It is very difficult to approach the sex question and to treat it at
once in a clear and dignified manner. And yet, who can deny that it
furnishes the key to the solution of many of the enigmas and obscurities
of psychology?
Who can question that sex is one of the bases of temperament?
Nevertheless, the subject may be discussed permissibly in scientific and
very general terms, as by Professor Freud. What is unpardonable is any
attempt to bring it down to the sphere of the practical and concrete.
I am convinced that the repercussion of the sexual life is felt through
all the phenomena of consciousness.
According to Freud, an unsatisfied desire produces a series of obscure
movements in consciousness which eat at the soul as electricity is
generated in a storage battery, and this accumulation of psychic energy
must needs produce a disturbance in the nervous system.
Such nervous disturbances, which are of sexual origin, produced by the
strangulation of desires, shape our mentality.
What is the proper conduct for a man during the critical years between
the ages of fourteen and twenty-three? He should be chaste, the priests
will say, shutting their eyes with an hypocritical air. He can marry
afterwards and become a father.
A man who can be chaste without discomfort between fourteen and
twenty-three, is endowed with a most unusual temperament. And it is one
which is not very common at present. As a matter of fact, young men are
not chaste, and cannot be.
Society, as it is well aware of this, opens a little loophole to
sexuality, which is free from social embarrassment--the loophole of
prostitution.
As the bee-hive has its workers, society has its prostitutes.
After a few years of sexual life without the walls, passed in the
surrounding moats of prostitution, the normal man is prepared for
marriage, with its submission to social forms and to standards which are
clearly absurd.
There is no possibility of escaping this dilemma which has been decreed
by society.
The alternative is perversion or surrender.
To a man of means, who has money to spend, surrender is not very
difficult; he has but to follow the formula. Prostitution among the
upper classes does not offend the eye, and it reveals none of the sores
which deface prostitution as it is practised among the poor. Marriage,
too, does not sit heavily upon the rich. With the poor, however, shame
and surrender walk hand in hand.
To practise the baser forms of prostitution is to elbow all that is most
vile in society, and to sink to its level oneself. Then, to marry
afterwards without adequate means, is a continual act of self-abasement.
It is to be unable to maintain one's convictions, it is to be compelled
to fawn upon one's superiors, and this is more true in Spain than it is
elsewhere, as everything here must be obtained through personal
influence.
Suppose one does not submit? If you do not submit you are lost. You are
condemned irretrievably to perversions, to debility, to hysteria.
You will find yourself slinking about the other sex like a famished
wolf, you will live obsessed by lewd ideas, your mind will solace itself
with swindles and cheats wherewith to provide a solution of the riddle
of existence, you will become the mangy sheep that the shepherd sets
apart from the flock.
Ever since early youth, I have been clearly conscious of this dilemma,
and I have determined and said: "No; I choose the abnormal--give me
hysteria, but submission, never!"
So derangement and distortion have come to my mind.
If I could have followed my inclinations freely during those fruitful
years between fifteen and twenty-five, I should have been a serene
person, a little sensual, perhaps, and perhaps a little cynical, but I
should certainly not have become violent.
The morality of our social system has disturbed and upset me.
For this reason I hate it cordially, and I vent upon it in full measure,
as best I may, all the spleen I have to give.