SEX AND SCIENCE
havior as a norm. The italics in the following quotation are mine.
"For those who like the term
it
is clear that there is a sexual drive
which cannot be set aside for any large portion of the population,
by any sort of social convention.
For those who prefer to think in
simpler terms of action and reaction,
it is a picture of an animal who,
however civilized or cultured, continues to respond to the constantly
present sexual stimuli, albeit with some social and physical restraints."
The Report obviously finds the second formulation to be superior to
the first.
Now there are several advantages in keeping in mind our own
animal nature and our family connection with the other animals.
The advantages are instrumental, moral, and poetic-! use the last
word for want of a better to suggest the mere pleasure in finding
kinship with some of the animals. But perhaps no idea is more diffi–
cult to use than this one. In the Report it is used to establish a
dominating principle of judgment, which is the Natural.
As
a con–
cept of judgment this is notoriously deceptive and has been belabored
for generations, but the Report knows nothing of its dangerous
reputation and uses it with the naivest confidence. And although
the Report directs the harshest language toward the idea of the
Normal, saying that it has stood in the way of any true scientific
knowledge of sex, it is itself by no means averse to letting the idea
of the Natural develop quietly into the idea of the Normal. The
Report has in mind both a physical normality-as suggested by its
belief that under optimal conditions men should be able to achieve
the orgasmic frequency of the primates-and a moral normality,
the acceptability, on the authority of animal behavior, of certain
usually taboo practices.
It is inevitable that the concept of the Natural should haunt any
discussion of sex. It is inevitable that it should make trouble, but
most of all for a scientific discussion that bars judgments · of value.
Thus, in order to show that homosexuality is not a neurotic mani–
festation, as the Freudians say it is, the Report adduces the homo–
sexual behavior of rats. But the argument
de animalibus
must surely
stand by its ability to be inverted and extended. Thus, in having lost
sexual periodicity, has the human animal lost naturalness? Again,
the female mink, we learn, fiercely resists intercourse and must be
actually coerced into submission. Is it she who
is
unnatural or is her
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