of sex--in a way which divorces it wholly from its end--creation on
the physical as well as the spiritual plane--is immoral because it is
"unnatural." Again and again it will be found to lead to a violent reaction
of feeling--a repulsion which is as intense and violent as the devotion
which was its prelude.
What then should those do who have this temperament? No one, perhaps, can
wisely counsel them but themselves. They alone can find out the way by
which the disharmony of their being can be transcended. That it can be so
I am persuaded. That modern psychology has already made strides in the
knowledge of this problem we all know. What is due to arrested development
or to repression can be set right or liberated: what is temperamental
transmuted. But I appeal to those who know this, but who have suffered and
do still suffer under this difficulty, to make it their business to let in
the light, to help others, to know themselves, to learn how to win harmony
out of disharmony and to transcend their own limitations. Let them take
hold of life there where it has hurt them most cruelly, and wrest from
their own suffering the means by which others shall be saved from suffering
and humanity brought a little further into the light. Who knows yet of what
it is capable? Who knows what is our ultimate goal? It may be that out of
a nature so complex and so difficult may come the noblest yet, when the
spirit has subdued the warring temperament wholly to itself.
And to the others I would say this. If the homosexual is still the most
misunderstood, maltreated, and suffering of our race, it is due to our
ignorance and brutal contempt. How many have even tried to understand? How
many have refrained from scorn? Other troubles have been mitigated, other
griefs respected if not understood. But this we refuse even to discuss.
We are content to condemn in ignorance, boasting that we are too good
to understand. In consequence, though a few here and there have preached
homosexuality as a kind of gospel, far more have suffered an agony of
shame, a self-loathing which makes life a hell.
To be led to believe that one is naturally depraved!--to be condemned as
the worst of sinners before one has committed even a single sin! Is that
not the height and depth of cruelty? Do you wonder if here and there one
of the stronger spirits among these condemned ones reacts in a fierce,
unconscious egotism and proclaims himself the true type of humanity, the
truly "civilized" man? How shall they see clearly whom we have clothed in
darkness, or judge truly who are so terribly alone?
To have a temperament is not in itself a sin! To find in your nature a
disharmony which you must transcend, a dislocation you have to restore
to order, is not a sin! Whose nature is all harmony? Whose temperament
guarantees him from temptation? Is there one here who is not conscious of
some dislocation in his life that he must combat? Not one!
It is a disharmony to have an active spirit in a sickly body. It is a
disharmony to have, like one of the very greatest of Christ's disciples, "a
thorn in the flesh to buffet him." Who shall deliver us from this body of
death? When you hear of a Beethoven deaf or of a Robert Louis Stevenson
spitting blood, are you not conscious of disharmony? Where there is perfect
harmony--_perfect_, I say--such a dislocation could not be. Epilepsy has
been called "la maladie des grands," because some great ones have suffered
from it. Perhaps St. Paul did. It is not possible to imagine Christ doing
so. In Him there existed so perfect a harmony of being that one can no more
associate Him with ill-health than with any other disorder or defect.
Yet we do not speak (or think) with horrified contempt of the disharmony
present in St. Paul or in Beethoven. Rather we reverence the glorious
conquest of the spirit over the weakness and limitations of the flesh. Some
of us have even rushed to the opposite extreme and preached ill-health as a
kind of sanctity, in our just admiration for those who have battled against
it and shown us the spirit dominant over the flesh.
But, it will be urged, ill-health is quite another kind of disharmony than
vice. We are not responsible for it, and cannot be blamed.
I am not prepared to admit that this is altogether true, but I will not
discuss it now. The point I want to make clear, if I make nothing else
clear, is that to be born with a certain temperament is not in itself a
sin nor does it compel you to be a sinner. "Your temperament decides your
trials; it does not decide your destiny." It is no more "wicked" to have
the temperament of a homosexual than to have the weakness of an invalid. It
is difficult for the spirit to dominate and to bring into a healthy harmony
a body predisposed to illness and disorder. The greater the glory to those
who succeed! Let us confess with shame that in this other and far harder
case we have not only ignored the difficulty and despised the struggler,
but--God forgive us--have, so far as in us lay, made impossible the
victory.
VIII
MISUNDERSTANDINGS
"If there is one result or conclusion that we may pick out from
the science of sex which has developed so rapidly of recent
years, as thoroughly established and permanently accepted, it
is that the old notion of the sinfulness of the sex process,
_in se_, is superstitious, not religious; and must be discarded
before ethical religion can assert its full sway over
humanity's sex life. And, most assuredly, the conception
narratives [of the New Testament], by retaining the sex process
to the important extent of normal pregnancy and parturition,
foreshadowed and hallowed this development of ethical thought.
They make it clear that the Spirit of God and the spirit of
woman, in conscious union, refuse to justify superstitious and
paralyzing fears, refuse to allow that the sex process is
irredeemable; they render possible and imperative the working
out of the ethical problems directly concerned with sex."
_Northcute: Christianity and Sex Problems_, _pp._ 415, 416.
During the course of these addresses I have more than once, and with more
than common urgency, pleaded for the light of knowledge, that we may
in future not make so many disastrous mistakes from sheer ignorance
and misunderstanding. I have been asked to say more definitely what
"misunderstandings" I had in mind, and to discuss them with at least as
much courage as I have so pressingly demanded from others.
The demand is just; and I feel the less able to disregard it because I have
discussed these very difficulties with people whose lives have been wrecked
by the ignorance in which they were brought up, or saved by knowledge
wisely imparted before the difficulties arose. Knowledge cannot save us
from hardship or difficulty; it cannot make us invulnerable to attack, or
lift us above the ordinary temptations of ordinary mortals; but it can show
us where we are going; it can guide us when we wish to be guided; it can
save us, when we wish to be saved, from mistakes cruel to ourselves and
often far more cruel to other people.
For instance: it is very generally believed that the struggle for
continence is greatly eased by continual and even exhausting physical
activity. To work hard--to work even to exhaustion--is believed by some
to be a panacea. At our great public schools the craze for athleticism
is justified on the ground that, even at the expense of the things of the
mind, it does at least keep the boys from moral evil.
I believe this to be a mistake, and a mistake which is due to our looking
at sex from a too purely physical point of view. It is, of course, imbecile
to forget the physical, and deal with sex simply as a "sin"; but it is no
less stupid to forget that our bodies and souls are intimately bound
together, and that there is much more in passion than a merely physical
instinct. As a matter of fact, a tired person is not immune from
sex-hunger, and even an exhausted person is likely to find that, far from
sexual feeling being exhausted too, it turns out to be the only sensation
that will respond to stimulus at all. The exploitation of sexuality by our
theatres and Press is not successful only in the case of the idle and the
overfed; it finds its patrons also among those who are too tired to put
their minds into anything really interesting from an intellectual or
artistic point of view, but whose attention can be distracted and whose
interest held by a more or less open appeal to the primitive instincts of
sex. Tired people want to be amused and interested if possible; but they
are not easily amused by anything that appeals to the mind, because they
are tired. They want a sensation other than the customary one of fatigue,
and the easiest sensation to excite is a sexual one. They get it thinly
disguised, in a theatre or music-hall, more thickly disguised in the
form of cheap fiction, or quite undisguised elsewhere. But the idea that
sexuality is destroyed by fatigue is a very mischievous illusion which
has misled and helped to destroy some of the most honest strivers after
self-control. Such people will, with a touching belief in saws, seek to
find in exhaustion relief from temptation. But it is not amusing always
to feel tired. One desires at last something else--some other kind of
feeling--and one is too tired to make an effort. But sexual sensation is
easily excited, and in the end the unfortunate finds that he has yielded
again. His hard fight has only ended in defeat, and he either abandons the
advice as mistaken, or himself as hopelessly and uniquely depraved.
The truth is, of course, that what is needed is not physical exhaustion
any more than physical idleness and overfeeding. What is wanted is hard
and _interesting_ work--work that absorbs one's mental as well as physical
strength. A boy at a public school who really cares for games can pour
his energies into them and appear a fine example of the system; a boy who,
though games are compulsory, cannot interest himself in them at all, is not
helped by being physically exhausted. If, then, he yields to a temptation
the other has escaped, this need not be because he is more wicked or more
weak. It may quite well be because the insistence on athleticism, which has
been elevated into a cult, in our public schools, has supplied a real and
absorbing interest for the one, but has merely used the physical capacity
of the other without touching his mind or his spirit at all. When shall
we learn that every human being is a unity, and that to ignore any part of
it--body, mind or spirit--is idiotic? The muscular Christian who believes
that continence is achieved by physical fatigue is as short-sighted as he
who would treat the whole matter as a purely ethical problem. But the man
or woman who works hard at some congenial and absorbing task--especially if
it be creative work--finds the virtue of continence well within his grasp
without exhaustion and without asceticism. It is because sex is essentially
a creative--the creative--power in humanity that we have to direct its
force into some more spiritual channel than mere physical labour, if we are
to make ourselves its master.
Again, an increasing number of us believe that to master our physical
impulses is possible; and that it has seemed impossible--at least,
for men--in the past largely because so little knowledge and so little
common-sense has been used in achieving mastery. Naturally, it was simpler
to assume that it was impossible to control oneself than to find out how
to make it possible, but as we grow more civilized we cease to be perfectly
content with this simple plan, and begin to perceive its extraordinary
injustices and brutalities. It has been said that the civilization of any
people or period may be judged by the position of its women, and though
this is too simple to be quite true, it is far more true than false. If,
however, civilization does raise the position of women, and assign to them
a greater freedom of action and a wider scope for their lives than
was theirs before, it must be clearly understood that women in these
circumstances and of this type will take a quite different line on the
question of sex morals than their great-grandmothers did. It is, for
example, still urged that women must not do this, that or the other
work, because it involves working with men whose sex instincts may be
uncontrollably aroused by such collaboration. Sir Almroth Wright has
pleaded this, and it is being urged to-day against the entrance of women
into what is now almost the only sphere still closed to them--the spiritual
work of the Churches. It is urged that some men are afraid of being
sexually excited if they are addressed by a woman-preacher, and that others
cannot be within the sanctuary, with a woman near them, without similar
danger. The misunderstanding that arises here is, surely, that the cause of
this abnormal excitement is in the woman, whereas (in the cases cited)
it is in the man. There are, of course, women who find an exactly similar
difficulty in working with men: women who are transformed by the mere
presence of men, as there are men who cannot enter a room full of women
without physical disturbance. Such men, such women, are not necessarily
depraved or immoral persons, their temperament may be a source of genuine
distress to them. It may be most admirably controlled, and in thousands of
cases it is so, especially when the sufferer understands himself or--more
rarely--understands herself. All the help that psychology and medical
science can give (and it is much) should be given to and accepted by such
people. The one thing that should _not_ be yielded is the ridiculous claim
that men and women who are not so susceptible (and who are in the vast
majority) should rule their lives according to the standards of those who
are sexually over-developed or one-sidedly developed. It cannot be too
strongly insisted that this problem is the problem of the individual. He
(or she) has got to settle it. He must learn to manage himself in such a
way that he ceases to be abnormally excitable, or he must arrange his life
so that he avoids, as far as possible, the causes of excitement. He must
not expect others to cramp their lives to fit him; he must not expect
civilization to be perverted or arrested in order to avoid a difficulty
which is his own.
The only alternative to this is to revert to a form of civilization in
which it was frankly admitted that sex-impulses could not be controlled,
either by men or by women, and society was therefore organized on a basis
which, quite logically, provided for the restraint of women in a bondage
which prevented them from satisfying their impulses as they chose, and at
the same time protected them from attack by other men than their lawful
owners; and which, further, provided conveniences for the equally
uncontrollable instincts of men.
This system is quite logical; so is the one here advocated, of assuming
that the sexual instincts of both sexes can be controlled. What is not
logical is the assumption that they _can_ be controlled, but that such
control is to be exercised not by each one mastering himself, but by
the removal of all possibility of temptation! This demand is really
incompatible with our civilization, and those who make it should try to
understand that what they ask is, in fact, the reversal of all advance in
real self-control in matters of sex.
Let us abandon the pretence that it is "wicked" for either a man or a woman
to have strongly-developed sex-instincts. When we do this, we shall be
on the high way to learning how to manage ourselves without making
preposterous demands upon our neighbours or inroads upon their individual
freedom.
We shall also, I believe, get rid of those perversions which darken
understanding as well as joy. One need not go all the way with Freud--one
may, indeed, suspect him of suffering from a severe "repression"
himself--while admitting, nevertheless, that much of the folly that
surrounds our treatment of sex-questions is due to the pathetic
determination of highly respectable people to have no sex nature or
impulses at all. Certainly this accounts for much that is called "prudery"
in women, whose repressed and starved instincts revenge themselves in a
morbid (mental) preoccupation with the details of vice. I am forced to the
conclusion that it has also something to do with the quite extraordinary
description that certain ecclesiastics give of their own inability to
control their imaginations even at the most solemn moments. A narrow and
dishonest moral standard has been foisted upon women in these matters, and
instead of knowing themselves and learning to control their natures, they
have been given a false idea of their own natures, and taught instead
merely to repress them. So, very often, a curiously artificial code
of manners has been accepted by the clergyman--a code which has been
crystallized in a phrase by calling the clergy "the third sex"--and he,
like the women, should be in revolt against it if he is to be saved.
Indeed, we are or should be allies, not foes. Let the priest or minister
wear the same kind of collar as other people, mix with them on equal terms,
and then, if he has a higher moral standard than they, it will be his
own standard, accepted by him because it commands his homage, and not a
standard imposed on him merely because he belongs to a certain caste. It
is always the code of morals imposed from without that does mischief, and
results in the repressions and perversions about which modern psychology
has taught us so much.
It will perhaps be urged that the peculiar dangers of which ecclesiastics
are conscious are due to the psychological fact that the erotic and
religious emotions are closely allied. That this is a fact will hardly be
doubted. But again the problem is either an individual one, _or_ it must
be solved by abandoning our present position and reverting to that of an
earlier and cruder civilization. It is possible to argue that eroticism and
religion are so nearly allied and so easily mistaken for one another, that
safety and sincerity alike demand separate worship for men and women.[F] It
is also possible to leave it to the individual to manage himself, conquer
where he can and flee where he cannot. But it is not possible, on grounds
of religious eroticism, to protect men from listening to a woman preaching,
at the cost of compelling women to listen to no one but a man; or insist on
the intolerable cruelty of compelling a man-priest to celebrate mass with a
woman server, while forcing the woman to make her confession to a man.
[Footnote F: As, _e.g._, among the Mahometans and, to a less extent, the
Jews.]
I am convinced that when religious people learn to refrain from cheap
"religion" based on emotional preaching and sentimental or rowdy music,
they will find that, though eroticism and religion are nearly allied and
can easily be mistaken, it is not impossible to distinguish between them.
The effort to do so should be made by our spiritual leaders, and when made
will result in a sturdier and more thoughtful religion. While for those,
whether men or women, who are honestly aware that for them certain things
are impossible there will be an obvious alternative. The man who cannot
forget the woman in the priest or preacher will not attend her church; the
woman, of whom the same is sometimes true, will avoid the ministrations of
men. There will then be less of that eroticism in religion which some of
those who--by a curious perversion of logic--oppose the ministry of women
actually quote as a reason for compelling women to go to men-priests
because there is no one else for them to go to.
IX
FURTHER MISUNDERSTANDINGS: THE NEED FOR SEX CHIVALRY
"Men venerated and even feared women--particularly in their
specifically sexual aspect--even while they bullied them; and
even in corrupt and superstitious times, when the ideal of
womanhood was lost sight of, women tended to get back as
witches the spiritual eminence they had failed to retain as
saints, matrons and saviours of society."
_Northcote: Christianity and Sex Problems, p_. 326.
Chivalry is the courtesy of strength to weakness. Yet women who pride
themselves on their superior moral strength in regard to sex rarely feel
bound to show any chivalry towards the weak. I do not myself believe that
women are _as a whole_ stronger than men, or that men are _as a whole_
stronger than women; but I am sure that the sexes are relatively stronger
in certain respects and at certain points, and that where one is stronger
than the other, that one should feel the chivalrous obligation of strength
whether man or woman. Chivalry is not and ought not to be a masculine
virtue solely.
For example, it is quite common to be told of (or by) some girl who is an
artist in flirtation that she is "quite able to take care of herself." This
appears to mean that whoever suffers, she will not; and whatever is given,
she will not be the giver. It is possible to go further and say that
whatever she buys she will certainly not pay for.
What does she buy? Well, it depends, of course, on what she wants and what
is her social class. But, roughly speaking, she wants both pleasure and
homage--not only theatres and cinemas, ice-creams or chocolates, but the
incense that goes with such things--the demonstration of her triumphant
sexual charm, which evokes such offerings.
Of course, in a great deal of this there is no harm. People who like each
other will like to please each other, to give pleasure, and to enjoy it
together. But there is something beyond this which is not harmless but
detestable, and that is the deliberate playing on sexual attraction in
order to extract homage and to demonstrate power. A girl will sometimes
play on a man as a pianist on his instrument, put a strain on him that
is intolerable, fray his nerves and destroy his self-control, while she
herself, protected not by virtue but frigidity, complacently affirms that
she "can take care of herself." The blatant dishonesty of the business
never strikes her for a moment. She takes all she wants and gives nothing
in return, and honestly believes that this is because she is "virtuous."
That she is a thief--and one who combines theft with torture--never occurs
to her; yet it is true.
Observe--I do not suggest that it would be creditable if she did "pay." It
would be no more so than Herod's payment of John the Baptist's head. But
although it is wrong to take something you want and give in return what you
ought not to give, it would be a curious sort of morality that would go on
to argue that it is right to take all and give nothing. Both transactions
are immoral and one is dishonest.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that a parasite _must_ take all
and give nothing or as little as possible. That is the law of its being.
And so long as men resent the independence of women, and enjoy the position
of perpetual paymaster, so long will many women be driven to use the only
weapon they have left. Moreover, it is fair to say--and this is why I plead
for light--that many of them are genuinely ignorant that they are playing
with fire. The more frigid they are themselves, the less are they able to
gauge the forces they are arousing; the more ignorant they are, the less
possible is it for them to be chivalrous to those whose strength and
weakness they alike misunderstand. The half-knowledge, the instinctive
arts, which girls sometimes display continually mislead men into thinking
them a great deal cleverer than they are. Each is ignorant of the other's
weakness, and each puts the other in danger because of that ignorance.
I once spoke to a big meeting of girls in the neighbourhood of a big camp,
during the war; and reflecting on the difficult position of the men--their
segregation from ordinary feminine society, their distance from their
homes, their unoccupied hours, and the inevitable nervous and emotional
strain of preparing for the front--I tried to make the girls realize how
hard they could make it for the men to keep straight, if they were ignorant
or foolish themselves. I knew--and said so--that the girls were in a
difficult position too; but, after all, they prided themselves on being the
more "moral" (_i.e._ the stronger) sex, and should be chivalrous.