This statement applies with additional force to the arguments that fly so thick in the controversy waged around the sex problem, for here, especially, is opinion and behavior based on powerful emotions and sentiments, the products of heredity, education, race and creed. Hence to dispute is merely to emphasize the hopeless incompatibility. As Spencer remarks, "in respect of private life the problems presented are so complex and so variable, that nothing like definite solutions of them can be reached by any intellectual processes, however methodic and however careful.
They can be completely solved only by the organic
adjustment of constitution to condition". There is too much faith in regulating conduct by
precepts. Our beliefs are not founded on conclusions built up from premises, and only when
they are challenged do we fall back upon the resources of logic to support them.
Even were it possible to alter settled opinions by debating, we would still be far from
influencing conduct. The gulf between preaching and practice cannot be bridged over in this
way. Consistency in people's lives is proverbially rare, and perhaps this is for the best, since
social stability might be endangered if all were to act in accordance with their half-baked
convictions.
How far afield consistency in sexual conduct practiced on a large scale may lead,
can be gathered from a phenomenon which took place in Russia a few years ago, when the
young students of both sexes in colleges and universities, indignantly rejecting the unjust
double standard of morality, decided to live up to their ideas. Accordingly, they organized
so-called Leagues of Free Love and surrendered themselves to promiscuous relations. The
consequences made their appearance very promptly, tho not in the form expected by the
votaries. Instead of dealing a death blow to conventional morals, the reformers were stricken
down by venereal diseases, which spread among them like an epidemic, and this, together
with numerous pregnancies in the young girls, necessitated the closing of several colleges.
The whole case illustrates clearly, how unlooked for effects usurp the place of expected
results, and this knowledge ought to give us pause before we proceed to shape our conduct
in conformity with hasty generalizations.
The foregoing seemingly irrelevant introduction will have served a useful purpose if it
succeeds in impressing upon the reader that discussions of ethical matters have less value as
guides to behavior than is ordinarily assumed. They are interesting and noteworthy chiefly
as a barometer of the times, indicating the drift of progress, which emanates from far deeper
sources than human reason.
The current debates about sexual matters are devoted mainly to the so called double
standard of sex morality, and to the future form of the family. Are men to continue their
enjoyment of freedom while chastity is strictly demanded by women, and is our present
monogamic family destined to be permanent? These are the questions most anxiously asked.
Concerning the double standard, we must admit right at the outset that it was not the
product of an impartial recognition of natural sex distinctions, but arose and continued to
exist as one of the many concomitants of man's original physical supremacy over woman.
It's present advocates have no difficulty in advancing spurious reasons for its continuation,
reasons which were threshed out and found wanting innumerable times. To tell the simple
truth, these advocates have their emotions and feelings enlisted in behalf of the double
standard thru heredity and up bringing, and seek to support it by grasping at any accessible
argument.
The history of morals shows repeatedly, how people have never been at a loss to find
apparently plausible reasons for the most iniquitous customs and institutions. The wholesale
burning alive of heretics was eloquently defended several centuries ago, when pious Christian
ladies witnessed auto da fes, and looked on complacently at the roasting unbelievers. The
early Christian ancestors of these ladies, a thousand years or more further back, were
customarily tied to the branches of trees and set on fire, in order to entertain Roman ladies
with nocturnal illuminations a spectacle immortalized in Semiradski's famous painting. The
fanatic religious and political zeal of those times stifled the sympathetic emotions and found
vent in torture and martyrdom, while defenders of faith were ready with a storehouse of
argumentative ammunition to justify inhuman cruelties ad majorem Dei gloriam.
Nor was it otherwise with the unjust treatment of women in past ages. It had to be
justified post factum, and a most original defence was accordingly unearthed. "In ancient
Greece", relates Lecky, "the inferiority of women to men was strongly asserted, and it was
illustrated and defended by a very curious physiological notion, that the generative power
belonged exclusively to men, women having only a very subordinate part in the production
of their children. Aeschylus has put this notion into the mouth of Apollo in a speech in the
Eumenides. It has, however, been very widely diffused, and may be found in Indian, Greek,
Roman and even Christian writers. St. Thomas Aquinas accepted it and argued from it that
a father should be more loved than a mother".