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PARTISAN REVIEW
find a sounder measure of our contemporary aversion from ph,.sicality
than in the non-physical emphasis of
Male and Female.
Lawrence knew
what we would scarcely guess from Dr. Mead's book, that sex is life itself.
And he knew that life must be lived, not solved; that sex is a primary
experience and not merely a means to an end. He knew that life is
destroyed by program-making.
But this impulse to solve life, or, at least, to rationalize life, is not
the error of Dr. Mead alone, nor of the social sciences alone.
It
is
the
progressive fallacy of our time to suppose that we can rationalize all of
life's anomalies. The notion that life demands choice and that choice
inevitably implies sacrifice is something which only the religious intel–
ligence seems, at the moment, wiIling to entertain-which may be why
religion is making such rapid advances in the modern world. For in–
stance, as Dr. Mead makes her judgment upon the Samoans, that they
are the sunniest people she has studied, she is at no pains to point out
that they give up a great deal for their contentment which we might
not wish to give up. Yet not to take into constant active account the
fact that sacrifice and frustration lie at the very core of the personal
and social organization-it is the great Freudian truth, of course-is to
belie the very nature of the material we wish to shape.
But an even greater limitation upon Dr. Mead's imagination than
her refusal to see life in terms of its necessary frustrations is, as I have
indicated, her instrumental view of sex and of life itself. How are we to
prize our specific sexuality except in its exercise? And how are we to
exercise our maleness and femaleness in a world such as Dr. Mead's
book describes, in which the whole of our sexual motive would seem
to be social motive? Dr. Mead wishes to preserve our civilization by,
among other
things,
marshalling our best sexual forces. But by our
best sexual forces she apparently means the skiIls peculiar to each of the
sexes, not sexuality itself: if it takes the greater muscular development
of men to dig a subway, then men should dig our subways; if it takes
the greater delicacy and patience of women to fold parachutes, then
women should fold our parachutes. She does not mean by sex what
W. H. Auden means in his poem on Freud when he invokes, "Eros,
builder of cities." The sexuality of
Male and Female
is the sexuality of
ego, never of libido. It is directed toward achieving, not toward being.
And therefore, paradoxically enough, it will not achieve what Dr.
Mead wishes it to.
