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Book of Life, The

<h2>CHAPTER XXXII SEX AND THE POOR</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and the diseases which result from it.) </div> It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, without drawing the poor after them; and in addition to this, the poor have their own evil instincts, which fester in neglect. There were several hundred thousand dark rooms, that is rooms without light or ventilation, in New York City before the war. Now the country is reported to be short a million homes, and in New York City working girls are sleeping six or eight in a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, and the world moves back to that primitive communism, in which incest is an everyday affair, and little children learn all the vices there are. I have in my hand a pamphlet by a physician, in charge of a hospital in New York, who in fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who have been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months! I have another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who discusses the problem of the thousands of deserted wives, most of them with children, many with children yet unborn. As I write, there are millions of men out of work in our country, and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to the road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket stiffs"; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the more prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality there will inevitably be. Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. Many years ago I visited the mill towns of New England, "she-towns" they are called, and one of the young fellows said to me that you could buy a girl there for the price of a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have previously referred, and see how our working girls live. Dorothy Richardson describes her room-mate, who read cheap novels which she found in the gutter weeklies. She read them over and over; when she had got to the bottom of the pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that she had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richardson happened to be groping in a corner of a closet, and came upon a great pile of bottles, and examined them, and was made sick with horror—abortion mixtures. Dr. William J. Robinson, an authority on the subject, estimates that there are one million abortions in the United States every year. Some of these are accidental, caused by venereal disease, but the vast majority are deliberate acts, crimes under the law, murder of human life. Dr. Robinson also estimates, from the many thousands of cases which come to him, that ninety-five per cent of all men have at some time practiced self-abuse. He is a strenuous opponent of what he calls "hysteria" on the subject of venereal disease, and insists that its prevalence is exaggerated; that instead of one person in ten being syphilitic, as is commonly stated, the proportion is only one in twenty. He insists that the percentage of persons having had gonorrhea is only twenty-five per cent, instead of seventy-five or eighty-five. I find that other authorities generally agree in the statement that fifty per cent of young men become infected with some venereal disease before they reach the age of thirty. The Committee of Seven in New York estimated in 1903 that there were two hundred thousand cases of syphilis in the city, and eight hundred thousand of gonorrhea. There were villages in France before the war in which twenty-five per cent of the inhabitants were syphilitic, and in Russia there were towns in which it was said that every person was syphilitic. We may safely say that these latter are the only towns in Europe in which there was not an enormous increase of this disease during and since the war. What are the consequences of these diseases? The consequences are frightful suffering, not merely to persons guilty of immorality, but to innocent persons. Dr. Morrow, generally recognized as the leading authority on this subject, estimates that ten per cent of all wives are infected with venereal disease by their husbands; he estimates that thirty per cent of all the infected women in New York were wives who had got the disease from their husbands. It is estimated that thirty per cent of all the births, where either parent has syphilis, result in abortions. It is estimated that fifty per cent of childlessness in marriage is caused by gonorrhea, and twenty-five per cent of all existing blindness. In Germany, before the war, there were thirty thousand persons born blind from this cause. It is estimated that ninety-five per cent of all abdominal operations performed upon women are due to gonorrhea. And any of these horrors may fall upon persons who lead lives of the strictest chastity. There was a case reported in Germany of 236 children who contracted venereal disease from swimming in a public bath. All these things are products of our system of marriage-plus-prostitution. They are all part of that system, and no study of the system is complete without them. Everywhere throughout modern civilization prostitution is an enormous and lucrative industry. In New York it is estimated to give employment to two hundred thousand women, to say nothing of the managers, and the runners, and the men who live off the women. There are thousands of resorts, large and small, high-priced and cheap, and the police know all about it, and derive a handsome income from it. And you find it the same in every great city of the world; in every port where sailors land, or every place where crowds of men are expected. If there is to be a football game, or a political convention, the managers of the industry know about it, and while they may never have heard the libel that Socialism preaches sexual license, they all know that capitalism practices it, and they provide the necessary means. In the United States there are estimated to be a half a million prostitutes, counting the inmates of houses alone. During the late war, at the army bases in France, the British government maintained official brothels; but if you published anything about this in England, you ran a chance of having your paper suppressed. During the occupation of the Rhine country, the French sent in negro troops, savages from the heart of Africa, whose custom it is to cut off the ears of their enemies in battle; and the French army compelled the German population to supply white women for these troops. I have quoted in "The Brass Check" a pious editorial from the Los Angeles Times, bidding the mothers of America be happy, because "our boys in France" were safe in the protecting arms of the Y. M. C. A. and the Knights of Columbus. I dared not publish at this time a passage which I had clipped from the London Clarion, in which A. M. Thompson told how he watched the "doughboys" in the caf�s of Paris, with a girl on each knee, and a glass of wine in each hand. I will add one little anecdote, giving you a glimpse of the sex conventions of war. The American army made desperate efforts to keep down venereal disease, and required all men to report to their regimental surgeon immediately after having had sex relations. Our army moved into Coblentz, and the regulations strictly forbade any fraternizing with the inhabitants. But immediately it was discovered that there was an increase of disease, and investigation was made, and revealed that men had been ceasing to report to the surgeons, because they were afraid of being punished for having "fraternized with the enemy." So a new order was issued, providing that having sexual intercourse would not be considered as "fraternizing." I do not know any better way to distinguish my ideal of morality from the military ideal, than to say that according to my understanding of it, the sex relationship should always and everywhere imply and include "fraternizing." Finally, in concluding this picture of our present-day sex arrangements, there is a brief word to be said about divorce. In the year 1916, the last statistics available as I write, there were just over a million marriages in the United States, and there were over one hundred and twelve thousand divorces. This would indicate that one marriage in every nine resulted in shipwreck. But as a matter of fact the proportion is greater, because the marriages necessarily precede the divorces, and the proportion of divorces in 1916 should be calculated upon the number of marriages which took place some five or ten years previously. Of the one million marriages in 1916, we may say that one in seven or one in eight will end in the divorce courts. Let this suffice for a glimpse of the system of marriage-plus-prostitution—a field of weeds which we have somehow to plow up and prepare for a harvest of rational and honest love! <h2>CHAPTER XXXIII SEX AND NATURE</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Maintains that our sex disorders are not the result of natural or physical disharmony.) </div> Elie Metchnikoff, one of the greatest of scientists, wrote a book entitled "The Nature of Man," in which he studied the human organism from the point of view of biology, demonstrating that in our bodies are a number of relics of past stages of evolution, no longer useful, but rather a source of danger and harm. We have, for example, in the inner corner of the eye a relic of that third eyelid whereby the eagle is enabled to look at the sun. This is a harmless relic. But we have also an appendix, a degenerate organ of digestion, or gland of secretion, which now serves as a center of infection and source of danger. We have likewise a lower bowel, a survival of our hay-eating days, and a cause of autointoxication and premature death. Among the sources of trouble, Metchnikoff names the fact that the human male possesses a far greater quantity of sexual energy than is required for purposes of procreation. This becomes a cause of disharmony and excess, it causes man to wreck his health and destroy himself. Manifestly, this is a serious matter; for if it is true, our efforts to find health and happiness in love are doomed to failure, and Lecky is right when he describes the prostitute as the "guardian of virtue," the eternal and necessary scapegoat of humanity. But I do not believe it is true; I think that here is one more case of the endless blundering of scientists and philosophers who attempt to teach physiology, politics, religion and law, without having made a study of economics. I do not believe that the sex troubles of mankind are physiological in their nature, but have their origin in our present system of class privilege. I believe they are caused, not by the blunders of nature, but by the blunders of man as a social animal. Let us take a glimpse at primitive man. I choose the Marquesas Islands, because we have complete reports about them from numerous observers. Here was a race of people, not interfered with by civilization, who manifested all that overplus of sexual energy to which Metchnikoff calls attention. They placed no restraint whatever upon sex activity, they had no conception of such an idea. Their games and dances were sex play, and so also, in great part, was their religion. Yet we do not find that they wrecked themselves. Physically speaking, they were one of the most perfect races of which we have record. Both the men and women were beautiful; they were active and strong from childhood to old age, and—here is the significant thing—they were happy. They were a laughing, dancing, singing race. They hardly knew grief or fear at all. They knew how to live, and they enjoyed every process and aspect of their lives, just as children do, naively and simply. This included their sex life; and I think it assures us that there can be no such fundamental physical disharmony in the human organism as the great Russian scientist thought he had discovered. Is it not a fact that throughout nature a superfluity of any kind of energy or product may be a source of happiness, rather than of distress? Consider the singing of the birds! Or consider nature's impulse to cover a field with useless plants, and how by a little cunning, we are able to turn it into a harvest for our own use! In the life of our bodies one may show the same thing again and again. We have within us the possibility of and the impulse toward more muscular activity than our survival makes necessary; but we do not regard this additional energy as a curse of nature, and a peril to our lives—we turn out and play baseball. We have an impulse to see more than is necessary, so we climb mountains, or go traveling. We have an impulse to hear more, so we go to a concert. We have an impulse to think more, so we play chess, or whist, or write books and accumulate libraries. Never do we think of these activities as signs of an irrevocable blunder on the part of nature. But about the activities of love we feel differently; and why is this? If I say that it is because we have an unwholesome and degraded attitude toward love, because, as a result of religious superstition we fear it, and dare not deal with it honestly, the reader may suspect that I am preparing to hint at some self-indulgence, some form of sex orgy such as the "turkey trot" and the "bunny hug" and the "grizzly bear," the "shimmy" and the "toddle" and the "cuddle." I hasten to explain that I do not mean any of the abnormalities and monstrosities of present-day fashionable life. Neither do I mean that we should set out to emulate the happy cannibals in the South Seas. In the Book of the Mind I set forth as carefully as I knew how, the difference between nature and man, the life of instinct and the life of reason. It is my conviction that if civilized life is to go on, there must be a far wider extension of judgment and self-control in human affairs; our lost happiness will be found, not by going "back to nature," but by going forward to a new and higher state, planned by reason and impelled by moral idealism. But we find ourselves face to face with horrible sex disorders, and a great scientist tells us they are nature's tragic blunder, of which we are the helpless victims. Manifestly, the way to decide this question is to go to nature, and see if primitive people, having the same physical organism as ours, had the same troubles and spent their lives in the same misery. If they did, then it may be that we are doomed; but if they did not, then we can say with certainty that it is not nature, but ourselves, who have blundered. Our task then becomes to apply reason to the problem; to take our present sex arrangements, our field of bad-smelling weeds, and plow it thoroughly, and sow it with good seed, and raise a harvest of happiness in love. It is my belief that, admitting true love—honest and dignified and rational love—it is possible to pour into it any amount of sex energy, to invent a whole new system of beautiful and happy love play. <h2>CHAPTER XXXIV LOVE AND ECONOMICS</h2> <div class="blockquot">(Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due to the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.) </div> If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, what is it? Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature, the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and virtue are products like vinegar." Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and class privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited power with practically no responsibility—a strain which not one human being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the conferring upon a class of power without responsibility means the collapse of that class and the downfall of its civilization. So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system of privilege does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his sex desires. What it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to abolish that mutuality in sex, that interaction between male and female influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual selection, and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit. In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her, according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type. But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in which opportunity, and indeed survival, depend upon money, and the whole tendency of society is to make money standards supreme. We do not like to admit this, of course; our instincts revolt against it, and our higher faculties reinforce the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives, and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear people deny it is money which determines admission into what is called "society," the intimate life of the ruling class. They will tell you that it is not money, it is "good taste," "refinement," "charm of personality," and so on. But if you analyze all these things, you speedily discover that they are made out of money; they are symbols of the possession of money, devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping themselves apart from those who do not possess it. I would safely defy a member of the ruling class to name a single element in what he calls "refinement," or "good taste," that is not in its ultimate analysis a symbol of the possession of money. Let it be the pronunciation of a word, or the cut of a coat, or the method of handling a fork—whatever it may be, it is part of a code, revealing that the person, or more important yet, the ancestors of the person, have belonged to the leisure class, and have had time and opportunity to learn to do things in a certain precise conventional way. I say "conventional," for very frequently these tests have no relationship whatever to reality. Considered as a matter of common sense and convenience, it is a great deal better to eat peas with a spoon than with a fork, and to use both a knife and fork in eating lettuce; but if you eat peas with a spoon, or use a knife on lettuce, every member of the ruling class will instantly know that you are an interloper, as much so as if you took to throwing the china at your hostess. Our culture is a money culture, our standards are money standards, and our sex decisions are based upon money, not upon love. Any man can have money in our society, provided the accident of birth favors him, and it is everywhere known that any man who has money can get a wife. It is certainly not true that any man with no money can get a wife, and it is true that most men who have little money have to take wives who have less—that is, who belong to a lower class, according to the world's standards. The average young girl of the propertied classes is trained for marriage as for any other business. She is taught to be sexually cold, but to imitate sexual excitement deliberately, so as to arouse it in the male, and to keep herself surrounded with a swarm of males; this being the basis of her prestige, the factor which will cause the "eligible" man, the "catch," to desire her. In polite society this proceeding is known as "coquetry," or "charm," and it would be no exaggeration to say that seventy-five per cent of all the novels so far written in the world are expositions of this activity; also that when we go to the theater, we go in order to watch and sympathize with these manifestations of pecuniary sexuality. As a rule the young girl knows what she is doing, but she is taught to camouflage it, to preserve her "innocence." She would not dream of marrying for money; she wants to marry something "distinguished"—that is to say, something which has received the stamp of approval from a world which approves money. She wants to marry somebody who is "elegant," who is in "good form"; she wants to marry without having to think about the horrid subject of money at all, and so she is carefully chaperoned, and confined to a world where nothing but money is to be met. In Tennyson's poem, "The Northern Farmer," the old fellow is coaching his son on the subject of marriage, and they are driving along a road, and the farmer listens to his horses' hoofs, and they are saying, "Proputty, proputty, proputty!" The farmer sums up in one sentence the doctrine of pecuniary marriage as it is taught to the ruling class virgin: "Do�n't thee marry for money, but go� wheer money is." In this process, of course, the ruling class virgin must spend a great deal of money in order to keep up her own prestige; and when she is married, she must spend it to keep up the prestige of her unmarried sisters, and then of her children. As a result of this, the only ruling class males who can afford to marry are the rich ones. There are always some who are richer, and these are the most desirable; so the tendency with each generation is to put the period of marriage further off; the man has to wait until he has accumulated enough "proputty" to satisfy the girl of his desires—a girl whom he admires because of her pecuniary prestige. He delays, and meantime he satisfies his passions with the daughters of the poor. As a result of this, when he does finally come to marry, he is apt to be unlovely and unlovable. The woman frequently does not love him at all, but takes him cold-bloodedly because he is "eligible"; in that case she is a cold and "sexless" wife. Or else, after she has married him she discovers his unloveliness, and either decides that all men are selfish brutes, and reconciles herself to a celibate life, or else she goes out and preys upon the domestic happiness of other women. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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