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In it I tried to give expression to that which I hold to be a great truth, and one on which I should not fear to challenge the verdict of long future generations that, the direction in which the endeavour of woman to readjust herself to the new conditions of life is leading today, is not towards a greater sexual laxity, or promiscuity, or to an increased self-indulgence, but toward a higher appreciation of the sacredness of all sex relations, and a clearer perception of the sex relation between man and woman as the basis of human society, on whose integrity, beauty and healthfulness depend the health and beauty of human life, as a whole.
The liveliest lesson I must have drawn, however, from that source makes in any case, at the best, an odd educational connection, given the kind of concentration at which education, even such as ours, is supposed especially to aim: I speak of that direct promiscuity of insights which might easily have been pronounced profitless, with their attendant impressions and quickened sensibilities yielding, as these last did, harvests of apparitions.
Families whose size testified to their bourgeois respectability, lolled in happy promiscuity upon the sands; the children constructed forts or canals, the women tore some neighbour's reputation to pieces, the men lay back lazily and smoked and kept an eye out for the bathers.
While the judge did everything to vilify him, harshly reproaching him with his wretched childhood and youth, magnifying every stain and every transgression in his career, referring to the promiscuity of his life between Madame Theodore and little Celine as something bestial, he, the prisoner, quietly said yes or no, like a man who has nothing to hide and accepts the full responsibility of his actions.
They went by and returned, gathered about her, separated, melted away as people do in our musings. Her eyes were fixed on the low roof of the cave. The lilt of the water seemed to rock her soul in a cradle. "Madre Ruffo! Madre Ruffo!" The words were in her mind like a refrain. And then the oddity, the promiscuity of life struck her.
The scene before her typified to Undine her first real taste of life. How meagre and starved the past appeared in comparison with this abundant present! The noise, the crowd, the promiscuity beneath her eyes symbolized the glare and movement of her life. Every moment of her days was packed with excitement and exhilaration.
Spencer and Gillen in their two works on Australian tribes, whose customs seem to them to be inexplicable except on the supposition of primitive promiscuity, in spite of Westermarck's arguments; and in support of this view the sexual license granted in many tribes to unmarried girls may be adduced. However this may be, the custom in question appears to be civil and not religious.
Conceive the state of Tahiti, where, as through all Polynesia, the girls have their fling at promiscuity from puberty to the late teens or early twenties, when an immense and increasing population compelled the thinking men to devise a remedy for the starvation which in times of drought or comparative failure of the feis or breadfruit or a scarcity of fish menaced the nation!
What most hurt the feelings of the young priest, however, was the extraordinary promiscuity of the table d'hote, at which men and women, young girls and ecclesiastics, were packed together in chance order, and satisfied their hunger like a pack of hounds snapping at offal in all haste. Baskets of bread went round and were promptly emptied.
I have been told that I “had quite deliberately gone back to our uncivilised ancestors to ‘fish up’ the precedent of the matriarchate;” that I “had allowed my prejudices to dictate my choice of material, and had thus brought forward examples explanatory of my own opinions;” that I “had fastened eagerly on these, without inquiring too carefully about other facts having a contrary tendency.” I was reminded of what I well knew, that the matriarchate and promiscuity with which it is usually connected were not universally accepted by anthropologists; the tendency to-day being to discredit both as being among the early phases of society.
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