Sleep
He giveth His Beloved Sleep.
The healing magic of sleep is known to all. Sleeplessness is a
punishment for so many different violations of nature's laws, that
it is perhaps one of the most prevalent of humanity's innumerable
sufferings. While most of the aspects of sleep and sleeplessness
have received much attention from specialists in human physiology,
the relation between sleep and coitus appears to be but little
realised. Yet there is an intimate, profound and quite direct
relation between the power to sleep, naturally and refreshingly, and
the harmonious relief of the whole system in the perfected sex-act.
We see this very clearly in ordinary healthy man. If, for some
reason, he has to live unsatisfied for some time after the acute
stirring of his longing for physical contact with his wife, he tends
in the interval to be wakeful, restless, and his nerves are on edge.
Then, when the propitious hour arrives, and after the love-play, the
growing passion expands, until the transports of feeling find their
ending in the explosive completion of the act, at once the tension
of his whole system relaxes, and his muscles fall into gentle, easy
attitudes of languorous content, and in a few moments the man is
sleeping like a child.
This excellent and refreshing sleep falls like a soft curtain
of oblivion and saves the man's consciousness from the jar and
disappointment of an anti-climax. But not only is this sleep a
restorative after the strenuous efforts of the transport, it has
peculiarly refreshing powers, and many men feel that after such a
sleep their whole system seems rejuvenated.
But how fare women in this event? When they too have had complete
satisfaction they similarly relax and slumber.
But as things are to-day it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that
the majority of wives are left wakeful and nerve-racked to watch
with tender motherly brooding, or with bitter and jealous envy,
the slumbers of the men who, through ignorance and carelessness,
have neglected to see that they too had the necessary resolution of
nervous tension.
Many married women have told me that after they have had relations
with their husbands they are restless, either for some hours or for
the whole night; and I feel sure that the prevalent failure on the
part of many men to effect orgasms for their wives at each congress,
must be a very common source of the sleeplessness and nervous
diseases of so many married women.
The relation between the completion of the sex act and sleep in
woman is well indicated in the case of Mrs. A., who is typical
of a large class of wives. She married a man with whom she was
passionately in love. Neither she nor her husband had ever had
connection with anyone else, and, while they were both keen and
intelligent people with some knowledge of biology, neither knew
anything of the details of human sex union. For several years her
husband had unions with her which gave him some satisfaction and
left him ready at once to sleep. Neither he nor she knew that women
should have an orgasm, and after every union she was left so "on
edge" and sleepless that never less than several hours would elapse
before she could sleep at all, and often she remained wakeful the
whole night.
After her husband's death her health improved, and in a year or two
she entered into a new relation with a man who was aware of women's
needs and spent sufficient time and attention to them to ensure a
successful completion for her as well as for himself. The result was
that she soon became a good sleeper, with the attendant benefits of
restored nerves and health.
Sleep is so complex a process, and sleeplessness the resultant of
so many different maladjustments, that it is, of course, possible
that the woman may sleep well enough, even if she be deprived of the
relief and pleasure of perfect union. But in so many married women
sleeplessness and a consequent nervous condition are coupled with a
lack of the complete sex relation, that one of the first questions a
physician _should_ put to those of his women patients who are worn
and sleepless is: Whether her husband really fulfils his marital
duty in their physical relation.
From their published statements, and their admissions to me, it
appears that many practising doctors are either almost unaware
of the very existence of orgasm in women, or look upon it as a
superfluous and accidental phenomenon. Yet to have had a moderate
number of orgasms at some time at least is a necessity for the full
development of a woman's health and all her powers.
As this book is written for those who are married, I say nothing
here about the lives of those who are still unmarried, though,
particularly after the age of thirty has been reached, they may
be very difficult and need much study and consideration. It is,
however, worth noticing how prevalent sleeplessness is among a
class of women who have never had any normal sex-life or allowed any
relief to their desires. There is little doubt that the complete
lack of a normal sex relation is one of the several factors which
render many middle-aged unmarried women nervous and sleepless.
Yet for the unmarried woman the lack is not so acute nor so
localised as it is for the married woman who is thwarted in the
natural completion of her sex-functions after they have been
directly stimulated.
The unmarried woman, unless she be in love with some particular
man, has no definite stimulus to her sex desires beyond the natural
upwelling of the creative force. The married woman, however, is not
only diffusely stirred by the presence of the man she loves, but is
also acutely locally and physically stimulated by his relation with
her. And if she is then left in mid-air, without natural relief to
her tension, she is in this respect far worse off than the unmarried
woman.
When a wife is left sleepless through the neglect of the mate who
slumbers healthily by her side, it is not surprising if she spends
the long hours reviewing their mutual position; and the review
cannot yield her much pleasure or satisfaction. For, deprived of
the physical delight of mutual orgasm (though, perhaps, like so
many wives, quite unconscious of all it can give), she sees in the
sex act an arrangement where pleasure, relief and subsequent sleep,
are all on her husband's side, while she is merely the passive
instrument of his enjoyment. Nay, more than that: if following every
union she has long hours of wakefulness, she then sees clearly the
encroachment on her own health in an arrangement in which she is
not merely passive, but is actively abused.
Another of the consequences of the incomplete relation is that
often, stirred to a point of wakefulness and vivacity by the
preliminary sex-stimulation (of the full meaning of which she may
be unconscious), a romantic and thoughtful woman is then most able
to talk intimately and tenderly--to speak of the things _most_ near
and sacred to her heart. And she may then be terribly wounded by
the inattention of her husband, which, coming so soon after his
ardent demonstrations of affection, appears peculiarly callous. It
makes him appear to her to be indifferent to the highest side of
marriage--the spiritual and romantic intercourse. Thus she may see
in the man going off to sleep in the midst of her love-talk, a gross
and inattentive brute--and all because she has never shared the
climax of his physical tension, and does not know that its natural
reaction is sleep.
These thoughts are so depressing even to the tenderest and most
loving woman, and so bitter to one who has other causes of
complaint, that in their turn they act on the whole system and
increase the damage done by the mere sleeplessness.
The older school of physiologists dealt in methods too crude to
realise the physiological results of our thoughts, but it is
now well known that anger and bitterness have experimentally
recognisable physiological effects, and are injurious to the whole
system.
It requires little imagination to see that after months or years of
such embittered sleeplessness, the woman tends not only to become
neurasthenic but also resentful towards her husband. She is probably
too ignorant and unobservant of her own physiology to realise the
full meaning of what is taking place, but she feels vaguely that he
is to blame, and that she is being sacrificed for what, in her still
greater ignorance of _his_ physiology, seems to her to be his mere
pleasure and self-indulgence.
He, with his health maintained by the natural outlet followed by
recuperative sleep, is not likely to be ready to look into the
gloomy and shadowy land of vague reproach and inexplicable trivial
wrongs which are all the expression she gives to her unformulated
physical grievance. So he is likely to set down any resentment she
may show to "nerves" or "captiousness"; and to be first solicitous,
and then impatient, towards her apparently irrelevant complaints.
If he is, as many men are, tender and considerate, he may try
to remedy matters by restricting to the extreme limit of what
is absolutely necessary for him, the number of times they come
together. Unconsciously he thus only makes matters worse; for as a
general rule, he is quite unaware of his wife's rhythm, and does
not arrange to coincide with it in his infrequent tender embraces.
As he is now probably sleeping in another room and not daring to
come for the nightly talks and tenderness which are so sweet a
privilege of marriage, here, as in other ways, his well-meaning but
wrongly-conceived efforts at restraint only tend to drive the pair
still further apart.
To make plain the reasonableness of my view regarding sleep, it is
necessary to mention some of the immensely profound influences which
it is now known that sex exerts, even when not stimulated to its
specific use.
In those who are deprived of their sex-organs, particularly when
young, many of the other features and organs of the body develop
abnormally or fail to appear. Castrated boys (eunuchs) when
grown up, tend to have little or no beard, or moustache, to have
high-pitched voices and several other characters which separate them
from normal men.
The growth of organs and structures so remote from the sex-organs,
as, e.g., the larynx, have been found to be influenced by the
chemical stimulus of secretions from the sex-organs and their
subsidiary glands. These secretions are not passed out through
external ducts but enter the blood system _directly_. Such
secretions passing straight from the ductless glands into the
vascular system are of very great importance in almost all our
bodily functions. They have recently been much studied, and the
general name of _Hormones_ given to them by Starling.[7] The idea
that some particular secretions or "humours" are connected with
each of the internal organs of the body, is a very ancient one; but
we have even yet only the vaguest and most elementary knowledge
of a few of the many miracles performed by these subtle chemical
substances. Thus we know that the stimulus of food in the stomach
sends a chemical substance from one ductless gland in the digestive
system chasing through the blood to another gland which prepares a
different digestive secretion further on. We know that the thyroid
gland in the neck swells and contracts in very sensitive relation
with the sex organs; we know that some chemical secretion from
the developing embryo, or the tissue in which it grows, sends its
chemical stimulus to the distant mammary glands of the mother;
we know that if the ovaries of a girl or the testes of a boy are
completely cut out, the far-reaching influences their hormones would
have exerted are made evident by the numerous changes in the system
and departures from the normal, which result from their lack.
[7] See Prof. Ernest H. Starling's Croonian Lecture to the Royal
Society, 1905.
But we do _not_ know, for physiologists have not yet studied the
degree and character of the immense stimulus of sex-life and
experience on the glands of the sex-organs, or how they affect the
whole of the human being's life and powers.
The "Mendelians" and the "Mutationists," who both tend to lay so
much (and I think such undue) stress on morphological hereditary
factors, seem at present to have the ear of the public more than
the physiologists. But it is most important that every grown up man
and woman should know that through the various chemical substances
or "messengers" (which Starling called the hormones) there is an
extremely rapid, almost immediate, effect on the activities of
organs in remote parts of the body, due to the influences exerted on
one or other internal organ.
It is therefore clear that any influences exerted on such profoundly
important organs as those connected with sex must have far-reaching
results in many unexpected fields.
What must be taking place in the female system as a result of the
completed sex act?
It is true that in coitus woman has but a slight external secretion,
and that principally of mucus. But we have no external signs of
all the complex processes and reactions going on in digestion and
during the production of digestive secretions. When, as is the case
in orgasm, we have such intense and apparent nervous, vascular
and muscular reactions, it seems inevitable that there must be
correspondingly profound internal correlations. Is it conceivable
that organs so fundamentally placed, and whose mere existence
we know affects the personal characters of women, could escape
physiological result from the intense preliminary stimulus and acute
sensations of an orgasm?
To ask this question is surely to answer it. It is to my mind
inconceivable that the orgasm in woman as in man should not have
profound physiological effects. Did we know enough about the
subject, many of the "nervous breakdowns" and neurotic tendencies of
the modern woman could be directly traced to the partial stimulation
of sexual intercourse without its normal completion which is so
prevalent in modern marriage.
This subject, and its numerous ramifications, are well worth the
careful research of the most highly-trained physiologists. There is
nothing more profound, or of more vital moment to modern humanity as
a whole, than is the understanding of the sex nature and sex needs
of men and women.
I may point out as a mere suggestion that the man's sex-organs
give rise to _external_ and also to _internal_ secretions. The
former only leave the glands which secrete them as a result of
definite stimulus; the latter appear to be perpetually exuded in
small quantities and always to be entering and influencing the
whole system. In women we know there are corresponding perpetual
internal secretions, and it seems evident to me that there must be
some internal secretions which are only released under the definite
stimulus of the whole sex-act.
The English and American peoples, who lead the world in so many
ways, have an almost unprecedentedly high proportion of married
women who get no satisfaction from physical union with their
husbands, though they bear children, and may in every other respect
appear to be happily married.
The modern civilised neurotic woman has become a by-word in the
Western world. Why?
I am certain that much of this suffering is caused by the
_ignorance_ of both men and women regarding not only the inner
physiology, but even the obvious outward expression, of the complete
sex-act.
Many medical men now recognise that numerous nervous and other
diseases are associated with the lack of physiological relief for
natural or stimulated sex feelings in women. Ellis[8] quotes the
opinion of an Austrian gynecologist who said that, "of every hundred
women who come to him with uterine troubles, seventy suffer from
congestion of the womb, which he regarded as due to incomplete
coitus." While a writer in a recent number of the _British Medical
Journal_[9] published some cases in which quite serious nervous
diseases in wives were put right when their husbands were cured of
too hasty ejaculation.
[8] H. Ellis. "Sex in Relation to Society," 1910, p. 551.
[9] See Porosz, _British Medical Journal_, April 1, 1911, p. 784.
Sleep, concerning which I began this chapter, is but one of
innumerable indications of inner processes intimately bound up with
the sex-reactions. When the sex-rite is, in every sense, rightly
performed, the healing wings of sleep descend both on the man and on
the woman in his arms. Every organ in their bodies is influenced
and stimulated to play its part, while their spirits, after soaring
in the dizzy heights of rapture, are wafted to oblivion, thence to
return gently to the ordinary plains of daily consciousness.