I have emphasised this question of the unholy ascetic view of marriage because of its unspeakable evil, not only for women, but for the waste it entails to the race. It is the basis of most of the failures and diseases in our sexual life. As you know, our moral and religious systems regard the body as the prison of the soul, and pay consequently no attention whatever to the body from the moral point of view. I desire a regeneration of all the instincts of the body through consciousness. I desire this much more for the health and happiness of women themselves than I do for the enjoyment of men.
But it is not going to be easy. The education of the senses is quite a new thing, and it is not even allowed to most women to possess them. The principle of “re-discovery” will have to be begun. We must teach woman that she wants love for herself; the man must not claim it from her as a right he has bought by marriage.
Most women and some men do not realise (at least, they do not openly acknowledge) the immense disturbing power of sex and the claims the sexual life makes at some time on us all. To hear many people talk you would think it were possible to free ourselves at will of all those troubles and prejudices of sex that are our heritage from an uncountable past. Love is something fiercer than hand-holding in the darkness of the cinema, or moon-gazing in the parks.
In fear we try to keep the blinds down so that love may be decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its action, like all the emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths of the ordinary experience of each of us; it exercises its influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.
Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. The emotional self refuses at times to be controlled by the reason self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evil. For our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretences we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own deceit or collectively as a nation in the hope of controlling conduct.