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The exploitation of sexuality by our theatres and Press is not successful only in the case of the idle and the overfed; it finds its patrons also among those who are too tired to put their minds into anything really interesting from an intellectual or artistic point of view, but whose attention can be distracted and whose interest held by a more or less open appeal to the primitive instincts of sex.
This imperfect transfusion of his material is a far more significant defect in Whitman's poetry than the relatively few passages of unashamed sexuality which shocked the American public in 1855. The gospel or burden of "Leaves of Grass" is no more difficult of comprehension than the general drift of Emerson's essays, which helped to inspire it.
To find a bit of pleasure in what was and not expect anything more: this was seeing innate value instead of creating ideal scenarios, which were bound to not happen and lead to disappointment. The mystery of obtaining happiness was not so confusing but sexuality, that ever changing river, was.
Again, "Few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality.... It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory e.g. sex deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian Mystics.
Romanticism, which extols sex as the prime and only thing of life, prudery which closes its eyes to it and makes sour faces, need special places in Dante's Inferno. Neither has dealt with reality, reality, which is satisfying and pleasant unless examined with the prejudices instilled by the hypersexual romance writer and the perverted sexuality of the prude.
F. also told me that an Indian princess in his part of the country would permit coitus for fifty cents. A. sometimes slept with F., and I could imagine their embraces. S., a secretive, handsome boy of 13, wetted his bed with urine every night. The only sign that he gave of an interest in sexuality was his laughing remark concerning the coupling of rose-bugs.
Then followed the new gospel, "I celebrate myself," chanted in long lines of free verse, whose patterns perplexed contemporary readers. For the most part it was passionate speech rather than song, a rhapsodical declamation in hybrid rhythms. Very few people bought the book or pretended to understand what it was all about. Some were startled by the frank sexuality of certain poems.
When he left the seminary, he had rejoiced at finding himself a stranger among his fellowmen, no longer walking like them, carrying his head differently, possessed of the gestures, words, and opinions of a being apart. He had felt emasculated, nearer to the angels, cleansed of sexuality.
We have here once more before us, if this opinion be correct, a scientific erotophobia, that is the dread mostly among physicians and psychologists of sexuality, although this is at least one of the chief driving instincts of human life.
Greyhounds give a better comparison where the rippling of the body is more expressive of their speed than the flying of their feet. These creatures must have touched the earth, but their bodies also ran. And just as young dogs play for the sake of activity, without method or purpose, so did these; and just as with young animals the sexes mingle without any hint of sexuality, so did these.
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