Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant
and in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment
to life.
CHAPTER XLVIX. COMPETITION AND CO-OPERATION 107
Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and
the part which selfishness and unselfishness play in the
development of social life.
CHAPTER L. ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY 115
Discusses the idea of superior classes and races, and
whether there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.
CHAPTER LI. RULING CLASSES 119
Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained,
and what sanction it can claim.
CHAPTER LII. THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION 122
Discusses the series of changes through which human
society has passed.
CHAPTER LIII. INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION 126
Examines the process of evolution in industry and the
stage which it has so far reached.
CHAPTER LIV. THE CLASS STRUGGLE 132
Discusses history as a battle-ground between ruling and
subject classes, and the method and outcome of this
struggle.
CHAPTER LV. THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM 136
Shows how wealth is produced in modern society, and
the effect of this system upon the minds of the workers.
CHAPTER LVI. THE CAPITALIST PROCESS 142
How profits are made under the present industrial
system and what becomes of them.
CHAPTER LVII. HARD TIMES 145
Explains why capitalist prosperity is a spasmodic thing,
and why abundant production brings distress instead of
plenty.
CHAPTER LVIII. THE IRON RING 148
Analyzes further the profit system, which strangles production,
and makes true prosperity impossible.
CHAPTER LIX. FOREIGN MARKETS 151
Considers the efforts of capitalism to save itself by marketing
its surplus products abroad, and what results from
these efforts.
CHAPTER LX. CAPITALIST WAR 155
Shows how the competition for foreign markets leads
nations automatically into war.
CHAPTER LXI. THE POSSIBILITIES OF PRODUCTION 158
Shows how much wealth we could produce if we tried
and how we proved it when we had to.
CHAPTER LXII. THE COST OF COMPETITION 162
Discusses the losses of friction in our productive machine,
those which are obvious and those which are
hidden.
CHAPTER LXIII. SOCIALISM AND SYNDICALISM 166
Discusses the idea of the management of industry by the
state, and the idea of its management by the trade unions.
CHAPTER LXIV. COMMUNISM AND ANARCHISM 170
Considers the idea of goods owned in common, and the
idea of a society without compulsion, and how these
ideas have fared in Russia.
CHAPTER LXV. SOCIAL REVOLUTION 175
How the great change is coming in different industries,
and how we may prepare to meet it.
CHAPTER LXVI. CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION 179
Shall the workers buy out the capitalists? Can they
afford to do it, and what will be the price?
CHAPTER LXVII. EXPROPRIATING THE EXPROPRIATORS 183
Discusses the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its
chances for success in the United States.
CHAPTER LXVIII. THE PROBLEM OF THE LAND 188
Discusses the land values tax as a means of social readjustment,
and compares it with other programs.
CHAPTER LXIX. THE CONTROL OF CREDIT 192
Deals with money, the part it plays in the restriction of
industry, and may play in the freeing of industry.
CHAPTER LXX. THE CONTROL OF INDUSTRY 198
Discusses various programs for the change from industrial
autocracy to industrial democracy.
CHAPTER LXXI. THE NEW WORLD 202
Describes the co-operative commonwealth, beginning
with its money aspects; the standard wage and its variations.
CHAPTER LXXII. AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION 206
Discusses the land in the new world, and how we foster
co-operative farming and co-operative homes.
CHAPTER LXXIII. INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION 210
Discusses scientific, artistic, and religious activities, as
a superstructure built upon the foundation of the standard
wage.
CHAPTER LXXIV. MANKIND REMADE 215
Discusses human nature and its weaknesses, and what
happens to these in the new world.
PART THREE
THE BOOK OF LOVE
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE REALITY OF MARRIAGE
(Discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world, and their
relation to the ideal of monogamous love.)
Just as human beings through wrong religious beliefs torture one
another, and wreck their lives and happiness; just as through wrong
eating and other physical habits they make disease and misery for
themselves; just so they suffer and perish for lack of the most
elementary knowledge concerning the sex relationship. The difference is
that in the field of religious ideas it is now permissible to impart the
truth one possesses. If I tell you there is no devil, and that believing
this will not cause you to suffer in an eternity of sulphur and
brimstone, no one will be able to burn me at the stake, even though he
might like to do so. If I advise you that it is not harmful to eat
beefsteak on Friday, or to eat thoroughly cooked pork any day of the
week, neither the archbishops nor the rabbis nor the vegetarians will be
able to lock me in a dungeon. But if I should impart to you the simplest
and most necessary bit of knowledge concerning the facts of your sex
life--things which every man and woman must know if we are to stop
breeding imbecility and degeneracy in the world--then I should be
liable, under federal statutes, to pay a fine of $5,000, and to serve a
term of five years in a federal penitentiary. Scarcely a week passes
that I do not receive a letter from someone asking for information about
such matters; but I dare not answer the letters, because I know there
are agencies, maintained and paid by religious superstition, employing
spies to trap people into the breaking of this law.
I shall tell you here as much as I am permitted to tell, in the simplest
language and the most honest spirit. I believe that human beings are
meant to be happy on this earth, and to avoid misery and disease. I
believe that they are given the powers of intelligence in order to seek
the ways of happiness, and I believe that it is a worthy work to give
them the knowledge they need in order to find happiness.
At the outset of this Book of Love we are going to examine the existing
facts of the sex relationships of men and women in present-day society.
We shall discover that amid all the false and dishonest thinking of
mankind, there is nowhere more falsity and dishonesty than here. The
whole world is a gigantic conspiracy of "hush," and the orthodox and
respectable of the world are like worshippers of some god, who spend
their day-time burning incense before the altar, and in the night-time
steal the sacred jewels and devour the consecrated offerings. These
worshippers confront you with the question, do you believe in marriage;
and they make the assumption that the institution of marriage exists, or
at some time has existed in the world. But if you wish to do any sound
thinking about this subject, you must get one thing clear at the outset;
the institution of marriage is an ideal which has been preached and
taught, but which has never anywhere, in any society, at any stage of
human progress, actually existed as the general practice of mankind.
What has existed and still exists is a very different institution, which
I shall here describe as marriage-plus-prostitution.
By this statement I do not mean to deny that there are many women, and a
few men, who have been monogamous all their lives; nor that there are
many couples living together happily in monogamous marriage. What I mean
is that, considering society as a whole, wherever you find the
institution of marriage, you also find, co-existent therewith and
complementary thereto, the institution of prostitution. Of this double
arrangement one part is recognized, and written into the law; the other
part is hidden, and prohibited by law; but those who have to do with
enforcing the law all know that it exists, and practically all of them
consider it inevitable, and a great many derive income from it. So I
say: if you believe in marriage-plus-prostitution, that is your right;
but if marriage is what you believe in, then your task is to consider
such questions as these: Is marriage a possible thing? Can it ever
become the sex arrangement of any society? What are the forces which
have so far prevented it from prevailing, and how can these forces be
counteracted?
It is my belief that monogamous love is the most desirable of human sex
relationships, the most fruitful in happiness and spiritual development.
The laws and institutions of civilized society pretend to defend this
relationship, but the briefest study of the facts will convince anyone
that these laws and institutions are not really meant to protect
monogamous love. What they are is a device of the property-holding male
to secure his property rights to women, and more especially to secure
himself as to the paternity of his heirs. In primitive society, where
land and other sources of wealth were held in common, and sex monogamy
was unknown, there was no way to determine paternity, and no reason for
doing so. But under the system of private property and class privilege,
it is necessary for some one man to support a child, if it is to be
supported; and when a man has fought hard, and robbed hard, and traded
hard, and acquired wealth, he does not want to spend it in maintaining
another man's child. That he should let himself be fooled into doing so
is one of the greatest humiliations his fellowmen can imagine. If you
read Shakespeare's plays, and look up the meaning of old words, so as to
understand old witticisms and allusions, you will discover that this was
the stock jest of Shakespeare's time.
In order to protect himself from such ridicule, the man maintained in
ancient times his right to kill the faithless woman with cruel tortures.
He maintains today the right to deprive her of her children, and of all
share in his property, even though she may have helped to earn it. But
until quite recent times, the beginning of the revolt of women, there
was never any corresponding penalty for faithlessness in husbands. Under
the English law today, the husband may divorce his wife for infidelity,
but the wife must prove infidelity plus cruelty, and the courts have
held that the cruelty must consist in knocking her down. While I was in
England, the highest court rendered a decision that a man who brought
his mistress to his home and compelled his wife to wait upon her was not
committing "cruelty" in the meaning of the English law.
This is what is known as the "double standard," and the double standard
prevails everywhere under the system of marriage-plus-prostitution, and
proves that capitalist "monogamy" is not a spiritual ideal, but a matter
of class privilege. It is a breach of honor for the ruling class male to
tamper with the wife of his friend; it is frequently dangerous for him
to tamper with the young females of his own class; but it is in general
practice taken for granted that the young females of lower classes are
his legitimate prey. In England a man may have a marriage annulled, if
he can prove that the woman he married had what is called a "past"; but
everybody takes it for granted that the man has had a "past"; it is
covered by the polite phrase, "sowing his wild oats." Wherever among the
ruling class you find men bold enough to discuss the facts of the sex
order they have set up, you find the idea, expressed or implied, that
this "wild oats" is a necessary and inevitable part of this order, and
that without it the order would break down. The English philosopher,
Lecky, making an elaborate study of morals through the ages, speaks of
the prostitute in the following frank language:
"Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient
guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless
happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their
untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have
known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble
form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with
shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the
eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."
I invite you to study these sentences and understand them fully.
Remember that they are the opinion of the most learned historian of sex
customs who has ever written in English; a man whose authority is
recognized in our schools, whose books are in every college library.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky is not in any sense a revolutionist; he is
a conventional English scholar, an upholder of English law and order and
patriotism. He is not of my school of thought, but of those who now own
the world and run it. I quote him, because he tells in plain language
what kind of world they have made; I invite you to study his words, and
then judge my statement that the sex arrangement under which we live in
modern society is not monogamous love, but marriage-plus-prostitution.
It is my hope to point the way to a higher system. I should like to call
it marriage; but perhaps it would be more precise to call it
marriage-minus-prostitution. In working it out, we shall have to think
for ourselves, and discard all formulas. It is obvious that our
present-day religious creeds, ethical ideals, legal codes, and social
rewards and punishments have been powerless to protect marriage, or to
make it the rule in sex relationships. So we shall have to begin at the
beginning and find new reasons for monogamous love, a new basis of
marriage other than the protection of private property. We shall have to
inform ourselves as to the fundamental purposes of sex; we shall have to
ask ourselves: What are the factors which determine rightness and
wrongness in the sex relationship? What is love, and what ought it to
be? These questions we shall try to approach without any fixed ideas
whatever. We shall decide them by the same tests that we have used in
our thinking about God and immortality, health and disease. We shall
ask, not what our ancestors believed, not what God teaches us, not what
the law ordains, not what is "respectable," nor yet what is "advanced,"
according to the claim of modern sex revolutionists and "free lovers."
We shall ask ourselves, what are the facts. We shall ask, what can be
made to work in practice, what can justify itself by the tests of reason
and common sense.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARRIAGE
(Deals with the sex-relationship, its meaning and its history, the
stages of its development in human society.)
What, in the most elemental form, is sex? It is a difference of function
which makes it necessary for two organisms to take part in the
reproduction of the species. The purpose, or at any rate the effect, of
this sex difference is the mixing of characteristics and qualities. If
the sex relationship were unnecessary to reproduction, variations might
begin, and be propagated and carried to extremes in one line of
inheritance, without ever affecting the rest of the species. Very soon
there would be no species, or rather an infinity of them; each line of
descent would fly apart, and become a group all by itself. You have
perhaps heard people comment on the fact that blondes so frequently
prefer brunettes, and that tall men are apt to marry short women, and
vice versa. This is perhaps nature's way of keeping the type uniform, of
spreading qualities widely and testing them thoroughly. Nature is
continually trying out the powers of every individual in every species,
and by the process of sexual selection she chooses, for the reproduction
of the species, the individuals which are best fitted for survival.
This, of course, refers to nature, considered apart from man. In human
society, as I shall presently show, sexual selection has been distorted,
and partly suppressed.
Sex differentiation and sexual selection exist almost universally
throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, everywhere save in the
lowest forms of being. They take strange and startling forms, and like
everything else in nature manifest amazing ingenuity. People who wish to
prove this or that about human sex relations will advance arguments from
nature; but as a matter of fact we can learn nothing whatever from
nature, except her determination to preserve the products of her
activity and to keep them up to standard. Sometimes nature will give the
precedence in power, speed and beauty to the male, and sometimes to the
female. She is perfectly ruthless, and willing in the accomplishment of
her purpose to destroy the individuals of either sex. She will content
the most rabid feminist by causing the female spider to devour her mate
when his purpose has been accomplished; or by causing the male bee to
fall from his mating in the air, a disemboweled shell.
As for man, he has won his supremacy over nature by his greater power to
combine in groups; by his more intense gregarious, or herd instincts,
which enabled him to fight and destroy creatures which would have
exterminated him if he had fought them alone. So in primitive society
everywhere, we find that the individual is subordinated to the group,
and the "folkways" give but little heed to personal rights. Very
thorough investigations have been made into the life of primitive man in
many parts of the world, and the anthropologists are now arguing over
the exact meaning of the data. We shall not here attempt to decide among
them, but rest content with the statement that communism and tribal
ownership is a widespread social form among primitive man, so much so as
to suggest that it is an early stage in social evolution.
And this communism includes, not merely property, but sex. In the very
earliest days there was often no barrier whatever to the sex
relationship; not even between brothers and sisters, nor between parents
and children. In fact, we find savages who do not know that the sex
relationship has anything to do with procreation. But as knowledge
increases, sex "tabus" develop, some wise, and some foolish. From causes
not entirely clear, but which we discuss in Chapter XLVIII, there
gradually evolves a widespread form of sex relationship of primitive
man, the system of the "gens," as it is called. This is the Latin word
for family, but it does not mean family in the narrow sense of mother
and father and children, but in the broad sense of all those who have
blood relationship, however far removed--uncles and aunts and cousins,
as far as memory can trace. In primitive communism a man is not
permitted to enter into the sex relationship with a woman of the same
gens, but with all the women of some other gens. It is difficult for us
to imagine a society in which all the men named Jones would be married
to all the women named Smith; but that was the way whole races of
mankind lived for many thousands of years.
In that primitive communist society, the woman was generally the equal
of the man. It is true that she did the drudgery of the camp, but the
man, on the other hand, faced the hardships of battle and the chase on
land and sea. The woman was as big as the man, and except when
handicapped by pregnancy, as strong as the man; she was as much
respected, if not more so. Her children bore her name, and were under
her control, and she was accustomed to assert herself in all affairs of
the tribe. In Frederick O'Brien's "White Shadows in the South Seas," you
may read a comical story of a journey this traveler made into the
interior of one of the cannibal islands. Everywhere he was treated with
courtesy and hospitality, but was embarrassed by continual offers from
would-be wives. In one case a powerful cannibal lady, whose advances he
rejected, picked him up and proceeded to carry him off, and he was quite
helpless in her grasp; he might have been a cannibal husband today, if
it had not been for the intervention of his fellow travelers.
The basis of this sex equality under primitive communism is easy to
understand. All goods belonged to the tribe, and were shared alike
according to need. Children were the tribe's most precious possession;
therefore the woman suffered little handicap from having a child to bear
and feed. Primitive woman would bear her child by the roadside, and pick
it up in her arms, and continue her journey; and when she needed food,
she did not have to beg for it--if there was food for anyone, there was
food for her and her child. She did her share of the gathering and
preparing of food, because that was the habit and law of her being; she
had energies, and had never heard of the idea of not using them.
This primitive communism generally disappears as the tribe progresses.
We cannot be sure of all the stages of its disappearance, or of the
causes, but in a general way we can say that it gives way before the
spread of slavery. In the beginning primitive man does not have any
slaves, he does not have sufficient foresight or self-restraint for
that. When he kills his enemies in battle, he builds a fire and roasts
their flesh and eats them; and those whom he captures alive, he binds
fast and takes with him, to be sacrificed to his voodoo gods. But as he
comes to more settled ways of living, and as the tribe grows larger, it
occurs to the chiefs in battle that the captives would be glad to give
their labor in return for their lives, and that it would be convenient
to have some people to do the hard and dirty work. So gradually there
comes to be a class at the bottom of society, and another class at the
top. Those who capture the slaves and keep them at work lay claim to the
products of their labor--at first better weapons and personal
adornments, then separate homes for the chiefs and priests, separate
gardens, separate flocks and herds, and--what more natural?--separate
women.
This process becomes complete when the tribe settles down to
agriculture, and the ruling classes take possession of the land. When
once the land is privately owned, classes are fixed, and class
distinctions become the most prominent fact in society. And step by step
as this happens, we see women beaten down, from the position of the
cannibal lady, who could ask for the man she wanted and carry him off by
force if necessary, to the position of the modern woman, who is
physically weak, emotionally unstable, economically dependent, and
socially repressed. You may resent such phrases, but all you have to do
is to read the laws of civilized countries, written into the statute
books by men to define the rights and duties of women; you will see that
everywhere, before the recent feminist revolt, women were classified
under the law with children and imbeciles.
Maternity imposes on woman a heavy burden, and before the discovery of
birth control, a burden that is continuous. For nine months she carries
the child in her body, and then for a year or two she carries it in her
arms, or on her back; and by that time there is another child, and this
continues until she is broken down. Having this burden, she cannot
possibly compete with the unburdened male for the possession of
property. So wherever there is economic competition; wherever certain
individuals or classes in the tribe or group are allowed to seize and
hold the land; wherever the products of labor cease to be the community
property, and become private property, the objects of economic strife;
then inevitably and by natural process, woman comes to be placed among
those who cannot protect themselves--that is, among the children and the
imbeciles and the slaves. Of course, some children are well cared for,
and so are some imbeciles, and some slaves, and some women. But they are
cared for as a matter of favor, not as a matter of their own power. They
proceed no longer as the cannibal lady, but by adopting and cultivating
the slave virtues, by making themselves agreeable to their masters, by
flattering their masters' vanity and sensuality--in other words by
exercising what we are accustomed to call "feminine charm."
From early barbaric society up to the present day, we observe that there
are classes of women, just as there are classes of men. The position of
these classes changes within certain limits, but in broad outline the
conditions are fixed, and may be easily defined. There is, first of all,
the ruling class woman. She must have birth; she may or may not have
wealth, according as to whether the laws of that society or tribe permit
her to have possessions of her own, or to inherit anything from her
parents. If she has no wealth, then she will need beauty. She is the
woman who is selected by the ruling class man to bear his name and his
children, and to have charge of the household where these children are
reared, and trained for the inheriting of their father's wealth and the
carrying on of his position. This confers upon the ruling class woman
great dignity, and makes her a person of responsibility. She rules, not
merely over the slaves of the household, but over men of inferior social
classes, and in a few cases an exceptionally able woman has become a
queen, and ruled over men of her own class. This ruling class woman has
been known through all the ages by a special name, and the ways and
customs regarding her have been studied in an entertaining book, "The
Lady," by Emily James Putnam.
Next in privilege and position to the "lady" is the mistress, the woman
who is selected by the ruling class man, not primarily to bear his
children, but to entertain and divert him. She may, of course, bear
children also. In barbaric societies, and up to quite recent times, the
importance of the ruling class man was indicated by the number of
concubines he had, and the position of these women was hardly inferior
to that of the wife or queen. In the days of the French monarchy, the
king's mistress was frequently more important than the queen; she was a
woman of ability, maintaining her supremacy in the intrigues of the
court. In ancient Greek society, the "hetairae" were a recognized class,
and Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, was the most brilliant and most
conspicuous woman in Athens. In modern France, the position of the
mistress is recognized by the phrase "demi-monde," or half-world. The
American plutocracy has developed upon a superstructure of Puritanism,
and therefore, in America, hypocrisy is necessary. But in the great
cities of America, the vast majority of the ruling class men keep
mistresses before marriage, and a great many keep them afterwards; and
these mistresses are coming to be more and more openly flaunted, and to
acquire more and more of what is called "social position." It is
possible now in the "smart set" for a lady to accept the status of
mistress, delicately veiled, without losing caste thereby, and actresses
and other free lance women who got their start in life by taking the
position of mistress, are coming more and more to be recognized as
"ladies," and to be received into what are called the "best circles."
There remains to be considered the position of the lower class women. In
barbarous society these women were very little different from slaves.
They had no rights of their own, except such rights as their master man
chose to allow them for his own convenience. They were sold in marriage
by their parents, and they went where they were sold, and obeyed their
new master. They became his household drudges, and reserved their
affections for him; if they failed to do this, he stoned them to death,
or strangled them with a cord and tied them in a sack and threw them
into the river.
And, of course, the rights of the master man yielded to the rights of
men of higher classes. The king or nobleman could take any woman he
wished at any time, and he made laws to this effect and enforced them.
In feudal society the lord of the manor claimed the right of the first
night with the wives of his serfs; this was one of the ruling class
privileges which was abolished in the French revolution. Wherever the
French revolution did not succeed in affecting land tenure, the right of
the land owner to prey upon his tenant girls continues as a custom, even
though it is not written in the law, and would be denied by the
hypocritical. It prevails in Poland, as you may discover by reading
Sienkiewicz's "Whirlpools"; it prevails in England, as you may discover
from Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." You will find that it prevails
in every part of the world where women have poverty and men have wealth
and prestige, dress suits and automobiles. You will find it wherever
there are leisure class hotels, or colleges, or other gatherings of
ruling class young males. You will find it in the theatrical and moving
picture worlds. It is well understood in the theatrical world of
Broadway that the woman "star" in the profession gets her start in life
by becoming the mistress of a manager or "angel." In the moving picture
world of Southern California it is a recognized convention, known to
everyone familiar with the business, that a young girl parts with her
virtue in exchange for an important job.
CHAPTER XXX
SEX AND YOUNG AMERICA
(Discusses present-day sex arrangements, as they affect the future
generation.)
Our first task is to consider how people actually behave in the matter
of sex--as distinguished from the way they pretend to behave. The first
and most necessary step in the cure of any disease is a correct
diagnosis, and in this case we have not merely to make the diagnosis,
but to prove it; because the most conspicuous fact about our present
sex-arrangements is a mass of organized concealment. Not merely do
teachers and preachers for the most part suppress all mention of these
subjects; but the defenders of our present economic disorder are
accustomed to acclaim the private property regime as the only basis of
family life. So long as people hold such an idea, there is no use trying
to teach them anything on the subject. There is no use talking to them
about monogamous love, because all they understand is hypocrisy. In this
chapter, therefore, we shall proceed to hold up the mirror in front of
capitalist morality.
I pause and consider: Where shall I begin? At the top of society, or at
the bottom? With the city or the country? With the old or the young? I
think you care most of all about your boys and girls, so I am going to
tell you what is happening to the youth of America in these days of
triumphant reaction.
I have a son, about whom naturally I think a great deal; just now he is
a student at one of our state universities, and he wrote me the other
day: "I went to a dance, and believe me, father, if you knew what these
modern dances mean, you would write something about them." I know what
they mean. They have come to us straight from the brothels of the
Argentine, among the vilest haunts of vice in the world. Others have
come from the jungle, where they were natural. The poor creature of the
jungle has his sex-desire and nothing else; he is not troubled with
brains, he does not have a complicated social organism to build up and
protect, consequently he does not need what are called "morals." But we
civilized people need morals, and we are losing them, and our society is
disintegrating, going back to the howling and fighting and cannibalism
of the jungle.
Prof. William James, America's greatest psychologist, tells us that
going through the motions appropriate to an emotion automatically causes
that emotion to be felt. If you watch an actor preparing to rush on the
stage in an emotional scene, you will see him walking about, clenching
his fists, stamping his feet, making ferocious faces, "working himself
up." And now, what do you think is going on in the minds of young men
and women, while with their bodies they are going through procedures
which are nothing and can be nothing but imitations of sexual contact?
The parents, it appears, are ignorant and unsophisticated, and have left
it for the children to find out what these dances mean. In Rhode Island,
one of our oldest states, is Brown College, chosen by New England's
aristocracy for the education of its sons; and these boys go to social
affairs in the best homes in Providence, and they call them
"petting-parties." And here is what they write in their college paper:
"The modern social bud drinks, not too much, often, but enough. She
smokes unguardedly, swears considerably, and tells 'dirty' stories. All
in all, she is a most frivolous, passionate, sensation-seeking little
thing."
This statement, published in a college paper, causes a scandal, and a
newspaper reporter goes to interview the college boy who edits the
paper, and this boy talks. He tells how he met a lovely girl at a dance,
and his heart was thrilled with the rapture of young love. "Frankly,
between you and me, I was pretty smitten with this particular little
lady. Felt about her, don't you know, like a real guy feels about the
girl he could imagine himself married to. Thought she was too nice to
touch, almost; you know the grave sort of love affair a man always has
once in a lifetime. Well, we walked a bit, and I guess I didn't say
much, for a while. I felt plenty--respectfully--just the same. And as we
turned the corner of one of the buildings here, she grasped my hand.
Hers was trembling. 'Love and let love is my motto, dearie,' said this
seraph of my dreams; 'come, we're losing a lot of time getting started.'
That girl thought I was dead slow. She didn't know that just then I
imagined the great love of my life was just entering the door. It was
cruel the way she got down from the pedestal I had built for her."
Suppose I should ask you to name the influence that is having most to do
with shaping the thoughts of young America--what would you answer?
Undoubtedly, the moving pictures. It is from the "movies" that your
children learn what life is; if I can show you that a certain thing is
in the "movies," you can surely not deny that it is passing every day
and night into the hearts and minds of millions of our boys and girls.
Take a vote among the girls, what would they consider the most
delightful destiny in life; surely nine out of ten would answer, to
become a screen star, and pose before a world of admirers, and be paid a
million dollars a year. Make a test and see; and put that fact together
with the one I have already stated, that in order to get an important
job in the "movies," a girl must regularly and as a matter of course
part with her virtue.
You will be told, no doubt, that this is a slanderous statement, so let
me give you a little evidence. I happened within the past year to be in
the private office of a well known moving picture producer, a man who is
married, and takes care to tell you that he loves his wife. He was
producing a play, the heroine of which was supposed to be a daughter of
Puritan New England. To play this part he had engaged a chaste girl, and
as a result was in the midst of a queer trouble, which he poured out to
me. His "leading man" had refused to act with this girl, insisting that
no girl could act a part of love unless she had had passionate
experience; no such thing had ever been heard of in moving pictures
before. Likewise, the director agreed that no girl who is chaste could
act for the screen, and the producer asked my advice about it. Mr.
William Allen White, of Kansas, was present in the office, and
authorizes me to state that he substantiates this anecdote. We both
advised the producer to stand by the girl, and he did so; and the
picture went out, and proved to be what in trade parlance is termed a
"frost"; that is to say, your children didn't care for it, and it cost
the producer something like a hundred thousand dollars to make this
attempt to defy the conventions of the moving picture world.
I will tell you another story. I have a friend, a prominent man in Los
Angeles, who was appealed to by a young lady who wished to act in the
"movies." My friend introduced this young lady to a very prominent
screen actor, who in turn introduced her to one of the biggest producers
in America, one of the men whose "million dollar feature pictures" are
regularly exploited. The producer examined the young lady's figure, and
told her that she would "do"; he added, quite casually, and as a matter
of course, that she would be expected to "pay the price." The young lady
took exception to this proposition, and gave up the chance. She told my
friend about it, and he, being a man of the world, accustomed to dealing
with the foibles of his fellowmen, wrote a note to the actor, explaining
that inasmuch as this young lady had been socially introduced to him,
and by him socially introduced to the manager, she should not have been
expected to "pay the price." To this the actor answered that my friend
was correct, and he would see the manager about it. The manager conceded
the point, and the young lady got her chance in the "movies" and made
good without "paying the price." This story tells you all you need to
know about the difference in sex ethics that society applies to the
"lady" and to the daughter of the common people.
You know, of course, what is the stock theme of all moving pictures--the
virtuous daughter of the people, who resists all temptations, and is
finally rescued from her would-be seducer by the strong and sturdy arm
of a male doll. Could one ask a more perfect illustration of capitalist
hypocrisy than the fact that the girl who plays this role is required to
pay with her virtue for the privilege of playing it! And if you know
anything about young girls, you can watch her playing it on the screen,
and see from her every gesture that what I am telling you is true. My
wife knows young girls, and I took her, the other day, to see a moving
picture. She said: "I have solved a problem. When I come home on the
street-cars, it happens that I ride with a lot of young girls from the
high school. I have been watching them, and I couldn't imagine what was
the matter with them. All simple, girlish straightforwardness is gone
out of them; they are making eyes, in the strangest manner--and at
nobody; just practicing, apparently. They wear yearning facial
expressions; when they start to walk, they do not walk, but writhe and
wiggle. I thought there must be some nervous eye and lip disease got
abroad in the school. But now, when I go to a moving picture, I discover
what it means. They are imitating the 'stars' on the screen!"
In these pictures, you know, there are "ingenues," young girls engaged
in making a happy ending to the story by capturing a rich lover; and
then there are "vamps," engaged in seducing young men, or breaking up
some happy home. In old-style melodrama it was possible to tell the
"ingenue" from the "vamps"; the former would trip lightly, and glance
coyly out of the corners of her eyes, while the "vamp" moved with slow,
languished writhing, blinking heavy-lidded, sinister eyes. But
now-a-days the "vamps" have learned to pose as "ingenues," and the
"ingenues" are as vicious as the "vamps"; they both make the same
glances, and culminate in the same sensual swoon. It is all sex, and
nothing else--except revolvers and fighting, and wild rushing about.
And then, too, there are the musical comedies, made wholly out of sex,
being known as "girl shows," or more frankly still, "leg shows." A row
of half naked women, prancing and gyrating on the stage, and in front of
them rows of bald-headed old men, gazing at them greedily; also college
boys, or boys too imbecile to get through college, sending in their
cards with boxes of costly flowers. You will be shocked as you read my
plain statements of fact, but if you are the average American, you will
take your family to a musical show which has come straight from the
brothels of Paris, every allusion of which is obscene. I remember once
being in a small town in the South, when one of these "road shows"
arrived from New York, and I realized that this institution was simply a
traveling house of ill fame; the whole male portion of the town was
a-quiver with excitement, a mixture of lust and fear.
I live in Southern California, one of many places in America where the
idle rich gather for their diversion. The country is dotted with
palatial hotels, and a golden flood of pleasure-seekers come in every
winter. I have talked with some of the college boys in this part of the
country, and also with teachers who try to save the boys; they report
these "swell" hotels as hot-beds of vice, haunted by married women with
automobiles, and nothing to do, who wish to go into the canyons for
sexual riots. Even elderly women, white-haired women, old enough to be
your grandmother! I have had them pointed out to me in these hotels,
their cheeks and lips covered with rouge, with pink silk tights on their
calves, and nothing else almost up to their knees and nothing at all
half way down their backs. These old women seek to prey on boys, wanting
their youth, and being willing to lavish money upon them. They are
preying on your boys--you prosperous business men, who have preached the
gospel of "each for himself," and are proud of your skill to prey upon
society. You heap up your fortunes, and call it success, and are secure
and happy. You have made your children safe against want, you think; but
how are you going to make them safe against the "vamps" who prey upon
the overwhelming excitements of youth, and betray your sons before your
very eyes--teaching them lust in their youth, so that love may never be
born in their stunted hearts? All the haunts of "gilded vice" are
thriving, and somebody's boy is paying the interest on the capital, to
say nothing of paying the police.
Many years ago I paid a call upon Anthony Comstock, head of the Society
for the Prevention of Vice. Comstock was an old-style Puritan, and many
insist that he was likewise an old-style grafter. However that may be,
he had a collection of the literature of pornography which would cause
any man to hesitate in condemning his activities. There is a vast
traffic in this kind of thing; it is sold by pack-peddlers all over the
country, and it is sold in little shops in the neighborhood of public
schools. You may be sure that in your school there are some boys who
know where to get it, even though they will not tell what they know. I
will describe just one piece that a school boy brought to me, a
catalogue of obscene literature, for sale in Spain, and to be ordered
wholesale. You know how men with wares to sell will expend their
imaginations and exhaust their vocabulary in describing to you the
charms of each particular article for sale. Here was a catalogue of one
or two hundred pages, listing thousands of items, pictures, pamphlets
and books, and various implements of vice, all set forth in that
imitation ecstasy of department stores and seed catalogues: here was
"something neat," here was a "fancy one," this one was "a peach," and
that one was "a winner."
When I was a lad, I was tramping in the Adirondack mountains and was
picked up by an itinerant photographer. We rode all day together, and he
became friendly, and showed me some obscene pictures. Presently he
discovered that he was dealing with a young moralist, and apparently it
was the first time he had ever had that experience; he talked honestly,
and we became friends on a different basis. This man had a wife and
children at home, but he traveled all over the mountains, and was like
the sailor with a girl in every port. Also he was thoroughly familiar
with all forms of unnatural vice, and took this also as a matter of
course, and spread it on his journeys.
The other day I read a statement by a prominent physician in New York;
he had been talking with a police captain, and had asked him to state
what in his opinion was the most significant development in the social
life of New York. The answer was, "The spread of male prostitution."
Here is a subject to which I have to admit my courage is unequal. I
cannot repeat the jokes which I have heard young men tell about these
matters, and about the attitude of the police to them. Suffice it to say
that these hideous forms of vice are now the commonplace of the
under-world of all our great cities. The other day a friend of mine was
talking with a prostitute who had left a high-class resort, where the
price charged was ten dollars, and gone to live in a "fifty-cent house,"
frequented by sailors. She was asked the reason, and her explanation
was, "The sailors are natural." Dr. William J. Robinson has written in
his magazine an account of the haunts in Berlin which are frequented by
the victims of unnatural vice, there allowed to meet openly and to
solicit. Frank Harris, in his "Life of Oscar Wilde," tells how when that
scandal was at its height, and further exposure threatened, swarms of
the most prominent men in England suddenly discovered that it was
advisable for them to travel on the Continent. The great public schools
of England are rotten with these practices; the younger boys learn them
from the older ones, and are victims all the rest of their lives. And
the corruption is creeping through our own social body--and you think
that all you have to do is not to know about it!
My friend Floyd Dell, reading this manuscript, insists that this chapter
and the one following are too severe. In case others should agree with
him, I quote two newspaper items which appear while I am reading the
proofs. The first is from an interview with H. Gordon Selfridge, the
London merchant, telling his impressions of America. He tells about the
"flappers," and then about the "shifters."
"The other is the newly exploited 'shifters.' The 'shifters' are an
organization of mushroom growth among high school girls and boys which
is spreading through the eastern States and winning converts among
youngsters. It is described as the 'flapper Ku Klux,' and its emblem, if
worn by a girl, according to high school teachers and children's society
leaders who oppose it, to be nothing more nor less than an invitation to
be kissed.
"To call it an organization even is exaggeration, for the 'shifters' are
better described as a secret understanding without any responsible head.
"From being a seemingly harmless group whose emblem was originally a
brass paper clip fastened in the coat lapel it has developed by rapid
strides. Manufacturers of emblems are coining money by the sale of
hands, palm outstretched. The significance is take what you want or, as
the motto of the order says, 'be a good fellow; get something for
nothing.' One of the principles is to 'do' one's parents, referred to as
'they.'"
The second item is an Associated Press despatch:
"ST. LOUIS, March 10.--In reiterating his statement that a girls' and a
boys' secret organization requiring that all applicants must have
violated the moral code before admission was granted, existed in a local
high school, Victor J. Miller, president of the Board of Police
Commissioners, tonight named the Soldan High School as the one in which
the alleged immoral conditions exist. The school is attended largely by
children of the wealthy West End citizens.
CHAPTER XXXI
SEX AND THE "SMART SET"
(Portrays the moral customs of those who set the fashion in our
present-day world.)
We have discussed what is happening to our young people; let us next
consider what our mature people are doing. Having mentioned conditions
in England, I will give a glimpse of London "high life" two years before
the war.
As a visiting writer, I was invited to luncheon at the home of a woman
novelist, whose books at that time were widely read both in her country
and here. Present at the luncheon was a prominent publisher, who I
afterwards learned was the lady's lover; also the lady's grown and
married son. The publisher looked like a buxom hunting squire, but the
lady told me that he was very unhappy, because his wife would not
divorce him. The lady had just come from a week-end party at the home of
an earl, who at this moment occupies one of the highest posts in the
gift of the British Empire. Things had gone comically wrong at this
country house party, she said, because the hostess had failed to
remember that Lord So-and-so was at present living with Lady
Somebody-else. One of the duties of hostesses at house parties, it
appears, is to know who is living with whom, in order that they may be
put in connecting rooms. In this case his Lordship had been grouchy, and
everybody's pleasure had been spoiled.
This produced a discussion of the subject of marriage, and the son
remarked that marriage was like an old slipper; you wore it, because you
had got used to it, but you did not talk about it, because it was
unimportant and stupid. I went away, and happened to mention these
matters to a friend, who had met this woman novelist in Nice. The
novelist had there, in a group of people, been introduced to a young
girl who was suffering from neurasthenia. "My dear," said the novelist,
affectionately, "what you need is to have an illegitimate baby."
This, you will say, is the "old world," and you always knew that it was
corrupt. If so, let me tell you a few things that I have seen among the
"upper circles" of our own great and virtuous democracy. My first
acquaintance with New York "society" came after the publication of "The
Jungle." As the author of that book I was a sensation, almost as much so
as if I had won the heavy-weight championship of the world. Out of
curiosity I accepted an invitation for a weekend amid what is called the
"hunting set" of Long Island. Here was a gorgeous palace with many
tapestries, and soft-footed servants, and decanters and cocktails at
every stage of one's journey about the place, like coaling stations on
the trade routes of the British Empire. One of the first sights that
caught my young eye was a large and stately lady in semi-undress,
smoking a big black cigar. If I were to mention her name, every
newspaper reader in America would know her; and before I had been
introduced to her, I heard two young men in evening dress make an
obscene remark about her, and what she was waiting for that evening.
I discovered quickly that, while there was a great deal of sex among
these people, there was very little love. There was principally a wish
to score cleverly and subtly at the expense of another person's
feelings. It is called the "smart set," you understand, and I will give
you an idea of how "smart" it is. I was walking down a passage with a
lady, and on a couch sat another lady, side by side with a certain very
famous lawyer, whose golden eloquence you have probably listened to from
platforms, and whom for the purpose of this anecdote I will name Jones.
Mr. Jones and the lady on the sofa were sitting very close together, and
my companion, with a bright smile over her shoulder, called out: "Be
careful, Mary; you'll be scattering a lot of little Joneses around here
if you don't watch out!" Quite "continental," you perceive; and a long
way from the Puritanism of our ancestors!
From there I went to the billiard-room, and observed a young man of
fashion trying to play billiards when he was half drunk. It was a funny
spectacle, and they took away his cigarette by force, for fear he would
drop it on the cloth of the billiard table. Pretty soon he was telling
about a racing meet, and an orgy with negro women in a stable. Therefore
I returned to where the ladies were gathered, and one middle-aged
matron, who had read widely, including some of my books, engaged me in
serious conversation. I came later on to know her rather well, and she
told me her views of love; the source of all the sex troubles of
humanity was that they took the relationship seriously. Modern
discoveries made it unnecessary to attach importance to it. She herself,
acting upon this theory, probably had had relations with--my friends,
reading the proofs of this book, beg me to omit the number of men,
because you would not believe me!
You may argue that this is not typical; say that I fell into the
clutches of some particular group of degenerates. All I can tell you is
that these people are as "socially prominent" as any in New York City. I
will say furthermore that I have sat in the home of the best known
corporation lawyer in America, who was paid a million dollars to
organize the steel trust--the late James B. Dill, at that time a member
of the Court of Appeals of New Jersey--and have heard him "muck-rake"
his business friends by the hour with stories of that sort. I have heard
him tell of the "steel crowd" hiring a trolley car and a load of
prostitutes and champagne, and taking an all-night trip from one city to
another, smashing up both the car and the prostitutes. I have heard him
tell of sitting on the deck of a Sound steamer, and overhearing two of
his Wall Street associates and their wives arranging to trade partners
for the night.
I have mentioned a lady who had a great many lovers. Once in the
dining-room of a club on Fifth Avenue, commonly known as "the
Millionaires'," a companion pointed out various people, many of whom I
had read about in the newspapers, and told me funny stories about them.
"See that old boy with a note-book," said my host. "That is Jacob
So-and-so, and he is entering up the cost of his lunch. He keeps
accounts of everything, even of his women. He told me he had had over a
thousand, and they had cost him over a million."
It is impossible to say what is the most terrible thing in capitalist
society, but among the most terrible are assuredly the old men. The
richest and most powerful banker in America was in his sex habits the
merry jest of New York society. He took toward women the same attitude
as King Edward VII; if he wanted one, he went up and asked for her, and
it made no difference who she was, or where she was. This man's personal
living expenses were five thousand dollars a day, and all women
understood that they might have anything within reason.
When I was a boy, living in New York, there was a certain aged
money-lender about whom one read something in the newspapers almost
every day. He was a prominent figure, because he was worth eighty
millions, yet wore an old, rusty black suit, and saved every penny.
Every now and then you would read in the paper how some woman had been
arrested for attempting to blackmail him in his office. It seemed
puzzling, because you wouldn't think of him as a likely subject for
blackmail. Some years later I met Dorothy Richardson, author of "The
Long Day," a very fine book which has been undeservedly forgotten. Miss
Richardson had been a reporter for the New York _Herald_, and had been
sent to interview this old money-lender. She was ushered into his
private office, and as soon as the attendant had gone out and closed the
door, the old man came up, and without a word of preliminaries grabbed
her in his arms like a gorilla. She fought and scratched, and got out,
and was wise enough to say nothing about it; therefore there was nothing
published about another attempt to blackmail the aged money-lender!
What this means is that men of unlimited means live lives of unbridled
lust, and then in their old age they are helpless victims of their own
impulses. There was a certain enormously wealthy United States Senator
from West Virginia, who came very near being Vice President of the
United States. This doddering old man would go about the streets of
Washington with a couple of very decorous and carefully trained
attendants; and whenever an attractive young woman would pass on the
street, or when one would approach the Senator, these two attendants
would quietly slip their arms into his and hold him fast. They would do
this so that the ordinary person would not suspect what was going on,
but would think the old man was being supported.
You do not have to take these things on my word; the newspapers are full
of them all the time, and they are proven in court. Just now as I write,
the president of the most powerful bank in America is claiming in court
that his children are not his own, but that their father is an Indian
guide. His wife, on the other hand, is accusing the banker of having
played the role of husband to several other women. He would take these
women traveling on his yacht, which, quaintly enough, was termed the
"Modesty."
Also the papers have been full of the "Hamon case." Here is a wealthy
man, Republican National Committeeman from Oklahoma, who is about to go
to Washington to advise our new President whom to appoint to office from
that state. Before he goes, he casts off his mistress, and she shoots
him. She was his secretary, it appears, and helped him to make his
fortune; she has made many friends, and a million dollars is spent to
save her life. The prosecuting attorney calls her a "painted snake," and
accuses her of having sat week after week "displaying to the jury
twenty-four inches of silk stockinged shin-bone." The jury, apparently
unable to withstand this allurement, acquits the woman, and she
announces that she intends to bring suit under the man's will to get his
money! Also, she is going into the "movies," and tells us that it is to
be "for educational purposes." Everything in our capitalist society must
be "educational," you understand. It was P. T. Barnum who discovered
that the American people would flock to look at a five-legged calf, if
it was presented as "educational."
The moving pictures and the theatres are the honey-pots which gather the
feminine beauty and youthful charm of our country for the convenience of
rich men's lust. These girls swarm in the theatrical agencies, and in
the artists' studios; they starve for a while, and finally they yield.
In every great city there are thousands of men of wealth, whose only
occupation is to prey upon such girls. I know a certain theatrical
manager, the most famous in the United States, a sensual, stout little
Jew. He is a man of culture and subtle insight, and in the course of his
conversation he described to me, quite casually and as a matter of
course, the charm of deflowering a virgin. Nothing could equal that
sensation; the first time was the last.
Many years ago there was a horrible scandal in New York. The most famous
architect in America was murdered, and the newspapers probed into his
life, and it was revealed to us that many of the most famous artists and
men about town in New York maintained elaborate studios, equipped with
every luxury, all the paraphernalia of all the vices of the ages; and
through these places there flowed an endless stream of beautiful young
girls. In every large city in America you will find an "athletic club,"
and if you go there and listen to the gossip, you discover that there
are scores of idle rich men with automobiles and private apartments, and
a staff of procurers used in preying, not merely upon young girls, but
also upon young boys. And these are not merely the children of the poor,
they are the children of all but the rich and powerful. In the "movies"
you see pictures of girls lured into automobiles, and carried out into
the country, or seduced by means of "knock-out drops," and you think
this is just "melodrama"; but it is happening all the time. In every big
city of our country the police know that hundreds of young girls
disappear every year. At a recent convention of police chiefs in
Washington, it was stated, from police records, that sixty thousand
girls disappear every year in the United States, leaving no trace.
Unless the parents happen to be in position to make a fuss, not even the
names of the girls are published in the newspapers. I do not ask you to
believe such things on my word; believe District Attorney Sims of
Chicago, who made the most thorough study of this subject ever made in
America, and wrote:
"When a white slave is sold and landed in a house or dive she becomes a
prisoner.... In each of these places is a room having but one door, to
which the keeper holds the key. Here are locked all the street clothes,
shoes and ordinary apparel.... The finery provided for the girls is of a
nature to make their appearance on the street impossible. Then in
addition to this handicap, the girl is placed at once in debt to the
keeper for a wardrobe.... She cannot escape while she is in debt, and
she can never get out of debt. Not many of the women in this class
expect to live more than ten years--perhaps the average is less. Many
die painful deaths by disease, many by consumption, but it is hardly
beyond the truth to say that suicide is their general expectation."
CHAPTER XXXII
SEX AND THE POOR
(Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and the
diseases which result from it.)
It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, without drawing
the poor after them; and in addition to this, the poor have their own
evil instincts, which fester in neglect. There were several hundred
thousand dark rooms, that is rooms without light or ventilation, in New
York City before the war. Now the country is reported to be short a
million homes, and in New York City working girls are sleeping six or
eight in a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and
children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, and the
world moves back to that primitive communism, in which incest is an
everyday affair, and little children learn all the vices there are. I
have in my hand a pamphlet by a physician, in charge of a hospital in
New York, who in fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who
have been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months! I have
another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who discusses the problem of
the thousands of deserted wives, most of them with children, many with
children yet unborn. As I write, there are millions of men out of work
in our country, and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to
the road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket
stiffs"; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the more
prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality there will
inevitably be.
Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. Many years ago I
visited the mill towns of New England, "she-towns" they are called, and
one of the young fellows said to me that you could buy a girl there for
the price of a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have previously
referred, and see how our working girls live. Dorothy Richardson
describes her room-mate, who read cheap novels which she found in the
gutter weeklies. She read them over and over; when she had got to the
bottom of the pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that
she had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richardson happened
to be groping in a corner of a closet, and came upon a great pile of
bottles, and examined them, and was made sick with horror--abortion
mixtures.
Dr. William J. Robinson, an authority on the subject, estimates that
there are one million abortions in the United States every year. Some of
these are accidental, caused by venereal disease, but the vast majority
are deliberate acts, crimes under the law, murder of human life. Dr.
Robinson also estimates, from the many thousands of cases which come to
him, that ninety-five per cent of all men have at some time practiced
self-abuse. He is a strenuous opponent of what he calls "hysteria" on
the subject of venereal disease, and insists that its prevalence is
exaggerated; that instead of one person in ten being syphilitic, as is
commonly stated, the proportion is only one in twenty. He insists that
the percentage of persons having had gonorrhea is only twenty-five per
cent, instead of seventy-five or eighty-five. I find that other
authorities generally agree in the statement that fifty per cent of
young men become infected with some venereal disease before they reach
the age of thirty. The Committee of Seven in New York estimated in 1903
that there were two hundred thousand cases of syphilis in the city, and
eight hundred thousand of gonorrhea. There were villages in France
before the war in which twenty-five per cent of the inhabitants were
syphilitic, and in Russia there were towns in which it was said that
every person was syphilitic. We may safely say that these latter are the
only towns in Europe in which there was not an enormous increase of this
disease during and since the war.
What are the consequences of these diseases? The consequences are
frightful suffering, not merely to persons guilty of immorality, but to
innocent persons. Dr. Morrow, generally recognized as the leading
authority on this subject, estimates that ten per cent of all wives are
infected with venereal disease by their husbands; he estimates that
thirty per cent of all the infected women in New York were wives who had
got the disease from their husbands. It is estimated that thirty per
cent of all the births, where either parent has syphilis, result in
abortions. It is estimated that fifty per cent of childlessness in
marriage is caused by gonorrhea, and twenty-five per cent of all
existing blindness. In Germany, before the war, there were thirty
thousand persons born blind from this cause. It is estimated that
ninety-five per cent of all abdominal operations performed upon women
are due to gonorrhea. And any of these horrors may fall upon persons who
lead lives of the strictest chastity. There was a case reported in
Germany of 236 children who contracted venereal disease from swimming in
a public bath.
All these things are products of our system of
marriage-plus-prostitution. They are all part of that system, and no
study of the system is complete without them. Everywhere throughout
modern civilization prostitution is an enormous and lucrative industry.
In New York it is estimated to give employment to two hundred thousand
women, to say nothing of the managers, and the runners, and the men who
live off the women. There are thousands of resorts, large and small,
high-priced and cheap, and the police know all about it, and derive a
handsome income from it. And you find it the same in every great city of
the world; in every port where sailors land, or every place where crowds
of men are expected. If there is to be a football game, or a political
convention, the managers of the industry know about it, and while they
may never have heard the libel that Socialism preaches sexual license,
they all know that capitalism practices it, and they provide the
necessary means. In the United States there are estimated to be a half a
million prostitutes, counting the inmates of houses alone.
During the late war, at the army bases in France, the British government
maintained official brothels; but if you published anything about this
in England, you ran a chance of having your paper suppressed. During the
occupation of the Rhine country, the French sent in negro troops,
savages from the heart of Africa, whose custom it is to cut off the ears
of their enemies in battle; and the French army compelled the German
population to supply white women for these troops. I have quoted in "The
Brass Check" a pious editorial from the Los Angeles _Times_, bidding the
mothers of America be happy, because "our boys in France" were safe in
the protecting arms of the Y. M. C. A. and the Knights of Columbus. I
dared not publish at this time a passage which I had clipped from the
London _Clarion_, in which A. M. Thompson told how he watched the
"doughboys" in the cafes of Paris, with a girl on each knee, and a
glass of wine in each hand.
I will add one little anecdote, giving you a glimpse of the sex
conventions of war. The American army made desperate efforts to keep
down venereal disease, and required all men to report to their
regimental surgeon immediately after having had sex relations. Our army
moved into Coblentz, and the regulations strictly forbade any
fraternizing with the inhabitants. But immediately it was discovered
that there was an increase of disease, and investigation was made, and
revealed that men had been ceasing to report to the surgeons, because
they were afraid of being punished for having "fraternized with the
enemy." So a new order was issued, providing that having sexual
intercourse would not be considered as "fraternizing." I do not know any
better way to distinguish my ideal of morality from the military ideal,
than to say that according to my understanding of it, the sex
relationship should always and everywhere imply and include
"fraternizing."
Finally, in concluding this picture of our present-day sex arrangements,
there is a brief word to be said about divorce. In the year 1916, the
last statistics available as I write, there were just over a million
marriages in the United States, and there were over one hundred and
twelve thousand divorces. This would indicate that one marriage in every
nine resulted in shipwreck. But as a matter of fact the proportion is
greater, because the marriages necessarily precede the divorces, and the
proportion of divorces in 1916 should be calculated upon the number of
marriages which took place some five or ten years previously. Of the one
million marriages in 1916, we may say that one in seven or one in eight
will end in the divorce courts. Let this suffice for a glimpse of the
system of marriage-plus-prostitution--a field of weeds which we have
somehow to plow up and prepare for a harvest of rational and honest
love!
CHAPTER XXXIII
SEX AND NATURE
(Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of natural or
physical disharmony.)
Elie Metchnikoff, one of the greatest of scientists, wrote a book
entitled "The Nature of Man," in which he studied the human organism
from the point of view of biology, demonstrating that in our bodies are
a number of relics of past stages of evolution, no longer useful, but
rather a source of danger and harm. We have, for example, in the inner
corner of the eye a relic of that third eyelid whereby the eagle is
enabled to look at the sun. This is a harmless relic. But we have also
an appendix, a degenerate organ of digestion, or gland of secretion,
which now serves as a center of infection and source of danger. We have
likewise a lower bowel, a survival of our hay-eating days, and a cause
of autointoxication and premature death. Among the sources of trouble,
Metchnikoff names the fact that the human male possesses a far greater
quantity of sexual energy than is required for purposes of procreation.
This becomes a cause of disharmony and excess, it causes man to wreck
his health and destroy himself.
Manifestly, this is a serious matter; for if it is true, our efforts to
find health and happiness in love are doomed to failure, and Lecky is
right when he describes the prostitute as the "guardian of virtue," the
eternal and necessary scapegoat of humanity. But I do not believe it is
true; I think that here is one more case of the endless blundering of
scientists and philosophers who attempt to teach physiology, politics,
religion and law, without having made a study of economics. I do not
believe that the sex troubles of mankind are physiological in their
nature, but have their origin in our present system of class privilege.
I believe they are caused, not by the blunders of nature, but by the
blunders of man as a social animal.
Let us take a glimpse at primitive man. I choose the Marquesas Islands,
because we have complete reports about them from numerous observers.
Here was a race of people, not interfered with by civilization, who
manifested all that overplus of sexual energy to which Metchnikoff calls
attention. They placed no restraint whatever upon sex activity, they had
no conception of such an idea. Their games and dances were sex play, and
so also, in great part, was their religion. Yet we do not find that they
wrecked themselves. Physically speaking, they were one of the most
perfect races of which we have record. Both the men and women were
beautiful; they were active and strong from childhood to old age,
and--here is the significant thing--they were happy. They were a
laughing, dancing, singing race. They hardly knew grief or fear at all.
They knew how to live, and they enjoyed every process and aspect of
their lives, just as children do, naively and simply. This included
their sex life; and I think it assures us that there can be no such
fundamental physical disharmony in the human organism as the great
Russian scientist thought he had discovered.
Is it not a fact that throughout nature a superfluity of any kind of
energy or product may be a source of happiness, rather than of distress?
Consider the singing of the birds! Or consider nature's impulse to cover
a field with useless plants, and how by a little cunning, we are able to
turn it into a harvest for our own use! In the life of our bodies one
may show the same thing again and again. We have within us the
possibility of and the impulse toward more muscular activity than our
survival makes necessary; but we do not regard this additional energy as
a curse of nature, and a peril to our lives--we turn out and play
baseball. We have an impulse to see more than is necessary, so we climb
mountains, or go traveling. We have an impulse to hear more, so we go to
a concert. We have an impulse to think more, so we play chess, or whist,
or write books and accumulate libraries. Never do we think of these
activities as signs of an irrevocable blunder on the part of nature.
But about the activities of love we feel differently; and why is this?
If I say that it is because we have an unwholesome and degraded attitude
toward love, because, as a result of religious superstition we fear it,
and dare not deal with it honestly, the reader may suspect that I am
preparing to hint at some self-indulgence, some form of sex orgy such as
the "turkey trot" and the "bunny hug" and the "grizzly bear," the
"shimmy" and the "toddle" and the "cuddle." I hasten to explain that I
do not mean any of the abnormalities and monstrosities of present-day
fashionable life. Neither do I mean that we should set out to emulate
the happy cannibals in the South Seas. In the Book of the Mind I set
forth as carefully as I knew how, the difference between nature and man,
the life of instinct and the life of reason. It is my conviction that if
civilized life is to go on, there must be a far wider extension of
judgment and self-control in human affairs; our lost happiness will be
found, not by going "back to nature," but by going forward to a new and
higher state, planned by reason and impelled by moral idealism.
But we find ourselves face to face with horrible sex disorders, and a
great scientist tells us they are nature's tragic blunder, of which we
are the helpless victims. Manifestly, the way to decide this question is
to go to nature, and see if primitive people, having the same physical
organism as ours, had the same troubles and spent their lives in the
same misery. If they did, then it may be that we are doomed; but if they
did not, then we can say with certainty that it is not nature, but
ourselves, who have blundered. Our task then becomes to apply reason to
the problem; to take our present sex arrangements, our field of
bad-smelling weeds, and plow it thoroughly, and sow it with good seed,
and raise a harvest of happiness in love. It is my belief that,
admitting true love--honest and dignified and rational love--it is
possible to pour into it any amount of sex energy, to invent a whole new
system of beautiful and happy love play.
CHAPTER XXXIV
LOVE AND ECONOMICS
(Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due to the
displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.)
If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, what is it?
Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature,
the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We
hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that
human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can
watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we
had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold
human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a
certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and
virtue are products like vinegar."
Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and class
privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural
sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live
in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited
power with practically no responsibility--a strain which not one human
being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the
past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the
conferring upon a class of power without responsibility means the
collapse of that class and the downfall of its civilization.
So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system of privilege
does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his sex desires. What
it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to
abolish that mutuality in sex, that interaction between male and female
influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a
predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as
well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual selection,
and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit.
In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of
the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the
contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male
charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her,
according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak
and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the
procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type.
But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in which opportunity,
and indeed survival, depend upon money, and the whole tendency of
society is to make money standards supreme. We do not like to admit
this, of course; our instincts revolt against it, and our higher
faculties reinforce the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives,
and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear people deny it
is money which determines admission into what is called "society," the
intimate life of the ruling class. They will tell you that it is not
money, it is "good taste," "refinement," "charm of personality," and so
on. But if you analyze all these things, you speedily discover that they
are made out of money; they are symbols of the possession of money,
devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping themselves apart
from those who do not possess it. I would safely defy a member of the
ruling class to name a single element in what he calls "refinement," or
"good taste," that is not in its ultimate analysis a symbol of the
possession of money. Let it be the pronunciation of a word, or the cut
of a coat, or the method of handling a fork--whatever it may be, it is
part of a code, revealing that the person, or more important yet, the
ancestors of the person, have belonged to the leisure class, and have
had time and opportunity to learn to do things in a certain precise
conventional way. I say "conventional," for very frequently these tests
have no relationship whatever to reality. Considered as a matter of
common sense and convenience, it is a great deal better to eat peas with
a spoon than with a fork, and to use both a knife and fork in eating
lettuce; but if you eat peas with a spoon, or use a knife on lettuce,
every member of the ruling class will instantly know that you are an
interloper, as much so as if you took to throwing the china at your
hostess.
Our culture is a money culture, our standards are money standards, and
our sex decisions are based upon money, not upon love. Any man can have
money in our society, provided the accident of birth favors him, and it
is everywhere known that any man who has money can get a wife. It is
certainly not true that any man with _no_ money can get a wife, and it
is true that most men who have little money have to take wives who have
less--that is, who belong to a lower class, according to the world's
standards. The average young girl of the propertied classes is trained
for marriage as for any other business. She is taught to be sexually
cold, but to imitate sexual excitement deliberately, so as to arouse it
in the male, and to keep herself surrounded with a swarm of males; this
being the basis of her prestige, the factor which will cause the
"eligible" man, the "catch," to desire her. In polite society this
proceeding is known as "coquetry," or "charm," and it would be no
exaggeration to say that seventy-five per cent of all the novels so far
written in the world are expositions of this activity; also that when we
go to the theater, we go in order to watch and sympathize with these
manifestations of pecuniary sexuality.
As a rule the young girl knows what she is doing, but she is taught to
camouflage it, to preserve her "innocence." She would not dream of
marrying for money; she wants to marry something "distinguished"--that
is to say, something which has received the stamp of approval from a
world which approves money. She wants to marry somebody who is
"elegant," who is in "good form"; she wants to marry without having to
think about the horrid subject of money at all, and so she is carefully
chaperoned, and confined to a world where nothing but money is to be
met. In Tennyson's poem, "The Northern Farmer," the old fellow is
coaching his son on the subject of marriage, and they are driving along
a road, and the farmer listens to his horses' hoofs, and they are
saying, "Proputty, proputty, proputty!" The farmer sums up in one
sentence the doctrine of pecuniary marriage as it is taught to the
ruling class virgin: "Doaen't thee marry for money, but goae wheer money
is."
In this process, of course, the ruling class virgin must spend a great
deal of money in order to keep up her own prestige; and when she is
married, she must spend it to keep up the prestige of her unmarried
sisters, and then of her children. As a result of this, the only ruling
class males who can afford to marry are the rich ones. There are always
some who are richer, and these are the most desirable; so the tendency
with each generation is to put the period of marriage further off; the
man has to wait until he has accumulated enough "proputty" to satisfy
the girl of his desires--a girl whom he admires because of her pecuniary
prestige. He delays, and meantime he satisfies his passions with the
daughters of the poor. As a result of this, when he does finally come to
marry, he is apt to be unlovely and unlovable. The woman frequently does
not love him at all, but takes him cold-bloodedly because he is
"eligible"; in that case she is a cold and "sexless" wife. Or else,
after she has married him she discovers his unloveliness, and either
decides that all men are selfish brutes, and reconciles herself to a
celibate life, or else she goes out and preys upon the domestic
happiness of other women.
CHAPTER XXXV
MARRIAGE AND MONEY
(Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher form of
prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience.")
I realize that all these sex problems are complicated. Every case is
individual, and in no two cases can you give exactly the same
explanation. But it is my thesis that whatever the cause, if you trace
down the causes of the cause, you will find economic inequality and
class privilege. It is evident in the lives of the rich, and it is even
more evident in the lives of the poor, who are not permitted the luxury
of pretense. The poor live in a world dominated by forces which they
seldom understand, subjected to enormous pressure which crushes and
destroys them, without their being able to see it or touch it. In the
world of the poor there is first of all poverty; there is insecurity of
employment and insufficiency of wage, and the daily and hourly terror of
starvation and ruin. Above this is a world of power and luxury, a
wonderland of marvels and thrills, seen through a colored mist of
romance. The working-class girl, born to drudgery and perpetual
child-bearing, has a brief hour in which her cheeks are red and her
beauty is ripe; and out of the heaven above her steps a male creature
panoplied in the armor of ruling class prestige--that is to say, a dress
suit--and scattering about him a shower of automobile rides, jewelry and
candy and flowers. She opens her arms to him; and then, when her brief
hour of rapture is past, she becomes the domestic drudge of some
workingman, or else the inmate of a brothel.
It is a custom of social workers and church people, seeking data about
these painful subjects, to interview numbers of prostitutes, and
question them as to the causes of their "fall"; so you read statistics
to the effect that seventeen per cent of prostitution has an economic
cause, that twenty-six per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These
pious people, employed by the ruling class to maintain ruling class
prestige by demonstrating that wage slavery has nothing to do with
white slavery, attain their purpose by restricting the word "economic"
to food and shelter; forgetting that young girls do not live by bread
alone, but also by ribbons, and silk stockings, and moving picture
shows, and trips to Coney Island, and everything else that gives a
momentary escape from drudgery into joy. We all understand, of course,
that the daughters of the rich are entitled to joy, and we provide them
with it as a matter of course; but the daughters of the poor are
supposed to work in a cotton mill ten or eleven hours a day from
earliest childhood, and the joy we provide for them is vicarious. As a
woman poet sets it forth:
"The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play."
Some years ago my wife and I were invited to meet Mrs. Mary J. Goode, a
keeper of brothels in the "Tenderloin," who had revolted against the
system of police graft, and had exposed it in the newspapers. My wife
questioned her closely as to the psychology of people in her business,
and she insisted that the majority of prostitutes were not oversexed,
nor were they feeble minded; they were women who had loved and trusted,
and had been "thrown down." As Mrs. Goode phrased it, they said to
themselves: "Never again! After this, they'll pay!"
As a matter of fact, the causes of prostitution are so largely economic
that the other factors are hardly worth mentioning. The sale of sex is
unknown in savage society, and would be unknown in a Socialist society.
If here and there some degenerate individual would rather sell her sex
than do her share of honest labor in a free and just world, such an
individual would become a patient in the psychopathic ward of a public
hospital. Economic forces drive women to prostitution, first, by direct
starvation, and second, by teaching them money standards of prestige,
the ideal of living without working, which is the heaven achieved by the
rich and longed for by the poor. Contributory to the process are
policemen, politicians, and judges who protect the property of the rich,
and prey upon the disinherited; also newspaper editors, college
professors, priests of God and preachers of Jesus, who attribute the
social evil to "original sin," or the "weakness of human nature."
So far as men are concerned, economic forces operate by three main
channels; late marriage, loveless marriage, and drudgery in wives. You
will find patronizing and maintaining the brothels the following kinds
of males; first, young boys who have been taught that it is "manly" to
gratify their sex impulses; second, young men who take it for granted
that they cannot afford to marry; third, old bachelors who have looked
at marriage and decided that it is not a paying proposition; fourth,
married men who have been picked out for their money, and have come to
the conclusion that "good women" are necessarily sexless; and finally,
married men whose wives have lost the power to charm them by continuous
childbearing, and the physical and nervous strain of domestic slavery.
This latter applies not merely to the wives of the poor. It applies to
members of the middle classes, and even of the richer classes, because
the job of managing many servants is often as trying as the doing of
one's own work. To explain how domestic drudgery is caused by economic
pressure would require a little essay in itself. The home is the place
where the man keeps his sex property apart under lock and key, and it
is, therefore, the portion of our civilization least influenced by
modern ideas. Women still drudge in separate kitchens and nurseries, as
they have drudged for thousands of years. They cook their dinners over
separate fires, and have each their own little group of children,
generally ill cared for, because the work is done by an untrained
amateur. Moreover, the prestige of this home has to be kept up, because
the social position and future prosperity of the man depend upon it. The
children must be dressed in frilled and starched clothing, which makes
them miserable, and wears out the tempers and pocketbooks of the
mothers. Costly entertainments must be given, and twice a day a meal
must be prepared for the father of the family--all good wives have
learned the ancient formula for the retention of masculine affections:
"Feed the brute!" Living in a world of pecuniary prestige, every
particle of the woman's surplus energy must go into some form of
ostentation, into buying or making things which are futile and
meaningless. In such a blind world, dazed by such a struggle, women
become irritable, they lose their sex charm, they forget all about
love; so the husband gives up hoping for the impossible, accepts the
common idea that love and marriage are incompatible, and adopts the
formula that what his wife doesn't know will not hurt her.
And step by step, as economic evolution progresses, as vested wealth
becomes more firmly established and claims for itself a larger and
larger share of the total product of society--so step by step you find
the pecuniary ideals becoming more firmly established, you find marriage
becoming more and more a matter of property, and less and less a matter
of love. In European countries there may still be some love marriages
among the poor, but in the upper classes there is no longer any pretense
of such a thing, and if you spoke of it you would be considered absurd.
In countries of fresh and naive commercialism, like America, the women
select the men because of their money prestige; but in Germany, the
process has gone a step further--the men are so firmly established in
their class positions that they insist upon being bought with a fortune.
The same is true when titled foreigners condescend to visit our "land of
the dollar." They will stoop to a vulgar American wife only in case her
parents will make a direct settlement of a fortune upon the husband, and
then they take her back home, and find their escape from boredom in the
highly cultivated mistresses of their own land.
Everywhere on the Continent, and in Great Britain also, it is accepted
that marriages are matters of business, and only incidentally and very
slightly of affection. The initiative is commonly taken, not by the
young people, but by the heads of the families. Preliminary protocols
are exchanged, and then the family solicitors sit down and bargain over
the matter. If they were making a deal for a carload of hams, they would
be governed by the market price of hams at the moment, also by the
reputation of that particular brand of ham; and similarly, in the case
of marriage, they are governed by the prestige of the family names, and
the market price of husbands prevailing. Always the man exacts a cash
settlement, and in Catholic countries he becomes the outright owner of
all the property of his wife, thus reducing her completely to the status
of a chattel. If any young couple dares to break through these laws of
their class, the whole class unites to trample them down. One of the
greatest of English novelists, George Meredith, wrote his greatest
novel, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," to show how, under the most
favorable circumstances, the union of a ruling class youth with a
farmer's daughter could result in nothing but shipwreck.
The country in which the property marriage is most firmly established is
probably France; and in France the rights of nature are recognized in a
kind of supplementary union, which constitutes what is known as the
"domestic triangle," or in the French language, "_la vie trois_." The
young girl of the French ruling classes is guarded every moment of her
life like a prisoner in jail. She is sold in marriage, and is expected
to bear her husband an heir, possibly two or three children. After that,
she is considered, not under the law or by the church, but by the
general common sense of the community, to be free to seek satisfaction
of her love needs. Her husband has mistresses, and she has a lover, and
to that lover she is faithful, and in her dealings with him she is
guided by an elaborate and subtle code. Practically all French fiction
and drama deal with this "life in threes," and the complications and
tragedies which result from it. I name one novel, simply because it
happens to be the last that I myself have read, "The Red Lily," by
Anatole France.
Of course, every human being knows in his heart that this is a monstrous
arrangement, and there are periods of revolt when real feeling surges up
in the hearts of men, and we have stories of true love, young and
unselfish love, such for example as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," or
St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," or Halevy's "L'Abbe Constantin."
Everybody reads these stories and weeps over them, but everybody knows
that they are like the romantic shepherds and shepherdesses of the
ancient regime; they never had any existence in reality, and are not
meant to be taken seriously. If anybody attempts to carry them into
action, or to preach them seriously to the young, then we know that we
are dealing with a disturber of the foundations of the social order, a
dangerous and incendiary villain, and we give him a name which sends a
shudder down the spine of every friend of law and order--we call him a
"free-lover."
I see before my eyes the wretch cowering upon the witness stand, and the
virtuous district attorney, who has perhaps spent the previous night in
a brothel, pointing a finger of accusing wrath into his face, and
thundering, "Do you believe in free love?" The wretch, if he is wise,
will not hesitate or parley; he will not ask what the district attorney
means by love, or what he means by freedom. Here in very truth is a case
where "he who hesitates is lost!" Let the wretch instantly answer, No,
he does not believe in free love, he believes in love that pays cash as
it goes; he believes in love that investigates carefully the prevailing
market conditions, decides upon a reasonable price, has the contract in
writing, and lives up to the bargain--"till death do us part." If the
witness be a woman, let the answer be that she believes in slave love;
that she expects to be sold for the benefit of her parents, the prestige
of her family and the social position of her future offspring. Let her
say that she will be a loyal and devoted servant, and will never do
anything at any time to invalidate the contract which is signed for her
by her parents or guardians.
CHAPTER XXXVI
LOVE VERSUS LUST
(Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it should be
followed and when repressed.)
We have considered the sex disorders of our age and their causes. We
have now to grope our way towards a basis of sanity and health in these
vital matters.
Consider man, as Metchnikoff describes him, with his overplus of sex
energy. From early youth he is besieged by impulses and desires, and as
a rule is left entirely uninstructed on the subject, having to pick up
his ideas from the conversation of older lads, who have nothing but
misinformation and perversions to give him. Nearly all these older lads
declare and believe that it is necessary to gratify the sex impulse,
that physically it is harmful not to do so. I have even heard physicians
and trainers maintain that idea. Opposed to them are the official
moralists and preachers of religion, who declare that to follow the sex
impulse, except when officially sanctioned by the church, is to commit
sin.
At different times in my life I have talked with all kinds of people,
young and old, men and women, doctors and clergymen, teachers and
trainers of athletes, and a few wise and loving mothers who have talked
with their own boys and other boys. As a result I have come to agree
with neither side in the debate. I believe that there is a distinction
which must be drawn, and I ask you to consider it carefully, and bear it
in mind in all that I say on the problem of happiness and health in sex.
I believe that a normal man is one being, manifesting himself in various
aspects, physical, emotional, intellectual. I believe that all these
aspects of human activity go normally together, and cannot normally be
separated, and that the separation of them is a perversion and source of
harm. I believe that the sex impulse, as it normally manifests itself,
and would manifest itself in a man if he were living a normal life, is
an impulse which includes every aspect of the man's being. It is not
merely physical desire and emotional excitement; it is intellectual
curiosity, a deep and intense interest, not merely in the body, but in
the mind and heart and personality of the woman.
I appreciate that there is opportunity for controversy here. As a matter
of psychology, it is not easy to separate instinct from experience, to
state whether a certain impulse is innate or acquired. Some may argue
that savages know nothing about idealism in sex, neither do those modern
savages whom we breed in city slums; some may make the same assertion
concerning a great mass of loutish and sensual youths. We have got so
far from health and soundness that it is hard to be sure what is
"normal" and what is "ideal." But without going into metaphysics, I
think we can reasonably make the following statement concerning the sex
impulse at its first appearance in the average healthy youth in
civilized societies; that this impulse, going to the roots of the being,
affecting every atom of energy and every faculty, is accompanied, not
merely by happiness, but by sympathetic delight in the happiness of the
woman, by interest in the woman, by desire to be with her, to stay with
her and share her life and protect her from harm. In what I have to say
about the subject from now on, I shall describe this condition of being
and feeling by the word "love."
But now suppose that men should, for some reason or other, evolve a set
of religious ideas which denied love, and repudiated love, and called it
a sin and a humiliation; or suppose there should be an economic
condition which made love a peril, so that the young couple which
yielded to love would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their
children starve. Suppose there should be evolved classes of men and
women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi-starvation;
then, under such conditions, the impulse to love would become a trap and
a source of terror. Then the energies of a great many men would be
devoted to suppressing love and strangling it in themselves; then the
intellectual and spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the
beauty and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become a
starving beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the night-time, or
an assassin with a dagger and club. In other words, sex would become all
the horror that it is today, in the form of purchased vice, and more
highly purchased marriage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we
should have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility
of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a being who is
not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit all together. So it
would be possible for pitiful, unhappy man, driven by the blind urge of
nature, to conceive of desiring a woman only in the body, and with no
care about what she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her
afterwards.
That purely physical sex desire I will indicate in our future
discussions by the only convenient word that I can find, which is lust.
The word has religious implications, so I explain that I use it in my
own meaning, as above. There is a great deal of what the churches call
lust, which I call true and honest love; on the other hand, in Christian
churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages between
innocent young girls and mature men of property, which I describe as
legalized and consecrated lust.
We are now in position to make a fundamental distinction. I assert the
proposition that there does not exist, in any man, at any time of his
life, or in any condition of his health, a necessity for yielding to the
impulses of lust; and I say that no man can yield to them without
degrading his nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but
mentally, and in the long run physically. I assert that it is the duty
of every man, at all times and under all circumstances, to resist the
impulses of lust, to suppress and destroy them in his nature, by
whatever expenditure of will power and moral effort may be required.
I know physicians who maintain the unpopular thesis that serious damage
may be done to the physical organism of both man and woman by the long
continued suppression of the sex-life. Let me make plain that I am not
disagreeing with such men. I do not deny that repression of the sex-life
may do harm. What I do deny is that it does any harm to repress a
physical desire which is unaccompanied by the higher elements of sex;
that is to say, by affection, admiration, and unselfish concern for the
sex-partner and her welfare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress
and destroy the impulse toward lust in his nature, I am not telling him
to live a sexless life. I am telling him that if he represses lust, then
love will come; whereas, if he yields to lust, then love may never come,
he may make himself incapable of love, incapable of feeling it or of
trusting it, or of inspiring it in a woman. And I say that if, on the
other hand, he resists lust, he will pour all the energies of his being
into the channels of affection and idealism. Instead of having his
thoughts diverted by every passing female form, his energies will become
concentrated upon the search for one woman who appeals to him in
permanent and useful ways. We may be sure that nature has not made men
and women incompatible, but on the contrary, has provided for
fulfillment of the desires of both. The man will find some woman who is
looking for the thing which he has to offer--that is, love.
And now, what about the suppression of love? Here I am willing to go as
far as any physician could desire, and possibly farther. Speaking
generally, and concerning normal adult human beings, I say that the
suppression of love is a crime against nature and life. I say that long
continued and systematic suppression of love exercises a devastating
effect, not merely upon the body, but upon the mind and all the energies
of the being. I say that the doctrine of the suppression of love, no
matter by whom it is preached, is an affront to nature and to life, and
an insult to the creator of life. I say that it is the duty of all men
and women, not merely to assert their own right to love, but to devote
their energies to a war upon whatever ideas and conventions and laws in
society deny the love-right.
The belief that long continued suppression of love does grave harm has
been strongly reinforced in the last few years by the discovery of
psycho-analysis, a science which enables us to explore our unconscious
minds, and lay bare the secrets of nature's psychic workshop. These
revelations have made plain that sex plays an even more important part
in our mental lives than we realized. Sex feeling manifests itself, not
merely in grown people, but in the tiniest infants; in these latter it
has of course no object in the opposite sex, but the physical sensations
are there, and some of their outward manifestations; and as the infant
grows, and realizes the outside world, the feelings come to center upon
others, the parents first of all. These manifestations must be guided,
and sometimes repressed; but if this is done violently, by means of
terror, the consequences may be very harmful--the wrong impulses or the
terrors may survive as a "complex" in the unconscious mind, and cause a
long chain of nervous disorders and physical weaknesses in the adult.
These things are no matter of guesswork, they have been proven as
thoroughly as any scientific discovery, and are used in a new technic of
healing. Of course, as with every new theory, there are unbalanced
people who carry it to extremes. There are fanatics of Freudianism who
talk as if everything in the human unconsciousness were sex; but that
need not blind us to the importance of these new discoveries, and the
confirmation they bring to the thesis that sane and normal love, wisely
guided by common sense and reasoned knowledge, is at a certain period of
life a vital necessity to every sound human being.
CHAPTER XXXVII
CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY
(The ideal of the repression of the sex impulse, as against the
ideal of its guidance and cultivation.)
There are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are
generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. The two
words are celibacy and chastity. We define celibacy as the permanent and
systematic suppression of love. We define chastity, on the other hand,
as the permanent and systematic suppression of lust. Chastity, as the
word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it
is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of
consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy
for love. In that sense we regard chastity as one of the most essential
of virtues in the young. It is widely taught today, but ineffectively,
because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other
words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and
one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases.
The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. At a certain
stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some
man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic
imagination. To use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual
nature. But under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside
him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and
trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these destructive
agencies, as it seems to the man, is sex. By means of sex he is laid
hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his
higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their
convenience. At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health,
time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put
him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In the words of a
wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, "He who marries and has
children gives hostages to fortune." In a world wherein war, pestilence,
and famine held sway, the man of family had but slight chance of
surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a
deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he
imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert,
and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips,
and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy
in himself the impulse of sex.
So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use,
but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate
priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have
the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the sex
relationship--notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our
social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true
wisdom and health and happiness in love.
I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is
a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking
it down, and she always succeeds. There never has been a celibate
religious order, no matter how noble its origin and how strict its
discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of
loathsome unnatural vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to
weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history
about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have "nieces"
and attractive servant girls. Make the acquaintance of any police
sergeant in any big city of America, and get him to chatting on friendly
terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the
police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of
celibate religious orders. As one old-timer in the "Tenderloin" of New
York said to me, "Of course, we don't make any trouble for the good
fathers." Nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an Irishman
and a Catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every
man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companionship
of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every
barrier that society may set against it.
There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious
ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature.
It is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as "bachelorhood"; it has
as its complements the institutions of old maidenhood and of
prostitution. Both forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic,
are entirely incompatible with chastity, which is only possible where
love is recognized and honored. Chastity is a preparation for love; and
if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social convention, or by
economic strangling, you at once make chastity a Utopian dream. You may
preach it from your pulpits until you are black in the face; you may
call out your Billy Sundays to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions;
you may threaten hell-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audiences
into spasms--but you will never make them chaste. On the contrary,
strange and horrible as it may seem, those very excitements will turn
into sexual excitements before your eyes! So subtle is our ancient
mother nature, and so determined to have her own way!
The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its
distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the
world. It is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and
supposed to be modern forms. Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained
enormous influence, not merely in Russia, but throughout the world among
people who think themselves liberal--humanitarians, pacifists,
philosophic anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about sex, his teachings and
writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous
manifestation of disease. All through his youth and middle years, as an
army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life
was one of license, and the attitude toward women he thus acquired, he
never got out of his thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his
old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole
attitude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness.
But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral
consciences of humanity. He looked about him at a world gone mad with
greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit
and escape the power of evil. As regards sex, his thought took the form
of ancient Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of
sex, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, the
relationship of brother and sister. In his novel, "Resurrection,"
Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl
and conceives for her such a noble and generous emotion; but gradually
the poison of physical sex-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her,
and she becomes a prostitute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime
he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and
wins her to God and goodness by the unselfish and unsexual love which he
should have maintained from the beginning.
It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of
love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to
be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer
was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people
would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here
you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we are
"conceived in sin and born in iniquity." We may be pure and good, and
cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. Some choose to
sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future;
and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile
crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom God has
sent to call down destruction upon a world which He had made--through
some mistake never satisfactorily explained!
It is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh at such a
perverted view of life; but the truth is that this attitude toward sex
is written, not merely into our religious creeds and formulas, but into
most of our laws and social conventions. It is this, which for
convenience I will call the "monkish" view of love, which prevents our
dealing frankly and honestly with its problems, distinguishing between
what is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to remedy
the evils of marriage-plus-prostitution. That is why I have tried so
carefully to draw the distinction between what I call love and what I
call lust; between the ideal of celibacy, which is a perversion, and the
idea of chastity, which must form an essential part of any regimen of
true and enduring love.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE DEFENSE OF LOVE
(Discusses passionate love, its sanction, its place in life, and
its preservation in marriage.)
I have before me as I write a newspaper article by Robert Blatchford, a
great writer and great man. He is dealing with the subject of "Love and
Marriage," and his doctrine is summed up in the following sentences:
"There is a difference between loving a woman and falling in love with
her. The love one falls into is a sweet illusion. But that fragrant
dream does not last. In marriage there are no fairies."
This expresses one of the commonest ideas in the world. Passionate love
is one thing, and marriage is another and different thing, and it is no
more possible to reconcile them than to mix oil and water. Our notions
of "romantic" love took their rise in the Middle Ages, from the songs
and narratives of the troubadours, and this whole tradition was based
upon the glorification of illegitimate and extra-marital love. That
tradition has ruled the world of art ever since, and rules it today. I
do not exaggerate when I say that it is the conventional view of grand
opera and the drama, of moving pictures and novels, that impassioned and
thrilling love is found before marriage, and is found in adultery and in
temptations to adultery, but is never found in marriage. I have a pretty
varied acquaintance with the literature of the world, and I have sat and
thought for quite a while, without being able to recall a single
portrait of life which contradicts this thesis; and certainly anyone
familiar with literature could name ten thousand novels and dramas and
grand operas which support the thesis.
English and American Puritanism have beaten the tradition down to this
extent: the novelist portrays the glories and thrills of young love, and
carries it as far as the altar and the orange blossoms and white ribbons
and showers of rice--and stops. He leaves you to assume that this
delightful rapture continues forever after; but he does not attempt to
show it to you--he would not dare attempt to show it, because the
general experience of men and women in marriage would make him
ridiculous. So he runs away from the issue; if he tells you a story of
married life, it is a story of a "triangle"--the thrills of love
imperiling marriage, and either crushed out, or else wrecking the lives
of the victims. Such is the unanimous testimony of all our arts today,
and I submit it as evidence of the fact that there must be something
vitally wrong with our marriage system.
Personally, I am prepared to go as far as the extreme sex-radical in the
defense of love and the right to love. I believe that love is the most
precious of all the gifts of life. I accept its sanctions and its
authority. I believe that it is to be cherished and obeyed, and not to
be run away from or strangled in the heart. I believe that it is the
voice of nature speaking in the depths of us, and speaking from a wisdom
deeper than we have yet attained, or may attain for many centuries to
come. And when I say love, I do not mean merely affection. I do not mean
merely the habit of living in the same home, which is the basis of
marriage as Blatchford describes it. What I mean is the love of the
poets and the dreamers, the "young love" which is thrill and ecstasy, a
glorification and a transfiguration of the whole of life. I say that,
far from giving up this love for marriage, it is the true purpose of
marriage to preserve this love and perpetuate it.
To save repetition and waste of words, let us agree that from now on
when I use the word love, I mean the passionate love of those who are
"in love." I believe that it is the right of men and women to be "in
love," and that there is no true marriage unless they are "in love," and
stay "in love." I believe that it is possible to apply reason to love,
to learn to understand love and the ways of love, to protect it and keep
it alive in marriage. Blatchford writes the sentence, "Matrimony cannot
be all honeymoon." I answer that assuredly it can be, and if you ask me
how I know, I tell you that I know in the only way we really know
anything--because I have proven it in my own life. I say that if men and
women would recognize the perpetuation of the honeymoon as the purpose
of marriage, and would devote to that end one-hundredth part of the
intelligence and energy they now devote to the killing of their fellow
human beings in war, we might have an end to the wretched "romantic
tradition" which makes the most sacred emotion of the human heart into
a sneak-thief skulking in the darkness, entering our lives by back
alleys and secret stairways--while greed and worldly pomp, dullness and
boredom, parade in by the front entrance.
In the first place, what is love--young love, passionate love, the love
of those who "fall in"? I know a certain lady, well versed in worldly
affairs, who says that it is at once the greatest nonsense and the
deadliest snare in the world. This lady was trained as a "coquette";
she, and all the young ladies she knew, made it their business to cause
men to fall in love with them, and their prestige was based upon their
skill in that art. So to them "love" was a joke, and men "in love" were
victims, whether ridiculous or pitiable. To this I answer that I know
nothing in life that cannot be "faked"; but an imitation has value only
as it resembles something that is real, and that has real value.
I am aware that it is possible for a society to be so corrupted, so
given up to the admiration of imitations, of the paint and powder and
silk-stocking-clad-ankle kind of love, that true and genuine love
interest, with its impulse to self-sacrifice and self-consecration, is
no longer felt or understood. I am aware that in such a society it is
possible for even the very young to be so sophisticated that what they
take to be love is merely vanity, the worship of money, and the grace
and charm which the possession of money confers. I have known girls who
were "head over heels" in love, and thought it was with a man, when
quite clearly they were in love with a dress suit or a social position.
In such a society it is hard to talk about natural emotions, and deep
and abiding and disinterested affections.
Nevertheless, amid all the false conventions, the sham glories and
cowardices of our civilization, there abides in the heart the craving
for true love, and the idea of it leaps continually into flame in the
young. In spite of the ridicule of the elders, in spite of blunders and
tragic failures, in spite of dishonesties and deceptions--nevertheless,
it continues to happen that out of a thousand maidens the youth finds
one whose presence thrills him with a new and terrible emotion, whose
lightest touch makes him shiver, almost makes his knees give way.
If you will recall what I have written about instinct and reason, you
will know that I am not a blind worshipper of our ancient mother
nature. I am not humble in my attitude toward her, but perfectly willing
to say when I know more than she does. On the other hand, when I know
nothing or next to nothing, I am shy of contradicting my ancient mother,
and disposed to give respectful heed to her promptings. One of the
things about which we know almost nothing at present is the subject of
eugenics. We are only at the beginning of trying to find out what
matings produce the best offspring. Meantime, we ought to consider those
indications which nature gives us, just as we consider her advice about
what food to eat and what rest to take.
It is not my idea that science will ever take men and women and marry
them in cold blood, as today we breed our cattle. What I think will
happen is that young men and women will meet one another, as they do at
present, and will find the love impulse awakening; they will then submit
their love to investigation, as to whether they should follow that
impulse, or should wait. In other words, I do not believe that science
will ever do away with the raptures of love, but will make itself the
servant of these raptures, finding out what they mean, and how their
precious essence may be preserved.
I perfectly understand that the begetting of children is not the only
purpose of love. The children have to be reared and trained, which means
that a home has to be founded, and the parents have to learn to
co-operate. They have to have common aims in life, and temperaments
sufficiently harmonious so that they can live in the house together
without tearing each other's eyes out. This means that in any civilized
society all impulses of love have to be subjected to severe criticism. I
intend, before long, to show just how I think parents and guardians
should co-operate with young people in love; to help them to understand
in advance what they are doing, and how it may be possible for them to
make their love permanent and successful. For the moment I merely state,
to avoid any possible misunderstanding, that I am the last person in the
world to favor what is called "blind" love, the unthinking abandonment
to an impulse of sex passion. What I am trying to show is that the
passionate impulse, the passionate excitement of the young couple, is
the material out of which love and marriage are made. Passion is a part
of us, and a fundamental part. If we do not find a place for it in
marriage, it will seek satisfaction outside of marriage, and that means
lying, or the wrecking of the marriage, or both.
Passion is what gives to love and marriage its vitality, its energy, its
drive; in fact, it gives these qualities to the whole character. It is a
vivifying force, transfiguring the personality, and if it is crushed and
repressed, the whole life of that person is distorted. Yet it is a fact
which every physician knows, that millions of women marry and live their
whole lives without ever knowing what passionate gratification is. As a
consequence of this, millions of men take it for granted that there are
"good" women and "bad" women, and that only the latter are interesting.
This, of course, is simply one of the abnormalities caused by the
supplanting of love by money as a motive in marriage. Love becomes a
superfluity and a danger, and all the forces of society, including
institutionalized religion, combine to outlaw it and drive it
underground. Or we might say that they lock it in a dungeon--and that
the supreme delight of all the painters, poets, musicians, dramatists
and novelists of all climes and all periods of history, is to portray
the escape of the "young god" from these imprisonments. The story is
told in six words of an old English ballad: "Love will find out the
way!"
Is it not obvious that there must be something vitally wrong with our
institutions and conventions in matters of sex, when here exists this
eternal war between our moralists and our artists? Why not make up our
minds what we really believe; whether it is true that poets are, as
Shelley said, "the unacknowledged legislators of mankind," or whether
they are, as Plato declared, false teachers and seducers of the young.
If they are the latter, let us have done with them, let us drive them
from the state, together with lovers and all other impassioned persons.
But if, on the other hand, it is truth the poets tell about life, then
let us take the young god out of his dungeon, and bring him into our
homes by the front door, and cast out the false gods of vanity and greed
and worldly prestige which now sit in his place.
CHAPTER XXXIX
BIRTH CONTROL
(Deals with the prevention of conception as one of the greatest of
man's discoveries, releasing him from nature's enslavement, and
placing the keys of life in his hands.)