Sexual union

“ That legal bond is a recognition that the introduction of a new individual into the community is not, like sexual union, a mere personal fact, but a social fact, a fact in which the State cannot fail to be concerned. And the more we investigate the tendency of the modern marriage movement the more we shall realize that its attitude of freedom, of individual moral responsibility, in the formation of sexual relationships, is compensated by an attitude of stringency, of strict social oversight, in the matter of procreation. ”

“ The state of the countryman or peasant is advantageous for marriage, not only because it does not offer such a suitable soil for prostitution, but because the danger of venereal disease is diminished, and the procreation of healthy offspring favors conjugal happiness and constancy in sexual union. From the religious point of view, the freedom in sexual intercourse which prevails among country people before marriage is looked upon as immoral ”

“ Quite a large family could easily result from quite a few sexual unions. For the rest the couple should be celibate. Any intercourse not having procreation as its intention is “sexual union as an end in itself,” and therefore by inference condemned by the Lambeth Conference.
[18] Think of the facts of life. Let us recall our own love—our marriage, our honeymoon. Has not sexual union over and over again been the physical expression of our love without thought or intention of procreation? Have we all been wrong? ”

“ It would obviously be premature to express either approval or disapproval of the conceptions of sexual morality which Ellen Key has developed with such fervour and insight. It scarcely seems probable that the methods of sexual union, put forward as an alternative to celibacy by some of the adherents of the new movement, are likely to become widely popular, even if legalized in an increasing number of countries. I have elsewhere given reasons to believe that the path of progress lies mainly in the direction of a reform of the present institution of marriage. ”

“ All this, until the actual day of weaning, comes strictly within the cycle of Woman’s complete sexual experience. To suppose that the mere act of sexual union, which is the first step in this cycle, is sufficient or adequate in the case of Woman, especially positive Woman, is to court disaster, it is to violate her deepest craving. ”

“ The paths of civilization, from the complete promiscuity of sexual intercourse to the lofty ideal of life-long monogamic union, has not been a straightforward one, but has been marked by various aberrations of sexual relationship; hetairism, prostitution, polyandry, incest, rape, the jus primae noctis, etc. The anthropologist is able to trace the successive stages of the development of the institution of monogamic marriage ”

“ The difficulty is that such preference, of profound biological importance, is often thwarted among civilised people by considerations of property and the accepted morality. From this standpoint permanent marriage may often fail to do justice to the sexual needs both of the individual and the wider needs of the race. Nature has no care for sex-morals as we understand them, any mode of sexual union is equally right so long as it serves the race-process. ”

“ In all these cases the custom of mutual avoidance is observed by persons of opposite sex who, though physically capable of sexual union, are forbidden by tradition and public opinion to have any such commerce with each other. ”

“ Many physically intact individuals of both sexes are far more contaminated than those who have had actual sexual experience. Others again, superior in the abstract, and from the physically sexual aspect, are ethically inferior to the unchaste, so that the union with these latter would be more likely to prove happy than a union with those who are nominally pure." And further, "Careful fathers of marriageable daughters, who seek this virginity in their sons-in-law, will, if they find it, seldom find it a guarantee for the simultaneous possession of solid moral qualities." ”

“ There was complete failure to realize that nothing is more immoral than the existence of unreal sexual unions, not only from the point of view of theoretical but also of practical morality, for no community could tolerate a majority of such unions. ”

“ Where such intellectual harmony fails to exist, the sexual intercourse is purely mechanical and thereby becomes immoral. Men and women of refinement demand a mutual attraction that extends beyond their sexual relations, and that shall have an ennobling effect upon the new beings which may spring from their union. ”

“ The advantage for women of free sexual unions over compulsory marriage is well recognized in the case of the working classes of London, among whom sexual relationships before marriage are not unusual, and are indulgently regarded. ”

“ From a mistaken standpoint other supporters of women’s rights oppose the ideal method in sex-relations, life-long monogamy, and the ideal of sexual sensibility, motherhood, and they put forward quite new sexual pretensions on behalf of women, as belonging to them by natural right. ”

“ As we proved by our whole argument, the progress visible in this chain of phenomena is connected with the peculiarity of more and more curtailing the sexual freedom of the group marriage for women, but not for men. And group marriage is actually practised by men to this day. What is considered a crime for women and entails grave legal and social consequences for them, is considered honorable for men or in the worst case a slight moral blemish born with pleasure. ”

“ The modern advocates of the rights of women, who demand that in the sexual sphere also, woman should receive emancipation, oppose the view that in the male the sexual impulse is stronger than in the female, and also the view that whilst in the male the impulse is simply one toward sexual congress, in the female the determining motive to intercourse is furnished by the desire for motherhood. ”

“ But the emergence of women has had another significant effect, namely: an increase in frankness concerning extra-legal sexual relations, if not in their number. Of late there has been much public discussion of the wantonness of our modern youth; which, being interpreted, means the disposition of our girls to take the same liberty of indulgence in pre-nuptial sexual affairs that has always been countenanced in boys. This tendency is an entirely [Pg 148] natural result of woman’s increased freedom. ”

“ The state therefore, the argument goes, has an interest in encouraging all opposite-sex sexual activity, whether responsible or irresponsible, procreative or otherwise, to occur with a stable marriage, as this encourages the development of a social norm that opposite-sex sexual activity should occur within marriage. ”

“ Not only have the acquired liberties and the social aims of the present day a tendency to give to women in general a freer and higher position, to emancipate them from the bonds in which owing to the conditions of family life they have so long been shackled, but some members of the women’s rights party go even farther, and demand for women greater freedom in the sphere of sexual activity. ”

“ In addition to the imposition of these arbitrary standards of masculinity and femininity, society has forced upon its members conformity to a uniform and institutionalized type of sexual relationship. This institutionalized and inflexible type of sexual activity, which is the only expression of the sexual emotion meeting with social approval, not only makes no allowance for biological variations, but takes even less into account the vastly complex and exceedingly different conditionings of the emotional reactions of the individual sex life. ”

“ Conscious of the grandeur of their sexual and social duty they will raise aloft [63] the standard of our descent, which is that of the true future life of man, at the same time striving for the emancipation of their sex. Viewed in this way, the sexual role of woman becomes elevated and solemn. Man should less and less maintain his indifference towards the social miseries to which the slavery of woman has led, which has lasted thousands of years and which has dishonored the highest functions of her sex, by abuses without number. ”

“ With the disappearance of the artificial barriers in the way of friendship between the sexes and of the economic motive to sexual relationships—perhaps the two chief forces which now tend to produce promiscuous sexual intercourse, whether dignified or not with the name of marriage—men and women will be free to engage, unhampered, in the search, so complicated in a highly civilized condition of society, for a fitting mate. ”

“ The laws regarding marriage which provide both when the sexual powers may be used and the legal and societal context in which children are born and brought up, as well as laws forbidding adultery, fornication and homosexual practices which express the negative of the proposition, confining sexuality to lawful marriage, form a pattern so deeply pressed into the substance of our social life that any Constitutional doctrine in this area must build upon that basis. ”

“ With deep sorrow we must admit the absolute truth of the charge that too many men clamber out of the abyss of debauchery to a blighted marriage. But the demand 264for equal moral rights, for the abandonment of the hitherto prevalent bisexual ethical standards, is in vain conflict with actuality, with the defensive instincts of young men, with the difficulties entailed by the struggle for existence, with the increasing pretensions (to sexual freedom) of women themselves ”

“ That is precisely the essence of prostitution.
The only legitimately moral end of marriage—whether we regard it from the wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of human society—is as a sexual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of sexual selection, and having as its direct object a united life of complete mutual love and as its indirect object the procreation of the race. Unless procreation forms part of the object of marriage, society has nothing whatever to do with it and has no right to make its voice heard. ”

“ So long as responsibility was denied to women, so long as a father or a husband, backed up by the community, held himself responsible for a woman's sexual behavior, for her "virtue," it was necessary that the whole of sexual morality should revolve around the entrance to the vagina. It became absolutely essential to the maintenance of morality that all eyes in the community should be constantly directed on to that point, and the whole marriage law had to be adjusted accordingly. ”

“ There is one great modern movement of a definite kind which will serve to show how clearly sexual morality is to-day moving towards a new standpoint. This is the changing attitude of the bulk of the community towards both State marriage and religious marriage, and the growing tendency to disallow State interference with sexual relationships, apart from the production of children. ”

“ There is, however, a perhaps even greater interest in tracing the development of the same tendency among new prosperous and highly progressive communities who have either not inherited the custom of sexual freedom or are now only reviving it. ”

“ When I ask you to unspecialise, I am thinking not of the abolition of sex, but the abolition of the irksome, restricting, obstructive obsession with sex. It may be true that sex made society, that the first society was the sex-cemented family, the first state a confederacy of blood relations, the first laws sexual taboos. ”

“ In this attitude towards sex boundaries or captions may lie the explanation, incidentally, of what is a constant puzzle to the European visitor—the freedom of social intercourse allowed to the youth of opposite sexes. Since consummation only constitutes sexual intimacy in American opinion, and since consummation, it is assumed, is utterly out of the question, why raise barriers between boys and girls? The assumption that consummation is out of the question is, by and large, correct, which is still another puzzle. ”

“ A Catholic revisionist/progressive view of sex before or outside of marriage would maintain that sexual encounters cause no unjust harm, involve free consent, mutuality of sexual desire, and equality of personhood, power, and status. ”

“ Adultery, homosexuality and the like are sexual intimacies which the State forbids altogether, but the intimacy of husband and wife is necessarily an essential and accepted feature of the institution of marriage, an institution which the State not only must allow, but which always and in every age it has fostered and protected. ”

“ I will not repeat what I have said in Chapter XIII, but simply state categorically that, when women have acquired in society rights and duties equal to those of men (in accordance with sexual differences) , when they can react freely according to their feminine genius, in a manner as decisive as men, on the destinies of the community, a third fundamental root of present sexual abuses will be suppressed. The complete emancipation of woman thus constitutes our third principal postulate, and in this I am in accord with Westermarck, Secretan and many other eminent persons. ”

“ We have long sought to preserve our social balance by placing an unreasonable licence in the one scale, an equally unreasonable abstinence in the other; the economic independence of women, tending to render both extremes unnecessary, can alone place the sexual relationships on a sound and free basis.
The State regulation of marriage has undoubtedly played a large and important part in the evolution of society. ”