(discusses the sex-customs now existing in the world, and their relation to the ideal of monogamous love.)
just as human beings through wrong religious beliefs torture one another, and wreck their lives and happiness; just as through wrong eating and other physical habits they make disease and misery for themselves; just so they suffer and perish for lack of the most elementary knowledge concerning the sex relationship. the difference is that in the field of religious ideas it is now permissible to impart the truth one possesses. if i tell you there is no devil, and that believing this will not cause you to suffer in an eternity of sulphur and brimstone, no one will be able to burn me at the stake, even though he might like to do so. if i advise you that it is not harmful to eat beefsteak on friday, or to eat thoroughly cooked pork any day of the week, neither the archbishops nor the rabbis nor the vegetarians will be able to lock me in a dungeon. but if i should impart to you the simplest and most necessary bit of knowledge concerning the facts of your sex life—things which every man and woman must know if we are to stop breeding imbecility and degeneracy in the world—then i should be liable, under federal statutes, to pay a fine of $5,000, and to serve a term of five years in a federal penitentiary. scarcely a week passes that i do not receive a letter from someone asking for information about such matters; but i dare not answer the letters, because i know there are agencies, maintained and paid by religious superstition, employing spies to trap people into the breaking of this law.
i shall tell you here as much as i am permitted to tell, in the simplest language and the most honest spirit. i believe that human beings are meant to be happy on this earth, and to avoid misery and disease. i believe that they are given the powers of intelligence in order to seek the ways of happiness, and i believe that it is a worthy work to give them the knowledge they need in order to find happiness.
at the outset of this book of love we are going to examine the existing facts of the sex relationships of men and women in present-day society. we shall discover that amid all the false and dishonest thinking of mankind, there is nowhere more falsity and dishonesty than here. the whole world is a gigantic conspiracy of "hush," and the orthodox and respectable of the world are like worshippers of some god, who spend their day-time burning incense before the altar, and in the night-time steal the sacred jewels and devour the consecrated offerings. these worshippers confront you with the question, do you believe in marriage; and they make the assumption that the institution of marriage exists, or at some time has existed in the world. but if you wish to do any sound thinking about this subject, you must get one thing clear at the outset; the institution of marriage is an ideal which has been preached and taught, but which has never anywhere, in any society, at any stage of human progress, actually existed as the general practice of mankind. what has existed and still exists is a very different institution, which i shall here describe as marriage-plus-prostitution.
by this statement i do not mean to deny that there are many women, and a few men, who have been monogamous all their lives; nor that there are many couples living together happily in monogamous marriage. what i mean is that, considering society as a whole, wherever you find the institution of marriage, you also find, co-existent therewith and complementary thereto, the institution of prostitution. of this double arrangement one part is recognized, and written into the law; the other part is hidden, and prohibited by law; but those who have to do with enforcing the law all know that it exists, and practically all of them consider it inevitable, and a great many derive income from it. so i say: if you believe in marriage-plus-prostitution, that is your right; but if marriage is what you believe in, then your task is to consider such questions as these: is marriage a possible thing? can it ever become the sex arrangement of any society? what are the forces which have so far prevented it from prevailing, and how can these forces be counteracted?
it is my belief that monogamous love is the most desirable of human sex relationships, the most fruitful in happiness and spiritual development. the laws and institutions of civilized society pretend to defend this relationship, but the briefest study of the facts will convince anyone that these laws and institutions are not really meant to protect monogamous love. what they are is a device of the property-holding male to secure his property rights to women, and more especially to secure himself as to the paternity of his heirs. in primitive society, where land and other sources of wealth were held in common, and sex monogamy was unknown, there was no way to determine paternity, and no reason for doing so. but under the system of private property and class privilege, it is necessary for some one man to support a child, if it is to be supported; and when a man has fought hard, and robbed hard, and traded hard, and acquired wealth, he does not want to spend it in maintaining another man's child. that he should let himself be fooled into doing so is one of the greatest humiliations his fellowmen can imagine. if you read shakespeare's plays, and look up the meaning of old words, so as to understand old witticisms and allusions, you will discover that this was the stock jest of shakespeare's time.
in order to protect himself from such ridicule, the man maintained in ancient times his right to kill the faithless woman with cruel tortures. he maintains today the right to deprive her of her children, and of all share in his property, even though she may have helped to earn it. but until quite recent times, the beginning of the revolt of women, there was never any corresponding penalty for faithlessness in husbands. under the english law today, the husband may divorce his wife for infidelity, but the wife must prove infidelity plus cruelty, and the courts have held that the cruelty must consist in knocking her down. while i was in england, the highest court rendered a decision that a man who brought his mistress to his home and compelled his wife to wait upon her was not committing "cruelty" in the meaning of the english law.
this is what is known as the "double standard," and the double standard prevails everywhere under the system of marriage-plus-prostitution, and proves that capitalist "monogamy" is not a spiritual ideal, but a matter of class privilege. it is a breach of honor for the ruling class male to tamper with the wife of his friend; it is frequently dangerous for him to tamper with the young females of his own class; but it is in general practice taken for granted that the young females of lower classes are his legitimate prey. in england a man may have a marriage annulled, if he can prove that the woman he married had what is called a "past"; but everybody takes it for granted that the man has had a "past"; it is covered by the polite phrase, "sowing his wild oats." wherever among the ruling class you find men bold enough to discuss the facts of the sex order they have set up, you find the idea, expressed or implied, that this "wild oats" is a necessary and inevitable part of this order, and that without it the order would break down. the english philosopher, lecky, making an elaborate study of morals through the ages, speaks of the prostitute in the following frank language:
"herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. but for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. on that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. she remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people."
i invite you to study these sentences and understand them fully. remember that they are the opinion of the most learned historian of sex customs who has ever written in english; a man whose authority is recognized in our schools, whose books are in every college library. william edward hartpole lecky is not in any sense a revolutionist; he is a conventional english scholar, an upholder of english law and order and patriotism. he is not of my school of thought, but of those who now own the world and run it. i quote him, because he tells in plain language what kind of world they have made; i invite you to study his words, and then judge my statement that the sex arrangement under which we live in modern society is not monogamous love, but marriage-plus-prostitution.
it is my hope to point the way to a higher system. i should like to call it marriage; but perhaps it would be more precise to call it marriage-minus-prostitution. in working it out, we shall have to think for ourselves, and discard all formulas. it is obvious that our present-day religious creeds, ethical ideals, legal codes, and social rewards and punishments have been powerless to protect marriage, or to make it the rule in sex relationships. so we shall have to begin at the beginning and find new reasons for monogamous love, a new basis of marriage other than the protection of private property. we shall have to inform ourselves as to the fundamental purposes of sex; we shall have to ask ourselves: what are the factors which determine rightness and wrongness in the sex relationship? what is love, and what ought it to be? these questions we shall try to approach without any fixed ideas whatever. we shall decide them by the same tests that we have used in our thinking about god and immortality, health and disease. we shall ask, not what our ancestors believed, not what god teaches us, not what the law ordains, not what is "respectable," nor yet what is "advanced," according to the claim of modern sex revolutionists and "free lovers." we shall ask ourselves, what are the facts. we shall ask, what can be made to work in practice, what can justify itself by the tests of reason and common sense.
