“ Let us go back for a few decades and see if we can catch the values of our time confusedly shaping themselves within the framework of human life. I say shaping themselves, for as Nietzsche said fifty years ago, the time of the conscious valuers has passed; our values for a century have not been created, they have happened. They happened because men had become skeptical not merely of God, or of the existence of a moral order, but of life itself, and could not set before themselves any purpose justifying life, but only its bare mechanism, work, duty, the preservation of society. ”

“ The subject of sex has been treated in this generation with a strange, rather panic-stricken lack of balance. Obscenity hawks its old wares at one end of the road and dogmatic piety shouts warnings at the other—while between is chaos. And the chaos extends beyond ideas and talk, beyond novels and scenarios and Sunday feature stories, into the realm of actual conduct. Religion has indeed found substantial matter for its words of caution and disapproval: never in recent generations have human beings so floundered about outside the ropes of social and religious sanctions. ”

“ To follow an ideal which almost entirely excludes sex interest as something evil is to condemn one of the richest elements in personal experience. And this ideal has regulated not only woman’s sex experience but has demanded and received incalculable sacrifices in all the phases of her life, mercilessly limiting the sphere of her activities, smothering interests of value and nourishing others to an unnatural state of development, and warping her character to satisfy its most exacting demands. ”

“ The circumstances can be made happier, the attitude of society can foster it; but the talk of friendship has already reached a splendid perfection beyond which my imagination is unable to soar. At its best it has, despite its personal aspect, an impersonal beauty; it is a poignant fulfillment of those profound impulses which we call curiosity and candor; it serves human needs as deep as those which poetry and music serve, and is in some sense an art like them. The art exists, and it remains only for the future to give it an adequate hospitality. ”

“ Man’s search for the female genius is more consoling than his sorrowful quest for the snows of yesteryear. For snows, like all beauty, have a way of melting with time; a mind ripens and mellows with age. Granted a mind which it is no longer a shame or a battle to develop, women can look upon the passing of the years with at least as great an equanimity as does man. ”

“ Promiscuity would be an evil, but it does not in itself involve this particular immorality. The worst evils in the present situation are due not to the “lower” half of the double standard but to the doubleness itself.
It is true that the ideal of womanly virtue is only one element in the conventional system of sex morality. But, like a Leibnitzian monad, it reflects the whole universe within itself—the universe of sex mores. It is in no real sense any “higher” than the ideal by which men have lived. ”

“ This commerce between men and women is not merely sexual, in the narrow sense which we have given the word; it involves every human joy, all the thoughts and aspirations of mankind stretching into infinity. It is the thing which has inspired all great artists, mystical as well as earthy. It is the point of reference for any morality which is not a disguised kind of adaptation; for virtue consists in the capacity to partake freely of human happiness. All reform, all economic and political theory has a meaning in so far as it makes for this ”

“ We may not assume, as some do, that the difference between major and minor creativeness lies in degrees of rationality. This is certainly erroneous. The true creator is what he is, not because of his rationality but because of what he does with it. The differentia, as I see them, are two: boldness of imagination and tremendous concentration on self. The creator, when he creates, is spiritually alone; he dominates his material by drawing it into the self and he permits his imagination, for once torn off the moorings of tradition and precedent, to indulge in flights of gigantic sweep. ”

“ Similarly those who are deliberately unfaithful should be disgraced—not for the act of unfaith but for the hypocrisy of remaining in a union which that very act, which the temptation to that very act, shows to have lost its purpose and its meaning.
This sort of social control is not my ideal. Love is like religion, a matter for the individual soul. To change partners in love is very much like changing one’s opinion on some deep and vital matter. The spirit must bear its own inherent witness. ”

“ But where our instrumental philosophy has had the most grotesque effect has been upon our conception of love. People have come to regard love as merely a device for propagating the race. Now this view of love is not new; it has always been dear to the bourgeoisie, who have always thought it a matter of immense moment that they should have sons to carry on their businesses when they were dead. It is the immemorial philistine conception of love: the strange thing is that it has been taken over by the intelligentsia and glorified. ”

“ They are so completely unable to lose themselves carelessly in passion and so insistent upon the need of adjusting it somehow to the other interests of life that they strike one as more like saints than like gallants, and their books are far more chilling than inflammatory. Huxley and Joyce try to laugh sex away, but their scorn of the flesh suggests Erasmus more than Rabelais, and, as for Lawrence, his novels constitute so solemn a warning that one imagines him as thoroughly bored with the exigencies of passion and more likely to make his disciples celibates than debauchés. ”

“ Just as women have imitated the drug-habits of men, without the faintest excuse or reason, merely to show that they can, so are they imitating men’s sex habits, in large measure. Those who go too far in such excesses will presumably die without issue, doing no permanent harm to the stock. This wild excitement over sex, as if it were a new discovery peculiar to our time, will be allayed by further knowledge. Even a little study of the common facts of nature has a cooling and heartening influence. ”

“ She can point out in support of this attitude that the past does contain its female geniuses, however few; and certainly if all the barriers that have been set up against woman’s entry into the larger world have not entirely stifled female genius, we may at least look forward hopefully to a kinder future. Something of this attitude, of this demand for free experimentation, must make part of every woman’s armor against the implications of this theory. But taken alone, it becomes more merely defensive than the status of the theory deserves. For it is really the theory that must defend itself. ”

“ We burn men at the stake to light a Roman garden, to save the world from the horror of heresy, or to protect the sanctity of female virtue and assure the supremacy of the white race, but we burn them always; we fight because arms are glorious, because the service of God demands the rescue of His holy [Pg 169] sepulcher from the infidel, or because we must make the world safe for peace, but always we fight; and the most important thing is the insistent lust of cruelty or the impulse to fight rather than the rationalization of these motives. ”

“ She must learn them by heart and accept them on faith as the Pythagoreans must have had to learn their curious list of taboos, a list running from the taboo against eating beans to that against sitting on a quart measure. This ideal of virtue does not apply with equal rigidity to men; quite different things are expected of them and accepted for them. It is obvious that two such conflicting ideals by the very nature of their combination will produce a class of women who do not live up to the standard of virtue set them as members of their sex. ”

“ The prostitute is to society that one thing, defined by the purpose which she serves, and that is all she is, all she is allowed to be. The depersonalization, the moral non-existence, one might call it, of a large number of women is, then, implicit in the social system currently accepted. It is not a punishment meted out to those who fail to act in accordance with the social scheme (though it is as such, of course, that society defends it) but is itself an absolutely essential element in the social scheme, an element woven in and out through the entire fabric of current sex morality. ”

“ People have always felt this vaguely; it has made labor endurable to them; but hardly ever have they recognized it clearly, and to the poets and artists who know it they have always responded a little skeptically. They have thought of love as a justification a little too materialistic for life; but love is only materialistic when it is regarded as a means.
To accept men and women as ends in themselves, to enter into their life as one of them, is to partake of absolute life, that life which at every moment realizes itself, existing for its own sake. ”

“ How, he asks in effect, is he to poetize this ridiculous function, which he shares with the beasts, and concerning which science is constantly presenting us with an increasing amount of disillusioning knowledge? Exercising the most perverse ingenuity in confronting romance with biology and in establishing the identity (in the realm of fact) of love and lust, he has continually tracked the trail of the beast into the holy of holies—but only because it hurt him so much to find it there. ”

“ The precautions which a good woman takes to preserve her purity are indeed legion. There are places where no nice woman will go, situations with which she must have no immediate acquaintance, people with whom she must not associate; there are various embodiments of evil, in short, to which she must not expose herself. That these evils should exist, that they should be tolerated as meeting certain needs in the lives of men and be made possible by other women—all this the average good woman swallows without repulsion, or, more commonly, ignores. ”

“ But the census bureau, compiling all the facts of feminine industry, forgot to note that woman might perform these amazingly varied operations, outside the home, without changing in any measurable degree the rooted conception of her nature and activities. She may step out of skirts into knickers, cut her hair in a dozen short shapes and even beat a man in a prize fight, but old ideas as to her place and qualities endure. ”

“ But most of all I am for tolerance in sex relations and for respecting privacy. Why not all kinds of relations for all kinds of persons? Just as there are now, but with respect or tolerance for the individual and without hypocrisy. ”

“ When the world of nations will sheathe its sword forever—an event toward the realization of which woman will probably contribute more than man—woman, to whom nothing human is foreign, will at last be free to show the world what she can accomplish as the mother of the family of man. ”

“ In this moving picture there is illustrated what I call the insane view of monogamic marriage, namely, that it is put on like a shirt or a [Pg 199] coat and must be kept on however ill-fitting, comfortless, unclean, or dangerous, and that in this mere keeping on there is virtue. There is the further implication that marriage has nothing to do with good behavior, which is rewarded even in penitentiaries, or with ill; that it is, indeed, an abstract kind of fate, a magical or infernal machine, a metaphysical trap. Once you are caught in it, you must stay caught. To wriggle is sin. ”

“ And for all this the age—an age in which labor has a fantastic prominence—is responsible; for it is in a time when everybody works, and when there is nothing conceivable that one can do but work, that the cantankerous question of inequality arises. Only in a race can one be slower than another; only then does the necessity [Pg 75] to become as good a runner as the fastest come home poignantly to every one. But if it should happen that life is not a race at all? ”

“ The truth is that we dare not admit that any pleasure whatever has a right to exist without serving society, and serving it deliberately. The joys of other generations have become our duties; and it is significant that Mr. Shaw and the bulk of the intelligentsia are at one on the birth-rate with the Roman Catholic Church, that church which has on many occasions through its theologians affirmed its belief that sensual love is a guilty thing, and, using its own kind of logic, has exhorted man to multiply and replenish the earth. ”

“ Men and women are ignoring old laws. In their relations with each other they are living according to tangled, conflicting codes. Remnants of early admonitions and relationships, the dictates of custom, the behavior of their friends, their own tastes and desires, elusive dreams of a loveliness not provided for by rules—all these are scrambling to fill the gap that was left when Right and Wrong finally followed the other absolute monarchs to an empty, nominal existence somewhere in exile. But the traditional, ministerial method with chaos was not Jehovah’s method. ”

“ But as long as the female geniuses remain undiscovered, it must be also a bit insecure. Women may have minds—every average man will now grant that. But (he will quickly ask) have they ever much more than average minds? Look at history, which this time really does prove what you want it to. Every high peak in the historic landscape is masculine. Point them out just as they occur to you: Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Virgil, Horace, Catullus, Plato, Socrates, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Watt, Edison, Steinmetz, Heine, Shelley, Keats, Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Tolstoi....
Where are the female geniuses? ”

“ To frame a rational theory of the relations of men and women is easy and agreeable. The very fashioners of such theories, being human, will be brought, under the discomforts of social pressure, to seem to assent to all that their minds most passionately deny. A man or a woman of the highest philosophic insight will struggle through the ignominy of the divorce courts not so much in order to dissolve a meaningless legal bond as to save some one whom he or she loves and reveres from the criticism of the vulgar. ”

“ Friendship between men and women is rather a new thing in the history of the world. Friendship depends upon equality and choice, and there has been very little of either in the relations of the sexes, up to the present. A woman does not choose her male relatives, nor is she according to archaic family laws their equal; motives other than personal choice might lead her to become a man’s wife; wholly impersonal reasons might place her in the relationship of kept mistress. ”