=The Fate of the Younger Mate.= The younger mate, however, can

hardly hope to escape unscathed when going thru such an experience.

The old are benefited because their muscles, nerves, glands, etc.,

imitate the attitudes and behavior of the younger mate's organs and

become accordingly younger.

The same process of imitation is at work in the younger mate and the

damage done to him or her is naturally great, altho not always obvious

at first.

His or her younger organism, less experience-laden, and hence more

elastic and more responsive, adapts itself more quickly to the ways of

old age than old age adapts itself to the ways of youth.

Even in cases when the gratification seems to be mutual, the damage

done to the younger mate reveals itself thru neurotic disturbances.

A man of thirty-five consulted for anxiety states, nightmares,

"nervous" gastric troubles, etc.

He had been living since his twentieth year with a woman twenty years

his senior, in fact, a friend and schoolmate of his mother's.

He called her Mama and she called him Sonny. While, according to his

statements, their sexual life was absolutely normal and satisfying, the

repressed incest-fear lurking in his unconscious betrayed itself thru a

nightmare which disturbed his sleep with alarming frequency:

"I am at the foot of marble stairs. A female figure is standing at the

top, a relative, perhaps my mother. She extends her hand to me to help

me up the stairs, but that hand is so weak that it cannot hold me and

then I am frightened by a powerful male figure, a man in authority,

perhaps my father, coming toward me from the side."

Altho the man was physically satisfied, the split in his unconscious

made him very irritable, restless and an unpleasant companion for his

"mama" to whom he made endless scenes for trifling reasons.

=King David.= In Biblical days when King David grew old,[2] his

ministers besought themselves of the following remedy: they found a

young virgin and "let her lie in his bosom" in the hope that the dying

man might be revived by her contact. Even that availed nothing.

In our days, however, we have come to prize human life and happiness

more highly and young virgins shall not be sacrificed, being the new

generation and the future, to the welfare of some modern King David who

is the past.

The young women in our midst, virgins or others, whom a morbid

obsession draws to the bosom of some King David must be saved from the

winter chill that awaits them. Modern psychology holds the key opening

for them the door to freedom and normal love.

CHAPTER XXVII

NEGATIVE LOVE

The only form of love which is positive is complete love, which

gratifies both the physical and the mental aspects of the organism

and which, besides, is human and, hence, recognises and admits the

relativity of all things human.

Any form of love which excludes either the physical or the mental

relationship of male and female, is incomplete and, therefore, abnormal.

All the puritanical rant to the contrary notwithstanding, platonic

love and prostitution are on the same biological level, as morbid and

unnatural one as the other.

Prostitution only gratifies the body more or less completely and

starves the mind, causing the mental aspect of the love craving to

become stunted or perverse.

Platonic love gratifies the intellect more or less completely,

rather less than more, for it offers few egotistical rewards, but it

starves the body and leads it into adopting morbid forms of craving

gratification.

=A Clean Life.= Many a patient has declared proudly to me that he led

a "clean life." A few days later, after losing his selfconsciousness

in my presence, he would gradually confess to a terrible "struggle"

against his "animal" instincts. Which meant, that at irregular

intervals, self-gratification would give him, in a morbid day dream,

the woman whose love he craved; or a pollution dream would allow

him, in the unconsciousness and ethical irresponsibility of sleep,

to make up for his privations by indulging in imaginary promiscuous

cohabitation.

This is in too many cases, the seamy side of a platonic love affair,

when one or both of the mates is not naturally unsexed but unsexes

himself thru what he or she calls will-power and which analysis reveals

to be conscious or unconscious fear.

This is the meaning of love plus continence. In the majority of cases

its damage stops there. In a few cases, however, especially when the

sex cravings of one of the mates have been so successfully repressed

that they are no longer experienced consciously, symbolical nightmares

of the most exhausting kind, hysterical disturbances during the

waking hours, compulsions and obsessions of all sorts, reveal to the

psychoanalyst that lava is boiling under the apparently extinct cone of

a safe volcano.

The platonic individual, like the puritan, is either oversexed or

undersexed.

The oversexed must surround themselves with protective measures lest

their violent cravings may lead them into socially punishable acts. The

simplest neurotic expedient is to utter a complete denial, whenever

possible a public one, of the existence of sexual cravings, and then to

be forced by one's statements into living up to an absurd self-imposed

standard.

=Utterances and Conduct.= This at times results in most grotesque

conflicts between utterance and conduct. We see for instance the

much married Mrs. Eddy who as the witty Theodore Schroeder remarked,

had many more husbands than children, stating that the pleasures of

the flesh "are always wrong unless the physiologic factor can be

excluded from consciousness" (a rather cryptic sentence) and also that

"generation rests on no sexual basis."

Thy hysteric whose volcanic outbursts supply her with a morbid sexual

relief for which she rejects all responsibility, for she is unconscious

at the time is generally in her private and public life a woman of

great repressions and perfect behavior, likely to sneer at every

mention of a sex urge.

In other cases, platonic love is an attempt at creating an artificial

value thru destroying a natural, biological human function.

=Oracles and Prophecies.= In ancient times it was observed that

people deprived of any sexual gratification made at times mysterious

utterances which were considered as an emanation of some divine

intelligence.

Those utterances were nothing but hysterical ravings, accepted as

oracles, prophecies, etc.

Our praise of continence, practiced even when it is unnecessary, (as in

the case of lawfully married mates), is, after all, a survival of such

superstitious beliefs based on misunderstood morbid phenomena.

Modern science, especially the new science of endocrinology, has shown

that to every display of sexual activity corresponds an outpouring of

hormonic secretions which benefits the entire system.

=Can We Save Our Vital Force?= Once upon a time it was assumed that

continence enabled people to save their "vital force," to preserve the

"resources of their body."

We know now that the gonads produce two secretions, one which would

pass out of the body in any event, and one which flows directly in the

blood and is the only one which can benefit the organism.

The various puritanical theories as to the great value of continence

had been shaken many times by evidence from the biography of all the

great writers, artists, philosophers, inventors and other men and women

who have left the world much enriched by their creative labor and at

the same time indulged freely in the pleasures of the flesh.

=Sublimation.= Endocrinology strikes now the last blow at those

theories, one of which by the way, was Freud's romantic hypothesis of

the "sublimation."

Freud believed that sexual energy could be diverted towards social ends

of greater value and non-sexual in character. This is scientifically

absurd, as it disregards the dualism of glandular secretions. The

outward secretions cannot be "saved" and the inner secretions which are

beyond our control flow directly into the blood stream.

I have shown in another book, "Sex Happiness" that the platonic man

is either the victim of his ignorance of sex matters and of ascetic

superstitions which modern physiology can no longer countenance, or a

physiologically deficient individual.

The heroes of Beresford's "God's Counterpoint" and of May Sinclair's

"The Romantic" whom I analised in "Sex Happiness" correspond to the

first and the second of those types, respectively.

=The Sexless.= There are men and women, of course, of the hypogonadal

type, undersexed or sexless, who are capable of deep affection for a

person of the opposite sex. That such an affection never culminates

in complete physical communion is easily understood. Sexual failures

discourage the weaker friend from risking any more experiments likely

to result in humiliation.

The sexless man is practically a woman, and like certain homosexuals,

treats women as members of his own sex. He may make a pleasant,

delicate, safe companion, but no woman should allow herself to care for

him.

=Frigid Women= who never experience any thrill in their husband's

embrace and hence consider the physical communion as an indecent

act forgivable in a husband only, as it is a part of the marriage

arrangement, may love a man very deeply and yet never feel the urge to

surrender their body to him.

Here again we have to deal with ignorance or neurosis or both.

The frigid woman, as I explained elsewhere is generally a neurotic,

(perhaps made so by unpleasant first sexual experiences and her mate's

failure to awaken her normal erotism), who is afraid of life, of its

biological duties, of responsibility, of submission to a man's will,

etc., and burdened with some unconscious incest fixation on her father,

or homosexual fixation on her mother, etc.

Her platonic attitude in love is due to numberless unconscious fears

which are a strong bulwark against temptation.

=Ideal Love.= Another form of negativism in love which receives no

little amount of praise at the hands of the romantically silly and of

the ill-informed, is the quest of the ideal love.

We meet men and women, sometimes of mature years, who tell us with a

great deal of pride that they never married because they could not find

the "right mate."

I will not deny that in rare cases this may be considered a perfectly

valid reason, pointing to no morbid disposition on the part of the

unwillingly single person. Marriage might have implied mating with a

member of an erotically indifferent race, African or Asiatic; isolation

in a remote farming community where a refined woman could only select

a mate from among primitive laborers, or in mining regions like some

Alaska camps, where the only women available at times are prostitutes.

Barring such "legitimate" exceptions, which to my mind, imply however,

a suspicious indifference to securing a mate, the seeker for an ideal

mate is almost always neurotic.

=Protective Measures.= By setting his goal very high, he is

protected against the danger of finding a mate and assuming life's

responsibilities, increased as they would be by normal sexual

activities.

This is done in various ways, thru exaggerated social expectations, or

thru unreasonable economic demands, or through morbid criticism of the

possible mate.

A working girl may set her heart on marrying none but a Prince Charming

who could by no chance whatsoever be attracted by her appearance or her

manners, unless he himself were a neurotic seeking safety in a union

with a socially inferior mate (students marrying waitresses, etc.).

Newspapers publish enough news of such matches to supply the neurotic

woman with a reasonable rationalisation of her fear of matrimony.

Some poor, unattractive young man may likewise decide never to marry

unless he may secure as his bride a woman whom her social position

makes unattainable. Here again, unions of heiresses with menials supply

the rationalisation.

Some unattractive women may make such financial demands on the man

seeking their affection that no one will have the courage to tempt them

away from their single-blessedness.

=Lovers of the Absolute.= There are individuals of a much more

pathological type still, who refuse to recognise and accept the

relativity of all things human, who seek absolute beauty, perfection,

intelligence, understanding, sympathy in their future mate and who grow

discouraged and depressed when they unavoidably discover flaws in every

companion of the opposite sex.

In certain cases that obsession of the perfect detail is a symptom of

insanity.

Cartoonists have often amused themselves and us by representing famous

men and women with their features so distorted that their distant

likeness to some animal is emphasized.

I have observed the same distortion in neurotics to whom that delusion

brought no humorous enjoyment but on the contrary deep suffering.

=A Troublesome Patient.= One of my patients a handsome young man of

twenty-six, had had very ephemeral affairs with several women and left

them abruptly when he suddenly discovered in their features a likeness

to certain animals, pigs, dogs, monkeys, etc. After which he could

never be prevailed upon to see them again.

One morning he called on me, announcing coolly that he had decided to

shoot me. I invited him to sit down and discuss his plans more fully

before carrying them out, and also to mention some of his reasons for

that somewhat radical decision.

He explained to me, with his right hand annoyingly buried in his

coat pocket, that he had been in love for a few weeks, with a very

attractive girl. Recently, he had noticed something in her profile

which distantly resembled a pig's snout. The night before, while he

was in her company, he suddenly saw her head transformed into a pig's

head. He fled from her rooms in terror and disgust and, attributing his

"clear insight into her true nature" to my psychoanalytic teachings,

had decided to save others from my baneful influence by killing me.

As is usually the case with maniacs, a quiet conversation cast doubts

in his mind. I told him that I did not approve of his plans which

might, however, be excellent, but that, as I was really a biased

adviser in that matter, he should discuss them with an impartial third

party. He then decided to call on Dr. Everett Dean Martin who advised

him to take a rest cure and escorted him to Bellevue Hospital.

The poor boy's transfer to the State Asylum has put an end to his

search for the ideal love. That search was a disguised flight from

women and love, his delusion was an effective measure of protection

against temptation.

Nothing but the absolute could satisfy him in a woman. Relativity was

abhorrent to him.

Every seeker for the ideal love has gone a few steps along the road

which led my poor patient into the house of the living dead.

=Higher Aspirations.= Neurotics of that type are plausible for they

compensate for their fear and their inferiority with a pride based upon

"higher aspirations," "greater delicacy of feelings," "an aristocratic

nature" or the tell-tale statement that "their mother's beautiful

character," "their father's noble nature" makes every man or woman

appear very inferior in their eyes.

Proud of certain characteristics of theirs which they cannot help

having, they childishly display an egotism and selfishness which makes

them at times very ridiculous, for it says indirectly: "Nobody is

quite good enough for me."

When the search for ideal love results in nervous states due to

egotistical starvation, psychoanalysis can help greatly by giving the

neurotic insight into the fear of life or the parent-fixation which is

at the bottom of his romantic aspirations.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE NEW WOMAN AND LOVE

How will love fare at the hands of the new woman? The old forms of

love will naturally be as unbearable to her as the steel corsets of a

forgotten generation. Yet the problem is not so very pressing, for the

truly new woman is still an almost insignificant factor, numerically

speaking, in every community.

Even in the professions and trades of a distinctly masculine character

which woman has recently invaded, we meet constantly the mock-modern

person, who under a veneer of modernity, still harbors all the

superstitions, and exhibits all the mannerisms of the "old fashioned"

woman.

Being old-fashioned in love, as in every other activity of life,

presents a great temptation to the lazy, the unintelligent, the

neurotic.

It is an excuse for all sorts of unethical forms of conduct, for

failure or inactivity, and yet carries with itself a deceptive air of

mock refinement and distinction.

The woman who boasts of being old fashioned can misbehave and retain

for years her husband's or her environment's confidence in her purity.

Being old fashioned, she is assumed by all to be a little "simple" and

"silly" at times, but unlikely to ever cross certain boundaries. At the

same time, she can pass cruel judgments on all the trangressors who

have not been as shrewd or lucky as she.

As a basis for a discussion of the extent to which love will affect the

modern woman and modern woman affect love, I shall select the picture

drawn by George Bernard Shaw in McCall's Magazine for October 1920 of

the woman of the new generation.

"=What Women Had to Do Recently=," Shaw writes, "was not to repudiate

their femininity but to assert its social value, not to ape masculinity

but to demonstrate its insufficiency. This was the point of my play

Candida in which it is made quite plain that the husband's masculine

career would go to pieces without the wife's feminine activity.

"As refinement was supposed to be proper to women and roughness proper

to men fifty years ago, the great increase in companionship between

men and women during that period was bound either to refine the

men or roughen the women. It has done both. The feminine refinement

which was only silliness disguised by affection has gone; and women

are hardier and healthier, and the stock sizes of their clothes are

larger in consequence. The masculine vigor that was only boorishness,

slovenliness and neglect of person and clothes has fled before feminine

criticism.

"=But the Generalisation That Women are Refined and Men Rough by

Nature= is a superficial one, holding good only when, as often happens,

the man's occupation is rougher than the woman's. The natural woman

cannot afford to be as fastidious as the natural man; if she shirked

all the unpleasantness that he escapes, the race would perish. As a

matter of fact, there are coarse women and coarse men, refined women

and refined men; and there is no reason to suppose that the proportions

differ in the two sexes.

"=There is, However, a Rebellion against Nature= in the matter of

the very unequal share of the burden of reproduction which falls to

men and women in civilized communities. I say civilized communities

advisedly, because the extremely artificial life of the modern lady

has the effect of making her natural functions pathological. Whether

the rebellion has been going on ever since ladies were invented I do

not know, because history is silent on the subject, as it is on so

many specifically feminine subjects. But I can testify that among

women brought up amid the feminist movement of the second half of the

nineteenth century there was a revolt against maternity which went

deeper than that revolt against excessive maternity which has led

to birth control. These more thoroughgoing rebels objected to the

whole process, from the occasional event itself to the more permanent

conditions it imposes. It is easy to dismiss this as monstrous and

silly, but the modern conception of creative evolution forbids us to

dismiss any development as impossible if it becomes the subject of an

aspiration.

"There is no limit to the truth of the old saying that where there is a

will there is a way, and though for the moment a refusal to accept the

existing conditions of reproduction would mean race suicide, the rebels

against nature may be the pioneers of evolutionary changes which may

finally dispose of the less pleasant incidents of nutrition, and make

reproduction a process external to the parents in its more burdensome

phases, as it now is in many existent species."

=The Entrance of Woman into Commercial Life= has trained her no longer

to expect something for nothing (exchangeable) and to realize that a

bargain, to be satisfactory, an agreement, to be lasting, must be based

on mutual advantages to both parties.

Love, with the old fashioned, began with a struggle of wits between the

sexes, the man trying to conquer without granting any advantages to the

defeated, woman trying to wear out her opponent and make him yield more

and more advantages before she finally "paid up."

On one side, fear of financial burdens, at the other end, fear of

desertion and pregnancy, suspicion and cruelty.

The sex struggle with its disgusting features of hypocrisy, pretence,

duplicity, misrepresentation, denial of biological facts, etc., has

yielded to an agreement, much as the robber system of past ages has

been replaced by commercial transactions which leave no hatred and no

desire for vengeance in their wake.

=Was It a Sacrifice?= The old-fashioned woman, wife or mistress,

assuming the position of the conquered and defeated, claimed infinite

privileges as an offset to what she has "given up," "sacrificed,"

"yielded." She humiliated her conqueror by pretending that

his body or his caresses were not the equal of hers, and that she only

submitted to his desire, without much pleasure, compelled by his "low

instincts."

The modern woman, conversant with the facts of sex, and no longer

having to create an artificial value for her body based on disregard

of biological facts, since her activities, mental and physical, now

command a definite price on the market place, seeks a partner with whom

she will exchange caresses leading, as she recognises without silly

shame, to mutual gratification.

=The Pursuit.= The old-fashioned woman, who always assumed the

passive role in life and who, supposedly indifferent to the pleasures

of the flesh, ran away, actually or figuratively, from the brutal

pursuer, played a preposterous dual part in the pre-love skirmishes.

Who has never encountered the woman who wears in a public place some

dress which reveals a great deal of her bust, and yet who pretends to

be offended if some man stares at what she has exposed in order to

attract his stare?

The modern woman whose worth is determined, not by the male's

eroticism in her presence, but by her accomplishments, can afford to be

frank, honest, if not, at times, aggressive, in the love search.

=The Passing of Respectable Prostitution.= The old-fashioned woman,

having created the artificial value of womanhood as such, indulged in

a mild, genteel form of prostitution, which, having no consequences

likely to impose a burden on the community, (pregnancy, childbirth)

never was criticised very severely. She sold her company for meals,

theatre tickets, comfortable transportation, flowers, trinkets. Now and

then, developing a streak of fairness and honesty, she would grant the

man she exploited small privileges of a superficial kind. But the real

old-fashioned girl was of the absolutely sordid type, who could allow a

more or less repellent suitor to spend considerable sums to amuse her

but would express genuine indignation at the thought that the man could

be as sordid as she was, and expect some caresses in return.

The modern woman, made independent financially by her non-sexual

activities, can remove from her love all taint of even mild

commercialism, returning favors in kind, or accepting presents, no

longer as a bribe, but as a token of affection on the part of a man she

loves.

=The Abettor of Ethical Sins.= The old fashioned wife was in many more

cases than superficial thinking would cause us to imagine, a more

dangerous corrupter of public and private morality than the prostitute.

Numerically the wife predominates. The prostitute constitutes a very

small minority of the population of large cities and does not thrive in

small town, villages or farming communities.

Louis Berman, who is generally very indifferent to psychology, makes a

very valuable remark in his book on glands: "Consider," he writes, "the

unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the

mate and then the mate's career."

Which means that the woman who takes up wifehood as a profession has

no social morality. Her husband is her oyster and the world must in

turn be her husband's oyster. She knows only one thing: that she must

support her mate in anything he does so long as his activities, be they

even immoral or criminal, provide food and shelter for her and her

children. She cares not what he does as long as he "succeeds."

She founds her estimate of success upon visible accomplishment. Getting

"theirs," to her is preferable to getting "there." She, in short, is

a foe to the world, as the world is the foe her mate has set out to

capture and rob.

She willingly sells his ethics to buy success and, at the same time,

is loud in her denunciation of public, self-confessed prostitutes. She

would not prostitute herself but she lightheartedly prostitutes her

mate.

The modern woman can in an emergency help her husband financially and

thus enable him to follow the dictates of social ethics. She will

thereby earn deeper love and respect from him than by any willingness

to stand by him in crooked deals.

=Health Versus Sickness.= To the old fashioned wife, weakness and

sickness were invaluable assets. Sickness excused laziness and

capriciousness. Sickness was a bait for petting and at the same time,

a protection against unwelcome physical intimacies. Her menstruation

became a mysterious, offensive, painful process which debarred her from

many careers she never thought of entering, saved her from duties she

was only too glad to shirk. Undismayed by the sight of professional

women, singers, actresses, dancers, divers, etc., who not only never

seemed disabled by the "dreaded" period but also held a distinct

fascination to males "in spite" of their lack of neurotic femininity,

she prided herself in living up to Michelet's asinine description of

woman, "an invalid twelve times unclean."

The modern woman seeking accomplishment of the positive type, scorns

the negative superiority which sickness and invalidism assure to

neurotics. She has acquired a more scientific knowledge of sex matters

and the superstitious fears surrounding menstruation no longer affect

her.

From my own clinical experience, I am compelled to agree heartily with

Dr. Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, who in their very fine

and practical book "Outwitting our Nerves" state that "ninety-five

out of a hundred cases of painful menstruation are caused by fear and

expectation of pain."

=The Passing of the Doll.= The modern woman, active, self reliant,

honest and healthy, will force out of existence a type which has lent

much picturesque charm to social gatherings and to pictorial art, the

doll type of woman, prettiness incarnate, of rose leaf charm, unfit for

any biological function except the mild lovemaking, not so much of a

husband, as of a lover. Tuberculous poets and composers of the Musset

and Chopin type, affected pictorial artists like Helleu, will deplore

her disappearance. Man, put at his ease by the modern woman, who does

not require constant protection, mental and physical, will find the

doll "too much trouble."

Only the very stupid and unmanly man will cultivate her for she will

not throw his physical shortcomings into too striking relief and it

will not require any mental exertion on his part to converse with her.

=The Passing of the Flirt.= The flirt is doomed. The flirt is a

rather unintelligent woman with a mild prostitution complex. She has

been trained from infancy to consider a woman's career as successful

when the woman fastens to herself a breadwinner whom she holds by his

physical desire of her body. Having never acquired any market value

outside of the sexual field, she must constantly test her powers and

reassure herself by leading all sorts and conditions of men, for whom

she may never experience even the slightest fancy, into consequential

overt acts revealing that she has awakened their eroticism.

Anyone will do, provided she reads in his eyes the verdict: I am still

attractive.

The terror of growing old is not so overwhelming to the modern woman

who has acquired a non-sexual market value. She tests herself thru

positive accomplishment, leadership, principally, and does not need to

keep her eye constantly on the sex thermometer.

=Modesty, Old and New.= Knowledge which dispels physical ghosts

and a positive self-valuation based on accomplishment will cause the

modern woman to discard the old fashioned modesty which was supposed to

be her greatest attraction, and which husbands, while being obviously

attracted by immodest women, encouraged in their wives as a bulwark

against the advances of other men.

Havelock Ellis in his "Impressions and Comments" contrasts cleverly

thru two striking illustrations the old-fashioned type, worshipping

at the altar of false modesty, and the modern type, who is no longer

ashamed of her body or her sex:

"In one of my books I had occasion to mention the case, communicated

to me, of a woman in Italy who preferred to perish in the flames,

when the house was on fire, rather than shock her modesty by coming

out of it without her clothes. So far as it has been within my power

I have always sought to place bombs beneath the world in which that

woman lived, so that it might altogether go up in flames. I read of

a troop ship torpedoed in the Mediterranean and almost immediately

sunk within sight of land. A nurse was still on deck. She proceeded

to strip, saying to the men about her: 'Excuse me, boys, I must save

the Tommies.' She swam around and saved a dozen of them. That woman

belongs to my world. Now and again I have come across the like, sweet

and feminine and daring women who have done things as brave as that,

and even much braver because more complexly difficult and always I feel

my heart swinging like a censer before them, going up in a perpetual

fragrance of love and adoration.

"I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger

than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains

modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were

in the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with a

loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends

told, and yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world

in the self sacrificing passion of human service."

Thus far I have presented the silver lining of what some timid persons

call the cloud of modernism in love.

To be perfectly fair and honest, I must now mention the cloud itself,

altho, like all clouds, it will soon blow away or resolve itself into

a few drops of water, tears, perhaps, also of a temporary nature.

=The Unadapted Woman.= The sudden rise of women in certain fields

of activity has left quite a number of them unpleasantly unadapted.

Certain positions, well filled by women, and which pay rather high

salaries, demand but a modicum of intellectual development, little

culture or manners.

The women who fill them, and who generally come from the working class,

financially well off, accustomed to expensive clothes and to respectful

treatment on the part of their coworkers or employers, are loath to

enter a married relationship or even a liaison, with men of their

social set, that is, having the same culture or lack of culture, for

those men are financially lower and lack certain manners which they

expect to find in their environment.

A husband of the working class type could not, in case of pregnancy,

give such a woman the comfort which she now craves. Motherhood would

deprive her, temporarily at least, from an income which nothing could

replace.

Nor could she become subservient to a husband after being very

independent and having become slightly snobbish on account of the

attentions she has received from men financially superior to her.

Some of those women whom I have known, and whose profession I shall

not mention to avoid references of an odious character, sought mates,

legitimate or illegitimate, out of their class, taking for husbands or

lovers unsuccessful professional men in need of help.

The results of those matches were anything but encouraging.

The male prostitutes who accepted such arrangements, either showed

plainly their scorn of their unintellectual mate or left her as soon as

success in their chosen field made them independent of their working

class wife or mistress.

=The Proud Husband.= Many men drawing even small salaries, are

absolutely unwilling to marry a woman engaged in a gainful occupation.

This is due either to hidden jealousy, some men imagining that daily

contact with other men is bound to jeopardise a woman's morals, or to

silly pride and panicky fear of "what THEY will say." I have heard many

donkeys telling me that they do not wish "people" to think that they

cannot support their wives.

The cloud hovering over the modern woman and which may, at times, cast

a shadow on her love life, will be blown away as soon as culture

spreads to all social classes of the population owing to the increase

and systematisation of leisure, and as soon as the old fashioned male

has been consigned to his last resting place or analised out of his

foolish neurotic notions.

CHAPTER XXIX

BIRTH CONTROL

Modern love, as I have endeavored to show in the preceding chapters is

infinitely more complex than love was in the past. When woman was meant

to obey and serve, when feudalism or any other rigid caste system set

clear-cut boundaries to each individual's range of development, there

was less unrest among women just as there was less unrest among slaves.

And both the mediaeval slave and the mediaeval women were probably

absolute bores.

Unrest is growth and complexity is the obvious evidence of growth.

Love stirrings among the amoebae are probably similar to those

experienced by human beings. Nature probably puts a premium of pleasure

on the cleavage of the unicellular animal which reproduces itself by

dividing itself in two, by issuing forth another cell, as it does on

the human male when his gonads liberate spermatozoa.

But the amoeba's love feelings are extremely simple and lead to

no complication for they imply no enduring companionship, no

responsibilities to a mate nor to the "offspring."

=What We Expect of the Modern Woman.= The modern woman who is expected

to be, not merely a sexual mate but a social and intellectual mate as

well, a companion in our athletic diversions, a comrade-at-arms in the

world's battles, and many other things, can no longer allow chance to

interrupt her developmental strivings, to handicap her in the friendly

race she is running with the mate of her choice for intellectual

accomplishment by unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient pregnancy and

child bearing.

Every child claims two years of its mother's life and it seems

reasonable that the mother should have something to say as to what

number that chapter will bear in her biography.

As only the very weak-minded or very hypocritical offer as a remedy for

frequent pregnancy male continence, we shall not even consider for one

minute such an absurd, abnormal, biologically immoral solution.

=The Only Solution.= The only other solution which has ever been

proposed is a system of sexual enlightenment which will enable a

woman to prevent pregnancy until such time when she feels that she can

in justice to herself and to her offspring bear a child, and will,

further, enable her to have an abortion performed when, in spite of all

contraceptive measures, pregnancy has begun.

This solution has been adopted by the entire civilised world, and in

fact, I might say that the degree of civilisation of a race or nation

can be accurately gauged by the number of individuals within that race

or nation practicing birth control.

With very few exceptions, a large family betokens stupidity, poverty

and ignorance. It is the poor, the stupid and the ignorant who are

burdened with children and, in turn, that burden keeps them stupid,

poor and ignorant. A vicious circle which seems hard to break.

=The Human Milch Cow.= Many a time when beholding some miserable

female from the slums wrecked by repeated childbearing, dwarfed in

mind, deformed in body, I have felt that sexual relations between her

and her mate had probably reached the level at which they could only by

an unusual stretch of one's imagination, be even distantly connected

with love. To her and to her mate, every embrace, except after the

onset of pregnancy, meant added suffering, added expense, further

physical degradation and decay.

Since the "nice" people, however, know the remedy and apply it, why

bother any longer? Because, while normally intelligent men and women

know how to avoid pregnancy and to whom to turn when an accident

happens, the greatest uncertainty about contraception obsesses their

minds and panicky fears bring about many catastrophes when the

unwelcome fruit must be removed from the mother's body.

Thousands of men and woman, enlightened in the mysteries of

contraception by some one who is little less ignorant than themselves,

are chilled in their enjoyment of lawful love by the thought of

possible danger.

Many women accept their husbands caresses in fear and trembling and

many, imagining that there is a close connection between orgasm and

pregnancy succeed in making themselves frigid, which leads to neurotic

disturbances in the wife and unhappiness for both mates. Many husbands

never dare to "let themselves go" unless it be in the arms of a

prostitute who is "wise" and can "take care of herself." Many a woman

has deceived her husband because a wise "man of the world" assured her

that she ran no risk of pregnancy in his arms.

=The Nightmare of Abortion.= And, if in spite of all, an

"accident" happens, what is the mental state of the woman who calls

at the "unethical" practitioner's office? While such an operation

practiced with a modicum of skill may be harmless, the dread fear of

possible consequences is quite able to kill the woman.

Fear may bring forth any morbid symptom, from an embolus to violent

suppuration.

Fear, on the other hand, on which the advocates of suppressive measures

rely, hardly ever leads anyone to continence or prevents any one from

resorting to abortion.

Legal obstacles to contraceptive education attain only one result. They

make married love risky and unpleasant, kill many a young woman and, in

the case of neurotic mothers, allow one morbid generation to bring into

this world another morbid generation.

=The Plight of the Neurotic Woman.= Many neurotic women imagine that

they hate their husbands and rationalise that hatred by bringing up

many absurd, imaginary charges against them. To them their husbands

symbolise pregnancy.

Many neurotic mothers, who did not wish to bear another child, often

compensate for their lack of real love for the unwelcome child by an

absurd, exaggerated tenderness which spoils the child or develops

morbid fears (the fear they might hurt or kill the child, fear as to

the child's health or welfare) which wreck the child's mental balance

and not infrequently land the mother in a sanatarium.

A neurotic woman I treated was obsessed by the fear that she might

some day kill her husband and children. Several years ago she had had

an abortion performed by a midwife whom she did not trust. Septic

poisoning set in and she hovered between life and death for several

months. A great fear of death drove her into reading many religious

books. She came to the conclusion that she had committed a murder.

But her husband, having impregnated her, was more guilty than she,

for he was the cause of it all. Hence, her insane logic added, he and

she would be better off dead than leading a sinful life. She should,

therefore, kill him and kill herself. Furthermore, her children being

the offspring of murderers, must be themselves tainted with criminal

tendencies and should also be saved from a life of crime. When she was

brought to me she had attempted to kill the entire family by turning

on the gas faucets all over the house about two o'clock in the morning.

The lawmakers who prevented that woman from having an operation

performed legally, (which would remove the fear of crime) safely, by a

reputable practitioner, (which would remove the fear of consequences),

openly, (which would remove the fear of social ostracism), would

have been responsible for the death of several people, had she not

accidentally awakened her husband by upsetting a chair on her way back

to her bed.

There are thousands of neurotics, suffering from a feeling of

inferiority, who are unfit to become mothers until their morbidity has

been cured by psychotherapy, and who, if allowed to bear children, will

train a new generation to behave in a negative, neurotic, socially

baneful way.

=The Children of Neurotic Mothers=, in whom the fear and hatred of

sex and love is rampant, will some day become prostitutes or puritans,

both of them degrading love equally.

I cannot follow Freud when he states that every neurosis has its root

in a failure of the love life, but some of the artificial obstacles

created by a stupid puritanical civilisation between man and the

full realisation of his sexual goal have not infrequently wrecked a

life which, neurotically oriented as it was, might have gone on, in a

socially tolerable way, for years and perhaps until the individual's

death.

Difficulties due to the use of improper or misunderstood contraceptive

appliances, the terrors of pregnancy, actual or expected, the fear

of abortion, the sufferings following abortion in a complex-ridden

organism, have too often upset a balance which at best was precarious.

=Birth Control and Indulgence.= Certain critics of birth control

attack it on the ground that it would lead to "overindulgence" of the

sex relationship. Those people are generally unprepossessing, worn,

individuals who are trying to compensate for their sexual weakness by

making a virtue out of an unavoidable inferiority. Their opposition to

what they call "overindulgence" (one thing which nature hardly ever

allows, barring rare morbid cases of priapism) is grotesque in the case

of married couples.

More unions are wrecked by underindulgence due to fear, ignorance of

the mates or inhibitions on the part of one or both, than to indulgence

of the normal kind.

Anything which prevents or discourages the normal exchange of sexual

caresses between those legally entitled to each others enjoyment is

pernicious, antisocial and antibiological for, as Grace Potter writes:

"Mating has to do with other creation than that of new human beings. It

has to do with every kind of creation--a new state, a poem, a picture,

a great bridge, a happier world. Mating is concerned with repeopling

the world but also with regeneration of the individual, opening his

capacities to growth. Who shall say that the one is not as important

as the other? If the second were not as important as the first there

would have been hardly any advance in human culture. Of all the errors

incident to the development of human beings, in their struggle to

attain a consciousness that makes them more than animals, none has had

wider ill-effects than our misuse of love.

"There are two equally unfortunate attitudes toward love which perhaps

grow out of each other. The one is the puritan attitude and the other

is the vulgar one. The puritan attitude is that sex impulses are

somehow vile and so, altho they give pleasure, must be denied. The

vulgar attitude takes it for granted that sex impulses are vile but as

they are pleasant are to be accepted. The one tends to deny physical

values to love. This is suppression. The other tends to deny tender

values to love. That is suppression also. They have neither one known

love. And finally the puritan becomes incapable of tenderness and the

vulgar becomes equally incapable of physical expression. It is not a

beautiful picture.

"The healthy attitude is this: The sex impulse is not degrading any

more than any other impulse is. It is a force as gravity is a force.

Those human beings achieve beauty and harmony who correlate sexual

impulses harmoniously with all their other impulses."[3]

"In spite of the age-long teachings that sex life in itself is

unclean," Margaret Sanger writes in "Woman and the New Race," the

world has been moving to a realization that A GREAT LOVE BETWEEN A MAN

AND A WOMAN IS A HOLY THING freighted with great responsibilities for

spiritual growth. The fear of unwanted children removed, the assurance

that she will have a sufficient amount of time in which to develop

her love life to its greatest beauty, with its comradeship in many

fields--these will lift woman by the very soaring quality of her

innermost self to spiritual heights that few have attained. Then the

coming of the eagerly desired children will but enrich life in all its

avenues, rather than enslave and impoverish it as do unwanted ones

to-day.

"What healthier grounds for the growth of sound morals could possibly

exist than the ample spiritual life of the woman just depicted? Free

to follow the feminine spirit, which dwells in the sanctuary of her

nature, she will, in her daily life, give expression to that high

idealism which is the fruit of that spirit when it is unhampered and

unviolated.

"The love for her mate will flower in beauty of deeds that are pure

because they are the natural expression of her physical, mental and

spiritual being. The love for desired children will come to blossom in

a spirituality that is high because it is free to reach the heights.

"=The Moral Force of Woman's Nature Will be Unchained=, and of its own

dynamic power will uplift her to a plane unimagined by those holding

fast to the old standards of church morality. Love is the greatest

force of the universe; freed of its bonds of submission and unwanted

progeny, it will formulate and compel of its own nature observance to

standards of purity far beyond the highest conception of the average

moralist."

=The Passing of the Double Standard.= "Birth Control in

philosophy and practice," Margaret Sanger writes in "THE PIVOT

OF CIVILIZATION," is the destroyer of the dualism in the

old sex code. It denies that the only purpose of sexual activity

is procreation; it also denies that sex should be reduced to the

level of sensual lust or that woman should permit herself to be the

instrument of its satisfaction. In increasing and differentiating her

love demands, woman must elevate sex into another sphere, whereby

it may subserve and enhance the possibility of individual and human

expression. Man will gain in this no less than woman; for in the

age-old enslavement of woman he has enslaved himself; and in the

liberation of womankind, all of humanity will experience the joys of a

newer and fuller freedom."

CHAPTER XXX

THE PASSING OF HUSBAND WORSHIP

While thousands of healthy people, men and women, rejoice over the fact

that woman of the modern type is coming to the fore, there are many

"calamity howlers," male and female, who bid us pause and consider the

direful consequences which they fear (that is, hope), this new stage in

the development of mankind will bring to the world.

Dr. Arabella Kenealy in "Feminism and Sex Extinction" forebodes the

passing of whatever is masculine in the male. Her arguments are not

very logical but they are interesting. She believes that "two fates

await woman unless she rids herself of contempt for functions and

duties purely hers, feminism and feministicism. She is handicapped

every month for two or three days by weakness or pain. The craze to do

men's work will result in man's emasculation.

"The desire to figure in legislation far from stiffening the manly

caliber of weak men will still further enervate them. Members

of either sex are not capable of doing their best work while in

association. Sex rivalries are excited. Sex ascendency is created.

Man inherits from his mother some of woman's apprehension, foresight

and altruism as required to present woman's bent and viewpoint. More

of it would be superfluous. The numerical preponderance of women must

ultimately swamp masculine initiative in state affairs unless the

political functions of the sexes are separated."

Why the process should be more baneful for men than it has been for

women who, for countless generations have been decidedly "swamped in

state affairs" is not very evident.

=Is Man's Virility Declining?= An editorial writer in the New York

Medical Journal also foresees degeneration ahead unless the male

retains his mastery: "The yielding by man to the other sex of masculine

essential rights and obligations is a symptom of declining virility,

physical and mental."

Another medical writer sounds a different alarm: "Overworked woman

may impair the constitutional vigor of man, while she works with

him. She is kept up by nervous excitement, by strong tea or drugs.

In short, woman is fussy. In a stress of work she will work on with

crimson cheeks and growing irritation, while man will put on his hat

and calmly resort to the nearest lunch room. Women by their eternal

high pressure as heads of departments are making nervous wrecks of

themselves."

Finally there comes Havelock Ellis, usually less panicky, who thinks

he has noticed a distinct degeneration in the young man of today.

"These weak-chinned, neurotic young men are no match at all for the

heavy-jawed resolute young women feminist methods are creating. The

yielding to women of masculine rights is a symptom of declining

virility. Equality in all things yielded, pride in himself, in his

work, gone, he will descend to the state of the decadent savage who

keeps as many wives to work for him as their work for him enables him

to keep."

=There is Undue Pessimism in All Those Warnings.= Woman has not become

brutish as some writers claim, nor has man become effeminate. Woman

has simply gained a clearer knowledge of her latent powers and the war

has provided her with a touchstone for her physical resistance and

endurance.

The work woman had to do during the war, which she had never suspected

she could do, for until then it had been considered as man's work, has

not "masculinised" her but it has rid many "delicate flowers" of their

morbid belief in the fragile character of their constitution.

Male man is not in danger of passing out of existence but one variety

of man is doomed, the type which has always wished to mate with the two

types of women which, in the preceding chapter, I declared doomed, the

doll and the flirt.

=The Wise Husband.= That almost extinct species is the type of husband

who speakes of HIS wife, who knows "women" and what is "good" for

them, the home Jehovah, all-knowing and all-powerful, who must be

served and obeyed, who, on his return from work must find his wife

ready to entertain him if so he wishes, or to plunge back into the

depths of the kitchen if his mood so requires, the husband who knows

that he is the aim and goal of his wife's existence.

A ridiculous old man, abandoned by his too young wife, made to the

reporters a statement betraying sadly the infinite conceit of that

type: "She will return to me because I love her so."

A most unprepossessing man was bewailing in my office the fact that his

wife had grown sexually indifferent to him. I advised him not to compel

her to have intercourse with him against her will, especially as he

was diseased. He naïvely remarked: "But she is my wife."

That type of husband, in other words, considers a wife as a chattel,

to be submitted to any sort of legal indignity because she is "only a

female." He may force motherhood upon her to demonstrate his doubtful

virility or to protect his jealous egotism. He would accept with

enthusiasm Goldschmidt's theories which I presented for what they were

worth in the chapter on Virginity, and according to which, woman is

soft wax and characterless, waiting to be shaped into a personality by

her husband's caresses.

Scientific investigators of a more reliable type than Goldschmidt and

who avoid drawing "yellow" conclusions from their labors, have supplied

the reading world with facts which should cause the Jehovah husband to

fear for his lofty position.

=Is the Male Indispensable?= Jacques Loeb and others have demonstrated

that as far as the physical results of love, the continuance of the

race, is concerned, the male may not be absolutely indispensable.

Loeb had shown that almost anything which causes the protoplasm of the

egg to separate itself from its membrane is sufficient to introduce

"life" into that curious organism which until then only holds

possibilities of life.

Nature, in order to produce one individual demands two principles, one

male and one female principle. She must have one egg which is modified

by some product of the male organism, pollen or sperm.

=Modern Scientists Have Beaten Nature at Her Own Game= of

creation; they have taken one egg, the female principle and proceeded

to fertilise that egg without any male product whatsoever.

The experiment has only been made on low forms of animal life, sea

urchins and the like, but the egg of the sea urchin is not different in

any essential respect from the egg of the human species.

By taking unfecundated eggs and placing them for two minutes in a

mixture of sea water and acetic, or butyric, or valerianic acid, then

placing them back in sea water and twenty minutes later, immersing

them for about an hour in hypertonic sea water or sugar solution, and

finally returning them to sea water, Loeb was able to bring to life

young larvæ. A French scientist, Delage, repeating the same experiments

managed to keep those larvæ alive until the time of their sexual

maturity.

Loeb also succeeded in fertilising eggs by placing them in the blood

serum of cows, sheep, pigs or rabbits.

Mathews has fertilised some by shaking them gently for a period of time.

=Twins To Order.= Loeb and others have gone further even than that

and produced not only single individuals but twins, triplets, etc.

The secrets of nature's laboratory are being revealed more and more

clearly from day to day.

The conceited fathers who imagine that the bringing into life of twins

is a symptom of their powerful virility must learn that a mere chemical

phenomenon called _osmosis_ is responsible for the over-fertility of

some wives.

Remove from sea water sea urchin's eggs and place them for fifteen

minutes or so in ordinary water. The density of water being lower than

that of sea water, the eggs will absorb a great deal of water and burst

open. A drop of protoplasm will come out at the break in the membrane.

Replace the exploded egg into sea water and two larvæ will hatch out of

it. Separate the two portions of the exploded egg and the twins will be

as healthy as tho they had been allowed to grow for a while in Siamese

style.

By repeating the experiment, Loeb has produced not only twins but

triplets and quadruplets, all normal and growing out of the same egg

which was only meant originally to produce one urchin.

One can understand how a variation in the pressure of the liquids

surrounding the human egg may lead to the same result.

While scientists have created living beings by using the female

principles as a basis, they have not thus far attained any results by

experimenting with the male principle alone.

=The Mother is the Race= apparently and the stubbornness of man

in claiming and fighting for the principle of masculine superiority

is apparently due to his obscure feeling that after all he is not

indispensable.

The more vociferous the claim, the weaker generally the basis for that

claim. In certain forms of insanity, the more the organism is destroyed

by disease the more extravagant the statements are which the insane man

makes about himself, claiming power, wealth, health, youth, beauty, etc.

At least one animal species, the bees, have placed the male on that

footing. The male bee represents a convenient and pleasant means of

bringing about the fecundation of the eggs. After his chemical part

has been played, however, no one takes him seriously and his official

existence ends. Certain spiders and other insects consider the male in

the same light, some of them killing and eating the male as soon as his

fecundating activities have come to an end.

The feminine domination, if it should ever implant itself into our

world would undoubtedly lead to the absurdities, the exaggerations and

the repressions which are the result of our man made civilisation.

=Matriarchal Communities of the Past= in which the woman was the

head of the family and probably of the state and matriarchial groups of

Tibet have not left visible tokens of their worth as a family system.

As they preceded the present family system however, it may be that

all traces of their achievements have been obliterated by time. The

Tibetan experiment may have been blighted by unfavorable geographical

conditions and rendered as barren as the Mongolian patriarchal

experiments in a neighboring part of the world.

Man as a means of fecundation is not likely to be discarded by normal

women but his prestige is likely to decrease as the secret of his

mysterious power becomes better known.

The passing of the smug, self satisfied Jehovah husband, a neurotic in

every case, is in sight and his passing will facilitate the adaptation

of some of the inadapted women I mentioned in the preceding chapter,

some of whom fail to find love, and some of whom do not dare to seek it.

=The Successful Modern Woman is Rather Conceited.= Some of the things I

said about female artists applies in a great measure to the woman who

in business or in a profession has managed to make her mark.

After struggling years for a certain object which she has at last

attained, she is naturally loath to surrender her personality to the

average husband of the self-styled masculine type.

She at times resorts to homosexualism in an effort to retain her

independence and yet satisfy her love cravings without submitting to a

domination which she feels to be unjustified.

=The Terrors of The Climateric.= The passing of the Jehovah husband

will also ease a process of woman's (and man's) life which has to this

day held countless terrors to the uninitiated, the climacteric.

To the old-fashioned and the gullible woman, the change of life meant

the end of life as a female. The stupid man, who is constantly

endeavoring to subdue his mate thru disparagement and kills speedily

her youth, her enthusiasm and her hopes by repeating constantly the

trashy "At your age, my dear," is in a great measure responsible for

transforming that harmless phenomenon into a painful crisis, mental and

physical.

The crisis of the "Dangerous Age," to use Karin Michaelis's expression,

is generally due to the clash of a weak masochistic female with a weak

and sadistic male, a clash in which, owing to age and the staleness of

the mates, affection has no redeeming, consoling physical features.

=The Masculine Man is in No Danger of Passing Away= and he will for

ever be as attractive to woman as the feminine woman is to him.

As Shaw said, what has been killed in men by the growth of feminism is

"not masculinity but boorishness," a characteristic, not of the strong

but of the weak, who is trying to compensate for his weakness and to

conceal it. What has been killed in woman is not feminine sweetness but

overfeminine silliness which woman used as a deceptive weapon against

the domineering male.

In a world which grants equal opportunities to men and women, no

husband will be able to justify or excuse his treatment of a woman

by saying "She is my wife." He will have to remain her lover in order

to hold her. No wife will be able to make the home hideous and, at

the same time, brandish over her husband's head the certificate of

enslavement called a marriage license. She will have, in order to

compete with the free women whose personality will impose itself upon

her environment, to remain his mistress.

Every step ahead which the world takes fortunately proves a new step

which love takes in the direction of completeness and freedom from

sordidness and ugliness.

CHAPTER XXXI

PERFECT MATRIMONIAL ADJUSTMENTS

While marriage, regardless of whatever form it may assume, has always

been mentioned in this book as unavoidably related to love, we must

not blink the fact that marriage and love are two absolutely different

things forced into frequent association by social and economic

necessity.

Love is an involuntary and compulsory craving which draws a male and a

female into the closest possible union for the purpose of mutual sexual

gratification, generally followed by conception and reproduction.

=Marriage a Compromise.= Marriage on the other hand is merely a

compromise between the positive individual cravings which demand the

most complete and frequent gratification of the love urge, regardless

of its consequences, and the negative feeling which causes the

community to shirk all possible responsibilities incurred by the

individual, among others, the support of pregnant or lactating females

and of helpless infants.

Unless the community owns mother and child and can exploit their labor

or receive their cash value (slavery system), it demands that their

owner, the impregnator of the woman and procreator of the child, supply

food and shelter for both.

Marriage is also a compromise between two individual cravings which may

not be synchronised, as the male's desire for the female may subside

before her desire for him does, or reciprocally.

Through the institution of marriage the community protects itself

against new burdens directly by penalties (sentences against wife

deserters or those who abandon children) and indirectly by protecting

the mates against their own cravings for whose duration they are not

responsible (laws against bigamy or adultery, etc.).

=Considering the Artificial Character of the Marriage Union=, and

at the same time the psychological importance of its durability as far

as the mental health of the off-spring is concerned, one of the most

pressing duties of the community (and one which it never performs),

should be to devise all the possible ways and means whereby the sex

cravings of both mates could be helped to retain their freshness and

strength as long as possible.

=Attractiveness an Asset.= The first thought which should be forced

into the minds of modern men and women is that attractiveness is a

positive asset not only to woman but to man. In classic Greece, a

man could not be merely good, he had to be beautiful too. By "good"

the Greek meant "fit" but in the compound word which implied both

qualities, _kalos_, beauty came first.

Cravings being awakened and kept alive by certain fetishes, the

individual should be trained to recognize his and his mate's fetishism

and to make all possible efforts to retain, if necessary by artificial

means, the fetishes which lead to the awakening of erotism between him

and his mate.

=The Average Man or Woman of Forty is a Sorry Sight.= Yet a

little intelligence would compel them to retain or regain the physical

idiosyncrasies they exhibited at the time of their marriage.

Too many women consider it sinful to devote much time to their physical

appearance and the care of their body. In a man, any attempt to make

himself attractive is considered in stupid middle-class circles as a

stigma of effeminacy.

The "pretty" man has always been despised by men and women, and

endocrinology has confirmed their judgment by revealing to us that he

is a glandular weakling. Between the pretty man and the attractive man,

however, there is a far cry.

While the American movies, generally speaking, are catering to the

weak-minded and the unimaginative, they have, in their search for a

bait where-with to catch audiences, rendered mankind a signal service

by starring the kind of man which would have passed muster in ancient

Greece, beautiful and fit.

=Athletic, if not Acrobatic, Movie Idols= present to the female part

of the audience a complex of physical qualities which women will

gradually demand from their mates. It is regrettable that women

should not attend prize fights in large numbers, for the sight of the

godlike participants in those affrays would force them to institute

enlightening comparisons between professional fighters and the average

male.

Besides retaining or regaining their fetishes, human beings should make

a special effort not to let those fetishes lose their power.

=The Worst Foe of Married Happiness.= Balzac in his "Physiology of

Marriage" says that the married have to wage a constant fight with a

monster which devours everything: Habit. Every stimulus, as we know,

pleasant or unpleasant, loses its power when applied continuously or

too frequently.

It is only for the first minute or so that the ice cold shower causes

our naked skin to tingle with excitement. As soon as the reaction sets

in and the capillaries fill with red blood, the pleasant sensation of

the water needles becomes dulled.

After holding our hand for a minute in hot water, we no longer

realise the high temperature of the liquid and in order to continue

to experience the feeling of heat we must continually raise the

temperature of the water.

And likewise we may grow so accustomed to one source of erotic

stimulation that we become indifferent to it.

=Friendship May Survive the Death of Sexual Love=, provided the sex

desire has died in both mates at the same time. When desire dies off in

the wife first and is not replaced by aversion, the situation may be

very simple for she can still satisfy her more ardent mate and derive

some gratification therefrom.

When the man's desire dies first, on the other hand, there may arise

unpleasant complications. A man may be impotent with a woman whom he

loves tenderly but no longer desires sexually and yet be potent with

some other woman to whom he is not completely "accustomed."

Jealousy on the part of the wife may then prevent the advent of the

platonic friendship which is not uncommon between old married mates,

altho Montaigne denies the possibility of its existence.

Modern mates, conscious of that danger, have now and then devised ways

and means to combat Balzac's monster.

Not so long ago a well-known woman writer announced that she was

planning to marry a certain man with whom, however, she did not intend

to live day after day. The experiment has many chances of success if

jealousy does not complicate the situation.

I suggested to reporters last summer, when two famous artists parted

company, that their union might have been of longer duration if one of

them had lived at the Plaza while the other was stopping at the St.

Regis.

=Married People Should Separate for Periods of Variable Duration= in

order that a fresh stimulation may emanate from their fetishes when

they meet again. By leading more individual lives and having separate

sets of friends, they would, besides, bring to each other a new sort

of mental pabulum and stimulation day after day. Conversation becomes

futile and unnecessary between a husband and wife who always pay and

receive calls together, attend the same spectacles and hence always see

the same side of life. Now and then we read of couples who separate

and a few years later remarry. Those few years spent apart from each

other mean for both new experiences which enrich their mind and their

conversation and make them again interesting to each other.

=The Play Function of Love.= Another factor which the monstrous

hypocrisy of puritanism makes very difficult to discuss openly and

honestly and which wrecks many promising unions is the ignorance, more

common than we suspect among married couples, of what Maurice Parmelee

in his "Personality and Behavior" has called the Play Function of Love,

a term which has been given a broader meaning by Havelock Ellis in an

article for the _Medical Review of Reviews_ for March 1921.

The average man or woman is tragically ignorant of the mission of sex.

The average man, as Ellis writes, has two aims: "to prove that he is a

man and to relieve a sexual tension.

"He too often considers himself, from traditional habits, as the active

partner in love and his own pleasure as the prime motive of the sex

communion.

"His wife, naturally adopts the complementary attitude, regards herself

as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible.

"She has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her

whole nature remains ill-developed and unharmonized, and that she

is incapable of bringing her personality (having indeed no achieved

personality to bring) to bear effectively on the problems of society

and the world around her."

I have described in "Sex Happiness" the tragedies which result from

that form of ignorance, especially the tragedy of the unsatisfied wife,

her restlessness, her gradual dislike of her mate, her curiosity as to

what feelings she might experience if married to another man, when some

other man seems to awaken her erotism, and then the dilemma, repression

leading to neurosis, or indulgence leading into the divorce court.

=Psychoanalysis to the Rescue.= "In this matter," Ellis writes,

"we may learn a lesson from the psychoanalysts of today without

any implication that psychoanalysis is necessarily a desirable or

even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser

psychoanalysts insist that the process of liberating the individual

from outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and

impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free play of

his nature.

"It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the suppression

of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound rules and

maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the leading out

of the individual's special tendencies.

"It removes inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the

individual, or that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon

himself, with the best moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a

larger and freer and more natively spontaneous morality to come into

play.

"It has this influence above all in the sphere of sex, where such

inhibitions have been most powerfully laid on the native impulses,

where the natural tendencies have been most surrounded by taboos and

terrors, most tinged with artificial stains of impurity and degradation

derived from alien and antiquated traditions.

"Thus the therapeutical experience of the psychoanalysts reinforce

the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the intimate

experiences of life."

=Wounded Egotism.= Love in marriage is endangered from another quarter:

The greatest foe of sexual desire, as I have stated several times in

this book, is wounded egotism.

A perfect matrimonial adjustment does not mean the modification of

either mate's personality. We have seen in the chapters on glands that

the normal personality is practically inadaptable, that is, nothing

short of serious sickness or a surgical operation can transform an

active person into a sluggish one and vice versa.

It is only the neurotic personality which can be adapted by the removal

of certain unconscious fears which prevent it from attaining social and

biological balance and happiness.

All psychoanalysis does in such cases is to teach the patient to accept

everything which is biologically normal in his personality.

We must then have an absolute respect for personality in ourselves

and others. We must find a socially acceptable outlet for all our

idiosyncrasies, a difficult, but never impossible task.

Lack of an outlet means a neurotic disturbance. The so-called

adaptable people are those who succeed in repressing temporarily their

cravings and denying their existence, a result which they attain at

the cost of much suffering to themselves and, indirectly, to their

environment.

=Democracy in the Home= is the prerequisite of every perfect

matrimonial adjustment.

The autocratic government of the home by a male bully of a female nag

leads to either a revolution (divorce) or to the destruction of human

material after a bitter strife, (neurotic ailments).

The bullied wife and the henpecked husband fill the offices of

neurologists, gynaecologists, psychoanalysts and sexologists. This is

the way in which the wounded ego of the defeated mate avenges itself.

The defeated mate becomes sexually disabled.

The results of maladjustment of the mates are strikingly summed up by

Kempf in his monumental work "Psychopathology":

"Upon marriage a subtle if not overt struggle occurs between the mates

for the dominant position in the contract. The big, aggressive wife

and the timid, little husband attest to the importance of organic

superiority in the adjustment, but the average marriage does not show

such organic differences. The sadistic or masochistic husband and the

masochistic or sadistic wife will certainly adjust to please their

reciprocating cravings, no matter what influence this may have upon

their children, and a sadistic wife and sadistic husband, although both

are cruel in their pleasures, will divorce each other on the charge

of the other being cruel; but it is the commonplace adjustment which

interests us most, because it is most predominant.

"Nature places an unerring punishment upon the woman, who, by

incessantly using every whim, scheme or artifice, finally succeeds

in dominating her husband. By forcing him to submit to her thousand

and one demands and coercions, within a few years, he unconsciously

becomes a submissive type and loses his sexual potency with her as the

love-object. If he does not have secret love interests which stimulate

him to strive for power, he finally loses his initiative and sexual

potency completely and must live always at a commonplace level, the

servant of more virile men: the counterpart of the subdued impotent

males of the animal herd.

"His more aggressive, selfish mate, if periodically heterosexually

erotic, will become neurotic if her moral restraints are insurpassable,

or seek a new mate whom she will again attempt to subdue. Never is she

able to realise that her selfishness makes her sexually unattractive.

The psychopathologist meets many such women whose husbands have evaded

domination by secretly depending upon the affections of another more

suitably adjusted woman."

In "The New Horizon in Love and Life," Mrs. Havelock Ellis writes "It

is more than probable that the evolved relationship of the future will

be monogamy--but a monogamy wider and more beautiful than the present

caricature of it, as the sea is wider and more delicious than a duck

pond.

"The lifelong, faithful love of one man for one woman is the exception

and not the rule. The law of affinity being as subtle and as

indefinable as the law of gravitation, we may, by and by, find it worth

while to give it its complete opportunity in those realms where it can

manifest itself most potently. We are on the wrong bridge if we imagine

that laxity is the easiest way to freedom. The bridge which will bear

us must be strong enough to support us while experiments are tried.

"What is the gospel in this matter of sexual emancipation for men

and women in the new world where love has actually come of age? It

is surely the complete economic independence of women. While man

is economically free and woman still a slave, either physically,

financially or spiritually, mankind as a whole must act as if

blindness, maimness and deafness constituted health.

"The complete independence of husband and wife is the gospel of the new

era of marriage. This is the actual matter which philosophers, parents,

philanthropists and pioneers so often ignore when teaching the new

ideals of morality. When a woman is kept by a man she is not a free

individuality either as child, wife or mistress. Imagine for a moment

a man kept by a woman as women are kept by men and a sense of humor

illuminates the absurdity of the situation between any class of evolved

human beings."

As a clever patient of mine whom I regret I cannot mention by name said

one day: "married happiness, to be lasting, requires more than sexual

cooperation of both mates, it must resolve itself into cooperative

egotism."

[Footnote 1: See Mary Sinclair's "The Life and Death of Harriet Freau."]

[Footnote 2: Kings. I, 1-2.]

[Footnote 3: Birth Control Review, April 1922.]

THE END

INDEX

Abortion, 295

Active homosexuals, 167

Adler, 32, 41, 71, 115, 130, 132, 141, 142, 170, 192, 211, 225

Adrenals, 230

Adrenin, 6

Algolagnists, 188

Androgynes, 160

Animal love fights, 196

"Animal" types, 87

Antifetishes, 24, 25

Aphrodite, 195

Aristotle, 207

Atavism, 194

Attractiveness, 317

Auditory sensations, 57

Baby talk, 57

Balzac, 318

Basogas, 43

Bees in love, 52, 53

Beresford, 267

Berman, Dr. Louis, 228

Bernhardt, Sarah, 100

Bloch, Iwan, 88

Blood relations, 47

Bonaparte, 192

Bored wives, 89

Boredom, 212

Bottle-fed men, 20

Bovary, Madame, 91

Brain, cells, 16

function of the, 7

operations on a dog's, 13

Breast-fed men, 20

Brothers and sisters, 78

Brutus, 82

Business women, 279

Cæsar, 180

Calf love, 54

Cannon, 10

Chicago Vice Report, 108

Childish behavior, 158

Choice, meaning of, 11, 12

Cigar smoking, 59

Clean lives, 264

Climacteric, 312

Community's criticism, 256

Contraception, 294

Conversation, 321

Cooperative egotism, 328

Copepods, behavior of, 15

Craig's Birds, 40

Crile, 63

Cybela, 196

Dark Types, 234

Darwin, 45

Death dreams, 75

Death wishes, 73, 74

Delage, 308

Deluded martyrs, 81

Delusional jealousy, 147

Democracy in the home, 325

Demosthenes, 83

Descartes, 162

Displacement upward, 6

Dissatisfied people, 216

Divorces in the art world, 221

Doll type, 284

Don Juan, 92, 94, 139

Double standard, 302

Ductless glands, 225

Duncan, Isadora, 100

Economic exhibitionism, 69

Eddy, Mary Baker, 265

Effeminacy, 317

Ego rampant, 139

Electrical exchanges, 60, 63

Ellis, Havelock, 88, 177, 286, 305, 321

Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, 327

Endocrinologists, 226

Environment, 236

Erotropism, 4

Ethical prostitution, 113

Eulenburg, Albert, 162, 194

Fatherhood cravings, 69

Fear of accidents, 76

Fear of woman, 114

Female artists, 218

Feminine refinement, 277

Ferenczi, 148 sqq.

Fetishes, list of, 19, 20

feminine, 21

masculine, 21

non-physical, 24, 25

Fiji Islands, 42

First Night, the right of the, 68

Fixation, parent, 30, 31, sqq.

Flappers, 247, 248

Flattery, 218, 219, 220

Flirt, the, 285

Foot Fetishism, 18, 22

symbolism, 24

Forel 134

Frazer, 44

Freud, 23, 24, 31, 42, 49, 62, 140, 164, 165, 211, 225, 267, 297

Friedlander, Benedikt, 183

Friendship, 319

Frigid wives, 245

Frink, 137

Galvanotropism, 4

Genesis, 43

Gerontophilia, 24

Getting even, 90

Glands, 34

Glandular drunkenness, 193

Glandular insufficiency, 203

Glove fetishism, 205

Goldschmidt, Jules, 116

Gonads, 231

Greek Gods, 156

Griseldis, 195

Gross, Dr. Otto, 184

Habit, 310

Hair Fetishism, 17, 26, 27

Heart, physiology of the, 5

Heredity, 34

Hirschfeld, Magnus, 158, 186

Hirth, George, 88, 89

Holding hands, 60

Homosexual tragedies, 179

Husbands and lovers, 141

Ideal Love, 269

Identification mania, 35, 36

Imitation, 33

Immodest modesty, 127

Impotence, 26

Inbreeding, 44

Incest fear, 42

Independent women, 281

Infidelity, 85

Institution children, 101

Jack the Ripper, 197

Jealousy and impotence, 137

Jesus, 67

Jung, 32, 33, 225

Kempf, 173, 325

Kenealy, Dr. Arabella, 303

King David, 261

Kiss, 60, 61

Krafft-Ebing, 162

Kronos, 195

Lean types, 235

Leonardo da Vinci, 180

Lesbian Love, 156

Loeb, Jacques, 307 sqq.

Lombroso, 105

Lorand, 259

Love, a compulsion, 10

Lover, the successful, 52

the unsuccessful, 53

Lovers of the absolute, 271

Male artists, 218

Male lovers, 156

Male prostitutes, 109

Marriage, a compromise, 315

Masculine protest, 130

Masked Sadism, 154

Masoch, Leopold von Sacher, 200 sqq.

Masochistic husbands, 206

Matriarchal communities, 311

Matrimonial Engineers, 238

Messalina, 94

Metatropism, 161

Michael Angelo, 176

Michaelis, Karin, 313

Michelet, 284

Milch cows, 293

Milk, 59

Mind, seat of the, 6, 7

Mobs, 198

Moreau de Tours, 189

Movie Idols, 318

Movies, 57

Naked male dancers, 123

Narcism, 167

Negative Love, 176

Negro Haters, 79

Nerve memory, 8

Nerves, 50

Neurotic frigidity, 70

Neurotic Life Plan, 33

Neurotic motherliness, 71

Neurotic mothers, 249, 296

Nietzsche, 180

Nurses, 39

Obscene talkers, 132

Obsessions, 27

Oedipus Complex, 30

Old fashioned women, 275

Oracles, 266

Organism, unity of, 49, 50, 51

Paranoiacs, 147

Parent-Child Relationship, 223

Parmelee, Maurice, 321

Passive homosexuals, 167

Perfect Mothers, 246

Personality, 239

Personality, respect for the, 324

Perverse birds, 164

Phototropism, 3

Physical incompatibility, 254

Pimps, 109

Pituitary, 228

Plato, 155

Platonic love, 63

Play function of love, 321

Plural love, 84

Polyandry, 84

Potter, Grace, 299

Preferences, 39

Pregnancy and Health, 242

Priapism, 84

Primal horde, 45

Primitive races, 42

Prize fights, 318

Prohibition, 81

Projection, 153

Proud husbands, 289

Psychoanalysis, 322

Puritanical males, 129

Rebellion against nature, 277

Reformers, 80

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 207

Rules for husbands, 134

Sade, Marquis de, 189 sqq.

Sadistic lovers, 213

Sadistic mates, 215

Sadzer, 166

Safety devices, 170

Safety symbols, 97

Sallow Type, 235

Sanger, Margaret, 300 sqq.

Sapho, 155

Savages, modesty among, 123

Schneider, Kurt, 105

Schopenhauer, 182

Schroeder, Theodore, 265

Sea urchins, 308

Self love, 67

Sensuality, 107

Sexless jealousy, 140

Sexless persons, 208

Sexual Libido, 65

Shaw, G. B., 276 sqq.

Shoe fetishism, 18, 22, 205

symbolism, 24

Sight, 56

Sinclair, May, 268

Skooptsy, 208

Slender types, 236

Smell, 58

Social pressure, 237

Socrates, 155

Sour grapes, 77

Steinach, 163 sqq.

Stekel, Wilhelm, 128, 160, 170, 183

Sublimation, 267

Suggestive draperies, 125

Suttee custom, 142

Syphilophobiacs, 80

Tall types, 235

Taste, 59

Teeth, 237

Telegony, 116

Test of love, 75

Third sex, 158 sqq.

Thyroid, 230

Touch, 60

Transvestites, 159

Triplets, 310

Twins, 309

Type, parent, 39

Ultrafeminine, 93

Unadapted women, 288

Uniform fetishism, 25

Vamps, 213

Varietism, 84

Vital Force, 266

Vomiting, in pregnancy, 243

Von Kupfer, 181, 182

Wagner, 252

Walker, Dr. Mary, 160

War prisoners, 70

Whipping, 202

Wifehood, a profession, 282

Wilde, Oscar, 180

Will-to-be-the-first, 115

Winckelman, 176

Wise husbands, 306

Women Sadists, 210

Women who enjoy a beating, 209

Wounded egotism, 324

Wulffen, 193

End of Project Gutenberg's Psychoanalysis and Love, by André Tridon