The oversexed must surround themselves with protective measures lest
their violent cravings may lead them into socially punishable acts. The
simplest neurotic expedient is to utter a complete denial, whenever
possible a public one, of the existence of sexual cravings, and then to
be forced by one's statements into living up to an absurd self-imposed
standard.
=Utterances and Conduct.= This at times results in most grotesque
conflicts between utterance and conduct. We see for instance the
much married Mrs. Eddy who as the witty Theodore Schroeder remarked,
had many more husbands than children, stating that the pleasures of
the flesh "are always wrong unless the physiologic factor can be
excluded from consciousness" (a rather cryptic sentence) and also that
"generation rests on no sexual basis."
Thy hysteric whose volcanic outbursts supply her with a morbid sexual
relief for which she rejects all responsibility, for she is unconscious
at the time is generally in her private and public life a woman of
great repressions and perfect behavior, likely to sneer at every
mention of a sex urge.
In other cases, platonic love is an attempt at creating an artificial
value thru destroying a natural, biological human function.
=Oracles and Prophecies.= In ancient times it was observed that
people deprived of any sexual gratification made at times mysterious
utterances which were considered as an emanation of some divine
intelligence.
Those utterances were nothing but hysterical ravings, accepted as
oracles, prophecies, etc.
Our praise of continence, practiced even when it is unnecessary, (as in
the case of lawfully married mates), is, after all, a survival of such
superstitious beliefs based on misunderstood morbid phenomena.
Modern science, especially the new science of endocrinology, has shown
that to every display of sexual activity corresponds an outpouring of
hormonic secretions which benefits the entire system.
=Can We Save Our Vital Force?= Once upon a time it was assumed that
continence enabled people to save their "vital force," to preserve the
"resources of their body."
We know now that the gonads produce two secretions, one which would
pass out of the body in any event, and one which flows directly in the
blood and is the only one which can benefit the organism.
The various puritanical theories as to the great value of continence
had been shaken many times by evidence from the biography of all the
great writers, artists, philosophers, inventors and other men and women
who have left the world much enriched by their creative labor and at
the same time indulged freely in the pleasures of the flesh.
=Sublimation.= Endocrinology strikes now the last blow at those
theories, one of which by the way, was Freud's romantic hypothesis of
the "sublimation."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account