CHAPTER 6

THE LATER YEARS.-ADOLESCENCE AND MATURITY

The importance of sex.

Human nature offers no paradox more puzzling than its attitude towards sex. Here is a tremendous human force, the direct or indirect theme of most of the world's greatest literature, the subject-matter of a large proportion of the daily thoughts and feelings of the average man, the strongest urge to human activity, a scorching flame which often reveals a man's nature from top to bottom, the very well-spring of our life-and over this great center of human energies is spread an almost impenetrable blanket of silence, innuendo, and ignorance. With all the talk and thought that hovers about sex, little of really primary significance has as yet been said, and mankind seems determined, if possible, always to flirt with this most interesting and dangerous of all subjects. This fact alone is responsible for most of the problems raised by sex in our lives.

Suppose that eating and drinking was never spoken of openly, save in veiled or poetic language, and that no one ever ate food publicly, because it was considered immoral and immodest to reveal the mysteries of this natural function. We know what would occur. A considerable proportion of the community, more especially the more youthful members, possessed by an instinctive and legitimate curiosity, would concentrate their thoughts on the subject. They would have so many problems to puzzle over: How often ought I to eat? What ought I to eat? Is it wrong to eat fruit, which I like? Ought I to eat grass, which I don't like? Instinct notwithstanding, we may be quite sure that only a small minority would succeed in eating reasonably and wholesomely. The sexual secrecy of life is even more disastrous than such a nutritive secrecy would be; partly because we expend such a wealth of moral energy in directing or misdirecting it, partly because the sexual impulse normally develops at the same time as the intellectual impulse, not in the early years of life, when wholesome instinctive habits might be formed. And there is always some ignorant and foolish friend who is prepared still further to muddle things: Eat a meal every other day! Eat twelve meals a day! Never eat fruit! Always eat grass! The advice emphatically given in sexual matters is usually not less absurd than this. When, however, the matter is fully opened, the problems of food are not indeed wholly solved, but everyone is enabled by the experience of his fellows to reach some sort of situation suited to his own case. And when the rigid secrecy

is once swept away a sane and natural reticence becomes for the first time possible.1

The primary need, then, in connection with sex is for the removal of taboos and restrictions, not all of them external by any means, which hinder attempts to understand this subject. Human beings must learn how to approach the problems of sex with the same freedom and desire to discover the truth that they often aspire to in other realms. Few things, certainly, are nearer to human happiness than an early and adequate understanding of sexual life. This need becomes crucial at puberty, but it exists before and after that period as well.

Men are sometimes loath to admit the great place of sex in life. Could anything be plainer? Even a cursory glance at human institutions and activities is enough to settle the question, and closer study is absolutely decisive. In some men, of course, the fire of life burns low, or with a flickering flame, and these persons are by no means always among the most weakly endowed of our kind. But thought and activity thus removed from the close and vitalizing touch of passion is generally doomed to be esoteric, and ever tends towards sterility. As for the great mass of mankind, none can doubt that the feelings connected with sex are the pre-eminent driving forces. "The main principle of enjoyment for the human race is not art, nor thought, nor the practice of virtue, but for man, woman, and for woman, man.” 2 Love in very truth makes the world go round. An ethics or a code of life which ignores this fact condemns itself to essential triviality from the very start.

The biological significance of sex.

Sex is apparently not necessary for reproduction, since thousands of creatures of one kind or another reproduce without reliance on its mechanisms. One-celled animals like the amoeba, for example, simply subdivide, the parent animal thus perpetuating itself in two others which take its place. In the case of other animals both sexes are present in some generations, and but one in others. In fact, the arrangements whereby new creatures are brought into being are many, although it is the rule among the higher animals that a male and a female must have sexual intercourse for the production of new members of the species.

Though sex is not everywhere necessary for reproduction, and may some day be dispensed with in the case of man, it is of considerable biological importance as a guarantee of variability. Two hereditary strains are mixed in sexual reproduction wherever inbreeding does not occur. It has frequently been noted that

the population of isolated islands tends to deteriorate because new blood is not available to vitalize the indigenous stocks. Barring external accident, a similar stagnation would also seem to be the fate of unsexed animals, whereas new qualities may now and then be expected to appear whenever two individuals of different heredity mate. That this possibility is of considerable social importance is indicated by the new combinations of qualities noted whenever peoples who have previously been separated begin to interbreed. The mating of peoples of different stocks is not always fortunate, however, from the sociological point of view, especially when one of the groups is laboring under social prejudices and disabilities, as is the case, for example, with negroes at the present time in many parts of the white world.

The sex history of the individual.

The human being undergoes great changes at puberty, for it is then that his sexual powers finally reach maturity, and he becomes able to reproduce his kind, but it must not be thought that sexual influences are unimportant in his life until that time, for the precise opposite is the case. Nor are the effects of sex ever confined purely to the sexual organs and their operations; from birth to death they extend to all parts of the body. Nor, finally, are sexual influences at work only when sexual feelings separately and definitely arise into awareness; on the contrary, they are permanent features of our makeup, the effect, probably, in the first instance of more or less regular flow of secretions from the appropriate glands, and eventually also of deepset bodily trends and habits built upon this foundation.

In order to understand the full range and importance of sex in human life, then, it is necessary to divorce the notion from an exclusive connection with reproductive processes-that is to say, not only from the desire for children, which is extremely weak in many persons (mostly males), but also from the specific desire for physical sexual relationships. These items, in fact, form but a small part of human sexual urges. Let us trace the matter out historically in the life of a human being, making use, where we can, of the factual data uncovered by the work of Freud and his associates, while refusing to involve ourselves in the more theoretical interpretations of these data that he has offered.3

The history of a human being commences, it will be recalled, with the fertilization of a female cell or ovum by a male cell or spermatozoon. At that time the basic heredity of the new individual, including its sex, is laid down in accordance with Mendelian principles, and the complex process of cell division initiated

that finally results in the infant who some nine months later is born into the world. In the course of development specific germ cells are eventually formed and the individual attains the power to reproduce his kind, but this by no means marks the beginning of sex life, which is probably present from the very start. A number of bodily zones in the adult are always especially sensitive to at least quasi-sexual stimulation, as for instance the lipscf. the sensations accompanying kissing; and it seems fairly certain that even the infant experiences rudimentary pleasures of the same sort from the kisses and caresses it is continually receiving, and also from the act of suckling. The sensations accompanying the excretion of waste products from the body also furnish another group of quasi-sexual pleasures. These experiences have been called auto-erotic, for they are the least in part connected with the developing sex life, as has many times been shown in the study of sexual abnormalities, and they are prevailingly selfcentered. To this aspect of human experience as more completely developed a little later Freud has given the name of Narcissism, for Narcissus was the Greek youth in the myth who admired his own reflection in a pool of water.

It is inevitable that the child's first feelings should depend very closely on what happens inside his own body, for his initial experiences do not carry him beyond it, although they are dependent at every moment on extra-organic factors. The earliest notion of an other is no doubt furnished by the mother, for she it is who flows ceaselessly in and out of the baby's widening experience, and she it is who continually touches it where it is most vivid, in connection with feeding, excreting, cuddling, being washed, and the like. And so the internal organization which is to furnish the infant with a self proceeds in connection with the external organization, and this latter centers largely around the mother. The attachment for the mother is certainly seldom sexual in the developed adult sense of that term, but it does contain elements which also appear in adult sexuality, and no end of case histories might be cited which show the biographical continuity of adult sexual feeling with the earlier emotional fixation on the mother. The precise significance of the mother relation is more obscure in the case of girls than with boys.

In middle childhood, somewhere between the sixth and the eighth years, the earlier auto-erotic absorption in the child's own bodily processes and the later absorption in the mother tend to recede into the background, and interest begins to turn towards other children of the same sex. Before this time most children choose their playmates indiscriminately from either sex, but it eventually comes about, speaking generally, that boys play with

boys, and girls with girls, while the other sex may be ignored or despised. This stage in sex life is less clearly established either than those which precede it or than that which follows, the precise details differing greatly from one individual to another, depending on the size and composition of the family, the available playments, the previous course of development of the individual's life, and other similar considerations. Social influences tending to segregate and distinguish the sexes also no doubt help to motivate this appearance of diverse interests and activities, but the social arrangements in this instance seem to be in broad accord with fundamental biological urges.

At the time of puberty new interests and energies are again released, and yet another focussing of the child's sex life is required, which, like all the others, has both its internal and its external aspects. The body undergoes great changes, not only as respects the organs of sex but throughout all of its parts, and the feeling life is also greatly altered, both as regards the attainment of a high degree of interest in the opposite sex (heterosexuality) and through a great increase in general affectivity. It is of the highest social importance that the earlier stages in sexuality should give way smoothly and easily to the heterosexual, for where they do not, sexual perversions and other psychological disturbances are almost inevitable. The earlier sexual interests, although they began as something very different, must at puberty be brought under the control of the impulses centering around reproduction. This is the great problem which the adolescent must solve—at the present time with practically no acquaintance on his own part with what is going on inside him, and with little or no help from the outside. The task, by no means a simple one under ideal conditions, must for the present be attempted under distinctly adverse circumstances.

The net result is that persons living a thoroughly sound and healthy sex life are probably less common than those whose sex life suffers from some maladjustments. It will not be necessary to enlarge upon the perversions that sometimes occur. They range all the way from the extreme of sexual frigidity to the extreme of incontinence; from the most nauseating desire to inflict pain (sadism) to the opposite desire to have pain inflicted upon one's self (masochism), based upon malfunctionings of the sexual life; from minor personal aberrations to the most complete subversions of the whole personality; and from very slight deviations from the appropriate sexual practices to the grossest misconducts. Many people suffer from a morbid interest in such themes an interest which is itself no doubt in large measure generated by the prevailing taboos and ignorance.