Sex and Common-Sense Part 5

During the course of these addresses I have more than once, and with more than common urgency, pleaded for the light of knowledge, that we may in future not make so many disastrous mistakes from sheer ignorance and misunderstanding. I have been asked to say more definitely what "misunderstandings" I had in mind, and to discuss them with at least as much courage as I have so pressingly demanded from others.

The demand is just; and I feel the less able to disregard it because I have discussed these very difficulties with people whose lives have been wrecked by the ignorance in which they were brought up, or saved by knowledge wisely imparted before the difficulties arose. Knowledge cannot save us from hards.h.i.+p or difficulty; it cannot make us invulnerable to attack, or lift us above the ordinary temptations of ordinary mortals; but it can show us where we are going; it can guide us when we wish to be guided; it can save us, when we wish to be saved, from mistakes cruel to ourselves and often far more cruel to other people.

For instance: it is very generally believed that the struggle for continence is greatly eased by continual and even exhausting physical activity. To work hard--to work even to exhaustion--is believed by some to be a panacea. At our great public schools the craze for athleticism is justified on the ground that, even at the expense of the things of the mind, it does at least keep the boys from moral evil.

I believe this to be a mistake, and a mistake which is due to our looking at s.e.x from a too purely physical point of view. It is, of course, imbecile to forget the physical, and deal with s.e.x simply as a "sin"; but it is no less stupid to forget that our bodies and souls are intimately bound together, and that there is much more in pa.s.sion than a merely physical instinct. As a matter of fact, a tired person is not immune from s.e.x-hunger, and even an exhausted person is likely to find that, far from s.e.xual feeling being exhausted too, it turns out to be the only sensation that will respond to stimulus at all. The exploitation of s.e.xuality by our theatres and Press is not successful only in the case of the idle and the overfed; it finds its patrons also among those who are too tired to put their minds into anything really interesting from an intellectual or artistic point of view, but whose attention can be distracted and whose interest held by a more or less open appeal to the primitive instincts of s.e.x. Tired people want to be amused and interested if possible; but they are not easily amused by anything that appeals to the mind, because they are tired. They want a sensation other than the customary one of fatigue, and the easiest sensation to excite is a s.e.xual one. They get it thinly disguised, in a theatre or music-hall, more thickly disguised in the form of cheap fiction, or quite undisguised elsewhere. But the idea that s.e.xuality is destroyed by fatigue is a very mischievous illusion which has misled and helped to destroy some of the most honest strivers after self-control. Such people will, with a touching belief in saws, seek to find in exhaustion relief from temptation. But it is not amusing always to feel tired. One desires at last something else--some other kind of feeling--and one is too tired to make an effort. But s.e.xual sensation is easily excited, and in the end the unfortunate finds that he has yielded again. His hard fight has only ended in defeat, and he either abandons the advice as mistaken, or himself as hopelessly and uniquely depraved.

The truth is, of course, that what is needed is not physical exhaustion any more than physical idleness and overfeeding. What is wanted is hard and _interesting_ work--work that absorbs one's mental as well as physical strength. A boy at a public school who really cares for games can pour his energies into them and appear a fine example of the system; a boy who, though games are compulsory, cannot interest himself in them at all, is not helped by being physically exhausted. If, then, he yields to a temptation the other has escaped, this need not be because he is more wicked or more weak. It may quite well be because the insistence on athleticism, which has been elevated into a cult, in our public schools, has supplied a real and absorbing interest for the one, but has merely used the physical capacity of the other without touching his mind or his spirit at all. When shall we learn that every human being is a unity, and that to ignore any part of it--body, mind or spirit--is idiotic? The muscular Christian who believes that continence is achieved by physical fatigue is as short-sighted as he who would treat the whole matter as a purely ethical problem. But the man or woman who works hard at some congenial and absorbing task--especially if it be creative work--finds the virtue of continence well within his grasp without exhaustion and without asceticism. It is because s.e.x is essentially a creative--the creative--power in humanity that we have to direct its force into some more spiritual channel than mere physical labour, if we are to make ourselves its master.

Again, an increasing number of us believe that to master our physical impulses is possible; and that it has seemed impossible--at least, for men--in the past largely because so little knowledge and so little common-sense has been used in achieving mastery. Naturally, it was simpler to a.s.sume that it was impossible to control oneself than to find out how to make it possible, but as we grow more civilized we cease to be perfectly content with this simple plan, and begin to perceive its extraordinary injustices and brutalities. It has been said that the civilization of any people or period may be judged by the position of its women, and though this is too simple to be quite true, it is far more true than false. If, however, civilization does raise the position of women, and a.s.sign to them a greater freedom of action and a wider scope for their lives than was theirs before, it must be clearly understood that women in these circ.u.mstances and of this type will take a quite different line on the question of s.e.x morals than their great-grandmothers did. It is, for example, still urged that women must not do this, that or the other work, because it involves working with men whose s.e.x instincts may be uncontrollably aroused by such collaboration. Sir Almroth Wright has pleaded this, and it is being urged to-day against the entrance of women into what is now almost the only sphere still closed to them--the spiritual work of the Churches. It is urged that some men are afraid of being s.e.xually excited if they are addressed by a woman-preacher, and that others cannot be within the sanctuary, with a woman near them, without similar danger. The misunderstanding that arises here is, surely, that the cause of this abnormal excitement is in the woman, whereas (in the cases cited) it is in the man. There are, of course, women who find an exactly similar difficulty in working with men: women who are transformed by the mere presence of men, as there are men who cannot enter a room full of women without physical disturbance. Such men, such women, are not necessarily depraved or immoral persons, their temperament may be a source of genuine distress to them. It may be most admirably controlled, and in thousands of cases it is so, especially when the sufferer understands himself or--more rarely--understands herself. All the help that psychology and medical science can give (and it is much) should be given to and accepted by such people. The one thing that should _not_ be yielded is the ridiculous claim that men and women who are not so susceptible (and who are in the vast majority) should rule their lives according to the standards of those who are s.e.xually over-developed or one-sidedly developed. It cannot be too strongly insisted that this problem is the problem of the individual. He (or she) has got to settle it. He must learn to manage himself in such a way that he ceases to be abnormally excitable, or he must arrange his life so that he avoids, as far as possible, the causes of excitement. He must not expect others to cramp their lives to fit him; he must not expect civilization to be perverted or arrested in order to avoid a difficulty which is his own.

The only alternative to this is to revert to a form of civilization in which it was frankly admitted that s.e.x-impulses could not be controlled, either by men or by women, and society was therefore organized on a basis which, quite logically, provided for the restraint of women in a bondage which prevented them from satisfying their impulses as they chose, and at the same time protected them from attack by other men than their lawful owners; and which, further, provided conveniences for the equally uncontrollable instincts of men.

This system is quite logical; so is the one here advocated, of a.s.suming that the s.e.xual instincts of both s.e.xes can be controlled. What is not logical is the a.s.sumption that they _can_ be controlled, but that such control is to be exercised not by each one mastering himself, but by the removal of all possibility of temptation! This demand is really incompatible with our civilization, and those who make it should try to understand that what they ask is, in fact, the reversal of all advance in real self-control in matters of s.e.x.

Let us abandon the pretence that it is "wicked" for either a man or a woman to have strongly-developed s.e.x-instincts. When we do this, we shall be on the high way to learning how to manage ourselves without making preposterous demands upon our neighbours or inroads upon their individual freedom.

We shall also, I believe, get rid of those perversions which darken understanding as well as joy. One need not go all the way with Freud--one may, indeed, suspect him of suffering from a severe "repression"

himself--while admitting, nevertheless, that much of the folly that surrounds our treatment of s.e.x-questions is due to the pathetic determination of highly respectable people to have no s.e.x nature or impulses at all. Certainly this accounts for much that is called "prudery"

in women, whose repressed and starved instincts revenge themselves in a morbid (mental) preoccupation with the details of vice. I am forced to the conclusion that it has also something to do with the quite extraordinary description that certain ecclesiastics give of their own inability to control their imaginations even at the most solemn moments. A narrow and dishonest moral standard has been foisted upon women in these matters, and instead of knowing themselves and learning to control their natures, they have been given a false idea of their own natures, and taught instead merely to repress them. So, very often, a curiously artificial code of manners has been accepted by the clergyman--a code which has been crystallized in a phrase by calling the clergy "the third s.e.x"--and he, like the women, should be in revolt against it if he is to be saved.

Indeed, we are or should be allies, not foes. Let the priest or minister wear the same kind of collar as other people, mix with them on equal terms, and then, if he has a higher moral standard than they, it will be his own standard, accepted by him because it commands his homage, and not a standard imposed on him merely because he belongs to a certain caste. It is always the code of morals imposed from without that does mischief, and results in the repressions and perversions about which modern psychology has taught us so much.

It will perhaps be urged that the peculiar dangers of which ecclesiastics are conscious are due to the psychological fact that the erotic and religious emotions are closely allied. That this is a fact will hardly be doubted. But again the problem is either an individual one, _or_ it must be solved by abandoning our present position and reverting to that of an earlier and cruder civilization. It is possible to argue that eroticism and religion are so nearly allied and so easily mistaken for one another, that safety and sincerity alike demand separate wors.h.i.+p for men and women.[F] It is also possible to leave it to the individual to manage himself, conquer where he can and flee where he cannot. But it is not possible, on grounds of religious eroticism, to protect men from listening to a woman preaching, at the cost of compelling women to listen to no one but a man; or insist on the intolerable cruelty of compelling a man-priest to celebrate ma.s.s with a woman server, while forcing the woman to make her confession to a man.

[Footnote F: As, _e.g._, among the Mahometans and, to a less extent, the Jews.]

I am convinced that when religious people learn to refrain from cheap "religion" based on emotional preaching and sentimental or rowdy music, they will find that, though eroticism and religion are nearly allied and can easily be mistaken, it is not impossible to distinguish between them.

The effort to do so should be made by our spiritual leaders, and when made will result in a st.u.r.dier and more thoughtful religion. While for those, whether men or women, who are honestly aware that for them certain things are impossible there will be an obvious alternative. The man who cannot forget the woman in the priest or preacher will not attend her church; the woman, of whom the same is sometimes true, will avoid the ministrations of men. There will then be less of that eroticism in religion which some of those who--by a curious perversion of logic--oppose the ministry of women actually quote as a reason for compelling women to go to men-priests because there is no one else for them to go to.

IX

FURTHER MISUNDERSTANDINGS: THE NEED FOR s.e.x CHIVALRY

"Men venerated and even feared women--particularly in their specifically s.e.xual aspect--even while they bullied them; and even in corrupt and superst.i.tious times, when the ideal of womanhood was lost sight of, women tended to get back as witches the spiritual eminence they had failed to retain as saints, matrons and saviours of society."

_Northcote: Christianity and s.e.x Problems, p_. 326.

Chivalry is the courtesy of strength to weakness. Yet women who pride themselves on their superior moral strength in regard to s.e.x rarely feel bound to show any chivalry towards the weak. I do not myself believe that women are _as a whole_ stronger than men, or that men are _as a whole_ stronger than women; but I am sure that the s.e.xes are relatively stronger in certain respects and at certain points, and that where one is stronger than the other, that one should feel the chivalrous obligation of strength whether man or woman. Chivalry is not and ought not to be a masculine virtue solely.

For example, it is quite common to be told of (or by) some girl who is an artist in flirtation that she is "quite able to take care of herself." This appears to mean that whoever suffers, she will not; and whatever is given, she will not be the giver. It is possible to go further and say that whatever she buys she will certainly not pay for.

What does she buy? Well, it depends, of course, on what she wants and what is her social cla.s.s. But, roughly speaking, she wants both pleasure and homage--not only theatres and cinemas, ice-creams or chocolates, but the incense that goes with such things--the demonstration of her triumphant s.e.xual charm, which evokes such offerings.

Of course, in a great deal of this there is no harm. People who like each other will like to please each other, to give pleasure, and to enjoy it together. But there is something beyond this which is not harmless but detestable, and that is the deliberate playing on s.e.xual attraction in order to extract homage and to demonstrate power. A girl will sometimes play on a man as a pianist on his instrument, put a strain on him that is intolerable, fray his nerves and destroy his self-control, while she herself, protected not by virtue but frigidity, complacently affirms that she "can take care of herself." The blatant dishonesty of the business never strikes her for a moment. She takes all she wants and gives nothing in return, and honestly believes that this is because she is "virtuous."

That she is a thief--and one who combines theft with torture--never occurs to her; yet it is true.

Observe--I do not suggest that it would be creditable if she did "pay." It would be no more so than Herod's payment of John the Baptist's head. But although it is wrong to take something you want and give in return what you ought not to give, it would be a curious sort of morality that would go on to argue that it is right to take all and give nothing. Both transactions are immoral and one is dishonest.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that a parasite _must_ take all and give nothing or as little as possible. That is the law of its being.

And so long as men resent the independence of women, and enjoy the position of perpetual paymaster, so long will many women be driven to use the only weapon they have left. Moreover, it is fair to say--and this is why I plead for light--that many of them are genuinely ignorant that they are playing with fire. The more frigid they are themselves, the less are they able to gauge the forces they are arousing; the more ignorant they are, the less possible is it for them to be chivalrous to those whose strength and weakness they alike misunderstand. The half-knowledge, the instinctive arts, which girls sometimes display continually mislead men into thinking them a great deal cleverer than they are. Each is ignorant of the other's weakness, and each puts the other in danger because of that ignorance.

I once spoke to a big meeting of girls in the neighbourhood of a big camp, during the war; and reflecting on the difficult position of the men--their segregation from ordinary feminine society, their distance from their homes, their unoccupied hours, and the inevitable nervous and emotional strain of preparing for the front--I tried to make the girls realize how hard they could make it for the men to keep straight, if they were ignorant or foolish themselves. I knew--and said so--that the girls were in a difficult position too; but, after all, they prided themselves on being the more "moral" (_i.e._ the stronger) s.e.x, and should be chivalrous.

Afterwards I got a reproachful letter from a woman-patrol, who a.s.sured me that if anything went wrong, it was not the fault of the girls. "They are a rough lot," she wrote, "and, of course, they like to have a soldier to walk out with. They like to romp with the men, and to kiss them, and perhaps they do go rather far in letting the men pull them about. But they have no intention whatever of going any further. If things do go further, it is the men's fault, not the girls'."

I could hardly have a better instance of the sort of thing I mean. The girls want to have "fun" up to a certain point, and there stop. It does not occur to them that there may be a difference in the point at which they propose--or wish--to stop, and that at which the man can. That there is any physiological or psychological factor in the case which makes stopping possible at one moment and next-door to impossible at another, and that these factors may differ between the s.e.xes, so that one cannot stop just where the other can, is quite a new idea not only to factory girls but to women-patrols--at least to some of them. A girl will cheerfully start a man rus.h.i.+ng down an inclined plane and then complain because he continues rus.h.i.+ng till he reaches the bottom. Well, in a sense, we ought not to complain of either of them: we ought to challenge the senseless way in which they are kept in the dark about each other.

In these days, when so much greater liberty is accorded to boys and girls than was given in the past, the friends of liberty should insist with obstinacy on the need for knowledge. For if liberty is unaccompanied and unguided by knowledge, its degeneration into licence will be triumphantly used by the lovers of bondage as an argument against liberty itself. Let me then say boldly that I am all for liberty. I want boys and girls, men and women, to see far more of each other and get to know each other much better than in the past. I believe in co-education, and in _real_ co-education--not the sham that is practised in some of our universities and colleges. I see the risks and I want to take them. I know there will be "disasters," and I think them much less disastrous than those attending the methods of obscurantism and restraint. I think the idea that a boy and girl may not touch each other introduces a silly atmosphere of unreal "romance"

where commonplace friends.h.i.+p is what is wanted. But with all this, and _because_ of all this, I want a girl to know that a boy's body and mind are not _exactly_ like hers; and perhaps a boy to know that a girl's is not totally _unlike_ his!

In what way do they differ? The male, I think, is more liable to sudden gusts of pa.s.sion, of violence so great as to be almost uncontrollable--at least so nearly so as to make it both cruel and stupid to arouse them. A woman's nature is not (generally) so quickly stirred. She takes longer to move (hence the universal fact of courts.h.i.+p). Or rather it might be more accurate to say that he and she may both start at the same time from the same point, but she takes longer to reach the end, and because this is so, is more capable of stopping before the end is reached. This she does not understand, and expects that if _she_ can pause, so can _he_; while he also misunderstands, and does not know that there is for her, just as much as for him, a moment when self-control becomes impossible.

I have said so much about the lack of chivalry shown by women to men that it is only reasonable to point out that the reverse is true, and that men are often extraordinarily unchivalrous towards women. The cause is, of course, the same: they do not realize what a strain they are putting on them. There is still a very general a.s.sumption, even by those who really know better, that women have no pa.s.sions and are untempted from within. I have often been a.s.sured by "men of the world" that "a woman can always stop a man if she wants to." No doubt she can--some men. She can "stop them if she wants to." The trouble is that a time comes when she cannot want to.

The bland a.s.sumption that a man has a perfect right to play on a woman's s.e.x-instincts till they are beyond control, and then call her the guilty one because they _are_ beyond control, is based on the age-old determination not to recognize the full humanity of women. They are "different" from men. So they are. I have admitted it. But the likeness is much greater than the difference. And neither the likeness nor the difference makes self-control an easy thing for her. It is easier up to a certain point, because she is more slowly moved; it is harder when that point is reached because her whole nature is involved. She has never learnt to say that she can give her body to one while remaining spiritually faithful to another, and perhaps she never will learn. I at least suspect so. She may be as fickle as a man, but it will be in a different way.

Of course, in all this I generalize very rashly from a very narrow experience. My excuse is that these things must be discussed if we are ever to generalize more safely, or to learn that we must not generalize at all.

And I have come to the conclusion that it is perhaps as possible to know something of what is or is not true when one is unmarried as when one is married. At least one escapes the snare into which so many married people surprisingly fall, of generalizing from an experience which is not merely as narrow as everyone's must be, but actually unique; which enables them to p.r.o.nounce with stupefying confidence that all men are as this man is; all women as his wife; and all marriages as his marriage. When one has had the honour of receiving the confidence of a succession of such prophets and heard them p.r.o.nounce in turn, but in an entirely different sense, upon the difficulties or easinesses of s.e.x-relations.h.i.+ps, always with a full a.s.surance that they are right, not only in their own case but universally, one begins to make a few tentative generalizations oneself in the hope that they will at least provoke discussion and engender light.

X

"THE SIN OF THE BRIDEGROOM"

"A deathless bubble from the fresh lips blown Of Cherubim at play about G.o.d's throne Seemed her virginity. She dreamed alone Dreams round and sparkling as some sea-washed stone.

Then an oaf saw and l.u.s.ted at the sight.

They smashed the thing upon their wedding night."

_Dunch, Susan Miles._

Something has been said by others of one of the most fruitful sources of misunderstanding between men and women, where misunderstanding is likely to have the most disastrous results--what has been called by Rosegger "the sin of the bridegroom." Perhaps "sin" is a mistaken word. If irreparable harm is often done on the wedding night, it is quite as much due to ignorance as to cruelty. Nothing is more astonis.h.i.+ng than the widespread ignorance of men _and women_ of the fact that courts.h.i.+p is not a mere convention, or a means of flattering the vanity of women, but a physiological necessity if there is to be any difference at all between the union of lovers and a rape.

It is all, I suppose, part of the old possessive idea which, making of a woman something less than a human personality with wishes, desires and temperament of her own, forbade the man to realize or even to know that her body has its needs as well as his, and that to regard it merely as an instrument is to be in danger of real cruelty.

You can bargain for the possession of a violin and the moment it is yours, may play upon it. It is yours. If you are in the mood to play, it must be ready for you. If it is not, then tune it, and it will be.[G] But a human being cannot be treated so in any human relations.h.i.+p. It needs mutual patience and mutual respect to make a relations.h.i.+p human.

[Footnote G: But even a violin will need to be tuned.]

This simple fact, however, has been so little understood of lovers, that husbands have, in genuine ignorance of the cruelty they were committing, raped their wives on their wedding night. Judging by what one knows of wedding-days, it could hardly be supposed that there could be a more unpropitious moment for the consummation of marriage. And when to the fatigue and strain of the day is added--_as is still quite often the case_--blank though uneasy ignorance as to what marriage involves, or the thunderbolt of knowledge (_sic_) launched by the bride's mother the night before, or the morning of the day itself, it would be difficult with the utmost deliberation and skill better to ensure absolute repulsion and horror on the part of the bride. I think that any man who would consider this from the bride's point of view would see that she need not necessarily be cold or unresponsive because, in such circ.u.mstances, she needs rest and consideration more than pa.s.sion. But I wish men could know a little more than this, and understand that to enforce physical union when a woman's psychical and emotional nature does not desire it, is definitely and physically cruel. Woman is not a pa.s.sive instrument, and to treat her as such is to injure her.

Perhaps I may be forgiven for labouring this point because, in fact, misunderstanding here is so disastrous. Marriage, after all, is a relation into which the question of physical union enters, and if there is no equality of desire, marriage will be much less than it might be. Women are--idiotically--taught to believe that pa.s.sion is a characteristic of the depraved woman and of the normal man, who is shown by this fact to be on a lower spiritual level than (normal) woman. This senseless pride in what is merely a defect of temperament where it exists has poisoned the marital relations of many men and women, and has led women into marrying when they were temperamentally unfitted for such a relation, and quite unable to make anyone happy in it. Nor ought they to be too much blamed, since they are often unaware of what they ought to be prepared to give in marriage and firmly convinced that their preposterous ignorance is in some inexplicable way a virtue. Why it should be admirable, or even commonly honest, to undertake duties of whose nature you are ignorant, neither men nor women seem ever to have decided, and the illusion is beginning to pa.s.s. But it is still not understood that the woman who is not temperamentally as.e.xual may easily be made so by being forced when she is not ready, and physically hurt when a little patience and tenderness would have saved her. Forel, Havelock, Ellis and others have insisted on this, but their books are unfortunately not easily accessible to the general public; and something may be added to the more widely read productions of Dr. Stopes.[H] Not only the physiological but the psychological side of the problem has to be considered, and it would be hard to decide which is the more important or which the _vera causa_ of the other's reaction. Scientists may perhaps tell us some day: here I want only to point out that there is a spiritual factor in the case which needs at least to be recognized.