As the race has found through long experience that monogamy is to be preferred to promiscuous mating; that the highest interests of life are fostered by loyalty to the institution of the family; that the careful rearing of several children rather than the mere production of many is in the long run to be desired; and that a single standard of morality is practicable; so society has established for its members a standard which is in direct opposition to the immeasurable urge of the past. To make matters worse, there have at the same time grown up in many communities a standard of living and an economic competition which still further limit the size of the family and the satisfaction of the reproductive impulse.
The Perpetual Feud. There thus arises the strategic
struggle between that which the race has found good in the past and that which the race finds good in the present. As the older race-experience is laid in they body and built into the very fiber of the individual, inherited as an innate impulse, it has become an integral part of himself, an individual need rather than a social one. On the other hand, man has, as another innate part of his being, the desire to go with the herd, to conform to the standards of his fellows, to be what he has learned society wants him to be. Hence the struggle, insistent, ever more pressing, between two sets of desires within the man himself; the feud between the past and the present, between the natural and the social, between the selfish and the ideal. On one side, there is the demand for instinctive satisfaction; on the other, for moral control; on one side the demand for pleasure; on the other, the demands of reality. [13]
[13] ] "All the burdens of men or society are caused by the inadequacies in the association of primal animal emotions with those mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in man-kind."—Shaler quoted by Hinkle: Introduction to Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious.
Two factors intensify the conflict. In the first place, the older habits have the head start. Compared with the almost limitless extent of our past history, our desire for the control of the instincts is very new indeed. It requires the long look and the right perspective
to understand how very lately we have entered into our new conditions and how old a habit we are trying to break. In the second place, the larger part of the stimulus comes from within the body itself. When studying the other instincts, we saw that the best way to control was to refuse to stimulate when the situation was not suitable for discharge. But with the organically aroused sex-instinct there is no such power of choice. We may fan the flame by the thoughts we think or the environment we seek, or we may smother the flame until it is out of sight, but we cannot extinguish it by any act of ours. The issue has always been too important to be left to the individual. The stimulation comes, primarily, not by way of the mind but by way of the body. With this instinct we cannot "stop before we begin," because Nature has taken the matter out of our hands and begins for us.
The Bulwark We Have Built
With the competing forces so strong and the issues so great, it is not to be wondered at that society has had to build up a massive bulwark of public opinion, to establish regulations and fix penalties that are more stringent than those imposed in any other direction. Nor is it remarkable that in its effort to protect itself, society has sometimes made mistakes.
These blunders seem to lie in two directions. Assuming that it is nearly impossible for the male to control his instincts, and that, after all, it does not matter so much whether he does or not, society has blinked at license in men, and thus has fostered a demoralizing, anti-social double standard which has broken up countless homes, has been responsible for the spread of venereal diseases, and has been among the greatest curses of modern civilization. At the same time society, in its efforts to maintain its standards for woman, has taught its children, especially its girls, that anything savoring of the word "sexual" is sinful, disgusting, and impure. To be sure, very many women have modified their childish views, but an astonishingly large number conserve, even in maturity, their warped ideas about the whole subject of sex. Many a mature woman secretly believes that she, at least, is not guilty of harboring anything so "vulgar" as a reproductive instinct, not realizing that if this were so, she would be, in very truth, a freak of nature.
Of course, woman is by nature as fully endowed with sex instincts as is man. Kipling portrays the female of the species as "deadlier than the male" in that the very framework of her constitution outlines the one issue for which it was launched,—stanch against any attack which might endanger the carrying on of life. Feeling the force of this instinctive urge, she