38.

Naturally, they wore high-heeled shoes with smart, pointed toes. So, with tight corsets, shoes and restricting skirts, with two or even three wide, frilly and belaced petticoats underneath, they had little inclination to rush about and assert themselves. They were completely dominated by the many women, whom at a glance, they so closely resembled.

There was a twofold distinction between male and female. excessively feminine and very daintily dressed and made-up person was almost certainly a male, and, while women could wear red or pink colours, men were dressed in frocks and skirts of pastel col- ours, green, blue, lilac, and so forth, but nothing in the least red, the ancient colour of aggression.

The frocks, skirts, underclothes and other garments were made of synthetic fibres far in advance of the nylon and tery- lene of the 60's. They were strong, yet dainty, filmy and light, though soft and warm, and nothing could harm them. Colours were fast and frocks and undies didn't stain or cre 36. So nearly perfect were the fabrics that they could be the more easily washed and dried.

Readers of Olaf Stapledon's masterpiece of imagination, fore- casting life in the future, will understand that, by the end of the twentieth century, most of the old taboos on sex had disapp- eared. Stapledon looked forward much farther than the 21st cen- tury and illustrated the time when sex was taken for granted, a natural, simple, though great pleasure, in any of its many forms, and that intercourse between friends was a kind of pleas- ing, courteous act, both perfectly correct and proper. Monogamy as such didn't exist, though partnerships of a century and more between the sexe 8 were common, with the proviso that variety of sexual experience was healthy, both in the form of intercourse itself and in the partners concerned. Even group intercourse was considered desirable at times.

If our women and women-men of the end of the 20th century had not quite reached that level of reason and sensibility, they had nevertheless very few inhibitions and took and enjoyed sex in many forms, as naturally as the people of fifty years be- fore had, in connection with food, prided themselves on the variety and delicacy of its presentation.