SEX
“The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.”
In one of the popular plays of last season, a melodrama toned up with snatches of satire and farce, the wife was portrayed as a beaten dog heeling her master after he has crushed her down across the table the better to rowel off her nose. Not until the would-be mutilator was finally disposed of by an untrammelled Mexican did the woman feel free to go to her lover, and even then she took little or no satisfaction in the venture. As for the lover, he had to be robbed of his pistol by the husband and shot at, and then—the husband out of the way—threatened by the bandit with the loss of the woman, before he felt free to take her. The two New Englanders were made happy in spite of themselves—and in accordance with the traditions or conventions of the audience.
To leave a husband for a lover is in theory un-American, unless the husband gives a legal ground for divorce and the divorce is secured. In several States cruelty is a legal ground, and so the conjugal fidelity of the stage-heroine was perhaps overdrawn. But the feeling that she was presumed to share with the audience—that the initiative towards freedom in love should not come from her—is a characteristic trait of American morality. If your husband is unrestrainedly a brute or a villain, you may leave him, in fact it behooves you to leave him, but if he is merely a bore, or perhaps a man you like well enough as a friend, but only as a friend, you must stay on with him in an intimacy where boredom readily becomes aversion and mere friendliness, disgust. The fact that you do not love a person is no reason at all, in American opinion, for not living as if you did.
This opinion or attitude is explicit in American divorce law. In none of the States is divorce granted either by mutual consent or at the desire, the overt desire, of either person. In fact collusion, as mutual consent is called, is accounted a reason against granting divorce, and desire for divorce on the part of one remains ineffectual until the other has been forced into entertaining it. He or she must be given due ground. Disinclination to intimacy is not of itself due ground. You must express disinclination in a way so disagreeable that he or she will want to get rid of you. The law sets a premium on being hateful, declares indeed that in this case it is an indispensable condition to not being miserable.
The grotesqueness, from either a social or psychological point of view, would be too obvious to emphasize, if the implications of this attitude towards divorce were not so significant of American attitudes at large towards sex—attitudes of repression or deception. Of deception or camouflage towards divorce there is one other conspicuous point I should like to note. “Strictness of divorce” is commonly argued to be protection of marriage for the sake of children, since brittle marriage is destructive of the family life. It is safe to say that from no contemporary discussion of divorce will this argument be omitted; and it is equally safe to say that the rejoinder that divorce laws should therefore discriminate between parents and non-parents will, by the opponents of divorce, pass unheeded. That this distinction should be so persistently ignored is accountable only, it seems to me, on the ground of emotional self-deception. What else but a covert emotional attitude could make tenable the irrationality, and what else is that attitude but that joy in mating is of negligible value, that sex emotion, if not a necessary evil, is at any rate a negligible good, deserving merely of what surplus of attention may be available from the real business of life? Indifference towards sex emotion is masked by concern for offspring.
In France, we may note, this confusion between parenthood and mating does not exist. The parental relation in both law and custom is highly regulated, much more regulated than among English-speaking peoples, but it is unlikely that it would be argued in France that mating and parenthood were inseparable concepts. Unlikely, because the French attitude towards sex differs so radically from the Anglo-Saxon.
To the French, as to many of the Continental peoples of Europe, sexual interest is normally to be kept stimulated, neither covered over nor suppressed. And in this case stimulation is seen to depend largely upon the factor of interrelation. Sex-facts are to be related to other facts of life, not rigidly or a priori, as in the American view that mating is inseparable from parenthood, but fluently and realistically, as life itself moves and finds expression. And sex-facts in European opinion are to be interrelated in a philosophy of sex. Failure to make these interrelations, together with the attitude of suppression, seem to me to be the outstanding aspects of the characteristically American attitude towards sex.
There is no need in this post-Freudian day of dwelling upon the effects of suppression of sex instinct or impulse. Suppression leads, we are told, either to sublimation, in which case it is diversion, rather than suppression, or it leads to perversion or disease. Unfortunately sex-pathology in the United States has been given little or no study, statistically. We have no statistical data of health or disease in relation to the expression or suppression of sex instinct, and no data on the extent or the effects of homosexuality or of the direction of the sex impulses towards self. Opinion therefore becomes merely a matter of personal observation and conclusion, observation of individuals or small groups. My own conclusion or guess in regard to perversion in this country is that part of the commonly observed spirit of isolation or antagonism between the sexes, and part of the spirit of competition between individuals, are associated with homosexual or masturbatory tendencies which get expressed in varying degrees according to varying circumstances. More particularly the lack of warmth in personal intercourse which makes alike for American bad manners and, in the more intellectual circles, for cheerlessness and aridity is due, I think, to failure of one kind or another in sex relations. I mean cultural failure, not merely individual failure.
May not some such theory of sex failure account also for that herd sense which is so familiar a part of Americanism, and which is not incompatible with the type of self-seeking or pseudo-individualism of which American individualism appears to be an expression? It is a tenable hypothesis that sexually isolated individuals become dependent upon the group for stimulus, whether of emotion or will, whereas persons in normal sex relations, although they may contribute to the group or co-operate with it, remain comparatively independent of it, finding stimulus in sex and its sublimations.
If this theory is valid, we may expect to find a comparatively large number of sex failures in those circles which are characterized by what Everett Dean Martin has recently called crowd behaviour, reform circles intolerant of other mindedness and obsessed by belief in the paramountcy of their own dogma.
“Leur printemps sans jeunesse exige des folies,
Leur sang brûlant leur dicte des propos amers,
L’émeute est un remède à la mélancolie,
Et nous aurions la paix si leurs yeux étaient clairs,
Ou leur femme jolie.”
Were a set of tests for sex failure or sex fulfilment applied to the more outstanding propagandists of this country, likewise, of course, for comparative purposes, to an adequate number of non-propagandists, the results might be of considerable significance. I recommend the undertaking to the National Research Council in co-operation with some organization for social hygiene.
Meanwhile in what measure propagandism of various sorts may be a perversion of sex or a sublimation remains speculative; and in applying theory one should be thoroughly aware that from the day of Sappho and before to the day of Elizabeth Blackwell and after, even to the Russian Revolution, sex failure of one kind or another, the kind considered at the time most despicable, has commonly been imputed to persons or groups disapproved of on other grounds or reprobated. Some sublimation of sex in the United States there must be, of course, not only, in propaganda movements, but in other expressions of American culture, in American art and letters and science, in philanthropy, in politics, finance, and business. By and large, however, in all these cultural expressions does one see any conspicuous measure of sex sublimation? Is not the concern practical rather than devotional, a matter of getting rather than giving, of self-advancement or family support rather than of interest in ideas and their forms or in the values of taste or of faith?
Interest in impersonal subjects in general is not an American trait. Personal concrete terms are the terms commonly used. Americans, as we say, are not given to abstract thought or philosophy. They are interested in facts as facts, not as related to other facts. How expect of Americans, therefore, that kind of curiosity about sex which leads to a philosophy of sex? Sex curiosity in American life does not lead past curiosity about isolated facts, and that means that it leads not to philosophy but to gossip and pruriency. Not long ago I was talking with a woman about a common acquaintance to whom I referred as singularly free through sophistication and circumstance to please any man she liked. “What do you mean? Have you heard any scandal about her?” snapped out my companion, not at all interested in the general reflection, but avid of information about illicit affairs.
Facts which are not held together through theory call for labels. People who do not think in terms of relations are likely to be insistent upon names. Labels or names for sex disposition or acts are, as a matter of fact, very definite in the American vernacular. “Engaged,” “attentive,” “devoted,” “a married man,” “a man of family,” “a grass widow,” “a good woman,” “a bad woman”—there is no end to such tags. Again, intimacy between a man and a woman is referred definitely to the act of consummation, a sex relation is strictly classified according to whether or not it is physically consummated. In this attitude towards sex boundaries or captions may lie the explanation, incidentally, of what is a constant puzzle to the European visitor—the freedom of social intercourse allowed to the youth of opposite sexes. Since consummation only constitutes sexual intimacy in American opinion, and since consummation, it is assumed, is utterly out of the question, why raise barriers between boys and girls? The assumption that consummation is out of the question is, by and large, correct, which is still another puzzle. To this some clue may be found, I think, in our concluding discussion.
Fondness for captions and for the sort of classification that is so likely to paralyze perception of the finer distinctions and to arrest thought, are natural enough in a child, learning language and so pressed upon by the multiplicity of phenomena that in self-protection he must make rough classifications and remain unaware of much. The old who are dying to life are also exclusive, and they, too, cling to formulas. Is American culture in the matter of sex childish and immature, as Americans imply when they refer to their “young country,” or is the culture representative of the aged; are Americans born old, as now and again a European critic asserts?
Such terms of age are figurative, of course, unless we take them in a historical sense, meaning either that a new culture was developed in this country—or rather that there were fresh developments of an old culture—or that an old culture was introduced and maintained without significant change. This is not the place to discuss the cultural aspects of Colonial America, but it is important to bear in mind in any discussion of merely contemporaneous sex attitudes in this country the contributions of European, and more particularly, English morality. Without recalling the traditions of early Christianity or of English Puritanism, those attitudes of ignoring or suppressing the satisfactions of the impulses of sex to which we have referred were indeed incomprehensible and bewildering—mere psychological interpretation seems inadequate. But viewed as consequences of the sense of sin in connection with sex, which was a legacy from Paul and his successors in English Puritanism, interpretation is less difficult, and the American attitude toward sex becomes comparatively intelligible—the attitude seen in divorce and in the melodramas, and in the standardizing of sex relations, in accordance with that most significant of Pauline dogmas that marriage is the lesser of two evils, that it is better to marry than to burn. Without the key of Paul and of the obscenities of the early Christian Fathers how explain the recent legislation in Virginia making it a crime to pay attention to a married man or woman, or such a sermon as was recently preached somewhere in the Middle West urging a crusade against the practice of taking another man’s wife in to dinner or dancing round dances? “At a dinner of friends let every man take his own wife on his arm and walk in to their seats side by side at the dinner table to the inspiring music of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” urged the minister. As to dancing, whenever a man is seen to put his arm around a woman who is not his wife, the band should cease playing. I do not quote the words of the latter injunction, as they are rather too indecent.
Turning from the historical back to the psychological point of view—in one of those circles of cause and effect that are composed now of cultural inheritance or tradition, now of psychological trend or disposition—the American case of sex, whether a case of adolescence or of senescence, may be said to present symptoms of arrested development. Together with the non-realism of childish or senile formula, there is here the kind of emotionalism which checks emotional vitality and which is fed upon the sense of crisis; we may call it crisis-emotion. Life at large, the sex life in particular, is presented as a series of crises preceded and followed by a static condition, and in these conventional times of crisis only, the times when the labels are being attached, are the emotions aroused. In the intervals, in the stretches between betrothal, marriage, birth, christening, or divorce, there is little or no sense of change—none of the emotions that correspond to changing relations and are expressions of personal adjustment. The emotions of crisis are statutory, pre-determined, conventionalized; neither for oneself nor for others do they make any demands upon imagination, or insight, or spiritual concern.
Here in this psychology of crisis is the clue—before mentioned—to an understanding of the freedom allowed our youth, of “bundling,” as the Colonials termed it, or, in current phrase, “petting.” In general, “keeping company” is accounted one kind of a relationship, marriage, another—one characterized by courtship without consummation, the other by consummation without courtship. Between the two kinds of relationship there is no transition, it is assumed, except by convention or ritual. So inrooted is this social attitude that the young cannot escape adopting it, at least the very young to whom, at any rate, uncritical conservatism seems to be natural. Indeed the taboo on unritualized consummation partakes enough of the absolutism of the taboo, shall we say, on incest, to preclude any risk of individual youthful experimentation or venture across the boundary lines set by the Elders.
Given these boundary lines, given a psychology of crisis, all too readily the sex relations, in marriage or out, become stale, flat, colourless, or of the nature of debauch, which is only another aspect of crisis-psychology. Sex relations perforce become limited to two conventions, marriage and prostitution. Prostitute or wife, the conjugal or the disorderly house, these are the alternatives. In formulaic crisis-psychology there may be no other station of emotional experiment or range of emotional expression.
That a man should “sow his wild oats” before marriage, and after marriage “settle down,” is becoming throughout the country a somewhat archaic formula, at least in so far as wild oats means exposure to venereal disease; but there has been no change, so far as I am aware, in the attitude towards the second part of the formula on settling down—in conjugal segregation. The married are as obtrusively married as ever, and their attitude towards persons of the opposite sex as dull and forbidding. Few “happily married” women but refer incessantly in their conversation to their husband’s opinion or stand; and what devoted husband will fail to mention his wife in one way or another as a notice of his immunity against the appeal of sex in any degree by any other woman? Shortly after the war, a certain American woman of my acquaintance who was travelling in France found herself without money and in danger of being put off her train before reaching Paris and her banker’s. She found a fellow-countryman and told him her predicament. He was quite willing to pay her fare; she was an American and a woman, but she was informed firmly and repeatedly that her knight was a married man, and besides, he was travelling with his business partner. Soon after I heard this anecdote I happened to repeat it to a Chicago lawyer who promptly joined in the laugh over the American man’s timidity. “Still, a married man travelling can’t be too prudent,” he finished off.
Circumspection towards women, in travel or elsewhere, or, better still, indifference towards women, is the standardized attitude of American husbands. In marriage, too, a relationship of status rather than of attention to the fluctuations of personality, indifference to psychical experience, is a not uncommon marital trait. American men in general, as Europeans have noted, are peculiarly indifferent to the psychology of women. They are also peculiarly sentimental about women, a trait quite consistent with indifference or ignorance, but one which, in view of American prostitution and the persistent exclusion of many women from equal opportunities for education and for life, gives an ugly look of hypocrisy to the trumpeters of American chivalry.
And yet subject the American concept of chivalry to a little scrutiny and the taunt, at least of hypocrisy, will miss the mark. For the concept is, both actually and historically, a part of the already noted classification of women as more or less sequestered, on the one hand, and unsequestered or loose on the other, as inexperienced and over-experienced or, more accurately, partially over-experienced. In this classification the claims of both classes of women are settled by men on an economic basis, with a few sentimentalities about womanhood, pure or impure, thrown in for good measure. The personality of the woman a man feels that he is supporting, whether as wife or prostitute, may, theoretically, be disregarded and, along with her personality, her capacity for sexual response. Whether as a creature of sin or as an object of chivalry, a woman becomes a depersonalized, and, sexually, an unresponsive being.
People sometimes forget this when they discuss the relations between men and women in this country, and especially the sexlessness or coldness of American women. They forget it in arguing against the feminizing of education, the theatre, literature, etc., meaning, not that women run the schools or are market for the arts, but that immature, sexless women are in these ways too much to the fore. In part at least it is thanks to chivalry or to her “good and considerate husband” that the American woman, the non-wage earner at least, does not grow up, and that it is possible for so many women to marry without having any but the social consequences of marriage in mind. One surmises that there are numbers, very large numbers, of American women, married as well as unmarried, who have felt either no stirring of sex at all or at most only the generalized sex stir of pre-adolescence. What proportion of women marry “for a home” or to escape from a home, or a job, and what proportion marry for love? After marriage, with the advent of children, what of these proportions?
Marriage for a home or for the sake of children, chivalry, “consideration” for the wife, all these attitudes are matters of status, not of personality, and to personality, not to status, love must look, since love is an art, not a formula. It often seems that in American culture, whether in marriage or out, little or no place is open to this patient, ardent, and discerning art, and that lovers are invariably put to flight. Even if they make good their escape, their adventure is without social significance, since it is perforce surreptitious. Only when adventurers and artists in love are tolerated enough to be able to come out from under cover, and to be at least allowed to live, if only as variants from the commonplace, may they contribute of their spirit or art to the general culture.
Elsie Clews Parsons