DISCOVERY 



25 



of masculinity and femininity of individuals, and it may be 

 said that the pure type, loo per cent, male or loo per cent. 

 female, only exists as an abstraction ; the author there- 

 fore makes a plea on biological grounds for a less rigid 

 and uncompromising view than is usually held of the 

 contrast betiveen the sexes. The greatest distinction, he 

 finds, lies in the structural speciaUsation of the female for 

 the task of supporting the life of the embryo during its 

 intra-uterine existence, a point that is not very clearly 

 followed up in the rest of the book. 



In the second (sociological) section, Dr. Iva Peters gives 

 a complete survey of the taboo of women, that complicated 

 and rigidly enforced code of things forbidden by which 

 primitive man limits his association with women or any- 

 thing connected with them, and so protects himself against 

 the evil influence that he believes to emanate from them. 

 Crawley's theory, that this taboo is designed to protect 

 man from the possibility' of being " infected " by the 

 weakness and inferioritv' of the other sex, is recorded, 

 but no mention is made of his teleological explanation 

 that the taboo serves to maintain the specialised division 

 of labour between men and women, which would be of 

 service to the community in maintaining the high degree 

 of efficiency that is favoured by specialisation. It may 

 be noted that the sexual taboos tend to emphasise and 

 reinforce the difference between the sexes, as though 

 primitive man had at bottom some deep horror of their 

 approximation. The taboo of women is next traced into 

 its development as the fear of witchcraft ; then, with the 

 fear sumblimated into awe, as the veneration of the 

 sibyl and prophetess ; and finally, by what the psycholo- 

 gist would call reaction formation, into the ideal of the 

 pure, spiritual woman, asexual and ethereal, culminating 

 in the \argin goddess. 



The author points out that the old sexual taboos are 

 still powerfully operative in modem communities and 

 are responsible for much unhappiness and injustice, but 

 she makes very little attempt to trace the influences of 

 the taboo feeling in its many and particular results, and 

 the only remedy that the author proposes against its 

 evil effects — and she appears to assume, what is not quite 

 justifiable, that all its effects are evil — is the complete 

 sexual education of the young and a more open treatment 

 of sex problems generally. But surely something more 

 than this is required, for the taboos are not mere customs 

 that we have preserved by imitation, but the expression 

 of deep-seated, and for the most part unconscious, mental 

 tendencies, and until the lines along which they affect 

 society- have been worked out and become common know- 

 ledge, it will be difficult to apply the rational outlook that 

 the author demands to these primitive traits that seem, 

 so disastrously in many ca^es, to have outlived their 

 usefulness. 



In the third section, which is in many ways the most 

 stimulating and original, the book comes directly to the 

 actual problems with which society is faced. Dr. Phvllis 

 Blanchard discusses the disharmonies of sexual life, the 

 unhappy marriages, the preference for celibacy and the 

 vagaries of the sexual impulse, in terms of the individual. 

 She sees that society ignores the variation in degree of 



masculinitj- and femininity that were indicated in the first 

 section, and sets up the ideal of a standard type to which its 

 members mu.st endeavour to conform even at the cost of 

 their individuality. 



She shows that the tendency to conform to the rigid 

 standard goes deeper than a desire "to do the right 

 thing," explaining it on the lines, recently set out bv Kempf , 

 of a " conditioned reflex " — that is to say, a reflex that is 

 thrown into activity not only by the normal stimulus, 

 but also by objects usually associated with it, objects 

 that may become in time an essential condition for the 

 excitation of the reflex and even become more powerful 

 in arousing it than the normal object. It is, for instance, 

 a matter of common obser\'ation that our feelings of affec- 

 tion can be aroused by almost any attributes of the person 

 that we care for, and even when they occur in other 

 people. Our affections become no longer liable to be ex- 

 cited by any sexually pleasing person, but the reflex is only 

 aroused upon the condition that he or she possesses some 

 of the attributes of the person of our choice. Trouble 

 ensues when the indi'vidual falls in love with some imagined 

 ideal of manhood or womanhood, created by society or 

 by special factors in the early environment, only to find 

 that the model who has excited their affection does not 

 fulfil the real demands of their personality, for the natural 

 reflex has been " conditioned " by the ideal standard. 



The author seems to feel that the choice of a mate is 

 becoming a matter of greater nicety among civilised 

 people because of increasing individualisation, or, rather, 

 the greater need felt by the individual for the free expres- 

 sion of his personality, a change that is naturally more 

 marked in women, for whom new spheres of activity are 

 constantly being opened. 



The rigid standards and ideals of society tend to lag 

 behind the needs of the time and make marriage more 

 hazardous and less attractive, so that many men and 

 women frankly question whether it is worth while, or, 

 if they are less reflective, they decide that their failure 

 to conform to the standard ideal indicates some radical 

 shortcoming in themselves which makes marriage an 

 impossibility. But the sexual impulse demands satis- 

 faction, and if the normal channel is closed, it tends to 

 find a vicarious expression, as, for example, in romantic 

 friendships with another of the same sex, or in other less 

 obvious manifestations of wayward affection. A potent 

 source of disharmony is also found in the fact that the 

 maternal and sexual impulses, though united in the model 

 woman, are not always closely correlated, but frequently 

 exist the one without the other ; a peculiarity that the 

 author seems to regard as innate, though it seems likely 

 that in man>- cases it is an acquired and remediable 

 condition, due to the repression of an instinct by some 

 accident of circumstance. 



Dr. Blanchard's section is a thoughtful examination 

 of the problems of society, and is warmly recommended 

 to those who find simple explanations of the " unsatis- 

 factoriness " of modern men and women and do not 

 hesitate to print them. 



The joint authorship of the book has made it possible 

 to gather together a great amount of specialised informa- 



