Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

It is, however, idle to count on a course of thought and action being taken by the rough majority among us which so much of our civilisation and daily environment makes difficult and indeed impossible. A race of young men and women surrounded with shameful concealments and bred to a blind acceptance of wrong sexual conditions, accustomed to an atmosphere of sniggering and suggestiveness in connection with the central facts of love and life—such a race cannot have, much less practise, an ideal of true chastity.

These wrong and vulgar conditions without doubt have acted more strongly against men than against women. And I would note in passing, that here, as I believe, we find one explanation of the greater continence among unmarried women than among unmarried men. It is not because satisfaction for the sex-needs is more necessary for the health and well-being of men than it is for the health and well-being of women—a statement I do not believe; nor is it proved that this absence of conscious sex-desires necessarily implies the absence of unconscious sex-action; all that can be claimed is that the sexual impulses have been diverted into different expressions, and the explanation of such diversion is to be sought in the boy’s and young man’s education and life, which forces sex so much more strongly into the conscious thought and attention.

We are dealing with a question very difficult to solve. On this assumption that the sex-needs of the man are more imperative than the sex-needs of the woman, much that is false has been accepted as true; there are many who have advocated a “duplex sexual morality,” and while demanding from the woman complete sexual abstinence until she marries, regard this as impossible in the case of men. Such a separation as this between the sex-needs of man and the sex-needs of woman is, in my opinion, a very grave error. Celibacy is unnatural and harmful in man, it is at least equally unnatural and harmful in woman.

Now, it is on this question of the sex-needs of women that I find myself, as I have suggested already, in such direct opposition to the great majority of women, numbers of whom do not, will not, admit to a consciousness of any kind of sexual need. I believe they are quite honest, but I know they are mistaken.

The doctrine of chastity being the natural and special virtue of women is entirely false. Complete abstinence from love cannot be borne by women through a long period of years without producing serious results on the body and the mind. And these results are by no means clearly dependent on a conscious knowledge of unsatisfied sex. The evil may be pronounced even when the woman herself has not the slightest knowledge of her real needs. In many women the penalty is paid in an unceasing and wearying restlessness of mind and body. We have also to face the fact that prolonged and enforced abstinence may act to cultivate a morbid obsession with sexual things. I believe that the celibate often is less chaste than the normally sexual individual. This may seem to be a wanton charge to some, but I am not speaking without due consideration.

I know well that some among my readers, and in particular women, will say that I am wrong, many will accuse me of exaggerating and complain that I see sex in everything; the few only will know that I am right. I would, however, refer all those who doubt to the researches of Freud and his followers, which have proved in the most conclusive way that the manifestations of sex may be concealed in numberless guises. Without some understanding of the “Unconscious” it is useless to attempt to deal with these questions. We need to realise that the fact of an individual, or group of individuals, being unconscious of the presence of sex does not prove that sex is not acting strongly and often harmfully within them. Nay, we may go further and say that could it be proved that desire was absent and no sex difficulties of any kind be discovered, this is no reason why we should necessarily be too satisfied. If no kind of action is apparent, it is very probable that some deep evil is at work, which hinders sex from a more healthy and open expression.

I am haunted by the fear that the careless reader will think I am writing against chastity. This is not so. I would affirm again, with all the power that I have, that compulsory sexual abstinence may not be confused with voluntary chastity. We must be very clear in our thought about this. We can never establish an ideal of true chastity until we have rooted out from our social life all the unnatural and empty forms of chastity. The long waiting for marriage which economic and other causes have forced upon us, more and more increases the difficulties of maintaining any true chastity. It is a great evil which almost always wastes the energies of life.

There are very many women (as also these are men) who are moral, because they are too great cowards to be immoral. The reasons for chastity must in many cases be sought in the poverty of experience and the difficulty of obtaining love, in the hard binding of circumstances, and, even more often, in the terror of being found out. Respectability is the strong moral safeguard of woman. The conception of faithfulness to one mate (the true chastity) is as strong in many men as it is in any woman, a fact to which I gladly bear witness, from my knowledge of the men I have known. It is too commonly taken for granted that sex-passion is less refined in men and different from sex-passion in women. I am sure in many cases it is not true. I am not going to discuss the question further, as it is one that cannot easily be proved.

It is, however, very necessary to break down the idea that for the impulses of sex, with their immense complications and differences, there is one general rule either for men or for women. In every case the element of personal idiosyncrasy must be taken into account, and, for this reason, the difficulties of these questions are enormously complex. Nor is it possible, I am sure, to make any arbitrary judgments. To me the man or woman who is able to live a celibate life is not necessarily better than the man or woman who is not. I may prefer one type, I may dislike the other, but this also is a matter of my personal idiosyncrasy. We cannot safely class those who differ from ourselves as wrong, and set them down as fit only for suppression and restraint. We have to put aside those shrieks of blame that are possible only to the ignorant.

It is all very well to preach the ideal of complete sexual abstinence until marriage, but there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for all but the really rich, who can marry when they want to do so without other consideration, and the very poor who marry young because they have nothing at all to consider. We have to face the presence amongst us to-day of an amount of suffering through enforced celibacy which is acting in many directions in degrading our sexual lives. Any number of these sufferers, both the unmarried and the married who are ill-mated, are everywhere amongst us. I need not say more to prove this: the facts face us all, unless, indeed, we are too ignorant and too prejudiced to know what is happening.