Part 2

At the same time, it should be emphasized here that childish practices of onanism or homosexuality, even when carried over into adolescence, are not what they are painted by medical quacks and superficial thinkers. They are not vicious sins, or even sins at all; they are merely preliminary and sterile steps in love. The reason that they are not high forms of love is that they are contrary to the tendency of life itself, which has developed the reproductive organs, not for sterile stimulation, but for reproduction. Both onanism and homosexual love are barren. The normal human love life must go beyond them.

The third stage is heterosexuality, or love for members of the opposite sex. Here the bodily organism comes into harmony with the tendency of life itself; this is the highest stage of bodily usage in contact with other human beings. The rest of this study will be devoted to an elaboration of its proper development.

Bousfield, in his “The Elements of Practical Psycho-Analysis,” has indicated statistically the evolution of the sexual components of the normal child in the following table:

_Infant_

Autosexuality 100%

_Child of 12_

Autosexuality 40% Homosexuality 50% Heterosexuality 10%

_Normal Individual at Puberty_

Autosexuality 20% Homosexuality 30% Heterosexuality 50%

From this it will be seen that vestiges of the lower stages persist in the higher. These do no harm, if the individual flowers well in his environment. Any serious obstacle in life, which cannot be overcome or passed, may dam up the flow of the life source, and cause a regression to one of the earlier stages. And, of course, in abnormal cases, there may be fixations at either of the earlier stages. But these are sterile stages, and the normal boy will soon step out of them into the third stage, which means manhood.

III.

THE ETHICS OF MATING

_Toward Equality._--The whole course of woman, for the last hundred years, has been toward a relative equality with man. It will be recalled that the first situation was a female superiority, in all essential matters; she had sole choice of her mate, as among animals, and was in charge of all important tribal matters. This was followed by man’s dominance, and the subject of women. Now the scales are swinging back toward justice, toward a situation in which the peculiar merits and abilities of each sex will complement the other, and in which mankind can go forward, man and woman hand in hand, toward a realization of the noblest dreams yet dreamed by the race.

There can never be more than a relative equality; for absolute equality is unknown in nature. Woman, by the very essence of her purpose as mother of posterity and keeper of the home, is now, and may forever be, bound to deal with lesser and more intimate affairs than men; that is, to think more personally and concretely, and less impersonally and abstractly, than men. Many women have shown a tendency to negative this; yet even in the works of such brilliant women as George Sand, George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Wolstonescraft, and others, the typical woman’s note is not wanting, of brilliant detail rather than lofty generalization. Men have made our civilization, such as it is. They have made a government and a social system which judges by dollars, and not by persons; a government which spends vast sums yearly for better pigs, and nothing, or comparatively nothing, for better babies. The influence of woman in our politics and our body social will be to counterbalance this by an emphasis upon persons rather than dollars. Prostitution will largely be ended; wars will be lessened and perhaps abolished; the conservation of human life and happiness will rank higher than the conservation of cotton plants and oil wells.

The struggle has, in the main, already been won. A hundred years ago, a woman could not vote or hold office. We have seen women in state legislatures; in the national legislature; upon the state and federal bench; and seated in the capitol of the largest state in the union. We may yet see a woman in the president’s chair. A hundred years ago, woman could not receive a general education, or engage in industry, professional, or artistic life, on the same terms as man. Today, there is no field in which she is not seen; no important institution of learning which withholds from her the human heritage of the rich achievements of men. A hundred years ago, she was dependent upon a man for a meal-ticket; he held the purse strings. Her choice lay between wife of a man who would feed and house her; mistress of a man who would feed and house her; or harlot of many men who would feed and house her. Today, she has conquered the economic field, and can afford to buy her will of the world. She does not need to marry for a meal-ticket; she has control of her own purse-strings. She is still incapacitated temporarily by child-bearing; but motherhood pensions by the state are a step toward removing this disability, which is so vitally helpful to the state. She can afford, let it be said again with all impressiveness, to buy her will of the world; and she will do so.

What the standpatters and regressives, who oppose woman’s entry into the world of affairs, fail to take into account, is the difference between sex and human affairs. Man is fitted to be a mate, a husband, a father; that is his sex business. Woman is fitted to be a mate, a wife, a mother; that is her sex business. Men and women both are fitted to go beyond this, into spheres neither male nor female, but human. Such matters as industry and business, in all of its phases; as professional life, in all of its ramifications; as the world of art and literature, in all of its beauties,--these are all human concerns, and not sex affairs. They are neither male nor female: they are human. In them both the man and the woman of the future will find themselves at home.

_Choice of a Mate._--The standpatters and regressives are especially exercised over the fear that the woman will seek to wrest from man the right to select a mate. Having lost everything else, they still cling to the idea that it is immodest for a woman to propose, and proper for a man to propose. During all the matriarchate, woman did the choosing; as she does throughout the animal kingdom. There was nothing immodest here. Indirectly, match-making mammas and designing daughters do much of the actual choosing here; when this is covered over with a veil of hypocrisy, a pretense that the male victims are really the choosers, the standpatters find nothing immodest here.

There is an essential difference between male choice and female choice. The man, following the biological imperative to fertilize at all costs, starts out after a group of women, determined to capture one of them for his mate. Which does he capture? Of course, the one he catches up with first; and that means, the slowest of the group, the one least fleet of foot, the one least fit to be the mother of his children and of the future. When a woman is wooed by a number of men, which does she choose for her mate? Not the weakest, the slowest, the one least fit to be the father of her children; but, to the very contrary, she chooses normally the finest, strongest, best, wisest, of all of her suitors. Woman marries upward; man, downward. So it will be a good thing for the race when the choice is no longer, in public esteem, essentially a male prerogative; but is at least a matter of mutual agreement. There is nothing immodest, and everything modest, in a woman’s letting a man know, in all seriousness, that she is willing to marry him. The proposal, as well as the acceptance, would ideally be a mutual thing.

_As to Children._--The tendency of life, and the purpose of mating, is to have children. Economic organization today makes children a hardship, and indeed a luxury, in all but the very poorest homes. The very poor, at times impelled onward by their religion (which subserves the ruling economic class, ever desirous of a large number of the working class), proceed to have many more children than they can raise even with the bleakest necessities of life. The educated classes, with more background of culture, adjudge that they cannot afford to have any children at all, or can have only one, two, or three. Statistics not so long ago indicated that half of the children born in this country died before reaching manhood; which means that the educated and cultured classes do not even replace themselves, while the country and the world is populated with the haphazard offspring, children born in filth and poverty, and yanked up rather than reared, of the poorest, most inefficient, least intelligent and least cultured of the community. More than this, the very wealthy, through their wealth-disease and natural inertia, elect to have few or no children, as a rule. If men had deliberately set about framing a system of reproduction which would breed down the human stock, they could not have arrived at a better one than the present system.

The intelligent co-operation of men and women in politics and social planning will inevitably alter this condition; lifting the poor, and seeing to the continuation of the species by the most fit. In fact, the despised poor, the past few decades, in various countries, have shown a commendable ability to lift themselves; it may ultimately be their efforts that raise the social level. The wise couple, having educated themselves as well as possible, and with some of the economic load of today removed, will mutually decide to have a normal family, of four or five children. Fewer is unfair to the children themselves; and the fact of parenthood is one of the great helpful shaping influences on the life of any adult man or woman. It is an indispensable experience toward complete manhood or womanhood.

_Double and Single Codes._--Down to the last two decades, men have insisted upon a double code of morality. By this, men were expected, as adolescents, to sow their wild oats, to enjoy women sexually; and then to marry a pure woman, and after marriage to have the right to continue their varied sexual experiences. Meanwhile, women were to be absolutely pure, if they were to be on the market as wives; and, if these were proposed to by no man, they were to gratefully accept the lot of spinster or old maid, and wither into a vinegary sterile branch, diseased with ingrown sex. The woman who took one step aside from the narrow path, who sowed one smallest oatling, was thereafter damned, outlawed, a social pariah, the prey of every man. Needless to say, any woman who could be seduced by a man was at once lowered into the level of the prostitute; and virtuous women and ordinary men united in casting stones upon her in the daytime, while the men visited her at night. Saintly old Augustine phrased the vicious teaching:

“Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb the whole world with lust.”

The prostitute, then, was to be kept in a living hell, to render the lot of the virtuous women the easier; not that men eased up in their attempts on the honors of wives and maidens. Needless to say, with the altered status of woman, with her economic ability today to buy her will of the world, she will not buy the iniquitous old double standard of morality. She may essay to buy a single standard for both, a standard of monogamy, pure and simple. It is doubtful if she could compel men to follow this, even if she had sole control of the purse-strings, which she has not. But her actions, since her financial liberation, have not indicated that this is her universal desire. She will probably achieve a single standard for men and women, more elastic than the one mentioned: a standard by which men and women can select monogamy, a limited promiscuity, or whatever arrangement they prefer, so long as it is voluntary, and no advantage be taken of the young and the untaught.

_Duration of Courtship._--It is obvious that true mating must be contemporaneous with true love; true conjugal love, with as much of the element of the romantic as the parties can acquire. When love ends, mating becomes immoral. Yet it should not be lightly surrendered by either party. Any love relationship is a social thing, affecting parents and relatives, and properly including the production of children, in most cases. All this should be soberly considered; it does not make love, but it should cause parties to consider carefully, in order not to give up love for a light or frivolous cause. Marriage is a difficult matter of readjustments, on both sides. Friction is inevitable, as in any human association. There must be a mutual give and take, a tolerance and forbearance on both sides.

One of the soundest methods of prolonging normal love is a continuation of the courtship, on the part of both men and women. Wives are too prone, having become married, to assume that their chase (the sole object of their life being, they are taught, to marry a meal-ticket) is over; and that the husband, tied to them for life, can not escape. Accordingly, they neglect him, give all their attention to clubs, social affairs, and what not, or, more commonly and seriously, give an inordinate amount of attention to their children, shutting their husbands out from the love and attention they are entitled to. This is one of the surest methods of killing conjugal love. Men, on their part, too often regard the winning of the woman as the completion of their chase; they have her, have her locked and tied with a marriage ring and license, and can now stray and play outside the marriage fence with impunity. Or they may remain sexually faithful, while discontinuing their courtship, and substituting their business affairs for the former important matter of courtship. This is just as sure a method of ending conjugal love.

The ideal arrangement means a continuance of the period of courtship as long as the mating lasts. Each party must make the effort--a pleasant one, with rich rewards--of keeping the desire of the mated partner alive and eager. At times there is an advantage in a similarity of interests without the house, as well as concerning their joint home affairs. Husband and wife who can collaborate in any work are, as a rule, in a more advantageous position to retain their conjugal interest in each other. Each mating is an experiment, with the odds somewhat against continuing happiness, as life develops today. Only a fine and consistent attempt, a constant sight of the other’s needs and wishes, a genuine sympathy or feeling with the partner, will preserve the average marriage. Yet the gain is no slight thing; there is perhaps no human gain, in the love field, as high.

IV.

PROPER MATING

_The Purpose of Mating._--Even from the individual standpoint, mating has more purpose than merely satisfying the love instinct. It is one of the two undisputed methods of human immortality. Even after death, a man or woman lives on in the lives of others who have been affected by what he has been, or done, or said, or written. As Samuel Butler words it,

Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again, Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.

But more than this, men and women live on in their children. There is an actual continuity of life here, in the germ passed on from the parents to the child. In the race, we have been alive since life began; in the race we shall live as long as our human strain persists, which may be as long as life exists. Since this is one of our conscious purposes, it lies upon us to make sure that our children have parents fit in every way to bear the future. This brings up the matter of the selection of the mate, from a broader angle.

If this is our conscious purpose, there is a deeper unconscious, instinctive purpose which is the same as the tendency of the social body, the race, itself: namely, the perpetuity of the race. It can only reproduce itself through its individual members; each man or woman is an outpost in the eternal struggle of the living organisms to continue to alter as much as possible of the lifeless into the living. From the standpoint of the race, the choice of fit mates to give birth to the future generations of men is all essential.

Our matings, it must be remembered, are largely haphazard. Accidents of propinquity, property-determined provisions of our parents, sentiments of pity or anger at another woman or man, these often determine a life mate. There is little opportunity granted today for the young man or woman to know truly the proposed mate, although this situation is clearing; there is no methodical investigation as to whether the mate in mind is unfitted physically or otherwise. This demands more attention than man has yet given it. Marriages are not made in heaven, despite the wide belief; they are blundered into on earth, in the majority of cases. Mere desire, mere animal passion or natural love, comes easily; unfortunately or fortunately, it often goes as easily; and if, in the meantime, marriage has been entered into, a wreckage of happiness is inevitable. It is not easy for man or woman to develop an abiding conjugal love. Marry at leisure, and do not repent, is no fool’s counsel.

_Eugenics._--The young man, then, is confronted with the question, what sort of woman should I mate with? His own deepest instincts will aid here; but they are far from enough. In general, the greatest happiness comes from a union of opposites, in appearance, temperament, and all. Yet individual needs often run counter to this. Nor, from the standpoint of the future, should an immense and overpowering love always control, unless the man is willing to forfeit in some cases all chances of having children. The racial aspect of the question is gradually being studied by the science and practice of eugenics.

Eugenics is the science of good breeding; of having children well born. Its formulator, Francis Galton, defined it as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race.” In another work Galton expanded this, saying that the aim of eugenics is

“to check the birth-rate of the Unfit, instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering productivity of the Fit, by early marriages and healthful rearing of their children.”

There is matter for investigation here, rather than wholesale acceptance. This cuts right across the personal aspect of selection for marriage; it comes perilously close to being an unwarrantable attempt to interfere with human freedom. Yet to an increasing extent this science is coming into the world’s legislation; and, while it will work some hardships, even unnecessary ones, the aim is no hardship.

Saleeby, pupil of Galton, divided eugenics unnecessarily into (1) positive, or encouraging worthy parenthood; (2) negative, or discouraging unworthy parenthood, and (3) preventive, “efforts made to stand between parenthood and racial poisons, that is, substances which are liable to originate degeneracy in healthy stocks.” His (3) is really a subhead of (2). Extreme advocates of eugenics say flatly that “we should rather bring the propagation of the race to the level of the stud farm, than that it should go on in the old haphazard way which surely leads to catastrophe.” Luckily, mankind will hardly follow this demagogic platform, even though we recall the legislative enactment of prohibition and the creation of the statutory crime of teaching Darwinism in an American college or school. It is true that we do not want science for domestic animals, and chance for men; but there is such a thing as attractive legislation, as opposed to prohibitive legislation; legislation offering an inducement to conduct held socially desirable, rather than legislation affixing a penalty to conduct held socially undesirable.

Scientifically, such legislation is based upon the Mendelian conception of heredity. And there are extreme cases where science should, tentatively at least, insist upon the enactment of statutory prohibitions, not of mating, but of child-bearing. A simple operation today alters man or woman so as to render them incapable of having children; in the cases suggested below, this may have to be applied. Switzerland, in ten years, largely abolished a particular type of cretin, or feeble-minded, that had flourished there, by negative eugenics. It is a matter for scientific investigation as to whether such traits as feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, dipsomania, and syphilis are inheritable in such proportion that prohibition of offspring should be applied. Science, which once held consumption inheritable, has reversed its position today; on any of these questions it may reverse itself, thereby requiring an alteration in the eugenics law.

_Eugenics in the Future._--There are shrewd observers who do not view eugenics as tolerantly as we have done. Bertrand Russell, in his “Icarus,” says the eugenics will undoubtedly be adopted.

“This power will be used, at first, to diminish imbecility, a most desirable object. But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations.”

The result, he says, will be to increase the average intelligence, and to decrease really exceptional intelligence. With charming impertinence he proceeds to the alteration that may take place in moral standards, by which one man may be permitted to be the sire of a vast progeny by many different mothers. Yet such reforms, he mourns, will be handed over to the average official to administer; it will not be the type desired by the modern eugenist who may be selected as the father of the future, but Prime Ministers and Bishops may be picked to be the fathers of half the next generation. His serious point is that government control of the matter will probably be used to produce a servile population, convenient to rulers but incapable of initiative.

Viscount Haldane, a greater scientist (at least in biological fields) and a more brilliant critic, indicates that eugenics may come in by a pleasanter though more startling route. By 1950, he anticipates the production of the first ectogenetic child, or child born from a womb withdrawn from the mother’s body, for all of the embryonic period. By a simple operation, he prophecies that science will be able to remove an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum every month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air. The falling birthrate among many nations will be a strong argument for the adoption of this ectogenesis, and birth from the woman’s body may become as antiquated as the horse-buggy in an era of motor cars. This total separation of sexual love and reproduction will, he holds, profoundly affect current morality. The choice of superior parents for the next generation will advance each generation,

“from the increased output of first-class music to the decreased convictions for theft,”

as he wittily summarizes.

So the foremost thinkers of today deal with eugenics. What the scientists will offer is suggested here; what the state and national legislatures may do with scientific discoveries is a far different matter. Things may not move as briskly as Russell and Haldane anticipate. But the individual should favor all positive eugenics, that is, adequate medical inspection of each prospective party to a mating, and mating only with the physically and mentally fit, in the widest sense.