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Book of Life, The

<h2>CHAPTER XXXV MARRIAGE AND MONEY</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses the causes of prostitution, and that higher form of prostitution known as the "marriage of convenience.") </div> I realize that all these sex 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 class 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-class 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 class 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 prostitutes, and question them as to the causes of their "fall"; so you read statistics to the effect that seventeen per cent of prostitution has an economic cause, that twenty-six per cent is caused by love of finery, etc. These pious people, employed by the ruling class to maintain ruling class 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 entitled 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: <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> <tr><td align="left">"The golf links lie so near the mill</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">That almost every day</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">The laboring children can look out</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">And see the men at play."</td></tr> </table> 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 prostitutes were not oversexed, 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 prostitution are so largely economic that the other factors are hardly worth mentioning. The sale of sex is unknown in savage society, and would be unknown in a Socialist society. If here and there some degenerate individual would rather sell her sex 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 prostitution, 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 God 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 sex 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 sexless; 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 classes, and even of the richer classes, 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 sex 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 sex 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 classes 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 class positions that they insist upon being bought with a fortune. The same is true when titled 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 class, the whole class 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 circumstances, the union of a ruling class 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 constitutes what is known as the "domestic triangle," or in the French language, "la vie trois." The young girl of the French ruling classes 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 Hal�vy'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 r�gime; 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. <h2>CHAPTER XXXVI LOVE VERSUS LUST</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses the sex impulse, its use and misuse; when it should be followed and when repressed.) </div> We have considered the sex 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 sex 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 sex 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 sex 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 sex. 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 sex 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. I appreciate that there is opportunity for controversy here. As a matter of psychology, it is not easy to separate instinct from experience, to state whether a certain impulse is innate or acquired. Some may argue that savages know nothing about idealism in sex, neither do those modern savages whom we breed in city slums; some may make the same assertion concerning a great mass of loutish and sensual youths. We have got so far from health and soundness that it is hard to be sure what is "normal" and what is "ideal." But without going into metaphysics, I think we can reasonably make the following statement concerning the sex impulse at its first appearance in the average healthy youth in civilized societies; that this impulse, going to the roots of the being, affecting every atom of energy and every faculty, is accompanied, not merely by happiness, but by sympathetic delight in the happiness of the woman, by interest in the woman, by desire to be with her, to stay with her and share her life and protect her from harm. In what I have to say about the subject from now on, I shall describe this condition of being and feeling by the word "love." But now suppose that men should, for some reason or other, evolve a set of religious ideas which denied love, and repudiated love, and called it a sin and a humiliation; or suppose there should be an economic condition which made love a peril, so that the young couple which yielded to love would be in danger of starvation, or of seeing their children starve. Suppose there should be evolved classes of men and women, held by society in a condition of permanent semi-starvation; then, under such conditions, the impulse to love would become a trap and a source of terror. Then the energies of a great many men would be devoted to suppressing love and strangling it in themselves; then the intellectual and spiritual sanctions of love would be withdrawn, the beauty and charm and joy would go out of it, and it would become a starving beggar at the gates, or a thief skulking in the night-time, or an assassin with a dagger and club. In other words, sex would become all the horror that it is today, in the form of purchased vice, and more highly purchased marriage, and secret shame, and obscure innuendo. So we should have what is, in a civilized man, a perversion, the possibility of love which is physical alone; a purely animal thing in a being who is not purely animal, but is body, mind and spirit all together. So it would be possible for pitiful, unhappy man, driven by the blind urge of nature, to conceive of desiring a woman only in the body, and with no care about what she felt, or what she thought, or what became of her afterwards. That purely physical sex desire I will indicate in our future discussions by the only convenient word that I can find, which is lust. The word has religious implications, so I explain that I use it in my own meaning, as above. There is a great deal of what the churches call lust, which I call true and honest love; on the other hand, in Christian churches today, there are celebrated innumerable marriages between innocent young girls and mature men of property, which I describe as legalized and consecrated lust. We are now in position to make a fundamental distinction. I assert the proposition that there does not exist, in any man, at any time of his life, or in any condition of his health, a necessity for yielding to the impulses of lust; and I say that no man can yield to them without degrading his nature and injuring himself, not merely morally, but mentally, and in the long run physically. I assert that it is the duty of every man, at all times and under all circumstances, to resist the impulses of lust, to suppress and destroy them in his nature, by whatever expenditure of will power and moral effort may be required. I know physicians who maintain the unpopular thesis that serious damage may be done to the physical organism of both man and woman by the long continued suppression of the sex-life. Let me make plain that I am not disagreeing with such men. I do not deny that repression of the sex-life may do harm. What I do deny is that it does any harm to repress a physical desire which is unaccompanied by the higher elements of sex; that is to say, by affection, admiration, and unselfish concern for the sex-partner and her welfare. When I advise a man to resist and suppress and destroy the impulse toward lust in his nature, I am not telling him to live a sexless life. I am telling him that if he represses lust, then love will come; whereas, if he yields to lust, then love may never come, he may make himself incapable of love, incapable of feeling it or of trusting it, or of inspiring it in a woman. And I say that if, on the other hand, he resists lust, he will pour all the energies of his being into the channels of affection and idealism. Instead of having his thoughts diverted by every passing female form, his energies will become concentrated upon the search for one woman who appeals to him in permanent and useful ways. We may be sure that nature has not made men and women incompatible, but on the contrary, has provided for fulfillment of the desires of both. The man will find some woman who is looking for the thing which he has to offer—that is, love. And now, what about the suppression of love? Here I am willing to go as far as any physician could desire, and possibly farther. Speaking generally, and concerning normal adult human beings, I say that the suppression of love is a crime against nature and life. I say that long continued and systematic suppression of love exercises a devastating effect, not merely upon the body, but upon the mind and all the energies of the being. I say that the doctrine of the suppression of love, no matter by whom it is preached, is an affront to nature and to life, and an insult to the creator of life. I say that it is the duty of all men and women, not merely to assert their own right to love, but to devote their energies to a war upon whatever ideas and conventions and laws in society deny the love-right. The belief that long continued suppression of love does grave harm has been strongly reinforced in the last few years by the discovery of psycho-analysis, a science which enables us to explore our unconscious minds, and lay bare the secrets of nature's psychic workshop. These revelations have made plain that sex plays an even more important part in our mental lives than we realized. Sex feeling manifests itself, not merely in grown people, but in the tiniest infants; in these latter it has of course no object in the opposite sex, but the physical sensations are there, and some of their outward manifestations; and as the infant grows, and realizes the outside world, the feelings come to center upon others, the parents first of all. These manifestations must be guided, and sometimes repressed; but if this is done violently, by means of terror, the consequences may be very harmful—the wrong impulses or the terrors may survive as a "complex" in the unconscious mind, and cause a long chain of nervous disorders and physical weaknesses in the adult. These things are no matter of guesswork, they have been proven as thoroughly as any scientific discovery, and are used in a new technic of healing. Of course, as with every new theory, there are unbalanced people who carry it to extremes. There are fanatics of Freudianism who talk as if everything in the human unconsciousness were sex; but that need not blind us to the importance of these new discoveries, and the confirmation they bring to the thesis that sane and normal love, wisely guided by common sense and reasoned knowledge, is at a certain period of life a vital necessity to every sound human being. <h2>CHAPTER XXXVII CELIBACY VERSUS CHASTITY</h2> <div class="blockquot">(The ideal of the repression of the sex impulse, as against the ideal of its guidance and cultivation.) </div> There are two words which we need in this discussion, and as they are generally used loosely, they must now be defined precisely. The two words are celibacy and chastity. We define celibacy as the permanent and systematic suppression of love. We define chastity, on the other hand, as the permanent and systematic suppression of lust. Chastity, as the word is here used, is not a denial of love, but a preparing for it; it is the practice and the ideal, necessary especially in the young, of consecrating their beings to the search for love, and to becoming worthy for love. In that sense we regard chastity as one of the most essential of virtues in the young. It is widely taught today, but ineffectively, because unintelligently and without discrimination; because, in other words, it is confused with celibacy, which is a perversion of life, and one of humanity's intellectual and moral diseases. The origin of the ideal of celibacy is easy to understand. At a certain stage in human development the eyes of the mind are opened, and to some man comes a revelation of the life of altruism and sympathetic imagination. To use the common phrase, the man discovers his spiritual nature. But under the conditions then prevailing, all the world outside him is in a conspiracy to strangle that nature, to drag it down and trample it into the mire. One of the most powerful of these destructive agencies, as it seems to the man, is sex. By means of sex he is laid hold upon by strange and terrible creatures who do not understand his higher vision, but seek only to prey upon him, and use him for their convenience. At the worst they rob him of everything, money, health, time and reputation; at best, they saddle him and bridle him, they put him in harness and set him to dragging a heavy load. In the words of a wise old man of the world, Francis Bacon, "He who marries and has children gives hostages to fortune." In a world wherein war, pestilence, and famine held sway, the man of family had but slight chance of surviving as a philosopher or prophet or saint. Discovering in himself a deep-rooted and overwhelming impulse to fall into this snare, he imagined a devil working in his heart; so he fled away to the desert, and hid in a cave, and starved himself, and lashed himself with whips, and allowed worms and lice to devour his body, in the effort to destroy in himself the impulse of sex. So the world had monasteries, and a religious culture, not of much use, but better than nothing; and so we still have in the world celibate priesthoods, and what is more dangerous to our social health, we have the old, degraded notions of the essential vileness of the sex relationship—notions permeating all our thought, our literature, our social conventions and laws, making it impossible for us to attain true wisdom and health and happiness in love. I say the ideal of celibacy is an intellectual and moral disease; it is a violation of nature, and nature devotes all her energies to breaking it down, and she always succeeds. There never has been a celibate religious order, no matter how noble its origin and how strict its discipline, which has not sooner or later become a breeding place of loathsome unnatural vices. And sooner or later the ideal begins to weaken, and common sense to take its place, and so we read in history about popes who had sons, and we see about us priests who have "nieces" and attractive servant girls. Make the acquaintance of any police sergeant in any big city of America, and get him to chatting on friendly terms, and you will discover that it is a common experience for the police in their raids upon brothels to catch the representatives of celibate religious orders. As one old-timer in the "Tenderloin" of New York said to me, "Of course, we don't make any trouble for the good fathers." Nor was this merely because the old sergeant was an Irishman and a Catholic; it was because deep down in his heart he knew, as every man knows, that the craving of a man for the society and companionship of a woman is an overwhelming craving, which will break down every barrier that society may set against it. There is another form of celibacy which is not based upon religious ideas, but is economic in its origin, and purely selfish in its nature. It is unorganized and unreasoned, and is known as "bachelorhood"; it has as its complements the institutions of old maidenhood and of prostitution. Both forms of celibacy, the religious and the economic, are entirely incompatible with chastity, which is only possible where love is recognized and honored. Chastity is a preparation for love; and if you forbid love, whether by law, or by social convention, or by economic strangling, you at once make chastity a Utopian dream. You may preach it from your pulpits until you are black in the face; you may call out your Billy Sundays to rave, and dance, and go into convulsions; you may threaten hell-fire and brimstone until you throw whole audiences into spasms—but you will never make them chaste. On the contrary, strange and horrible as it may seem, those very excitements will turn into sexual excitements before your eyes! So subtle is our ancient mother nature, and so determined to have her own way! The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the world. It is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and supposed to be modern forms. Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained enormous influence, not merely in Russia, but throughout the world among people who think themselves liberal—humanitarians, pacifists, philosophic anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about sex, his teachings and writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous manifestation of disease. All through his youth and middle years, as an army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life was one of license, and the attitude toward women he thus acquired, he never got out of his thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole attitude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness. But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral consciences of humanity. He looked about him at a world gone mad with greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit and escape the power of evil. As regards sex, his thought took the form of ancient Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of sex, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, the relationship of brother and sister. In his novel, "Resurrection," Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl and conceives for her such a noble and generous emotion; but gradually the poison of physical sex-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her, and she becomes a prostitute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and wins her to God and goodness by the unselfish and unsexual love which he should have maintained from the beginning. It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we are "conceived in sin and born in iniquity." We may be pure and good, and cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. Some choose to sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future; and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom God has sent to call down destruction upon a world which He had made—through some mistake never satisfactorily explained! It is easy nowadays to persuade intelligent people to laugh at such a perverted view of life; but the truth is that this attitude toward sex is written, not merely into our religious creeds and formulas, but into most of our laws and social conventions. It is this, which for convenience I will call the "monkish" view of love, which prevents our dealing frankly and honestly with its problems, distinguishing between what is wrong and what is right, and doing anything effective to remedy the evils of marriage-plus-prostitution. That is why I have tried so carefully to draw the distinction between what I call love and what I call lust; between the ideal of celibacy, which is a perversion, and the idea of chastity, which must form an essential part of any regimen of true and enduring love. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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