If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, what is it? Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature, the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and virtue are products like vinegar."

Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and class privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited power with practically no responsibility—a strain which not one human being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the conferring upon a class of power without responsibility means the collapse of that class and the downfall of its civilization.

So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system of privilege does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his sex desires. What it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to abolish that mutuality in sex, that interaction between male and female influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual selection, and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit.

In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her, according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type.

But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in which opportunity, and indeed survival, depend upon money, and the whole tendency of society is to make money standards supreme. We do not like to admit this, of course; our instincts revolt against it, and our higher faculties reinforce the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives, and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear people deny it is money which determines admission into what is called "society," the intimate life of the ruling class. They will tell you that it is not money, it is "good taste," "refinement," "charm of personality," and so on. But if you analyze all these things, you speedily discover that they are made out of money; they are symbols of the possession of money, devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping themselves apart from those who do not possess it. I would safely defy a member of the ruling class to name a single element in what he calls "refinement," or "good taste," that is not in its ultimate analysis a symbol of the possession of money. Let it be the pronunciation of a word, or the cut of a coat, or the method of handling a fork—whatever it may be, it is part of a code, revealing that the person, or more important yet, the ancestors of the person, have belonged to the leisure class, and have had time and opportunity to learn to do things in a certain precise conventional way. I say "conventional," for very frequently these tests have no relationship whatever to reality. Considered as a matter of common sense and convenience, it is a great deal better to eat peas with a spoon than with a fork, and to use both a knife and fork in eating lettuce; but if you eat peas with a spoon, or use a knife on lettuce, every member of the ruling class will instantly know that you are an interloper, as much so as if you took to throwing the china at your hostess.

Our culture is a money culture, our standards are money standards, and our sex decisions are based upon money, not upon love. Any man can have money in our society, provided the accident of birth favors him, and it is everywhere known that any man who has money can get a wife. It is certainly not true that any man with no money can get a wife, and it is true that most men who have little money have to take wives who have less—that is, who belong to a lower class, according to the world's standards. The average young girl of the propertied classes is trained for marriage as for any other business. She is taught to be sexually cold, but to imitate sexual excitement deliberately, so as to arouse it in the male, and to keep herself surrounded with a swarm of males; this being the basis of her prestige, the factor which will cause the "eligible" man, the "catch," to desire her. In polite society this proceeding is known as "coquetry," or "charm," and it would be no exaggeration to say that seventy-five per cent of all the novels so far written in the world are expositions of this activity; also that when we go to the theater, we go in order to watch and sympathize with these manifestations of pecuniary sexuality.

As a rule the young girl knows what she is doing, but she is taught to camouflage it, to preserve her "innocence." She would not dream of marrying for money; she wants to marry something "distinguished"—that is to say, something which has received the stamp of approval from a world which approves money. She wants to marry somebody who is "elegant," who is in "good form"; she wants to marry without having to think about the horrid subject of money at all, and so she is carefully chaperoned, and confined to a world where nothing but money is to be met. In Tennyson's poem, "The Northern Farmer," the old fellow is coaching his son on the subject of marriage, and they are driving along a road, and the farmer listens to his horses' hoofs, and they are saying, "Proputty, proputty, proputty!" The farmer sums up in one sentence the doctrine of pecuniary marriage as it is taught to the ruling class virgin: "DoÄn't thee marry for money, but goÄ wheer money is."

In this process, of course, the ruling class virgin must spend a great deal of money in order to keep up her own prestige; and when she is married, she must spend it to keep up the prestige of her unmarried sisters, and then of her children. As a result of this, the only ruling class males who can afford to marry are the rich ones. There are always some who are richer, and these are the most desirable; so the tendency with each generation is to put the period of marriage further off; the man has to wait until he has accumulated enough "proputty" to satisfy the girl of his desires—a girl whom he admires because of her pecuniary prestige. He delays, and meantime he satisfies his passions with the daughters of the poor. As a result of this, when he does finally come to marry, he is apt to be unlovely and unlovable. The woman frequently does not love him at all, but takes him cold-bloodedly because he is "eligible"; in that case she is a cold and "sexless" wife. Or else, after she has married him she discovers his unloveliness, and either decides that all men are selfish brutes, and reconciles herself to a celibate life, or else she goes out and preys upon the domestic happiness of other women.