Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Shaw insisted on regarding this patently special case of his own contriving as the type for sexual relationships in the real world; on maintaining as the order of existence that women initiate such relationships and men are "the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey"; on reiterating that what we are accustomed to think of as love, or infatuation, or lust, according to the circumstances or our temperament, is really God or Nature or the Life Force making purposeful experiments in eugenics. But this can be dismissed as another example of Shaw's tendency to exaggerate, to generalize...
...Superman had its inception, says its author with a perfectly straight face, in a suggestion by the critic A. B. Walkley that Shaw write a play about Don Juan. The old story of the Spanish libertine and defier of God had for Shaw two aspects, the sexual and the philosophical. These produced, or at least informed, respectively, the play and the dream-scene within it, which together justify the subtitle of Man and Superman, "a Comedy and a Philosophy." (This is not to say, of course, that the main play lacks philosophy or the interlude lacks comedy. Shaw's peculiar...
...propound," says Shaw to Walkley, "a certain social substance, sexual attraction to wit, for dramatic distillation; and I distill it for you." Thus the main plot of Man and Superman, a sort of Love's Labour's Won with woman as the laborer and man as the winnings; a "serio-comic love chase"; a nimble game in dead earnest of Higher Hide-and-Seek...
...Shaw's own sexual history was an odd one. He lost his chaste treasure on his 29th birthday, to the importunities of a widow lady named Jenny Patterson, who won by her persistence an immortality in such parentheses as this. After this momentous event Shaw slept around casually and childlessly for several years, until in his middle forties he married a "green-eyed Irish millionairess" after she had nursed him through a serious illness. After the wedding, in accordance with certain prejudices of his wife's, he gave up sex forever, and the two of them dwelt together, chaste...
...bestseller by Robert T raver (pen name of Justice John D. Voelker of the Michigan Supreme Court), is a courtroom melodrama that seems less concerned with murder than with anatomy. In scene after scene, the customers are bombarded with such no-nonsense words as "intercourse . . . contraceptive . . . spermatogenesis . . . sexual climax." And even the least barkbound of spectators may find himself startled to see and hear, in his neighborhood movie house, extended discussion of what constitutes rape ("Violation is sufficient; there need not be a completion ... on the part of the man"), of whether a doctor can or cannot "tell...