verted or arrested in order to avoid a difficulty
which is his own.

The only alternative to this is to revert to a form of civilization in
which it was frankly admitted that sex-impulses could not be controlled,
either by men or by women, and society was therefore organized on a basis
which, quite logically, provided for the restraint of women in a bondage
which prevented them from satisfying their impulses as they chose, and at
the same time protected them from attack by other men than their lawful
owners; and which, further, provided conveniences for the equally
uncontrollable instincts of men.

This system is quite logical; so is the one here advocated, of assuming
that the sexual instincts of both sexes can be controlled. What is not
logical is the assumption that they _can_ be controlled, but that such
control is to be exercised not by each one mastering himself, but by
the removal of all possibility of temptation! This demand is really
incompatible with our civilization, and those who make it should try to
understand that what they ask is, in fact, the reversal of all advance in
real self-control in matters of sex.

Let us abandon the pretence that it is "wicked" for either a man or a woman
to have strongly-developed sex-instincts. When we do this, we shall be
on the high way to learning how to manage ourselves without making
preposterous demands upon our neighbours or inroads upon their individual
freedom.

We shall also, I believe, get rid of those perversions which darken
understanding as well as joy. One need not go all the way with Freud--one
may, indeed, suspect him of suffering from a severe "repression"
himself--while admitting, nevertheless, that much of the folly that
surrounds our treatment of sex-questions is due to the pathetic
determination of highly respectable people to have no sex nature or
impulses at all. Certainly this accounts for much that is called "prudery"
in women, whose repressed and starved instincts revenge themselves in a
morbid (mental) preoccupation with the details of vice. I am forced to the
conclusion that it has also something to do with the quite extraordinary
description that certain ecclesiastics give of their own inability to
control their imaginations even at the most solemn moments. A narrow and
dishonest moral standard has been foisted upon women in these matters, and
instead of knowing themselves and learning to control their natures, they
have been given a false id