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.