The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [123]
Of course, most people of the late nineteenth century were much more conventional than Noyes and his marital mates, but as the new century approached, Victorian mores began to break down. One champion of the new sexual ideas was physician and researcher Havelock Ellis. From the 1890s through the first decades of the new century, he was the leading sex expert arguing for sexual pleasure—a much respected, even beloved, cultural character who weighed in on the progressive side of all the moment’s hot debates. Ellis was part of the Fabian Society, along with Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and a handful of others, a political and intellectual think tank whose members supported gradual (nonrevolutionary) social and sexual liberation. Ellis’s six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1898–1928) was published to enormous controversy, as were his Sexual Inversion (1897), a positive study of homosexuality, and his Erotic Rights of Women (1918). Ellis was a real hero to a lot of people. It is common to find testimonials to him as a life-changing influence against guilt, frustration, and ignorance.
Marie Stopes was also a crucial figure in this effort. She is now perhaps best known for her work in making birth control available, but Stopes was once most famous for her book Married Love (1918), which was really about married sex. How did she get away with it? Well, she took precautions. The book’s preface begins: “More than ever today are happy homes needed. It is my hope that this book may serve the State by adding to their numbers.”10 Although she does not return to this idea of justifying her sex book by calling it a service to the state, she often returns to the idea that her book’s purpose is happiness. Stopes explained that although an unmarried woman might not feel sexual needs, a wife who has been made love to but not brought to orgasm would be cranky, nervous, and sleepless. A husband should be attentive to what gives his wife pleasure and orgasm, and take the time and effort to provide it at every sexual encounter.11 Furthermore, a married couple should follow the wife’s cycle of sexual desire, which Stopes said could be generally approximated as “[t]hree or four days of repeated unions, followed by about ten days without any unions at all.” Continued Stopes, “I have been interested to discover that the people known to me who have accidentally fixed upon this arrangement of their lives are happy.”12
She argued that although men certainly could lose their vitality by having too many orgasms, they did not need to hold them back, but merely to refrain from spilling seed other than according to the prescribed schedule. If men or women get too little or too much sex, they get sick: neuralgia, “nerves,” and growths. By contrast, she explained, “mutually happy marriage relation” leads only to positive healing and vitalizing power.13 She wasn’t forthcoming with details, but still, Stopes could be erotic in her writing; we read of the couple’s “fusion of joy and rapture,” the “half-swooning sense of flux which overtakes the spirit,” and the “mutual penetration into the realms of supreme joy.” With her era, she assumed we each had a limited sexual economy, and had to negotiate it: “This truth should never be lost sight of in a marriage; where between the times of natural, happy, and also stimulating exercise of the sex-functions, the periods of complete abstinence should be opportunities for transmuting the healthy sex-power into work of every sort.”14 Sounds like Freudian sublimation, but Stopes never cites Freud. She was generous with her citations, so it wasn’t dishonesty, and it wasn’t likely ignorance either: Stopes earned her Ph.D. in Germany and was the first woman appointed to the science staff at the University of Manchester in 1904. Rather, Stopes and Freud were both operating in a world where this metaphor, of a limited amount of energy, dominated the way people thought.
Freud’s concept of libido was a person’s sexual energy. It was limited, to the extent that if you didn’t