Healthier Sex Relations And Techniques

( Originally Published 1940 )

Avoiding Ever-present Sex Dangers and Injurious Methods of Satisfaction Chapter 63 Introductory : AIM OF THIS BOOK: TO HELP MAKE MODERN SEXUAL LIFE A SOURCE OF THE GREATEST HUMAN HAPPINESS AND DELIGHT UP TO the present we have always shown the sexual life as the source of our life-energy, not merely showering life upon us in the future as the ultimate result of a rejuvenation but a renewal of our life-energy now, immediately. Just as with stocks and shares in the world of finance, the coupons are rows of little cheques that are only payable on certain dates at intervals of months, while the share itself, the original document, is the real property, of which we are proud. And this original share may be compared to the capital of love, which makes us richer and fills us with enthusiasm from the first.

Now comes the question: does the ideal which we have developed in this book really agree with our experience, as medical practitioners, of individual and social sexual life? Not in the least! This sexual life, which ought for almost everyone to be a source of the greatest joy and happiness, because it governs our feelings of happiness more intensely than anything else in the world, is really nowadays for the great majority of people a fruitful source of misery and even despair.

But this state of things is the best proof of my thesis. In reality we see on every side only glimpses of love and happiness. How beneficial and indispensable the sexual life is in its own way, is best evidenced by the misery felt by man wherever this ideal life is misunderstood, perverted or misused.

For many centuries now a "higher" form of love has been preached to us, in which every human heart should be filled with love, . . . and the elementary school of love, as mother Nature herself has shown us so clearly, has been systematically neglected, misunderstood and despised. So it is no wonder that this doctrine has met with so little success, because we have not yet been educated even in love's own preparatory school.

Let us, however, be quite fair in our judgment. Formerly, when man stood on a lower scale in his knowledge of the laws of nature and of morality, the spiritual and material seemed to be divided by an unbridgeable chasm, and our leaders in their dualistic perplexity looked upon the senses as the source of all evil, and considered the sexual life-the most prominent of the manifestations of the senses-as a lust of Satan. The abnegation of all things sexual thus became the highest of all virtues, and those who practiced self-denial in this respect were classed as saints.

Especially in the East where unbridled sensuality appeared as a striking contrast, the oriental temperament only too readily ran to the other extreme in adopting this asceticism. I may mention Buddha as he is described to us, when he abandoned the voluptuous court life by which he had been surrounded; the first Christian martyrs in striking contrast to the depraved Roman society; St. Augustine, who became pious in his old age, and then deplored having spent his adolescence in immorality, and his manhood in sensuality.

The opinions and convictions of this last-named saint became the basis of Catholicism, especially as he represented the absolute supremacy of the church as the principle of all that was good; over the state an the principle of all that was evil. And to a still greater degree his doctrine became the foundation of Protestantism. And indeed Luther 1 was brought up as an Augustine monk, and Calvin's gloomy dogma did not originate in the gospel itself, but only dated back as far as the teachings of St. Augustine, the father of the church, who had declared sensuality to be the worst of all sins. And because it is through this self-same sensuality that the human race is propagated, he fancied he saw original sin in it. And the whole of the doctrine of salvation has as its raison d'etre the saving of our souls from this original sin that began with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise.

Thus in our higher civilisation, dominated by this austere dualism, the sexual life becomes continually more furtive, instead of flourishing in the light of day. As a matter of fact man is born sexual; theoretically, however, he is expected to have no sex: duplicity everywhere! A hypocritical morality is preached as the highest virtue; without it we cannot get on.

How many married people there are, who allow their sexual instincts to have their natural outlet in their conjugal relations and feel all the better for it, and who, like St. Augustine, and perhaps from their reminiscences of youthful days like his, yet cannot help thinking that really it must be something sinful, and who in consequence are tortured by this internal conflict.

And this uneasiness of mind is felt to a much greater degree when the sexual intercourse is extra-marital, even in those cases where this is not only permissible, but is actually indicated and ethically right.

So it is the preachers of a false morality who poison our ultimate happiness.

And economic difficulties have also upset our sexual life. The struggle for existence has taken possession of the marriage market; and so many a wife who has been successful, has had too much sexual activity forced upon her, whilst many of her unmarried sisters pine away from loneliness. Both categories of women feel unhappy. And in the marketplace of unchastity, all that is holy is trodden under foot and smothered with filth.

We must therefore not be surprised that the sexual passion should be misunderstood and abused, and that up to the present it has never been sufficiently valued by Science. None of our functions has been so little elevated to consciousness, so that we might make it subservient to our higher aims. To have done everything in our power to contribute to this result is the endeavour of this whole book.

In order to help to remove the prevailing errors and evils, we must now, in this last part of the book, carefully review these morbid manifestations. But this can be done only in a very perfunctory manner; for in every field the normal can be briefly stated, while the deviations from the normal are innumerable.