PARTISAN REVIEW
thirty years
has
had an orgasmic frequency of thirty times a week.
As
for the objection to the involvement of sex with science, it
may be said that if science, through the Report, serves in any way to
free the physical and even the "mechanical" aspects of sex, it may
by that much have acted to free the emotions it might seem to deny.
And perhaps only science could effectively undertake the task of
freeing sexuality from science itself. Nothing has so reinforced moral–
istic or religious prohibitions as the concepts of science. At some
point in the history of Europe, some time in the Reformation, mastur–
bation ceased to be thought of as merely a sexual sin which could
be dealt with like any other sexual sin and, perhaps by analogy
with the venereal diseases with which the sexual mind of Europe was
obsessed, came to be thought of as the specific cause of mental and
physical disease, of madness and decay.
2
The prudery of Victorian
England went forward with scientific hygiene; and both in Europe
and in America the sexual mind was haunted by the idea of
degen–
eration,
apparently by analogy with the second law of thermo–
dynamics-here is enlightened liberal opinion in 1896: "The effects
of venereal disease have been treated at length, but the amount of
vitality burned out through lust has never been and, perhaps, never
can be adequately measured" (Article "Degeneration" in
The Encyclo–
pedia of Social Reform).
The very word
sex,
which we now utter
so casually, came into use for scientific reasons, to replace
love,
which had once been indiscriminately used but was now to be saved
for ideal purposes, and
lust,
which came to seem both too pejorative
and too human:
sex
implied scientific neutrality, then vague devalua–
tion, for the word which neutralizes the mind of the observer also
neuterizes the men and women who are being observed. Perhaps
the Report is the superfetation of neutrality and objectivity which,
in the dialectic of culture, was needed before sex could be free of their
cold dominion.
Certainly it is a great merit of the Report that it brings to mind
the earliest and best commerce between sex and science-the best
thing about the Report is the quality that makes us remember
Lucretius. The dialectic of culture has its jokes, and
alma Venus
having once been called to preside protectively over science, the
2
See Abram Kardiner,
The Psychological Frontiers of Society,
p.
32 and
p.
441
n.
464
