CHAPTER II. The Problem of Sex

THE PROBLEM OF SEX

How glorious will be the awakening when man’s desires will be honoured, his passions utilized, his labour exalted, whilst life is loved, and ever and ever creates love afresh.—ZOLA.

The Law of Population derives its force from an innate, powerful instinct or passion in man, the unguarded exercise of which brings about reproduction of the species. The thing therefore of greatest importance to general well-being is the discovery of means whereby to prevent this imperious instinct dominating and controlling the reproductive conditions—which imperatively need to be governed by reason and moral sense.

The sexual instinct, irresponsibly exercised, keeps population up to the margin of the means of subsistence—whatever that may be at the time—perpetuates disease, constitutional weakness and inherited taint, and frustrates the community’s best efforts to make life easier and happier to all.

My immediate purpose is to show that the prevention of all this evil is possible, for rational man may slowly and surely guide the above vital instinct into a new course—a course that will lead to the redemption of his physical nature, the purifying and elevating of his intellectual and emotional nature, and the direct creation of social virtue and happiness.

I must first point out the obstacles standing in the way of this fundamental far-reaching readjustment. There is a fatal ignorance of the true nature of the instinct in question, there is an obstinate prejudice that prevents frank discussion of the subject, there is Puritan or ascetic feeling that shuns pleasure as evil, and there is an optimistic fatalism which, basing itself on Darwinian law—already superseded by man’s interference—persists in the laissez-faire policy, however suicidal.

Sexual relations form the background of human life and are the primary sources of our finest emotions. Therefore the instinct that prompts to sex-union ought to hold a supremely honourable place in public estimation, and be carefully guarded from reproach and every hurtful or degrading condition. This great factor in physical and emotional life stands, at present, in disgrace. It is ignominiously repressed, it produces heart-rending misery and unmitigated evil. Publicly and in current literature, either it is ignored (hypocritically) or misjudged and condemned; and all the time privately it is intensely felt; and in every direction throughout society its licentious, furtive indulgence swirls into the vicious circles of destruction, the broken hearts and lives of women, the fallen dignity and besmirched consciences of men.

If we look at the matter of sexual intercourse calmly and in the light of pure reason alone, we must perceive that its intrinsic qualities are good, not evil. It creates happiness in the giving and receiving of pleasure, and the physiological exaltation connected with pleasure promotes individual health and buoyancy. To quote Herbert Spencer: “Pleasure increases vitality and raises the tide of life.” If man “eats and drinks immoderately,” said W. R. Greg, “nature punishes him with dyspepsia and disease; but nature never forbids him to eat when he is hungry and to drink when he is thirsty, provided he does so with discretion. Indeed, she punishes him equally if he abstains, as if he exceeds.” Mr. Greg further showed that the action of nature is precisely similar in respect of the sexual function. If man indulges to excess, he is punished by premature exhaustion, with appropriate maladies, not otherwise however. On the contrary, enforced and total abstinence is punished often, if not habitually, by “nervous disturbance and suffering and by functional disorder.” (Enigmas of Life, Chapter II.) Observe also the sexual desire “is the especial one of all our animal wants which is redeemed from animalism by being blended with our strongest and least selfish affections; which is ennobled by its associations in a way in which the appetites of eating and drinking and sleeping can never be ennobled in a degree to which the pleasures of the eye and ear can be ennobled only by assiduous and lofty culture.” (Enigmas of Life. W. R. Greg, p. 71.) We have no fastidious recoil from eating and drinking because these are merely animal functions. We take pains to improve our methods of preparing food, and we embellish our repasts with super-sensual surroundings in order to elevate the nutritive functions and free them from grossness or brutality. The fundamentally animal nature of sexual passion does not imply brutality, it is sociable to a far greater degree than eating or drinking, and this element of sociality purifies and ennobles, causing the function to become the basis of tender unselfish love. In its physiological aspect we may rest assured that the average normal human being has as little inherent tendency to sexual excess as to gluttony or drunkenness.

But apart from the question of excess, an attitude of mind towards the whole subject is common which must be condemned. This attitude consists of an element of shame, misnamed delicacy, and a sense of moral superiority. Women chiefly cherish the feeling, but men pay homage to it, with the result that in no friendly communion of men and women does it seem compatible with good taste to discuss questions of sex.

All vulgar allusions to love, all flippant talk on the subject of sex are distinctly contrary to good taste, they dishonour human nature, but I submit that it is an outrage on common sense, and an immoral action, when students of the Population—or any other grave social question—allow this spurious delicacy to interfere with their facing the whole facts of life, or to bias judgment in reasoning from the facts.

On the publication of my previous volume, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, in 1885, a woman of superior intellect and attainments reviewed the book. One passage in her criticism stands thus: “A certain instinct that in such matters the instinct of reprobation is as healthy as it is superficially unreasonable, may make one sicken at the suggestions of neo-Malthusianism.” (The Academy of May 15th, 1886.) Such squeamishness is no indication of health or good taste. Its unreasonableness condemns it, and the source from which it springs is prejudice induced through specific conditions. The reviewer appears to suspect as much, for, later she remarks: “One cannot put down the book without a greatly increased sense of the supreme necessity of criticizing all established theories and institutions and of the supreme duty of refraining from precipitate action.” This is a sentiment one can endorse, and I appeal to all my readers, especially to women, to refrain from forming any judgment on any part of this difficult, all-important problem, until they have mastered the subject in all its aspects. To pursue the opposite course is to act irrationally and immorally. It causes to spring up in other minds the prejudice which distorts and disguises truth.

In nutritive functions, all repulsive animalism becomes overborne, as human nature refines and civilizes, and in a profounder sense the brutality of sex-passion vanishes through the growth of a higher love, which has for its dominant quality—not eagerness for possession—but unselfish tenderness. This tenderness, permeating the individual and extending its benign influence into society, issues in the gentle manners and virtuous actions that seem to spring directly from a universal principle of sympathy and love.

The scientific exposition of the phenomena has long been before the public. G. H. Lewes, in his Problems of Life and Mind, demonstrated that whilst the individual functions of man (alimentation being one of these) arise in relation to the cosmos, his general functions, including sex-appetite, arise in relation to the social medium, and “animal impulses become blended with human emotions,” until “in process of evolution, starting from the merely animal appetite of sexuality, we arrive at the purest and most far-reaching tenderness.” The social instincts, which he calls analogues of the individual instincts, tend more and more to make “sociality dominate animality and thus subordinate personality to humanity.” (Problems of Life and Mind, vol. 1, p. 159.)

It is only recently that the full significance of these facts has begun to influence general thought and to create a revolt against the unscientific attitude of mind that covers the sexual instinct with contumely and hypocritical disdain. There dawns in consequence a new light upon the afflicting problem of our social impurity. It is seen that the horrible struggle for existence which makes grief and pain, exhausting mental effort and physical restraint, enter so largely into the lot of unhappy man, is the paramount evil to cast out. “The wonderful cycles of normal life are for ever clean and pure.” (The New Spirit, Havelock Ellis.) And with far more of sex-union—especially for the young—and all the tender social joys that emanate from that union, and far more of ease and happiness in life, there becomes possible a great increase of goodness.

Footnote 2:

It is well to know moments of material happiness, since they teach us where to look for loftier joys.—Wisdom and Destiny, by Maurice Maeterlinck.

The late James Hinton spoke truly of the matter when he said: “Sensuous pleasure will be to the moral life of the future as sense-impressions are to the knowledge of the present, and with the same history. It will not be a thing put aside as evil or degrading or misleading, but recognized as the very basis and means of the life, and used with enhancements and multiplied powers undreamt of by us.” And again, “This is what sets the soul on fire—the union of goodness and pleasure. It is a new possibility, a hope we never saw before, a means whereby all may be brought into goodness.” (The Law Breaker, pp. 275, 236.) The key to the position, he points out, is the taking of pleasure unselfishly and with complete regard to the happiness of others.

The region of sex is indeed to this day unreclaimed, but, as Mr. Ellis asks: “Why should the sweetening breath of science be guarded from this spot? Our attitude towards this part of life affects profoundly our attitude towards life altogether.” (The New Spirit, pp. 127, 125). Which of us has not felt the truth of that deep saying of Thoreau’s that “for him to whom sex is impure there are no flowers in nature.”

It is precisely here that development in the sense of purity gives a sure hope of moral regeneration. And very remarkable is it that as in the old days when prophetic poetry took the lead in all religious reforms so now we have art in the van of social reform boldly confronting the great enemies of progress—ignorance, pride, prejudice and malicious insinuation. When Ibsen’s “Ghosts” was first put upon the stage of a London theatre, a dramatic critic delivered himself thus: “It is a dream of revolt—the revolt of the ‘joy of life’ against the gloom of hidebound, conventional morality, the revolt of the natural man and woman, the revolt of the individual against the oppression of social prejudice. The joy of life, the joy of life—it rings like a clarion through the play.” (Star of March 14th, 1891.) The fine women of Ibsen’s creation speak out upon questions of sex with a pure, earnest candour that breathes a new morality, and this moral element is one of the central features in Whitman’s attitude towards sex. For the lover, there is nothing in the loved one impure or unclean; a breath of passion has passed over, and all things are sweet. For most of us this influence spreads no farther, for the man of strong moral instinct it covers all human things in infinitely widening circles; his heart goes out to every creature that shares the loved one’s delicious humanity, henceforth there is nothing human that he cannot touch with reverence and love. Leaves of Grass is penetrated by this moral element. (The New Spirit, Havelock Ellis, p. 123.)

Walt Whitman himself says: “Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality as an element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature.” (How I made a Book. An Essay by Walt Whitman.)

The principles underlying the new morality may be thus stated: Goodness does not consist in starving or denying any normal animal appetite, therefore chastity in the sense of total abstinence is essentially immoral. Life is not so prodigal of joys that man can wisely forego any source of innocent happiness, hence asceticism has no place in a rational theory and code of morals. The course for rational man to adopt in reference to sexual appetite is duly to satisfy and regulate it; and by removing every loathsome condition that superinduces degradation, to compel it to raise the tide of life in promoting individual comfort and general virtue.

To the reader who grasps the population problem it may seem that this moral code would place society on the horns of a painful dilemma, for while morality is said to require a closer union between the sexes than has hitherto prevailed, propagation—which is the actual result of that union—must be limited to an extent hitherto unknown, and by many people deemed impossible of attainment. By its patient investigations of nature, however, science here comes to the rescue of those whose standpoint in viewing the sexual problem is one of ardent sympathy with the essential needs and the moral aspirations of man in a social position truly pathetic.

Physiology has revealed that sexual organs are naturally divided into amative and reproductive organs, each class functionally distinct from the other. Amative organs relate primarily to sexual union, while reproductive organs relate primarily to impregnation and gestation. The process of reproduction may take place without use of the amative organs by simply bringing spermatozoa to ova (this has been done), and on the other hand the amative organs can be exercised without effecting reproduction. Sexual intercourse and procreation are not vitally related, as they are ordinarily assumed to be.

Moreover, the instincts connected with sexual union and with offspring are separate and distinct. In popular, confused thought, a reproductive instinct is attributed to animals and man. In reality, no direct instinct to reproduce the species exists. Animals unite sexually from an instinct directed to a pleasurable exercise of function; and although, in man, the relation has been made complex by his knowledge of the facts of reproduction and of social life, the sexual instinct is connected solely with pleasure and social feeling—not with reproduction. On the other hand, instincts associated with the presence and nurture of the young are not sexual or related to sexual passion. Therefore any doctrine requiring man’s exercise of the sexual function to be restricted to the end of reproduction is without justification in nature and directly conflicts with the facts of life.

The sexual act, in the natural order of things, is only occasionally in accidental relation to the reproductive process, for with married people in a thousand acts only a dozen may be reproductive. If social morality then requires the satisfaction of normal sexual feeling—and I think I have shown this to be the case—the desideratum is to prevent at will instead of leaving to accident the above occasional relation, and make the separation between amative and reproductive conditions as complete as their functional separation.

An American writer has well said: “If there is one social phenomenon which human ingenuity ought to bring completely under the control of the will, it is the phenomenon of procreation.” “Just as everyone is his own judge of how much he shall eat and drink, of what commodities he wants to render life enjoyable, so everyone should be his own judge of how large a family he desires, and should have power in the same degree to leave off when the requisite number is reached.” (Lester F. Ward. Dynamic Sociology, vol. 2, p. 465.) The Bible Communists of Oneida Creek practised voluntary control over the propagative function during thirty years with marked success. The number of births was regulated in accordance with the wishes of the community, and such careful attention was paid to the laws of heredity that no children of defective organisms or unsound constitutions were born. Were man universally intelligent and morally self-controlled, the knowledge of physiological facts and of invention applied to those facts would suffice to create general spontaneous limitation of the birth-rate and hygienic propagation of species. But one has only to think of the battered humanity in the back slums of every great city—the physical, mental and moral weaklings of our degraded populace—to realize that it is fantastic folly to expect individual intelligence under vicious and utterly depressing conditions, to counteract habit and save society from a rising tide of overwhelming numbers, the product of random pregnancy and sportive chance.

It cannot be a solution nor even a relief to the population difficulty that the intelligent—comparatively few—should limit their families so long as the masses refuse or fail to limit theirs. When society, becoming fully alive to the imminent danger of a too rapid birth-rate solves the population and social problems combined—in the only way possible—it will facilitate and promote the use of scientific checks to conception, and, if necessary, exact their adoption by some legislative device. (See Social Control of the Birth-rate, by G. A. Gaskell.)

By the aid of these personal means of avoiding or preventing conception the desired complete separation of amative and reproductive conditions is effected. Love is set free to rule in its own domain, and reason controls procreation to the infinite benefit of all future generations. In an article by Mr. J. Holt Schooling in the Contemporary Review for February, 1902, entitled “The Natural Increase of Three Populations,” it is shown how widely in the United Kingdom the use of preventive checks has spread within the last twenty years. The writer says in comparing the birth-rates of Germany, England and France since 1880: “There has been a fall in the birth-rate during each period in each country. But England’s fall has been larger than all; larger than the fall in the French birth-rate. During 1880–1884 there were 323 births per year per 10,000 of our population; during 1895–1899 there were only 291 births per year per 10,000 of population—a yearly fall of 32 births per 10,000 of population. France’s fall was 28 births and Germany’s fall was only 10 births, although Germany’s birth-rate was higher throughout than that of England or of France.” This is very satisfactory, and in regard to the strength of a nation that depends upon the adults, and there are more adults in a population where the children are fewer. The death-rate in England during the last twenty years has been always the lowest of the three countries.

At the present moment, society has no scientific sex-philosophy whatever. It affects to be governed by Puritanism—a vague doctrine belonging to the past history of the race and not in connexion with any ethical code directed to the development of goodness through a careful regard to the happiness of man and the satisfaction of his normal human nature. Puritanism, whether affected or real, spreads abroad hypocrisy, deceit, lying; it tends to licentiousness in men and the utter defilement of women, to social disorder and decay. Above all, it frustrates the development of that higher love, which, having animalism allied, but subordinate, fills the mind with exquisite emotion and creates unselfish delights.

Many years ago Miss Martineau wrote: “A thing to be carefully remembered is that asceticism and licentiousness universally co-exist. All experience proves this, and every principle of human nature might prophesy the proof. Passions and emotions cannot be extinguished by general rules.” (How to observe Morals and Manners, p. 169.) Puritanism ignores the sexual needs of the young. In a scientific age man is bound to recognize physiological reasons for early satisfaction of the sexual appetite and physiological reasons for delayed parentage.

Of the former, I have here to say that an early moderate stimulation of the female sexual organs (after puberty is reached) tends, by the law of exercise promoting development of structure, to make parturition in mature life easy and safe; and that the healthy functional and emotional life of love and gratified passion is the best preventive of hysteria, chlorosis, love melancholy, and other unhappy ailments to which our young women are cruelly and barbarously exposed, and which, I do not hesitate to say, make them in many cases feel their youth to be an almost insufferable martyrdom.

There are no less serious sexual evils which overtake masculine youth, if continent, namely, persistent and miserable cravings, abnormally directed instinct, spermatorrhoea, self-abuse; and these are usually hidden from sight and knowledge in consequence of a feeling that, in sexual matters, adults have no sympathy with the young.

In Lecky’s History of European Morals, vol. 2, p. 301, prostitution is thus referred to:—“However persistently society may ignore this form of vice, it exists, nevertheless, and on the most gigantic scale, and an evil rarely assumes such inveterate and perverting forms as when it is shrouded in obscurity and veiled by a hypocritical appearance of unconsciousness. The existence in England of unhappy women, sunk in the very lowest depths of vice and misery ... shows what an appalling amount of moral evil is festering uncontrolled, undiscussed and unalleviated under the fair surface of decorous society.” The number of London prostitutes was estimated at 80,000 in the year 1870. Since then, it has probably increased. In Paris, according to Von Dettingen, the actual number at that period was upwards of 60,000; in Berlin, 25,000 to 30,000. In Hamburg, in 1860, every ninth woman above the age of 15 was a prostitute, and in Leipzig the women depending principally or exclusively on prostitution was estimated at 2,000. This field of prostitution encloses whole armies of women finding there their only means of earning a miserable livelihood and a corresponding number of victims claimed by death and disease. (Woman in the Past, Present and Future. August Bebel, pp. 100–101.)

The prostitute, in her thousands; the married drudge, weary of child-bearing; the desolate old maid; these are all alike victims to social oppression. They are compelled to abstain from, or compelled to engage in, a specific function which is only natural, pleasurable, healthful and virtuous in the absence of all tyranny. Love to be real must be prompted by personal desire, and free to express itself in unhurtful conditions: I mean conditions that involve individual liberty, social respect and human dignity. The facts of prostitution alone would amply suffice to put Puritanism out of court in social reform. As a result of conduct, it has no control over vicious propensities, whilst it restrains tormentingly impulses that are normal and virtuous, that need only fitting conditions of healthful freedom.

Discarding asceticism and conventional purism as alike immoral, the social reforms that are based on a knowledge of human nature and a knowledge of the possibilities allied with conscious evolution, will bring all the institutions of our social life into accordance with the needs of the individual; and one essential condition of happy life is sexual love, with such union of the sexes as conforms to the general or collective interests.

In view of the law of population, and the fact that science has made plain how practically to separate the amative from the reproductive conditions of physical union, the love of the sexes can harmonize with the highest interests of our collective social life, and eugenics, not sexual love, may become paramount in generation.

What social morality requires is that the forces of philoprogenitiveness and a public conscience combined should dominate the function of reproduction, while love is left free from coercive control in the sphere of individual life.