She may forgive this first tragic disenchantment. It is doubtful whether she ever forgets it. And if her husband, as is often the case, continues inept, clumsy and uneasy about the whole relationship, it matters not even if they have children, that disillusionment which, in any case, is bound to come, is unduly expedited, and the union gets prematurely blighted. If there are no children—then there is either open revolt or infidelity, or both.
In this way very many eminently desirable women suffer untold hardships through monogamy[59]; and though they are frequently too proud and too dignified to reveal to anyone the smallest hint of their suffering, this may be read in a hundred signs about their homes and their persons. The bitter contempt that many women display towards their husbands, their tendency to contradict, offend and insult them before strangers, and their aptitude to appeal to outsiders rather than to their husbands for advice and help, are all probably the outcome of experiences that have occurred quite early in their married life, all of which were disenchanting, unpleasant, and destructive of confidence.
For the healthy, positive young man, in this case, all that can be pleaded is that it is not entirely his fault. In England, as a rule, he is bred in an atmosphere so perfectly sex-tight, that no intelligent or enlightening word ever reaches him on the subject. On the contrary, all is clammy, frightened, guilty silence. On reaching maturity, if he be sensitive, the ordinary means of acquiring practical experience in the matter will probably strike him as too sordid, too commercial, too completely lifted out of the atmosphere of romance and adventure in which his mind has always pictured ideal sexual experiences; and the consequence is that frequently he not only practises abstinence for too long, but also develops inhibitions and fantasies which hardly conduce, when the time comes, to a happy consummation of his first love-match.
And yet the world has grown so stupid in regard to all these matters, and foolish romantic women’s voices have become so clamorous, that there is an ever-increasing body of idiots who insist on the desirability of men being virgins when they marry!
(G2) Another deep objection, from the standpoint of woman, to the monogamic marriage, arises out of what is known as “maleness” in women. According to Weininger this varies in degree with each individual, and modern authorities on psychology have more or less confirmed Weininger’s view.
For the reader unacquainted with the present knowledge on this point, perhaps it would be as well to state plainly what results have been obtained.
In the first place it has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of most people that no one male or female is wholly masculine or feminine. The stage of hermaphroditism through which all human beings are supposed to pass in their early fœtal development, is never apparently quite overcome, and the fully developed fœtus, as also the perfectly developed child, retains in its constitution vestiges of a sex to which its outward and primary sexual characteristics do not belong. These vestiges of the other sex which survive are both physical and mental, and according to their proportion in the individual body, determine the character of their host. Thus a child who is to all outward appearance a boy may yet possess elements according to which he is actually 25 or 30 or only 10 per cent female. A female child may likewise possess vestiges of the other sex which constitute her 10, 20, 30 or even 40 per cent male.
Although, therefore, all men have a preponderancy of male elements, and all women a preponderancy of female elements, each may possess a more or less heavy percentage of the elements of the other.
In extreme cases these elements of the opposite sex cause trouble by leading those who possess them to form desires and to lead lives so conspicuously out of keeping with their primary sexual characteristics as to make them obnoxious to society; but it should be remembered that this degree of morbidity is rare, and that as a general rule the modicum of maleness in the female and femaleness in the male has no such disturbing results if the other elements proper to the sex of the primary reproductive organs in each individual find their normal adaptation.
Thus the maleness in the female has a tendency to manifest itself, more especially when her sexuality is not fully developed or not actively engaged. Little girls, for instance, are notoriously sadistic—sadism being a derivative of the male reproductive instinct—as are also many spinsters and some old women.