and the main action of our little play continues. The time is “the
present” and the problem is “the future.” The children who are now in
the second grade will be called upon to bear the burden of a very long
period of reconstruction. America, their home, has been compared to an
exceedingly powerful and influential woman who is not very popular but
who must not be offended on account of her eminent social position. The
folk who live along our international Main Street are not very well
disposed towards a neighbour who holds all the mortgages and lives in
the only house that has managed to survive the recent catastrophe. It
will not be an easy thing to maintain the peace in the neurasthenic
community of the great post-war period. It has been suggested that the
Ten Commandments, when rightly applied, may help us through the coming
difficulties. We beg to suggest that a thorough knowledge of the past
will prove to be quite as useful as the Decalogue. We do not make this
statement hastily. Furthermore, we qualify it by the observation that
both History and the Decalogue will be only two of a great many other
remedies that will have to be applied if the world is to be set free
from its present nightmare of poison gas and high-velocity shells. But
we insist that History be included. And we do so upon the statement of
a learned and famous colleague who passed through a most disastrous
war and yet managed to keep a cool head. We mean Thucydides. In his
foreword to the History of the Peloponnesian War he wrote: “The absence
of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its
interest; but if it be judged by those inquirers who desire an exact
knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future,
which in the course of human things, must resemble, if it does not
reflect it, I shall be content.”
When we measure out achievements in the light of this ancient Greek
ideal, we have accomplished very little indeed. An enormous amount of
work has been done and much of it is excellent. The great wilderness
of the past has been explored with diligent care and the material
lies, carefully classified, in those literary museums which we call
libraries. But the public refuses to go in. No one has ever been able
to convince the man in the street that time employed upon historical
reading is not merely time wasted. He carries with him certain hazy
notions about a few names, Cæsar and Joan of Arc (since the war) and
Magna Charta and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He remembers
that Paul Revere took a ride, but whither and for what purpose he
neither knows nor cares to investigate. The historical tie which
binds him to the past and which alone can make him understand his own
position in relation to the future, is non-existent. Upon special
occasions the multitude is given the benefit of a grand historical
pyrotechnic display, paid for by the local Chamber of Commerce, and a
few disjointed facts flash by amidst the fine roar of rockets and the
blaring of a brass band. But this sort of historical evangelising has
as little value as the slapstick vespers which delight the congregation
of Billy Sunday’s circus tent.
We live in an age of patent medicines. The short-cut to success is the
modern _pons asinorum_ which leads to happiness. And remedies which
are “guaranteed to cure” are advertised down the highways and byways
of our economic and social world. But no such cure exists for the sad
neglect of an historical background. History can never be detached from
life. It will continue to reflect the current tendencies of our modern
world until that happy day when we shall discontinue the pursuit of a
non-essential greatness and devote our energies towards the acquisition
of those qualities of the spirit without which human existence (at its
best) resembles the proverbial dog-kennel.
For the coming of that day we must be as patient as Nature.
HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON
SEX
“The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.”
In one of the popular plays of last season, a melodrama toned up with
snatches of satire and farce, the wife was portrayed as a beaten dog
heeling her master after he has crushed her down across the table the
better to rowel off her nose. Not until the would-be mutilator was
finally disposed of by an untrammelled Mexican did the woman feel free
to go to her lover, and even then she took little or no satisfaction in
the venture. As for the lover, he had to be robbed of his pistol by the
husband and shot at, and then--the husband out of the way--threatened
by the bandit with the loss of the woman, before he felt free to take
her. The two New Englanders were made happy in spite of themselves--and
in accordance with the traditions or conventions of the audience.
To leave a husband for a lover is in theory un-American, unless the
husband gives a legal ground for divorce and the divorce is secured. In
several States cruelty is a legal ground, and so the conjugal fidelity
of the stage-heroine was perhaps overdrawn. But the feeling that she
was presumed to share with the audience--that the initiative towards
freedom in love should not come from her--is a characteristic trait
of American morality. If your husband is unrestrainedly a brute or a
villain, you may leave him, in fact it behooves you to leave him, but
if he is merely a bore, or perhaps a man you like well enough as a
friend, but only as a friend, you must stay on with him in an intimacy
where boredom readily becomes aversion and mere friendliness, disgust.
The fact that you do not love a person is no reason at all, in American
opinion, for not living as if you did.
This opinion or attitude is explicit in American divorce law. In
none of the States is divorce granted either by mutual consent or at
the desire, the overt desire, of either person. In fact collusion,
as mutual consent is called, is accounted a reason against granting
divorce, and desire for divorce on the part of one remains ineffectual
until the other has been forced into entertaining it. He or she must
be given due ground. Disinclination to intimacy is not of itself due
ground. You must express disinclination in a way so disagreeable that
he or she will want to get rid of you. The law sets a premium on being
hateful, declares indeed that in this case it is an indispensable
condition to not being miserable.
The grotesqueness, from either a social or psychological point of view,
would be too obvious to emphasize, if the implications of this attitude
towards divorce were not so significant of American attitudes at large
towards sex--attitudes of repression or deception. Of deception or
camouflage towards divorce there is one other conspicuous point I
should like to note. “Strictness of divorce” is commonly argued to be
protection of marriage for the sake of children, since brittle marriage
is destructive of the family life. It is safe to say that from no
contemporary discussion of divorce will this argument be omitted; and
it is equally safe to say that the rejoinder that divorce laws should
therefore discriminate between parents and non-parents will, by the
opponents of divorce, pass unheeded. That this distinction should be so
persistently ignored is accountable only, it seems to me, on the ground
of emotional self-deception. What else but a covert emotional attitude
could make tenable the irrationality, and what else is that attitude
but that joy in mating is of negligible value, that sex emotion, if not
a necessary evil, is at any rate a negligible good, deserving merely
of what surplus of attention may be available from the real business
of life? Indifference towards sex emotion is masked by concern for
offspring.
In France, we may note, this confusion between parenthood and mating
does not exist. The parental relation in both law and custom is highly
regulated, much more regulated than among English-speaking peoples,
but it is unlikely that it would be argued in France that mating and
parenthood were inseparable concepts. Unlikely, because the French
attitude towards sex differs so radically from the Anglo-Saxon.
To the French, as to many of the Continental peoples of Europe, sexual
interest is normally to be kept stimulated, neither covered over nor
suppressed. And in this case stimulation is seen to depend largely
upon the factor of interrelation. Sex-facts are to be related to other
facts of life, not rigidly or _a priori_, as in the American view that
mating is inseparable from parenthood, but fluently and realistically,
as life itself moves and finds expression. And sex-facts in European
opinion are to be interrelated in a philosophy of sex. Failure to make
these interrelations, together with the attitude of suppression, seem
to me to be the outstanding aspects of the characteristically American
attitude towards sex.
There is no need in this post-Freudian day of dwelling upon the effects
of suppression of sex instinct or impulse. Suppression leads, we are
told, either to sublimation, in which case it is diversion, rather
than suppression, or it leads to perversion or disease. Unfortunately
sex-pathology in the United States has been given little or no study,
statistically. We have no statistical data of health or disease in
relation to the expression or suppression of sex instinct, and no data
on the extent or the effects of homosexuality or of the direction
of the sex impulses towards self. Opinion therefore becomes merely
a matter of personal observation and conclusion, observation of
individuals or small groups. My own conclusion or guess in regard
to perversion in this country is that part of the commonly observed
spirit of isolation or antagonism between the sexes, and part of
the spirit of competition between individuals, are associated with
homosexual or masturbatory tendencies which get expressed in varying
degrees according to varying circumstances. More particularly the
lack of warmth in personal intercourse which makes alike for American
bad manners and, in the more intellectual circles, for cheerlessness
and aridity is due, I think, to failure of one kind or another in sex
relations. I mean cultural failure, not merely individual failure.
May not some such theory of sex failure account also for that herd
sense which is so familiar a part of Americanism, and which is not
incompatible with the type of self-seeking or pseudo-individualism
of which American individualism appears to be an expression? It is a
tenable hypothesis that sexually isolated individuals become dependent
upon the group for stimulus, whether of emotion or will, whereas
persons in normal sex relations, although they may contribute to the
group or co-operate with it, remain comparatively independent of it,
finding stimulus in sex and its sublimations.
If this theory is valid, we may expect to find a comparatively large
number of sex failures in those circles which are characterized by
what Everett Dean Martin has recently called crowd behaviour, reform
circles intolerant of other mindedness and obsessed by belief in the
paramountcy of their own dogma.
“_Leur printemps sans jeunesse exige des folies,
Leur sang brûlant leur dicte des propos amers,
L’émeute est un remède à la mélancolie,
Et nous aurions la paix si leurs yeux étaient clairs,
Ou leur femme jolie._”
Were a set of tests for sex failure or sex fulfilment applied to the
more outstanding propagandists of this country, likewise, of course,
for comparative purposes, to an adequate number of non-propagandists,
the results might be of considerable significance. I recommend the
undertaking to the National Research Council in co-operation with some
organization for social hygiene.
Meanwhile in what measure propagandism of various sorts may be a
perversion of sex or a sublimation remains speculative; and in applying
theory one should be thoroughly aware that from the day of Sappho and
before to the day of Elizabeth Blackwell and after, even to the Russian
Revolution, sex failure of one kind or another, the kind considered
at the time most despicable, has commonly been imputed to persons or
groups disapproved of on other grounds or reprobated. Some sublimation
of sex in the United States there must be, of course, not only, in
propaganda movements, but in other expressions of American culture, in
American art and letters and science, in philanthropy, in politics,
finance, and business. By and large, however, in all these cultural
expressions does one see any conspicuous measure of sex sublimation? Is
not the concern practical rather than devotional, a matter of getting
rather than giving, of self-advancement or family support rather than
of interest in ideas and their forms or in the values of taste or of
faith?
Interest in impersonal subjects in general is not an American trait.
Personal concrete terms are the terms commonly used. Americans, as
we say, are not given to abstract thought or philosophy. They are
interested in facts as facts, not as related to other facts. How expect
of Americans, therefore, that kind of curiosity about sex which leads
to a philosophy of sex? Sex curiosity in American life does not lead
past curiosity about isolated facts, and that means that it leads
not to philosophy but to gossip and pruriency. Not long ago I was
talking with a woman about a common acquaintance to whom I referred
as singularly free through sophistication and circumstance to please
any man she liked. “What do you mean? Have you heard any scandal about
her?” snapped out my companion, not at all interested in the general
reflection, but avid of information about illicit affairs.
Facts which are not held together through theory call for labels.
People who do not think in terms of relations are likely to be
insistent upon names. Labels or names for sex disposition or acts
are, as a matter of fact, very definite in the American vernacular.
“Engaged,” “attentive,” “devoted,” “a married man,” “a man of family,”
“a grass widow,” “a _good_ woman,” “a _bad_ woman”--there is no end
to such tags. Again, intimacy between a man and a woman is referred
definitely to the act of consummation, a sex relation is strictly
classified according to whether or not it is physically consummated.
In this attitude towards sex boundaries or captions may lie the
explanation, incidentally, of what is a constant puzzle to the European
visitor--the freedom of social intercourse allowed to the youth of
opposite sexes. Since consummation only constitutes sexual intimacy in
American opinion, and since consummation, it is assumed, is utterly
out of the question, why raise barriers between boys and girls? The
assumption that consummation is out of the question is, by and large,
correct, which is still another puzzle. To this some clue may be found,
I think, in our concluding discussion.
Fondness for captions and for the sort of classification that is so
likely to paralyze perception of the finer distinctions and to arrest
thought, are natural enough in a child, learning language and so
pressed upon by the multiplicity of phenomena that in self-protection
he must make rough classifications and remain unaware of much. The
old who are dying to life are also exclusive, and they, too, cling
to formulas. Is American culture in the matter of sex childish and
immature, as Americans imply when they refer to their “young country,”
or is the culture representative of the aged; are Americans born old,
as now and again a European critic asserts?
Such terms of age are figurative, of course, unless we take them in
a historical sense, meaning either that a new culture was developed
in this country--or rather that there were fresh developments of an
old culture--or that an old culture was introduced and maintained
without significant change. This is not the place to discuss the
cultural aspects of Colonial America, but it is important to bear in
mind in any discussion of merely contemporaneous sex attitudes in this
country the contributions of European, and more particularly, English
morality. Without recalling the traditions of early Christianity or
of English Puritanism, those attitudes of ignoring or suppressing
the satisfactions of the impulses of sex to which we have referred
were indeed incomprehensible and bewildering--mere psychological
interpretation seems inadequate. But viewed as consequences of the
sense of sin in connection with sex, which was a legacy from Paul
and his successors in English Puritanism, interpretation is less
difficult, and the American attitude toward sex becomes comparatively
intelligible--the attitude seen in divorce and in the melodramas, and
in the standardizing of sex relations, in accordance with that most
significant of Pauline dogmas that marriage is the lesser of two evils,
that it is better to marry than to burn. Without the key of Paul and of
the obscenities of the early Christian Fathers how explain the recent
legislation in Virginia making it a crime to pay attention to a married
man or woman, or such a sermon as was recently preached somewhere
in the Middle West urging a crusade against the practice of taking
another man’s wife in to dinner or dancing round dances? “At a dinner
of friends let every man take his own wife on his arm and walk in to
their seats side by side at the dinner table to the inspiring music
of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” urged the minister. As to dancing,
whenever a man is seen to put his arm around a woman who is not his
wife, the band should cease playing. I do not quote the words of the
latter injunction, as they are rather too indecent.
Turning from the historical back to the psychological point of view--in
one of those circles of cause and effect that are composed now of
cultural inheritance or tradition, now of psychological trend or
disposition--the American case of sex, whether a case of adolescence or
of senescence, may be said to present symptoms of arrested development.
Together with the non-realism of childish or senile formula, there is
here the kind of emotionalism which checks emotional vitality and which
is fed upon the sense of crisis; we may call it crisis-emotion. Life at
large, the sex life in particular, is presented as a series of crises
preceded and followed by a static condition, and in these conventional
times of crisis only, the times when the labels are being attached,
are the emotions aroused. In the intervals, in the stretches between
betrothal, marriage, birth, christening, or divorce, there is little or
no sense of change--none of the emotions that correspond to changing
relations and are expressions of personal adjustment. The emotions of
crisis are statutory, pre-determined, conventionalized; neither for
oneself nor for others do they make any demands upon imagination, or
insight, or spiritual concern.
Here in this psychology of crisis is the clue--before mentioned--to
an understanding of the freedom allowed our youth, of “bundling,”
as the Colonials termed it, or, in current phrase, “petting.” In
general, “keeping company” is accounted one kind of a relationship,
marriage, another--one characterized by courtship without consummation,
the other by consummation without courtship. Between the two kinds
of relationship there is no transition, it is assumed, except by
convention or ritual. So inrooted is this social attitude that the
young cannot escape adopting it, at least the very young to whom, at
any rate, uncritical conservatism seems to be natural. Indeed the taboo
on unritualized consummation partakes enough of the absolutism of the
taboo, shall we say, on incest, to preclude any risk of individual
youthful experimentation or venture across the boundary lines set by
the Elders.
Given these boundary lines, given a psychology of crisis, all too
readily the sex relations, in marriage or out, become stale, flat,
colourless, or of the nature of debauch, which is only another
aspect of crisis-psychology. Sex relations perforce become limited
to two conventions, marriage and prostitution. Prostitute or wife,
the conjugal or the disorderly house, these are the alternatives. In
formulaic crisis-psychology there may be no other station of emotional
experiment or range of emotional expression.
That a man should “sow his wild oats” before marriage, and after
marriage “settle down,” is becoming throughout the country a somewhat
archaic formula, at least in so far as wild oats means exposure to
venereal disease; but there has been no change, so far as I am aware,
in the attitude towards the second part of the formula on settling
down--in conjugal segregation. The married are as obtrusively married
as ever, and their attitude towards persons of the opposite sex as
dull and forbidding. Few “happily married” women but refer incessantly
in their conversation to their husband’s opinion or stand; and what
devoted husband will fail to mention his wife in one way or another
as a notice of his immunity against the appeal of sex in any degree
by any other woman? Shortly after the war, a certain American woman
of my acquaintance who was travelling in France found herself without
money and in danger of being put off her train before reaching Paris
and her banker’s. She found a fellow-countryman and told him her
predicament. He was quite willing to pay her fare; she was an American
and a woman, but she was informed firmly and repeatedly that her knight
was a married man, and besides, he was travelling with his business
partner. Soon after I heard this anecdote I happened to repeat it to a
Chicago lawyer who promptly joined in the laugh over the American man’s
timidity. “Still, a married man travelling can’t be too prudent,” he
finished off.
Circumspection towards women, in travel or elsewhere, or, better still,
indifference towards women, is the standardized attitude of American
husbands. In marriage, too, a relationship of status rather than of
attention to the fluctuations of personality, indifference to psychical
experience, is a not uncommon marital trait. American men in general,
as Europeans have noted, are peculiarly indifferent to the psychology
of women. They are also peculiarly sentimental about women, a trait
quite consistent with indifference or ignorance, but one which, in view
of American prostitution and the persistent exclusion of many women
from equal opportunities for education and for life, gives an ugly look
of hypocrisy to the trumpeters of American chivalry.
And yet subject the American concept of chivalry to a little scrutiny
and the taunt, at least of hypocrisy, will miss the mark. For the
concept is, both actually and historically, a part of the already
noted classification of women as more or less sequestered, on the one
hand, and unsequestered or loose on the other, as inexperienced and
over-experienced or, more accurately, partially over-experienced. In
this classification the claims of both classes of women are settled by
men on an economic basis, with a few sentimentalities about womanhood,
pure or impure, thrown in for good measure. The personality of the
woman a man feels that he is supporting, whether as wife or prostitute,
may, theoretically, be disregarded and, along with her personality, her
capacity for sexual response. Whether as a creature of sin or as an
object of chivalry, a woman becomes a depersonalized, and, sexually, an
unresponsive being.
People sometimes forget this when they discuss the relations between
men and women in this country, and especially the sexlessness or
coldness of American women. They forget it in arguing against the
feminizing of education, the theatre, literature, etc., meaning,
not that women run the schools or are market for the arts, but that
immature, sexless women are in these ways too much to the fore. In
part at least it is thanks to chivalry or to her “good and considerate
husband” that the American woman, the non-wage earner at least, does
not grow up, and that it is possible for so many women to marry without
having any but the social consequences of marriage in mind. One
surmises that there are numbers, very large numbers, of American women,
married as well as unmarried, who have felt either no stirring of sex
at all or at most only the generalized sex stir of pre-adolescence.
What proportion of women marry “for a home” or to escape from a home,
or a job, and what proportion marry for love? After marriage, with the
advent of children, what of these proportions?