The Book of Life Part 24

This becomes a cause of disharmony and excess, it causes man to wreck his health and destroy himself.

Manifestly, this is a serious matter; for if it is true, our efforts to find health and happiness in love are doomed to failure, and Lecky is right when he describes the prost.i.tute as the "guardian of virtue," the eternal and necessary scapegoat of humanity. But I do not believe it is true; I think that here is one more case of the endless blundering of scientists and philosophers who attempt to teach physiology, politics, religion and law, without having made a study of economics. I do not believe that the s.e.x troubles of mankind are physiological in their nature, but have their origin in our present system of cla.s.s privilege.

I believe they are caused, not by the blunders of nature, but by the blunders of man as a social animal.

Let us take a glimpse at primitive man. I choose the Marquesas Islands, because we have complete reports about them from numerous observers.

Here was a race of people, not interfered with by civilization, who manifested all that overplus of s.e.xual energy to which Metchnikoff calls attention. They placed no restraint whatever upon s.e.x activity, they had no conception of such an idea. Their games and dances were s.e.x play, and so also, in great part, was their religion. Yet we do not find that they wrecked themselves. Physically speaking, they were one of the most perfect races of which we have record. Both the men and women were beautiful; they were active and strong from childhood to old age, and--here is the significant thing--they were happy. They were a laughing, dancing, singing race. They hardly knew grief or fear at all.

They knew how to live, and they enjoyed every process and aspect of their lives, just as children do, naively and simply. This included their s.e.x life; and I think it a.s.sures us that there can be no such fundamental physical disharmony in the human organism as the great Russian scientist thought he had discovered.

Is it not a fact that throughout nature a superfluity of any kind of energy or product may be a source of happiness, rather than of distress?

Consider the singing of the birds! Or consider nature's impulse to cover a field with useless plants, and how by a little cunning, we are able to turn it into a harvest for our own use! In the life of our bodies one may show the same thing again and again. We have within us the possibility of and the impulse toward more muscular activity than our survival makes necessary; but we do not regard this additional energy as a curse of nature, and a peril to our lives--we turn out and play baseball. We have an impulse to see more than is necessary, so we climb mountains, or go traveling. We have an impulse to hear more, so we go to a concert. We have an impulse to think more, so we play chess, or whist, or write books and acc.u.mulate libraries. Never do we think of these activities as signs of an irrevocable blunder on the part of nature.

But about the activities of love we feel differently; and why is this?

If I say that it is because we have an unwholesome and degraded att.i.tude toward love, because, as a result of religious superst.i.tion we fear it, and dare not deal with it honestly, the reader may suspect that I am preparing to hint at some self-indulgence, some form of s.e.x orgy such as the "turkey trot" and the "bunny hug" and the "grizzly bear," the "shimmy" and the "toddle" and the "cuddle." I hasten to explain that I do not mean any of the abnormalities and monstrosities of present-day fashionable life. Neither do I mean that we should set out to emulate the happy cannibals in the South Seas. In the Book of the Mind I set forth as carefully as I knew how, the difference between nature and man, the life of instinct and the life of reason. It is my conviction that if civilized life is to go on, there must be a far wider extension of judgment and self-control in human affairs; our lost happiness will be found, not by going "back to nature," but by going forward to a new and higher state, planned by reason and impelled by moral idealism.

But we find ourselves face to face with horrible s.e.x disorders, and a great scientist tells us they are nature's tragic blunder, of which we are the helpless victims. Manifestly, the way to decide this question is to go to nature, and see if primitive people, having the same physical organism as ours, had the same troubles and spent their lives in the same misery. If they did, then it may be that we are doomed; but if they did not, then we can say with certainty that it is not nature, but ourselves, who have blundered. Our task then becomes to apply reason to the problem; to take our present s.e.x arrangements, our field of bad-smelling weeds, and plow it thoroughly, and sow it with good seed, and raise a harvest of happiness in love. It is my belief that, admitting true love--honest and dignified and rational love--it is possible to pour into it any amount of s.e.x energy, to invent a whole new system of beautiful and happy love play.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

LOVE AND ECONOMICS

(Maintains that our s.e.x disorders are of social origin, due to the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.)

If the cause of our s.e.x disorders is not physiological, what is it?

Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature, the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and virtue are products like vinegar."

Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and cla.s.s privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited power with practically no responsibility--a strain which not one human being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the conferring upon a cla.s.s of power without responsibility means the collapse of that cla.s.s and the downfall of its civilization.

So far as concerns the ruling cla.s.s male, what the system of privilege does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his s.e.x desires. What it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to abolish that mutuality in s.e.x, that interaction between male and female influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of cla.s.s as well as of s.e.x, and the result is the perverting of s.e.xual selection, and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit.

In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her, according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type.

But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in which opportunity, and indeed survival, depend upon money, and the whole tendency of society is to make money standards supreme. We do not like to admit this, of course; our instincts revolt against it, and our higher faculties reinforce the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives, and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear people deny it is money which determines admission into what is called "society," the intimate life of the ruling cla.s.s. They will tell you that it is not money, it is "good taste," "refinement," "charm of personality," and so on. But if you a.n.a.lyze all these things, you speedily discover that they are made out of money; they are symbols of the possession of money, devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping themselves apart from those who do not possess it. I would safely defy a member of the ruling cla.s.s to name a single element in what he calls "refinement," or "good taste," that is not in its ultimate a.n.a.lysis a symbol of the possession of money. Let it be the p.r.o.nunciation of a word, or the cut of a coat, or the method of handling a fork--whatever it may be, it is part of a code, revealing that the person, or more important yet, the ancestors of the person, have belonged to the leisure cla.s.s, and have had time and opportunity to learn to do things in a certain precise conventional way. I say "conventional," for very frequently these tests have no relationship whatever to reality. Considered as a matter of common sense and convenience, it is a great deal better to eat peas with a spoon than with a fork, and to use both a knife and fork in eating lettuce; but if you eat peas with a spoon, or use a knife on lettuce, every member of the ruling cla.s.s will instantly know that you are an interloper, as much so as if you took to throwing the china at your hostess.

Our culture is a money culture, our standards are money standards, and our s.e.x decisions are based upon money, not upon love. Any man can have money in our society, provided the accident of birth favors him, and it is everywhere known that any man who has money can get a wife. It is certainly not true that any man with _no_ money can get a wife, and it is true that most men who have little money have to take wives who have less--that is, who belong to a lower cla.s.s, according to the world's standards. The average young girl of the propertied cla.s.ses is trained for marriage as for any other business. She is taught to be s.e.xually cold, but to imitate s.e.xual excitement deliberately, so as to arouse it in the male, and to keep herself surrounded with a swarm of males; this being the basis of her prestige, the factor which will cause the "eligible" man, the "catch," to desire her. In polite society this proceeding is known as "coquetry," or "charm," and it would be no exaggeration to say that seventy-five per cent of all the novels so far written in the world are expositions of this activity; also that when we go to the theater, we go in order to watch and sympathize with these manifestations of pecuniary s.e.xuality.

As a rule the young girl knows what she is doing, but she is taught to camouflage it, to preserve her "innocence." She would not dream of marrying for money; she wants to marry something "distinguished"--that is to say, something which has received the stamp of approval from a world which approves money. She wants to marry somebody who is "elegant," who is in "good form"; she wants to marry without having to think about the horrid subject of money at all, and so she is carefully chaperoned, and confined to a world where nothing but money is to be met. In Tennyson's poem, "The Northern Farmer," the old fellow is coaching his son on the subject of marriage, and they are driving along a road, and the farmer listens to his horses' hoofs, and they are saying, "Proputty, proputty, proputty!" The farmer sums up in one sentence the doctrine of pecuniary marriage as it is taught to the ruling cla.s.s virgin: "Doan't thee marry for money, but goa wheer money is."

In this process, of course, the ruling cla.s.s virgin must spend a great deal of money in order to keep up her own prestige; and when she is married, she must spend it to keep up the prestige of her unmarried sisters, and then of her children. As a result of this, the only ruling cla.s.s males who can afford to marry are the rich ones. There are always some who are richer, and these are the most desirable; so the tendency with each generation is to put the period of marriage further off; the man has to wait until he has acc.u.mulated enough "proputty" to satisfy the girl of his desires--a girl whom he admires because of her pecuniary prestige. He delays, and meantime he satisfies his pa.s.sions with the daughters of the poor. As a result of this, when he does finally come to marry, he is apt to be unlovely and unlovable. The woman frequently does not love him at all, but takes him cold-bloodedly because he is "eligible"; in that case she is a cold and "s.e.xless" wife. Or else, after she has married him she discovers his unloveliness, and either decides that all men are selfish brutes, and reconciles herself to a celibate life, or else she goes out and preys upon the domestic happiness of other women.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

MARRIAGE AND MONEY

(Discusses the causes of prost.i.tution, and that higher form of prost.i.tution known as the "marriage of convenience.")

I realize that all these s.e.x problems are complicated. Every case is individual, and in no two cases can you give exactly the same explanation. But it is my thesis that whatever the cause, if you trace down the causes of the cause, you will find economic inequality and cla.s.s privilege. It is evident in the lives of the rich, and it is even more evident in the lives of the poor, who are not permitted the luxury of pretense. The poor live in a world dominated by forces which they seldom understand, subjected to enormous pressure which crushes and destroys them, without their being able to see it or touch it. In the world of the poor there is first of all poverty; there is insecurity of employment and insufficiency of wage, and the daily and hourly terror of starvation and ruin. Above this is a world of power and luxury, a wonderland of marvels and thrills, seen through a colored mist of romance. The working-cla.s.s girl, born to drudgery and perpetual child-bearing, has a brief hour in which her cheeks are red and her beauty is ripe; and out of the heaven above her steps a male creature panoplied in the armor of ruling cla.s.s prestige--that is to say, a dress suit--and scattering about him a shower of automobile rides, jewelry and candy and flowers. She opens her arms to him; and then, when her brief hour of rapture is past, she becomes the domestic drudge of some workingman, or else the inmate of a brothel.

It is a custom of social workers and church people, seeking data about these painful subjects, to interview numbers of prost.i.tutes, and question them as to the causes of their "fall"; so you read statistics to the effect that seventeen per cent of prost.i.tution has an economic cause, that twenty-six per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These pious people, employed by the ruling cla.s.s to maintain ruling cla.s.s prestige by demonstrating that wage slavery has nothing to do with white slavery, attain their purpose by restricting the word "economic"

to food and shelter; forgetting that young girls do not live by bread alone, but also by ribbons, and silk stockings, and moving picture shows, and trips to Coney Island, and everything else that gives a momentary escape from drudgery into joy. We all understand, of course, that the daughters of the rich are ent.i.tled to joy, and we provide them with it as a matter of course; but the daughters of the poor are supposed to work in a cotton mill ten or eleven hours a day from earliest childhood, and the joy we provide for them is vicarious. As a woman poet sets it forth:

"The golf links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play."

Some years ago my wife and I were invited to meet Mrs. Mary J. Goode, a keeper of brothels in the "Tenderloin," who had revolted against the system of police graft, and had exposed it in the newspapers. My wife questioned her closely as to the psychology of people in her business, and she insisted that the majority of prost.i.tutes were not overs.e.xed, nor were they feeble minded; they were women who had loved and trusted, and had been "thrown down." As Mrs. Goode phrased it, they said to themselves: "Never again! After this, they'll pay!"

As a matter of fact, the causes of prost.i.tution are so largely economic that the other factors are hardly worth mentioning. The sale of s.e.x is unknown in savage society, and would be unknown in a Socialist society.

If here and there some degenerate individual would rather sell her s.e.x than do her share of honest labor in a free and just world, such an individual would become a patient in the psychopathic ward of a public hospital. Economic forces drive women to prost.i.tution, first, by direct starvation, and second, by teaching them money standards of prestige, the ideal of living without working, which is the heaven achieved by the rich and longed for by the poor. Contributory to the process are policemen, politicians, and judges who protect the property of the rich, and prey upon the disinherited; also newspaper editors, college professors, priests of G.o.d and preachers of Jesus, who attribute the social evil to "original sin," or the "weakness of human nature."

So far as men are concerned, economic forces operate by three main channels; late marriage, loveless marriage, and drudgery in wives. You will find patronizing and maintaining the brothels the following kinds of males; first, young boys who have been taught that it is "manly" to gratify their s.e.x impulses; second, young men who take it for granted that they cannot afford to marry; third, old bachelors who have looked at marriage and decided that it is not a paying proposition; fourth, married men who have been picked out for their money, and have come to the conclusion that "good women" are necessarily s.e.xless; and finally, married men whose wives have lost the power to charm them by continuous childbearing, and the physical and nervous strain of domestic slavery.

This latter applies not merely to the wives of the poor. It applies to members of the middle cla.s.ses, and even of the richer cla.s.ses, because the job of managing many servants is often as trying as the doing of one's own work. To explain how domestic drudgery is caused by economic pressure would require a little essay in itself. The home is the place where the man keeps his s.e.x property apart under lock and key, and it is, therefore, the portion of our civilization least influenced by modern ideas. Women still drudge in separate kitchens and nurseries, as they have drudged for thousands of years. They cook their dinners over separate fires, and have each their own little group of children, generally ill cared for, because the work is done by an untrained amateur. Moreover, the prestige of this home has to be kept up, because the social position and future prosperity of the man depend upon it. The children must be dressed in frilled and starched clothing, which makes them miserable, and wears out the tempers and pocketbooks of the mothers. Costly entertainments must be given, and twice a day a meal must be prepared for the father of the family--all good wives have learned the ancient formula for the retention of masculine affections: "Feed the brute!" Living in a world of pecuniary prestige, every particle of the woman's surplus energy must go into some form of ostentation, into buying or making things which are futile and meaningless. In such a blind world, dazed by such a struggle, women become irritable, they lose their s.e.x charm, they forget all about love; so the husband gives up hoping for the impossible, accepts the common idea that love and marriage are incompatible, and adopts the formula that what his wife doesn't know will not hurt her.

And step by step, as economic evolution progresses, as vested wealth becomes more firmly established and claims for itself a larger and larger share of the total product of society--so step by step you find the pecuniary ideals becoming more firmly established, you find marriage becoming more and more a matter of property, and less and less a matter of love. In European countries there may still be some love marriages among the poor, but in the upper cla.s.ses there is no longer any pretense of such a thing, and if you spoke of it you would be considered absurd.

In countries of fresh and naive commercialism, like America, the women select the men because of their money prestige; but in Germany, the process has gone a step further--the men are so firmly established in their cla.s.s positions that they insist upon being bought with a fortune.

The same is true when t.i.tled foreigners condescend to visit our "land of the dollar." They will stoop to a vulgar American wife only in case her parents will make a direct settlement of a fortune upon the husband, and then they take her back home, and find their escape from boredom in the highly cultivated mistresses of their own land.

Everywhere on the Continent, and in Great Britain also, it is accepted that marriages are matters of business, and only incidentally and very slightly of affection. The initiative is commonly taken, not by the young people, but by the heads of the families. Preliminary protocols are exchanged, and then the family solicitors sit down and bargain over the matter. If they were making a deal for a carload of hams, they would be governed by the market price of hams at the moment, also by the reputation of that particular brand of ham; and similarly, in the case of marriage, they are governed by the prestige of the family names, and the market price of husbands prevailing. Always the man exacts a cash settlement, and in Catholic countries he becomes the outright owner of all the property of his wife, thus reducing her completely to the status of a chattel. If any young couple dares to break through these laws of their cla.s.s, the whole cla.s.s unites to trample them down. One of the greatest of English novelists, George Meredith, wrote his greatest novel, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," to show how, under the most favorable circ.u.mstances, the union of a ruling cla.s.s youth with a farmer's daughter could result in nothing but shipwreck.

The country in which the property marriage is most firmly established is probably France; and in France the rights of nature are recognized in a kind of supplementary union, which const.i.tutes what is known as the "domestic triangle," or in the French language, "_la vie trois_." The young girl of the French ruling cla.s.ses is guarded every moment of her life like a prisoner in jail. She is sold in marriage, and is expected to bear her husband an heir, possibly two or three children. After that, she is considered, not under the law or by the church, but by the general common sense of the community, to be free to seek satisfaction of her love needs. Her husband has mistresses, and she has a lover, and to that lover she is faithful, and in her dealings with him she is guided by an elaborate and subtle code. Practically all French fiction and drama deal with this "life in threes," and the complications and tragedies which result from it. I name one novel, simply because it happens to be the last that I myself have read, "The Red Lily," by Anatole France.

Of course, every human being knows in his heart that this is a monstrous arrangement, and there are periods of revolt when real feeling surges up in the hearts of men, and we have stories of true love, young and unselfish love, such for example as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," or St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," or Halevy's "L'Abbe Constantin."

Everybody reads these stories and weeps over them, but everybody knows that they are like the romantic shepherds and shepherdesses of the ancient regime; they never had any existence in reality, and are not meant to be taken seriously. If anybody attempts to carry them into action, or to preach them seriously to the young, then we know that we are dealing with a disturber of the foundations of the social order, a dangerous and incendiary villain, and we give him a name which sends a shudder down the spine of every friend of law and order--we call him a "free-lover."

I see before my eyes the wretch cowering upon the witness stand, and the virtuous district attorney, who has perhaps spent the previous night in a brothel, pointing a finger of accusing wrath into his face, and thundering, "Do you believe in free love?" The wretch, if he is wise, will not hesitate or parley; he will not ask what the district attorney means by love, or what he means by freedom. Here in very truth is a case where "he who hesitates is lost!" Let the wretch instantly answer, No, he does not believe in free love, he believes in love that pays cash as it goes; he believes in love that investigates carefully the prevailing market conditions, decides upon a reasonable price, has the contract in writing, and lives up to the bargain--"till death do us part." If the witness be a woman, let the answer be that she believes in slave love; that she expects to be sold for the benefit of her parents, the prestige of her family and the social position of her future offspring. Let her say that she will be a loyal and devoted servant, and will never do anything at any time to invalidate the contract which is signed for her by her parents or guardians.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

LOVE VERSUS l.u.s.t

(Discusses the s.e.x impulse, its use and misuse; when it should be followed and when repressed.)

We have considered the s.e.x disorders of our age and their causes. We have now to grope our way towards a basis of sanity and health in these vital matters.

Consider man, as Metchnikoff describes him, with his overplus of s.e.x energy. From early youth he is besieged by impulses and desires, and as a rule is left entirely uninstructed on the subject, having to pick up his ideas from the conversation of older lads, who have nothing but misinformation and perversions to give him. Nearly all these older lads declare and believe that it is necessary to gratify the s.e.x impulse, that physically it is harmful not to do so. I have even heard physicians and trainers maintain that idea. Opposed to them are the official moralists and preachers of religion, who declare that to follow the s.e.x impulse, except when officially sanctioned by the church, is to commit sin.

At different times in my life I have talked with all kinds of people, young and old, men and women, doctors and clergymen, teachers and trainers of athletes, and a few wise and loving mothers who have talked with their own boys and other boys. As a result I have come to agree with neither side in the debate. I believe that there is a distinction which must be drawn, and I ask you to consider it carefully, and bear it in mind in all that I say on the problem of happiness and health in s.e.x.

I believe that a normal man is one being, manifesting himself in various aspects, physical, emotional, intellectual. I believe that all these aspects of human activity go normally together, and cannot normally be separated, and that the separation of them is a perversion and source of harm. I believe that the s.e.x impulse, as it normally manifests itself, and would manifest itself in a man if he were living a normal life, is an impulse which includes every aspect of the man's being. It is not merely physical desire and emotional excitement; it is intellectual curiosity, a deep and intense interest, not merely in the body, but in the mind and heart and personality of the woman.