Whether it is due to hereditary influences or strictly orthodox early training or very early marriage or other circumstances, I cannot say; but as an ideal, as an abstract desideratum, the truly monogamic marriage appeals to me more than any other system of sexual relations. The truly monogamic couple, where the man and the woman go chaste to the marriage bed, and go thru life in mutual love and respect, these feelings growing stronger as the years pass by, finding full satisfaction in each other, without any desire for any other man or woman what nobler, what more appealing ideal can one conjure up?
Nor is it an utterly unrealizable ideal,
for the sneers of the cynics to the contrary, there are such couples, even at the present time,
and even in our largest Babylons. They may not constitute a large percentage, but that they
do exist and live most happily demonstrates that the ideal is not a chimera and is not
altogether outside the bounds of practical realization. In my practice, to encounter a man
who has had no sexual relations until his wedding night, and no extra-marital relations
whatever, is not such a great rarity.
How do I know that my patients tell me the truth, when they assure me of their strictly
and exclusively marital relations? Because, I know. Because my patients tell me the truth.
They come of their own free will and accord, they want to be helped, they know that I look
at sexual matters from the same calm dispassionate viewpoint that I regard a headache, or
dyspepsia, or a broken leg, they know that I am not a hypocrite or a moralist preacher, and
they tell me their sexual histories with the same ease and frankness as they would the history
of any of their other troubles.
They do not hesitate to disclose to me their perversions why
should they lie about their normal relations before or extra marital relations after marriage?
No, I can have confidence in the statements of my patients. And I repeat, the strictly chaste
and monogamic man is not such a rarity, at least in this country and in England. And if
marriage could be consummated at an early age, say at the age of eighteen to twenty two,
such cases would be much more frequent. The strictly monogamic ideal, I repeat, is not an
absurdity, not a chimera. And they are to be envied who can attain that ideal and live
happily under it.
But that ideal is not applicable to all mankind. Many of our troubles arise from our stupid
attempts to measure all men and all women by the same standard. The man with an
uncontrollably powerful sexuality would like to see all restrictive laws or opinions smashed
to pieces and he looks with contempt at the pious impotent weakling; the latter looks at the
former with hatred and would like to have him incarcerated. The moderate normal man
knows that both are wrong, both abnormal, but he also knows that neither can help his
opinions, for they are both influenced by their feelings, by their physical condition. An
examination of a man's prostate and seminal vesicles would often shed much light on the why
of his speaking and writing.
The strict ideal of monogamy, I said, is not applicable to all mankind. Antenuptially, for
instance, it is becoming more and more difficult to live up to that ideal. It is even
questionable if, with the late marriages, it is desirable that men should live up to it. And to
preach at men, to insist that they should remain chaste until their marriage, when that
marriage takes place when they are thirty or thirty five years old or even older, is absurd. I
am not sure that such preaching may not even be designated as criminal.
For if people really followed the advice of our moral preachers, the results would in many cases prove disastrous.
And I repeat what I said so many times before: an impotent man is a more pitiable man than
a venereally infected man. [For a fuller discussion of this point, see the author's "Sexual
Problems of To day", Chapter: "The Relations of the Sexes or Man's Inhumanity to
Woman".]