THE BIRTH OF SEX
The last chapter was a chapter of semi-digression. We now return to
the straight course. Is the straightness none too evident? Ah well,
it's a matter of relativity. A child is born with one sex only, and
remains always single in his sex. There is no intermingling, only a
great change of roles is possible. But man in the female role is still
male.
Sex--that is to say, maleness and femaleness--is present from the
moment of birth, and in every act or deed of every child. But sex in
the real sense of dynamic sexual relationship, this does not exist in
a child, and cannot exist until puberty and after. True, children have
a sort of sex consciousness. Little boys and little girls may even
commit indecencies together. And still it is nothing vital. It is a
sort of shadow activity, a sort of dream-activity. It has no very
profound effect.
But still, boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible,
that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that
lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each
has to offer the other, finally. We are all wrong when we say there is
no vital difference between the sexes. There is every difference.
Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a
woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And
in the reverse men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.
Man, acting in the passive or feminine polarity, is still man, and he
doesn't have one single unmanly feeling. And women, when they speak
and write, utter not one single word that men have not taught them.
Men learn their feelings from women, women learn their mental
consciousness from men. And so it will ever be. Meanwhile, women live
forever by feeling, and men live forever from an inherent sense of
_purpose_. Feeling is an end in itself. This is unspeakable truth to a
woman, and never true for one minute to a man. When man, in the
Epicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes himself a martyr to
it--like Maupassant or Oscar Wilde. Woman will _never_ understand the
depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man
will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will
play at the other's game, but they will remain apart.
The whole mode, the whole everything is really different in man and
woman. Therefore we should keep boys and girls apart, that they are
pure and virgin in themselves. On mixing with one another, in becoming
familiar, in being "pals," they lose their own male and female
integrity. And they lose the treasure of the future, the vital sex
polarity, the dynamic magic of life. For the magic and the dynamism
rests on _otherness_.
For actual sex is a vital polarity. And a polarity which rouses into
action, as we know, at puberty.
And how? As we know, a child lives from the great field of dynamic
consciousness established between the four poles of the dynamic
psyche, two great poles of sympathy, two great poles of will. The
solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, great nerve-centers below the
diaphragm, act as the dynamic origin of all consciousness in man, and
are immediately polarized by the other two nerve-centers, the cardiac
plexus and the thoracic ganglion above the diaphragm. At these four
poles the whole flow, both within the individual and from without
him, of dynamic consciousness and dynamic creative relationship is
centered. These four first poles constitute the first field of dynamic
consciousness for the first twelve or fourteen years of the life of
every child.
And then a change takes place. It takes place slowly, gradually and
inevitably, utterly beyond our provision or control. The living soul
is unfolding itself in another great metamorphosis.
What happens, in the biological psyche, is that deeper centers of
consciousness and function come awake. Deep in the lower body the
great sympathetic center, the hypogastric plexus has been acting all
the time in a kind of dream-automatism, balanced by its corresponding
voluntary center, the sacral ganglion. At the age of twelve these two
centers begin slowly to rumble awake, with a deep reverberant force
that changes the whole constitution of the life of the individual.
And as these two centers, the sympathetic center of the deeper
abdomen, and the voluntary center of the loins, gradually sparkle into
wakeful, _conscious_ activity, their corresponding poles are roused in
the upper body. In the region of the throat and neck, the so-called
cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia dawn into activity.
We have now another field of dawning dynamic consciousness, that will
extend far beyond the first. And now various things happen to us.
First of all actual sex establishes its strange and troublesome
presence within us. This is the massive wakening of the lower body.
And then, in the upper body, the breasts of a woman begin to develop,
her throat changes its form. And in the man, the voice breaks, the
beard begins to grow round the lips and on to the throat. There are
the obvious physiological changes resulting from the gradual bursting
into free activity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion,
in the lower body, and of the cervical plexuses and ganglia of the
neck, in the upper body.
Why the growth of hair should start at the lower and upper sympathetic
regions we cannot say. Perhaps for protection. Perhaps to preserve
these powerful yet supersensitive nodes from the inclemency of changes
in temperature, which might cause a derangement. Perhaps for the sake
of protective warning, as hair warns when it is touched. Perhaps for a
screen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of other
suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the head
acts as a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents of
physical and vitalistic activity to and from the brain. And perhaps
from the centers of intense vital surcharge hair springs as a sort of
annunciation or declaration, like a crest of life-assertion. Perhaps
all these things, and perhaps others.
But with the bursting awake of the four new poles of dynamic
consciousness and being, change takes place in everything, the
features now begin to take individual form, the limbs develop out of
the soft round matrix of child-form, the body resolves itself into
distinctions. A strange creative change in being has taken place. The
child before puberty is quite another thing from the child after
puberty. Strange indeed is this new birth, this rising from the sea of
childhood into a new being. It is a resurrection which we fear.
And now, a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. Now new
relationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence.
Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters and
mistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends. This is the period
of _Schwaermerei_, of young adoration and of real initial friendships.
A child before puberty has playmates. After puberty he has friends and
enemies.
A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bonds
relaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds now
relax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it never
dies.
It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger now enter the soul.
And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of
genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of
forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing
into his own isolation of individuality.
All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new
world. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be
responsible for it.
Now sex comes into active being. Until puberty, sex is submerged,
nascent, incipient only. After puberty, it is a tremendous factor.
What is sex, really? We can never say, satisfactorily. But we know so
much: we know that it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, and
a circuit of force _always_ flowing. The psychoanalyst is right so
far. There can be no vivid relation between two adult individuals
which does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force
or magnetism or electricity, call it what you will, between these two
people. Yet is this dynamic flow inevitably sexual in nature?
This is the moot point for psychoanalysis. But let us look at sex, in
its obvious manifestation. The _sexual_ relation between man and woman
consummates in the act of coition. Now what is the act of coition? We
know its functional purpose of procreation. But, after all our
experience and all our poetry and novels we know that the procreative
purpose of sex is, to the individual man and woman, just a side-show.
To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, a
vital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital individual
experience the life and very being of the individual largely depends.
But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We
know that in the act of coition the _blood_ of the individual man,
acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity--we know no word, so
say "electricity," by analogy--rises to a culmination, in a tremendous
magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of
the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense,
polarized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into
contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two
individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible,
clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an
electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the
densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passes
through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation
which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each--and then
the tension passes.
The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were
before? Is the air the same after a thunder-storm as before? No. The
air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. So is the blood
of man and woman after successful coition. After a false coition, like
prostitution, there is not newness but a certain disintegration.
But after coition, the actual chemical constitution of the blood is so
changed, that usually sleep intervenes, to allow the time for
chemical, biological readjustment through the whole system.
So, the blood is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost recreated,
like the atmosphere after thunder. Out of the newness of the living
blood pass the new strange waves which beat upon the great dynamic
centers of the nerves: primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and the
sacral ganglion. From these centers rise new impulses, new vision, new
being, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of blood.
And so individual life goes on.
Perhaps, then, we will allow ourselves to say what, in psychic
individual reality, is the act of coition. It is the bringing together
of the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarized
electric blood of the female, with the result of a tremendous flashing
interchange, which alters the constitution of the blood, and the very
quality of _being_, in both.
And this, surely, is sex. But is this the whole of sex? That is the
question.
After coition, we say the blood is renewed. We say that from the new,
finely sparkling blood new thrills pass into the great affective
centers of the lower body, new thrills of feeling, of impulse, of
energy.--And what about these new thrills?
Now, a new story. The new thrills are passed on to the great upper
centers of the dynamic body. The individual polarity now changes,
within the individual system. The upper centers, cardiac plexus and
cervical plexuses, thoracic ganglion and cervical ganglia now assume
positivity. These, the upper polarized centers, have now the positive
role to play, the solar and the hypogastric plexuses, the lumbar and
the sacral ganglia, these have the submissive, negative role for the
time being.
And what then? What now, that the upper centers are finely active in
positivity? Now it is a different story. Now there is new vision in
the eyes, new hearing in the ears, new voice in the throat and speech
on the lips. Now the new song rises, the brain tingles to new thought,
the heart craves for new activity.
The heart craves for new activity. For new _collective_ activity. That
is, for a new polarized connection with other beings, other men.
Is this new craving for polarized communion with others, this craving
for a new unison, is it sexual, like the original craving for the
woman? Not at all. The whole polarity is different. Now, the positive
poles are the poles of the breast and shoulders and throat, the poles
of activity and full consciousness. Men, being themselves made new
after the act of coition, wish to make the world new. A new,
passionate polarity springs up between men who are bent on the same
activity, the polarity between man and woman sinks to passivity. It is
now daytime, and time to forget sex, time to be busy making a new
world.
Is this new polarity, this new circuit of passion between comrades and
co-workers, is this also sexual? It is a vivid circuit of polarized
passion. Is it hence sex?
It is not. Because what are the poles of positive connection?--the
upper, busy poles. What is the dynamic contact?--a unison in spirit,
in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great _work_. A
mingling of the individual passion into one great _purpose_. Now this
is also a grand consummation for men, this mingling of many with one
great impassioned purpose. But is this sex? Knowing what sex is, can
we call this other also sex? We cannot.
This meeting of many in one great passionate purpose is not sex, and
should never be confused with sex. It is a great motion in the
opposite direction. And I am sure that the ultimate, greatest desire
in men is this desire for great _purposive_ activity. When man loses
his deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and is
lost. When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation,
even in his _secret_ soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair.
When he makes woman, or the woman and child the great center of life
and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair.
Man must bravely stand by his own soul, his own responsibility as the
creative vanguard of life. And he must also have the courage to go
home to his woman and become a perfect answer to her deep sexual call.
But he must never confuse his two issues. Primarily and supremely man
is _always_ the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown,
alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists
only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening
and the night are hers.
The psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation always,
do us infinite damage.
We have to break away, back to the great unison of manhood in some
passionate _purpose_. Now this is not like sex. Sex is always
individual. A man has his own sex: nobody else's. And sexually he goes
as a single individual; he can mingle only singly. So that to make sex
a general affair is just a perversion and a lie. You can't get people
and talk to them about their sex, as if it were a common interest.
We have got to get back to the great purpose of manhood, a passionate
unison in actively making a world. This is a real commingling of many.
And in such a commingling we forfeit the individual. In the
commingling of sex we are alone with _one_ partner. It is an
individual affair, there is no superior or inferior. But in the
commingling of a passionate purpose, each individual sacredly abandons
his individual. In the living faith of his soul, he surrenders his
individuality to the great urge which is upon him. He may have to
surrender his name, his fame, his fortune, his life, everything. But
once a man, in the integrity of his own individual soul, _believes_,
he surrenders his own individuality to his belief, and becomes one of
a united body. He knows what he does. He makes the surrender
honorably, in agreement with his own soul's deepest desire. But he
surrenders, and remains responsible for the purity of his surrender.
But what if he believes that his sexual consummation is his supreme
consummation? Then he serves the great purpose to which he pledges
himself only as long as it pleases him. After which he turns it down,
and goes back to sex. With sex as the one accepted prime motive, the
world drifts into despair and anarchy.
Of all countries, America has most to fear from anarchy, even from one
single moment's lapse into anarchy. The old nations are _organically_
fixed into classes, but America not. You can shake Europe to atoms.
And yet peasants fall back to peasantry, artisans to industrial labor,
upper classes to their control--inevitably. But can you say the same
of America?
America must not lapse for one single moment into anarchy. It would be
the end of her. She must drift no nearer to anarchy. She is near
enough.
Well, then, Americans must make a choice. It is a choice between
belief in man's creative, spontaneous soul, and man's automatic power
of production and reproduction. It is a choice between serving _man_,
or woman. It is a choice between yielding the soul to a leader,
leaders, or yielding only to the woman, wife, mistress, or mother.
The great collective passion of belief which brings men together,
comrades and co-workers, passionately obeying their soul-chosen leader
or leaders, this is not a sex passion. Not in any sense. Sex holds
any _two_ people together, but it tends to disintegrate society,
unless it is subordinated to the great dominating male passion of
collective _purpose_.
But when the sex passion submits to the great purposive passion, then
you have fulness. And no great purposive passion can endure long
unless it is established upon the fulfillment in the vast majority of
individuals of the true sexual passion. No great motive or ideal or
social principle can endure for any length of time unless based upon
the sexual fulfillment of the vast majority of individuals concerned.
It cuts both ways. Assert sex as the predominant fulfillment, and you
get the collapse of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. Assert
_purposiveness_ as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and you
drift into barren sterility, like our business life of to-day, and our
political life. You become sterile, you make anarchy inevitable. And
so there you are. You have got to base your great purposive activity
upon the intense sexual fulfillment of all your individuals. That was
how Egypt endured. But you have got to keep your sexual fulfillment
even then subordinate, just subordinate to the great passion of
purpose: subordinate by a hair's breadth only: but still, by that
hair's breadth, subordinate.
Perhaps we can see now a little better--to go back to the child--where
Freud is wrong in attributing a sexual motive to all human activity.
It is obvious there is no real sexual motive in a child, for example.
The great sexual centers are not even awake. True, even in a child of
three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall, in its
approach from the distance. But these are only an uneasy intrusion
from the as-yet-uncreated, unready biological centers. The great
sexual centers of the hypogastric plexus, and the immensely powerful
sacral ganglion are slowly prepared, developed in a kind of prenatal
gestation during childhood before puberty. But even an unborn child
kicks in the womb. So do the great sex-centers give occasional blind
kicks in a child. It is part of the phenomenon of childhood. But we
must be most careful not to charge these rather unpleasant apparitions
or phenomena against the individual boy or girl. We must be _very_
careful not to drag the matter into mental consciousness. Shoo it
away. Reprimand it with a pah! and a faugh! and a bit of contempt. But
do not get into any heat or any fear. Do not startle a passional
attention. Drive the whole thing away like the shadow it is, and be
_very_ careful not to drive it into the consciousness. Be very careful
to plant no seed of burning shame or horror. Throw over it merely the
cold water of contemptuous indifference, dismissal.
After puberty, a child may as well be told the simple and necessary
facts of sex. As things stand, the parent may as well do it. But
briefly, coldly, and with as cold a dismissal as possible.--"Look
here, you're not a child any more; you know it, don't you? You're
going to be a man. And you know what that means. It means you're going
to marry a woman later on, and get children. You know it, and I know
it. But in the meantime, leave yourself alone. I know you'll have a
lot of bother with yourself, and your feelings. I know what is
happening to you. And I know you get excited about it. But you
needn't. Other men have all gone through it. So don't you go creeping
off by yourself and doing things on the sly. It won't do you any
good.--I know what you'll do, because we've all been through it. I
know the thing will keep coming on you at night. But remember that I
know. Remember. And remember that I want you to leave yourself alone.
I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through it all myself. You've
got to go through these years, before you find a woman you want to
marry, and whom you can marry. I went through them myself, and got
myself worked up a good deal more than was good for me.--Try to
contain yourself. Always try to contain yourself, and be a man. That's
the only thing. Always try and be manly, and quiet in yourself.
Remember I know what it is. I've been the same, in the same state that
you are in. And probably I've behaved more foolishly and perniciously
than ever you will. So come to me if anything _really_ bothers you.
And don't feel sly and secret. I do know just what you've got and what
you haven't. I've been as bad and perhaps worse than you. And the only
thing I want of you is to be manly. Try and be manly, and quiet in
yourself."
That is about as much as a father can say to a boy, at puberty. You
have to be _very_ careful what you do: especially if you are a parent.
To translate sex into mental ideas is vile, to make a scientific fact
of it is death.
As a matter of fact there should be some sort of initiation into true
adult consciousness. Boys should be taken away from their mothers and
sisters as much as possible at adolescence. They should be given into
some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation
into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy die again,
symbolically, and pull him forth through some narrow aperture, to be
born again, and make him suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make
a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense
of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation,
from which the lad emerges emaciated, but cut off forever from
childhood, entered into the serious, responsible pale of manhood. And
with his whole consciousness convulsed by a great change, as his
dynamic psyche actually is convulsed.--And something in the same way,
to initiate girls into womanhood.
There should be the intense dynamic reaction: the physical suffering
and the physical realization sinking deep into the soul, changing the
soul for ever. Sex should come upon us as a terrible thing of
suffering and privilege and mystery: a mysterious metamorphosis come
upon us, and a new terrible power given us, and a new responsibility.
Telling?--What's the good of telling?--The mystery, the terror, and
the tremendous power of sex should never be explained away. The mass
of mankind should _never_ be acquainted with the scientific biological
facts of sex: _never_. The mystery must remain in its dark secrecy,
and its dark, powerful dynamism. The reality of sex lies in the great
dynamic convulsions in the soul. And as such it should be realized, a
great creative-convulsive seizure upon the soul.--To make it a matter
of test-tube mixtures, chemical demonstrations and trashy lock-and-key
symbols is just blasting. Even more sickening is the line: "You see,
dear, one day you'll love a man as I love Daddy, more than anything
else in the _whole_ world. And then, dear, I hope you'll marry him.
Because if you do you'll be happy, and I want you to be happy, my
love. And so I hope you'll marry the man you really love (kisses the
child).--And then, darling, there will come a lot of things you know
nothing about now. You'll want to have a dear little baby, won't you,
darling? Your own dear little baby. And your husband's as well.
Because it'll be his, too. You know that, don't you, dear? It will be
born from both of you. And you don't know how, do you? Well, it will
come from right inside you, dear, out of your own inside. You came
out of mother's inside, etc., etc."
But I suppose there's really nothing else to be done, given the world
and society as we've got them now. The mother is doing her best.
But it is all wrong. It is wrong to make sex appear as if it were part
of the dear-darling-love smarm: the spiritual love. It is even worse
to take the scientific test-tube line. It all kills the great
effective dynamism of life, and substitutes the mere ash of mental
ideas and tricks.
The scientific fact of sex is no more sex than a skeleton is a man.
Yet you'd think twice before you stock a skeleton in front of a lad
and said, "You see, my boy, this is what you are when you come to know
yourself."--And the ideal, lovey-dovey "explanation" of sex as
something wonderful and extra lovey-dovey, a bill-and-coo process of
obtaining a sweet little baby--or else "God made us so that we must do
this, to bring another dear little baby to life"--well, it just makes
one sick. It is disastrous to the deep sexual life. But perhaps that
is what we want.
When humanity comes to its senses it will realize what a fearful Sodom
apple our understanding is. What terrible mouths and stomachs full of
bitter ash we've all got. And then we shall take away "knowledge" and
"understanding," and lock them up along with the rest of poisons, to
be administered in small doses only by competent people.
We have almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with
_understanding_. The period of actual death and race-extermination is
not far off. We could have produced the same barrenness and frenzy of
nothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man
is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding,"
our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzy
of self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they looked
in the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and
biological process, draped in an ideal, is he? No wonder he sees the
skeleton grinning through the flesh.
Our leaders have not loved men: they have loved ideas, and have been
willing to sacrifice passionate men on the altars of the
blood-drinking, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wilson, or Karl
Marx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt one hot blood-pulse of love for the
working man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? Never. Each of
these leaders has wanted to abstract him away from his own blood and
being, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of a man.
And me? There is no danger of the working man ever reading my books,
so I shan't hurt him that way. But oh, I would like to save him alive,
in his living, spontaneous, original being. I can't help it. It is my
passionate instinct.
I would like him to give me back the responsibility for general
affairs, a responsibility which he can't acquit, and which saps his
life. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for the
future. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for
thought, for direction. I wish we could take hope and belief together.
I would undertake my share of the responsibility, if he gave me his
belief.
I would like him to give me back books and newspapers and theories.
And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and
rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.