Sexual Ethics

A Study of Borderland Questions

Robert Michels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138532458
• eBook ISBN: 9781351306621
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In his treatment of the issues raised by the movements of women for equal rights a century ago, Michels anticipated controversies and conflicts about which people care deeply today. He took a clear position in support of the desirability of equality between the sexes. In consequence, it remains relevant to current debates within feminism over equality and difference and the corresponding challenge to, and feminist critique of, social science arising from the (re) emergence of "difference" feminism.Sexual Ethics constitutes both an analysis of the "woman problem" and a document describing the wars between the sexes during this period and an important and overlooked piece of history of the classic sociological tradition. Michels observed that the national and economic conflicts in modern Europe were vast in scale and revealed sharply sensed injustices, and also that sex antagonisms are becoming more acute. He presented an argument, consistent with his theoretical position, about the seriousness of women's rights. Michels' discussions of sexuality, sexual morality, and the relations of the sexes had as its stimulus "the new sexual ethic" advocated by feminists. He pointed out that true equality required equality of rights to sexual liberty for women or chastity prior to marriage for men.Michels supported premarital chastity for men as an ideal, but he doubted that very many would practice it. Michels was virtually alone in the sociological tradition in seeking to illuminate the "struggle for love" between men and women by reference to the "erotic coquetry" in the sexual behavior of "lower animals." Despite his stand for equality of men and women in sexual matters, a recurrent theme in Sexual Ethics is that men are sexually more aggressive than women, at least in part due to social structures and cultural traditions. Michels advocated family planning (but opposed abortion) in the interests of marital and family happiness and economic well-being, especially for the poor.In his new introduction, Terry R. Kandal discusses Robert Michels' life. He explores, among other topics, Michels' treatment of the woman question and the reactions of Michels' contemporaries to the same question. He also discusses the feminist critique of social science, and the place of Michels in and the gender questions of our times. The book will be of particular interest to those interested in the history of relations between men and women as well as those interested in questions of biological determinism.

Part I.

General Borderland Problems of the Erotic Life.

CHAPTER I.

Hunger and love.

Necessity and Intensity of Sexual Love in a State of Nature—Urgency of Sexual Need as displayed in Popular Catchwords—Undis-criminating Character of the Sexual Impulse when Conventional Restraints are thrown aside—Ethical Limitations of the Right to Sexual Activity—The Primary Ethical Foundation of every Sexual Relationship must be the deliberate Consent of both Participants in the Love-Act.

SEXUAL love is one of the primary physical needs of the human race. For this very reason, chastity has a practical value, but it has such a value only as a means to higher ends. As an end in itself, chastity is unnatural and absurd. The sexual need takes the form of an urgent impulsion. In the case of every organ of the human body there is experienced an instinctive tendency to the exercise of its normal functional activity, and the sexual organs share this universal tendency. To convey some idea of the urgency and necessity of the sexual impulse, which, though often independent of the rational will, is experienced by every normal human being, this impulse has frequently been compared with the sense of hunger. The sexual impulse undoubtedly resembles hunger in this fact, that in a state of nature it is far from dainty. Throw any man and any woman together as the sole inhabitants of a remote and solitary American farmstead, the nature of their impulsive life will ensure their speedy sexual union. Primitive love is the outcome of sexual differentiation, and the consequent attraction between those of opposite sexes. Preference can arise only where there is a choice. The higher forms of love do not make their appearance in default of the possibility of choice from among a considerable number of persons of the opposite sex. In a state of civilisation there are extensive possibilities of choice, though as yet only for the male. In these circumstances the woman of a man’s choice may feel herself forced to accept his overtures, not because she herself desires him, but simply because she fears to lose him.

In Halle the following incident once came under my notice. It was during the epoch of the great masked balls, one of those voluptuous winter nights in which the entire city seems transformed into a teeming ant-heap, alive with couples wearied by the dance but hungering for love—a night sounding Cupid’s Æolian harp in every possible tone from the loudest to the softest. A youth and a maiden, engaged in an intimate and lively conversation, passed me in the street. What had happened before I saw them I cannot tell. Now and again I heard the woman’s voice repeating half emphatically, half tearfully, “No, no, I won’t do it.” The dispute continued. The young man appeared far from willing to accept this refusal, and continued his side of the argument with much vigorous play of facial expres sion. At length, he suddenly stopped—they were passing the corner of a well-known street full of licensed houses of prostitution—and dropped the girl’s arm. He stood for a moment facing her, half threateningly, half scornfully, and with a disagreeable smile which spoiled the expression of his pretty, beardless face, and then, as if he had made up his mind, turned down the dark alley. He had not made two paces away from her, when the girl rushed after him, crying out, “No, you shan’t do that!” and grasped his arm. He tried to break loose from her, and for a few moments they struggled vigorously. At length, watching the scene with lively interest from a little distance, I heard the girl say, “Come with me ; it shall be as you will.” This was the word of power which appeased the storm. Instantly he took her in his arms, kissed her cheek, took her by the arm, and disappeared with her round the next corner. It was evident that he had conquered her by an ignoble threat, and by an appeal to the dread of losing their lover by which so many women are dominated—a dread which makes them forget everything, forget honour and self-respect, so that they become docile instruments in the hands of the male.

In the great majority of human beings, even to-day, the manifestations of the love-instinct assume a rude and primitive form. What a man loves is not a woman, but women, that is to say, the female of his species. His only desire, or at any rate the chief of his desires, is the act of physical union. Every woman is regarded as a man’s predestined prey— unless deprived of value from this point of view by age or gross physical defects. For, as we are told in the Neapolitan folk-song: L’uomo è cacciatore (“Man is a hunter”)¹ Popular wit conveys ideas of this peculiarity of the erotic moods of the average man in caustic and pithy phrases. There is a Tuscan saying: Omo e donna in stretto loco è come paglia accanto al foco. In the Rhineland we find an equivalent phrase: Neu Bux op de Leppen macht Tröngschaf unger de Schleppen. The first of these sayings is to the effect that a man and a woman in close proximity are like fuel and flame; the second tells us that from the first kiss on the lips a man passes to the last intimacy; both are equivalent to the English proverbial saying about “fire and tow.” Thus, in the popular view, between the different forms of love there is no distinction as regards either end or means; the only variations are in the length of the strides by which progress is effected, or in the greater or less expenditure of mental energy requisite to attain the goal.

In the Middle Ages, more especially, physical love was regarded as an absolute necessity. In all popular festivals, prostitutes circulated freely, plying their trade before all the world. In the case of imprisoned debtors, their creditors were compelled twice a week to send them sufficient money to enable them to pay for the services of prostitutes.² Towards the end of the Middle Ages was current the legend that an accumulation of human semen must be dispersed if a poisoning of the blood was to be averted, and on the strength of this belief even boys of twelve were sent to the brothels.¹ In our own time we find in legal ideas traces of the absolute and necessary identity of every form of love with the physical act of sexual congress. In Italy, the Supreme Court holds’ that carnal union constitutes an integral part, and therefore a constituent element, of the act of abduction (raptus).² Thus, to the legal mind, abduction without cohabitation appears inconceivable.

It is a matter of common observation that those who are withdrawn from the accustomed paths, and are far removed from the artificial system of conventions and penalties of civilised life—conventions whose disregard imposes upon women the dread penalty of failure to attain marriage—become more “natural,” or, if you will, more atavistic in their ways. Those who spread European civilisation in the interior of Africa, soon come, in sexual relations, to resemble the most savage of negro kinglets as closely as one hair resembles another. The stiff-mannered English squires and city men, who leave their homes in respectable puritan England to enjoy a week-end in Gay Paris, are, in the circle of Parisian prostitutes, regarded as addicted to exceptionally extravagant debauchery. “It is reported by those who keep brothels that the taste of Englishmen demands very young girls.”³ The French and German prostitutes who nightly throng Regent Street and Piccadilly are said to exhibit a far higher degree of human depravity than English women in the same way of life, or than their sister prostitutes left behind on the continent.¹ The daughters of the Emilian peasants, habituated to a strict domestic discipline, who spend some weeks every summer in company with young fellows of the same province, in badly paid, exhausting, and unwholesome work in the wet rice-fields of Novare, speedily forget, when thus removed from the supervision of their parental homes, the teachings in which they have been brought up and the precepts of the catechism, and devote their scanty leisure at the end of the long working day to the unrestrained enjoyment of the forbidden pleasures of love. When attempts were made to do away with the sleeping-sheds common to both sexes, and to replace them by separate dormitories, young men and young women alike organised a strenuous resistance to the proposal, even threatening a strike if anything were done to throw hindrances in the way of their love pleasures.²

The strength of the spontaneous instincts veiled by the decent aspects of civilisation is most plainly illustrated by the behaviour of armies in time of war. From time immemorial Venus has been the lover of Mars, and has followed every step of the warrior-god. From the foot-soldiers of Charles V. and his contemporaries, and from the mercenary troops of the Thirty Years’ War, down to the armies of modéra times, the fighting regiments have always had at their heels a long train of prostitutes. In our own days, although this evil has by no means been completely abolished, serious attempts have been made to check it, not so much on moral grounds, as for administrative and technical reasons of a military order. But another even more hateful system has replaced it. The soldiers in a foreign land take their pleasure with any woman who is willing. The Napoleonic armies in Spain were accompanied by battalions of Spanish prostitutes, betrayers of their country, who received from their own countrymen the depreciatory nickname of afrancesadas (“the Frenchified woman”),¹ The men are shot down as enemies, while the women who consent—and there will always be plenty of these— are in request as concubines, whilst the wives of these men, torn between hope and fear, are awaiting the return of their soldier-heroes, and weaving for them crowns of victory. In the Franco-German war of 1870–71, the Teutons engaged in saving their fatherland were at the same time celebrating phallic festivals with the Parisian cocottes.² Simultaneously, the French soldiers and the Garibaldian troops who had flocked to their aid, were ruffling it in the brothels of Dijon; while the Italian officers, by the seduction of numerous women of the French bourgeoisie, were taking revenge for the Italian husbands whose wives after Magenta and Solferino had surrendered to the embraces of the French allies.¹ All great historical convulsions, and those also of a natural order, which, by the destruction or violent modification of the normal human environment, forcibly upset the balance of the human mind, react powerfully upon the sexual instincts, rendering them more acute and more excitable, and throwing out of action the inhibitary centres of acquired morality. It is a noteworthy fact that after the victory of the reaction in Russia and the horrible suppression of the revolution in that country, the young men at the universities, throwing over Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin, wallowed in the mire of unbridled sensuality.² Similarly, the young women who survived the disastrous earthquake at Messina, hardly rescued from the shattered fragments of the town, exhausted after their terrors, reacting in the fierce delight of finding themselves after all alive, and mad with sexual desire, fell, amid the very ruins of their homes, into the arms of the first male who came along.³

Love and hunger are alike in this, that most human beings crave for the satisfaction of these desires with extreme urgency; they are alike, further, in this, that in the case of the great majority of males, the satisfaction of the sexual impulse, no less than the satisfaction of hunger, is effected, when need is pressing, with the same animal lack of nice discrimination. But the sexual impulse is sharply differentiated from hunger in one matter of the first importance, so that the unconditional assimilation of hunger and of love may give rise to the most fallacious ideas, and if these ideas are translated into practice, to actions of the stupidest, the most unscrupulous, and the most unconscientious character. The object of hunger is of animal or even vegetable origin. The object of the sexual impulse, on the other hand, is the possession of another human being. Abstractly considered, the sexual instinct has no moral values, either positive or negative; like hunger, it is unsusceptible of mensuration. It exists, that is all, altogether apart from the realm of ethical values. To apply the words of Nietsche, it is “beyond good and evil.” But taken in the concrete, sexual love has to be justified in the terms of the categorical imperative. In other words, sexual love, involving as it does the mutual activity of two individuals, must not consist in one’s making use of the other simply for the purposes of the former—whereas a sexual act which injures no one is indifferent, ethically speaking, and therefore cannot be immoral. A corollary of this thesis is the ethical limitation of the right to sexuality. It has been said that love constitutes a sort of égoïsme à deux. This is so far true, in that one of the most frequent concomitants of sexual love is the mental concentration of the two lovers within the restricted circle of their own personalities, so that, as a result of this tendency, they readily lose all proper sense of their relationships with the outer world, and tend to neglect all other duties. But we may lay down as a moral law whose infraction makes sexual enjoyment altogether unethical, the postulate that this egoism of sex should have an altruistic basis, if not in external relationships, at least in internal. To exemplify, as immoral must be condemned every sexual act in which harm is wittingly done to the physical or moral personality of the sexual partner. Hence, sexuality, moral or amoral, whichever you will, presupposes freedom of action and intrinsic spontaneity in both partners. The existing legal codes involve a partial recognition of this point of view, for they punish as carnal violence any sexual act effected by brute force or under stress of threats of violence, and all other cases in which it can be shown that the sexual partner was deprived of freedom of choice. In this last category are included cases in which effective resistance to sexual advances was impossible, owing to physical immaturity, mental or physical malady, loss of consciousness, or some other cause independent of the direct action of the offender. Under the same head come the cases in which, by threats of murder or by false representations, the free operation of the will has been impaired. The abuse of a protective and fiduciary relationship for sexual purposes is also a criminal offence.

Whilst the law thus limits its attention to certain well-defined instances, the moral code condemns sexual intercourse effected either without full mutual consent or without full understanding of the nature of the act, or by means of false promises. The attainment of any end by holding out false hopes, by fraud of any kind, is immoral. From this point of view (that is to say, where seduction has been effected under promise of marriage) the English law which inflicts a punishment for breach of promise of marriage is sound and right. The Don Juan type of man, who regards love-making as the most agreeable way of passing his time, and whose principal aim in life is to overcome and to possess the largest possible number of women, cannot be said, morally speaking, to represent a very high type of manhood. Yet it cannot be denied that such a man, in so far as in his love-relationships he makes no use of false coin, so that every woman who gives herself to him does so with a free spirit and fully aware of what she is doing—the man who hides nothing and promises nothing—exhibits the primary attributes of sexual morality, attributes which should never be dissociated from the sex-relationship, namely, loyalty and truth.¹ The satisfaction of sexual hunger in a love-act freely undertaken by both parties does not infringe in any ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface to English Edition
• Preface
• Preliminary Observations
• Sexual Education
• PART I. GENERAL BORDERLAND PROBLEMS OF THE EROTIC LIFE
• PART II. BORDERLAND PROBLEMS OF THE EXTRACONJUGAL EROTIC LIFE
• PART III. PRE-CONJUGAL BORDERLAND PROBLEMS
• PART IV. BORDERLAND PROBLEMS OF THE CONJUGAL SEXUAL LIFE
• Appendix to Chapter II, Part III
• Index