Watching the English

CLASS RULES

The Class-endogamy Rule

Like every other aspect of our lives, sex among the English is subject to class rules. For a start, there is an unofficial class-endogamy rule, whereby intermarriage between the social classes, although not actually forbidden, tends to be discouraged, and in practice does not occur very often. There are exceptions, of course, and such inter-class marriages are certainly more common than they used to be, but it is still very unusual for people from opposite ends of the social spectrum to marry.

Outside the pages of Barbara Cartland and P. G. Wodehouse, the sons of dukes and earls do not tend to disoblige their families by insisting on marrying humble waitresses. Upper-class males may have sexual adventures or even infatuations with working-class females, but they generally end up marrying girls called Arabella and Lucinda, who grew up in large houses in Gloucestershire, with Labradors and ponies. The Arabellas and Lucindas, in turn, may have the odd rebellious youthful fling with a Kevin or a Dive, but usually 'come to their senses' (as their anxious mothers would put it), and marry someone 'from a similar background'.

Having said that, the two main factors affecting social mobility in England are still education and marriage. These two factors may often be connected, as universities are among the few places where young mate-seekers from different social classes are likely to meet 'as equals'. Even here, the odds are against class-exogamous unions, as studies regularly show that when the English go to university, they have an uncanny knack of making friends almost exclusively with fellow students from identical social backgrounds.

But despite these herd-instincts, people from different classes find themselves thrown together in seminars or tutorials, or through sports or other extra-curricular student activities such as theatre or music. And there are even some students who make a deliberate, determined effort to avoid associating 'just with people from the same sort of families and schools as mine', as one intrepid upper-middle-class girl explained.

The 'Marrying-up' Rule

Working-class intellectual males are often attracted to precisely this type of slightly rebellious upper-middle-class female, and may end up marrying one. Although there are no doubt many exceptions, such marriages tend to be somewhat less successful than those in which the female partner is the one 'marrying up'. This is because an unwritten rule requires the partner who is 'marrying up' to adopt the tastes and manners of the class he or she is marrying into, or at least to make rather more compromises and adjustments than the higher-class partner, and upwardly mobile women tend to be more willing to do this than upwardly mobile men.

When working-class males 'marry up', there is a conflict between snobbery and sexism - between the marrying-up rule and traditional male-dominance rules whereby women are expected to do more adapting and adjusting. Bright working-class men who 'become middle class' by education, and particularly those who jump several classes by marrying upper-middle females they meet at university, can sometimes be a bit truculent and resentful about having to change their habits. They may, for example, persist in referring to their evening meal as 'tea', plant pampas grass and marigolds in the garden, refuse to squash peas onto the back of their fork, and deliberately embarrass their snobbish mother-in-law by saying 'toilet' and 'settee' all the time at her Christmas party. Those upwardly-mobile males who do adapt willingly to their new class tend to have problems with their own parents, whom they may find both resentful and embarrassing. You can't win.

Although again there are exceptions, women who 'marry up' are usually more compliant, and make more of an effort to fit in. If anything, they can sometimes be rather too eager to adopt the accent, vocabulary, tastes, habits and manners of their husband's class, and miss some of the all-important nuances in their anxious enthusiasm. They may wear the right clothes but wrongly combined, use the right words but in the wrong context, or grow the right flowers but in the wrong kind of pot - ending up with a sort of anagram of an upper-middle-class lifestyle. This fools nobody, embarrasses their in-laws, and alienates their parents. Trying too hard can be worse than not trying at all. And it involves committing a serious breach of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule.

Partners do not have to come from opposite ends of the social spectrum for the marrying-up rule to cause tensions and conflicts. English people tend to despise the class immediately below theirs much more than the ones further down the scale. Upper-middles, for example, are often far more snooty and scathing about middle-middle tastes and habits than they are about those of the working classes. The boundary between middle-middle and upper-middle is full of booby-traps, and can be the hardest to cross.

The Working-class Potency Myth

Some upper-middle females are fascinated by working-class males at least partly because of a widely held belief that working-class men are more virile and better lovers than middle- or upper-class men. There is no empirical evidence to justify this belief. Working-class males may start having sex at a slightly earlier age than the higher echelons, but in general they do not have sex more often, nor is there any reason to believe that their partners enjoy it more. The notion that plebeian males are more sexually potent and uninhibited is a myth, perpetuated among the educated middle classes by people like D.H. Lawrence and John Osborne, and elsewhere by the soft-porn industry, where it seems to be an established fact that middle-class females all spend their time having fantasies about hunky working-class firemen, builders or window-cleaners. The working-class potency myth has recently been given a further boost by the rise of the 'Lad' and 'Lad culture' - which celebrates traditional, and essentially working-class, masculine values and interests (football, cars, tits, beer, etc.).

The persistence of this myth is, I think, mainly based on the mistaken assumption that the crass-and-boorish approach to flirtation, which is seen as more characteristic of lower-class males, is somehow indicative of greater sexual energy than the reticent-and-awkward manner, which is regarded as the preserve of the middle- and upper-class male. The truth is that both these approaches are symptoms of social dis-ease and sexual inhibition, and neither is a reliable indicator of virility or sexual competence. And in any case, the approach an Englishman adopts depends less on his social class than on the amount of alcohol he has consumed: all English males believe in the magical disinhibiting powers of the demon drink; the higher classes have particular faith in its capacity to make them as irresistibly crude and loutish as any proletarian sex-god.