Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 15

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This book is written largely in the hope that the thousands of unhappy married women, and the unmarried too, as fate sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly finds them a partner, will, in reading it, realize what is making them so restless and discontented.

In the past few years all interested observers of social phenomena have been appalled at the lightness with which a great majority of the upper middle classes regard matrimony.

Intelligent women, readers of good books, and themselves often friends of authors, artists, musicians, and other creative personalities are all absorbed in the most vital topics of the day, chief of which is the discussion of the normal adjustment of the sex relation. Indeed, it has been charged that both women and men in this stratum of society talk sex ad nauseam. This is likely to continue until the much desired adjustment is better made than it is at present.

The cause of this concentration upon sex problems can be only the fact that sex is a problem. If our sexual standards were fixed in a universally serviceable pattern such that changing external conditions did not almost hourly tend to make it antiquated and useless, the attention of so large a proportion of civilized humanity need not be given to it in the present-day excited manner.

It is, of course, a question whether sexual problems can ever be permanently solved; but those in the focus of public attention today are so insistent that it is impossible to ignore them. Various solutions are being attempted more or less secretly where public opinion’s ban on sex discussion is stronger; less secretly elsewhere.

But a pattern of sexual behaviour, a true love pattern, even if it could not be final should have at least enough elasticity to make the changes in it a gradual transition. No sensational innovations can ever hope to be adopted overnight with the approval of society at large. In fact, conventions in other spheres than those of love are made, and have been made gradually for centuries. But it is a curious fact that the conventionalities which concern the expression of the erotic impulse are those not of yesterday but of many hundreds of years ago. This is but a manifestation of the extreme complication of the external circumstances of modern life in contrast with the wonderful simplicity and directness of the emotions themselves which reverberate in response to the external complexities.

It will appear, as this discussion proceeds, that the sexual problems of today are conditioned by the inhibitions placed by modern economic conditions upon the natural and instinctive expression of the erotic impulse. In brief, both men and women talk sex and particularly women, in a certain extensive class of society, for the real though disguised purpose of exciting themselves sexually.

There is every satisfactory proof that this would not occur if their sexual lives were normal. It is therefore the repressed sexual activity that breaks out, not in sexual acts specifically, but in the vicarious sex activity of problem novels, problem plays, risqué stories, and the talk in mixed company which has been objected to as persistent sex talk.

Men and women with a perfectly normal love life feel no need whatever to talk about it. But the inference from that—namely, that those who resolutely refrain from mention of all such topics are themselves quite normal in their own love life—is illogical in the extreme. Many are constrained by an inner fear of self-revelation, lest they show themselves as abnormal. Thus it may occur that some will not refuse to discuss this most vital of all topics, for fear they may be considered themselves abnormal.

But it is safe to say that the greater number of those who talk much about love are those whose love is either undeveloped or in some way awry, and that unconsciously they are attempting to straighten themselves out, in their own eyes or in the eyes of their friends.