Motherhood and the Relationships of the SexesHartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
Philosophy
Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes
Hartley, C. Gasquoine (Catherine Gasquoine)
Mothers; Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions
This brings me to the last question I want to consider. Why does the
desire of the wife so often cease towards her husband? It is a difficult
question to answer. One reason has been given already in the false
attitude of the woman, which in so many cases makes her ashamed of
expressing openly the passion that she feels. Yet there is, I think,
another and much deeper part of the truth that is fairly clear. Each man
is able to enforce his sexual desire upon his wife at a time when she
feels no desire, whereas she cannot gain her desire unless he gain his.
We may perhaps trace back to this cause the feeling of disharmony and
waning of desire which injures the woman’s power to love. Of course, this
disharmony is not always conscious even to herself, and the man is quite
unaware of the evil. But his acceptance of the woman’s subordination,
however gladly given, does exhaust the passion in her.
This difference in the power for sexual sacrifice between the two sexes
is, I have frequently thought, one of the gravest causes of our misery.
It will take very long to overcome it. Only as we advance in refinement
and knowledge of love can this antagonism in the sex act lessen, as the
woman gains in frankness and the man comes to know how to arouse and keep
aflame her desire.
And there is here a question I would put to those husbands who are
suffering to-day from the sexual coldness of their wives. I would ask
them: Have they taken sufficient trouble to understand, both on the
physical and psychical side, the sexual nature of woman, which is much
more complex and difficult than their own? The art of love is not
understood by Western people. If we paid more attention to this subject
marriage would be freed from the greatest cause that brings it to
disaster. Greater openness and sexual confidence between the husband and
the wife is the first necessary step. But we shall never have this until
we have rooted out of our moral conscience the idea of “the body as the
prison of the soul.” I have often asked myself if this misconception of
love is not the real cause of all sex trouble.
And the remedy? Yes, that is the difficult matter. We cannot alter these
evils by any cut-and-dried plan. The expression of sex is a question
of refinement, and its regeneration must begin with a movement towards
consciousness.
It may seem that we have reached no very definite conclusion. We have not
solved the problem of venereal diseases. There is nothing to be gained
by denying the difficulties that visit us in our sexual lives, or in
talking, as many do, as though there were an easy way out. There is not.
I hold preaching on all these complicated questions to be quite useless.
No platitudinous formulæ, no recrimination of one sex against the other
sex, will do any good. The wrong is deep down in our attitude towards
love, in our system of education, and in the very prevalent vulgarity of
our surroundings. It is there that we must seek for it and destroy it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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