Sexcrime

Sexcrime is the Newspeak word under which the Party of Oceania gathers every sexual act outside one approved form into a single, deliberately compressed offence. Defined in the novel's account of Newspeak as "sexual immorality" and paired with Goodsex, or chastity, the term is said to regulate a Party member's sexual life almost entirely. Its real work is ideological rather than legal: by collecting fornication, adultery, homosexuality, other perversions and even ordinary intercourse practised for its own sake under one heading, it converts the body into a site of political policing and turns desire itself into the kind of forbidden thought the Thought Police exist to detect.

Definition and Structure in Newspeak

The appendix to the novel defines the two terms that govern the personal life of every Party member: "He knew what was meant by goodsex – that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was sexcrime." Sexcrime covers all sexual misdeeds — "fornication, adultery, homosexuality and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake" — and there is no need to enumerate them separately, because they are all equally culpable and "in principle, all punishable by death." The scientific vocabulary may keep specialised names for particular aberrations, but the ordinary citizen has no need of them. The construction is designed to compress judgment rather than encourage it: in Newspeak it is seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it is heretical, since beyond that point the necessary words are non-existent.

A Crime Without a Law

Sexcrime exists in a society that officially has no statutes at all. When Winston Smith first decides to open a diary, he reflects that the act is "not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws)", yet detection would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. This is the juridical status of Sexcrime as well. A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police; friendships, relaxations, behaviour towards a wife and children, the expression of the face when alone, even words muttered in sleep, are all scrutinised. Because Oceania has no formulated code, "thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden"; purges and vaporisations are not punishments for crimes actually committed but the wiping-out of persons who might commit a crime in the future. Sexcrime therefore indicts disposition rather than behaviour: the Party demands not only right opinions but right instincts.

The Party's War on the Sex Instinct

Behind the word is a deliberate policy of abolishing the desire it criminalises. All marriages between Party members have to be approved by a committee, and permission is always refused if the couple give the impression of being physically attracted to one another; the only recognised purpose of marriage is to beget children, and sexual intercourse is to be looked on as "a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema." The Junior Anti-Sex League advocates complete celibacy, children are to be begotten by artificial insemination, and "the Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it." For Winston Smith that repression creates rebellion: "The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime." Julia supplies the system's rationale, telling him that sexual privation induces a hysteria which can be transformed into "war-fever and leader-worship": "When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that." All the marching and cheering, in her phrase, is "simply sex gone sour."

Power, Submission and the Abolition of Desire

The full meaning of Sexcrime is spoken in the Ministry of Love, where O'Brien instructs the broken Winston Smith in the religion of power. The Party seeks power, O'Brien declares, not for wealth or luxury but for its own sake: "only power, pure power," and power is exercised over human beings, "above all, over the mind." His programme for the future includes the sentence "We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now." In the world to come "there will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother." The individual is only a cell, and escape from identity into the Party is the only route to power and immortality. The ritual of the Two Minutes Hate shows the emotional current that fills the space left by desire: one woman reaches out to the telescreen with a murmur that sounds like "My Saviour!", converting private ardour into worship of the face on the hoardings. Sexcrime is the crime of retaining a self that such worship cannot reach.

Narrative Cost: The Human Rebels

Julia is the novel's demonstration that Sexcrime is lived, not merely legislated. She has spent hours pasting up the Junior Anti-Sex League's slogans and wears its scarlet sash, while privately declaring herself "corrupt to the bones" and treating rule-breaking as the only sane response to an insane order; Winston calls her "only a rebel from the waist downwards." Their affair — the black-market sugar and coffee, the cosmetics, the rented room above Mr Charrington's shop — is an act of rebellion precisely because it is a private pleasure. The Ministry of Love reverses it: O'Brien reports that Julia betrayed Winston "immediately – unreservedly", with "all her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirtymindedness – everything has been burned out of her." At their final encounter in the Park she is thickened and stiffened, tells him "I betrayed you," and hears him answer "I betrayed you." Under torture Winston himself confesses that he is a sexual pervert, and Julia had earlier worked in Pornosec, the sub-section that produces pornography for the proles. The proles are the standing contrast: "The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted" — and, as the Party slogan insists, "Proles and animals are free."

Significance

Sexcrime belongs to the same architecture as the windowless Ministry of Love, the rewriting of history and the slogan "Freedom is Slavery." It gives bodily form to Orwell's account of a politics in which words are made to bear contradictory meanings: the appendix insists that in Newspeak "the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible," and Sexcrime is one of the instruments that make the unorthodox body speakable only as crime. Thomas Pynchon's introduction draws the consequence that sexual desire, taken on its own terms, is inherently subversive, and that the deepest sadness of the Winston–Julia story is the dismantling and destruction of her love. The term is therefore not a detail of the plot but a central mechanism of the dystopia: what the Party cannot see into, it must abolish, name and punish — and the word that does the naming is Sexcrime.