Is sex necessary?

Men and women have always sought, by one means and another, to be together rather than apart. At first they were together by the simple expedient of being unicellular, and there was no conflict. Later the cell separated, or began living apart, for reasons which are not clear even today, although there is considerable talk. Almost immediately the two halves of the original cell began experiencing a desire to unite again—usually with a half of some other cell. This urge has survived down to our time. Its commonest manifestations are marriage, divorce, neuroses, and, a little less frequently, gun-fire.

When society decided it would have to set up laws to govern these polymorphous manifestations of a once simple urge which had got out of hand, it did so without a very clear notion of sex as we know it today. It did not realize that direction of the Love Urge by outside forces of law and order must be subversive of the complete flowering of the individual—and is there anything in life more wonderful than a completely flowered individual, man or woman?

Yet under all the weight of social regulation, the ancient desire to unite and to separate and to unite again, usually with some one else, has survived, for the simple reason that it is stronger than man-made law and because cells, as now constituted, are more astute than the police. They have to be. Thus we find men and women being consistently together even against the rigorous dictates of a prescribed behaviorism to whose institutional coldness the warmth of their emotional natures is irrevocably opposed. And so on.

As far as I can make out, the authors of this remarkable book subscribe to the modern ideal of freedom in sex, but do not believe that marriage has yet been proved a failure in every case, nor that sex can profitably be examined entirely apart from that old institution. In this viewpoint the authors and myself are at one, which is probably the reason I was asked to write an introduction.

Marriage, as an instrument, is a well-nigh perfect thing. The trouble is that it cannot be successfully applied to the present-day emotional relationships of men and women. It could much more easily be applied to something else, possibly professional tennis. As they now stand, marriage and sex militate against each other. If marriage is to be retained it must be perfected to meet the new demands and intricacies of sex. There is, doubtless, a discoverable plane on which marriage and sex, the institutional and the emotional, could meet and, as who should say, become friends. Not only marriage, however, but sex as well, would have to make certain concessions. Tempered by this balanced viewpoint, one must find it, then, logically impossible to pose only the question, “What is wrong with marriage?” It becomes necessary also to pose the question, “What is wrong with sex?” For if it is plausible to assume that something may be so radically wrong with a well-nigh perfect institutional device that it might be well for society to abandon it, one must, in all fairness, entertain the suspicion that something may be so wrong with a well-nigh perfect emotional relationship that it might be well for society to abandon it, too.

People never have been satisfied with marriage. If the contracting parties are satisfied with it, some one else isn’t. How often one hears the expression, “I don’t know what she sees in him.” As a matter of fact, however, we hear that expression less frequently today than we used to, because psychology has enabled us to know what she does see in him. There is, however, still considerable doubt as to what he sees in her. Some authorities claim that no man can see all there is to see in a woman, because she is too complicated and mysterious for him. This notion—that Woman is more incomprehensible than Man—has persisted for centuries. It is of a piece with the legend that Woman is deserving of a certain form of idolatrous worship, a legend that grew up in the early ages of the world. When Man first came into being, he did not think that the female was extraordinary. He did not think that anything was extraordinary. The world was unattractive physically, and a little dull. There was no vegetation, and without vegetation there can be no fancy. Then trees came into existence. It was trees that first made Man begin to brood. In pondering their leafy intricacies he got his first crude concept of beauty. He used to tear great branches out of trees and take them home to his cave woman. “Here,” he would say to her, “lie on these.” The man then reclined in a corner of the cave and watched the woman’s hair mingle with the leaves, and her eyes shine through them, until he fell asleep. His dreams were troubled. Woman came into his dreams as a tree, then a tree came into his dreams as a woman. He also got her eyes, shining through the leaves, all mixed up with the moon. Out of this curious and lamentable confusion grew the tendency in Man’s mind to identify Woman with the phenomena of the burgeoning earth and the mysteries of the illimitable heavens. As time went on Man rather enjoyed cultivating this idea. It was something to think about. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Thus was the subconscious born, with all its strange mixture of fact and symbol.

As the vegetation of the earth grew more luxuriant Man grew more moody. Each new plant represented something that he could not easily fit into his practicable scheme of things (the tomato, for example, wasn’t fitted in until late in the nineteenth century). For the first wild iris, Man saw no conceivable use. However, he plucked it. It had, he noticed, that curious color, or pigmentation, which he associated with only two other things—the sky and Woman’s eyes. He brooded upon this astounding coincidence overlong. Often he got wet through, standing in a bog, contemplating a blue flag. Then he would take it home and give it to his mate.

All these things operated to bring about in Man’s mind an inclination to identify the wonders of the earth and sky with the physical fact of his mate’s existence. He decided they must have a great deal in common, these wonders and this woman. What that was he determined to find out. Too proud at first, too male, to take his mate into his confidence in the matter of his uncertainties, he got to tramping the bogs and woods at night, seeking the answer. He bayed questions at the moon, he beseeched the trees to speak, he shouted at the wild iris. There was no answer. It was then that it occurred to Man that, since these things could not tell him the answer to the riddle of the universe, the only possible source of that information must repose in the living creature which he identified with them, the woman with skyey eyes and leafy hair. Then came that important night when one of the early men resolutely rose from his knees, under the moon, and started back to his cave to demand from his mate an explanation of all these mysteries. On the way a star fell. Those ages were notable for falling meteors. This one frightened the man as it crashed sizzling through the trees and buried itself with a moan in the ground. He ran the rest of the way home, arriving breathless and white.

“Wha’ was ’at?” he croaked, pointing behind him. His mate saw nothing but the waving of fern fronds in the wind, the form of some animal slinking into the woods.

“It is nothing,” she said, and smiled, and ran her hand through his hair.

Right then and there Man conceived the notion that Woman was so closely associated, so inextricably entwined with the wonders and terrors of the world, that she had no fear of them. She was in quiet league with the forces of life. She was an integral part of the stars and the moon, she was one with the trees and the iris in the bog. He fell down on his knees, the pitiable idiot, and grasped her about the waist.

It is inconceivable that a myth as strong as this belief in the ineffability of Woman, as deeply rooted in the soils of time, can ever be completely eradicated. However fantastical, however untrue, crotchet or whim, fancy or foible, there it is and there it has always been. To destroy it would be to put the female properly in her place, as a plain, unadorned unit in the senseless but unending pattern of biological continuity. Romantic love would disappear. Life would be simplified. Neuroses would vanish. But Man clings to his ancient and silly value. What it has done to him is quite easy to see. It has subordinated him to Woman, for one thing. The emotional nature of the male has either been overlooked altogether or greatly disparaged. “Isn’t that just like a man?” is an all-too-glib and common expression. It implies that one can virtually ascribe to all men the simple reactions which, in a number of men, inexpertly observed, have proved likely to take place. (The italic is mine.)

Observers have been too prone to hold that the male is negligible, and to overemphasize the importance of the female. Thus we find such keen analysts as Ira S. Wile and Mary Day Winn⁠[1] asserting that “anyone who wishes to understand modern marriage must center his attention on woman and find out what she thinks of it and what she intends to do about it.” This is the old Bridegroom Fallacy—the notion, to paraphrase Miss Loos, that the bride is divine but that the bridegroom is just nothing. Unless more stress is laid, and pretty quickly, too, upon the complexity of the male, and the importance of what he is thinking about and what he intends to do, or at least what he would like to do, we are never going to arrive at a norm. How often do you hear it said that the little whims and desires of a man should be cherished, or even listened to? You don’t hear it said at all. What you do hear is that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” A thing like that hardens a man. He may eat his spinach and say nothing, but he is being hardened just the same.

The American male, because of the remarkable stress laid upon women in this country, has been understood least of all males. There has been no completely successful attempt to state his case until the authors of this extraordinary book came along. I do not know who they are. In places they do not seem to be themselves. But they’ve got something. (A lot of what they have they seem to have got from Zaner and Tithridge, which is all right with me.) At any rate, they state the case for the American man clearly and plausibly. At the same time they have by no means neglected the female. It takes two to make a neurosis, and nobody knows that any better than White and Thurber, unless it’s Zaner and Tithridge.

Herein are examined, therefore, both men and women, male and female, Man and Woman—not only in themselves, but in their curious reactions to each other. The term “reaction” seems to be used in this book to include not only those quick, unpremeditated reflexes which cause so much trouble, but also those slowly formulated prejudices, doubts, and suspicions which cause even more trouble. If this book does anything at all toward straightening out the lamentable mess that things have got into in America—and I certainly think it will—the authors will feel amply repaid for their pains, which consisted in large part, they tell me, of insults.

Lt. Col. H. R. L. Le Boutellier, C.I.E.
Schlaugenschloss Haus,
King’s Byway,
Boissy-le-Doux sur Seine.
July 15, 1929