And first, I would ask the reader to remember those many sex-conventions that in the past have gathered around women's lives. I need not enumerate them, they are known to you all, but what I want to emphasize is that, though so many of them have been removed their influence persists. Always the customs and beliefs of a past social life live on beneath the surface of society; in a thousand ways we do not recognize, they press upon the individual soul. We cannot without strong effort escape from the chains of our inheritance. In the nations of the West, where the bridegroom's joy with his bride is never spoken of except as a subject fit for jests, where celibacy has been extolled and marriage treated as "a remedy for sin," where barrenness instead of being regarded as the greatest possible evil is artificially produced, where the natural joys of the body—the sex-joys and the joy of wine and food have been confused with disgraceful things—it is there that a perpetual conflict lurks at the very heart of life; hidden it becomes more active for evil.
Always times of upheaval and change afford opportunities for escape in violent expression, and while we bewail the disorder and confusion, the many sexual crimes that are overwhelming us, we ought to take warning at our folly in having set up for ourselves the new fashionable god of "escape from sex."
Women are the worst sinners. At every opportunity the women of my generation have been insisting on "the monstrous exaggerations of the claims of sex," breaking away violently from the older obsessing preoccupation with their position as women, but only to take up new evasions—fresh miserable attempts at escape. What began as a war of ideals became before long a chaos. It has had the effect not at all of minimizing the power of sex, but just as far as the deeper needs and instincts have been denied, has there been a deliberate turning on the part of the young to the reliefs of sex-excitements. The servitude of sex is one of the essential riddles of life. Personally I do not feel there is any simple solution. The conflict, broadly speaking, lies in this: our sex needs have changed very little through the ages, now we are faced with the task of adapting them to the society in which we find ourselves placed, of conforming with the rules laid down, accepting all the pressing claims of civilized life, conditions, not clearly thought out and established to help us and make moral conduct easier, but dependent much more on property, social rank, and ignorance,—all combining to make any kind of healthy sex expression more difficult, which explains our duplicity and so often prevents the acceptance in practice of the code of conduct upheld by most of us as right. I think it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs. It is not pleasant to find oneself out as a moral hypocrite.
The primitive savage within us all always will make any kind of excuse to break out in its own primitive savage way. We are just too civilized to face this, and, I think, there can be little doubt that our conduct has been hindered by many of the modern intellectual suppressions. The convention that passions and emotions are absent, when in reality they are present, to-day has broken down as, indeed, it always must break down everywhere, leading in thousands of cases individual young women and men to disaster, making us all more furtive, more pitiful slaves of the force whose power we are not yet sufficiently brave to acknowledge.
Much of our civilization has revealed itself as a monstrous sham, more dangerously indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely wild growth,—glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet poisonous so that to sleep there was death.
II
We have yet to find our way in sexual things. The revealing knowledge that Freud and his followers have given to the world shows us something of our groping darkness; there is much we have to relearn, to accept many things in ourselves and others that we have denied. We must give up our cherished pretense of the sexual life being easy and innocent, we must open doors into the secret defenses we have set around ourselves. None of us know much, but at least we must begin to tell the truth about the little we do know.
Now, this self-honesty may sound a simple thing. It is not. Few of us even know how hard it will be. It will call for the greatest possible courage to tear away the new, as well as the old, bandages with which we have blinkered our eyes, walking in shadow so complete that some of us have lost the very power of sight, like the strange fishes that live in the gloom of the Kentucky caves. Honesty will demand a real conversion, a change in our attitude to ourselves and to one another. We shall have, indeed, to reassure ourselves of the sincerity of our intentions, to begin as the first necessary step to accept ourselves as we are and to give up what we desire to pretend we are, to learn to be truthful to ourselves about ourselves.
Better to know ourselves as sinners, than to be virtuous in falsehood. We must grow up emotionally; want things to seem what they are, not what we want them to be. Afterwards we can perhaps go on to help others.
III