36. The Origin of a Delusion
THE ORIGIN of the delusion that the average man is a Leopold II or Augustus the Strong, with the amorous experience of a guinea pig, is not far to seek. It lies in three factors, the which I rehearse briefly:
I. The idiotic vanity of men, leading to
their eternal boasting, either by open lying or sinister hints.
2. The notions of vice crusaders,
nonconformist divines, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, and other such
libidinous poltroons as to what they would do themselves if they
had the courage.
3. The ditto of certain suffragettes as to
ditto ditto.
Here you have the genesis of a
generalization that gives the less critical sort of women a great
deal of needless uneasiness and vastly augments the natural
conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in the discharge of
his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts in an
evening ploughing through such books as "The Memoirs of
Fanny Hill," Casanova's Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis
of Gaius Petronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal he arises
with the conviction that life amid the red lights must be one
stupendous whirl of deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway
or Piccadilly at night are out for revels that would have caused
protests in Sodom and Nineveh, that the average man who chooses
hell leads an existence comparable to that of a Mormon bishop,
that the world outside the Bible class is packed like a
sardine-can with betrayed salesgirls, that every man who doesn't
believe that Jonah swallowed the whale spends his whole leisure
leaping through the seventh hoop of the Decalogue. "If I
were not saved and anointed of God," whispers the vice
director into his own ear, "that is what I, the Rev. Dr.
Jasper Barebones, would be doing. The late King David did it; he
was human, and hence immoral. The late King Edward VII was not
beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his name has its
suggestions. Millions of others go the same route.... Ergo,
Up, guards, and at em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants! Order
out the searchlights and scaling-ladders! Swear in four hundred
more policemen! Let us chase these hellhounds out of Christendom,
and make the world safe for monogamy, poor working girls, and
infant damnation!"
Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from
his own secret aspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in
assuming that the unconsecrated, while sharing his longing to
debauch and betray, are free from his other weaknesses, e. g.,
his timidity, his lack of resourcefulness, his conscience. As I
have said, they are not. The vast majority of those who appear in
the public haunts of sin are there, not to engage in overt acts
of ribaldry, but merely to tremble agreeably upon the edge of the
abyss. They are the same skittish experimentalists, precisely,
who throng the midway at a world's fair, and go to smutty shows,
and take in sex magazines, and read the sort of books that our
vice-crusading friend reads. They like to conjure up the charms
of carnality, and to help out their somewhat sluggish
imaginations by actual peeps at it, but when it comes to taking a
forthright header into the sulphur they usually fail to muster up
the courage. For one clerk who succumbs to the houris of the
pave, there are five hundred who succumb to lack of means, the
warnings of the sex hygienists, and their own depressing
consciences. For one "clubman"--i. e., bagman or
suburban vestryman--who invades the women's shops, engages the
affection of some innocent miss, lures her into infamy and then
sells her to the Italians, there are one thousand who never get
any further than asking the price of cologne water and
discharging a few furtive winks. And for one husband of the
Nordic race who maintains a blonde chorus girl in oriental luxury
around the corner, there are ten thousand who are as true to
their wives, year in and year out, as so many convicts in the
death-house, and would be no more capable of any such loathsome
malpractice, even in the face of free opportunity, than they
would be of cutting off the ears of their young.
I am sorry to blow up so much romance. In
particular, I am sorry for the suffragettes who specialize in the
double standard, for when they get into pantaloons at last, and
have the new freedom, they will discover to their sorrow that
they have been pursuing a chimera --that there is really no such
animal as the male anarchist they have been denouncing and
envying-- that the wholesale fornication of man, at least under
Christian democracy, has little more actual existence than honest
advertising or sound cooking. They have followed the pornomaniacs
in embracing a piece of buncombe, and when the day of deliverance
comes it will turn to ashes in their arms.
Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the
courage and enterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere
physical valour, a quality in which the average man is far
exceeded by the average jackal or wolf, have more of both. If the
consequences, to a man, of the slightest descent from virginity
were one-tenth as swift and barbarous as the consequences to a
young girl in like case, it would take a division of infantry to
dredge up a single male flouter of that lex talionis in
the whole western world. As things stand today, even with the
odds so greatly in his favour, the average male hesitates and is
thus not lost. Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders if
you doubt it. They show that the weekly receipts of female
recruits upon the wharves of sin are always more than the demand;
that more young women enter upon the vermilion career than can
make respectable livings at it; that the pressure of the
temptation they hold out is the chief factor in corrupting our
undergraduates. What was the first act of the American Army when
it began summoning its young clerks and college boys and plough
hands to conscription camps? Its first act was to mark off a so-
called moral zone around each camp, and to secure it with
trenches and machine guns, and to put a lot of volunteer
termagants to patrolling it, that the assembled jeunesse
might be protected in their rectitude from the immoral advances
of the adjacent milkmaids and poor working girls.
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"In Defense Of Women" by H. L. Mencken, 1922