Sex, Love, and Chastity
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), part 1
Content Note: This post discusses sex, rape, murder, authoritarianism, and pornography.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) topped American best-seller lists in 2017 and Russian lists in 2022. Despite its enduring popularity, it has been banned in many places over the years.
It was banned for the whole of the Soviet Union until 1988.
You would think governments, especially those with authoritarian leanings would ban it because it shows how power works. But in the West, that hasn’t been the case.
It is frequently challenged and banned in the US, usually on the grounds that it contains sexually explicit scenes. One notable exception to this came ‘in 1981, the book was challenged in Jackson County, Florida, for being pro-communism’.
As you’ll see over the next few weeks, there is a lot of political content in the novel, but to call it pro-communist reveals, at best, a lack of understanding. I suspect the person who challenged the novel on such grounds either hadn’t read it or only gave it the most cursory of readings.
The novel shows how communism works in an autocratic country, but not in a way that would persuade any one to adopt communism as a way to organise society.
The more common objection that the novel contains sexually explicit scenes is even more curious. That’s what I’ll focus on here.
Sex in Nineteen Eighty-Four
If you haven’t read the novel and are now looking forward to a few titillating scenes, you’re likely to be disappointed. If it’s been a while since you read it and you’re struggling to remember any sex scenes, there’s nothing wrong with your memory.
In the world of the novel, ‘The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime’ (p. 71).
Julia, the central female character, appears to conform to Party expectations by being a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, designated by a red sash she wears around her waist. She attends demonstrations and vocally denounces marriage and sex, all while meeting various Party members for sexual liaisons – most of which aren’t described at all.
Winston Smith, the main character, is one of these liaisons. Prior to beginning his relationship with Julia, Winston was married. For all he knows, he’s still married, but his wife has been disappeared.
As a good Party member, Winston’s wife saw sex as a duty a woman must submit to in order to conceive a child. She dutifully and coldly submitted at regular intervals but never conceived.
Winston and Julia before their liaison
Before Winston and Julia begin their liaison, they know very little about one another; theirs is not a culture that invites unnecessary conversations. Talking to a woman he wasn’t married to or working with would have attracted unwanted attention from the authorities.
Nevertheless, he develops strong feelings about her.
Despite knowing almost nothing about her, during the Two Minutes of Hate that is vividly described in the opening chapter Winston discovers he is capable of hating Julia.
The Two Minutes of Hate is a compulsory ritual in which everyone gathers around the ubiquitous screens used for both communication and surveillance and hurls abuse at images of enemies of the State. The ritual is intended to strengthen loyalty to the Party and to build a sense of comradeship in banding together against the enemy.
One of Winston’s first acts of rebellion occurs when he voluntarily switches his own object of hate from the enemy of the state to Julia; this is before he even knows her name:
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Better than before, moreover, he realised why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity. (p. 17)
Winston expresses his hatred for Julia in sadistic sexual fantasy: he wants to flog her, tie her naked to a stake, and penetrate her with arrows. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to see what those arrows are standing in for.
When he imagines cutting her throat at the moment of climax he is effectively taking away all her agency; not only would he not allow her to climax, but he would also remove her from the sex act when he climaxed.
In this deeply misogynistic scene, Winston is both rebelling against the Party by choosing his own object of hatred and revealing how badly he’s been indoctrinated into the Party’s beliefs. He hates Julia because she’s a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League and he takes that, the ‘aggressive symbol of chastity’ around her waist, as the only reason he can’t sleep with her.
He can’t sleep with her not because the Party disapproves of any sex outside of marriage, but because she appears to agree with the Party’s teaching on that issue.
Winston and Julia’s affair
Almost 100 pages later, at the beginning of Part II if your edition is divided into parts, Julia passes Winston a note when they pass in the corridor that says, ‘I love you’ (p. 113).
They work in the same building, so have crossed paths and spoken occasionally since Winston’s sadistic fantasy, but all of their conversations have been necessarily perfunctory, so this note is Winston’s first clue she’s interested in him (I’ll return to his reaction to the note in a future edition of Scandalous Books).
For now, I’ll skip ahead to their first rendezvous in the countryside (Part II, chapter 2). Once they’re reasonably sure they’re alone, they have some awkward conversation and then try to have sex; this scene is worth quoting in its entirety:
The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down onto the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except that of mere contact. All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without women – he did not know the reason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair. She sat against him, putting her arm around his waist.
“Never mind, dear. There’s no hurry. We’ve got the whole afternoon. Isn’t this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I got lost once on a community hike. If anyone was coming you could hear them a hundred metres away.”
“What is your name?” said Winston.
“Julia. I know yours. It’s Winston – Winston Smith.”
“How did you find that out?”
“I expect I’m better at finding things out than you are, dear. Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?
He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.
“I hated the sight of you,” he said. “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police.”
The girl laughed delightedly, evidently taking this as a tribute to the excellence of her disguise. (pp. 126–7)
There’s a lot to unpack here.
I’ll start with the aborted lovemaking. That’s as explicit as the novel gets. A blink and you’ll miss it description of erectile dysfunction (ED).
If you did miss the ED, don’t feel bad. It’s hard to catch on a first reading if you’re not attuned to the coded language authors often use for such scenes.
I can spot these things a mile off because I have the unfair advantage of having spent decades reading and writing about Victorian novels – the first time I read Adam Bede, I missed the ‘scandalously’ explicit sex scene that results in a pregnancy until the baby arrived. Spotting these things takes experience and training that I’d wager few of the children the book banners are so keen to protect have.
I digress. Where is the ED in the passage I quoted above? In the fact that Winston feels ‘no physical desire’ followed closely by Julia’s sympathetic ‘Never mind, dear’.
While the book isn’t sexually explicit, there is some disturbing content in this passage and elsewhere in the novel. That said, there’s nothing most readers in their mid to late teens can’t deal with if they have the guidance of a teacher.
Returning to the passage I just quoted, what’s going on here other than Winston’s inability to feel anything other than ‘mere contact’, ‘incredulity and pride’? He’s intimidated and doesn’t feel any connection with Julia.
He doesn’t even know her name until after she puts a reassuring arm around his waist (the move he wanted to make on her in Part I, chapter 1, page 17) and assures him they have plenty of time.
We’re not told how he feels about the gesture or the comment, but he does manage to summon the courage to first ask her name and then tell the truth about his previous desire to rape and murder her.
That he has just tried to have sex with the woman he’s been having rape-murder fantasies about is disturbing, but her reaction even more so. She ‘laugh[s] delightedly’ because if she’s fooled him, she’s likely fooled the Party’s surveillance.
As you’ll know if you’ve read the novel, or will see over my next few posts, fooling Party surveillance is key to survival.
I won’t detail every encounter between the two, but despite this inauspicious beginning, Julia and Winston do go on to form a loving relationship. Their relationship does eventually lead to trouble with the Party, but for a while, they find space to be themselves and to be together.
Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four
Though the novel doesn’t revel in or even dwell on the sexual encounters between Winston and Julia, they are central to its contemplation of the workings of power in their world.
The novel is set in Oceania – mostly in a post nuclear war London – which is ruled by Big Brother and the Party. The Party maintains control through surveillance and has gone to great lengths to make it nearly impossible for Party members to form close relationships of any kind with one another.
Children are trained in the Junior Spies and the Youth League to spy on their elders, especially their parents. This makes anything like what we in the real world would recognise as a healthy parent-child bond all but impossible.
Adults dare not form close relationships with one another because they know it’s only a matter of time before one member of any relationship is interrogated by the Party. The closer the relationship, the more that person will be able to reveal about their friend or lover.
Near the end of the novel, O’Brien explains to Winston that all of this has been intentional: ‘We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer’ (p. 280).
He goes on to reveal that the Party has plans to take this social isolation further: ‘But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen’ (p. 280). This plan reduces all people to the level of livestock, but especially women and children.
In this future, the Party will be all: wife, friend, and parent. There will be no room for divided loyalties. O’Brien, who represents all Inner Party members, expects this level of Party dependency will result in total control over the individual’s thoughts and feelings.
Nevertheless, O’Brien recognises that sexual desire still poses a threat to Party loyalty – one might, after all, have stronger feelings for one’s lover than the Party. But he’s confident science will win in the end:
The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. (p. 280)
In this novel, Orwell isn’t overly interested in the technology of the future, unlike novels like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (which I’ll discuss in a few weeks). Thus, we never learn how Party neurologists propose to keep the sex act, which is required in the world of the novel for procreation, but do away with the male orgasm.
The novel doesn’t specify that neurologists are working to eradicate the male orgasm; it is made clear that marital sex (aka goodsex – more on this term below) is meant to be joyless and unpleasurable for wives who are, presumably, already not orgasming.
What Orwell is interested in is the workings of power. He’s especially interested in how authoritarian regimes take and maintain power. In O’Brien’s discussion with Winston, the ultimate aims of the Party are laid bare:
There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. (p. 280)
The Party not only wants to do away with the sexual impulse, but with all emotion that isn’t related to itself.
Chastity and the Party
The Party is obsessed with chastity, and Julia figures why before Winston:
Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. (p. 139)
The Party wants members to be sexually frustrated so they can channel that energy into Party activities. Also, the Party is far too jealous to countenance divided loyalties in its members. They must care only for the Party, not for each other.
After hearing Julia’s explanation of this, Winston finds he agrees as he thinks:
There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. (pp. 139–40)
If this all sounds disturbingly familiar, it likely means you’ve been paying attention to the American Republican Party over the last few decades. For now, they’re focused on trying to eliminate pornography:
This is addressed in Project 2025 and bans have already been proposed in Congress,
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has talked about having his 17-year-old son as his anti-porn accountability partner, and
Individual states have tried to pass wide-sweeping bans like the one that has so far failed to pass in Oklahoma that would ban sending sexual images to your partner if you’re not married.
Like the attempt to outlaw sexual pleasure in Nineteen Eighty-Four, these laws are designed to exert control over individuals and to focus party members’ minds on God, country, and party (not always in that order).
The language of sex
How does the Party propose to dehumanise members until they think about and feel only for the Party? By making it impossible for them to do otherwise.
Next week I’ll get into how language is used to exercise power over people. For now, let’s look at the words for sex that are available in Newspeak – the new language developed by the Party for the purpose of control.
Orwell explains how Newspeak works in the appendix to the novel. For most Party members, only two words are available to talk about sex: ‘sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity)’ (p. 318).
Goodsex refers to ‘normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman’ (p. 318). Preventing female pleasure and limiting intercourse to the purpose of procreation is the first step in making sure each individual’s life is completely wrapped up in and focused on the Party.
Any sex that does not fit the definition of goodsex is a sexcrime. This term covers ‘fornication, adultery, homosexuality and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death’ (p. 318).
That homosexuality, fornication, and adultery are lumped in with ‘other perversions’ reveals that the novel is of its time. In a twenty-first century discussion of this passage, I would expect a teacher or lecturer to address this and how times and attitudes have changed. Here, I’ll simply state that identities (like identifying as a member of the LGBTQ+ community) are never perverse, nor are acts consenting adults engage in – those acts may not be to everyone’s taste, but that doesn’t make them perverse.
In the novel, Party members limit the language people have to talk about sex because they assume that if people don’t have a name for a thing they can’t think about, talk about, or do it. So, if having sex with a spouse for the purpose of procreation is the only non-criminal sex act that has a name, it’s assumed it will be the only kind anyone engages in.
I’ll come back to the issue of language in the novel next week. For now, I’ll just say that’s not how language, or human sexuality for that matter, works. If you want proof, look at the teen pregnancy rates in schools that don’t have comprehensive sex education.
The End
Next week, I’ll be back to talk about language in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
When you read the novel, make sure you take the time to read the appendix. Orwell is at his most brilliant when writing about how language works. For more from Orwell on language, have a look at his 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’.