4775555Is Sex Necessary — Chapter IJames Thurber and E. B. White
CHAPTER I
The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism
In no other civilized nation are the biological aspects of love so distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness as they are in the United States of America. In China it's all biology. In France it's a mixture of biology and humor. In America it's half, or two-thirds, psyche. The Frenchman's idea, by and large, is to get the woman interested in him as a male. The American idea is to point out, first of all, the great and beautiful part which the stars, and the infinite generally, play in Man's relationship to women. The French, Dutch, Brazilians, Danes, etc., can proceed in their amours on a basis entirely divorced from the psyche. The Chinese give it no thought at all, and never have given it any thought. The American would be lost without the psyche, lost and a little scared.
As a result of all this there is more confusion about love in America than in all the other countries put together. As soon as one gets the psychical mixed up with the physical—a thing which is likely to happen quite easily in a composing-room, but which should not happen anywhere else at all—one is almost certain to get appetite mixed up with worship. This is a whole lot like trying to play golf with a basketball, and is bound to lead to maladjustments.
The phenomenon of the American male's worship of the female, which is not so pronounced now as it was, but is still pretty pronounced, is of fairly recent origin. It developed, in fact, or reached its apex, anyway, in the early years of the present century. There was nothing like it in the preceding century. Throughout the nineteenth century the American man's amatory instincts had been essentially economic. Marriage was basically a patriotic concern, the idea being to have children for the sake of the commonwealth. This was bad enough, but nevertheless it is far less dangerous to get the commonwealth mixed up with love than to get the infinite mixed up with love.
There was not a single case of nervous breakdown, of neurosis, arising from amatory troubles, in the whole cycle from 1800 to 1900, barring a slight flare-up just before the Mexican and Civil wars. This was because love and marriage and children stood for progress, and progress is—or was—a calm, routine business. "Mrs. Hopkins," a man would say to the lady of his choice (she was a widow in this case)—"Mrs. Hopkins, I am thinking, now that George[1] has been dead a year, you and I should get married and have offspring. They are about to build the Union Pacific, you know, and they will need men." Because parents can't always have men-children when they want them, this led to almost as many women as men working on the Union Pacific, which in turn led to the greater stature of women in the present Northwest than in any other part of the nation. But that is somewhat beside the point. The point is that men and women, husbands and wives, suitors and sweethearts, in the last century lived without much sentiment and without any psycho-physical confusion at all. They missed a certain amount of fun, but they avoided an even greater amount of pother (see Glossary). They did not worry each other with emotional didoes. There was no hint of a Pleasure-Principle. Everything was empiric, almost somatic.[2]
This direct evasion of the Love Urge on the part of Americans of the last century was the nuclear complex of the psycho-neurosis as we know it today, and the basis for that remarkable reaction against patriotic sex which was to follow so soon after the Spanish-American war.
Fig. 1. Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Baseball.
At the turn of the century, the nation was of a sound economic basis and men had the oppornity to direct their attention away from the mechanics of life to the pleasures of living. No race can leap lightly, however, from an economic value to an emotional value. There must be a long period of Übertragung, long and tedious. Men were not aware of this, thirty years ago, because the science of psychology was not far advanced, but nature came to their aid by supplying a temporary substitute for an emotional sex life, to tide them over during the period of Übertragung. This substitute took the form of games. Baseball assumed a new and enormous importance; prize-fighting reached its heyday; horse-racing became an absorption, bicycling a craze.
Now women, naturally intraverts, could not easily identify themselves with baseball or prize-fighting (they admired Christy Mathewson and Terry McGovern, but that was about all); they took but slowly to horse-racing; and they giggled and acted the fool when they first tried to balance themselves on a bicycle. They drew away from men and from men's concerns, therefore—there was no more of the old Union Pacific camaraderie—and began to surround the mere fact of their biological destiny with a nimbus of ineffability. It got so that in speaking of birth and other natural phenomena, women seemed often to be discussing something else, such as the Sistine Madonna or the aurora borealis. They became mysterious to themselves and to men; they became suddenly, in their own eyes, as capable of miracle and as worthy of worship as Juno and her sisters. This could not go on. The conflict was ineluctable.
Fig. 2. Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Bowling.
When men, wearied of games, turned to women with that urgency so notable in the American male for its simplicity and directness, they found them unprepared for acceptance and surrender. The process of adjustment in courtship and in marriage became more involved than it had ever been before in the history of the country, if not in the history of the world. The new outdoors type of American man, with all his strength and impetuosity, was not easily to be put off. But the female, equipped with a Defense far superior in polymorphous ingenuities to the rather simple Attack of the male, was prepared. She developed and perfected the Diversion Subterfuge. Its purpose was to put Man in his place. Its first manifestation was fudge-making.
The effectiveness of fudge-making in fending off the male and impressing him with the female’s divine unapproachability can not be over-estimated. Neither can its potentiality as a nuclear complex. The flitting from table to stove, the constant necessity of stirring the boiling confection, the running out-of-doors to see if the candy had cooled and hardened, served to abort any objective demonstrations at all on
Fudge-Making
"The female, equipped with a Defence far superior in polymorphous ingenuities to the rather simple Attack of the male, developed, and perfected, the Diversion Subterfuge. The first manifestation of this remarkable phenomenon was fudge-making."
the part of the male. He met this situation with a strong Masculine Protest. He began to bring a box of candy with him when he called, so that there would not be any more fudge-making. These years constituted the great Lowney's era in this country. Brought back to where she had started, face to face with the male's simple desire to sit down and hold her, the female, still intent upon avoidance of the tactual, retaliated by suggesting Indoor Pastimes—one of the greatest of all Delay Mechanisms. All manner of parlor games came into being at this period, notably charades,[3] which called for the presence of other persons in the room (Numerical Protection). The American male's repugnance to charades, which is equaled, perhaps, by his repugnance to nothing else at all, goes back to those years. The Masculine Protest, in this case, was a counter-suggestion of some games of his own, in which there was a greater possibility of personal contact. His first suggestions were quite primitive, such as that it would be fun to count up to a hundred by kissing. The female's response was the famous one of Osculatory Justification. There must be, she decreed, more elaborate reasons for kissing than a mere exhibition of purposeless arithmetical virtuosity. Thus Post Office and Pillow were finally devised, as a sort of compromise. Neither was satisfactory to either sex. The situation became considerably strained and relationships finally trailed off into the even less satisfactory expedient of going for long rides on a tandem bicycle, which has had its serious effects upon the nature of the American man. He liked, for one thing, to do tricks on a bicycle. The contraption was new to him, and he wanted to do tricks on it. One trick that he liked especially was riding backwards. But there wasn't one woman in ten thousand, riding frontwards on the rear seat of a tandem wheel, who would permit her consort to ride backwards on the front seat. The result of all this was not adjustment, but irritability. Man became frustrated.
Frustration wrought its inevitable results.
“There wasn’t one woman in ten thousand, riding front-wards on the rear seat of a tandem wheel, who would permit her consort to ride backwards on the front seat. The result of all this was not adjustment, but irritability. Man became frustrated.”
Men began to act jumpy and strange. They were getting nowhere at all with women. The female gradually assumed, in men’s eyes, as she had in her own, the proportions of an unattainable deity, something too precious to be touched. The seed of Pedestalism was sown. The male, in a sort of divine discontent, began to draw apart by himself. This produced that separation of the physical and the psychic which causes the adult to remain in a state of suspended love, as if he were holding a bowl of goldfish and had nowhere to put it. This condition nowadays would lead directly to a neurosis, but in those days men were unable to develop a neurosis because they didn’t know how. Men withdrew, therefore, quietly and morosely, to their “dens.” It was the epoch of the den in America. Some marvelous ones sprang into being. Their contents were curiously significant. Deprived of possessing the female, the male worked off his Possessive Complex by collecting all manner of bibelots and bric-à-brac. The average den contained a paper-weight from Lookout Mountain, a jagged shell from Chickamaugua, a piece of wood from the Maine, pictures of baseball-players with beards, pictures of bicycle champions, a yellowing full-page photograph of Admiral Schley, Fig. 3. Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Craps. a letter-opener from Niagara Falls, a lithograph of Bob Fitzsimmons, a musket-badge from the G. A. R. parade, a red tumbler from the state fair, a photograph of Julia Marlowe, a monk's head match-holder, a Malay kriss, five pipe racks, a shark's tooth, a starfish, a snapshot of the owner's father's bowling team, colored pictures of Natural Bridge and Balanced Rock, a leather table runner with an Indian chief on it, and the spangled jacket of a masquerade costume, softly shedding its sequins.
The den was the beginning of male sublimation in this country, but the fruits of that sublimation were slow in ripening. At the start, in fact, they were in a state of absolute suspension. Man began to preoccupy himself with anything, no matter how trivial, which might help him to "forget," as the lay expression has it. He thought up childish diversions, at which one person can amuse himself, and to justify his absorption in these futile pastimes he exaggerated their importance, as we shall see. These diversions included the diabolo, the jig-saw puzzle, linked nails and linked keys, which men took apart and put back together again, and most important of all, pigs-in-clover.
During this period almost no achievements
of value, in art, science, or engineering, were forthcoming in the nation. Art, indeed, consisted chiefly of putting strange devices on boxes with the aid of a wood-burning set. Fig. 4. Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Six-day Bicycle Racing. The commonest device was the swastika, whose curiously distorted conformation bears no discernible relationship to any known phallic symbolism. Those years were blank, idle, lost years. Outside affairs of all kinds were neglected. Men retired to their dens and were not seen for days. The panic of 1907 was a direct result. It might be interesting to examine into a typical case history of the period.
CASE HISTORY
George Smith, aged 32, real estate operator. Unmarried, lived with mother. No precocious mother fixation. Had freed his libido without difficulty from familial objects, and was eager to marry. Had formed an attachment in 1899, at the age of 29, with a young virgin. Her Protective Reactions had been immediate and lasted over a period of three years, during which he had never even held her hand. Defense Devices: usually euchre (four-handed), or pedro. Definite and frequent fudge-making subterfuge. Post Office and Pillow, both with low degree of success.
Smith's separation between the physical and the psychic occurred in 1902, the direct stimuli presenting themselves on June 6th of that year, examination (by Dr. Matthiessen) showed. On that day Smith ran, frightened, from a barbershop in Indianapolis, where he lived. Inside the shop, on the floor, a middle-aged man named Herschel Queeper had thrown a fit. Queeper had been trying for two days to get three little balls, under a glass in a tiny round box, to roll into an opening made for them (common pigs-in-clover puzzle). But no sooner would he get the third one in than one, or perhaps both, of the others would roll out. Mrs. Queeper was beginning to wonder where he was.
Smith withdrew to his den and pondered and fiddled around and made Unconscious Drawings (Cf. Plates I, II, III and IV). He turned his attention from the object of his amorous affections to a consideration of the problems of pigs-in-clover. The usual Justification of Occupation occurred. It took the form of exaggerating the importance of finding out whether the puzzle could possibly be solved, and of working out a methodology of solving it more readily, if it could be solved at all. The case procured one of the little boxes and began to roll the balls toward the opening. At first he set about it
Unconscious Drawing: Plate I
Unconscious drawings, as they are called in psychoanalytical terminology, are made by people when their minds are a blank. This drawing was made by Floyd Neumann, of South Norwalk. It represents the Male Ego being importuned by, but refusing to yield to, Connecticut Beautiful.
quite calmly. There were no immediate signs of mental deterioration, either malignant or benign. But although the case got all the balls into the opening, thus proving that it could be done, he never got them all in at the same time. In the second month he threw a brief fit. This, today, would ordinarily prove the first step toward a complete physico-psychic breakdown, but in those days neuroses were staved off longer, owing to the general ignorance of psychology, and Smith not only calmly examined the effect of the fit upon himself, without calling in any scientists, but determined to go on and examine the effects of fits upon others. He decided, however, that it would be difficult to examine the effects of puzzle-fits upon men, because men brooked no examination when they were intent upon puzzles, and so he hit on the idea of having his dog, an animal named Dewey, play with the little round box until it threw a fit. But when he called in his dog he found, after several experiments, that the dog could not hold the box in either its right or left paw.[4] Furthermore, the animal was profoundly incurious about the puzzle.[5]
Undismayed, Smith decided that somewhere in Indianapolis there must be a dog adroit enough to handle the box and sagacious enough to grasp the idea behind it, "Furthermore, the animal was profoundly incurious about the puzzle" and with a view to finding such an animal, he determined to get all the dogs in town, and all the pigs-in-clover puzzles in town, into one room and see what would happen. (Apotheosis Complex, with Plurality Fallacy.)
Smith was able, however, to round up only about 85 per cent of the dogs of the city, because there were many who were too busy to get away at the time. Even so, 85 per cent of the dogs in Indianapolis was more than had ever been got together in one room before. The case attempted to explain the problem to the dogs in short, one-syllable talks, but the bedlam was too loud and too prolonged for him to make himself heard. Fifty or more St. Bernards and a few dozen Chesapeake spaniels listened, half-heartedly, but the others made holiday. Furthermore, eighty-four bulldogs would not permit themselves to be muzzled, and this added to Smith's difficulties. Thus, on the fifth day of the singular experiment, Smith, hearing a remarkable hullaballoo belowstairs (he worked in the attic), descended to the parlor, where he discovered the bulldogs engaged in a sort of tug-of-war, using a body Brussels carpet as a rope. (The case's mother had several days before retreated to French Lick, in a rundown condition.)
Smith grasped the carpet firmly, with some idea of wresting it away from the dogs, whereupon all of them save three began to pull against him.[6] The Exaggeration Complex under which the case was laboring gave him strength enough to meet with some small success in his first efforts to take the carpet away from the dogs. He pulled them as far as the bay window in the parlor, largely because they had not settled down seriously to winning. When they did, however, the total of three hundred and twenty-four solidly implanted feet and the virtually immeasurable tugging potentiality were too much for Smith. He was slowly pulled out into the hall, through the front door, and into the street. He stubbornly contested every inch of the way until a drug store, three blocks away, was reached. Here some one had the presence of mind to call out the fire department.
Dr. Matthiessen, who took the case at about this period in its development, attempted to re
Unconscious Drawing: Plate II.
This was drawn by Peter Zinsner, 564 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn, without knowing it. We here see Sublimation in conflict with the Libido. Peter has reached a point in life where women seem so divine he doesn’t dare call them up on the phone. Yet they still call him.
duce the Magnification of Objective, first by Analytic Reasoning, and then by cold applications. Neither was successful. Matthiessen could not divert the libido. Smith declined to resume his interest in the feminine object of his affections, and insisted that his experiment with puzzles was a glorious project for the benefit of mankind.
It was sheer accident that saved the patient—not Dr. Matthiessen. Smith finally refused Dr. Matthiessen admittance to his house, nor would he go to the doctor's office, claiming that he did not believe in psychology, but one day he dropped one of the little pigs-in-clover puzzles and broke the glass in it. He then found that he did not have to roll the balls into the openings, but could push them in with his finger. He got a hammer and broke the glass in all the thousands of puzzles he had brought to his home for the dogs, and solved every one of the puzzles by pushing, not rolling. This instantly released him from his complex by the Gordian Knot principle of complex release. He thus gained the necessary confidence and sense of power to feel worthy of the woman with whom he was in love, and he finally married her. The marriage was of average success.
Marriages, however, were frequently delayed much longer than in the case of George Smith, and it was not, indeed, until 1909 that the usual norm was restored. Meanwhile, in between the time of the first general separation of the physical and the psychic in this country, and the final culmination in marriages, a period of sublimation set in. This followed directly on the heels of the remarkable and lamentable era of preoccupation with trivial diversions and was characterized by an extravert interest in truly important projects and activities. The airplane was brought to a high stage of development, the telephone transmitter was perfected, tungsten replaced carbon as a filament for incandescent lamps, better books were written, art progressed, there was a cultural advance generally and the birth of a new Æsthetic, and
This drawing was made from an old 1901 lantern slide often used by Dr. Karl Zaner in his illustrated lecture, "What Can We Learn from Animals?" Dr. Zaner has always contended that we can learn nothing of importance from animals beyond a few pointers on the art of relaxation. "Their general activities are, as a rule, not only meaningless to man, but frequently to themselves as well. This particular cat, for example, probably had nothing special in mind at all."
people began to get at the real facts in the Thaw
case. Nevertheless, Pedestalism has left its
serious effects. It is doubtful if they will fully
wear off for another fifty or seventy-five years.
↑The word "somatic" has been left out of the glossary because of the confusion which the dictionary itself seems to be in over the meaning of the term. "Pertaining to the wall of the body" is as close as the New International comes to what we have in mind here, but it goes right on to use "parietal" as a synonym and parietal means "pertaining to order within the buildings of a college." Then again the word goes back to the old Indian, or Fast Indian, root Soma which means a god, a liquor, and an asclepiadaccous climbing shrub (Sarcostemma acidum). Furthermore, if your eyes stray even a fraction of an inch, in looking up "somatic," you are in "sölvsbergite" which includes the feldspars, ægirite, grorudite, and tinguaite.
