Should it even be necessary to prove that love can only be free, when painters show it to us as a winged child, and poets in their cheerful, fanciful or sad songs show it as capricious, fickle, always seeking new horizons and fresh sensations.
… Love is a child of Bohemia!
And it is true. None of us can guarantee the stability of love. More than all other human feelings, it is changeable and fleeting, because it is not merely an affection of the heart, but also a desire of the senses and a physical need.
Let no one confuse love with marriage. Marriage is a social convention; love is a natural law. Marriage is a contract; love is a kiss. Marriage is a prison; love is a flowering. Marriage is the prostitution of love.
For love to retain its beauty and dignity, it must be free; and it can only be free if it is governed by its own law. There can be no material or moral considerations in this matter: two beings love one another, desire one another, declare it; they must have the right to give themselves to each other without any reason foreign to their desire intervening between them; as they must have the absolute right to leave each other the day they no longer desire one another.
And I do not say: “the day they no longer love one another”; but precisely the day they have ceased to desire one another. Because these are two entirely distinct things. One may cease to desire a woman and still love her; one may no longer want the lover and remain faithful to the friend. This case of psychology is too well known for me to dwell on it; but the side on which I wish to insist is the side of the question that concerns the woman.
For the woman it is generally accepted that her sexual life is nil or subordinate to that of the companion — legal or not — that she has chosen. She must live and feel through him; be passionate if he is, remain neutral if he is cold. Up to now, man has considered the sensual desire as something that must govern it essentially, refusing to recognise in the woman a being morally and physically organised like himself.
It is this question that I shall address first, in this study on Free Love.
I have said earlier that, to study the great natural laws properly, it is useful to go back to primitive sources, to study nature in animal life.
Well then, in animals, the female has a sexual life of her own; she has sexual needs, sexual desires, which she satisfies, with the same freedom, the same regularity as the male.
Now, none will deny that the physiological laws which govern animals are the same for humans. Why then, in that case, refuse to admit for women the same physiological similarity between her and the animal, that which is admitted to exist between the animal and man. Why refuse to the woman a sexual life of her own? Why make of love an exclusive need of the man?
Up until now, setting himself up as master in this question as in others, man has answered: “Because woman has no needs; because she does not desire, because she does not suffer from the deprivation of carnal satisfactions.”
But what does he know, that man, if the woman has no needs? Who then better than the woman herself can judge and decide?
For me I still have present in mind this phrase of a physician: “The celibacy of the woman is as monstrous as that of the priest. To condemn women to continence is an iniquity, for it is to prevent the integral development of the feminine being.”
Thus then, by the admission of this physician, the prolonged virginity of the woman causes a halt in her intellectual and physical evolution.
Then, if there do exist women who have no needs, cold women, without sensual desires — what does that prove? There are likewise men refractory to sensuality. But this is by no means the majority; and let it be permitted to me to state, this is by no means the majority of women, those who are refractory to love.
Moreover, at present, with the kind of education she receives, the woman herself is a bad judge of her sensations and desires. She does not analyse her inner life; she often suffers without knowing why.
The exuberant virgin of health, whose ardent blood burns her temples and reddens her lips, may not know that it is virginity which renders her nervous, dreamy, anxious. She may not know that it is the need of love which makes her weep or laugh without motive; but because she does not know how to define it, that does not make it any less true that it is this natural law of love that works in her.
Brutally, what she ignores, marriage will teach her; marriage, towards which she will have gone blind, because she will have simply invoked two arms as cradle where to find a refuge; then when at last she “knows”, when, initiated into sexual life, her flesh becomes consciously vibrant, she will discover that she is bound to a man whom perhaps she will no longer love. And, according to her temperament, she will go to the lover and resign herself to the conjugal duty.
And if she resigns, if she accepts duty without love, even though she might confess to others and to herself that she has no desires, that she feels no carnal need, she will simply deceive herself and others. The carnal need will have existed in her, but, not having found the environment necessary to its flowering, it will be atrophied and asleep. If that same woman had lived the free life; if, leaving the companion who did not respond to her desires, she had gone to one who would have made her live fully her life as lover, it is very probable that she would not have become a cold woman.
In our current customs it is much easier for a man to judge whether he is “cold” or not. Free to give course to his desires, he may knowingly — after passing through the arms of several women — declare himself for or against sensuality. But the woman — condemned to know only one man — cannot in reality know whether what she has not felt in the arms of this man, she would have felt in the arms of another.
Therefore, it is impossible to say exactly what women are from the point of view of sensuality. However, if one looks again at animal life, one will see that the anomaly of non-sensuality appears rarely in the female. It never appears in wild species; and if it does sometimes in domesticated species, it is because domestication has deformed them. Moreover we can observe that the bitch, deprived of sexual satisfaction, withers, decays and shortens by a quarter her lifespan.
There is no doubt that if the woman lived normally; that if she too had not been deformed either physically or morally by constraints, there is no doubt that the number of “cold” women would be greatly diminished. Yet I hold that even if there were only fifty per cent of genuinely sensual women, these fifty have the right to a full life, and it is simply inequitable to condemn them to the mutilation of a part of themselves, for the simple reason that there exist fifty perfectly satisfied with their lot. Absolute love-freedom — equally for woman and man — is nothing but elementary justice. That does not force the “cold” to become passionate; but it will permit the passionate not to suffer in the captivity of conventional and social laws.
⁂
I said at the beginning that one should not confuse love with marriage. Well, before leaving the physiological field, I go even further and say that one should not confuse love with desire.
Love is the complete communion of two minds, two hearts, two sensualities. Desire is only the whim of two epidermises that the same thrill of voluptuousness unites. Nothing is more fleeting and unstable than desire, yet none of us escapes it. If all women will be frank with themselves, they will confess that it has sometimes happened to them to give themselves virilely to a man whom they had only seen for a few hours — even for a short instant — and whose feelings and even name they ignored. But it was enough that a pressure of hands, the exchange of a glance, the issuing of the voice itself, for desire to be born; and whether she likes it or not, the woman who has felt desire will belong to that unknown man of yesterday, whom she will not possess and whom she will forget tomorrow.
We cannot be more masters of carnal desire than of the pangs of our stomach. Both are inherent to our physical being; they are the result of two natural needs equally legitimate one as the other. Hunger cannot be mastered: it must be satisfied.
And I still insist on the difference between love and desire because we are always inclined to confuse them, to assimilate one to the other, and this confusion often brings about unfortunate and sad results.
“The spirit is willing, the flesh is weak!” — Scripture tells us. Certainly, yes, the flesh is weak. What does it take for desire to become an act? And is that act always accomplished voluntarily and consciously? There are hours in which the notion of real things disappears in us, where nothing else exists in us but the sensation of the moment.
Those who have lived amid Nature know this perfectly when in spring the sap climbs the branches, when life effluvia burst up from the ground, the sun, the woods and the plants; desire also runs under the skin and makes chests tremble. And in the heavy summer evenings, warm and scented, who will deny that the need for voluptuousness is more intense? Go, the passionate who, on such evenings, have been alone, know well what they have suffered from their solitude on those evenings.
Now, if there are days and hours when sensuality is in some way exacerbated, nothing surprising that “the flesh is weak”. It is enough for chance the accomplice to put two individuals of opposite sexes in front of each other.
But that is not love; it is simply desire. Desire which sometimes takes on all the appearance of love; but which, once sated, leaves the two lovers perfectly strangers to one another, just as the hungry leaves the table without regret when his hunger is satisfied. Let no one conclude from that last phrase that I condemn desire. Why should I condemn it, since I have just shown that it is naturally linked to our sexual life? What I only wanted was clearly to establish the difference between desire and love.
Thus, marriage, love, desire are three distinct things:
— Marriage is the chain that binds man and woman prisoners to one another.
— Love is the integral communion of the two.
— Desire is the whim of two sensualities.
I leave marriage, of which I am the adversary, to return to the question of free love.
I said that love must be absolutely free, both for woman and for man; and I add again: love cannot truly exist except on the condition of being free. Without absolute freedom, love becomes prostitution, whatever name one gives it.
The act of selling one’s body for a higher or lower price, to a large clientele, is not only prostitution. Prostitution is not only the prerogative of the woman, the man also prostitutes himself. He prostitutes himself when, for some interest, he gives caresses without feeling desire.
Not only is legal marriage prostitution when it is the speculation of one spouse on the other, but it is always prostitution, since the virgin does not know what she does in marrying. As for conjugal duty, it is no more nor less still prostitution.
Prostitution, the submission to the husband; prostitution, resignation and passivity.
Prostitution also, free union when it passes from love to habit.
Prostitution, finally, all that brings sexes together outside desire and love.
⁂
One of the reasons why love must be absolutely free is precisely this similarity of love and desire I spoke of earlier, by asking that one must not confuse the two terms.
Rationally, can two beings contract any engagement when it is impossible for them to know whether they will be able to hold it? Does one have the right to bind two elements when one ignores what affinity exists between them? In legal marriage there is always a dupe: the woman, and sometimes a disappointed one: the husband, who finds in the wife not the one he thought he had guessed. Yet there they are bound to each other.
And even marriage may have been founded on mutual love, and nevertheless become after very little time a burden for both spouses. That is because that love was only a desire that possession extinguished; and if the two spouses had given themselves freely, before legalization, experience having proved they were not made for common life, it is very likely that this legalization would not have taken place. This is proof in favour of the necessity of free love.
From desire love can be born, but one can never affirm it. When love comes to the senses after having passed through the heart and mind, it has much more chance of lasting; but when it has for base only sexual desire, it runs great risk of extinguishing quickly if during its existence it could not gain the mind and heart.
Finally — since I make an analytical study, I must go to the bottom of the truth — I say that sexual desire alone can unite two beings for a very long time without ever giving rise to complete love.
A man and a woman may have intimate relations, without ever being joined by anything but that sexual desire. Their feelings and thoughts may be in perfect disagreement, while their bodies vibrate in unison.
And this — I insist that I observe — cannot in any way be compared to prostitution, since the feeling which draws these two individuals — though exclusively sensual — is sincere on both sides. There cannot be prostitution except where there is sale, constraint, ignorance or passivity. That is not the case, since the two lovers are drawn to each other by the same sensation, and they feel pleasure and satisfaction in the freely accepted union on both sides.
But the truth of what I have just exposed leads to the condemnation of monogamy. Indeed, from the diversity of feelings springs the diversity of desires, and if one admits that diversity as an essentially natural law one can no longer uphold the monogamic law. Monogamy is also a kind of prostitution: prostitution of the man to the woman and of the woman to the man.
It can therefore only exist on this question of sexual life of individuals a single law and a single morality for both sexes: absolute freedom of love.
⁂
The union of the bodies not being able to be governed by a single rule, identical for all individuals, not being subject therefore to any immutable determining law, must not, accordingly, create duties nor constitute rights, if one wants to preserve the entire freedom of love.
Is it not of the last illogic the word duty linked to the word love? Does one already not feel all the irony in this phrase from the books of childish morality: “The first duty of a child is to love his parents.”
Does one not also say in the common morality: “Mother must love her children; Woman must love her husband.”
Derision those words. Love, at whatever order it belongs, can it ever be a duty? Is it not natural that the child loves the mother who raised him; that the mother loves the child who cost her suffering and pain, and who is a dear memory of the tender caresses received? Is it not natural still that the woman loves the companion chosen, the friend who made her life as woman? If a child does not love his mother, if a mother does not love her children, if a woman does not love her companion, what can you do? Nothing. All the sentences of the Codes, all the moral and religious declamations will not make love appear if it was not born naturally.
Just as it cannot create duties, love cannot give rise to rights. The right of the husband over the wife, the right of the wife over the husband, that is oppression; and oppression kills love. The slave cannot love his master; he can only fear him and seek to please him.
The fact that a woman has loved a man and given herself to him, must not grant any privilege to that man over that woman; no more than the fact of having given herself must be for that woman a reason for authority over her companion. Free before having known each other, having loved each other freely, man and woman must find themselves free again after the union, when desire no longer draws them together, and love no longer unites them.
Summarising therefore this whole study, I conclude thus:
— Love must be entirely free; no law, no morality must govern or subject it in any sense whatsoever;
— No difference must be made between the sexes in what concerns love.
— Finally, sexual relations must not create between individuals neither obligations, nor duties, nor rights.
III
I do not ignore that at first reading my theory on love will seem to many people entirely immoral. Some of them will see in it the consecration of debauchery, the legitimacy of libertinage, the excuse of all excesses.
But if one will reason a little, and deepen the question, one will agree with me to declare that free love, far from being a source of immorality, will become the natural regulator of morality.
First of all, what is immorality? To define it one must rid oneself once again of atavism, which makes us consider as a natural law what is only social conventions.
For me, immorality is everything that is contrary to nature; it is everything that constrains the individual to purely conventional rules; it is everything that hinders the development of the human being; in the name of considerations of no value for whoever wants to deepen them.
Immorality is prostitution — legal or not — it is the forced celibacy of the woman; it is the sale of the female body; it is the submission of the wife; it is the lie of the husband toward her whom he no longer loves. But free love cannot be immorality, since it is a natural law; sexual desire cannot be immorality since it is a natural need of our physical life.
If sexual need is immorality, then there is no longer any immorality except to declare food, sleep, in short all the physiological phenomena which govern the human body.
If we look at our current morals, what source of immorality do we not discover in them? Marriage without affection where the man buys a dowry and the woman a situation; adultery of wife and husband: rapes of all kinds, carnal sales, lies of the flesh and the mind, various contracts delivering the ignorant to the old libertine, and the poor to the exploiter who speculates on her hunger.
Let free love become the rule, it could certainly be that the situation would not change in substance. At least it would have the merit of frankness in form.
But I am convinced, myself, that free love will be the moral emancipation of individuals, because it will liberate the sexes from physical constraints and servitudes.
Why believe that the free individual would be immoral? There is no immorality among free animals. These know none of the physical disorders which are the privilege of man, precisely because they do not subject themselves to any other law than the natural law. What creates immorality is the forced lie of man to others and to himself; and free love, by freeing man from lying, will put an end precisely to disorders, to derangements, to debauchery.
When man will be completely free, when he will be regenerated by a better education, he will find within himself the natural equilibrium of his physical and moral faculties, and become a normal and healthy being.
Moreover, we have within us an instinct-feeling which watches over us: the feeling of preservation. When we are no longer hungry, we no longer eat, because we know what inconveniences may result; when the walk has wearied us, we have the good sense to rest; when fatigue burns our eyelids, we know well that we must sleep. Likewise we will find the natural regulator of our sexual life in sexual expenditure itself.
The animal obeys this sense of preservation; why would the free human be inferior? I would not insult the human species by entertaining that last hypothesis.
No, the full development of the free being cannot be immorality. What is truly immoral is to falsify consciences by falsifying the fundamental truths of nature; it is to prevent the individual from living healthily and strongly in the name of dogmas, laws, conventions contrary to harmony and the beauty of life.
Source: MujeresLibres