Part 1

Little Blue Book No. =1089= Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

The Common Sense of Sex

James Oppenheim

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1926 Haldeman-Julius Company

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE COMMON SENSE OF SEX

Perhaps one of the hardest lessons this generation has had to learn is that sex is a natural thing. Christianity has had to admit, of course, that sexuality is necessary if the race is to go on, yet it has always frowned upon it. The holy people didn’t marry; the best people became priests, monks or nuns. And so deep has this puritanism gone that even a modern like Bernard Shaw has said that he was shocked at the conduct of married people--so many of them indulged in love for mere pleasure!

A wave of revolt has been sweeping over the western world. We have had poets like Walt Whitman who have celebrated sex as a clean, strong thing; writers like Havelock Ellis who have gathered together a mine of information on the subject; and finally, we have had the great psychologist, Freud, who has made a scientific study of sex and given us a flood of new light on its mysteries.

In spite of this new knowledge, however, most people are apparently still in ignorance. The subject is hedged around with fears and taboos. Shame attaches to many phases of it. There are men and women of strong desires who think they are living in sin; and, on the other hand, those without desire who think they are unnatural. It is time for this dark cloud to roll away; and this booklet is simply one more attempt to place the matter not only in the light of science, but also in the light of common sense.

ABNORMAL SEXUALITY

According to Freud, sexuality begins as something vague, distributed all over the child’s body, and gradually concentrating in the sexual organs. The first vague sexual act is suckling. The child not only experiences the pleasure of food, but also of an act that has rhythm in it, the rhythm of the mouth working with the nipple. It soon discovers that it can produce this rhythm by itself. It works its thumb into its mouth and sucks it. Here begins a pleasure, separated from the food-pleasure, which is dependent on rhythm, and includes the mouth and hand.

The hand, having learned this trick, now begins to rub various parts of the body in a rhythmical manner. In a vague sort of way auto-erotism sets in.

Along with this comes a growing interest in its own body, and a love of displaying it; the stage of exhibitionism. And naturally this leads to curiosity about other bodies, especially bodies like its own.

But, finally, interest is aroused in the opposite sex, and with the awakening of genuine sexual desire in puberty, the child is prepared to step over to normal sexuality.

According to this, every child who develops steadily will finally come to normal sexuality. Yet it is obvious that the world is full of people who have sexual trouble. There are men suffering from partial or complete impotence; there are women with whom desire centers upon the lips; there are others terrified at the sexual act; there are homosexuals, and those who cannot break the auto-erotic habit. Finally, there are those whose only pleasure consists in cruelty to others, or having cruelty practiced upon themselves--the sadists and the masochists.

These troubles, according to Freud, can be traced back to the child’s original love-attachment to the mother or father. It is the Oedipus complex, named after the Greek king who innocently and unknowingly married his own mother, had children by her, and when the truth was revealed to him, put out his own eyes and wandered homeless about the land. This is the crime of incest, tabooed almost universally by every race.

In other words, Freud thinks it natural that the child’s first love should have a sexual coloring; that the boy desires the mother, and the girl the father; but that the deep taboo, felt by the child though not understood by him, produces a fear that drives him finally to take some substitute for the mother, another woman (how often men seek women who are like their mothers!), or may make it impossible for him ever to have normal sexuality.

In other words, the child, in fear of going any further toward the goal of his love, the mother, may become fixed at some point of childish expression: one boy may never go further than auto-erotism; another may remain all his life at the homosexual phase. In this way the perversions are accounted for; they are infantile expressions, due to fear.

The cure, according to Freud, is two-fold: the patient must come to understand that the cause of the trouble is his love for the parent, and that this love must be sacrificed, and the attachment broken, in order that the desire for normal sexuality may be cultivated.

The other solution is _sublimation_. That is to say, express your abnormal desire, but on a higher level and in a different form. In fact, Freud traces many of the glories of our civilization to this technic, employed unconsciously as a rule. For instance, a man may be a sadist; his desire is to cut other people with a knife. Let him, then, become a surgeon, and cut people creatively instead of destructively.

Another man is an exhibitionist. He wants to display himself publicly. Let him become an actor.

A third has intense curiosity; he would, if he expressed this desire unsublimated, become a Peeping Tom. Let him become a scientist, intent on looking into the unknown.

Against this viewpoint of Freud’s, Dr. Jung, the psychologist of Zurich, brings a barrage of criticism. He says, first, that while these expressions of the child have every appearance of sexuality, they cannot be sexual, because as a rule true sexuality does not awaken in a child until puberty. And he says, second, that the desire for incest is relatively rare: since, naturally, when it comes to sexuality, a man desires a young woman and not an old.

While these criticisms seem to me well-founded, great credit must nevertheless go to Freud for having shown us that these sexual manifestations are not necessarily rooted in innate depravity and sinfulness, but appear as natural expressions in the development of everyone. For while it is true that not many children have sexual feeling before puberty, on the other hand in the cases of men and women who practice perversions it is usually found that the habit originated in childhood, and was not broken when puberty dawned.

I will reserve the treatment of the abnormal for a later chapter.

THE THIRD SEX

Edward Carpenter of England has advanced the theory that there is a third sex, which is hermaphroditic, or bi-sexual. He would place this sex as midway between man and woman and having some of the same characteristics of both. This does not mean that the third sex is physically hermaphroditic. While such people exist, they are relatively rare. It merely means men who have much of the woman in them, and women who have much of the masculine. However, often this shows in some physical characteristic, as an effeminate voice in a man, a growth of hair on a woman’s chin, a manner of walking, etc.

Edward Carpenter believes that this third sex was the one which, because it could not follow the beaten path, gave birth to philosophy, religion, art, law and invention. As he pictures it, in the savage tribe there would be a man who felt himself so different from the rest of the men and so much more akin to the women, that he would evade in every manner joining in the masculine occupations of hunting and fighting. He would stay home with the women and justify this by becoming the shaman or medicine-man, the first doctor and mystic. Thus he would have time for brooding, and in this way cultivate his imagination, and bring forth new theory and new arts.

That there is some basis for this theory is obvious. The founders of religion are usually pictured as more or less hermaphroditic in nature. Jesus, for instance, is shown as not only aggressive, courageous and self-assertive in the true masculine way, but also as gentle, loving, forgiving, merciful or feminine. He speaks of himself as the hen who would have gathered its brood under its protecting wings; and he tells his disciples to eat of his body in the form of the bread. (It is the mother who gives her body to her child to eat.)

We find, too, this hermaphroditic quality in some of the great artists and poets. Walt Whitman, our American poet, is a good example. He was powerfully built, robust, healthy and overflowing with vitality, so masculine that it is related that Lincoln said of him, “There goes a man”; yet he was as tender as a woman. He nursed personally thousands of soldiers in the Civil War, and their feeling was that he gave them a kind of mother love.

But there have been other great men, not artists or religious leaders, who were similar. Lincoln, for instance, had the brooding tenderness and the deep sympathy which we associate with the mother.

However, the implication in Carpenter’s theory is that it isn’t just a matter of mental qualities, but also sexual; that the third sex has some of the sexual feeling and need of both sexes, and that this is an explanation of the cause of homosexuality.

The facts, however, are against the Carpenter theory. One finds, in practice, that there are homosexual men aggressively masculine, and with hardly a trace of the feminine about them; and, on the other hand, more or less effeminate men whose sexuality is absolutely normal.

Moreover, there is a deeper explanation for the man who couldn’t go out and fight and hunt with the other men, and for the woman who hated the agricultural and house duties of other women. According to Jung, there are two great types, the extraverted and the introverted.

These types appear, he believes, as differentiations of the two basic and primary instincts, that of self-preservation and that of race-propagation, or, in other words, the ego-instinct and the sexual. We are, evidently, born into the one type or the other, just as we are born into the one sex or the other.

The sexual instinct, unconsciously, of course, leads toward the propagation of the species; the urge of nature is for reproduction so that the race can go on. And hence this instinct leads to marriage, the establishment of the family, and finally that of the tribe and nation. And it leads too to all the activities connected with these things. The men must fight to protect their women and children or to bring them more prosperity and power; they must hunt to bring food. The women must bring up the children, make and preserve the home, engage in activities like cooking, spinning, weaving, agriculture.

The sexual instinct leads them to activities, to the general run of common life; and in its higher development to the ideal of the brotherhood of man, democracy, etc.

The ego-instinct leads to contrary things. It is the opposite to the sexual instinct. Both instincts are natural and exist in everyone: for if it is natural to mate and to seek the good of others, it is equally natural to defend and develop oneself. However, the opposing types arise, according to Jung, because we are born with one instinct or the other predominant.

The ego-instinct makes one think of oneself. And while this self-concentration appears first as selfishness, as egotism, as setting oneself above and against others; in its development it leads further. It leads to withdrawing from others, in order to brood, to study, to develop the imagination. It leads to introverting, going into oneself.

It was this type then that produced the first shaman and medicine-man. For in order to give birth to art, or philosophy, or discovery and invention, one must seclude oneself from others, and enter the world of the imagination. Naturally, the introvert in the savage tribe felt himself different from others. He was not concerned with activity, with hunting, fighting, mating, having children; he was concerned with his own ideas and emotions, with the pictures that loomed up in his mind and which he felt compelled to scratch out on stone or bone; with an unseen world which he saw as one of gods and demons; with religion and invention.

The tribe doubtless thought him strange and abnormal; but not necessarily effeminate. He secured his place by the results he produced, so that, in the common mind, he became linked with the supernatural. In fact, up to very recent years, the world held as more or less sacred its religious leaders and artists, its doctors and great students.

The introvert dreams the future which the extravert lives. Our whole structure of civilization, with its sciences, its arts, its inventions, and even its manners and habits, was built up by extraverts who made use of the great discoveries of introverts.

It may be seen at a glance that the problem of sexuality differs for the two types. If the extraverted, or active, type is rooted in the sexual-instinct, naturally it is the more sexual type; whereas the introverted type, rooted in the ego-instinct, is less so. However, we must remember that the types are rarely pure; both instincts exist in every one of us, only in the extravert the one is accented, in the introvert, the other.

But quite aside from the problem of type, there is the problem of bi-sexuality. To Jung this is a mental and emotional matter, rather than a physical. In other words, just as in all of us exist the ego and sexual instincts, just so there exist in all of us the masculine and feminine _principles_.

In the recent fight for Women’s Rights, there were those women who enlightened us by saying that men and women are fundamentally alike, that there must be a single standard of morality or immorality, that women could do the work of men, etc. On the other hand, the so-called he-men of America are fond of affirming that they are red-blooded and masculine through and through. Neither of these statements can bear much scrutiny.

According to Jung, the masculine and feminine are not only opposing physical structures, but opposing principles.

The masculine tendency is to _spend_, the feminine to _retain_. This may be seen in the sexual act itself.

Man, in his true nature, is the gambler, the adventurer, the one who strays to new fields, who fights, who is more or less reckless, and who tends, therefore, toward the new and the radical. Men have been our great pioneers whether along extraverted or introverted lines, whether in giving us great new ideas or arts, or in exploration, tearing down and rebuilding, leading peoples to new forms of government, etc.

Woman, on the other hand, in her true nature is cautious, wants to keep things as they are, looks for safety. A woman who had been radical in her youth told a friend of mine that getting children made her a conservative. This was natural. All the womanly qualities of patience, love, loyalty and devotion are necessary in bringing up children; and naturally she wants that security and rock of changelessness that her task may not be broken up. Woman tends, therefore, to be the conservative. While man rushes out to grasp the new, she safeguards the heritage of the past.

It is not curious, therefore, that just a few days before the general strike broke out in England, one of the most radical acts that nation has known, there was a great parade of women of every rank protesting against strikes--or, in other words, a demand that the vast problem be worked out along conservative and safe lines.

However, while these two principles of the masculine and feminine are mutually opposed, we find on close study that they co-exist in each one of us. It would seem as if each human being had in him the whole of human nature, and that whole is not only the qualities of aggression, of self-assertion, of recklessness and courage, but also the qualities of tenderness, devotion, patience, etc. Put differently, while the bodies of man and woman differ from each other sexually, they are fundamentally the same body; so, too, while a man is more masculine than a woman, and she more feminine than a man, each has, though in less degree, the traits of the other.

This is one explanation of how men and women attract each other. A man who was, say, sixty percent masculine and forty feminine, would be apt to be attracted by his opposite, a woman sixty percent feminine and forty masculine. A man extremely feminine would seek a woman extremely masculine, and so on. And obviously enough, the percentage of either principle in a man or woman would have some effect on the sexuality. A more feminine man would lack aggressiveness and assertiveness, and be more passive; a more masculine woman would want to take the upper hand.

With this understanding of the mixed natures of man and woman we may better comprehend the art of love.

THE ART OF LOVE

Havelock Ellis, the great English student of sexuality, and a pioneer in that field, coined the phrase.

The sexual act, he maintains, is not a simple matter; it is part of an art, the art of lovemaking. This is based on the fact that, normally, the woman is more slow than the man to respond to sexual stimulus, and must be aroused. The man is swift, ready and active; the woman slow, unresponsive and passive. In order to bring her full response, there must be an interval of wooing. And it is this, from Havelock Ellis’s point of view, which makes sexuality a beautiful and a human thing, raising the act, in his mind, to something almost sacramental, something in which the poetry and mystery of existence participate.

While sexuality in its origin was merely an instinct aiming at generation and reproduction, like every other instinct it has been turned into an art by man and become a rich part of his life. Eating, too, is an instinctive performance; yet very few find satisfaction in eating alone and in a plain way. Man, at his best, has raised eating to a joyous affair, where people not only share the food, but share each other’s society. Even the food itself may be prepared and served in an artistic manner and in pleasant surroundings.

So, too, sexuality, according to Havelock Ellis, has become an end in itself: the joyous union of man and woman in the mystery of love. For instance, he says, in India the art is well known, and the act often prolonged for hours. The West he finds backward in both the knowledge and the practice of this art.

The sexual act he divides into two parts: the forepleasure and the act itself. The forepleasure is the preparation and wooing. It summarizes, according to him, all those so-called childish things which taken separately are called perversions. As we have seen, the child goes through every phase: sucking, rubbing, looking, exhibiting, caressing, etc., and in various ways. These, according to Ellis’s studies, are found in the sexual act wherever it is practiced as an art. And he finds them natural and good insofar as they contribute toward the complete arousal of the woman and the final act itself.

They become perversions only, he says, where they are ends in themselves. A man, for instance, who cares mainly for expression of the mouth has a perverted sexuality; but if this is merely a step toward complete sexuality, it is part of the natural process and enhances the act.

In short, in the sexual act as an art the man and woman relive their whole development from the stage of suckling to the act itself.

Havelock Ellis also maintains that the positions assumed by the man and woman need not be the so-called normal, but any that is found satisfactory. In fact, he believes that a sense of equality between the sexes may be cultivated by the man assuming what is usually the woman’s position.

However, there are those who do not accept completely some of these contentions. Recently, a well-known New York psychologist said before a large audience that he and his colleagues in investigating a large number of cases, found a surprising proportion of sensitive people who had no interest in the sexual act itself, but only in certain phases of the forepleasure. These people were, he said, found to be normal in every other way, and he advocated lifting off the stigma of shame which still attaches to such acts.

What Jung says in this connection is that it isn’t the _form_ of the sexuality that matters, but rather the attitude we have toward the sexual. And, if we bear in mind the mixed nature of men and women, that some men are more feminine, for instance, and some women more masculine, it will readily be understood that sexuality means different things to different people. With some the forepleasure is negligible, with others it is the chief thing. Some women are like men, swift and immediate; some men like women, slow and passive. It remains in each case for those concerned to find their own way.

SEXUALITY AND THE FOUR FUNCTIONS

But if sexuality means one thing to the introvert, and another to the extravert, if also it means one thing to man and another to woman, there are still other sharply marked differences of meaning, which lead one to believe that in the matter of sexuality no one has a right to lay down a general morality, a general rule of conduct. If it is wrong for a so-called pure person to rule that all other persons must be pure, it is equally wrong for those to whom sexuality is necessary to rule that everyone must have sexual expression.

Before, however, going further in these differences of meaning, let us look more closely at the difference between introvert and extravert in reaction to sexuality.

If the extraverted attitude springs from the sexual instinct, it is natural that in the average extravert, who has not, due to bad teaching, distorted his nature, the sexual development has been normal and reached a more or less strong maturity. But with the introvert it is different. Since the introverted attitude arises from the ego-instinct, the development is more along the lines of thought, idea, philosophy, art, etc., and the sexual as a rule remains undeveloped. If it is undeveloped, it is, in fact, childish.

In other words, what Freud explains as fixations, due to attachment to the parent, Jung explains as simply that side of the nature which is still undeveloped. Introverts who in many ways are highly developed, may, at the same time, remain children when it comes to sexuality.

The question then arises: Is it better to suppress the sexuality of the introvert altogether, since the only kind he is capable of has an air of perverseness about it, is perhaps auto-erotic, or concentrated on the forepleasure, or wrong in some other way? Certainly you can’t demand of a child what you demand of an adult; and neither can you demand of an undeveloped function what you demand of one fully matured.