The ghastly truth is—this is the truth that has filled the world with tears—that the average full-blooded male citizen is polygamous in his instinct and to some extent in his practice.
Every reasonably attractive woman who has been called upon to face the facts of life knows that men are impelled towards women by a force of desire that they call over-powering. It is not over-powering, as thousands of clean-minded men have proved, it is no more over-powering than the desire to gamble or the desire to take drugs; it can be conquered as these other desires have been conquered; but centuries of wayward living under relaxed standards (the double standard) have made men believe that it is over-powering and they act accordingly. And women yield on one pretense or another, smilingly or tearfully—how can they resist the dominant will of half the human race?
I find this in my diary heavily underscored:
“How can the same act be a sin for half the race and not a sin for the other half? For centuries men have proclaimed that women must not give themselves to men, but men may give themselves to women. Is there any greater absurdity? Wine may mix with water, but water must not mix with wine.”
If these sex-complaisant women were really filled with remorse, burdened with a sense of shame, we should all know it. Their eyes, their voices, their daily lives would reveal it. Could a million women be in physical pain, say from starvation, without all the world knowing it? Is pain of the soul less torturing than pain of the body? The fact is that these women are not in spiritual pain. They regard what they have done (often regretfully) as a result of impossible conditions in the world today, a world controlled by men.
I can speak about these things with a certain authority, since, for years, I sympathized with the self-indulgent point of view, in fact I lived in an artistic and Bohemian milieu where many of my friends followed the line of least resistance. I may even confess that I might have gone with the current, had I not seen the harm and unhappiness that resulted. It does not pay to be self-indulgent.
“LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION”
The suspicion that many women are disingenuous in regard to these irregularities of conduct was forced upon me some years ago in a conversation with Kendall Brown, who, for all his eccentricities, is a keen observer of life.
I give the conversation at some length just as I wrote it down in my diary:
“Kendall insists that women like me—he calls me a Class A woman which makes me furious for I'm afraid I am one—are never really on the level in sentimental affairs. If we were on the level, he says, we would not make such a fuss about the grand conspiracy of men against our virtue. There would be no point to it, for our virtue would never be in any danger unless we half-wished it to be. He says that the three great sins mentioned in the Bible and in all religions are killing, stealing and sex offences. Now, the attitude of the human race toward these sins, as established by centuries of habit, makes it almost impossible for the average citizen, man or woman, to either kill or steal. 'Isn't that true?' he asked.