Intellect and Sex

Unlike the Greeks whom we so admire, with our lips for their taste and their reason, we make no provision in society for the bacchanalian part of being. We do not know how to laugh or revel. We are serious thinkers or serious alcoholics. We read Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and approve but do not heed. The Middle Ages, for all their fits of puritanism and supposed fears of eternal punishment, knew how to wash away anxiety in laughter and make room in civilization for the Dionysiac, as well as for its sublimation in work. We have lost all three forms of release and can only look for "relaxation," wondering why we are timid and tired, afraid of power, and looking for shelter in little huts--art, the home, the religions of the East--like sufferers from agoraphobia.

The relation of work to the Dionysiac naturally suggests another relation--that of Intellect to sex. It can be said that a chief hindrance to the development of Intellect in the young is the incoherence of our sexual morality. It bedevils them by enjoying prolonged continence, yet subjects them also to guilt by tolerating inelegant substitutes and furtive infractions--attaching always, and enforcing at times, dire penalties to the crime of being found out. In a word, we show the young in every way that on this subject mental chaos rules. Science itself, allied to advertising and cultural snobbery, has complicated the fulfillment of the sexual instinct by the pedantry of "technique," only to find this destructive of the pleasure it was meant to enhance; so that after a quarter-century of profitable pontificating and book-selling at the expense of mortified couples, the new wisdom advises the burning of the books.