By immorality I do not mean that limited, foolishly narrow-minded notion of the Puritans, which confines itself to the condemnation of all sexual pleasure. The Puritans themselves were immoral in my sense; because, they were hostile to life. St. Paul himself was immoral, in my sense; because, being a celibate, and as good as a monk himself, he said to the Corinthians: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,...[24] For I would that all men were even as I myself[25].... I say, therefore, to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I.”[26] St. Paul was indeed very immoral in my sense; because when he cast about him for a reason to justify the holy and sacred union of matrimony, the only one he could find was that it alleviated a man’s lust.[27] I mean by immorality, as I have already explained, all those crimes of omission and commission that are hostile to the best kind of life. Social life cannot continue unless it is well ordered. Disordered social life is in danger of annihilation: therefore all those crimes that lead to social disorder as the result of man’s declining social instinct are, in my sense, immoral.
In Chapter III I showed how predominant the reproductive instinct must of necessity be in Woman; but I also showed that, owing to her mind’s constant misinterpretation of bodily messages, it does not follow that Woman will always be thinking of sex, man and the child, simply because her body thinks and works round nothing else.
The Positive Woman—the young fully formed girl—is all sex; her body aspires and yearns for nothing more ardently than the fulfilment of her destiny; this cannot help being so, and yet what from all appearances could be more remote, more different from thoughts of sexual relations and reproduction than the mental preoccupations of the healthy decent young girl? She could not tell you why she is fond of men’s society. She knows only that she is fond of it. She could not explain why she hopes to marry ultimately; she knows her father and mother were married and that most adults seem to marry, but she has not the faintest conception of all that this implies. She notices that she has a marked taste in men—that some men are like wooden images to her, and that others thrill her through and through; but she is not aware of the reasons of all this. While, however, the very mystery of these thrills, the very impenetrability of her likes and dislikes in regard to men, make her abandon any hope of knowing the why and the wherefore of these experiences, she is not unfavourably disposed towards them. On the contrary they interest her and attract her as if magnetically; while men are the object of her most solemn and most undivided attention. Occasionally she has a terrible, unutterable dream, the very recollection of which shocks her for days afterwards; but these adventures she has in slumber throw no fresh light on her problem for her; for has she not had the most impossible dreams all her life? Who is to say that these she is having now are any more reliable than those she had three, four, five or six years ago,—although the subject of them is so entirely different? Still, it is all very strange, very strange; and she regards men with perhaps a trifle more penetration on the morrow, and the day after.
The very positive girl may be timid, in fact is, as a rule, very timid in the presence of men, and very self-conscious too. Her body is aware that in this environment it can find its consummation, it would like to find its consummation, and it is therefore all tense and braced with excitement—an excitement that the girl herself does not quite understand, except that it makes her extremely uncomfortable. And it is the difficulty she feels in overcoming her body’s concern that constitutes the strain. This difficulty may easily be understood, however, if we remember that ever since she first became fully formed, her body has silently, but regularly been preparing for the consummation of its destiny. Unbeknown to the girl’s consciousness, though of course she has been aware of the phenomenon, every month Life has prepared her—her body has dressed itself, so to speak, for the act that will lead to the consummation of her destiny,—no wonder that after all these months and years of silent waiting and waiting, and elaborate and minute preparations for the guest, that there should be some bustle, some joyful apprehension, when a potential guest is at hand, or actually waiting. But the mind knows nothing of all this. What in fact is going on in the girl’s mind?
All this bodily agitation gets telephoned through correctly enough to the brain; but it is transmitted to consciousness in a form so utterly garbled and inaccurate, that it becomes unintelligible. Consciously, the girl only feels uncomfortable, and sometimes so painfully so that she has to take flight altogether, and retire somewhere alone to recover her self-possession. Charlotte and Emily Brontë had to avert their eyes when they passed an attractive man in the street.
You may be quite certain that when a fully formed and decent girl looks boldly and unmoved (as hundreds do nowadays) into the eyes of men—even of the most attractive men—her degree of positiveness is very low indeed, and her body feels very little at all in the presence of the male sex.
The whole of the above, of course, applies only to the virgin.
There is no true positiveness to the social instinct in the positive girl. The social instinct’s next finest products,[28] which are the fine arts, are to her but means to an end—unconscious means to an end, just as everything else is: the end being the full exercise of her reproductive instinct. If a girl show a strong desire to play the violin, to paint or to write, you may feel quite sure these next finest manifestations of man’s social instinct are attracting her only temporarily, as extra plumage with which to eclipse her sisters and friends. And the really positive girl will throw all these accessories to her bodily charms overboard the moment they have served her purpose. No admirably positive woman would ever continue the pastimes of painting, or music, once they had achieved her object for her.
As I suggested in Chapter III, for the social instinct to speak with even an ever so feeble voice in Woman, it means that some part of her reproductive instinct has had to stand aside—ergo, that her reproductive instinct is not as strong as it might be, and consequently that some flaw may be suspected either in her ancestry, or in the tone or correlation of her bodily parts. If, then, she applies herself to the fine arts—which are only the next highest bloom of the human social instinct working for order in expression—she can do so only under two conditions—(1) At the bidding of her reproductive instinct which makes her unconsciously adopt one of the arts temporarily as an extra feather with which to make her a more conspicuous female against the background formed by her sisters and friends; or (2) at the bidding of a genuine impulse to art, arising from a real whisper coming direct from her social instinct—in which case her reproductive instinct may be considered as imperfect, suspect, lacking in vigour. All positiveness to the social instinct in Woman, therefore, denotes a decline of Woman as Woman, a depression in the manifold and exalted virtues, the beauty, the charm, and the power of Woman as the breeder, the mother, and the custodian of Life.
Enough has now been said on this subject to leave the reader in no doubt as to how I distinguish between the Positive Man and the Positive Woman.