December marked the ninety-first anniversary of the death of bizarre Australian sex reformer, William James Chidley, the inventor of the Fatless Fuck Theory.

Nobody remembers Chidley now but in his hey-day in 1911-1916 he was big news, a headline-making sensation who was often jailed or sent to a loony bin because he wandered the streets in a see-through toga toting a Gladstone bag with the words The Answer stencilled on it.

The Answer was a pamphlet he’d written revealing how the world could be saved by his Theory of the Fatless Fuck.

He argued that men should shag women only with a half a fat or a plonker totally on the droop.

Like most sex reformers of this day his attitudes toward sex were fairly fucked and his experiences seriously warped.

• When he was five he had an erection that wouldn’t go down and a doctor was summoned. When the doctor dabbed his stiffie with a wet sponge he attacked him.
• As a young bloke he continued to have stiffies and became a compulsive serial wanker. One day he put his hard plonker on the toilet bowl rim and slammed the wooden lid on it, reporting, “My penis gave me great pain for a long time and went quite black.” Bummer.
• In Melbourne he allowed a school girl to play with his stiff salami of love and tie a ribbon around it. The he went into the kitchen and attacked his tockley with a knife inadvertently giving himself a vasectomy.
• Sick of wanking he then started bonking hookers and caught gonorrhoea.
  
• To scourge himself of his wicked willie ways he moved to Adelaide, the city of churches, where he killed a bloke in a street brawl.

After more repentance he shacked up with a highly sexed actress Ada Grantleigh who constantly whinged he wasn’t giving her enough action and objected to his belief that her haemorrhoids were the result of “unnatural sexual practices.”

She died of alcoholism in 1908. Chidley, convinced the real reason for her death was a marathon sex session they’d recently had, gave up meat, sex and grog and declared himself a sex expert.
He reckoned it was the way that people fucked that sent them mad and fucked up the world, and he developed the radical theory of the Fatless Fuck.

He said when he was once in bed with Ada his non erect penis somehow slipped into her pussy and the sex that followed was “of a new and highly stimulating kind.”

He wrote his mad book, The Answer and said Adam and Eve didn’t get kicked out of Eden for eating an apple – it was because Eve was always tackling Adam’s tackle. He claimed, “When Eve put forward her hand and tampered in childish curiosity with her mate, producing an erection thus; and he, knowing where to force an entrance, used force and artificial friction they fell.”

He also theorised that the “shock” men and women experienced during shagging was etched onto their faces, and he reckoned he just had to look at people’s faces to tell if they were habitual shaggers.
He published drawings showing how people’s faces fell apart after sex, and one of his drawings included King Edward V11. Chidley’s post-shag portrait of the king was captioned “Showing signs of deterioration and degeneracy through accumulated shocks of unnatural coition. That is why people get bald and wrinkled and blind and deaf and pigeon-toed and epileptic and criminal and finally mad.”
But it was the sexless Chidley who finally went mad – or was officially deemed mad.
In May 1911 he was arrested while striding down George Street Sydney wearing a purple bathing costume and carrying a placard plugging,

The Answer.
He claimed ordinary clothes led to erections and after his Sydney arrest he went to Melbourne where he started publicly wearing a see through toga and underpants. But the coppers gave him such a hard time he returned to Sydney in February 1912.

But after an appearance in the Domain in his toga he was arrested and committed to the Callan Park Mental Hospital. He was released in October 12 on the condition he wear ordinary clothing in public but immediately hit the Sydney streets again in his toga.

He was arrested numerous times, spent time in the Hospital for the Insane at Kenmore, and then sent back to Callan Park in September 1916. He doused himself in kerosene but his suicide attempt didn’t work. He died of a diseased heart at Callan Park Mental Hospital on December 21, 1916, leaving behind little but the legacy of his Fatless Fuck Theory which never took off – thank fuck.