Marriage and Morals/Chapter XIX

In the present chapter I propose to recapitulate things said in earlier chapters as regards the effects of sex and sexual morals upon individual happiness and well-being. In this matter we are not concerned only with the actively sexual period of life, nor with actual sex relations. Sexual morality affects childhood, adolescence, and even old age, in all kinds of ways, good or bad according to circumstances.

Conventional morality begins its operations by the imposition of taboos in childhood. A child is taught, at a very early: age, not to touch certain parts of the body while grown-up people are looking. It is taught to speak in a whisper when expressing an excretory desire, and to preserve privacy in performing the resultant action. Certain parts of the body and certain acts have some peculiar quality not readily intelligible to the child, which invests them with mystery and a special interest. Cer​tain intellectual problems, such as where babies come from, must be thought over in silence, since the answers given by grown-ups are either evasive or obviously untrue. I know men, by no means old, who, when in infancy they were seen touching a certain portion of their body, were told with the utmost solemnity: “I would rather see you dead than doing that.” I regret to say that the effect in producing virtue in later life has not always been all that conventional moralists might desire. Not infrequently threats are used. It is perhaps not so common as it used to be to threaten a child with castration, but it is still thought quite proper to threaten him with insanity. Indeed, it is illegal in the State of New York to let him know that he does not run the risk unless he thinks he does. The result of this teaching is that most children in their earliest years have a profound sense of guilt and terror which is associated with sexual matters. This association of sex with guilt and fear goes so deep as to become almost or wholly unconscious. I wish it were possible to institute a statistical enquiry, among men who believe themselves emancipated from such nursery tales, as to whether they would be as ready to commit adultery dur​ing a thunder storm as at any other time. I believe that ninety per cent of them, in their heart of hearts, would think that if they did so they would be struck by lightning.

Both sadism and masochism, although in their milder forms they are normal, are connected, in their pernicious manifestations, with the sense of sexual guilt. A masochist is a man acutely conscious of his own guilt in connection with sex. A sadist is a man more conscious of the guilt of the woman as temptress. These effects, in later life, show how profound has been the early impression produced by unduly severe moral teaching in childhood. On this matter, persons connected with the teaching of children, and especially with the care of the very young, are becoming more enlightened. But unfortunately enlightenment has not yet reached the law-courts.

Childhood and youth form a period in life when pranks and naughtiness and performance of forbidden acts are natural, spontaneous and not regrettable except when carried too far. But infraction of sex prohibitions is treated by grown-up people quite differently from any other breach of rules, and is therefore felt by the child to belong to a quite different category. ​If a child steals fruit from the larder you may be annoyed, you may rate the child soundly, but you feel no moral horror, and you do not convey to the child the sense that something appalling has occurred. If, on the other hand, you are an old-fashioned person and you find him masturbating, there will be a tone in your voice which he will never hear in any other connection. This tone produces an abject terror, all the greater since the child probably finds it impossible to abstain from the behaviour that has called forth your denunciation. The child, impressed by your earnestness, profoundly believes that masturbation is as wicked as you say it is. Nevertheless, he persists in it. Thus the foundations are laid for a morbidness which probably continues through life. From his earliest youth onward, he regards himself as a sinner. He soon learns to sin in secret, and to find a half-hearted consolation in the fact that no one knows of his sin. Being profoundly unhappy, he seeks to avenge himself on the world by punishing those who have been less successful than himself in concealing a similar guilt. Being accustomed to deceit as a child, he finds no difficulty in practising it in later life. Thus he becomes a morbidly intro​verted hypocrite and persecutor as a result of his parents’ ill-judged attempt to make him what they consider virtuous.

It is not guilt and shame and fear that should dominate the lives of children, Children should be happy and gay and spontaneous; they should not dread their own impulses; they should not shrink from the exploration of natural facts. They should not hide away in the darkness all their instinctive life. They should not bury in the depths of the unconscious impulses which, even with their utmost endeavours, they cannot kill. If they are to grow into upright men and women, intellectually honest, socially fearless, vigorous in action and tolerant in thought, we must begin from the very beginning to train them so that these results may be possible. Education has been conceived too much on the analogy of the training of dancing bears. Every one knows how dancing bears are trained. They are put on a hot floor, which compels them to dance because their toes are burnt if they remain in contact with it. While this is done, a certain tune is played to them. After a time the tune suffices to make them dance, without the hot floor. So it is with children. While a child is conscious of his sex​ual organ, grown-ups scold him. In the end, such consciousness brings up a thought of their scolding and makes him dance to their tune, to the complete destruction of all possibility of a healthy or happy sexual life.

In the next stage, that of adolescence, the misery caused by the conventional handling of sex is even greater than in childhood. Many boys do not know at all accurately what is happening to them, and are terrified when they first experience nocturnal emissions. They find themselves filled with impulses which they have been taught to consider extremely wicked. These impulses are so strong as to be an obsession, day and night. In the better sort of boy, there are at the same time impulses of the most extreme idealism towards beauty and poetry. and towards ideal love, which is thought of as wholly divorced from sex. Owing to the Manichaean elements in Christian teaching, the idealistic and the carnal impulses of adolescence are apt, among ourselves, to remain wholly dissociated, and even at war one with the other. On this point I may quote the confession of an intellectual friend, who says: “My own adolescence was, I believe, not untypical, and it exhibited this dissociation in a very ​marked form. For hours in the day I would read Shelley and sentimentalize over:

Then suddenly I would leave these heights and try to catch a surreptitious glimpse of the housemaid undressing. The latter impulse caused me profound shame; the former had, of course, an element of silliness, since its idealism was the obverse of a foolish fear of sex.”

Adolescence, as every one knows, is a time when nervous disorders are very frequent, and when persons who at all other times are well-balanced may easily be quite the reverse. Miss Mead, in her book called “Coming of Age in Samoa,” asserts that adolescent disorders are unknown in that island, and she attributes this fact to the prevalent sexual freedom. This sexual freedom, it is true, is being somewhat curtailed by missionary activity. Some of the girls whom she questioned lived in the missionary’s house, and these, during adolescence, practised only masturbation and homosexuality, whilst those who lived elsewhere engaged also in heterosexual practices. Our most famous boys’ schools are not altogether so very ​different in this respect from the house of the Samoan missionary, but the psychological effect of behaviour which, in Samoa, is harmless, may in an English schoolboy be disastrous, because he probably respects in his heart the conventional teaching, whereas the Samoan regards the missionary merely. as a white man with peculiar tastes that have to be humoured.

Most young men, in their early adult years, go through troubles and difficulties of a quite unnecessary kind in regard to sex. If a young man remains chaste, the difficulty of control probably causes him to become timid and inhibited, so that when he finally marries he cannot break down the self-control of past years, except perhaps in a brutal and sudden manner, which leads him to fail his wife in the capacity of a lover. If he goes with prostitutes, the dissociation between the physical and the idealistic aspects of love which has begun in adolescence is perpetuated, with the result that his relations with women ever after have to be either Platonic or, in his belief, degrading. Moreover, he runs a grave risk of venereal disease. If he has affairs with girls of his own class, much less harm is done, but even then the need of ​secrecy is harmful, and interferes with the development of stable relations. Owing partly to snobbery and partly to the belief that marriage ought immediately to lead to children, it is difficult for a man to marry young. Moreover, where divorce is very difficult, early marriage has great dangers, since two people who suit each other at twenty are quite likely not to suit each other at thirty. Stable relations with one partner are difficult for many people until they have had some experience of variety. If our outlook on sex were sane, we should expect university students to be temporarily married, though childless. They would in this way be freed from the obsession of sex which at present greatly interferes with work. They would acquire that experience of the other sex which is desirable as a prelude to the serious partnership of a marriage with children. And they would be free to experience love without the concomitants of subterfuge, concealment, and dread of disease, which at present poison youthful adventures.

For the large class of women who, as things are, must remain permanently unmarried, conventional morality is painful and, in most cases, harmful. I have known, as we all have, unmar​ried women of strict conventional virtue who deserve the highest admiration from every possible point of view. But I think the general rule is otherwise. A woman who has had no experience of sex and has considered it important to preserve her virtue has been engaged in a negative reaction, tinged with fear, and has therefore, as a rule, become timid, while at the same time instinctive, unconscious jealousy has filled her with disapproval of normal people, and with a desire to punish those who have enjoyed what she has forgone. Intellectual timidity is an especially common concomitant of prolonged virginity. Indeed, I am inclined to think that the intellectual inferiority of women, in so far as it exists, is mainly due to the restraint upon curiosity which the fear of sex leads them to impose. There is no good reason for the unhappiness and waste involved in the lifelong virginity of those women who cannot find an exclusive husband. The present situation, in which this necessarily occurs very frequently, was not contemplated in the earlier days of the institution of marriage, since in those days the numbers of the sexes were approximately equal. Undoubtedly, the existence of a great excess of women in many countries ​affords a very serious argument in favour of modifications of the conventional moral code.

Marriage, the one conventionally tolerated outlet for sex, itself suffers from the rigidity of the code. The complexes acquired in childhood, the experiences of men with prostitutes, and the attitude of aversion from sex instilled into young ladies in order to preserve their virtue, all militate against happiness in marriage. A well-brought-up girl, if her sexual impulses are strong, will be unable to distinguish, when she is courted, between a serious congeniality with a man and a mere sex attraction. She may easily marry the first man who awakens her sexually, and find out too late that when her sexual hunger is satisfied she has no longer anything in common with him. Everything has been done in the education of the two to make her unduly timid and him unduly sudden in the sexual approach. Neither has the knowledge on sexual matters that each ought to have, and very often initial failures, due to this ignorance, make the marriage ever after sexually unsatisfying to both. Moreover, mental as well as physical companionship is rendered difficult. A woman is not accustomed to free speech on ​sexual matters. A man is not accustomed to it, except with men and prostitutes. In the most intimate and vital concern of their mutual life, they are shy, awkward, even wholly silent. The wife, perhaps, lies awake unsatisfied and hardly knowing what it is she wants. The man perhaps has the thought, at first fleeting and instantly banished, but gradually becoming more and more insistent, that even prostitutes are more generous in giving than his lawful wife. He is offended by her coldness, at the very moment, perhaps, that she is suffering because he does not know how to rouse her. All this misery results from our policy of silence and decency.

In all these ways, from childhood through adolescence and youth, and on into marriage, the older morality has been allowed to poison love, filling it with gloom, fear, mutual misunderstanding, remorse, and nervous strain, separating into two regions the bodily impulse of sex and the spiritual impulse of ideal love, making the one beastly and the other sterile. It is not so that life should be lived. The animal and the spiritual natures should not be at war. There is nothing in either that is incom​patible with the other, and neither can reach its full fruition except in union with the other. The love of man and woman at its best is free and fearless, compounded of body and mind in equal proportions; not dreading to idealize because there is a physical basis, not dreading the physical basis lest it should interfere with the idealization. Love should be a tree whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose branches extend into heaven. But love cannot grow and flourish while it is hedged about with taboos and superstitious terrors, with words of reprobation and silences of horror. The love of man and woman and the love of parents and children are the two central facts in the emotional life of man. While degrading the one, conventional morality has pretended to exalt the other, but in fact the love of parents for children has suffered through the degradation of the love of parents for each other. Children who are the fruit of joy and mutual fulfilment can be loved in a way more healthy and robust, more in accordance with the ways of nature, more simple, direct, and animal, and yet more unselfish and fruitful, than is possible to parents starved, hungry, and eager, reaching out to the ​helpless young for some fragment of the nutriment that has been denied them in marriage, and in so doing, warping infant minds and laying the foundation of the same troubles for the next generation. To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.