The Terrible Monomania

Our biggest national problem concerning sex belongs exclusively to the majority that calls itself normal. They assume, in both cinema and church, saloon, school and home, that sexual attraction is the foundation of all but a few human relationships. Sounds absurd but even a cursory investigation will provide abundant evidence. For instance, it is unheard of for an unmarried woman and man to live together without exciting some or much gossip about their libidos. Even a frigid librarian would exclaim in rebuttal, "Why else live together!" Such a question is touching in its childlike faith that nastiness makes the world go round. Even an old guardian living with a girl child is in for something like, "There's something very odd going on in that house, I'll wager," and the young man living with his mother gets, "I've often wondered just why he never got married, if you see what I mean.

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There are exceptions, of course, but very, very few. Put a male and female together in a house (without legal or religious sanction of their sexual activities) and you'll have spontaneous biological conjecture by everyone in the county. Even man and wife do not escape the sex treatment. Everyone is oddly positive that they have sex ("They're married, aren't they?") so the chatter moves on to the kind of sex they must have.

We have even gone so far as to divide our species into categories that indicate not only what we do in bed but what we might but don't necessarily. And these all-important categories concern an activity which occupies only a fraction of the time of a normal, healthy human animal: they are, of course, "heterosexual" and "homosexual." We are positive-without actually convincing evidence that sex rules over all. And we, as a society, are so positive that sex between everybody is inevitable that we have set up history's most complicated and contradictory rules, laws, etiquettes and even thinking on the subject.

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