THE NEED OF A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO

PROBLEMS OF SEX CONDUCT

I. RADICAL PRACTICES CANNOT BE JUSTIFIED BY MERELY BIOLOGICAL DATA

CHARLES W. MARGOLD

Michigan State Normal College

ABSTRACT

I. It is not the task undertaken in this study to make a stand for or against the radical views regarding sex morality maintained by Mr. Havelock Ellis and other writers. It is rather to criticize the individualistic presuppositions and the general biological and physiological point of view of these writers which leads them to urge that in sex conduct only acts of procreation are social.

II. Contemporary scientific sociology posits in sex conduct things social as as much original data as are things individual, and sees the social as the collective aspect of the whole of human life. It considers the biologically given as not the adequate source for conduct. To it, conduct, sexual and other, is necessarily social, never individual alone.

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It is not the purpose of this study to take a position either for or against the radical views regarding sex morality which appear to be making such headway at the present time, but rather to criticize certain points of view or presuppositions of the writers of the radical school, and to suggest that their conclusions, in so far as they are based on such points of view and presuppositions, may be unsound.

Probably the most scientific and authoritative, as well as the most exhaustive, of these writers is Mr. Havelock Ellis; certainly he has no rival among them as regards influence with the Englishspeaking peoples. It is unnecessary, and might well be thought presumptuous, for the present writer to attempt a general estimate of the value of Mr. Ellis' monumental work, in six volumes, on "The Psychology of Sex." It is certainly learned, thorough, careful, engaging, and marked by a high courage and idealism—a signal contribution to knowledge. Its author is especially notable among writers of the biological school as being a man of the widest liter

ary, historical, and aesthetic culture, a fact of immense advantage in treating phenomena so pervasive of all aspects of life as are those of sex.

Mr. Ellis, however, is not in any technical sense a social psychologist. That is, he is not primarily interested in, nor has he, perhaps, much insight into, the processes of interaction between the person and the social medium in which he lives. His point of view, in this regard, is prevailingly biological, and (although he by no means ignores social influences) he tends on the whole to see the individual as somewhat independently developed from biological sources, and to see society as a distinct and antithetical influence affecting this development, for better or worse, in a rather external way.

This fact is the chief basis, so far as theory is concerned, for the exception to his and similar views which will be taken in this essay. He is an individualist in the sense that he sees human life in the manner just described, and especially in that he applies this view to matters of conduct in such a way as to throw almost the whole burden upon a somewhat vague and unregulated individual responsibility. He does not think in terms of an organic union between the social and individual processes of life.

I can best convey Mr. Ellis's characteristic attitude by quoting a passage from his chapter on "Sexual Morality," in which he is advocating, quite persuasively for the most part, an increased moral autonomy for women:

Sexual union, for a woman as much as for a man, is a physiological fact; it may also be a spiritual fact; but it is not a social act. It is, on the contrary, an act which, beyond all other acts, demands retirement and mystery for its accomplishment. That, indeed, is a general human, almost zoölogical, fact. Moreover, this demand for mystery is more especially made by woman in virtue of her greater modesty which, we have found reason to believe, has a biological basis. It is not until a child is born or conceived that the community has any right to interest itself in the sexual acts of its members. The sexual act is of no more concern to the community than any other private physiological act. It is an impertinence, if not an outrage, to seek to inquire into it. But the birth of a child is a social act. Not what goes into the womb, but what comes out of it, concerns society. The community is invited to receive a new citizen. It is entitled to demand that that citizen shall be worthy of a place in

its midst and that he shall be properly introduced by a responsible father and a responsible mother. The whole of sexual morality, as Ellen Key has said, revolves round the child.1

In this passage he says most emphatically that sexual union is not a social act, meaning, apparently, that it is not properly subject to any sort of social control, either formally or through the informal action of opinion; and readers of his works know how drastically he applies this conception in attempting to overthrow prevailing ideas upon this and other sexual subjects.

Without inquiring how far the withdrawal of control which he advocates is desirable, the writer believes that the underlying theoretical conception of a sexual life existing apart from control, more or less effective, by the public opinion and the mores of the community, is unreal, incompatible with human nature, never realized or capable of being realized in any society past or future. To advocate it amounts, in practice, to advocating the rejection of such moral standards as we have without putting any others in their room.

It is not asserted that this idea of an individuality responsible only to itself and independent of social control is a clearly defined theory consistently adhered to by Mr. Ellis and other radical writers; they write now from one point of view and now from another, as suits their purpose. But since they use it freely, frequently, and emphatically in urging their practical views regarding sex matters, since, moreover, it is widely adopted and used as a justification for radical conduct in such matters among the general public, we are certainly called upon to take it seriously and subject it to criticism. That it lends itself easily to a somewhat anarchic pursuit of impulse (little, it would seem, as this result would be intended by so high-minded a moralist as Ellen Key, or as practical a meliorist as Mr. Ellis) seems fairly obvious from the fact that it throws the individual back upon personal responsibility without indicating effectively what he is responsible to.

It will be maintained in this study that conduct of this sort, as of all sorts, must become subject to social control of some kind in 1Sex in Relation to Society, Vol. VI of his "Studies in the Psychology of Sex," p. 417.

so far as society achieves any moral organization at all, and that it is desirable that this control be exercised through conventions carefully worked out, inculcated by education and enforced by public opinion.

An attempt will be made to show that the sex conduct of man, the ways or modes of behaving, the ideas and ideals, the sentiments and beliefs, and so on, that men and women have and manifest in their sex life are not individual alone, but also social as well. I shall maintain that man's sex behavior marks group ways of doing and viewing things, that individual sexual acts and practices can be seen as phases in a general social process, that they are by no means individual alone.

Mr. Ellis and the other writers of his school, their writings show, rely chiefly, as a general position, upon a biological source of conduct in sex. In seeming to see little need for social control, Mr. Ellis would trust Nature's laws and man's "natural expressions." In matters of sex, as in all things biological, man's instincts, he believes, tend "under natural conditions to develop temperately and wholesomely." "Nature," he says, "maintains a gracious equilibrium." Sex instincts, when left completely free from all social suggestion, will follow "a biological norm of monogamy."

Says Mr. Ellis as regards this question:

Sexual relationships, in human as in animal societies, follow a natural law, oscillating on each side of the norm. If all artificial "laws" could be abolished, the natural order of the sexual relationship would continue to subsist substantially as at present.5

He tells us further:

The Line of Nature is a curve that oscillates from side to side of the norm. Such oscillations inevitably occur in harmony with changes in environmental conditions, and, no doubt, with peculiarities of personal disposition. So long as no arbitrary and merely external attempt is made to force Nature, the vital order is harmoniously maintained. . . . . Among certain species of ducks when males are in excess, polyandric families are constituted, but when the sexes become equal in number, the monogamic order is restored. The natural

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human deviations from the monogamic order seem to be generally of this character.?

Throughout his works, and in his "Studies," especially, he accordingly states his conviction of the importance of "natural," that is, socially uninfluenced, expression in sex, as if that were at all possible in human living, arguing both directly and indirectly that the highest morality and the truest education are those which leave greatest possibility to individuals for spontaneous impulse." He reminds us:

The wiser psychoanalists insist that the process of liberating the individual from outer or inner influences that repress or deform his energies and impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free play of his nature. It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the suppression of natural impulses, nor even of the instillation of sound rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in, but of the leading out, of the individual's special tendencies. It removes inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the individual, or that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon himself, with the best moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a larger, and freer, and more natively spontaneous morality to come into play."

This attitude and belief in the adequacy for conduct of the biologically given or of man's instinctive nature, however, does not, in their opinion, preclude the necessity for sexual education. Mr. Ellis, in fact, gives to it an important place.10 But the instruction that he would have the young get in sex is, apparently, to consist of information of the elements of physiology," and of "initiation into the knowledge of the great central12 facts of sex." Except, possibly, some special sexual initiation ceremonies at puberty, of somewhat the same nature as take place among primitive peoples,18 he would, apparently, have no moral instruction, no inculcation of the tradi

'Ibid., p. 492.

8 Cf. his "Studies," III, 365; I, 282; VI, 115; VI, 216; also The Task of Social Hygiene, p. 398.

'Little Essays of Love and Virtue, pp. 130–31.

10 See The Task of Social Hygiene, chap. viii; also Vol. VI of his "Studies,"

chap. ii.

"Sex in Relation to Society, chap. ii.

12 That is, presumably, biological and physiological.

13 Cf. op. cit., pp. 84–90.