



Produced by David Widger






SEX = LOVE,

AND ITS PLACE IN A FREE SOCIETY: (SECOND EDITION)

By Edward Carpenter.

Price Fourpence.

Manchester:

The Labour Press Society Limited, Printers and Publishers

1894.

     TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: There are several pages missing from
     this small book. A serious search was made both online and
     in print without another copy found. It seemed worthwhile to
     transcribe the book in spite of the missing pages as this is
     a startling essay for its date. If any reader should ever
     come across an intact print or online copy, kindly inform
     Project Gutenberg.  DW



SEX = LOVE

The subject of Sex is most difficult to deal with, not only on account
of a certain prudery as well as a natural reticence on the subject, but
doubtless also because the passion itself being so tremendously strong
and occupying such a large part of human thought--and words being so
scanty and inadequate on the subject--everything that _is_ said is
liable to be misunderstood; the most violent inferences are made, and
equivocations surmised, from the simplest remarks; qualified admissions
of liberty are interpreted into recommendations of unbridled licence;
and generally the perspective of literary expression is turned upside
down by the effect of the unfamiliarity of the topic on the reader's
mind.

There is indeed a vast deal of fetishism in the current treatment of
Sex; and the subject is dealt with as though it lay quite out of line
with any other need or faculty of human nature. Nor can one altogether
be surprised at this when one perceives of what vast import Sex is in
the scheme of things, and how deeply it it has been associated since the
earliest times not only with man's personal impulses but even with his
religious sentiments and ceremonials.

Next to hunger this is doubtless the most primitive and imperative of
our needs. But in modern civilised life Sex enters probably even more
into _consciousness_ than hunger. For the hunger-needs of the human race
are in the later societies fairly well satisfied, but the sex-desires
are strongly restrained, both by law and custom, from satisfaction--and
so assert themselves all the more in thought.

To find the place of these desires, their utterance, their control,
their personal import, their social import, is a tremendous problem to
every youth and girl, man and woman.

There are a few of both sexes, doubtless, who hardly feel the
passion--who have never been "in love," and who experience no strong
sexual appetite--but these are rare. Practically the passion is a
matter of universal experience; and speaking broadly and generally we
may say it is a matter on which it is quite desirable that every adult
at some time or other _should_ have experience--actual and physical, as
well as emotional. There may be exceptions; but, as said, the
sex-instinct lies so deep and is so universal, that for the
understanding of life--of one's own life, of that of others, and of
human nature in general--as well as for the proper development of one's
own capacities, such experience is almost indispensable.

While the glory of Sex pervades and suffuses all Nature; while the
flowers are rayed and starred out towards the sun in the very ecstasy of
generation; while the nostrils of the animals dilate, and their forms
become instinct, under the passion, with a proud and fiery beauty;
while even the human lover is transformed, and in the great splendors of
the mountains and the sky perceives something to which he had not the
key before--yet it is curious that just here, in Man, we find the magic
wand of Nature suddenly broken, and doubt and conflict and division
entering in, where a kind of unconscious harmony had erst prevailed.

Heine I think says somewhere that the man who loves unsuccessfully knows
himself to be a god. It is not perhaps till the great current of sexual
love is checked and brought into conflict with the other parts of his
being that the whole nature of the man, sexual and moral, under the
tremendous stress rises into consciousness and reveals in fire its
god-like quality. This is the work of the artificer who makes immortal
souls--who out of the natural love evolves even a more perfect love. "In
tutti gli amanti," says Giordano Bruno, "e questo fabro vulcano" ("in
all lovers is this Olympian blacksmith present").

To teach the child first, quite openly, its physical relation to its own
mother, its long indwelling in her body, and the deep and sacred bond of
tenderness between mother and child in consequence; then, after a time,
to explain the work of fatherhood, and how the love of the parents for
each other was the cause of its own (the child's) existence: these
things are easy and natural--at least