THE PLAY-FUNCTION OF SEX
When we hear the sexual functions spoken of we commonly understand the
performance of an act which normally tends to the propagation of the race.
When we see the question of sexual abstinence discussed, when the
desirability of sexual gratification is asserted or denied, when the idea
arises of the erotic rights and needs of woman, it is always the same act
with its physical results that is chiefly in mind. Such a conception is
quite adequate for practical working purposes in the social world. It
enables us to deal with all our established human institutions in the
sphere of sex, as the arbitrary assumptions of Euclid enable us to
traverse the field of elementary geometry. But beyond these useful
purposes it is inadequate and even inexact. The functions of sex on the
psychic and erotic side are of far greater extension than any act of
procreation, they may even exclude it altogether, and when we are
concerned with the welfare of the individual human being we must enlarge
our outlook and deepen our insight.
There are, we know, two main functions in the sexual relationship, or
what in the biological sense we term "marriage," among civilised human
beings, the primary physiological function of begetting and bearing
offspring and the secondary spiritual function of furthering the higher
mental and emotional processes. These are the main functions of the sexual
impulse, and in order to understand any further object of the sexual
relationship--or even in order to understand all that is involved in the
secondary object of marriage--we must go beyond conscious motives and
consider the nature of the sexual impulse, physical and psychic, as rooted
in the human organism.
The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from
without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work,
and, notably, stimulate the glandular system. In recent years the
glandular system, and especially that of the ductless glands, has taken on
an altogether new significance. These ductless glands, as we know,
liberate into the blood what are termed "hormones," or chemical
messengers, which have a complex but precise action in exciting and
developing all those physical and psychic activities which make up a full
life alike on the general side and the reproductive side, so that their
balanced functions are essential to wholesome and complete existence. In
a rudimentary form these functions may be traced back to our earliest
ancestors who possessed brains. In those times the predominant sense for
arousing the internal mental and emotional faculties was that of smell,
the other senses being gradually evolved subsequently, and it is
significant that the pituitary, one of the chief ductless glands active in
ourselves to-day, was developed out of the nervous centre for smell in
conjunction with the membrane of the mouth. The energies of the whole
organism were set in action through stimuli arising from the outside world
by way of the sense of smell. In process of time the mechanism has become
immensely elaborated, yet its healthy activity is ultimately dependent on
a rich and varied action and reaction with the external world. It is
becoming recognised that the tendency to pluri-glandular insufficiency,
with its resulting lack of organic harmony and equilibrium, can be
counteracted by the physical and psychic stimuli of intimate contacts with
the external world. In this action and reaction, moreover, we cannot
distinguish between sexual ends and general ends. The activities of the
ductless glands and their hormones equally serve both ends in ways that
cannot be distinguished. "The individual metabolism," as a distinguished
authority in this field has expressed it, "is the reproductive
metabolism."[18] Thus the establishment of our complete activities as
human beings in the world is aided by, if not indeed ultimately dependent
upon, a perpetual and many-sided play with our environment.
[18] W. Blair Bell, _The Sex-Complex,_ 1920, p. 108. This book is a
cautious and precise statement of the present state of knowledge on this
subject, although some of the author's psychological deductions must be
treated with circumspection.
It is thus that we arrive at the importance of the play-function, and
thus, also, we realise that while it extends beyond the sexual sphere it
yet definitely includes that sphere. There are at least three different
ways of understanding the biological function of play. There is the
conception of play, on which Groos has elaborately insisted, as
education: the cat "plays" with the mouse and is thereby educating
itself in the skill necessary to catch mice; all our human games are a
training in qualities that are required in life, and that is why in
England we continue to attribute to the Duke of Wellington the saying
that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."
Then there is the conception of play as the utilisation in art of the
superfluous energies left unemployed in the practical work of life; this
enlarging and harmonising function of play, while in the lower ranges it
may be spent trivially, leads in the higher ranges to the production of
the most magnificent human achievements. But there is yet a third
conception of play, according to which it exerts a direct internal
influence--health-giving, developmental, and balancing--on the whole
organism of the player himself. This conception is related to the other
two, and yet distinct, for it is not primarily a definite education in
specific kinds of life-conserving skill, although it may involve the
acquisition of such skill, and it is not concerned with the construction
of objective works of art, although--by means of contact in human
relationship--it attains the wholesome organic effects which may be
indirectly achieved by artistic activities. It is in this sense that we
are here concerned with what we may perhaps best call the play-function
of sex.[19]
[19] The term seems to have been devised by Professor Maurice Parmelee,
_Personality and Conduct_, 1918, pp. 104, 107, 113. But it is understood
by Parmelee in a much vaguer and more extended sense than I have used
it.
As thus understood, the play-function of sex is at once in an inseparable
way both physical and psychic. It stimulates to wholesome activity all the
complex and inter-related systems of the organism. At the same time it
satisfies the most profound emotional impulses, controlling in harmonious
poise the various mental instincts. Along these lines it necessarily tends
in the end to go beyond its own sphere and to embrace and introduce into
the sphere of sex the other two more objective fields of play, that of
play as education, and that of play as artistic creation. It may not be
true, as was said of old time, "most of our arts and sciences were
invented for love's sake." But it is certainly true that, in proportion as
we truly and wisely exercise the play-function of sex, we are at the same
time training our personality on the erotic side and acquiring a mastery
of the art of love.
The longer I live the more I realise the immense importance for the
individual of the development through the play-function of erotic
personality, and for human society of the acquirement of the art of love.
At the same time I am ever more astonished at the rarity of erotic
personality and the ignorance of the art of love even among those men and
women, experienced in the exercise of procreation, in whom we might most
confidently expect to find such development and such art. At times one
feels hopeless at the thought that civilisation in this supremely intimate
field of life has yet achieved so little. For until it is generally
possible to acquire erotic personality and to master the art of loving,
the development of the individual man or woman is marred, the acquirement
of human happiness and harmony remains impossible.
In entering this field, indeed, we not only have to gain true knowledge
but to cast off false knowledge, and, above all, to purify our hearts from
superstitions which have no connection with any kind of existing
knowledge. We have to cease to regard as admirable the man who regards
the accomplishment of the procreative act, with the pleasurable relief it
affords to himself, as the whole code of love. We have to treat with
contempt the woman who abjectly accepts the act, and her own passivity
therein, as the whole duty of love. We have to understand that the art of
love has nothing to do with vice, and the acquirement of erotic
personality nothing to do with sensuality. But we have also to realise
that the art of love is far from being the attainment of a refined and
luxurious self-indulgence, and the acquirement of erotic personality of
little worth unless it fortifies and enlarges the whole personality in all
its aspects. Now all this is difficult, and for some people even painful;
to root up is a more serious matter than to sow; it cannot all be done in
a day.
It is not easy to form a clear picture of the erotic life of the average
man in our society. To the best informed among us knowledge in this field
only comes slowly. Even when we have decided what may or may not be termed
"average" the sources of approach to this intimate sphere remain few and
misleading; at the best the women a man loves remain far more illuminating
sources of information than the man himself. The more one knows about him,
however, the more one is convinced that, quite independently of the place
we may feel inclined to afford to him in the scale of virtue, his
conception of erotic personality, his ideas on the art of love, if they
have any existence at all, are of a humble character. As to the notion of
play in the sphere of sex, even if he makes blundering attempts to
practice it, that is for him something quite low down, something to be
ashamed of, and he would not dream of associating it with anything he has
been taught to regard as belonging to the spiritual sphere. The conception
of "divine play" is meaningless to him. His fundamental ideas, his
cherished ideals, in the erotic sphere, seem to be reducible to two: (1)
He wishes to prove that he is "a man," and he experiences what seems to
him the pride of virility in the successful attainment of that proof; (2)
he finds in the same act the most satisfactory method of removing sexual
tension and in the ensuing relief one of the chief pleasures of life. It
cannot be said that either of these ideals is absolutely unsound; each is
part of the truth; it is only as a complete statement of the truth that
they become pathetically inadequate. It is to be noted that both of them
are based solely on the physical act of sexual conjunction, and that they
are both exclusively self-regarding. So that they are, after all, although
the nearest approach to the erotic sphere he may be able to find, yet
still not really erotic. For love is not primarily self-regarding. It is
the intimate, harmonious, combined play--the play in the wide as well as
in the more narrow sense we are here concerned with--of two personalities.
It would not be love if it were primarily self-regarding, and the act of
intercourse, however essential to secure the propagation of the race, is
only an incident, and not an essential in love.
Let us turn to the average woman. Here the picture must usually be still
more unsatisfactory. The man at least, crude as we may find his two
fundamental notions to be, has at all events attained mental pride and
physical satisfaction. The woman often attains neither, and since the man,
by instinct or tradition, has maintained a self-regarding attitude, that
is not surprising. The husband--by primitive instinct partly, certainly by
ancient tradition--regards himself as the active partner in matters of
love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
His wife consequently falls into the complementary position, and regards
herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible, if not
indeed as a thing to be rather ashamed of, should she by chance experience
it. So that, while the husband is content with a mere simulacrum and
pretence of the erotic life, the wife has often had none at all.
Few people realise--few indeed have the knowledge or the opportunity to
realise--how much women thus lose, alike in the means to fulfill their
own lives and in the power to help others. A woman has a husband, she has
marital relationships, she has children, she has all the usual domestic
troubles--it seems to the casual observer that she has everything that
constitutes a fully developed matron fit to play her proper part in the
home and in the world. Yet with all these experiences, which undoubtedly
are an important part of life, she may yet remain on the emotional
side--and, as a matter of fact, frequently remains--quite virginal, as
immature as a school-girl. She has not acquired an erotic personality, she
has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature
remains ill-developed and unharmonised, 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.
That alone is a great misfortune, all the more tragic since under
favourable conditions, which it should have been natural to attain, it
might so easily be avoided. But there is this further result, full of the
possibilities of domestic tragedy, that the wife so situated, however
innocent, however virtuous, may at any time find her virginally sensitive
emotional nature fertilised by the touch of some other man than her
husband.
It happens so often. A girl who has been carefully guarded in the home,
preserved from evil companions, preserved also from what her friends
regarded as the contamination of sexual knowledge, a girl of high ideals,
yet healthy and robust, is married to a man of whom she probably has
little more than a conventional knowledge. Yet he may by good chance be
the masculine counterpart of herself, well brought up, without sexual
experience and ignorant of all but the elementary facts of sex, loyal and
honourable, prepared to be, fitted to be, a devoted husband. The union
seems to be of the happiest kind; no one detects that anything is lacking
to this perfect marriage; in course of time one or more children are born.
But during all this time the husband has never really made love to his
wife; he has not even understood what courtship in the intimate sense
means; love as an art has no existence for him; he has loved his wife
according to his imperfect knowledge, but he has never so much as realised
that his knowledge was imperfect. She on her side loves her husband; she
comes in time indeed to have a sort of tender maternal feeling for him.
Possibly she feels a little pleasure in intercourse with him. But she has
never once been profoundly aroused, and she has never once been utterly
satisfied. The deep fountains of her nature have never been unsealed; she
has never been fertilised throughout her whole nature by their liberating
influence; her erotic personality has never been developed. Then
something happens. Perhaps the husband is called away, it may have been to
take part in the Great War. The wife, whatever her tender solicitude for
her absent partner, feels her solitude and is drawn nearer to friends,
perhaps her husband's friends. Some man among them becomes congenial to
her. There need be no conscious or overt love-making on either side, and
if there were the wife's loyalty might be aroused and the friendship
brought to an end. Love-making is not indeed necessary. The wife's latent
erotic needs, while still remaining unconscious, have come nearer to the
surface; now that she has grown mature and that they have been stimulated
yet unsatisfied for so long, they have, unknown to herself, become
insistent and sensitive to a sympathetic touch. The friends may indeed
grow into lovers, and then some sort of solution, by divorce or
intrigue--scarcely however a desirable kind of solution--becomes possible.
But we are here taking the highest ground and assuming that honourable
feeling, domestic affection, or a stern sense of moral duty, renders such
solution unacceptable. In due course the husband returns, and then, to her
utter dismay, the wife discovers, if she has not discovered it before,
that during his absence, and for the first time in her life, she has
fallen in love. She loyally confesses the situation to her husband, for
whom her affection and attachment remain the same as before, for what has
happened to her is the coming of a totally new kind of love and not any
change in her old love. The situation which arises is one of torturing
anxiety for all concerned, and it is not less so when all concerned are
animated by noble and self-sacrificing impulses. The husband in his
devotion to his wife may even be willing that her new impulses should be
gratified. She, on her side, will not think of yielding to desires which
seem both unfair to her husband and opposed to all her moral traditions.
We are not here concerned to consider the most likely, or the most
desirable, exit from this unfortunate situation. The points to note are
that it is a situation which to-day actually occurs; that it causes acute
unhappiness to at least two people who may be of the finest physical and
intellectual type and the noblest character, and that it might be avoided
if there were at the outset a proper understanding of the married state
and of the part which the art of love plays in married happiness and the
development of personality.
A woman may have been married once, she may have been married twice, she
may have had children by both husbands, and yet it may not be until she is
past the age of thirty and is united to a third man that she attains the
development of erotic personality and all that it involves in the full
flowering of her whole nature. Up to then she had to all appearance had
all the essential experiences of life. Yet she had remained spiritually
virginal, with conventionally prim ideas of life, narrow in her
sympathies, with the finest and noblest functions of her soul helpless and
bound, at heart unhappy even if not clearly realising that she was
unhappy. Now she has become another person. The new liberated forces from
within have not only enabled her to become sensitive to the rich
complexities of intimate personal relationship, they have enlarged and
harmonised her realisation of all relationships. Her new erotic experience
has not only stimulated all her energies, but her new knowledge has
quickened all her sympathies. She feels, at the same time, more mentally
alert, and she finds that she is more alive than before to the influences
of nature and of art. Moreover, as others observe, however they may
explain it, a new beauty has come into her face, a new radiancy into her
expression, a new force into all her activities. Such is the exquisite
flowering of love which some of us who may penetrate beneath the surface
of life are now and then privileged to see. The sad part of it is that we
see it so seldom and then often so late.
It must not be supposed that there is any direct or speedy way of
introducing into life a wider and deeper conception of the erotic
play-function, and all that it means for the development of the
individual, the enrichment of the marriage relationship, and the moral
harmony of society. Such a supposition would merely be to vulgarise and to
stultify the divine and elusive mystery. It is only slowly and indirectly
that we can bring about the revolution which in this direction would renew
life. We may prepare the way for it by undermining and destroying those
degrading traditional conceptions which have persisted so long that they
are instilled into us almost from birth, to work like a virus in the
heart, and to become almost a disease of the soul. To make way for the
true and beautiful revelation, we can at least seek to cast out those
ancient growths, which may once have been true and beautiful, but now are
false and poisonous. By casting out from us the conception of love as vile
and unclean we shall purify the chambers of our hearts for the reception
of love as something unspeakably holy.
In this matter we may learn a lesson from the psycho-analysts of to-day
without any implication that psycho-analysis is necessarily a desirable or
even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser
psycho-analysts 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.[20] 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 psycho-analysts
reinforces the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the
intimate experiences of life.
[20] See, for instance, H.W. Frink, _Morbid Fears and Compulsions_,
1918, Ch. X.
Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when
propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It
is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions.
It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism,
physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied. Nothing, it has
been said, is so serious as lust--to use the beautiful term which has been
degraded into the expression of the lowest forms of sensual pleasure--and
we have now to add that nothing is so full of play as love. Play is
primarily the instinctive work of the brain, but it is brain activity
united in the subtlest way to bodily activity. In the play-function of sex
two forms of activity, physical and psychic, are most exquisitely and
variously and harmoniously blended. We here understand best how it is that
the brain organs and the sexual organs are, from the physiological
standpoint, of equal importance and equal dignity. Thus the adrenal
glands, among the most influential of all the ductless glands, are
specially and intimately associated alike with the brain and the sex
organs. As we rise in the animal series, brain and adrenal glands march
side by side in developmental increase of size, and at the same time,
sexual activity and adrenal activity equally correspond.
Lovers in their play--when they have been liberated from the traditions
which bound them to the trivial or the gross conception of play in
love--are thus moving amongst the highest human activities, alike of the
body and of the soul. They are passing to each other the sacramental
chalice of that wine which imparts the deepest joy that men and women can
know. They are subtly weaving the invisible cords that bind husband and
wife together more truly and more firmly than the priest of any church.
And if in the end--as may or may not be--they attain the climax of free
and complete union, then their human play has become one with that divine
play of creation in which old poets fabled that, out of the dust of the
ground and in his own image, some God of Chaos once created Man.