Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

Were a set of tests for sex failure or sex fulfilment applied to the more outstanding propagandists of this country, likewise, of course, for comparative purposes, to an adequate number of non-propagandists, the results might be of considerable significance. I recommend the undertaking to the National Research Council in co-operation with some organization for social hygiene.

Meanwhile in what measure propagandism of various sorts may be a perversion of sex or a sublimation remains speculative; and in applying theory one should be thoroughly aware that from the day of Sappho and before to the day of Elizabeth Blackwell and after, even to the Russian Revolution, sex failure of one kind or another, the kind considered at the time most despicable, has commonly been imputed to persons or groups disapproved of on other grounds or reprobated. Some sublimation of sex in the United States there must be, of course, not only, in propaganda movements, but in other expressions of American culture, in American art and letters and science, in philanthropy, in politics, finance, and business. By and large, however, in all these cultural expressions does one see any conspicuous measure of sex sublimation? Is not the concern practical rather than devotional, a matter of getting rather than giving, of self-advancement or family support rather than of interest in ideas and their forms or in the values of taste or of faith?

Interest in impersonal subjects in general is not an American trait. Personal concrete terms are the terms commonly used. Americans, as we say, are not given to abstract thought or philosophy. They are interested in facts as facts, not as related to other facts. How expect of Americans, therefore, that kind of curiosity about sex which leads to a philosophy of sex? Sex curiosity in American life does not lead past curiosity about isolated facts, and that means that it leads not to philosophy but to gossip and pruriency. Not long ago I was talking with a woman about a common acquaintance to whom I referred as singularly free through sophistication and circumstance to please any man she liked. “What do you mean? Have you heard any scandal about her?” snapped out my companion, not at all interested in the general reflection, but avid of information about illicit affairs.

Facts which are not held together through theory call for labels. People who do not think in terms of relations are likely to be insistent upon names. Labels or names for sex disposition or acts are, as a matter of fact, very definite in the American vernacular. “Engaged,” “attentive,” “devoted,” “a married man,” “a man of family,” “a grass widow,” “a good woman,” “a bad woman”—there is no end to such tags. Again, intimacy between a man and a woman is referred definitely to the act of consummation, a sex relation is strictly classified according to whether or not it is physically consummated. In this attitude towards sex boundaries or captions may lie the explanation, incidentally, of what is a constant puzzle to the European visitor—the freedom of social intercourse allowed to the youth of opposite sexes. Since consummation only constitutes sexual intimacy in American opinion, and since consummation, it is assumed, is utterly out of the question, why raise barriers between boys and girls? The assumption that consummation is out of the question is, by and large, correct, which is still another puzzle. To this some clue may be found, I think, in our concluding discussion.

Fondness for captions and for the sort of classification that is so likely to paralyze perception of the finer distinctions and to arrest thought, are natural enough in a child, learning language and so pressed upon by the multiplicity of phenomena that in self-protection he must make rough classifications and remain unaware of much. The old who are dying to life are also exclusive, and they, too, cling to formulas. Is American culture in the matter of sex childish and immature, as Americans imply when they refer to their “young country,” or is the culture representative of the aged; are Americans born old, as now and again a European critic asserts?

Such terms of age are figurative, of course, unless we take them in a historical sense, meaning either that a new culture was developed in this country—or rather that there were fresh developments of an old culture—or that an old culture was introduced and maintained without significant change. This is not the place to discuss the cultural aspects of Colonial America, but it is important to bear in mind in any discussion of merely contemporaneous sex attitudes in this country the contributions of European, and more particularly, English morality. Without recalling the traditions of early Christianity or of English Puritanism, those attitudes of ignoring or suppressing the satisfactions of the impulses of sex to which we have referred were indeed incomprehensible and bewildering—mere psychological interpretation seems inadequate. But viewed as consequences of the sense of sin in connection with sex, which was a legacy from Paul and his successors in English Puritanism, interpretation is less difficult, and the American attitude toward sex becomes comparatively intelligible—the attitude seen in divorce and in the melodramas, and in the standardizing of sex relations, in accordance with that most significant of Pauline dogmas that marriage is the lesser of two evils, that it is better to marry than to burn. Without the key of Paul and of the obscenities of the early Christian Fathers how explain the recent legislation in Virginia making it a crime to pay attention to a married man or woman, or such a sermon as was recently preached somewhere in the Middle West urging a crusade against the practice of taking another man’s wife in to dinner or dancing round dances? “At a dinner of friends let every man take his own wife on his arm and walk in to their seats side by side at the dinner table to the inspiring music of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” urged the minister. As to dancing, whenever a man is seen to put his arm around a woman who is not his wife, the band should cease playing. I do not quote the words of the latter injunction, as they are rather too indecent.

Turning from the historical back to the psychological point of view—in one of those circles of cause and effect that are composed now of cultural inheritance or tradition, now of psychological trend or disposition—the American case of sex, whether a case of adolescence or of senescence, may be said to present symptoms of arrested development. Together with the non-realism of childish or senile formula, there is here the kind of emotionalism which checks emotional vitality and which is fed upon the sense of crisis; we may call it crisis-emotion. Life at large, the sex life in particular, is presented as a series of crises preceded and followed by a static condition, and in these conventional times of crisis only, the times when the labels are being attached, are the emotions aroused. In the intervals, in the stretches between betrothal, marriage, birth, christening, or divorce, there is little or no sense of change—none of the emotions that correspond to changing relations and are expressions of personal adjustment. The emotions of crisis are statutory, pre-determined, conventionalized; neither for oneself nor for others do they make any demands upon imagination, or insight, or spiritual concern.

Here in this psychology of crisis is the clue—before mentioned—to an understanding of the freedom allowed our youth, of “bundling,” as the Colonials termed it, or, in current phrase, “petting.” In general, “keeping company” is accounted one kind of a relationship, marriage, another—one characterized by courtship without consummation, the other by consummation without courtship. Between the two kinds of relationship there is no transition, it is assumed, except by convention or ritual. So inrooted is this social attitude that the young cannot escape adopting it, at least the very young to whom, at any rate, uncritical conservatism seems to be natural. Indeed the taboo on unritualized consummation partakes enough of the absolutism of the taboo, shall we say, on incest, to preclude any risk of individual youthful experimentation or venture across the boundary lines set by the Elders.

Given these boundary lines, given a psychology of crisis, all too readily the sex relations, in marriage or out, become stale, flat, colourless, or of the nature of debauch, which is only another aspect of crisis-psychology. Sex relations perforce become limited to two conventions, marriage and prostitution. Prostitute or wife, the conjugal or the disorderly house, these are the alternatives. In formulaic crisis-psychology there may be no other station of emotional experiment or range of emotional expression.

That a man should “sow his wild oats” before marriage, and after marriage “settle down,” is becoming throughout the country a somewhat archaic formula, at least in so far as wild oats means exposure to venereal disease; but there has been no change, so far as I am aware, in the attitude towards the second part of the formula on settling down—in conjugal segregation. The married are as obtrusively married as ever, and their attitude towards persons of the opposite sex as dull and forbidding. Few “happily married” women but refer incessantly in their conversation to their husband’s opinion or stand; and what devoted husband will fail to mention his wife in one way or another as a notice of his immunity against the appeal of sex in any degree by any other woman? Shortly after the war, a certain American woman of my acquaintance who was travelling in France found herself without money and in danger of being put off her train before reaching Paris and her banker’s. She found a fellow-countryman and told him her predicament. He was quite willing to pay her fare; she was an American and a woman, but she was informed firmly and repeatedly that her knight was a married man, and besides, he was travelling with his business partner. Soon after I heard this anecdote I happened to repeat it to a Chicago lawyer who promptly joined in the laugh over the American man’s timidity. “Still, a married man travelling can’t be too prudent,” he finished off.