ABSTRACT
We are told that sex was inflicted upon Adam and Eve after the Fall as a punishment. From what I have seen of its workings in the present day I am inclined to agree with this view. Almost all the young men and young women that I know suffer acutely in one way or another through its workings. Can you, reader, lay your hand on your heart and say that you have derived more pleasure than pain from sex and its consequences? In the old days of masculine domination the matter was simple. Men took what they wanted, and women submitted. In this way half the human race was happy and half unhappy. But with the modern demand for justice as between men and women, this arrangement became impossible. The reformers may have intended that women should become as happy as men, but what in fact they secured was that men became as unhappy as women. All would be well if only people would pair off as they did in Victorian novels and live happily ever after. But simple and satisfactory as this prescription is, people resolutely refuse to follow it. Either the wife gets tired of the husband or the husband gets tired of the wife. If the wife is sufficiently dutiful, she may conceal the disgust inspired by her husband’s habitual gestures and habitual anecdotes and habitual pronouncements on questions of public moment. In that case, she will take out her dissatisfaction on her children. Or she may seek distraction elsewhere, in which case she must either become an adept in deception or drive her husband to distraction with jealousy. If it is the husband that gets tired first, he may, if he is a man of high morality and iron self-control, take refuge in politeness and hard work, but sooner or later the strain will become
intolerable, and he will either break down or break out. Sometimes the solution is sought in divorce, but the same reasons which led to the first divorce are likely to lead to a second and third. I have frequently been embarrassed in talking to American ladies to find that whatever man I happened to mention had been their husband at some time or other.
