Sex and Common-Sense | Page 4

cause of

fornication"--feeling that the Master could not have meant anything
else. But, in fact, there is little doubt that Jesus did both say and mean
that marriage demanded lifelong fidelity on either side; just as He
really taught that a lustful thought was adultery in the sight of God.
But if Christendom has been staggered at the austerity of Christ's
morality not less has it been shocked at the quality of His mercy. His
gentleness to the sensual sinner has been compared, with amazement,
to the sternness of His attitude to the sins of the spirit. Not the
profligate or the harlot but the Pharisee and the scribe were those who
provoked His sternest rebukes. And perhaps the most characteristic of
all His dealings with such matters was that incident of the woman taken
in adultery, when He at once reaffirmed the need of absolute chastity
for men--demand undreamed of by the woman's accusers--and put
aside the right to condemn which in all that assembly He alone could
claim--"Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more."
Having then in mind this most lofty and compassionate of moralists, let
us turn to the problem of to-day. Here are nearly 2,000,000 women who,
if the austere demands of faithful monogamy are to be obeyed, will
never know the satisfaction of a certain physical need. Now it is the
desire of every normal human being to satisfy all his instincts. And this
is as true of women as of men. What I have to say applies indeed to
many men to-day, for many men are unable to marry because they have
been so broken by war--or otherwise--so shattered or maimed or
impoverished that they do not feel justified in marrying. But I want to
emphasize with all my power that the hardness of enforced celibacy
presses as cruelly on women as on men. Women, difficult as some
people find it to believe, are human beings; and because women are so,
they want work, and interest, and love--both given and received--and
children, and, in short, the satisfaction of every human need. The idea
that existence is enough for them--that they need not work, and do not
suffer if their sex instincts are repressed or starved--is a convenient but
most cruel illusion. People often tell me, and nearly always
unconsciously assume, that women have no sex hunger--no sex needs
at all until they marry, and that even then their need is not at all so
imperious as men's, or so hard to repress. Such people are nearly

always either men, or women who have married young and happily and
borne many children, and had a very full and interesting outside life as
well! Such women will assure me with the utmost complacency that the
sex-instincts of a woman are very easily controllable, and that it is
preposterous to speak as if their repression really cost very much. I
think with bitterness of that age-long repression, of its unmeasured cost;
of the gibe contained in the phrase "old maid," with all its implication
of a narrowed life, a prudish mind, an acrid tongue, an embittered
disposition. I think of the imbecilities in which the repressed instinct
has sought its pitiful baffled release, of the adulation lavished on a
parrot, a cat, a lap-dog; or of the emotional "religion," the
parson-worship, on which every fool is clever enough to sharpen his
wit. And all these cramped and stultified lives have not availed to make
the world understand that women have had to pay for their celibacy!
"The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth-point
goes. The butterfly beside the road Preaches contentment to that toad."
Modern psychology is lifting the veil to-day from the suffering which
repression causes. It is a pity that its most brilliant exponents should
ascribe to a single instinct--however potent--all the ills that afflict
mankind, for such one-sidedness defeats its own object; but, at least,
the modern psychologist is trying to show us "exactly where each
tooth-point goes" in the repression of the sex-instinct among women as
among men. Nor does the fact that the tabu of society has actually in
many cases enabled a woman to inhibit the development of her own
nature, obviate the fact that she does so at great cost, even when she
least understands what she does.
I affirm this, and with insistence, that the normal--the average--woman
sacrifices a great deal if she accepts life-long celibacy. She sacrifices
quite as much as a man. In those cases--too frequent even now--where
she is not educated or expected to earn her own living or to have a
career, I maintain that she loses more than a man who is expected to
work. I do not say, and I do not believe, that passion in a woman is