Let us take a glimpse at primitive man. I choose the Marquesas Islands, because we have complete reports about them from numerous observers. Here was a race of people, not interfered with by civilization, who manifested all that overplus of sexual energy to which Metchnikoff calls attention. They placed no restraint whatever upon sex activity, they had no conception of such an idea. Their games and dances were sex play, and so also, in great part, was their religion. Yet we do not find that they wrecked themselves. Physically speaking, they were one of the most perfect races of which we have record. Both the men and women were beautiful; they were active and strong from childhood to old age, and—here is the significant thing—they were happy. They were a laughing, dancing, singing race. They hardly knew grief or fear at all. They knew how to live, and they enjoyed every process and aspect of their lives, just as children do, naively and simply. This included their sex life; and I think it assures us that there can be no such fundamental physical disharmony in the human organism as the great Russian scientist thought he had discovered.
Is it not a fact that throughout nature a superfluity of any kind of energy or product may be a source of happiness, rather than of distress? Consider the singing of the birds! Or consider nature's impulse to cover a field with useless plants, and how by a little cunning, we are able to turn it into a harvest for our own use! In the life of our bodies one may show the same thing again and again. We have within us the possibility of and the impulse toward more muscular activity than our survival makes necessary; but we do not regard this additional energy as a curse of nature, and a peril to our lives—we turn out and play baseball. We have an impulse to see more than is necessary, so we climb mountains, or go traveling. We have an impulse to hear more, so we go to a concert. We have an impulse to think more, so we play chess, or whist, or write books and accumulate libraries. Never do we think of these activities as signs of an irrevocable blunder on the part of nature.
But about the activities of love we feel differently; and why is this? If I say that it is because we have an unwholesome and degraded attitude toward love, because, as a result of religious superstition we fear it, and dare not deal with it honestly, the reader may suspect that I am preparing to hint at some self-indulgence, some form of sex orgy such as the "turkey trot" and the "bunny hug" and the "grizzly bear," the "shimmy" and the "toddle" and the "cuddle." I hasten to explain that I do not mean any of the abnormalities and monstrosities of present-day fashionable life. Neither do I mean that we should set out to emulate the happy cannibals in the South Seas. In the Book of the Mind I set forth as carefully as I knew how, the difference between nature and man, the life of instinct and the life of reason. It is my conviction that if civilized life is to go on, there must be a far wider extension of judgment and self-control in human affairs; our lost happiness will be found, not by going "back to nature," but by going forward to a new and higher state, planned by reason and impelled by moral idealism.
But we find ourselves face to face with horrible sex disorders, and a great scientist tells us they are nature's tragic blunder, of which we are the helpless victims. Manifestly, the way to decide this question is to go to nature, and see if primitive people, having the same physical organism as ours, had the same troubles and spent their lives in the same misery. If they did, then it may be that we are doomed; but if they did not, then we can say with certainty that it is not nature, but ourselves, who have blundered. Our task then becomes to apply reason to the problem; to take our present sex arrangements, our field of bad-smelling weeds, and plow it thoroughly, and sow it with good seed, and raise a harvest of happiness in love. It is my belief that, admitting true love—honest and dignified and rational love—it is possible to pour into it any amount of sex energy, to invent a whole new system of beautiful and happy love play.
CHAPTER XXXIV
LOVE AND ECONOMICS
(Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due to the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.)
If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, what is it? Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature, the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and virtue are products like vinegar."
Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and class privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited power with practically no responsibility—a strain which not one human being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the conferring upon a class of power without responsibility means the collapse of that class and the downfall of its civilization.
So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system of privilege does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his sex desires. What it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to abolish that mutuality in sex, that interaction between male and female influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual selection, and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit.
In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her, according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type.