Lecture audiences often ask me whether plural love is possible. This would indicate on the part of the questioner a more or less unconscious wish to justify polygamous cravings. Plural marriages exist but I doubt whether any such thing as plural love has even been observed at any period of mankind's history. For the most complicated examples of plural marriage, as for all the varieties of sexual complications, we must turn to Greece of the classical period. Demosthenes wrote somewhere: "We have prostitutes to give us pleasure, concubines to minister to our daily needs and wives to bear us children and to watch over our homes."
When we remember that besides the three types of women with whom they had sexual relations, many and among them some of the greatest men of those times, indulged in homosexual unions with young men of feminine appearance, we must draw[Pg 84] two conclusions: first, that those men must have been sexual supermen, as they were at times mental supermen, second, that love as we understand it at the present day, can only have had very little to do with their sexual life.
Modern love as we shall see in Chapter XXXI means mutual love, the equal gratification of the mates thru the rites of sex communion.
Plural Love, be it of the ancient Greek type, of the Oriental or mormon type, means varietism for the male, scanty gratification for the female. At best a mild form of sexual slavery, most humiliating to the woman and possible only under a social system debarring woman from financial independence.
Only a man suffering from priapism could gratify the eroticism of a large number of wives and the latest or youngest wife would naturally receive a larger share of physical attention than the earlier and older mates. The jealousy and hatred thus engendered are in no way minimised by the fact that the custom of certain lands countenances such arrangements.
Polyandry as it existed in ancient times and still exsists in Tibet, where a woman marries several men (generally brothers) may be more satisfactory for the primitive female. Owing to her physiological[Pg 85] make up, and also to her passive r?le in love, woman can gratify several men and receive gratification from them. The neurotic disturbances which may arise as a result of a woman's lack of sexual gratification are avoided by the polyandric scheme of union. But this is the only superiority which polyandry has over polygamy.
Both polygamous and polyandric nations and civilisations have gradually receded as far as numerical importance and world prestige go and both institutions are bound to disappear.
The development of the human ego, both in men and women, will not permit much longer of the enslavement of one sex to gratify the pleasures of the other. Nor can any group, male or female, enforce its domination over individuals of the opposite sex and make them accept the dogma of an inferior sex by embodying that dogma in any religious creed of the mormon or mohammedan type.
Infidelity. Plural love is passing but infidelity has taken its place in every possible respect as a sexual and an egotistical form of gratification.
When dealing with infidelity we must establish a careful distinction between forms of infidelity due to "normal" causes and other forms due to un[Pg 86]conscious complexes. On the other hand we should beware of admitting, as many unscientific writers do, that there is a distinct difference of attitude to infidelity in the two sexes.
That shortsighted viewpoint has been unfortunately voiced in hundreds of popular sayings which represent man as the great examplary of infidelity and woman as faithfulness incarnate.
Economic conditions, not sexual differences, are at the bottom of the levity with which men treat their heart affairs and of the gravity with which women, officially at least, consider the marriage relationship.
Financial dependence and the fear of motherhood compel the domesticated, parasitic type of woman to secure the services of a breadwinner, and after achieving that object, to avoid hurting his susceptibilities.
Independent and professional women, especially the sterile or sterilised ones, are frankly "masculine" in their love habits.
But I insist on considering certain forms of infidelity as normal and others as abnormal, independently from the question as to whether they are socially desirable or undesirable.
The human type which is so perfectly normal that[Pg 87] it has no fixation and no definite fetishes, except species fetishes, and which weaklings and puritans designate as "animal," is not likely to be faithful to any mate. Like every strong and healthy animal at rutting time, he or she is sexually aroused by every individual of the opposite sex. No safety complex restrains him as far as sexuality is concerned. The only fears which restrain his search for gratification are fear of exposure and ostracism within his herd, fear of pregnancy or infection and fear of final complications, not to mention of course the fear of inflicting suffering upon a lifemate of whom he may be extremely fond.
For we must never forget the fact, unpleasant as it may appear to unscientific hypocrites, that lasting love is a matter of fixation and fetishism, hence, always slightly tainted with neurosis.
When Love Dies. "Normal" infidelity may also be merely the only hope of sexual gratification for the normal man or woman whose mate has ceased to present the fetishes needed to awaken his or her eroticism. Healthy individuals are neither willing nor capable to forego sexual gratification. Now and then complications arise, a man being very fond, for sexual reasons, of a woman who would prove undesirable as his mate and, for sentimental reasons,[Pg 88] of a woman who is infinitely congenial but no longer arouses his desire. Likewise, a woman may be deeply attached to both her lover and her husband. Ivan Bloch writes: "It is quite possible to love more than one person at the same time with nearly equal tenderness and be honestly able to assure each of the passion felt for him or her. The vast psychic differentiation involved by modern civilization increases the possibility of this double love for it is difficult to find one's complement in a single person and this applies to women as well as to men."
George Hirth, in his "Wege zur Heimat" also points out that women, as well as men, can love two persons at the same time. Men flatter themselves with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather brain, can only hold one man at a time and that if there is a second man, it is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all the erotic writers, poets and novelists, even physicians and psychologists, belong to this class. They look upon a woman as property and of course two men cannot "possess" one woman.
"Regarding novelists, however," remarks Havelock Ellis, "the remark may be interpolated that there are many exceptions. Thomas Hardy, for instance, frequently represents a woman as more or less in love with two men at the same time."
[Pg 89]
Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged to be untrue to one man because she has conceived a passion for another man. "Today," Hirth writes, "truly lo............