The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sex And Common-Sense, by A. Maude Royden

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Title: Sex And Common-Sense

Author: A. Maude Royden

Release Date: April 8, 2004 [EBook #11965]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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SEX AND COMMON-SENSE

BY

A. MAUDE ROYDEN
ASSISTANT PREACHER AT THE CITY TEMPLE, LONDON
1918-1920

To MY FRIENDS A.J.S. AND W.H.S.

PREFACE TO AMERICAN EDITION

THE NOBILITY OF THE SEX PROBLEM

Of all the problems which the alert and curious mind of modern man is
considering, none occupies him more than that of the relations of the
sexes. This is natural. It touches us all and we have made rather a mess
of it! We want to know why, and we want to do better. We resent being the
sport of circumstance and perhaps we are beginning to understand that this
instinct of sex which has been so great a cause of suffering and shame and
has been treated as a subject fit only for furtive whispers or silly jokes,
is in fact one of the greatest powers in human nature, and that its misuse
is indeed "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame."

It is not the abnormal or the bizarre that interests most of us to-day. It
is not into the by-ways of vice that we seek to penetrate. It is the normal
exercise of a normal instinct by normal people that interests us: and it is
of this that I have tried to write and speak. The curiosities of depravity
are for the physician and the psychologist to discuss and cure. Ordinary
men and women want first to know how to live ordinary human lives on
a higher level and after a nobler pattern than before. They want, I
think,--and I want,--to grow up, but to grow rightly, beautifully,
humanely.

And I believe the first essential is to realize that the sex-problem, as it
is called, is the problem of something noble, not something base. It is
not a "disagreeable duty" to know our own natures and understand our own
instincts: it is a joy. The sex-instinct is not "the Fall of Man"; neither
is it an instance of divine wisdom on w