Notes about Sexuality and Religion

Page 9

… but with the growth of modern civilization the rôle of the father is being increasingly taken over by the State,  and there is reason to think that a father may cease before long to be biologically advantageous, at any rate in the wage-earning class. If this should occur, we must expect a complete breakdown of traditional morality, since there will no longer be any reason why a mother should wish the paternity of her child to be indubitable. Plato would have us go a step further, and put the State not only in place of the mother also.

Page 15

It has, for example, been a common practice, not only with savages but with some comparatively civilized races, for virgins to be officially (and sometimes publicly) deflowered by priests. In Christian countries men have held that defloration should be the prerogative of the bridegroom, and most Christians, at any rate until recent times, would have regarded their repugnance to the custom of religious defloration as an instinctive one. The practice of lending one’s wife to a guest as an act of hospitality is also one which to the modern European seems instinctively repugnant, and yet it has been very widespread. Polyandry is another custom which an unread white man would suppose contrary to human nature. Infanticide might seem still more so; yet the facts show that it is resorted to with great readiness wherever it seems economically advantageous.

Page 16

I do not know how it may be with savages, but civilized people have to learn to perform the sexual act.* It is not uncommon for doctors to be asked by married couples of some years’ standing for advice as to how to get children, and to find on examination that the couples have not known how to perform intercourse. The sexual act is not, therefore,  in the strictest sense instinctive, …

* ff. Havelock Ellis, “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” VoL VI, p. 510.

Page 17

Indeed, where human beings are concerned we do not have the precise behaviour-patterns which are to be found among other animals, and instinct in that sense is replaced by something rather different. What we have with  human beings is first of all a dissatisfaction leading to activities of a more or less random and imperfect sort, but arriving gradually, more or less by accident, at an activity which gives satisfaction and which is therefore repeated. What is instinctive is thus not so much the finished activity as the impulse to learn it, …

Page 22

Malinowski maintains, and in this I think he must be right, that if a man remains with his wife during pregnancy and child-birth he has an instinctive tendency to be fond of the child when it is born, and that this is the basis of the paternal sentiment.

Page 25

As soon as a father recognizes that the child is, as the Bible says, his “seed,” his sentiment towards the child is reinforced by two factors, the love of power and the desire to survive death. The achievements of a man’s descendants are in a sense his achievements, and their life is a continuation of his life.

Page 26

Hence the discovery of fatherhood led to the subjection of women as the only means of securing their virtue – a subjection first physical and then mental, which reached its height in the Victorian age. Owing to the subjection of women there has in most civilized communities been no genuine companionship between husbands and wives; their relation has been one of condescension on the one side and duty on the other. All the man’s serious thoughts and purposes he has kept to himself, since robust thought might lead his wife to betray him.

Page 37

Sacred prostitution is another institution which was very widespread in antiquity. In some places ordinary respectable women went to a temple and had intercourse either with a priest or with a casual stranger. In other cases, the priestesses themselves were sacred harlots. [more on page 147]

Page 39

Beliefs… hardly likely that they will be the prime causes of an anti-sexual attitude.

The two main causes of such an attitude are, I should say, jealousy and sexual fatigue. Wherever jealousy is aroused, even if it be only faintly, the sexual act appears to us disgusting, and the appetite which leads to it seems loathsome.

Page 41

Consequently men who are not restrained by a fairly rigid ethic are apt to indulge to excess: this produces in the end a feeling of weariness and disgust, which leads naturally to ascetic convictions.

Page 83

The demand for equality between men and women concerned itself from the first not only with political matters but also with sexual morality. The attitude of Mary Wollstonecraft was thoroughly modern, but she was not imitated in this respect by the subsequent pioneers of women’s rights. They, on the contrary, were for the most part very rigid moralists, whose hope was to impose upon men the moral fetters which hitherto had only been  endured by women.

Page 88

This however, is only another illustration of the well-known fact that the professional moralist in our day is a man of less than average intelligence.

             

Page 89

It may be suggested that the procreation of children should only occur within marriage, and that all extra-marital sexual intercourse should be rendered sterile by the use of contraceptives. In that case husbands might learn to be as tolerant of lovers as Orientals are of eunuchs. The difficulty of such a scheme as yet is that it requires us to place more reliance on the efficacy of contraceptives and the truthfulness of wives than seems гаtional; this difficulty may, however, be diminished before long. The other alternative compatible with the new morality is the decay of fatherhood as an important social institution, and the taking over of the duties of the father by the State.

Page 100

Unfortunately, unless great pains are taken, the sexual act tends to be associated with pleasure, but by sufficient moral care this can be prevented, at any rate in the female. It is illegal in England to state in print that a wife can and should derive sexual pleasure from intercourse. (I have myself heard a pamphlet condemned as obscene in a court of law on this among other grounds.)

Page 106

There is one aspect of this question which has, I think, not been sufficiently realized by those who wish to cleanse sex from the filth with which it has been covered by Christian moralists. The subject of sex has been associated by nature with excretory processes, and so long as these processes are treated with disgust, it is psychologically natural that some portion of this disgust should attach to sex.

Page 113

…abundantly established by the history of the use which has been made of Lord Campbell’s Act in England. Lord Campbell’s Act, as any one may discover by reading the debates on it, was directed solely to the suppression of pornography, and it was thought at the time  that it had been so drafted as to be incapable of use against other types of literature. This belief, however, was based upon an insufficient appreciation of the cleverness of  policemen and the stupidity of magistrates. The whole subject of the censorship has been admirably treated in a book by Morris Ernst and William Seagle.*

*”To the Pure,” Viking Press, 1928.

Page 125

nor can they adequately value the gradual approaches to the final act which are essential to most women’s enjoyment. Indeed they often fail to realize that a woman should experience enjoyment, and that if she does not, her lover is at fault.

Page 127

Among modern emancipated people, love in the serious sense with which we are concerned is suffering a new danger. When people no longer feel any moral barrier against sexual intercourse on every occasion when even a trivial impulse inclines to it, they get into the habit of dissociating sex from serious emotion and from feelings of affection; they may even come to associate it with feelings of hatred.

Page 130

As a rule, animal marriages are monogamic, and according to some authorities this is the case in particular amongst the anthropoid apes. It seems, if these authorities are to be believed, that these fortunate animals are not faced with the problems that beset human communities, since the male, once married, ceases to be attracted to any other female, and the female, once married, ceases to be attractive to any other male.

Among the anthropoid apes, therefore, although they do not have the assistance of religion, sin is unknown, since instinct suffices to produce virtue. There is some evidence that among the lowest races of savages a similar state of affairs exists. Bushmen are said to be strictly monogamous, and I understand that the Tasmanians (now extinct) were invariably faithful to their wives. Even in civilized mankind faint traces of a monogamic instinct can sometimes be perceived.

Page 161

… there are great advantages in the emancipation, however partial, of young people in America, as compared with their elders. They are freer from priggery, less inhibited, less enslaved to authority devoid of rational foundation. I think also that they are likely to prove less cruel, less brutal, and less violent than their seniors. For it has been characteristic of American life to take out in violence the anarchic impulses which could not find an outlet in sex.

Page 176

This is especially true of Christianity, which has always had an ambivalent attitude towards the family. “Whoso  loveth father or mother more than me is not  worthy of me,” we read in the gospels, and  this means, in effect, that a man should do  what he thinks right, even if his parents think  it wrong-a view to which an ancient Roman or an old-fashioned Chinese would not subscribe. This leaven of individualism in Christianity has worked slowly, but has tended gradually to weaken all social relations, especially among those who were most in earnest.

Page 188

[Re: abolishing fatherhood]. Whether the effect upon men would be good or bad, I do not venture to say. It would  eliminate from their lives the only emotion equal in importance to sex love. It would make sex love itself more trivial. It would make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death. It would make men less active and probably cause them to retire earlier from work. It would diminish their interest in history and their sense of the continuity of historical tradition. At the same time it would eliminate the most fierce and savage passion to which civilized men are liable, namely, the fury which is felt in defending wives and children from attacks by coloured populations. I think it would make men less prone to war, and probably less acquisitive. To strike a balance between good and bad effects is scarcely possible, but it is evident that the effects would be profound and far-reaching. The patriarchal family, therefore, is still important, although it is doubtful how long it will remain so.

Page 275

The result of this teaching is that most children in their earliest years have a profound sense of guilt and terror which is associated with sexual matters. This association of sex with guilt and fear goes so deep as to become almost : or wholly unconscious.

Page 288

Those who stimulate the appeals to harry prostitutes and those who secure legislation, nominally against the White Slave Traffic, but really against voluntary and decent extra-marital relations; those who denounce women for short skirts and lipsticks; and those who spy upon sea beaches in the hope of discovering inadequate bathing costumes, are none of them supposed to be the victims of a sexual obsession. Yet in fact they probably suffer much more in this way than do writers who advocate greater sexual freedom. Fierce morality is generally a reaction against lustful emotions, and the man who gives expression to it is generally filled with indecent  thoughts – thoughts which are rendered indecent, not by the mere fact that they have a sexual content, but that morality has incapacitated the thinker from thinking  cleanly and wholesomely on this topic.

Page 309

The doctrine that there is something sinful about sex is one which has done untold harm to individual character – a harm beginning in early childhood and continuing throughout life. By keeping sex love in a prison, conventional morality has done much to imprison all other forms of friendly feeling, and to make men less generous, less  kindly, more self-assertive and more cruel.