There is next the question of the physical health and beauty of
the community and how far sexual rules and customs affect that, and
thirdly the question of the mental and moral atmosphere in which sexual
conventions and laws must necessarily be an important factor. It is
alleged that probably in the case of men, and certainly in the case of
women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary phase in existence; that
without it there is an incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a
real wilting and failure of energy and vitality and the development of
morbid states. And for most of us half the friendships and intimacies
from which we derive the daily interest and sustaining force in our
lives, draw mysterious elements from sexual attraction, and depend and
hesitate upon our conception of the liberties and limits we must give to
that force.
3.29. THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.
The individual attitudes of men to women and of women to men are
necessarily determined to a large extent by certain general ideas of
relationship, by institutions and conventions. One of the most important
and debatable of these is whether we are to consider and treat women as
citizens and fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men and
grouped in positions of at least material dependence to individual men.
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