§ 130
On this principle he does always the next best thing to what he thinks is expected of him provided he cannot or fancies he cannot do exactly what people look to him to do.
This praise and blame, coming from other people and this looking to him, to do this or that, are both examples of the control society is exerting on him from childhood up. The clothes he wears, the books he reads, the plays he sees, everything he does is at least partly dictated to him by the people with whom and among whom he lives. If he knows people expect him to wear a linen collar and silk tie he puts them on if he has them. If he has only a collar he puts that on. If he has no linen collar he possibly puts on a paper or celluloid one.
At any rate he gives them the next best thing in any and every line coming up as far as possible to their demands.
In sexual instincts there is only one conventional demand; namely, that, except in marriage, he repress them entirely. The next best thing, the celluloid collar, in this case, is any and everything society calls non-sexual. He may waste his time playing cards and his money on the races or the stock market, and if he succeeds in getting excitement enough out of them to prevent his thoughts turning to sex topics he will have the comparative approval of society. If he leaves women alone entirely he will be called a clean man. Anything short of actual criminality serves as the next best thing to sex in the eyes of conventional society.
Society to date makes only this negative demand on him. It as much as admits that it has nothing to do with sex and still less with love. That simply means that society is so blind it has not yet seen that it can get anything out of sex, or of love either. Society has no eyes, no arms, no lips. Why should society be interested in the employment of these parts of men in amatory ways? They need not expect it to. They have no need to look to it for such things.
Society on the other hand wants the individual’s time and energy devoted entirely to professional, commercial and artistic ends, and grudges him every moment he spends in doing and thinking along lines of pleasure and advantage to himself. Society plans the rôle of the gods in the old Platonic fable before mentioned ([§ 46]) but has taken the half-humans and halved them again.
Society, unlike the fabled gods, however, wishes each of these to devote full time to making, manufacturing, buying, selling, even fighting, which always makes more work, but never to loving, which it considers a mere waste of time. Children it wants, but they can be begotten without love; and the less love the greater numbers.
Society therefore completely ignores the individual. It tells him to make chairs and tables but never to make love.