” (41)? Working-class women come across in Hoggart as desire-less, obligated, responsible, yet incompetent.
It might be hard to pin down what makes sexual practices “highbrow” or “lowbrow,” but Hoggart’s discussions of sex suggest that sexual practices do have class dimensions. Is it just a class issue or a taste issue? Does sexual taste have brows, then, just as taste in food or literature does? Should Russel Lynes have included in his pictorial chart images of lowbrow lust and highbrow humping?
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