He likes porn? Then join in

Spectator, The, Nov 16, 1996 by Kenny, Mary

. . . that was the sort of advice offered by Marjorie Proops. Mary Kenny deplores reactions to her death

WHEN the `Queen of Agony Aunts' Marje Proops (a testimony from the genre's high priestess, Claire Rayner) died at the weekend, the tributes from the good and the great were fulsome. Tony Blair said, `She was a legend in journalism and will be sadly missed.' The Tory MP Lady Olga Maitland, a voice of conservative values, saluted Marje's `great integrity'. Paddy Ashdown, Barbara Castle, Bruce Forsyth, and Sir Richard Attenborough, who said she `represented the height of charisma of any media figure', all joined in the tributes.

Sir Richard said that Mrs Proops was 'a wonderful person, an extraordinary personality', and no doubt that is correct. She was the daughter of a pub landlord in Hoxton, who rose, by sheer dint of personality, to become one of the most influential voices in the country. Not only that: she reinvented the genre of the agony aunt, and formed a whole new generation of the species.

There was an exception to all the glowing tributes: William Oddie, former Anglican priest, now a Roman Catholic one, writing in the Daily Mail, asked whether Mrs Proops helped create the misery she sought to alleviate - by removing restraints, and thus abandoning people to moral anarchy. But more typical was John Major who told the Daily Mirror, where Marje had reigned as a queen for 42 years, `For years, Marje Proops dispensed caring advice. And she had a disarming frankness that endeared her to a generation.' If the agony aunts today are among the most powerful groups influencing policy John Major and Tony Blair pay tribute to Marje because politicians recognise power when they see it - it is all down to Marje. The agony aunts, after Marje Proops, have also become among the most anti-family and amoral forces in the culture.

Before Marje rose to power in the 1960s, agony aunts dispensed more or less sensible, and nearly always morally serious, advice to their readers. Evelyn Home, who was the pre-Marje doyenne, writing in Woman, said of her philosophy in 1956, 'I suppose it is Christianity translated into everyday life - the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments.' She added, `Faith in religion is the basis of the good life.' Evelyn Home dealt with problems with compassion, but she generally upheld marriage, morality and parental authority.

Even her more liberal rival, Mary Grant of Woman's Own, would, in the pre-Marje period, generally advise teenagers to confide in their parents (in the case of a hidden pregnancy, for example) and warn young girls of tender years that men generally tried to argue them into bed with more than friendly persuasion. `He has asked me to do what I consider to be wrong before he goes away,' wrote a 17- year-old to Mary Grant in May 1956, `and I am in a terrible state of mind. I love him so much and am afraid I may lose him if I don't agree.' The agony aunt told her firmly that she should definitely not agree. `To do something which one believes to be wrong always leads to unhappiness and emotional upsets.' If he loved her, then `true love waits'.

That was, of course, very much the tenor of the times before the pill revolution of 1961, and it would be something of an oversimplification to blame Marje Proops for all that followed. But it was Marje who led the way in giving more candid and saucy advice, which probably did accord more with natural human desires and certainly made for more entertaining reading - but at the cost of eroding such values as deferred gratification and women's moral power. Instead of `true love waits', Marje would write, `You can't argue with a teenage erection.' When wives told her they were upset to find their husbands perusing pornography, Marje wrote breezily back that they should join in the fun. they might pick up a trick or two. The preMarje agony aunts believed that women set the moral agenda and that men would behave just as badly as women allowed them to do - or behave as well as women demanded. Pornography did not really figure in pre-Marje agony columns - the language was so genteel before 1960 that the women's magazines forbore to use the word 'pregnant', and referred instead to `mothers-to-be' or `expectant mothers' (the last only in medical columns) - but even without referring to something as squalid as porn, the standards were clear. Interestingly, questions which would now be regarded as referring to `sexual harassment' ('a man at my work is inclined to pester me . . . ') were more empowering to women than today's victim culture is: firm instructions about how to deal with a male pest were handed out, in the clear affirmation that women were creatures of spirit who could handle men with a little show of sturdiness. In contrast, women today are advised they must either sue for sexual harassment, support new 'stalking' legislation or go crybabying to a sexual harassment therapist.

Marje Proops brought a different agenda to the agony aunt business of old: no doubt she had compassion for many individuals who wrote to her, but her approach to her work was based on her own unhappiness. And that became the case for many other agony aunts who followed her. While the Evelyn Homes had been happily married women who believed they had a teaching and pastoral role to help others while upholding public virtue, the Marje Proops oeuvre grew out of a therapeutic impulse to heal their own afflicted `inner child'. Claire Rayner and Anna Raeburn have also spoken candidly about the broken experiences of their lives which led them to become agony aunts, and Mrs Proops's leadership had a radicalising impact on previous agony aunts such as Mary Grant , who, under her real name of Angela Willans, altered from upholding moral values to catering to therapeutic needs.