(Maintains that our sex disorders are of social origin, due to the displacing of love by money as a motive in mating.) If the cause of our sex disorders is not physiological, what is it? Everything in nature must have a cause, and this includes human nature, the actions and feelings of men, both as individuals and as groups. We hear the saying: "You can't change human nature"; but the fact is that human nature is one of the most changeable things in the world. We can watch it changing from age to age, for better or for worse, and if we had the intelligence to use the forces now at our command, we could mold human nature, as precisely as a brewer converts a carload of hops into a certain brand of beer. Voltaire was author of the saying, "Vice and virtue are products like vinegar."
Our civilization is based upon industrial exploitation and class privilege, the monopoly of the means of production and the natural sources of wealth by a group. This enables the privileged group to live in idleness upon the labor of the rest of society; it confers unlimited power with practically no responsibility—a strain which not one human being in a thousand has the moral strength to endure. History for the past five thousand years is one demonstration after another that the conferring upon a class of power without responsibility means the collapse of that class and the downfall of its civilization.
So far as concerns the ruling class male, what the system of privilege does is to give him unlimited ability to indulge his sex desires. What it does for the female is to submit her to the male desires, and to abolish that mutuality in sex, that interaction between male and female influence, which is the very essence of its purpose. Woman, in a predatory society, is subject to a double enslavement, that of class as well as of sex, and the result is the perverting of sexual selection, and a constantly increasing tendency towards the survival of the unfit.
In a state of nature the males compete among themselves for the favor of the female. The female is not raped, nor is she kidnapped; on the contrary, she exercises her prerogative, she inspects the various male charms which are set before her, and selects those which please her, according to her deeply planted instincts. The result is that the weak and unfit males seldom have a chance to reproduce themselves, and the procreating is done by the highest specimens of the type.
But now we have a world which is ruled by money, in which opportunity, and indeed survival, depend upon money, and the whole tendency of society is to make money standards supreme. We do not like to admit this, of course; our instincts revolt against it, and our higher faculties reinforce the revolt, so we carefully veil our money motives, and invent polite phrases to conceal them. You will hear people deny it is money which determines admission into what is called "society," the intimate life of the ruling class. They will tell you that it is not money, it is "good taste," "refinement," "charm of personality," and so on. But if you analyze all these things, you speedily discover that they are made out of money; they are symbols of the possession of money, devised by those who possess it, as a means of keeping themselves apart from those who do not possess it. I would safely defy a member of the ruling class to name a single element in what he calls "refinement," or "good taste," that is not in its ultimate analysis a symbol of the possession of money. Let it be the pronunciation of a word, or the cut of a coat, or the method of handling a fork—whatever it may be, it is part of a code, revealing that the person, or more important yet, the ancestors of the person, have belonged to the leisure class, and have had time and opportunity to learn to do things in a certain precise conventional way. I say "conventional," for very frequently............