Sex-Love, and Its Place in a Free Society — John Shaqi
Sex-Love, and Its Place in a Free SocietyCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
Sex-Love, and Its Place in a Free Society
Carpenter, Edward
Sex; Sexual ethics
And here in passing I would say that in the social life of the future
this need will surely be recognised, and not only will young people
be deliberately prepared and instructed for the fulfilment of Sex
when their time comes, but (while there will be no stigma attaching to
voluntary celibacy) the state of enforced celibacy in which vast numbers
of women live to-day will be looked upon as a national wrong, almost as
grievous as that of prostitution--of which latter evil indeed it is in
some degree the counterpart or necessary accompaniment.
Of course Nature (personifying under this term the more unconscious,
even though human, instincts and forces) takes pretty good care in her
own way that most people should have sexual experience. She has her
own purposes to work out, which in a sense have nothing to do with
the individual--her racial purposes. But she acts in the rough,
with tremendous sweep and power, and with little adjustment to or
consideration for the later developed and more conscious and intelligent
ideals of humanity. The youth, deeply infected with the sex-passion,
suddenly finds himself in the presence of Titanic forces--the Titanic
but sub-conscious forces of his own nature. "In love" he feels a
superhuman strength--and rightly so, for he identifies himself with
cosmic energies and entities, powers that are preparing the future of
the race, and whose operations extend over vast regions of space and
millennial lapses of time. He sees into the abysmal deeps of his own
being, and trembles with a kind of awe at the disclosure. And what he
feels concerning himself he feels similarly concerning the one who has
inspired his passion. The glances of the two lovers penetrate far beyond
the surface, ages down into each other, waking a myriad antenatal
dreams.
For the moment he lets himself go, rejoicing in the sense of limitless
power beneath him--borne onwards like a man down rapids, too intoxicated
with the glory of motion to think of whither he is going; then the
next moment he discovers that he is being hurried into impossible
situations--situations which his own moral conscience, as well as the
moral conscience of Society, embodied in law and custom, will not admit.
He finds perhaps that the satisfaction of his imperious impulse is, to
all appearances, inconsistent with the welfare of her he loves. His own
passion arises before him as a kind of rude giant which he or the race
to which he belongs may, Frankenstein-like, have created ages back, but
which he now has to dominate or be dominated by; and there declares
itself in him the fiercest conflict--that between his far-back Titanic
instinctive and sub-conscious nature, and his later developed, more
especially human and moral self.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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