(From Music at Night)
Appendix
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work. The domestication of sex presents a problem whose solution must be attempted on two distinct levels of human experience, the psycho-physiological and the social. On the social level the relations of the sexes have everywhere been regulated by law, by uncodified custom, by taboo and religious ritual. Hundreds of volumes have been filled with accounts of these regulations, and it is unnecessary to do more than mention them in passing. Our present concern is with the problem of domesticating sex at the source, of civilizing its manifestations in the individual lover. This is a subject to which, in our Western tradition, we have paid much too little attention. Indeed, it is only in very recent years that, thanks to the declining influence of the Judaeo-Christian ethic, we have been able to discuss it realistically. In the past the problem used to be dealt with in one or other of three equally unsatisfactory ways. Either it was not mentioned at all, with the result that adolescents coming to maturity were left to work out their sexual salvation, unassisted, within the framework of the prevailing, and generally barbarous socio-legal system. Or else it was mentioned—but men ioned on the one hand with obscene delight or obscene disapproval (the tone of the pornographers and the Puritan moralists), or with a vague and all too “spiritual” sentimentality (the tone of the troubadours, Petrarchians and romantic lyrists). Today we are condemned neither to silence, nor obscenity, nor sentimentality; we are at liberty, at last, to look at the facts and to ask ourselves what, if anything, can be done about them. One of the best ways of discovering what can be done is to look at what has been done. What experiments have been made in this field, and how successful have they been?
I shall begin not at the faraway beginning of everything, among the Trobrianders, for example, or the Tahitians, but rather at the beginning of our own current phase of civilization—in the middle years, that is to say, of the nineteenth century.
Victoria had been on the throne for seven years when, in 1844, John Humphrey Noyes published his book, Bible Communism. (It is worth remarking that, for the American public of a hundred years ago, Communism was essentially biblical. It was preached and practiced by men and women who wanted to emulate the earliest Christians. The appeal was not to Marx’s Manifesto—still unpublished when Noyes wrote his book—but to the Acts of the Apostles.) In the fourth chapter of Bible Communism and again, at greater length, in his Male Continence, written more than twenty years later, Noyes set forth his theories of sex and described the methods employed by himself and his followers for transforming a wild, God-eclipsing passion into a civilized act of worship, a prime cause of crime and misery into a source of individual happiness, social solidarity and good behavior.
“It is held in the world,” Noyes writes in Bible Communism, “that the sexual organs have two distinct functions—viz: the urinary and the propagative. We affirm that they have three—the urinary, the propagative and the amative., i.e. they are conductors first of the urine, secondly of the semen and thirdly of the social magnetism…” After Mrs. Noyes had come dangerously near to death as the result of repeated miscarriages, Noyes and his wife decided that, henceforth, their sexual relationships should be exclusively amative, not propagative. But how were the specifically human aspects of sex to be detached from the merely biological? Confronted by this question, Robert Dale Owen had advocated coitus interruptus; but Noyes had read his Bible and had no wish to emulate Onan. Nor did he approve of contraceptives—“those tricks,” as he called them, “of the French voluptuaries.” Instead he advocated Male Continence and what Dr. Stockham was later to call Karezza. With the most exemplary scientific detachment he began by “analyzing the act of sexual intercourse. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. Its beginning and most elementary form is the simple presence of the male organ in the female.” Presence is followed by motion, motion by crisis. But now “suppose the man chooses to enjoy not only the simple presence, but also the reciprocal motion, and yet to stop short of the crisis… If you say that this is impossible, I answer that I know it is possible—nay, that it is easy.” He knew because he himself had done it. “Beginning in 1844, I experimented on the idea” (the idea that the amative function of the sexual organs could be separated from the propagative) “and found that the self-control it required is not difficult; also that my enjoyment was increased; also that my wife’s experience was very satisfactory, which it had never been before; also that we had escaped the horrors and the fear of involuntary propagation.” Noyes was a born prophet, a missionary in the bone. Having made a great discovery, he felt impelled to bring the good news to others—and to bring it, what was more, in the same package with what he believed to be true Christianity. He preached, he made disciples, he brought them together in a community, first in Vermont and later at Oneida, in upstate New York. “Religion,” he declared, “is the first interest, and sexual morality the second in the great enterprise of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth.” At Oneida the religion was Perfectionist Christianity and the sexual morality was based upon the psycho-physiological practices of Male Continence and the social law of Complex Marriage. Like all earlier founders of religious communities, Noyes disapproved of exclusive attachments between the members of his group. All were to love all, unpossessively, with a kind of impersonal charity which, at Oneida, included sexual relationships. Hence the establishment, within the community, of Complex Marriage. Noyes did not condemn monogamy; he merely believed that group love was better than exclusive love. “I would not,” he wrote, “set up a distinction of right and wrong between general and special love, except that special love, when false, makes more mischief. I insist that all love, whether general or special, must have its authority in the sanction and the inspiration of the ascending fellowship. All love that is at work in a private corner, away from the general circulation, where there are no series of links connecting it with God, is false love; it rends and devours, instead of making unity, peace and harmony.” At Oneida there was to be no love in a private corner, no idolatrous and God-eclipsing attachment of one for one, outside the general circulation. Each was married to all; and when any given pair decided (with the advice and permission of the Elders) to consummate their latent nuptials, Male Continence guaranteed that their union should be fruitful only of “social magnetism.” Love was for love’s sake and for God’s, not for offspring.
The Oneida Community endured for thirty years and its members, from all accounts, were excellent citizens, singularly happy and measurably less neurotic than most of their Victorian contemporaries. The women of Oneida had been spared what one of Noyes’s lady correspondents described as “the miseries of Married Life as it is in the World.” The men found their self-denial rewarded by an experience, at once physical and spiritual, that was deeper and richer than that of unrestrained sexuality. Here is the comment of a young man who had lived in the community and learned the new Art of Love. “This Yankee nation,” he wrote to Noyes, “claims to be a nation of inventors, but this discovery of Male Continence puts you, in my mind, at the head of all inventors.” And here are Noyes’s own reflections on the psychological, social and religious significance of his discovery. “The practice which we propose will advance civilization and refinement at railroad speed. The self-control, retention of life and advance out of sensualism, which must result from making freedom of love a bounty on the chastening of sensual indulgence, will at once raise the race to new vigor and beauty, moral and physical. And the refining effects of sexual love (which are recognized more or less in the world) will be increased a hundredfold when sexual intercourse becomes a method of ordinary conversation and each becomes married to all.” Furthermore, “in a society trained in these principles, amative intercourse will have its place among the “fine arts.” Indeed, it will take rank above music, painting, sculpture, etc.; for it combines the charms and benefits of them all. There is as much room for cultivation of taste and skill in this department as in any.” And this is not all. Sexual love is a cognitive act. We speak—or at least we used to speak—of carnal knowledge. This knowledge is of a kind that can be deepened indefinitely. “To a true heart, one that appreciates God, the same woman is an endless mystery. And this necessarily flows from the first admission that God is unfathomable in depths of knowledge and wisdom.” Male Continence transforms the sexual act into a prolonged exchange of “social magnetism”; and this prolonged exchange makes possible an ever deepening knowledge of the mystery of human nature—that mystery which merges ultimately, and becomes one with the mystery of Life itself.