Sex and Common-SenseRoyden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Philosophy
Sex and Common-Sense
Royden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Marriage; Sex; Sexual ethics
But there is another possibility. You can repress, and God knows how many
boys and young men, how many young women and girls have struggled to do so,
and are trying to do so to-day, with a sense always of guilt and shame
in their minds, laying up mental difficulties for themselves, the
psychologists tell us, by this repression. You know the type; you know the
kind of person who becomes hard and narrow and uncomprehending. That is
one type. You can read it in their faces. The pinched look, the cramped
mentality reflects itself in the body and in the face. And then there is
the other type, those who have rejected this attitude towards life, denying
that there is anything to be ashamed of in the natural impulse of their
sex, or cause for regret if they give rein to that whose repression does
so much harm, who frankly fling away the idea of self-control, because
repression has seemed such a disastrous method of self-control. You can see
it in their faces also; in the gradual demoralization of their nature.
The rake on one hand, the prude on the other, represent the ultimate
consequence of the process I am trying to describe. Many people have marked
on their souls, if not on their faces, one or other of these ways of life.
They have not, perhaps, gone far, they may have gone but a little way in
one direction or the other; but the mark on the soul remains all the same.
And when you see the extreme result, the prude on one side, the rake on
the other, do you not begin to desire a better way? To ask yourself whether
there is not a third choice before you?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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