THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: BEING A RATHER COMPLETE SURVEY OF THE ENTIRE
SEXUAL SCENE
The sexual revolution began with Man’s discovery that he was not
attractive to Woman, as such. The lion had his mane, the peacock his
gorgeous plumage, but Man found himself in a three-button sack suit.
His masculine appearance not only failed to excite Woman, but in many
cases it only served to bore her. The result was that Man found it
necessary to develop attractive personal traits to offset his dull
appearance. He learned to say funny things. He learned to smoke, and
blow smoke rings. He learned to earn money. This would have been
a solution to his difficulty, but in the course of making himself
attractive to Woman by developing himself mentally, he inadvertently
became so intelligent an animal that he saw how comical the whole
situation was.
Thus, at the very start of the sexual revolution, Man faced one
very definite problem: in becoming mentally “aware,” he had become
intellectually critical, and had discovered that it was increasingly
difficult to make up his mind whether he really desired any one woman,
however capable he was of getting her. It was the heyday of monogamy,
and in order to contemplate marriage, it was necessary for a man to
decide on One Particular Woman. This he found next to impossible, for
the reason that he had unconsciously set up so many mental barriers and
hazards.
Let me mention a few.
(1) The fear that his fiancée might get fat inside of a few years. To
any mentally alert man, this thought was a strong deterrent. Quite
often the man met the girl’s parents. He would quickly size up her
mother and make a mental calculation as to how long it would be before
the daughter was in the same boat. Somehow, it took the bloom off
the romance. If he was not fortunate enough to meet the parents of the
young lady, he was quite apt to note things about her own conformation
that seemed prophetic. A slight thickness in the neck, a trace of
rotundity in the bosom, a touch too much ankle. In these portents he
found much discomfort, and was quite likely to call the engagement off.
[Illustration: “_The lion had his mane ... but man found himself in a
three-button sack suit._”]
(2) The use of a word, phrase, or punctuation mark by his fiancée that
annoyed him. In these early days of the sex awakening, it was not at
all uncommon to find examples of the girl’s using some slight phrase
which had a grating effect. It was often the case that the man was
literarily inclined—because literary inclinations were early found
to be advantageous in sex, almost as advantageous, in fact, as the
peacock’s tail—and if this was the case the man was doubly sensitive to
the curious little crudities, niceties, whimsies, and circumlocutions
which women were afflicted with. I am thinking at the moment of the
case of a young man who, in his junior year in college, had found the
girl he believed ideal for him to marry, and then one day learned,
quite by accident, that she was in the habit of using the word “Howdy”
as a form of salutation. He did not like “Howdy,” although he did not
know why. Days and nights he spent trying to reconcile himself to the
idea of it, weighing the young lady’s extreme beauty and affability
against her one flaw. In the end he decided he could not stomach it,
and broke the troth.
(3) Difference in height. If a man fell in love with a woman taller
than himself (which sometimes happened), he became morose from dwelling
on the objections to such an alliance. This particular situation
usually had a way of settling itself automatically: there were so many
reasons, real or imaginary, why the man felt that the marriage was
impossible, that just the mere business of thinking about them broke
him in health and he died, leaving a margin of several weeks before the
date of the wedding.
[Illustration: “_He would quickly size up the mother and make a mental
calculation as to how long it would be before the daughter was in
the same boat._”]
(4) The suspicion that if he waited twenty-four hours, or possibly
less, he would likely find a lady even more ideally suited to his
taste than his fiancée. Every man entertained such a suspicion.
Entertained it royally. He was greatly strengthened in his belief by
the fact that he kept catching a fleeting glimpse of this imaginary
person—in restaurants, in stores, in trains. To deny the possibility
of her existence would be, he felt, to do a grave injustice to her,
to himself, and to his fiancée. Man’s unflinching desire to give
himself and everybody else a square deal was the cause of much of his
disturbance. Man had become, you see, a thinking being. He had come
to know enough about permutations and combinations to realize that
with millions of Caucasian females to choose from, the chances of his
choosing the ideal mate were almost zero.
[Illustration: _Male Type (eastern seaboard). Definitely interested in,
but uncertain what to do about, the Female. To men of this type many
aspects of the Sexual Revolution never became clear at all._]
So matters went. Man, we have seen, had begun to develop himself so
that he would be attractive to Woman, and in doing so had made Woman of
doubtful attraction to _him_. He had become independent. He had become
critical. He had become scared. Sex was awakening and it was all Man
could do to keep from laughing.
Woman, on her part, saw dimly what was going on in the world. She saw
it through the sweet haze of Dream. She caught glimpses of it in the
mirror of her Narcissistic soul.[8] Woman was at the crossroads. She
had many ways open to her, but she chose one: _she chose to imitate
Man_. At a time when sex was in transition, she had the bad judgment
to begin a career of independence for herself, in direct imitation of
her well-meaning mate. She took up smoking. She began to earn money
(not much, but some). She drank. She subordinated domesticity to
individuality—of which she had very little. She attained to a certain
independence, a cringing independence, a wistful, half-regretful state.
Men and women both became slightly regretful: men regretted that they
had no purple tail to begin with, women that they had ever been fools
enough to go to work. Women now “understood life,” but life had been so
much more agreeable in its original mystery.
[8] This is the first mention in this article of Narcissism. You’ll
hear more about it, don’t worry.
And now we come to Sex.[9] Woman, observing that her mate went out
of his way to make himself entertaining, rightly surmised that sex
had something to do with it. From that she logically concluded that
sex was recreational rather than procreational. (The small, hardy
band of girls who failed to get this point were responsible for the
popularity of women’s field hockey in this country, 1911–1921.) As
though in a vision, the “right to be sexual” came to women. They fell
to with a will. For thousands of years they had been content merely
to be amiable, and now they were going to be sexual. The transition
from amiability to sexuality was revolutionary.[10] It presented a
terrific problem to Woman, because in acquiring and assuming the habits
that tended to give her an equality with Man, she discovered that she
necessarily became a good deal _like_ Man. The more she got like him,
the less he saw in her. (Or so he liked to think, anyway.) Just as
soon as she began to put her own sex on an even basis, she found that
he lost interest. Her essential Narcissism (pleasure of looking in
a mirror) was met by his Begonia-ism (concept of the potted plant).
Things got so that Woman spent _all_ her time admiring herself in
mirrors, and Man, discouraged, devoted himself quietly to raising
begonias, which are fairly easy to raise. Sex atrophied.
[9] Are you glad?
[10] Zaner claims it was also amusing.
[Illustration: “_Sex atrophied._”]
But, as I say, sex was in the transition stage. Woman soon began to
outgrow her Narcissism and was satisfied to snatch quick glances of
herself in make-shift mirrors, such as the backs of watches, the shiny
fenders of automobiles, plateglass windows, subway weighing machines,
and such. Convinced that sex was not sin, she set out joyously to study
it. How hard she studied has recently been apparent, even to persons
who read only a few books a year.
New York became the capital of the sexual revolution. It was
conveniently located, had a magnificent harbor,[11] a high mortality
rate, and some of the queerest-shaped apartments to be found anywhere.
There are apartments in New York in which one must step across an open
bathtub in going from the kitchen to the bedroom; any unusual layout
like that arouses sexual desire and brings people pouring into New York
from other cities. New York became the Mecca for young ladies from the
South and from the Middle West whose minds were not quite made up about
sexual freedom, but who thought that if they could once get to New York
and into an irregular apartment, the answer might come to them.
[11] New York has one of the finest harbors in the world.
Their mothers were against it.
“Now what can you get in New York that you can’t get right here at
home?” their mothers said.
“Concerts, new plays, and the opera,” the daughters invariably replied.
There has never, to my knowledge, been a case of a young lady telling
her mother that she wanted to go to New York because she was seeking
an outlet for her erotic eagerness. It was always concerts that she
wanted. Often it turned out to be concerts that she got.
When she arrived in New York and secured her unfurnished apartment
(usually in West Fourth Street), her mental elation was so great and
her activity in making parchment lamp shades so unabating that for the
first couple of weeks she let sex go. Women are notoriously apt to get
off the track; no man ever was diverted from the gratification of his
desires by a parchment lamp shade. At any rate, the young lady was
so tired at night she could hardly keep her eyes open, much less her
mind. Furthermore, she was beginning to have _Schmalhausen_ trouble.
_Schmalhausen_ trouble is a common ailment among girls in their
twenties. It usually attacks girls who have taken a small apartment
(_schmalhausen_) and are reading the behaviorism essays of Samuel D.
Schmalhausen. The effect of sitting within narrow walls and absorbing
a wide viewpoint breaks down their health. The pain that they suffer
during this period is caused by their discovery of the lyrical duality,
or two-sidedness, of life—a discovery that unbalances all sensitive
young ladies in whom sex cries for expression. Even in a New York
apartment there are two sides to everything, and this particularly
applies to a girl’s potential sexuality.[12]
[12] Girls with a bad case of Schmalhausen sometimes saw as many as
three sides to sex.
[Illustration: “_Furthermore, she was beginning to have Schmalhausen
trouble._”]
Let me explain this duality.
The very fact that the young lady had settled in the vicinity of
Sheridan Square indicates that there was a strong vein of poetry in
her. She saw life (and sex) through a lyrical haze which tended to
accentuate its beauty by softening its truths. The whole purpose and
scheme of poetry is to heighten the tenderness and essential goodness
of life by a musical elaboration of its traditional worth.[13] Well,
when the young lady allowed the lyrical possibilities of love to work
on her mind, it made her mad to remember how candid she had been the
night before in discussing contraception with the commercial artist
who lived downstairs. It grew to be a big question in her own mind,
just what her emancipation ought to consist of: whether it meant having
lemon skins and gin stoppers in the wash-basin and talking freely of
exhibitionism and voyeurism, or whether it meant being the recipient
of some overwhelmingly beautiful passion which her poetical soul still
prescribed but which she knew couldn’t exist because she was so widely
read. To stall for time she would make another lamp shade.
[13] See Tithridge’s “Poetry,” but don’t read it.
Days slipped by. Always there was conflict in her soul. She had
plunged into the “candor régime” whole-heartedly; she could enter a
roomful of people and say almost anything at all. She also went in for
nudity—another outlet for sex eagerness. She dallied in the bath, lay
around the apartment without any clothes on, appeared scantily clad
at her door when the laundryman called to collect, and week-ends went
swimming naked in the moonlight with other young people. (Incidentally,
when she saw what a man looked like without any clothes on, the old
_Schmalhausen_ trouble came back stronger than ever.)
By and by, because of this very uncertainty of soul, a kind of
orderliness of habit crept into her life. Unable to decide whether
sex was the poem she half believed it to be or the casual episode she
had schooled herself to think it was, she compromised by practically
giving sex the air. She now held a good job and was earning well.
Candor and nudity, with an occasional bit of exhibitionism, began
to satisfy her completely. She was growing older. The apartment was
nicely decorated now and teeming with lamp shades. She held some good
industrial stocks and had developed an ambition to write. She became
content to be literary rather than sexual. She became, in other words,
that most dangerous of all by-products of the Sexual Revolution—a
biologico-cultural type. She had a way of leading young men on into
exhilarating topics, and sitting with them in provocative attitudes,
and then putting on her hat and going quietly home to bed. In short,
New York was now home to this girl, this biologico-cultural lady,
and she was in a fair way to step placidly into a good old-fashioned
marriage when the right man came along.
And he usually did, the poor yap.