Under this head I have included a number of characteristics, which have no connective bearing upon one another. It seemed the most convenient classification.

Perhaps it will be best to take as the first example a sex tendency which can hardly be described as super-abnormal, for among single men, and especially among boys, it is extremely common.

Auto-eroticism in the form of self-abuse is not an easy problem to tackle. The usual policy adopted towards boys is most immoral. Well-meaning but hopelessly vicious purists, write terrifying pamphlets or deliver lectures in which they declare that this practice will inevitably lead to lunacy, paralysis or even death. The result is that the boy is scared into an ineffectual attempt at repression, which, so far as it is successful, sets the sex-impulse at work into morose channels and makes him a liar or a thief. Or he may be impelled to inquire for himself. He finds that, so long as self-abuse occurs infrequently, it does not bring about these dire evils, and accordingly he assumes that all moral doctrine is hypocrisy and often falls into the opposite extreme of constant self-abuse, with the result that actual physical and mental deterioration sets in.

What is really the truth?

The first consideration is that frequent and unregulated abuse does cause physical harm. The margin of frequency which will escape this harm varies with the individual. But, with growing boys, the practice is perhaps more dangerous than after physical maturity. The whole reserve of the physical constitution appears to be needed while the body is developing.

The difficulty of this problem is its complications. There are several entirely conflicting influences which must be weighed one against the other.

We have seen the physical danger, and, since morality must not be founded on a lie, we must freely admit that the physical danger may be eliminated by limiting the frequency of the practice. It may then be physically harmless. There remain, however, at least two causes which make for a misuse of the sex-force, that is—for immorality. The first is that it is usually the result of mental weakness, sheer inability to overcome the inclination. The mind, the will, must be supreme in its own house. Until that is done little else matters. And it comes, therefore, to this, so far as this particular consideration is concerned, that it is better for a man deliberately to regulate himself by programme to certain times, than to keep up an ineffectual struggle, or to obey whenever the inclination arises.

For, in both these cases, remorse follows. And this is as great an evil as the failure of will; indeed, it is failure of will. Remorse is not penitence. It is useless thereby to regret what has been done. A man must simply own to himself that he has failed, make a resolution to be stronger next time, and then sweep the recollection from his mind, switching off on to other mental channels.

The second influence which makes for impurity is that by this practice the sex-force becomes literally selfish. Now, sex is fundamentally a movement towards union through love, whether it be physical or super-physical. This practice is merely a vicious circle, in which the love element, save in the perverted form of narcissism, is absent. Accordingly, there must, almost always, be evil mental results from this abuse. And, once again, we see that the real evil is not in the physical act but in the realm of thought, whether the act occurs or not.

On the other hand, we must not become such abstract moralists as to deny that in many individuals the sex-force is so strong as to press almost irresistibly towards physical expression. Even dreams, which are the normal outlet, may not be sufficient. A man who for some reason, cannot marry, will therefore argue that his only alternative is recourse to prostitution, and that self-abuse, so long as it is regulated, is morally preferable. One remedy is, as we have already seen, the transfer of the sex-force to higher channels, so that all the glow and energy of sex is energized in devotion to a group of persons, or to a religious or humanitarian ideal in concrete labour. For sex is primarily creative, and if it is not creating physical children it may have, and should have, a spiritual progeny—as in art and literature.

The truth is that each individual case must be treated according to its particular state of development. General rules in this instance are particularly dangerous. We can only repeat that the repression is worse than commission, that a seething mass of sexual thought is worse when it has no physical outlet; that the ideal, when there may be no legitimate outlet—and, indeed, to some extent, in all cases—is to find an emotional outlet, to dig thought and emotional channels along which the sex-force may flow, but the physical expression of which is, in the ordinary sense of the term, non-sexual.[20]

And this is quite possible.

II

Attraction towards young children is frequently, perhaps almost entirely, sexual. A symptom of this temperament is that romantic attachments are formed towards either sex, because, before puberty, the child is bisexual or sexless. This must essentially be a cult; it is a clean and noble cult, but the penalty of its high standard is that here all physical sex expression must be denied except in the lesser form of embrace.

Here, indeed, the prosecution of the law against sex-acts is justified. For, not only is the child incapable of giving valid consent, but the commission of the sex-act is physically and morally injurious. It is physically injurious beyond all doubt at a young age, and it is morally injurious, because it introduces sex to an age of development when the consciousness of sex should not have appeared above the horizon. The inevitable result is that if sex-acts take place the child eventually ages rapidly, as can be seen among the child-mothers of India. Maturity is induced far before its time.

The sex consciousness, as distinct from the unconsciousness, can be awakened in the earliest years of childhood. The young boy or girl often shows an extraordinarily intuitive perception that there is a sexual design behind even the apparently harmless overtures. And this is why this cult is particularly dangerous. The lover, in fact, must not only entirely eliminate the morally criminal sex inclinations, but he must take care not to become so sentimental and romantic as really to suggest sex to the child’s unconsciousness. It is difficult to draw the line as to what is a lawful and what is an unlawful expression of this sex-temperament. One can only say that the remedy is not to concentrate love on one child, but on children generally. The child must not be treated as an adult; there must be no manifestations of jealousy, or insistence on a return of love expression. The embrace of children must be natural but not too ardent. In fact, the lover must diffuse his love and romp with children as a class rather than allow himself to appear emotional over one individual.

Many unthinking people will at once regard this temperament as impure when they have been convinced that scientifically it is sexual. But this is only because they cannot understand that sex is a clean thing and that the physical side of it is an occasional and by no means an inevitable incident. The cult of child-love is in fact one of the purest and noblest of sex-expressions. But it is a difficult path, and he who treads it must beware of many pitfalls.Again, I quite deny that it is due to thwarted paternal instinct. I believe it to be as natural a variety as any other of the sex-temperaments. We have suffered too long from the superstition that sex is a uniformity of type.

III

Then there is that strange form of sex-expression known as bestiality.

To most of us the connexion between man and beast in sex is so revolting that there is a great danger of our prejudice running away with us.

I believe that prejudice against what seems to me so debased a vice, is justifiable. But I am equally sure that to punish such offences by criminal law has no shred of justification, except when the act is done in public so as to be openly indecent. No physical or moral harm can be done to the animal. And were it not tragic, the idea of sentencing the offenders to penal servitude would be itself a travesty.

The practice, which is not so uncommon as many people imagine, is not so much immoral as unnatural. I mean that this can hardly ever be a variety of sex-temperament. Although the love of women for pet dogs is probably a form of perverted sex-outlet, it seems impossible to discover here any actual love going out towards animals rather than to humans. Therefore, the act is almost always due to a desire for mere physical expression, when this happens to have been chosen as the most convenient.

The true remedy, therefore, can only be to take the individual and educate him. He must be shown that it is immoral for man to devolve back to the animal level. He is superior to the beast. He must be reminded that sex must be a result of love, and that sex-love between man and animal would only be possible if it were moral for man to cease to reason, to go down on all fours, and to eat and drink and live like an animal. Even the most primitive man would not wish to do that. And if he feels any sense of abhorrence at such a proposal, then he must learn to extend his abhorrence to any attempt at a similar equality in sex.

IV

The strange and almost endless forms of sex-association need not be considered, since they have no moral problem of their own. The man whose sex-force is stirred into energy by the sight of some inanimate physical object is obviously the victim of a sex-repression. And such diseases must be treated as any other repressions should be. These general considerations must suffice here for all forms of sex perversions, such as sadism and its converse. And it is not difficult to distinguish between the unnaturalness of such practices and the natural character of the main sex-types which we have already mentioned.