The Sexual Misery of the Working Masses and the Difficulties of Sexual Reform

Abstract

The committee preparing the Fourth Congress of the World League for Reform has emphasized in its announcement a concern for Sexual Reform on a Scientific Basis. Since no serious sexual reform can dispense with scientifically based conclusions, such an emphasis would only appear superfluous were it not intended to imply a contrast to another platform, namely a political one. Furthermore, this emphasis can only mean that political discussion is to be excluded from the conference. Although the fundamentals of sexual reform must indeed be prepared scientifically, I maintain that the primary issue to be clarified is the question as to whether the political relations of a state or social system will permit the practical implementation of scientific knowledge. In other words, whether or not sexual reform is possible under existing circumstances. When we consider further that problems of glandular secretions can certainly be discussed without examining social institutions, but that sexual misery originating in these institutions cannot, then it becomes quite clear that we find ourselves in the midst of politics, in the truest sense of that term, merely by placing this topic on the agenda. A discussion and thorough critique of the social order is the scientific basis upon which sexual reform must be founded if the discussion of the problem is to be fruitful. Serious scientific study of sex has freed itself to a large extent from the so-called unpolitical approach to sexual problems. However, there are many stages of transition from this point to a more conclusive and courageous critique of the social roots of sexual misery, which are, in turn, impeded by the social constraint upon science in bourgeois society. Once a social critique has been carried out, then undetermined biological and psycho-sexual factors can be dealt with by the respective disciplines. Two separate aspects of the sexual misery of the masses can be easily distinguished: an external aspect caused directly by their material mode of existence, and an internal aspect evoked by the psycho-sexual structure of those affected. The first involves such larger concerns as inadequate housing, birth control, and prostitution. The second involves sexual illnesses, i.e., neuroses and perversions, and typical sexual conflicts, all of which, in the final analysis, are caused by the ruling sexual order (sexual repression, ruling moral values, etc.). These conflicts can clearly be grouped as the sexual conflicts in childhood, puberty, and married adulthood.