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5. Sexual Morality
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no
getting away from it: the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with
complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence." Now this
is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either
Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong.
One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct
which has gone wrong.
But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex
is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body.
Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is
quite true that most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much.
One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The
appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously.
But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt
inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily
populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous
excess of its function.
Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a
strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose
you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a
covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let
every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton
chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something
had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had
grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about
the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease
acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that
country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the
strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual
starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that
similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible
explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step
would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or
little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that
a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the
hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same way,
before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we
should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual
abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease
were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made
sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it
than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and
even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis
of "starvation" the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual
appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may
think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the
famished, like titillations.