In France, we may note, this confusion between parenthood and mating does not exist. The parental relation in both law and custom is highly regulated, much more regulated than among English-speaking peoples, but it is unlikely that it would be argued in France that mating and parenthood were inseparable concepts. Unlikely, because the French attitude towards sex differs so radically from the Anglo-Saxon.
To the French, as to many of the Continental peoples of Europe, sexual interest is normally to be kept stimulated, neither covered over nor suppressed. And in this case stimulation is seen to depend largely upon the factor of interrelation. Sex-facts are to be related to other facts of life, not rigidly or a priori, as in the American view that mating is inseparable from parenthood, but fluently and realistically, as life itself moves and finds expression. And sex-facts in European opinion are to be interrelated in a philosophy of sex. Failure to make these interrelations, together with the attitude of suppression, seem to me to be the outstanding aspects of the characteristically American attitude towards sex.
There is no need in this post-Freudian day of dwelling upon the effects of suppression of sex instinct or impulse. Suppression leads, we are told, either to sublimation, in which case it is diversion, rather than suppression, or it leads to perversion or disease. Unfortunately sex-pathology in the United States has been given little or no study, statistically. We have no statistical data of health or disease in relation to the expression or suppression of sex instinct, and no data on the extent or the effects of homosexuality or of the direction of the sex impulses towards self. Opinion therefore becomes merely a matter of personal observation and conclusion, observation of individuals or small groups. My own conclusion or guess in regard to perversion in this country is that part of the commonly observed spirit of isolation or antagonism between the sexes, and part of the spirit of competition between individuals, are associated with homosexual or masturbatory tendencies which get expressed in varying degrees according to varying circumstances. More particularly the lack of warmth in personal intercourse which makes alike for American bad manners and, in the more intellectual circles, for cheerlessness and aridity is due, I think, to failure of one kind or another in sex relations. I mean cultural failure, not merely individual failure.
May not some such theory of sex failure account also for that herd sense which is so familiar a part of Americanism, and which is not incompatible with the type of self-seeking or pseudo-individualism of which American individualism appears to be an expression? It is a tenable hypothesis that sexually isolated individuals become dependent upon the group for stimulus, whether of emotion or will, whereas persons in normal sex relations, although they may contribute to the group or co-operate with it, remain comparatively independent of it, finding stimulus in sex and its sublimations.
If this theory is valid, we may expect to find a comparatively large number of sex failures in those circles which are characterized by what Everett Dean Martin has recently called crowd behaviour, reform circles intolerant of other mindedness and obsessed by belief in the paramountcy of their own dogma.
“Leur printemps sans jeunesse exige des folies,
Leur sang brûlant leur dicte des propos amers,
L’émeute est un remède à la mélancolie,
Et nous aurions la paix si leurs yeux étaient clairs,
Ou leur femme jolie.”