Questions of our day / Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Questions of our day / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    VI LOVE AND THE EQUALITY OF THE SEXES DO you know I am tired of men going about the world loving with their minds and their bodies and never at all with their hearts? Take . . . for instance, and there are many like him, who goes about with a sexual text-book, trying to make women, whom he does not love in the least, fit into what the text-book says. They are crusading like Knights of the Holy Grail, and can't see a sexually unsatisfied woman (or one whom they think so) without aching to satisfy her— as though mere sexual satisfaction ever satisfied any woman. In this cheerful campaign to give women the maximum of happiness these sexual crusaders often only succeed in giving the maximum of misery. The writer is a woman with a varied knowledge of life, a wife and mother, with some success to her credit both in literary and business fields, and not altogether ignorant of what she here writes. It is perhaps worth consideration. I am reminded again of Jules de Gaultier's application to the sphere of sex of what he calls that metaphysical contrariety which is at the heart of existence. Perhaps I shall be suspected of a too partial attitude towards those sexual crusaders if I seem to account for their activities on metaphysical grounds. But if my friend is right in arguing that a woman can do with little sex if she has a lot of love and a man can do with little love if he has a lot of sex we are concerned with a difference which goes beyond individual defect and is rooted in Nature, or, as Jules de Gaultier would put it, is ultimately metaphysical. Here is one of the reasons why I am always disposed to i6
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