Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse
I sometimes think that a calm and exhaustive study of the American temperament in relation to sex and its various manifestations would result in the scientific conclusion that this country, taken as a whole, is as much a victim of a deep-seated neurosis relating to this impulse as any, the most morbid of those who appeal to psycho-analysis for treatment. The profound and even convulsive interest in any case involving a sex crime or delusion (Thaw, Leo Frank, Billy Brown, Carlisle Harris, Nan Patterson, Durant; or any negro rape case in the South); the ridiculous and quite neurotic interest displayed by grown men and women, to say nothing of children, in the exploits of so-called “cuties”—the “Spring Blossoms,” “June Elfs,” “Violet Dawns” of the movies—the perennial and astonishingly profitable (in so far as a certain class of theatrical management is concerned) interest of the male and even female American in the utterly mechanical and standardized beauty chorus shows with their (presumably) seventeen-year-old maids in bathing, bedroom-bath and other forms of abbreviated attire! Are not these points in evidence? In the matter of the latter, no story is necessary; just erotic color, music, dancing evolutions and double-meant (I almost said “mint”) jokes, and the thing is done.
Again, look at any American city where morality or religion, or both, presumably have full sway (and in what American city are they not supposed to be dominant?), and what do you find? The most desirable locations in the best portions of the city, outside of the trade centers, given over to the leading churches and the newspapers, which preach a lofty code of ethics and morals which they themselves find difficult if not impossible to practice; while elsewhere the local bookstores and picture shops and bill-boards are crowded with a class of literature and illustration, or so-called “art,” which to read or view, according to the adjacent churches and newspapers, would result in the loss of your immortal soul as well as your local standing. And yet these same are displayed, sold and read plentifully and with avidity, for the very good reason, no doubt, that they satisfy a craving and a thirst not otherwise open to satiation. In any town of any size, what pictures are not displayed and sold: “September Morn,” “Youth,” “Purity,” “Innocence,” “Yes,” “Waiting,” and the like, disguised as little as the law will permit. Again, where will you not find a swarm of sex magazines labeled “breezy,” “snappy” and the like, the kind that any sex-suppressed neurotic might well crave, and all received with the profoundest gratitude and widest distribution? Where in America, any more than abroad (barring countries of Asia, Africa and the South Pacific, where sex-suppression is not the order of the day) does one lack for pornographic nudes or privately circulated writings of the most lurid character? Are the art or book or drug stores of the small towns free of them? Is it not true that you can still buy almost everywhere, “Three Weeks,” “Life’s Shop Window,” “The Yoke,” and other such classics, whereas those admirable volumes of life and satire “The Decameron,” “Droll Stories,” “The Confessions,” Cellini, are only to be discovered, and that by chance and peradventure and “against the law,” on the dark and musty shelves of some out-of-the-way old book store, and these consumed by the intelligensia and the sex-satisfied only, and with an upward mouth-curl of amusement at the innate humors of passion? The hobble-skirt, the tango dance, the Hula-Hula or Hawaiian melodies—what did each in its day indicate? Plays like “Everywoman,” “Experience,” “The Girl from Rector’s,” “Parlor, Bedroom and Bath”—what did they suggest?
Not so very long since, I stopped for a little while in a town of a hundred thousand population in the South. It was moral, religious, conventional—in other words, American. It might as well, however, have been in New England, the Northwest, the Southwest, the Middle West, for any difference to be discovered in its moral texture. In this home of chivalry, courtesy, purity and the like, erected originally on the backs of driven slaves, a number of its most interesting points of vantage were as usual occupied by the churches, as impressive and prosperous as those anywhere. It had only one theater of consequence, and that open only two nights a week, if so often. Its poorer classes were entertained by three or four moving-picture establishments (“Passed by the National Board of Censors”); but the well-to-do also attended these, for they had no other place to go for amusement. Yet, in the face of the highly censored “movies,” theater and bookstores and the absence of houses of ill-repute (all suppressed), there were two or three “first-class” hotels, all with their Thès Dansantes, cabaret suppers and the like, of the character of which I propose to speak later. The most exclusive bookstore was so very moral that it would not carry any books not approved by the “Watch and Ward” and “Library Protection” association, nor would the vine-covered library in the best section, although at any time you might have gone to the principal dry-goods store and by a roundabout process secured nearly all that you desired.
While I was in this city a twelve-year-old boy was arrested at one of the railroad stations about two hundred yards from the principal beach for appearing in a two-piece bathing suit. It was not asserted in the prosecution which followed (which was vigorously defended by his father) that a twelve-year-old boy in a two-piece bathing suit was immoral, but a man in a one-piece one or a girl in any kind at all would be, and to avoid the possible vitiation of public purity which might thus follow the boy was arrested. He was discharged with a warning—but even so. You can see how high the virtue at this city should be.
Yet, at the same time, in this same city, were the three aforementioned hotels with their Thès Dansantes, roof gardens, cabaret grills, this, that and the other, and in these might have been seen, any late afternoon or evening, winter and summer, such a collection of sex-struck infants and elders as would be worth the same price of admission anywhere. The clothes! The wondrous shoes and gaudy purses, the subdued and yet moving and suggestive combination of colors! The efforts to flagellate the already too harried imagination with a promise of delights which the local morality squad, I fear, would never permit to be realized. You could pay as much in either of these places for a pot of tea and three little thin slices of toast as you could anywhere in the world. In their efforts to provide you with a superior (sex) atmosphere they made it possible for you so to do.
Wrong? Not a bit. I am not describing it for that purpose; nor am I quarreling with human nature for expressing its inmost desires, being what it is: avid, alluring, secret, hungry. I am smiling at the anachronistic spirit of the same community which would arrest the boy in the bathing suit, prohibit “near beer,” snip every even weakly suggestive passage out of a “movie,” “run” any indecent play (“Hedda Gabler,” let us say, or “The Wild Duck,” since it could not understand them) out of town. No copies of “The Song of Songs,” Rousseau’s “Confessions,” “The Decameron,” or the unexpurgated “Arabian Nights.” Never, never, never! Yet look at these same hotels, these girls and youths clinging to each other in the suggestive dances! The movements, the sinuous, almost savage, abandon, the love-looks, the whispers! And the automobiles lined up along distant country roadsides in the dark later—although not a single house of assignation or prostitution was tolerated within the city limits. One had to secure a Ford and employ the open woods and fields instead. And in the basement next to the barbershop in each hotel was one or more “manicure booths,” curtained confessionals or recessionals, into which one might retire with a manicure maid to have one’s fingers done. Owing to the dashing quality of these maids the business was large.
For myself, I do not know what the psychic or spiritual or creative significance of these impulses of the sexes may be, unless, in truth, within equational limits they are moral or at least essential, and so to be cherished as a good instead of an evil; but one thing is certain: their appearance in this florid public form and in the center of a vice-cured city would indicate that either the attitude of the nation is wrong or that we have in our midst a host of neurotic or sex-struck degenerates who ought to be eliminated from the body civic in a very radical manner. But are they neurotic? Or is it the nation that is wrong, and these but the neurotic symptoms of its error? Certainly, nowhere outside of America and especially in such a vice-taboo realm as this, I fancy, are the terrors of sex excess, the degradation and disease following sex libertinage, more enthusiastically or more glowingly pointed out as the psychic or spiritual aftermath or heavenly punishment of these “sins”; and, yet, for all the length of time these horrors have been “known” or insisted upon or pointed out, and regardless of whether they are really true or not, is there any marked diminution of the so-called sex evil in America? Has the denying of drink or prophylactics to the American sailor or soldier cured him of his interest in sex? Will it? The world apparently, or that part of it expressed by, in or through the sexes, is as avid and seeking as ever. We know, or some of us do, that the chemistry by which we and the sex impulse are compounded is above the knowledge or volition of man, although its object in so far as human moods and passions are concerned, is plain enough. But in America we are not willing, if we do know, to admit it. Our increasing numerical presence here should be evidence enough of its force, but we waive that in favor of our theories in regard to the inherently moral and Christian home—even the complete suppression of sex! That a balance or equation between excess and license and inane, mollusc-like passivism in regard to sex and its expression is all that is ever struck in Nature, is plain enough to those who think; but that an American in authority in state or church should admit it! Life, apparently, is never exact in anything, and the desirability of having it so is of course open to question. But still——
Yet, to me, the impulses we are trying to suppress are, this side of excess, perfectly normal, while the thing we think we want is an infantile conception of life and its processes, unsuited to thinking men and women. Our conviction is apparently that sexuality is essentially wrong and debasing, and yet we do not really think so, as our intense national interest in every phase of sex proves. We are afraid to face ourselves honestly and openly in anything, neurotically so, and that is what makes the American intellect so utterly contemptible and negligible at times. What is nearer the truth is that our attitude is to be psychoanalytically traced in various ways to the strangely exaggerated (neurotic, I think) conceptions of the part sex or its over-emphasis plays in life due to repression, which have followed upon impossible religious theories brought from abroad (Quaker, Methodist, Puritan, Mennonite, Catholic), and our reaction to them. These have developed that repressive social and biologic ignorance regarding sex characteristic of so many American families, offspring of these sects even when they are no longer of them. The conviction that sex is debasing, dominant at least at this time in nearly every American mind, I believe, is to be traced so often to these earlier experiences, particularly with regard to parents and their views. The average American child—and I suppose England is not much better, judging by their novels and morals—is permitted to base its ideals of life and social relations, especially sex relations, on this earlier pretense on the part of parents that sex does not exist—for them at least.
So it is that we find adult boys and girls pretending, even to themselves, that they do not know what sex is and the manner in which children come into existence, and preachers and pretending thinkers speaking and writing as though sex were not an all but dominant force in life. And instead of viewing this inconceivably dull attitude as something that needs modification and bringing ourselves to the realization that there is nothing inherently disgraceful about having sexual desire, or at least knowledge of it, and of eventually gratifying it, we allow ourselves to be kept in tow of crack-brained religionists and ethic mongers who insist on painting our very normal natures as abnormal and so developing national neuroses and psychoses which make us ridiculous, not only to ourselves but to every other nation. It has even succeeded in twisting our judgments in regard to politics and economics. For without a rational conception of the part, and the very normal part, sex plays in life, how can there be sanity in these other things? One cannot be wrong as to one vital point in life and right as to all others. We continue to assert, as a nation and as individuals, that everything sexual is wrong, while at the same time having sexual feelings and impulses which we can scarcely disguise even to ourselves and which we satisfy or over-compensate for in ways too ridiculous to mention (a Billy Sunday revival, for instance; a White Slave Crusade in which our papers blaze with sickening criticism; an insane, an impossible pursuit of money or vice, due to the repression, of every other normal instinct). Truly, a goose nailed to the floor by its feet and stuffed daily to produce an enlarged and salable liver, could be no more ridiculous or pathetic than the average American debarred from every avenue of intelligence or effort save that which relates to money.
It is a bit curious, one cannot help remarking, that the widespread fame and weight of such sincere and eminent investigators as Kraft-Ebbing, Ellis, Freud and his host of followers, with all the profoundly moving evidence of the pathos of sex-repression which they offer, has not had more influence upon our national, if not the world’s international, mind. The sorrows revealed! The grisly prison doors unlocked by the patient and brilliantly revealing researches of Freud alone! The old sorrows dragged from the depths of the repressed subconscious and at last permitted to come forth into the light, where the fortuitous and yet crushing weight of earthly illusion and error may be noted! And yet they have not apparently as yet enlightened or broadened us.
At this point I would like to present a citation from the writings of one of our leading neurologists and psychoanalysts (H. W. Frink) in regard to the type of patient (neurotic) pouring in upon him from all parts of America. “My own experience,” he writes (“Morbid Fears and Compulsions,” page 224), “is that the sexual factor comes to expression in every analysis at once, usually within the first two or three visits, and I am sure that for this result no special technique or dexterities are required; about all that is necessary being to let the patient talk. To the question, Why is the sexual factor dominant in every neurosis? I shall not attempt to make any detailed reply. The answer is perhaps to be sought in the direction indicated by Meyer (“Discussion of Some Fundamental Issues in Freud’s Psychoanalysis,” State Hospital Bulletin, Vol. II, No. 4, 1910), when he says: ‘No experience or part of our life is as much disfigured by convention as the sex feelings and ambitions.’ That is to say, if we had other impulses which throughout the whole life of the individual were so consistently and unremittingly warped, cramped and deformed in every conceivable and unnatural manner (as they are in America) and they had the same strength to rebel against such treatment as have the sex impulses, then we might have neuroses in which they and not the sex factor played the dominant role.”
For my own part, I cannot understand why it is that the human mind, and more especially the American or Anglo-Saxon mind, unless it is regulated by biogenetic forces over which it has no control but which have full control over it, functions so dully in regard to sex and its import. One would assume, from the average religious or social conception of the time, that the sole function of sex in all its ramifications is the production of more children, to live, work and die according to the prescribed routine of the dullest Christian formula. But, unquestionably, sex means much more than that. While it is true that some of the minor professors of psychoanalysis are offering what they are pleased to term the “sublimation of the holophilic (or sex) impulse” into more “useful,” or, at any rate, more agreeable fields of effort via suppression or restraint, this in my judgment is little more than a sop, and an obvious one, to the moralists. What is actually true is that via sex gratification—or perhaps better, its ardent and often defeated pursuit—comes most of all that is most distinguished in art, letters and our social economy and progress generally. It may be and usually is “displaced,” “referred,” “transferred,” “substituted by,” “identified with” desires for wealth, preferment, distinction and what not, but underneath each and every one of such successes must primarily be written a deep and abiding craving for women, or some one woman, in whom the sex desires of any one person for the time being is centered. “Love” or “lust” (and the one is but an intellectual sublimation of the other) moves the seeker in every field of effort. It is the desire to enthrone and enhance, by every possible detail of ornamentation, comfort and color—love, sensual gratification—that man in the main moves, and by that alone. Protean as this impulse may be, and it takes many forms, it stands revealed as the underlying reality of a thousand astounding impulses or disguises—pathetic, lying, simulating, denying, but the same old impulse everywhere and under all circumstances. Refracted as it is by opposition, misunderstanding, failure into a million glistering and lovely or pathetic things, it may seem to be what it is not; but hold fast, trace it back, and there, at bottom, sex appears, a craving for love, and its accompanying sensual gratification, and there is no other.
But the thing which is especially interesting about America is its infantile blindness to all this and the pathetic and at least semi-neurotic condition into which we have fallen in consequence. As one views American life to-day it can be safely asserted that scarcely one of a hundred America men or women view this phase of life intelligibly, although they respond to it normally enough in some of its other phases. Usually before their so-called vision, and between them and their daily deeds, hangs an inane and miasmatic cloud of cant and make-believe. The physiologically and biologically informed know, of course, how ridiculous is the assumption that sex union is the narrowly “moral” function which the religionists would have one believe, although moral it may well be in some larger constructive sense, as is any other life process, if life itself can be termed moral. But that it can involve, without becoming profoundly ridiculous, a narrow or sectarian religious interpretation, is open to question. That it has a sad, tragic, even ruthless aspect (read Maeterlinck’s description of the struggles of some flowers to be born and continue the species) is not, scientifically at least, to be combatted. In its biological aspects it has many, many tragic sides, although so dull is the race to all but its most individual ambitions and needs that it cannot be expected to sense this either. Indeed, as expressed by the impulses in man (concocted by what psychic meditation below and on the part of what?), sex is an unregenerate and only partially controlled passion which has more as its aim perhaps than is dreamed of in the philosophies of man. It is a fire, a chemical explosion, really. It concerns not so much the individual as the race, the endless unbroken chain of men and women, however much any individual may think it concerns him alone. Instead of denouncing the individual for his mood in regard to all this, it might be more important to inquire how moral in their import are the elements which compound and bring about the explosion and to treat him as one of their victims.
The truth no doubt is that in this much-maligned impulse which chemical forces beyond and above the willing of men are compounding lies the destiny of man (if he has one), only we are not as yet able to fathom that destiny. Here we come, bottles of fluid dynamite (prepared by what satiric super-soul, and why?), and somewhere in the world is, or may be, another compound which will set us aflame—and we are supposed to connect this with a narrow religious order or theory! I will admit that for the necessities of social arrangement and relationship here, the necessary balances and inter-adjustments that go to make up a workable society of beings, some form of equation between the less and more avid sexually, the too hot and the too cold, must be and is struck, willy-nilly and regardless of individual or man’s moral theory. But by what rule and rote? Is there so-called “justice” in it, or “reason,” or a fixed social order or method of procedure? We see that in spite of our fixed methods of moral procedure the tragedies continue, the waves and flames of morality and immorality come and go. Our divorce rate! Our sex tragedies and districts! And what guide has the individual? The Golden Rule? A more liberal method of adjustment? In the past, Nature has tolerated polygamy, polyandry and an abbreviated monogamy, and may do so again. The stress and strain which the present social arrangements show are almost premonitory.
But one thing is certain: no hard-and-fast rule governing this impulse has worked with accuracy for any given length of time, anywhere. If there are discovered or discoverable rules for its control and best management in the interest of the race and so in the interest of the Creator they have not yet been announced. We hear of the duty of preserving the sanctity of the home, maintaining a wife and raising a family according to the monogamic theory. Well and good. But, outside of raising endless children to be slain in wars, vegetated in a routine factory life, worn threadbare in a vast and internecine struggle for existence, there is not so much to be said for that, either. Routine home life, even an artistic breeding-pen, can scarcely be the be-all and end-all of human existence, any more than may unrestrained license. And however comfortable or admirable or encouraging the average home may be to given individuals, it is not necessarily so to all. There are those who find it confining, destroying. And, again, religionists and theorists, moral and otherwise, as well as the great greedy syndics and master minds in business or politics, prey upon the fruit of the home and collect “spiritual” and material taxes and establish “spiritual” as well as material autocracies or over-lordships which in no wise make for sex morality any more than for the forces which destroy it. Vice, suborned by the wealthy and powerful, as well as the avid and perverse among the weak, feeds upon the fruit of the so-called moral home. The bull seal still conquers his fifty or a hundred, and the weakling none. In fact, in a so-called Christian realm the mistress abounds, and the high divorce rate attests much private dissatisfaction with the theory. Laws come and laws go; and still we are about where we were before. The gardens of Aphrodite still exist. The hetæra of Greece and Rome are still with us—in our back streets or our high-priced apartment houses. If we no longer have our streets of the so-called “fallen” or “evil” women, who walk in the dark, is it not because caution has become the better part of trade? Are they not to be found behind closed doors in response to special rings, by card of admission, in our best streets? The endless pother! And still sex is as vigorous and dominant as ever it was. The riant scoffers nod and smile and accept the new rules.
Personally, after all this time, my conclusion is: (1), that no individual, however well or ill compounded physically, can make or unmake his moods or add one jot or tittle to his moral desires or perfections, although he and society (or convention) can exercise a certain amount of restraint—a restraint that will almost invariably prove irksome and which he will seek to evade; (2), that however much theorists, hypocrites and sincere religionists, chill-blooded or otherwise, may revile sex or attempt to restrain or destroy it, yet Nature (God or the devil, or the two in one) permits these wild fires to be generated in man, and, in spite of all punishments and hindrances, sees to it that his passions overleap his fears and judgments and cause him to do all the things that may be strictly forbidden him but which may nevertheless be of value to the race itself; (3), that man is not temperamentally or chemically a monogamous animal, however much the social conditions and necessities by which he finds himself surrounded in certain lands and times tend to make him believe so or fear, and that a rough balance or equation is all that is ever struck between his outward public deeds and his inner chemic condition; (4), that, to this hour, there is no city without its percentage of prostitution or hetæra of one grade or another; (5), that there is no city or town where some women or girls do not walk, secretly or openly, to accomplish prostitution and where men do not, secretly or openly, encourage and pursue them, the chemic necessities of their being as much as poverty impelling them to do it; (6), that there is no city or town or countryside, anywhere, where adultery or fornication is not indulged in outside wedlock for love or pleasure; (7), that a high percentage of men in all walks, including priests and clergymen, look after some one type at least of woman and lust after her; (8), that a moderate percentage of women, in marriage and out, seek the affection of a given type of man temperamentally or chemically agreeable or appealing to them, and offer their bodies as a bid for or sacrifice to that affection; (9), that women crave monogamy where their affections or the interests of their children are involved; (10), that love of one woman or one man, or their several or joint love of children, is likely to overlay and put at rest, for the time being, the usual roving desires of sex; (11), that law in all special instances is absolutely helpless before passion, powerless either to interpret its psychology or fix a just measure of praise or blame; (12), that convention has not made, and cannot make, any headway against a chemical scheme of life which puts sex desires first and all else as secondary or socially contributory.
Do I seem illogical or inclined to exaggerate? Think well over the things I have said. The world has a partially traceable history covering more than ten thousand years; in that time nations have risen and fallen, law codes have come and gone, religions have dominated and been swept away. In no law code and in no religion of any nation has the sex question, the need of moderation, duty to family and the like, been ignored. But in all that time the social expression of sex has never been so much as modified, let alone done away with. The Mosaic law is all of three thousand years old, yet what has it availed? Are our women all pure, our men all moral? Yet, in the face of history and present-day occurrences, the facts of divorce courts, night courts, streets crowded with prostitution and kept women, men seeking constantly to lure women, and vice versa, all the million and one evidences in books, plays, newspapers and social life generally that sex is the keynote of existence, there are those who would bar all mention of it, harry the prostitute, unduly punish the fornicator, ostracise the woman who strays from the path of virtue or seeks in divorce a way out of a troubled marital state.
What to make of the brain of man under such circumstances? What to say of the thing that causes him to fight the passion of which he is a victim? Necessity for equation and balance in all things, a very rough balance which cares no more for the individual “good” or “bad” than we care for flies or gnats? Inherent love of moderation in some? Love of peace in some? Love of the reverse in others? The tendency of all things to become static, even passionate temperaments? Surely that, and nothing more. Yet, aside from that, there is something which does not care for the equation-seeking mood of either individuals or society, which is busy manufacturing and pouring into the world new individuals with all their new dreams, passions, lacks of equation, lack of a sense of self-restraint, and sweeping away the old, the conservative, the religious, sanctimonious.
One of the sanifying recourses in life is, of course, to fix one’s eye on youth and note what it desires. Plainly, it is a fair expression of the thing that creates it, the chemic mood of the biologic force, for plainly it is closer to that which creates it. As the human or physical machine ages and wears out it is prepared, and then only, to accept the restraints and the equation which society, in order to maintain itself, requires; but not before. In the main, youth blazes with non-equational fires and it best represents that which makes it, the concocting chemic impulses below or behind life. Is youth wrong? Then so is the life impulse, for it builds youth freshly to its needs yearly, daily. The physical laws which seem to govern the biologic impulse after it expresses itself in the shape of youth, or man, and compels it for purposes of social expression to submit to restraints and equation, is another matter, inherent, perhaps, in the constitution of the universe itself and not to be avoided by the biologic impulse or its creatures. But this, as I have said before, does not provide us with exact rules for conducting ourselves here or how best to subdue or balance with other things the enormous fires with which we sometimes find ourselves lit. Better admit at once that hard-and-fast and cock-sure rules or laws are of no avail, and trust to the crude accidents of life to caution youth. A happy balance between the fires of youth and the fears and chills of age may be desirable, but, freely admitting that, can it be fixed by exact rule? We are inherent in some greater thing than man—Nature Herself. Only She knows.
One thing is sure: we are not done with the conflict and amazing super-impulses of sex, and are not likely to be soon. And if we were, would life be the varied, fascinating, humorous, poetic, tragic thing we see it to be? Suppose the moralists ruled, with their stiff and narrow balance, and man accepted their quiescent dictates—then what? Contrast it with some of the freer, more distinguished periods—Greece, Rome, Italy during the Renaissance, France under the Louis, England under Elizabeth and Charles II. Consider. I for one see no immediate solution, and firmly believe there is none which does not end in complete mental quiescence—balance or its equivalent, intellectual and emotional or temperamental nothingness, decay and dissolution, with something not so balanced and therefore alive, to supersede, if we are to have any form of life at all.