While permanency is eminently valuable in sexual relations, can we venture to say the same as regards exclusiveness? This distinctive quality of exclusiveness is not an extension of love, but a narrowing of it down—a restraint upon personal feeling. When woman wins her freedom and is no longer under any circumstances man’s dependent and slave, but his friend and comrade in the battle of life, will she restrain the physical expression of sex-love, yet fearlessly respond to all the tender ties certain to unite her with the opposite sex? To give at present a dogmatic reply is impossible. Personally, my instincts—so far as I know them—accord with Herbert Spencer’s dictum: the ultimate form of sexual relation will be monogamic; but I recognize my own limitations. Since the women of my generation are children of bond-slaves, hampered within and without by survivals from an epoch of sex subjection wherein man’s dominancy superimposed upon woman a chastity he repudiated for himself, the standpoint from which the freed being of the future will decide her sex-morality is not in the grasp of my apprehension.
Nevertheless, the immediate path of progress is distinctly marked out. I agree with the author who holds the opinion that: “Better indeed were a Saturnalia of free men and women than the spectacle which, as it is, our great cities present at night.” (Edward Carpenter.) But set women free “from the mere cash-nexus to a husband, from the money slavery of the streets, from the nameless terrors of social opinion, and from the threats of the choice of perpetual virginity or perpetual bondage,” and we need not fear for sex-morality. “Sex in man is an organized passion, an individual need or impetus; but in woman it may more properly be termed a constructive instinct, with the larger signification that that involves.... Nor does she often experience that divorce between the sentiment of love and the physical passion which is so common with men. Sex with her is a deep and sacred instinct, carrying with it a sense of natural purity.” (Woman, Edward Carpenter, p. 9.) And from woman herself let me quote a passage occurring in a women’s journal: “Love is an emotion separate from sex-impulse, it may or may not exist in co-relation to it. The testimony easily taken from the lives of many women is to the effect that love enters not into the impulse which, active and unrestrained on the part of those to whom they are yoked for life, has created for them a life which can be called by no name save slavery.” (Shafts, October, 1895.) Again, turning to the opposite sex, Havelock Ellis states (in his study of Man and Woman, Contemporary Science Series) that: “In women men find beings who have not wandered so far as men from the typical life of earth’s creatures; women are for men the human embodiments of the restful responsiveness of Nature.”
I am convinced that however polygamous the male-sex—under a system of industrial commercialism may appear—the great mass of our women are not licentious and not polyandrous in tendency. While a Saturnalia of free men and women would, as compared with present sexual conditions, be a preferable evil, we need not in our forecast of the future dread such a Saturnalia, or face its possibility. It is a libel on humanity to assume that no self-restraints are inherent to withhold mankind from sexual excesses when freed from control by Church and State. And although it might be said that “the growing complexity of man’s nature would be likely to lead him into more rather than fewer sex relations, on the other hand it is obvious that as the depth and subtlety of any attachment that really holds him increases, so does such attachment become more permanent and durable and less likely to be realized in a number of persons.... In man and woman we find a distinct tendency towards the formation of this double unit of wedded life ... and while we do not want to stamp such natural unions with any false irrevocability or dogmatic exclusiveness, what we do want is a recognition to-day of the tendency to their formation as a natural fact independent of any artificial laws.” (Marriage, Edward Carpenter, p. 31.)
The natural restraints or checks upon undue indulgence in sex-intercourse extend from the physical or material plane to the spiritual plane. These are—considerations of health; feelings of unselfishness and social duty; and a spiritual, i.e. an ideal, conception of humanity and of all the manifold relations of life.
Unselfishness is pre-eminently the natural check and regulator of sex relations, and not until love is emancipated from selfishness will it reach an ideal form. If we love unselfishly we desire the happiness and freedom of the being loved even to the extent of self-abnegation; tyranny and jealousy become impossible. All natural checks will necessarily strengthen and grow as humanity rises higher in the scale of being; moreover, education is bound—under racial progress—to become to each succeeding generation a much more adequate guide than hitherto. Even in the present day, it would not be difficult to get youths and girls at the age of romance to understand that “though they may have to contend with some superfluity of passion in early years, the most permanent and deeply-rooted desire within them will, in all probability, lead them at last to find their complete happiness and self-fulfilment only in a close union with a life-mate”; to understand also that “towards this end they must be prepared to use self-control, to prevent the aimless straying of their passions, and patience and tenderness towards the realization of the union when its time comes.” (Edward Carpenter.) This teaching would bring to the young a far truer conception of the sacredness of marriage than our marriage laws and customs give.
It must never be forgotten, however, that this question of marriage and every other social question must be viewed in relation to kindred topics. A sectional treatment of society will surely mislead if we fail to recall the changes going forward in every department of life, and the close connexion that exists between the forces of social and individual evolution. Scientific meliorism implies a reconstruction of domestic life; and, within the new environment, the instructing of youth and its guidance in sex-conduct will become comparatively easy. Nor is it only by the training and guidance of youth that marriage will be favourably affected in a new domestic system. The tendency to tyranny within the home—an abhorrent feature of past monogamy—will have no opportunity to appear; and two undesirable female types—the idle fine lady and the household drudge—will become as extinct as the dodo.
Outside the precincts of home, large social and industrial changes will promote the disappearance of the prostitute, and finally there will emerge the truly emancipated woman, fearless and enlightened—a capable guide to man in the task of consciously subordinating passions that are selfish and transitory to those deeper attachments and higher emotions that give birth to spiritual love. “Is marriage a failure?” has been boldly asked and widely discussed in comparatively recent years; and that the audible answer—sadly re-echoed in thousands of hearts—was in the affirmative, shows a wholesome awakening to facts—an awakening that inevitably precedes all real reforms in an epoch of conscious evolution.
So permeated with selfishness is the mental atmosphere surrounding all questions of sex that the rule of life I here indicate will be utterly distasteful to those who accept the régime of custom. Yet as regards morality or an ethical code, there are two, and two only, logical attitudes of mind. Either we must think of the stamping out of all sexual feeling on the ground of its purely animal nature, and limiting physical union to the utmost that is compatible with perpetuation of species; or we must think of a gradual elevating of sexual instinct and action to a dignified position in human life with due consideration for the desires and needs of every one after puberty is reached. The first is practically impossible to the vast majority of the race at its present stage of development. They would simply refuse submission to the intolerable restraints necessitated. In effect, the ascetic answer to problems of sex is no actual solution, but a shelving of the fundamental question, with a tacit acceptance of the prodigious evils around us in respect both of sex-union and the advent of children. The only rational course is that of elevating and regulating these relations in view of human happiness. This implies a steady repression of anti-social emotions and persistent cultivation of unselfishness. Our marital habits of selfish appropriation and jealous control are in direct opposition to the moral elevation of sexual instinct. Selfishness degrades where it penetrates, and the problem is to rescue our sexual forces from selfishness, and utilize these forces, i.e. make them subserve the interests of social virtue. Hitherto, they have been ignored and neglected—a result of false thinking and ascetic teaching, while in actual life they have run riot, creating incalculable evils.
The British race publicly professes monogamy and preaches to the young a Puritan doctrine. Privately the drama enacted would disgrace a civilization of the Middle Ages. In the lower classes wife-beating and murder, in the upper classes the hideous revelations of the Divorce Court, witness to the impurity and the misery of our boasted monogamy. We tolerate licence, we condemn and conceal vicious propensities; we harbour a social evil of gigantic magnitude, we permit hypocrisy to prevail, we instigate the young to form self-interested mercantile marriages. We are corrupt in our social life and mentally debased, for we refuse to think out a rational code of sex morals, and without that we shall never attain to a lofty conception, a true ideal of what life ought to be. Our modern monogamy in its inwardness is not falsely pictured in this indictment: “The commercialism which buys and sells all human things; the narrow physical passion of jealousy; the petty sense of private property in another person; social opinions and legal enactments, have all converged to choke and suffocate wedded love in egoism, lust and meanness.” (Edward Carpenter’s Marriage, p. 38.)
In view of general happiness and virtue, we must seek the abrogation of all laws based on or involving sex-inequality. And, further, that marriage may become transformed into a sacred, sympathetic and permanent bond—a deeper and truer relation of life—we must seek facilities for divorce or the abrogation of the specific law that binds beings together for life in ill-assorted or artificial unions.