Loathing, disgust or indifference to the sex relationship nearly
always lies behind the advocacy to continence except for the conscious
purpose of creating children. In other words, while one in ten
thousand persons may find full play for a diverted and transmuted sex
force in other creative functions, the rest avoid the sex union from
repression. These are two widely different situations--one may make
for racial progress and the happiness of the few individuals capable
of it; the other poisons the race at its fountain and brings nothing
but the discontent, unhappiness and misery which follow enforced
continence. For all that, an increasing number of persons, mostly
women, are advocating continence within marriage.
Sexual union is nearly always spoken of by such persons as something
in itself repugnant, disgusting, low and lustful. Consciously or
unconsciously, they look upon it as a hardship, to be endured only, to
bring "God's image and likeness" into the world. Their very attitude
precludes any great probability that their progeny will possess an
abundance of such qualities.
Much of the responsibility for this feeling upon the part of many
thousands of women must be laid to two thousand years of Christian
teaching that all sex expression is unclean. Part of it, too, must be
laid to the dominant male's habit of violating the love rights of his
mate.
The habit referred to grows out of the assumed and legalized right of
the husband to have sexual satisfaction at any time he desires,
regardless of the woman's repugnance for it. The law of the state
upholds him in this regard. A husband need not support his wife if she
refuses to comply with his sexual demands.
Of the two groups of women who regard physical union either with
disgust and loathing, or with indifference, the former are the less
numerous. Nevertheless, there are many thousands of them. I have
listened to their stories often, both as a nurse in obstetrical cases
and as a propagandist for birth control. An almost universal cause of
their attitude is a sad lack of understanding of the great beauties of
the normal, idealistic love act. Neither do they understand the
uplifting power of such unions for both men and women. Ignorance of
life, ignorance of all but the sheer reproductive function of mating,
and especially a wrong training, are most largely responsible for this
tragic state of affairs. When this ignorance extends to the man in
such a degree as to permit him to have the all too frequent coarse and
brutal attitude toward sex matters, the tragedy is only deepened.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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