Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment/The Conservation of Beauty
Human beauty, we have pointed out, is a sign of fitness for parenthood: fitness to propagate children who shall be, in high degree, able to hold their own in the mental and physical struggle with nature and with their human competitors. It is the sign which is intuitively recognized by the race and upon which the process of sexual selection is based. It therefore is nothing superficial: it is the external appearance of the germinal potentiality which is the most important of all things for society.
When we say that this sign is intuitively recognized, we do not mean that it has any mystic properties: we mean that it is a sign wh ich is accepted and acted upon, without induction or inference, or reasoned process: recognized in the visual details of form and coloration and graceful movement, in the audible details of voice, and the tactually felt smoothness of skin and firmness of muscle and glossiness of hair. Concerning the processes of development through which this recognition may have passed, and the conjectural mechanism through which it has come about, we need not speculate. That it is a fact, is the point uponwhich our emphasis should be placed.
In the absence of more scentific tests of the racial potentiality of the individual, beauty must be used as our guide—beauty as we have described it in the preceding chapter. And, since the betterment of the race should be evidenced by an increase in that which is the sign of desirable qualities, the problem of racial betterment is the problem of conserving beauty, and eliminating ugliness, that beauty may more and more predominante; and the race become more and more fit, instead of declining under the influence of those factors in civilization which inhibit sexual selection and natural selection.
At the present time, we have no right to assume that any strain of the human race can be improved. Transmission of acquired characters may be possible, but the burden of proof is upon those who maintain that hypothesis. Nevertheless, we know that improvement in mixed stocks can be secured by the selection of the more fit, and the elimination of the less fit. In stock-breeding, we propagate from those individuals which show in highest obtainable degree the qualities we desire, and by so doing we improve the breed. We have reason to believe therefore that in the much mixed human races, by increasing the breeding of the more beautiful individuals, and decreasing the breeding of the less fit, the level of the race may be raised, since the better strains will thus gain a greater and greater predominance over the weaker. Even if it be possible to gradually improve the poorer strains themselves (which we have said above is not probably), the sure and far more rapid method of improvement is the elimination of these weaker strains, and the multiplication of the better.
In two ways the progress of civilization has obstructed the propagation of the fittest, and facilitated the multiplication of the unfit. The first way is by the development of humanitarianism, and the development also of efficacious tools for its use: surgery, pharmacology, and prophylaxis, with large funds and personnel to apply them. By the active influence of humanitarianism, the less resistant, less virile, have been given a greater ratio of survival, and with the increase in survival has gone an increase in propagation.
I am not unappreciative of the benfits of humanitarianism; it is the real glory of civilization, and we would be Huns if we did not realize it. It is true that many of the individuals whom science and philanthropy snatch from untimely ends, although individually weaklings, are weaklings by economic accident and germ infection, but really belong to desirable stocks and are capable of propagating desirable progeny. Moreover, the essence of civilization is the fact that it places a value on the individual where nature places value only on the species. The true type of natural valuation is illustrated by the bees, the male of which dies in the act of copulation, the female is discarded as soon as she ceases to produce eggs copiously, and the neuters are mere machines to care for the eggs and feed the queen and larvæ. That this sort of social organization is not good for man, however well it suits the bees, the Germans have impressively demonstrated. Although civilization evaluates individuals as such, regardless of the sort of offspring they produce, it dares not nullify the laws of nature beyond a certain limit, or it would commit suicide. The obvious compromise is to preserve the individual, whether a virile or weakling, but to prevent the weakling from reproducing. Thus both humanitarianism and racial needs are served.
Perhaps there are limits beyond which the preservation of the individual is undesirable. It seems not only useless but dangerous to preserve the incurably insane and the lower grades of feeble-minded, even when we consider the case from the individualistic point of view. When we estimate what the personal labor put into asylums and into institutions for feeble-minded, might accomplish if expended in the poorer districts of our cities in teaching the children who will be the parents of a large fraction of the next generation of citizens, how to work and play, it seems a pity that we cannot asphyxiate the hopeless insane and feeble-minded as kindly as we do stray dogs and cats. Such a course of procedure, however, is impracticable, for the reasons assigned below against legalized sterilization.
The second way in which civilization interferes with the conservation of the desirable human qualities, is in setting sexual values which conflict with those of beauty, and which obscure or override them.
The natural desire for children is inhibited by other desires of various sorts: desires which in many cases are good in themselves, but which are so puffed up by civilization that many couples who are personally qualified, legally authorized, and economically able, to create children, produce none or too few. On account of these social values which civilization creates, many who are excellently qualified for parenthood do not even marry.
On the other hand, the social values which are purchasable by wealth and which again, are in many cases commendable, often obscure personal undesirability; and men and women who, in a more natural order of things would not be counted beautiful, nor considered desirable coparents, are sought after and married. Fortunately, it frequently happens that the inhibitory process we have just mentioned; the checking of the desire for children by conflicting social values; enters into a great many of these mammonistic marriages and tends to neutralized their evil results. The harm of mismating is not completely destroyed by childlessness, however, for although positive damage—the procreation by the unfit parent—may thus be prevented, the loss due to the nonprocreation by the fit mate in such a union is not made up.
Features of civilization which are in themselves good may, as indicated above, work seirous harm in society which has not yet completely adjusted itself to these features. Certain benefits, on the other hand may accrue to society from features which are in themselves malignant, even though the evil wrought by these features is enormously in excess of the incidental benefits. Prostitution is one of these sinister features, which, it is probable, has conferred slight benefits on society, and has also contributed to social modifications whose value is open to serious question.
Prostitution is a social institution developed with civilization as a result of social maladjustment: maladjustment of the various other institutions which develop by irregular growth. Although no longer accepted as a necessity, it resists all attempts to eliminate it based on the assumption that it is a primary institution, instead of what it really is: namely, a derivative. Like all symptoms, it is to be treated as a symptom, and removed by removing the causes. Neither homeopathic nor allopathic measure have had permanent remedial effect upon it. Yet, like all symptomatic phenomena, it has direct consequences, flowing from it rather than from its causes, and these consequences are probably both good and evil.
Prostitution has undoubtedly had some effect, and possibly a large effect, in checking the increase, if not in producing the decrease, of certain individual qualities which are deemed undesirable, either from the personal or the social point of view.
In its commenst form, prostitution is a means of limiting the sexual freedom of women, while extending the largest freedom to men compatible with such restriction upon the female. It provides, in other words, the greatest possible sexual liberty for male and the greatest possible limitation for women, which can coexist. A major distinction is thus created between the two classes of harlots and “virtuous women,” into which two classes all women are distributed if the system is perfectly carried out. As a matter of fact, in most social groups under the successive stages of civilization, there has been a “borderline” class, never large, but rapidly increasing in size at the present time.
The typical rule of prostitution, although absent from some civilizations, is that the woman who “sins” once, if found out, becomes permanently a prostitute. Exceptions are made, in later forms of civilization, in favor of women belonging to certain small classes, but these exceptions are not of sufficient importance to alter the general conditions. Prostitutes are in general childless, except for the single “love child” which is in many cases the instrument through which the woman’s “sin” is discovered, and through which, therefore, she is committed to harlotry. In total, the progeny of harlots are of small consequence.
Prostitution furnishes therefore a sink, into which certain lines of human descent are constantly vanishing. The types of woman absorbed in this sink include two of probable importance as regards their effect on the stock. These are, first: the feeble-minded, who, according to current statistics, are found in significant frequency among harlots and “delinquent” woman;[1] and second, those women who are more like the male in the temporal course of sexual desire than is the average woman, and are hence more apt to actively seek intercourse, or more apt to yield to the illicit soliciations of the male. The occurrence among prostitutes of a certain proportion of nymphomaniacs is not surprising.
The age-long drafting into the ranks of harlots of the more ardent women should theoretically give a slight advantage in reproduction to the “colder” types, and could thus have produced amodificiation in the average constitution of woman; which seems indeed to have occurred. While among savages, according to many accounts, women are more lustful, if anything, than men; among modern civilized peoples the rule is that aside from coquetry, woman yields rather than seeks. Her sexual desires are a flame which must be lighted from an external source, whereas the male’s are self-igniting. Man’s desire is always explicit, but woman’s are usually implicit, becoming explicit only under the favorable stimulating influence—mental and physical—of the male. The manifestation of the implicit desire in extreme cases is coquetry, which is only an exaggeration of the normal tendency to encourage the male, that is, to submit herself to the stimulation, mental at first, which will eventually arouse her explicit desire. The beautiful reciprocity of the sexes herein exhibited must command our admiration by its efficiency in promoting Dame Nature’s aims.
Prostitution has no such selective effect on the males as it has on the females. It may have a slight effect in delaying, or in exceptional cases obviating, marriage. But whereas prostitutes never constitute more than a small percentage of the female population, their patrons constitute an important percentage of the male population: estimates (admittedly unreliable) running as high as ninety per cent in America, and higher in Europe. Nor can it be said there is any less ultimate fecundicity among the more frequent male fornicators than among the less frequent, or among the minority who take monogamy seriously. Other vices, however, homosexuality in particular, do lessen reproduction by males of weak strains,[2]although having no probably effect on female reproduction.
The presumptive effect of prostitution on the average emotional constitution of woman can as reasonably be assumed to be a loss as again. If we could free ourselves from the still prevalent view of woman as property; if marriage could be put on a plan of equality; there would undoubtedly be a consensus of opinion that society loses by a repression of the emotional life of females. Hence, the only benefit we can assume from prostitution is the reduction of reproduction by the feeble-minded. And this, in contrast with the serious racial effects of venereal disease which prostitution facilitates: with the even more serious evil of unmated women which prostitution augments: and with the psychological effects on the men who resort to prostitutes—effects which have not been given due consideration as yet—is a contribution so small that it is not worth consideration.
- ↑ Caution in evaluating these statistics is necessary. They are of course drawn from the relatively small class of “delinquents” who are caught; and of course the woman of lower intelligence is more apt to be caught than is the more intelligent “delinquent.” To a lesser degree, the same consideration applies to the statistics on relative frequency of nymphomania.
- ↑ Against the Freudian supposition that homosexuality is a normal incident of the development of the individual, I wish to set the conjecture, at least as plausible, that it is the mark of an hereditary taint, where it is not produced by extremely pathological social conditions, and that even in these latter cases, it develops under the guidance of an influential tainted stock. Although homosexuality is frequent among women, that it acts as a preventive of marriage and child bearing in more than an inconsiderable number of cases does not seem probable.