the one is something too shocking to talk about, the other too boring to discuss. Yet even when you know the name it is difficult to discover whether UNO exists. It may have been abolished as a distraction from the war effort by a government committed to the socialisation of the means of reproduction, distribution and exchange.
Where America goes topless, New Zealand has pioneered topdressing. The porn laws protect New Zealanders against the imminent threat of invasion from Denmark. No electrodeloaded volunteers devote themselves to a labour of love in the back seat of a mock-up car in some Auckland University laboratory and Patterns of Sexuality in a Northland Town by those well known social eroticians and bicycle menders Fischbein and Roganblatt remains unwritten. In Britain, women’s magazines devote themselves to the sexual problems of their readers: the formula for a successful newspaper’s women’s page is ritual doses of abortion, illegitimacy, divorce and the pill. New Zealand counterparts tackle more fundamental problems: ‘What to do about my winter sweet shrub which is making no growth, while the leaves have become brown, P.F. Auckland’. The Havelock you will hear about is North not Ellis and it is not necessary to get New Zealand Wildlife under plain cover.
Compared with Britain, this looks to be a cautiously antiseptic society. Prostitutes are as common as coelacanths and in most places taxi drivers will ask you where they can get a woman. Nary a nipple will confront you from the newspapers. Two-thirds of the population has fluoride in its water (the rest oppose it nail if not tooth) and you may well conclude that fluoridation eliminated nipples with dental caries. The idea of key parties where wives are swapped by the throwing in of car keys is unthinkable in a society more likely to throw in wives and swap precious cars.
Then you will begin to notice symptoms of UNO. In pub and rugby club, beer inflates the imagination, if not the libido. Men are men and women grateful for it—often. The Homeric narrators become the Edmund Hillarys of sexology; life a kind of sexual Outward Bound course. No scientific accuracy exists because Kelburn harbours no Kinsey defining norms for Ngaio or frequencies for Feilding. Yet feats are recounted in action replays, feats which would have tested the stamina of a sex-crazed superman, raised on vitamin E in Nero’s Rome. The narrators may exaggerate slightly in their surveys of the performing arts, but at least they think about sex.
Then you notice another symptom: the titivation industry. Much of this is imported. They don’t assemble pornography locally under licentiousness and the Feltex version of The Carpetbaggers has yet to be filmed, so the pornshop is not the grossest part of the G.N.P. as in Scandinavia. Nevertheless, the sex substitutes are there. Look at the movie billings. One newspaper described Irma La Douce as ‘a story of passion, bloodshed, desire and death—in fact everything that makes life worth living’. Others follow on similar lines. ‘Insatiably, music drove her onward’—The Sound of Music. ‘Shocking things, things that astonished the world, happened in this car’—Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang. Truth titivates. Its billboards are usually more exciting than the actual newspaper, but its headlines also excite. ‘Bedding-out in the North Island’—gardening column. ‘The Master and the Forty Boys’—overcrowding in primary schools. Here is a nation sublimating.
Stage three of the process of adjustment is the assumption that beneath the surface New Zealand throbs with a sexual activity from which you alone are excluded. You see few outward symptoms simply because sex is the most asexual activity. Everyone is sexually content, possibly exhausted. The prostitute has vanished because no one needs her. You alone are not getting your share and you begin to feel like the psychiatrist who wanted to be a sex maniac but failed the practicals.
Understanding comes as a compromise between these extreme views of bromideland or wall to wall sex. As in everything else, they conform to a norm: a quarter-acre, one-car, three-children, two-orgasm family. UNO exists. Unfortunately it can’t be talked about. This is partly because of their puritan legacy which makes it easier to get sex than actually discuss it. The small town environment, when Big Neighbour tenderly watches over them every step every yard of the way, also makes frankness difficult. Note that in Britain, adverts for feminine deodorants are quite explicit on where and why they are to be applied. Counterpart adverts in New Zealand could be for catarrh.
UNO involves relationships between people, deep feelings and emotions, things the New Zealander has been conditioned to avoid and repress. It brings up basic problems of the relationship between the sexes, that fault line in the New Zealand society. In America the social battleground is the streets—in New Zealand it is the bedroom. Here the role conflicts and tensions which characterise this society are put to the basic test. The battle goes on in an atmosphere of sullen incomprehension. They don’t know what it’s all about.
Hence the embarrassed silence: the altar of hymen has to be discreetly draped in candlewick. Children have to be left to find out for themselves which, being good Kiwi pragmatists, they promptly do. This is perfectly acceptable. UNO itself isn’t objected to—just indications that it goes on. A deaf ear is turned to anything that goes bump in the night, but one mistake brings the shotguns out and makes the erring youngsters sooner wed than dead.
If anything becomes public, the government will appoint a Royal Commission or the Railways Department will inquire into the Bluff-Invercargill train. This is the morality of ‘thou shalt not be known to’ rather than ‘thou shalt not’. Negative all this may be, but it’s vigorous. Since it can’t stop intercourse, it will stamp out contraception. It can’t check conception, so it will prohibit abortion. Critics who attack such acts as making bed situations worse, completely mistake the importance of morality, which isn’t really about other people but about salving our own consciences. The job of the moralist is really to push the inconsiderate tip of the iceberg (the point at issue) back under the water.
Formal instruction is ruled out, by their religious belief in the trinity of monkeys, so the great amateur tradition takes over. After a collective initiation in the group gropes, which pass for teenage parties, the explorers are off on their own (‘together we found out’). Their endeavours are confined to cars, fields and livingroom floors, so as to reinforce the inbuilt feeling that sex is dirty and beastly, and to preserve the feeling that marriage and clean sheets are a desirable goal. New Zealanders are among the highest users of the pill in the world (indeed thanks to it there will be over a quarter of a million fewer New Zealanders by 1990 than there would otherwise have been). Yet it is officially denied to the unmarried, which explains why the number of babies born in the first seven months after marriage now runs at around a third of nuptial first births and why the illegitimacy rate is second only to Sweden and has been rising more rapidly than practically any country, even without encouragement from the Monetary and Economic Council. Progressive churchmen have long been considering changing the marriage service to read, ‘I did’. Small wonder that in 1969 the government ‘authorised further research into the causes of the increase in extramarital intercourse’, a study which would have been as enjoyable as it was pointless.
So there’s your final picture. New Zealand is a society in which sex undoubtedly exists—in fact it’s almost as common as rugby and can produce just as many injuries. Yet like rugby, it has to be restricted to amateurs. There is no pulsating promiscuity, just a rather sad amateur experimentation, a low standard of loving. In a drugged sleep, William James once thought he had stumbled on the key to the human dilemma. Hastily he wrote it down. He awoke next morning to read the legend, ‘Higamus hogamus, woman is monogamous. Hogamus, higamus, man is polygamous’. His disappointment was not at the triteness of the message but because it did not really apply to New Zealand. Big Neighbour behind the Venetian blinds does not allow the male Kiwi to be anything more than monogamous. His fierce female mate is determined to be nothing else. The unmarried experimenters enjoy a monogamy before marriage that’s almost as glum as the monogamy after marriage; by the time they are married