Woman

(H) But the chief and most serious objection to the monogamic marriage, apart from all the pain that it brings to individuals, male and female, consists in the injury which, particularly at the present day, it does to the offspring of each generation. From the standpoint of posterity, indeed, the gravity of this charge can hardly be exaggerated.

It may seem a far cry to speak of the increase of indigestion and of bad or defective teeth in connexion with the monogamic marriage, but in practice this connexion is not so remote as it would appear.

The ideal condition for a child that is to be well-constituted and flourishing in body and mind, is, in the first place, that its mother should be left in peace during gestation, and certainly that she should be left scrupulously alone during the period of suckling. From the standpoint of the race it is of such supreme importance that a child should be reared on mother’s milk, that everything should be done, no stone should be left unturned, to secure if possible the certainty of this condition.

With regard to cohabitation during gestation it is only fair to say that opinions are sadly divided, some doctors maintaining one thing, and others the reverse. If we require a standard, however, we have only to study the lower animals, among which the female is not even accessible during pregnancy. Whereas some doctors will declare, however, that any cohabitation whatsoever during gestation is most pernicious, all are unanimous in pronouncing against normal indulgence at such times. But apart from everything that changeable and uncertain science may periodically proclaim regarding this question, it would seem obvious that cohabitation at a time when fertilization is impossible cannot in any case have been Nature’s design; and if, therefore, there remain the smallest doubt about the matter—as the division of opinion among medical men reveals—surely the benefit of the doubt ought, in all humanity, to be given to the expected offspring!

With regard to cohabitation after the confinement and during the seven to nine months of suckling that should follow, there can, however, be no doubt whatsoever. This must be bad; for, seeing that it is of primary importance that the child during these months should be able to obtain mother’s milk, no risks should be run which can in any way jeopardize the happy fulfilment of this condition.

At such times the mother should be left severely alone. She is happy, exquisitely happy.[65] Her nervous system is concentrated on the one important and essential object—that of providing for her infant child. Any action or diversion that tends to disturb the attention of the nervous system, or to shake this precious concentration upon the mammæ, cannot therefore be too strongly deprecated.

What is the alternative? The mammæ find the nervous energy of the body divided. The woman’s system is no longer that of a mother alone; it has been recalled to its rôle as a wife. There may be conception or there may not—at any rate, the frequent occurrence of children only a year or thirteen months older than a brother or sister, shows how often conception does take place in such circumstances—and the consequence is that the suckling has to be removed from the breast, in order to become the experimental victim of every kind of abomination in the form of substitutes for mother’s milk.

To the ignorance of the young mother concerning artificial foods are now added the ignorance of neighbours, the audacious and criminal lies of commercial baby-food manufacturers, and frequently the ineptitude of the local doctor. Against such a conspiracy of error—irrespective of the fact that no substitute, however good, can possibly compensate for the loss of mother’s milk—it is not surprising that the infant’s body should rebel; and the result is a child who cannot by any conceivable chance be saved from digestive trouble, whom nothing can cure of digestive trouble, and who, by having alimentary disorders started so early in life, reaches maturity not only with a strong bias in favour of gastric and intestinal vices, but also—if indeed his teeth survive so long—with every imaginable kind of dental disease, from caries to pyorrhœa.

From mothers congenitally and constitutionally unfit either to have babies or to nurse them, there will surely always come a sufficiently vast contribution of unhealthy and undesirable babies to each generation; but these, at least, no ordinary precaution can save, and if their early upbringing only tends to promote a condition of degeneracy already inherent in them, so that they find it difficult to survive, we can only applaud this confirmation of a thoroughly moribund tendency.

But in the case of healthy, positive women, admirably fitted to fulfil all the functions of motherhood efficiently and pleasurably, anything that interferes with this healthy functioning amounts to a national and racial calamity, and it is to these I refer when I emphasize the immense danger of cohabitation during the nursing period.

Now the monogamic marriage makes this sort of plague almost a natural necessity, a sort of ineluctable scourge. It is impossible to ask a normal, positive, healthy man to exercise sexual abstinence for sixteen or eighteen months—that is to say, the nine months of his wife’s pregnancy and the seven or nine months of lactation. Only Manicheans, Puritans, or people thoroughly below par and quite devoid of virility, could possibly think of recommending such a course. Psycho-analysis has at last shown what all decent and clean-minded people knew about prolonged sexual abstinence—that it is both wrongful and harmful. It can only be thought of and practised by people who have either used religious and alcoholic methods of sublimating their passions, or else by people who are utterly and conspicuously undesirable; but in the case of the latter it should be remembered that it is not abstinence or so-called “self-control,” but semi-impotence. Where it is attempted by exuberant, positive young men, who are neither geniuses in art, philosophy or religion, it can only mean disease—possibly physical, but certainly nervous.

The husband, therefore, in a monogamic marriage consisting of the union of two positive, healthy people, finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. If he be sound and normal he cannot dream of abstaining for the number of months that would be necessary for his child’s welfare (for even if he indulges in cohabitation during gestation, he still has to face the seven or nine months of suckling, during which he must at all costs leave his wife in peace); and yet society (modern society) and convention generally bid him rather ruin his child than practise even the most innocuous form of virtual polygamy.

Of course the intelligent, thoughtful and good-natured man in such circumstances turns to some sort of modern substitute for polygamy. But the curse of modern civilization, its great blot and disfigurement, lies in the fact that at this stage in his wise resolve, he must perforce resort to secrecy, to deception, to concealment, to a hole-and-corner liaison, which may and frequently does expose him to every conceivable danger and expense—danger from disease if he be a fool and unwary, danger from blackmail if he fall into the hands of knaves, danger from ruin if he happen to have lighted upon unscrupulous associates, and danger from a criminal prosecution into the bargain.

But in any case, however fortunate he may be in forming his liaison, he is certain, if found out, to incur the moral indignation of all the snivelling, worthless, ignorant and “respectable” people of his circle, among whom the loudest in their outcry will be the spinsters and the Puritans, of whom not one—no not one—can have or ever has had the faintest beginnings of an understanding of any aspect of the sex question.

This is how our society is organized. Its whole basis, its whole prepossession, is directed stubbornly towards degeneration. Nothing that points, however meekly, the other way, is any longer listened to, much less observed!

Can it be wondered at, in the circumstances, that the average unresourceful and timid man, prefers to remain strictly faithful to his monogamic vows? Can it be wondered at that he prefers to ruin his child’s constitution and temper?

This is the gravest charge that can be brought from the standpoint of the race against the monogamic marriage, and it embodies the outline of an explanation of perhaps half the physical and mental degeneracy of modern times.

It seems necessary to remind the reader here, that all these strictures against monogamy only apply to the healthy, normal, positive man and woman. They do not, therefore, apply to half the existing population. For in order that a woman may be thoroughly happy bearing and nursing children, she must be healthy, well-constituted and positive, and in order that a man may find it impossible to practise what the modern Age arrogantly calls “self-control,” he must be positive, healthy and exuberantly virile. To half the modern world this alleged “self-control” is merely a euphemistic cover for the ease with which they can forget the weak, barely audible call of their bodies; and to an ever-increasing number of modern women there is precious little enjoyment associated with any stage in the sexual cycle, whether it be actual fertilization, gestation, parturition or lactation.

In discussing the value of monogamic marriage, therefore, and the possible reforms that might be instituted to render it suitable for the positive man and woman, it is hoped that none of the remarks I shall make will be thought to apply to the vast crowds to-day who are able to find in monogamic marriage a satisfactory, though perhaps tiresome, adaptation.

But, in the first place, it may be objected that, since I find so many serious difficulties in modern monogamic marriage, why do I not straightway recommend its total abolition, and advocate polygamy, or promiscuity, or polyandry, or total sexual anarchy?

I might certainly be tempted to advocate frank and open polygamy were I not too deeply conscious of the very many serious and far-reaching advantages that the ideal of the family, as at present held in modern Europe, enjoys over every other kind of social unit designed to solve the problem of the sexes.

As I have already stated these advantages, from the standpoint of society, earlier in the chapter, there is no need to repeat them here. Nevertheless, before proceeding, it might be as well for the reader to glance at them again, so that he may the more easily follow the modifications I am about to recommend.

The problem before us, therefore, is how to maintain the monogamic marriage and give it fresh life, while modifying it in such a way as to meet the gravest of the objections that can be advanced against it.

But before I proceed it may be as well to utter some words of warning to those romanticists and sentimentalists who have doubtless been offended by the strictures I have already pronounced against monogamic marriage.

Let me tell them, therefore, that however much they may be persuaded of the contrary, it is not I, with my clear and merciless criticism of modern marriage, who am the bitterest enemy of that institution, but they themselves, with their wilful concealment of all that I have brought to light.

Modern marriage is now on the rocks. If it has drifted into this perilous position it is, however, not because the question of its advantages and disadvantages has been properly ventilated and discussed, and the disadvantages corrected; but because it has been persistently and almost maliciously overlaid with false sentiment and bogus psychology, by these very romanticists and sentimentalists themselves.

If, therefore, it is to be saved, as it should be saved, this end can be achieved only by a blank refusal to shut one’s eyes to its drawbacks, so that the latter may be rectified wherever possible; and by a full and earnest advocacy of its advantages, however unromantic and unsentimental these may appear to feverish modern sensationalists.

Before proceeding to the review of the specific objections outlined above, the general criticism of modern monogamic marriage with which the chapter opened must first be dealt with.

Method of Meeting General Criticisms.

1. Stress should be removed from the alleged permanence of love and the happiness of the marriage state, as far as possible, and laid on the utilitarian aspect of matrimony.

2. The young people should be taught realistically that since some sort of physical adaptation in sex is indispensable to the healthy adult, monogamic marriage was designed as a means of meeting that need.

3. Its difficulties should be emphasized, and a happy issue shown to be as difficult an accomplishment as the complexities of the contract would lead them to expect. They should be told that in their search for a mate they should show more concern about minimizing these difficulties than about desiring to have “a good time.”

4. The responsibilities of a family should be understood, and the wife regarded in her utilitarian aspect as a keeper of the home, as a mother, and as a guardian of the home comforts; marriage itself, as the sacred garden of the future of mankind, in which each party to the contract has the privilege of contributing to that future.

5. Differences of temperament and tradition between mates should be avoided. Since ill-health forbids our marrying into our own families (the ideal match), the young must not forget that in going beyond their families for a mate in order to contradict certain hereditary taints—such as gout, or consumption, or cancer, or any other constitutional vice—they need not therefore contradict the virtues and abilities that their particular family line has cultivated; for this leads to decline, and to the procreation of children who have no character and no ability. They should seek, as far as possible, their like in a strange family.[66] The policy of avoiding family taints in too near relations should not be extended into a policy of seeking opposites.

6. If by chance the expected disenchantment does not supervene in a form intolerably acute, when marriage has been taught on these lines, and the two young people discover that they do not necessarily become surfeited of each other with years, then at least the surprise would be pleasant, and not as it always is to-day, the sudden unpleasant realization of complete disillusionment.

Method of Meeting Specific Objections.[67]

(A1) People should be taught quite early how changeable they are. They should be persuaded of the frangibility of their resolutions, vows, and promises, and they should learn how deeply they are wedded to variety before ever they celebrate their final and most fateful wedding.

(2) They should be taught that it is only the exceptions among mankind that have that genius for love which can endure for a lifetime, and they should be shown the hollowness of the popular assumption that every one is capable of une grande passion; therefore, that to arrange their lives as if they were one of these geniuses in love is not only the grossest form of megalomania, but dangerous into the bargain.

(B) The problem here is one belonging to the art of life. Those who can practise this art, and contrive to make themselves always the desired object of the spouse, have overcome one of the principal difficulties of monogamic marriage. The French are perhaps the most successful European people at practising this art—hence the high percentage of happy marriages in France.

(C) If the approval of each party to the match is understood merely to mean the recognition by each of the necessity of an adequate physical adaptation, and the unconscious desire for this physical adaptation in each is discounted from the enthusiasm felt for the other as mate, then it will be seen that the residue, which will be a pretty tepid feeling, is by no means the outcome of an overvaluation of the individual, and the contempt need not arise.

In other words, teach the girl to subtract the need and the desire for physical adaptation from her love of the man, and teach the man to do the same in regard to the girl, and what remains will quickly be seen to consist only of a strong personal regard, which can hardly lead to the contempt that would otherwise result if the enthusiasm on both sides were supposed to arise from the unaided charms of either party to the match.

(D) The remedy here is the same as for (C). If a man realizes that when a girl protests her undying love for him the bulk of the ardour she feels is provoked merely by him as her physical adaptation—by him qua male—and that his individual traits play only a minor part, he will be less likely to believe that he is capable of provoking a life-long passion because a girl approved of him as her mate. It is a simple idea to grasp. Both the girl and the man should always reflect how much nature is helping them towards their success. When the declaration of life-long love came, it could then be estimated at its proper worth, without either party fancying that any exceptional fascination in themselves had been the principal power at work.

(E) It should be inculcated upon all, young and old alike, that companionship is not to be sought with people whom, in view of peculiar circumstances, one is bound to see every day and every hour of the day.

The sooner we free our minds from these foolish notions the better. A man and a woman should seek companions of the same sex as themselves, and outside their families. Then an hour with the mate—with the lawful spouse—may come as a rest, as a respite, as a welcome spell of peace when we need not say or do anything. But this moment of repose, of speechless serenity, with the sound of someone breathing not three feet away, should not be confused with companionship.

(F) As society is organized at present it is difficult to meet this objection. Wherever possible the man should, of course, have a concubine of some sort. Provided that the wife continues child-bearing, at regular intervals, as she should, she cannot weary of the relationship as hopelessly as he will. Women should be taught to realize that the division of labour is so unfair, that they get so much more entertainment out of sex than men do, that some compensating feature ought to be introduced into the lives of the latter. The importance of the act of fertilization alone to the man’s reproductive instinct cannot be exaggerated. To woman, its importance is only equal to the proportion it bears to the rest of the sexual cycle. To preserve his peace of mind and health of body and nerves, therefore, the man must be in a position to perform his one function with healthy desire. The children he had from his concubine, if any there were, would not necessarily rank in law with the children of his first wife.

(G1) In order to meet this objection it is imperative that we should institute some sort of tasteful method of initiation into sex for young men. Let the girls be initiated by their proper and natural initiators—their husbands; anything else is simply modern nonsense; but men should be properly and carefully initiated before marriage, away from the dangers of commercial prostitution. This school of initiation, however formed, would also serve, as it did with the Greeks, as a means of preventing the evils of total sexual abstinence among the young men who have to wait a long time for marriage.

The general ideal in modern England is that the eligible young man should be what is called “clean-minded.” It cannot be disputed that “clean-mindedness” is a very desirable and very rare quality. But the way to set about securing it is the very reverse of that which the bulk of modern English people would recommend. They would say, let the young man practise rigorous sexual abstinence before marriage, let him go in for sport and exercise “self-control.” Only thus can he remain clean-minded.

But the very last means by which a healthy positive young man may hope to attain to a clean mind is precisely the means advocated under the general head of sexual abstinence. The non-indulgence of the sex-impulses in the vigorous young male is the means par excellence of destroying clean-mindedness.

Sexual abstinence, even when accompanied by energetic exercise and indulgence in sports, by chaining in the desires and wishes arising from the young man’s reproductive instincts, causes them to become ramping demons. It causes the imagination to become filled with wish fantasies, often of a morbid kind. It fills the mind with obsessions, always obscene and frequently revolting, and if not quickly relieved must undermine the whole of a young man’s healthy mental and physical attitude towards a normal sexual life. No mind residing in a healthy young male body, practising sexual abstinence, can remain clean every minute of the day, and even in the night it is disturbed by occasional bodily protests in the form of dreams.

The dangers of not being clean-minded, however, are so great and so far-reaching, and the risks run by the healthy total sexual abstainer are so enormous, that it is high time that the truth about this matter were more widely understood.

To clean the mind, the deep wishes of the body, which refuse to be flouted, must be satisfied. To forget sex, in fact, the sex instinct must be indulged. Freedom here, as in the case of any other appetite, can only be attained by gratification.

It is true that permanent sublimation is also a possible alternative. But unless a young man is destined for the Holy Catholic Church, who would wish to sublimate his sex?

It necessarily follows from this, that clean-mindedness in abstinent young men, as it is generally understood, is a pure myth, a complete misunderstanding; and that if it is desirable that eligible young men should be clean-minded (and I am of opinion that it is most desirable), then the road thereto does not lie through the dark spook-haunted swamps of sexual abstinence, but through the open sunny highways of healthy sex gratification, secured from the dangers of commercial prostitution.

(G2) This objection can only be met by the Herculean undertaking of rearing a type of manhood richer in masculine traits of mind and character, and possessed of more exuberant virility—a type, that is to say, by the side of which virile women would immediately feel the inadequacy of their male elements and would not be tempted to use them as weapons. By this means alone can the male elements in the finest women be made recessive.

At present the idea of the “manly” man is foolishly limited to one who loves sports of all kinds, who believes in open-air life, and who, while having a sense of humour, also wears about him an air of breezy modesty. By this modesty is meant a disinclination to make any special claims for himself.

But all women quickly discover the ease with which they become mistress of the fate of such a man, and it is curious that, in spite of the thousands of cases of such subjection on the part of this type of man in English marriages, he still continues to pass as the “manly” man.

The man of will, the man of character, the man who wishes to administer his own life and the lives of those dependent upon him, because he is conscious of being fit for the responsibility, and repeatedly proves this fitness,[68] is being born in ever smaller numbers every year.

It is the system of education in England that is at fault. It produces a womanly will-less creature, with heavier muscles than the average woman, but with less grit and less bite in him, with less pride and less jealous love of responsible action and mastery than the average girl has who is his partner at golf.

If this seems like calumny or exaggeration, let the reader watch the career of any one of these alleged “manly” men of England, from his school years to his tenth or eleventh year of marriage, and if in every case they do not behold a creature who has long abandoned all self-direction, not to speak of direction of dependents, I invite him to close this book at this point as the most unspeakable nonsense.

With such a man, woman’s male elements cannot possibly be made recessive. But it should not be imagined that she is any happier on that account. On the contrary, both wisdom and compassion would seem to unite in advocating the return in ever larger numbers of exuberantly virile men, if only for the sake of securing happier and fuller lives to the bulk of modern women.

(H) Regarding, as I do, this objection as so serious as to constitute the chief and most fundamental objection to monogamic marriage, I can see no possibility of making the institution sound unless something be done to meet it. We cannot hope that things will right themselves with an evil like this at the root of our national life. Suppressing the sale of commercial products fraudulently declared to be equal to mother’s milk is not enough. Self-control is the counsel for wax-figures. To be offended by a frankly polygamic solution and yet to feel that no stigma attaches to women unable to suckle their babies,[69] and to be conscious of no indignation at the horrors of the present state of monogamy with prostitution, is wanton and brutal hypocrisy. Those who are guilty of this hypocrisy have wished to run the world too long.

I have now examined the monogamic marriage of the positive man and the positive woman in all its more important aspects. Wisdom would seem, at all costs, to advocate the salvage of monogamic marriage from the wreckage of modern society. But before marriage can be saved and handed on as a valuable institution to the New Age, it must be reformed and established on a sounder basis. To continue along our present lines, without correcting our attitude towards marriage and some of the most rigorous customs that govern it, is simply to steer our course headlong back into sexual promiscuity, anarchy and chaos. No reform of modern marriage, or of the ideas that cluster about it, can possibly achieve any good, however, which does not satisfactorily meet every one of the objections I have advanced against it. To proceed, as we are now proceeding, by making the dissolution of marriage easier, is only one step farther in the direction of barbaric promiscuity. No readjustment can avail that does not go to the root of the problems involved; and although it may certainly be legitimate to inquire whether, at this late hour in our torrential degeneration, it is worth while making any reforms in anything, it does not alter the fact that if marriage is to be saved, all the objections to it that have been raised in this chapter will require to be fairly and seriously faced.

Since, however, the sex question is so fundamental as to be almost of primary importance; since the building of the social unit, the ideal family, constitutes the first elementary task in all sound social organization, it is not impossible, fantastic though it may seem, that wise and thorough reform in this department of life may alone prove the best means of rescuing Western Civilization itself.