Sex and Common-SenseRoyden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Philosophy
Sex and Common-Sense
Royden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Marriage; Sex; Sexual ethics
Every marriage in the world probably lacks something of perfection. There
are no perfect human beings, and, therefore, hardly, perhaps, a perfect
marriage; and to my mind those who do not admit the concern of the
community in their marriage do lack something. But to suppose that those
people are immoral, when others who live together, legally licensed to do
so, in selfishness, in infidelity, for financial reasons, or for social
reasons, are moral is fundamentally dishonest. When a woman sells her body
for money, do you think that it makes it moral that she does it in a church
or in a registry office? Is there one whit of difference, morally, between
the prostitution that has no legal recognition and the prostitution that
has? Is it anything but prostitution to sell yourself for money, whether
you are a man or a woman? Do you imagine that because you have a contract
to protect you while you do it, you are doing what is moral? If you marry
for any reason but love--for experience, to "complete your nature"--without
much regard to the man or woman you marry, or to the children you bring
into the world, are you not exploiting human nature just as certainly,
though not so brutally, as a man who buys a woman in the street? It is not
so base a form of exploitation, God knows; that I admit; but when there
is _any_ element of exploitation in the bargain it is not made more truly
moral because it happens to be blessed in a church or registered in an
office. The legal ceremony must be the outcome of a morality which makes
you realize that what you do affects other people, that what you do
most profoundly affects the children that you hope to have, and that the
community has both an interest and a responsibility in all this. That is
"moral." But if the relationship thus to be legalized is not moral, it is
dishonest to pretend that it can be made so by any ceremony which those
concerned may undergo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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