Sex--The Unknown Quantity: The Spiritual Function of Sex

by Alexander J. McIvor-Tyndall

It is claimed that the bald-headed eagle never varies from monogamy. A mate once chosen, the union lasts until the death of either partner. It does not follow from this, however, that the bald-headed eagle is a creature of a superior moral conscience. It may be that he is guided in his selection of a conjugal mate by an intuitional power undeveloped by other types of life, or, which is far more probable, it may be that his sexual nature is easily satisfied and that he has no temperamental affinities or repulsions, in which event force of habit would be the strongest actuating power. This explanation is in keeping with the eagle character.

The point is that marriage, or what constitutes marriage, exists among birds and animals, and that it antedates history as a social institution among men. Another fact which we must concede, if we are just, is that marriage apparently knows no systematic and upward trend. There is, in fact, no determined evolution toward a definite and conclusive practice of monogamy, although the monogamic custom is recognized as the evolutionary type among the civilized races of today. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imply that a strict monogamy obtains in the letter of the word, or that social exigencies might not reinstate polygamy as a legalized custom.

Passing over those forms of mating, which may be classed as sex-promiscuity, such, for example, as exist among the Esquimaux, and also among the Dyaks, of Borneo, where a "contract" is made for a night by the simple expediency of the man and the woman exchanging head-gear, we come to one of the earliest and most general forms of marriage among primitive peoples, where the parents arranged a marriage between their children for reasons of personal profit. In these instances, neither the youth nor the girl was consulted and generally did not meet until they met to consummate the marriage. In fact, they seemed not to have any preferences. These marriages were easily broken, unless children resulted therefrom, when there seems to have developed a sense of obligation to the offspring to continue the family.

Marriage by capture grew out of the matriarchal system and came as the very natural revolt of the male from the female rule, in which he had no rights and no home with his spouse. Since the gens of the family was the first consideration and this was maintained by the female heads of a clan, there was nothing left for the male to do, if he would be a factor in the community, but to steal his wife from her family, and establish a family life of his own. Thus the female became the possession of the male, by his right of capture and defense.

Inspired by the thirst for further invasions, the male gradually acquired not only one, but many wives, which constituted his "possessions," from the fact that he had earned them by right of conquest, conquest being not only the savage but also the civilized idea of "earning."

Indeed, our modern marriages reveal a degree of savagery in this respect, which is not suspected by the casual observer. The almost general observance of what has come to be known in legal jurisprudence as "the unwritten law," which permits a man to go unpunished when he kills another man whom he believes to have been on terms of intimacy with his wife, is a tacit admission of a man's vested rights in his wife's person.

In innumerable instances, which have been given world-wide publicity within very recent times, the man who has been guilty of homicide under these circumstances has been exalted to the plane of a martyr-hero, and one woman writer, whose hysterical effusions are given considerable space in the public print, defended a man who had taken advantage of this "unwritten law" to shoot his rival, in the following words: "You, Mister, would shoot a man whom you found prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these pestilential marauders?"

Of course we question the right of human beings to kill each other in defense of mere property; but that is not the point here. The inference here is obvious that this woman, who represents at least the average degree of intelligence, placed her sex in the category of man's possessions, utterly ignoring the woman's right, or power of free-will.

Mention is here made of this incident to show how deeply rooted is the possessive idea of marriage, which had its origin in nothing more ideal than the animal instinct of the dog with the bone.

Nor would we give the impression that this one-sided idea of what constitutes a monogamous marriage is confined to the male. The same idea of possession as of a piece of property, representing so much investment of time and money, and service of one kind or another, actuates the female also although the rights of the woman in the male are not so generally defended and she seldom resorts to such violent methods of defense or of revenge for loss of her property. Perhaps she has a keener sense of values. Necessity has substituted "support" for "outraged honor," and modern woman avenges the loss of her possessions through the safer channels of the law-courts.