Sex Morality : Past, Present, and Future

The strict ideal of monogamy, I said, is not applicable to all mankind. Antenuptially, for instance, it is becoming more and more difficult to live up to that ideal. It is even questionable if, with the late marriages, it is desirable that men should live up to it. And to preach at men, to insist that they should remain chaste until their marriage, when that marriage takes place when they are thirty or thirty-five years old or even older, is absurd. I am not sure that such preaching may not even be designated as criminal. For if people really followed the advice of our moral preachers, the results would in many cases prove disastrous. And I repeat what I said so many times before: an impotent man is a more pitiable man than a venereally infected man.

So much for the unmarried man, the bachelor. We now come to the married man. To even venture to suggest that strict monogamy is not applicable, suitable, healthy or even possible for all men, is a risky undertaking indeed. You run the risk not only of being branded as immoral and depraved by the ignorant and well-meaning fools, who do not know, and do not wish to learn, the difference between the discussion of a thing and its advocacy, but you run a greater risk: you run the risk of having your work, to which you have given your best and most earnest thought, declared obscene and unmailable by our ignorant and autocratic obscurantist censors, who do not know the difference between obscenity and a high class scientific discussion of a sexual subject.