BEING CONCERNED WITH PASSIONATE FRIENDSHIPS, AND HOW RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT
MAY BE ESTABLISHED IN SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE.
"A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself, but the
simple pass on and are punished."--Pro. xxxvii. 12.
I
All over the world women are restless; perhaps, in no direction is this
shown more alarmingly than in the attitude of many modern girls toward
marriage and motherhood. There is dissatisfaction brewing in sexual
matters as well as in every other department of life, and only the
hypocrites cry "Peace" when there is no peace.
I have said so much about this restlessness of women that I do not want
to labor the question, rather I wish to consider what to me seem the
results as they are finding expression in the relations of women and
men. It is, of course, a subject much too difficult to allow arbitrary
judgments, all I can do is to jot down a few remarks, rough notes, as it
were, on what I have seen and thought.
And first, I would ask the reader to remember those many sex-conventions
that in the past have gathered around women's lives. I need not
enumerate them, they are known to you all, but what I want to emphasize
is that, though so many of them have been removed their influence
persists. Always the customs and beliefs of a past social life live on
beneath the surface of society; in a thousand ways we do not recognize,
they press upon the individual soul. We cannot without strong effort
escape from the chains of our inheritance. In the nations of the West,
where the bridegroom's joy with his bride is never spoken of except as a
subject fit for jests, where celibacy has been extolled and marriage
treated as "a remedy for sin," where barrenness instead of being
regarded as the greatest possible evil is artificially produced, where
the natural joys of the body--the sex-joys and the joy of wine and food
have been confused with disgraceful things--it is there that a perpetual
conflict lurks at the very heart of life; hidden it becomes more active
for evil.
Always times of upheaval and change afford opportunities for escape in
violent expression, and while we bewail the disorder and confusion, the
many sexual crimes that are overwhelming us, we ought to take warning at
our folly in having set up for ourselves the new fashionable god of
"escape from sex."
Women are the worst sinners. At every opportunity the women of my
generation have been insisting on "the monstrous exaggerations of the
claims of sex," breaking away violently from the older obsessing
preoccupation with their position as women, but only to take up new
evasions--fresh miserable attempts at escape. What began as a war of
ideals became before long a chaos. It has had the effect not at all of
minimizing the power of sex, but just as far as the deeper needs and
instincts have been denied, has there been a deliberate turning on the
part of the young to the reliefs of sex-excitements. The servitude of
sex is one of the essential riddles of life. Personally I do not feel
there is any simple solution. The conflict, broadly speaking, lies in
this: our sex needs have changed very little through the ages, now we
are faced with the task of adapting them to the society in which we find
ourselves placed, of conforming with the rules laid down, accepting all
the pressing claims of civilized life, conditions, not clearly thought
out and established to help us and make moral conduct easier, but
dependent much more on property, social rank, and ignorance,--all
combining to make any kind of healthy sex expression more difficult,
which explains our duplicity and so often prevents the acceptance in
practice of the code of conduct upheld by most of us as right. I think
it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs. It is not pleasant to
find oneself out as a moral hypocrite.
The primitive savage within us all always will make any kind of excuse
to break out in its own primitive savage way. We are just too civilized
to face this, and, I think, there can be little doubt that our conduct
has been hindered by many of the modern intellectual suppressions. The
convention that passions and emotions are absent, when in reality they
are present, to-day has broken down as, indeed, it always must break
down everywhere, leading in thousands of cases individual young women
and men to disaster, making us all more furtive, more pitiful slaves of
the force whose power we are not yet sufficiently brave to acknowledge.
Much of our civilization has revealed itself as a monstrous sham, more
dangerously indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something
like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the
land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high
palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely
wild growth,--glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet poisonous so
that to sleep there was death.