DR. W. J. ROBINSON'S article on Sexual Morality very aptly illustrates his claim that individual bias creates influences and controls personal opinion. After reading his article, there is no doubt left that this is so. His enthusiastic support of sexual immorality would indicate a moral myopia where sex questions are concerned, which limits his vision, and forces him to see objects out of their proper proportions.
From no point of view can the mere gratification of the senses be regarded as admirable,
useful, beneficial or praiseworthy, and such gratification, we know, savors rather of weakness
and selfishness. The sex impulse is but a means to an end, and the supreme object of marriage
is the child, and not such sense gratification. If this sex impulse did not exist, the burden of bearing and rearing a family might have
been avoided, so its existence fulfils a wise purpose, but when this function, thru its
intemperate use, becomes the means by which misery, disease, and death are introduced into
homes and families, when it becomes a force to deteriorate and decimate the race, then it is
time to put the brakes on, and regulate the balance wheel in order to regain normal
proportions.
It would be well to have a correct definition of the terms "strong sexuality", and
"powerful sexuality", with which the article is seasoned. A powerful sexuality, overmastering
in demand, and brooking no denial is the type met in the pervert, the idiot, the imbecile, who
are as indecent as they are dangerous. The man low-down in the scale of civilization has also
a "strong" and a "powerful" sexuality, because he is a little nearer his four footed progenitors,
than his civilized brother when the latter is normal. It is the strong and virile man who controls his appetites he masters them, but the
weakling, whose lascivious thoughts keep him in a constant state of irritation, becomes the
slave of his.
Sexual intemperance, as a recent writer has stated, is a habit, slowly acquired thru long
generations, fostered by false and pernicious traditions, and the absence of punishment for
the aggressor. We are now learning that the imperiousness of the sex instinct has been greatly
overrated, and that the evils of temperance are more or less imaginary. Fournier has declared
that he does not know what the evils of continence are, for he has never seen them, but that
one eighth of the disease and misery of the world has been due to incontinence.
It would seem that the strong sexuality displayed by a sex whose biological contribution
to the germ of the race is discharged in a brief moment of enjoyment, is very greatly less than
that exhibited by the party of the other part whose contribution is made thru long months
of patient endurance, in the agony of parturition, and in the long months of unselfish
devotion which follow. Can anyone doubt the greater power, energy, capacity of the lifegiver,
the mother of the race, whose natural instincts are for the preservation and upbuilding of that
race to which she has given birth? It is she whose instincts form the safest guide and not those
of her mate; and it is her demands which must furnish the standard for both.
It has been said that the reality of marriage sanctifies the form. Marriage should not be
a mere sexual coupling. It must include the psychic sympathy, the intangible, emotional,
invisible chains which are stronger than the Atlantic cable while they last at any rate. So
that if a man tires of his wife, which Dr. Robinson assures us some men do, and he longs
for not another wife, but some woman, any woman, in order to gratify his animalism, then
both the man and his partner must coarsen and deteriorate. They have no emotional excuse;
there is on the one side but sensuality, and on the other cupidity; and the man returns to the
wife he expects to be faithful, reeking with the disease of the woman he embraced, and in his
heart despised. He has made himself a perjurer, a hypocrite, and an adulterer. Ellen Key very
truly says, "Man has as little right to satisfy desire by unchastity, as he has to satisfy hunger
by theft".
As for the men who we are assured cannot live in permanent union with any woman and
who like temporary changes: well, for these there will always be some women like themselves
and they can wallow in filth together, but decent women who have unfortunately mated with
men of this class should obtain a divorce in order to protect their bodies from disease, and
their minds from contamination.