Kenneth Ingram

“ For the rest, I am inclined only to re-affirm the general principle which I have already attempted to define—namely, that sex becomes a sin where the main objective becomes the physical gratification. Once the proportion is weighed on the side of physical expression, love is prostituted. The purity of true love is known by the fact that its face is turned not to mere physical functions, but beyond the emotional and even mental, to the spiritual ideal. Indeed, a lover, whatever his temperament happens to be, loves even if his beloved is removed from all physical reach. ”

“ It is consistent to regard all sex as evil. But when the average Christian, while denouncing adultery as a sin, insists on copulation in marriage as its consummation, a difficulty arises which must not be ignored. Here, in adultery, is a sin which is so serious in the eyes of Christian men, that it can never be redeemed; the stigma of impurity remains for ever on the offender. Yet this same act, if only committed under the regulation of marriage becomes not merely something permissible, but the essential act of consummation, the divine method of procreation. ”

“ Ought two people in love to remain sexually apart simply because one of them is still married to, let us say, an incurable lunatic? In principle there seems to be every reason why they should; no actual physical or mental harm is done to them, provided they have a sufficiently developed will-power to transfer their sex-desire into other channels of activity. The sacrifice will be immense, but it is no more than any man has to make who refrains from marrying his beloved because he is too poor or is suffering from some disease which may affect his children. ”

“ It is not a matter of curing individual immorality, not even of explaining it only, it is the greater matter of laying a sound foundation for a practicable social morality that is the object of consideration here. It is important that any such opposition should be neither hypocritical nor hyper-critical, for great national issues are at stake. Without the healthy mind there can be no healthy body, at any rate from the point of view of the community, and thus such a scientific inquiry as is set forth in these pages is definitely leading towards the production of a healthier nation. ”

“ The embrace of children must be natural but not too ardent. In fact, the lover must diffuse his love and romp with children as a class rather than allow himself to appear emotional over one individual.
Many unthinking people will at once regard this temperament as impure when they have been convinced that scientifically it is sexual. But this is only because they cannot understand that sex is a clean thing and that the physical side of it is an occasional and by no means an inevitable incident. The cult of child-love is in fact one of the purest and noblest of sex-expressions. ”

“ The emotions are in the saddle. For directly the mind begins to operate there is introduced the element of permanency and constancy. The deepest and most real pleasures only begin in the realm of mentality. The man who hears music only to beat time or remember a catchy tune is shut out of the immense joy of the intellectual love of music. So the young man who lives in a fever of hot-house sexuality, of absorbing intrigues in the dance-room, or the morbid atmosphere of the street corner, is shut out of all the exquisite joys of love. ”

“ We enter the realm of pure conjecture if we attempt to inquire the purpose for which this type has been deliberately created. And I can only record my own entirely unproveable, but definite opinion, that the human race, in the far ages ahead, will return, by a spiral process, to the bisexual species from which I believe it has come. If this is so, the homosexual is apparently a prototype, a preliminary attempt of nature to combine both sex-natures in one individual. ”

“ Sex-instinct is bound to grow as the physical body grows, and to ignore this fact is to create the conception that sex-instinct is immoral. We then obtain the usual attitude adopted in public schools—that sex is to be indulged behind closed doors and sex literature sniggered at in dark corners. The boy grows up with a totally unclean view of sex. He becomes either an intolerable prude, or else he approaches sex-experience with an entirely twisted conception of sex-morality. One is continually meeting instances of this perverted imagination. ”

“ I wish to emphasize that the ideal towards which we should set our faces is that of fewer but healthier marriages. Both Church and State should, I feel, take pains to assure themselves that these undesirable elements are absent in all unions which they are respectively called upon to solemnize. And I emphasize this because I believe that we are suffering far too much from the popular fallacy and the smug Puritanic doctrine that the cure for all sexual proclivities is for men and women to marry, and that once they marry all things are sexually permissible. ”

“ Therefore it can fairly be argued that where the sex development has been restricted to these lines it denotes some strange dislocation which has prevented natural growth. The fact that in some cases this cause can actually be traced—such as a disappointment in an early love affair with the opposite sex, or to artificial circumstances which have made for celibacy—confirm many students of sex-science in this opinion.
But as if nature deliberately intends to thwart all easily attained explanations, she sets out certain facts, in practice, which entirely invalidate the theory. ”

“ How far is prostitution tolerable, so that a medical system of registration should be introduced into England? We have seen why prostitution is immoral; it is concerned with the physical side of sex, and with little else. But no thoughtful man could reasonably advocate the suppression of prostitution by law. The result of such a measure, at the present state of national development, would be deplorable, even if it were practicable. People do not become moral because they are frightened to do what they still want to do. ”

“ A man who for some reason, cannot marry, will therefore argue that his only alternative is recourse to prostitution, and that self-abuse, so long as it is regulated, is morally preferable. One remedy is, as we have already seen, the transfer of the sex-force to higher channels, so that all the glow and energy of sex is energized in devotion to a group of persons, or to a religious or humanitarian ideal in concrete labour. For sex is primarily creative, and if it is not creating physical children it may have, and should have, a spiritual progeny—as in art and literature. ”

“ Nor, even in childless marriages, is the sense of permanence an artificial convention which can be abolished by the decree of a court. The deeper the love, the more permanent must its nature tend to be. Love is not a contract; it is a spiritual bond.
It is impossible, I contend, to think of a normally healthy marriage without realizing that both the man and woman naturally enter into it with the assumption that it will be a permanent relationship. ”

“ We must be careful not to avoid this standard of comparative values in approaching sex morality. So long as we admit that at least there are acts and principles which, taken in the abstract, approach purity more nearly than others, we must not judge all individuals by the same standard. We must not consider a very ordinary, unintelligent, animal-blooded young man as being excessively sinful for having a vivid sex experience ”

“ In the same way the average Englishman, who has been inculcated, far more than he realizes, with Calvinist dogma, regards sex as immoral only when it is physical. A man may indulge in sexual emotion and thought, but so long as he suppresses any physical act he is not guilty; if this can be regarded as an exaggeration it is certainly true that popular Protestant theology regards a man as more immoral if he commits the physical sex-act than if he thinks of it. ”

“ It is obvious the moment we examine this conception that it is utterly indefensible. If the [Pg 28] sex-act is evil [7] because it is physical, then it is equally evil to eat or drink. And if an attempt is made to avoid this difficulty by saying that it is evil to debase love by expressing it in a physical act, or that it is better to love spiritually and non-physically, then it is equally evil to debase artistic inspiration by expressing it with paints on a physical canvas, or better to allow melodies to float in one’s mind than to reduce them to the level of a physical composition. ”

“ These crude examples of the result of driving sex into a dark corner exactly represent what one is up against in school, and in the world, when one begins to deal with sex openly and cleanly as a natural and non-repressible instinct. ”

“ Let us apply this doctrine by taking the simple case of a man and woman who are accused of having committed adultery. We inquire first, whether mutual love was the true motive, whether in fact the act of adultery was an unpremeditated incident which occurred as naturally as the kiss which a child gives to its mother. We draw a clear moral line between the sort of assignation which has for its one object the gratification of physical sensations, or the even lower motive, so far as the prostitute is concerned, of substituting for love the earning of a few shillings. ”

“ We know, that is to say, that there are, not one, but many emotions and thoughts which are directly sexual, and that there would seem to be every reason why sex, which manifests variety in its physical expression, should be equally various in the realm of the mind. Further than this, we are able to advance the principle that when the emphasis is laid further away from the physical level, the functioning power on that level weakens. Man, as we have already agreed, is a more developed animal than the elephant, because he is active in thought. ”

“ A musician may, for [Pg 32] example, be drawing on his sex-energy in composing or performing musical works; a humanitarian may be sexual in his diffused love of fellow-men and women. We cannot possibly draw a line and say that here sex begins and there it ends. We can only admit that it carries far beyond those particular physical manifestations which we popularly associate with sex.
If we accept the principle of ascending levels of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual functions, we should expect to find that sex makes its appearance in more than one form. ”

“ The moment one begins to lay the emphasis on the lower levels, the more one becomes correspondingly less pure. Lust, in fact, is the desire only for physical sex experience—the wrong proportion and balance. A man’s stage of moral development is to be discovered by the particular level on which he is most active.
We must not avoid the consequence of this principle. We must be prepared to admit as relatively moral, behaviour which popular philosophy might regard as immoral. We must also be prepared to regard as immoral many marriages in which the physical is the chief incentive. ”

“ The truth is that each individual case must be treated according to its particular state of development. General rules in this instance are particularly dangerous. We can only repeat that the repression is worse than commission, that a seething mass of sexual thought is worse when it has no physical outlet; that the ideal, when there may be no legitimate outlet—and, indeed, to some extent, in all cases—is to find an emotional outlet, to dig thought and emotional channels along which the sex-force may flow, but the physical expression of which is, in the ordinary sense of the term, non-sexual. ”

“ The basic principle of sex values is that sex is immoral so far as the physical side outweighs in proportion the emotional and mental—so far indeed, as the act becomes the motive and not the incident. Sex may be dedicated only to love; divorced from love, it is an abuse. ”

“ Let us first see how far the popular critics of the Catholic doctrine of indissoluble marriage are wrong. They regard marriage as simply a contract, from which it follows that divorce should be obtained by mutual consent, or even on the application of one of the parties. But this ignores, among other things, one vital natural law. Marriage begets parenthood, and between the parents of the same child there is a definite and permanent relationship. No Act of Parliament can make men and women cease to be the parents of their own children. ”

“ We have seen the physical danger, and, since morality must not be founded on a lie, we must freely admit that the physical danger may be eliminated by limiting the frequency of the practice. It may then be physically harmless. There remain, however, at least two causes which make for a misuse of the sex-force, that is—for immorality. The first is that it is usually the result of mental weakness, sheer inability to overcome the inclination. The mind, the will, must be supreme in its own house. ”

“ Indeed, we do not find any evidence that Puritanism succeeds in carrying its anti-sex theories into practice. In South Wales, for example, where Puritanism has established a particular stronghold, sexual laxity is peculiarly marked.
The reaction from Puritanism, especially in regard to sex, has been precipitated and exaggerated by the Great War. We have therefore in modern society two opposing policies. Among those who have thrown over all “religious” observance and have freed themselves entirely from Puritanism, there seems to be a complete absence of any moral sex-standard. ”