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SEXUAL MORALITY

We ards sex, what Christians call the virtue of chastity The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of &039;modesty&039; (in one sense of that word); ie propriety, or decency The social rule of propriety lays do much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in ords, according to the custoiven social circle Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all tiirl in the Pacific islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady coht both be equally ` to the standards of their own societies: and both, for all we could tell by their dress, ht be equally chaste (or equally unchaste) Soe which chaste women used in Shakespeare&039;s time would have been used in the nineteenth century only by a woman completely abandoned When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in theainst chastity But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to shock or e unchaste, but they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure inother people uncomfortable I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of propriety is any proof of chastity or any help to it, and I therefore regard the great relaxation and si of the rule which has taken place in e, however, it has this inconvenience, that people of different ages and different types do not all acknowledge the same standard, and we hardly knohere we are While this confusion lasts I think that old, or old-fashioned, people should be very careful not to assu or `emancipated&039; people are corrupt whenever they are (by the old standard) i people should not call their elders prudes or puritans because they do not easily adopt the new standard A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems

Chastity is theaway froe, with complete faithfulness to your partner or else total abstinence&039; Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong One or the other Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong

But I have other reasons for thinking so The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body Noe eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as ant, it is quite true most of us will eat too h for two, but he does not eat enough for ten The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enored his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he e This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function

Or take it another way You can get a large audience together for a striptease act�Cthat is, to watch a girl undress on the stage Now suppose you coing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country so with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was so equally queer about the state of the sex instinct a us?

One critic said that if he found a country in which such strip-tease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving He s as the strip-tease act resulted not froree with hie land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact,consuood deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one In the sa sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we should have to look for evidence that there is in fact es when things like the strip-tease were unknown But surely there is no such evidence Contraceptives have e and far safer outside it than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times Nor is the hypothesis of &039;starvation&039; the only one we can iine Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence Starving ed, as well as the famished, like titillations

Here is a third point You find very few people ant to eat things that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of eating it In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare But perversions of the sex instinct are nuo into all these details, but I must The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely It is not true The anda, you see that it is not

They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up But for the last twenty years it has not been It has been chattered about all day long Yet it is still in aup had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right But it has not I think it is the other way round I think the huinally hushed it up because it had beco, &039;Sex is nothing to be ashas Theyto be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure&039; If they ht Christianity says the sa, nor the pleasure, that is the trouble The old Christian teachers said that ifless than it is noould actually have been greater I know some ht that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in the Christianity is alhly approves of the body - which believes that ood, that God Hioing to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy Christianity has glorified reatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once But, of course, when people say, &039;Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,&039; they may ot is nothing to be asha I think it is everything to be asha your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food theat pictures of food and dribbling and s their lips I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation Our ancestors have handed over to us organisrow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity There are people ant to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them

Before we can be cured we et it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult It is easy to think that ant so ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realised that while his lips had been saying, &039;Oh Lord, , `But please don&039;t do it just yet&039; This may happen in prayers for other virtues too; but there are three reasons why it is now specially difficult for us to desire - let alone to achieve - complete chastity

In the first place our warped natures, the devils who teanda for lust, co are so `natural&039; so `healthy,&039; and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them Poster after poster, film after filence with the ideas of health, norood humour Now this association is a lie Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth �Cthe truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself apart frorown round it) is &039;normal&039; and &039;healthy,&039; and all the rest of it The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act of which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealood humour, and frankness For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the clai, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing Every sane and civilised man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others One ienic principles, another on sociological principles The real conflict is not between Christianity and &039;nature,&039; but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of &039;nature&039; For `nature&039; (in the sense of natural desire) will have to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life The Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying the the others

In the second place,Christian chastity because they think (before trying) that it is i has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility Faced with an optional question in an examination paper, one considers whether one can do it or not: faced with a coet soet none for leaving the question alone Not only in exa to skate, or swi a stiff collar with cold fingers, people quite often do what seemed impossible before they did it It is wonderful what you can do when you have to

We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity-like perfect charity-will not be attained by any merely human efforts You must ask for God&039;s help Even when you have done so, ittiiven Never iveness, pick yourself up and try again Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again For however ie, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection

Thirdly, people often y teaches about &039;repressions&039; It teaches us that &039;repressed&039; sex is dangerous But &039;repressed&039; is here a technical term: it does not mean &039;suppressed&039; in the sense of &039;denied&039; or &039;resisted&039; A repressed desire or thought is one which has been thrust into the subconscious (usually at a very early age) and can now conisable form Repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression On the contrary, those who are seriously attereat deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else They coton knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes Virtue-even atte

Finally, though I have had to speak at soth about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian ard unchastity as the supre The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred For there are two things insidewith the human self which I must try to become They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self The Diabolical self is the worse of the two That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute But, of course, it is better to be neither