The Vice of Kings. Jasun Horsley
to the sexual exploitation of children for profit, Califia writes: “Closing down this industry without providing alternative employment is equivalent to sentencing young people to frustration, abuse, or suicide in cozy little suburban ranch-style prisons” (2003).
Califia was somewhat ahead of his/her time with such arguments; or perhaps, considering that they formed a central part of the Cornell University course in the 1970s, s/he was instrumental (like my brother) in normalizing prostitution, child or otherwise. In March 2015, The Daily Telegraph ran a piece about how British university students are now making extra money in the sex industry. The piece reads more like an advertisement:
Researchers surveyed 6,750 students, of whom 5 per cent said they'd worked in the sex industry. Almost a quarter admitted they had considered it. The reasons they gave were to fund their lifestyle, pay basic living costs, reduce debt at the end of university, sexual pleasure and curiosity. One in 20 sounds like a lot, hence a general shock at the findings. But frankly, given the relative ease of sex work—and the fact that it's so lucrative—I'm surprised more undergrads aren't giving it a go…. There are, of course, less than pleasurable elements of sex work. But aren't there in every job?…Student sex workers aren't victims; they're making a choice. And after all: they're running a business; handling the accounts, branding, marketing and sales. How many other undergraduates can claim that? (Reid, 2015)
In Germany, prostitution has been legal since 2002, and there has been a recurring debate ever since over whether the government can legally oblige women receiving unemployment benefit to become “sex workers” (Chapman, 2005). So much for freedom of choice.
My brother did his own stint as a sex worker, and in Dandy in the Underworld he called prostitutes “the most open and honest creatures on God's earth.” “The whore fuck,” he wrote, “is the purest fuck of them all” (S. Horsley, 2007, pp. 197, 199). I am sure he would have applauded the Telegraph's view of sexual self-exploitation as social liberation, though he might have been disturbed and disappointed to discover how fashionable his supposedly subversive views had become.
CHAPTER IV
Progressive politics and witchcraft: Brazier's Park, order of Woodcraft, Common Wealth
“Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”
—George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
It would be nice if, somehow, I could lay all of this information out as a straightforward, linear narrative; but that would be a little like hoping to put a leash on an octopus. If the connections I am attempting to map were simple, straightforward, and linear, they would already be obvious for all to see. Octopi do not come to heel when called. Of course, there is a danger that, since I am selecting the material in order to show how it is all interconnected, I will create a picture that exists only in my own mind due to my perceptual bias. The only remedy I know of for this is to resist the temptation to emphasize the connections, and focus primarily on the facts that appear to be connected.
I have briefly mentioned Common Wealth, the organization set up by my grandfather's friends, Sir Richard Acland and J. B. Priestley, to which Alec Horsley belonged. Another member was Norman Glaister, a Fabian. In 1950, Glaister set up something called Braziers Park, a country house in Oxfordshire, England, owned and operated by a charitable trust as a residential adult education college, and center for the School of Integrative Social Research. The following is from its website.
Norman Glaister was a medical student during the period when Wilfred Trotter was Professor of Surgery at University College Hospital, although he was unaware of Trotter's interest in sociology. However, when Glaister was serving as a Captain in the RAMC [Royal Army Medical Corps] in Palestine and heard that his wife (neé Irene Sowerbutts) had died in the flu epidemic of 1918, he felt that he could only face the future if he could find some meaningful research and activity that would improve the human condition. The chance finding of Trotter's The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War gave him his inspiration. Back in England, he studied psychiatry, worked for the Ministry of Pensions, the Tavistock Clinic and the Royal Free Hospital.1 He built up his own practice. Glaister became interested in the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, a pacifist, camping movement that encouraged children and adults to work together learning woodcraft skills and fostering new educational ideas coming from the study of evolution and psychology. He took his three young children to the annual camp in 1924. (Braziers Park, 2017)
Glaister had initially wanted to open a school where “the adults in charge…would offer the children experiences which would enable them to make positive and balanced choices at the time, and in later life.” When this plan was frustrated, “Glaister settled for general practice and psychological work for the Clinic” (Braziers Park, 2016; presumably the clinic is Tavistock). It was not until 1950 that Glaister set up the School of Integrative Social Research, the same year Braziers Park was established. The School is partly a commune; its aim was and is “to explore the dynamics of people living in groups” (Catalyst, 2008).
Glaister was inspired by Trotter, who was known as “the biological father of British psychoanalysis” (Torres, 2003, p. 104). It was under Trotter that another Wilfred, Wilfred Bion (who graduated from Oxford in 1922) worked in his own medical training, before going on to study group psychology and train as a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Institute. In her account of his life “The Days of Our Years,” Bion's wife writes that Trotter greatly influenced the direction of Bion's work on group relations. Edward Bernays, the now-notorious (thanks to Adam Curtis's documentary, Century of the Self) social engineer, author of Propaganda, and nephew to Freud, also cites Trotter in his writings.
One of Trotter's primary ideas, besides that of the herd instinct (which Freud rejected), was that of two types of human being, the “resistive” type (making up the majority) and the “unstable” type (the minority who bring about, or at least are open to, change). Glaister later replaced “unstable” with “sensitive,” and later still, “sensory.” This basic psychological premise of a dichotomy within the human species was adopted by The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, founded in 1916 by Ernest Westlake, which included a “Sensory Advisory Committee.” Glaister joined the Order—described by Derek Edgell (1992) as “a New Age Alternative to the Boy Scouts”—in 1924, and there met Dorothy Revel, who became his second wife.
The Order is said to have provided the basis for the New Forest coven, and through that the Neopagan religion of Wicca. Westlake was a naturalist, anthropologist, and traveler of Quaker upbringing, who moved away from Quakerism to extol the “old gods” of paganism. Inspired by authors such as Edward Carpenter, Nietzsche, Havelock Ellis, and J. G. Frazer, he created the Order as a means to escape “the cul-de-sac of intellectualized religion” and “revive the greater Hellas of modern civilization” (Hutton, 2001, p. 165). He saw women as incarnations of God, to be “worshipped in spirit and in truth,” revered the Jack-in-the-Green as the English equivalent of Dionysus, and proposed a “Trinity of Woodcraft” consisting of Pan, Artemis, and Dionysus (ibid.). After Westlake's death in a motoring accident in 1922, the role of British chief of the Order fell to Harry Byngham, who subsequently changed his name to Dion, short for Dionysus. Byngham promoted phallic worship as a means of venerating the life force. He introduced an Order periodical called The Pinecone, which included nudity (rare at that time) and published work by Victor Benjamin Neuburg. It was Neuburg who introduced Byngham to the ideas of Aleister Crowley, under whom Neuburg discipled (he was also his lover, or abuse-victim, depending on how you read it). The Order was primarily aimed at children and, by its pacifist stance, particularly appealed to Quaker families as an alternative to Scouting (ibid., p. 167). Even more directly linked to the Order than Crowley was Gerald Gardner, the leading figure in the Wiccan revival of twentieth century Britain.2
If