I’m not particularly aware of the British being sexually repressed. The joke about ‘lie back and think of England’ dates to early twentieth century at the latest.
However, digging a little deeper I would guess a remainder of such a stereotype might derive from British television and movies about pre-1950’s Britain, with the stiff upperlip and the understatement and the prim and proper vicars and housewifes. To me that doesn’t result in a ‘sexually repressed’ stereotype, rather more a ‘mannered’ society which doesn’t preclude a heated amorous interaction behind the bedroom doors.
"Lie back and think of England, " IIRC, was Queen Victoria’s advice to one of her daughters … and, yes, Victoria herself was quite notably sexually active, at least while Prince Albert was alive. (And maybe at other John-Brown-related times, if you believe those particular rumours.) It’s her contemporaries who gained the reputation for being repressed.
(Well, that, and she mostly looks stiff and miserable in photographs … but, apparently, this is just because she was uncomfortable about being photographed. There’s at least one that I’ve seen where the photographer caught her off-guard, and she actually looks quite a merry old party in that.)
Whoever it was who coined the phrase, it wasn’t Queen Victoria. The standard explanation is that it was first used by Lady Hillingdon in 1912, but that has never been confirmed and it was probably invented much, much later. It merely plays to the existing, well-established stereotype of sexually-repressed Englishmen and women.
As for the origins of the stereotype itself, I suspect that those are mostly early twentieth century and reflected the anti-nostalgia for the nineteenth century then fashionable in progressive circles. It is most unlikely to predate Freud. Nor was it ever any more accurate than any other crude stereotype.
I had heard that the Brits had a reputation for being sexually repressed as I have heard the same of Americans. I can tell you from personal experience that we are both very, very slutty.
Now you guys are the real “mucky little fuck-pigs” :D. The English are absolute prudes compared to the Dutch. The Germans are all perverts, and the Scandinavians… don’t even mention the Scandinavians. Why do you think they’re famous for all those “stag films” they sold to the rest of Europe in the sixties and seventies?
WARNING: All stereotypes included. May be hazardous to my health.
Two factors come to mind when considering the stereotype of English sexuality and why folks there are considered repressed:
The Victorian Age - The English Empire was in full power during this era, at the same time world communications began to get faster, with telegraphs, the spread of magazines and the like. I wonder if the stereotype of English got established and embedded in the world consciousness during that era - which might suggest that the reputation is more due to those being more repressed times in general worldwide.
Class distinctions - The English have a reputation - no comment from me as to whether it is deserved or not - of being class conscious. I wonder if that contributes to the reputation. Maybe the upper upper class work so hard at being proper to differentiate themselves from lower classes that it contributes to the stereotype? If so, then the scandals involving the royal family would clearly have messed all that up…
IMHO Czarcasm is getting a little hot under the collar.
So to answer the OP, the origin was so called Victorian moral values (including such kinky items as anti-masturbatory devices for children). And since the 60’s at least England has been less sexually repressed than most countries (certainly less than USA). I expect Scotland and Wales would fall under the same mistaken stereotype
It definately seems to stem from Victorian times - in a slightly earlier era, the English had a reputation in Europe for particular kinkiness; spanking being the “English Perversion”, and so forth.
But the English reputation for le vice anglais was undiminished in the Victorian period, at least according to the most authoritive contemporary: writing in his Index Liberorum Prohibitorum of 1877, Pisanus Fraxi was able to declare that “this vice has certainly struck deeper root in England than elsewhere” and suggested that it featured in most of the English language books in his survey of the pornographic literature.
Of course, Henry Spencer Ashbee (aka Fraxi) is rather biased in that his own tastes do seem to have run heavily in this direction.
As APB’s already noted, much of what is conventionally assumed about Victorian sexual mores is a later invention. Plenty of them were “mucky little fuck-pigs” indeed. Though in Ashbee’s case, probably mainly in his head.
Brits!?! Pruddish?!? Sexually repressed??? And this from an American? Not one whit in my experience. I think the OP should have asked if any other Country was a sexually repressed as America.
mind boggles at an American calling the British sexually repressed
Er, no, we’re not. I would venture to say that the US is far more repressed than we are, what with exhortions practically everywhere about how one should save oneself for marriage, the fuss over the ‘accidental’ showing of a breast when gasp children could have seen it, etc etc.
But is that down to the nation, or the volume of the vocal minority within it?
To be fair, the UK did have a very vocal ‘decency’ lobby for a few decades, personified by the late Mary Whitehouse. However, most people dismissed her as having a bug up her arse, or mocked her. And nobody stepped up to fill her shoes, and now we’re wallowing in more televisual filth than you could shake a shitty stick at.
But that’s the point - we mocked Mary Whitehouse. A lot. In my experience, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of mocking going on of the “decency police” in America.
You’d have to agree that they aren’t really comparable though wouldn’t you? Whitehouse was this doddering old busybody who had quite a narrow agenda that few (at least in the UK) took all that seriously. The American decency police are an altogether more freaky bunch though. They seem closely allied to televangelists, miltant anti-abortionists, creationists and assorted fundie loons with powerful representation in government. If you stop to consider that all these people are ascendant in the political scene at the moment it makes it harder to dismiss them out of hand.
