3.28. SEX.
So far I have ignored the immense importance of Sex in our lives and for
the most part kept the discussion so generalized as to apply impartially
to women and men. But now I have reached a point when this great
boundary line between two halves of the world and the intense and
intimate personal problems that play across it must be faced.
For not only must we bend our general activities and our intellectual
life to the conception of a human synthesis, but out of our bodies and
emotional possibilities we have to make the new world bodily and
emotionally. To the test of that we have to bring all sorts of questions
that agitate us to-day, the social and political equality and personal
freedom of women, the differing code of honour for the sexes, the
controls and limitations to set upon love and desire. If, for example,
it is for the good of the species that a whole half of its individuals
should be specialized and subordinated to the physical sexual life, as
in certain phases of human development women have tended to be, then
certainly we must do nothing to prevent that. We have set aside the
conception of Justice as in any sense a countervailing idea to that of
the synthetic process.
And it is well to remember that for the whole of sexual conduct there is
quite conceivably no general simple rule. It is quite possible that, as
Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illuminating "Nature of
Man," we are dealing with an irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We
have passions that do not insist upon their physiological end, desires
that may be prematurely vivid in childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old
needs of the ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the man,
emotions that jar with physical impulses, inexplicable pains and
diseases. And not only have we to remember that we are dealing with
disharmonies that may at the very best be only patched together, but we
are dealing with matters in which the element of idiosyncrasy is
essential, insisting upon an incalculable flexibility in any rule we
make, unless we are to take types and indeed whole classes of
personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit only for
suppression and restraint. And on the mental side we are further
perplexed by the extraordinary suggestibility of human beings. In sexual
matters there seems to me--and I think I share a general ignorance
here--to be no directing instinct at all, but only an instinct to do
something generally sexual; there are almost equally powerful desires to
do right and not to act under compulsion. The specific forms of conduct
imposed upon these instincts and desires depend upon a vast confusion of
suggestions, institutions, conventions, ways of putting things. We are
dealing therefore with problems ineradicably complex, varying endlessly
in their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to
think that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is in
terms of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the play,
autobiography or biography of the frankest sort. But such
generalizations as I can make I will.
To me it seems manifest that sexual matters may be discussed generally
in at least three permissible and valid ways, of which the consideration
of the world as a system of births and education is only the dominant
chief. There is next the question of the physical health and beauty of
the community and how far sexual rules and customs affect that, and
thirdly the question of the mental and moral atmosphere in which sexual
conventions and laws must necessarily be an important factor. It is
alleged that probably in the case of men, and certainly in the case of
women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary phase in existence; that
without it there is an incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a
real wilting and failure of energy and vitality and the development of
morbid states. And for most of us half the friendships and intimacies
from which we derive the daily interest and sustaining force in our
lives, draw mysterious elements from sexual attraction, and depend and
hesitate upon our conception of the liberties and limits we must give to
that force.
