Anticonceptional Measures from the Æsthetic Point of View.—In conclusion, I will refer to a subject which is perhaps not quite in its place in this chapter. The anticonceptional measures recommended for reasons of social hygiene, which tend to regulate conceptions and improve their quality, have been often condemned, sometimes as immoral, sometimes as contrary to æsthetics. To interfere in this way with the action of nature is said to injure the poetry of love and the moral feeling, and at the same time to disturb natural selection.
There are several replies to these objections: In the first place, it is wrong to maintain that man cannot encroach on the life of nature. If this were the case, the earth would now be a virgin forest and a great many animals and plants would not have been adapted to the use of man. Our fields, our gardens and our domestic animals would die, instead of bearing fruit and multiplying as they do at present. The naturalist has much more fear of seeing rare and interesting wild plants and animals exterminated from the face of the earth by the egoistic and pitiless hand of man. He seeks in vain the means of checking this work of destruction.
We have proved without the least deference, often with a brutal hand, to the misfortune of art and poetry, that we are capable of successfully intermeddling with the machinery of nature, even in what concerns our own persons. I shall not return here to the subject of ethics. In Chapter XV, I have sufficiently shown how false is our present sexual morality, and I have proved in Chapter XIV the absolute necessity of measures to regulate conception in order to realize an efficacious social sexual morality.
The æsthetic argument appears at first sight more valid; it is unnecessary, however, to discuss matters of taste. Spectacles are certainly not particularly æsthetic; nevertheless the poetry of love does not suffer much from their use, and when one is shortsighted or longsighted one cannot do without them. Great artists wear spectacles. It is the same with false teeth, with clothes, with bicycles and a hundred other artificial things which man makes use of to make his life more easy. So long as they are novel and unusual they wound the æsthetic sentiment; but when we become accustomed to them we no longer take notice of them. Man has even come to regard as æsthetic, women's corsets which deform their chests, and pointed shoes which deform the feet. I am certain that the first man who mounted a horse was accused by his contemporaries of committing an act contrary to æsthetics!
From all points of view, the details of coitus leave much to be desired from the æsthetic point of view, and such a slight addition as a membranous protective does not appear to make any serious difference. It is impossible for me to recognize the validity of such an objection, which I attribute to the prejudice against anything which disturbs our habits.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See also Lameere "L'Évolution des ornements sexuels," 1904.
[16] "Die Anfänge der Kunst und die Theorie Darwins." Hessiche Blätter für Volkskunde, Vol. III, Part 2.