Sex and Common-Sense

Sex and Common-Sense

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sex And Common-Sense, by A.
Maude Royden This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no
cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give
it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Sex And Common-Sense
Author: A. Maude Royden
Release Date: April 8, 2004 [EBook #11965]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEX AND
COMMON-SENSE ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Bonnie Rubio, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

SEX AND COMMON-SENSE
BY
A. MAUDE ROYDEN ASSISTANT PREACHER AT THE CITY
TEMPLE, LONDON 1918-1920

To MY FRIENDS A.J.S. AND W.H.S.

PREFACE TO AMERICAN EDITION
THE NOBILITY OF THE SEX PROBLEM
Of all the problems which the alert and curious mind of modern man is
considering, none occupies him more than that of the relations of the
sexes. This is natural. It touches us all and we have made rather a mess
of it! We want to know why, and we want to do better. We resent being

the sport of circumstance and perhaps we are beginning to understand
that this instinct of sex which has been so great a cause of suffering and
shame and has been treated as a subject fit only for furtive whispers or
silly jokes, is in fact one of the greatest powers in human nature, and
that its misuse is indeed "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame."
It is not the abnormal or the bizarre that interests most of us to-day. It is
not into the by-ways of vice that we seek to penetrate. It is the normal
exercise of a normal instinct by normal people that interests us: and it is
of this that I have tried to write and speak. The curiosities of depravity
are for the physician and the psychologist to discuss and cure. Ordinary
men and women want first to know how to live ordinary human lives
on a higher level and after a nobler pattern than before. They want, I
think,--and I want,--to grow up, but to grow rightly, beautifully,
humanely.
And I believe the first essential is to realize that the sex-problem, as it
is called, is the problem of something noble, not something base. It is
not a "disagreeable duty" to know our own natures and understand our
own instincts: it is a joy. The sex-instinct is not "the Fall of Man";
neither is it an instance of divine wisdom on which moralists could, if
they had only been consulted in time, greatly have improved. It is a
thing noble in essence. It is the development of the higher, not the
lower, creation. It is the asexual which is the lower, and the sexually
differentiated which is the higher organism.
In the humbler ranks of being there is no sex, and in a sense no death.
The organism is immortal because--strange paradox--it is not yet alive
enough to die. But as we pass from the lower to the higher, we pass
from the less individual to the more individual; from asexual to sexual.
And with this change comes that great rhythm by which life and death
succeed each other, and death is the cost of life, and to bring life into
the world means sacrifice; and--as we rise higher still--to sustain life
means prolonged and altruistic love. This is the history of sex and of
procreation, a history associated with the rising of humanity in the scale
of being, a history not so much of his physical as of his spiritual
growth.

By what an irony have we come to associate the instinct of sex with all
that is bestial and shameful!
It has happened because the corruption of the best is the worst. I always
want to remind people of this truism when they have first come into
contact with sex in some horrible and shameful way. That is one of the
greatest misfortunes that can happen to any of us, and unfortunately it
happens to many. Boys and girls are allowed to grow up in ignorance.
The girls perhaps know nothing till they have to know all. The boys
learn from grimy sources. I was speaking on this subject at one of our
great universities the other day, and afterwards many of the men came
and talked to me privately. With hardly a single exception they said to
me--"Our parents told us nothing. We have never heard sex spoken of
except in a dirty way."
It is difficult for us, in such a case, to realize that sex is not a dirty thing.
It can only be realized, I think, by remembering that the corruption