The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
principle. Past indulgence, she suggested, had affected men’s
brains so that they were now inclined to sexual indulgence to a
greater extent than ever before:
The grooves in the brains of men have been, through heredity,
carved out deeper in the sexual desire nature, until an
abnormal tendency to indulgence in sex-relations has been
engendered quite contrary to and subversive of natural law.
Men have made their laws fit in and give license to their
stimulated predilections. 45
Besant tried to account for the phenomenon in a similar way.
Speaking of the ‘excessive’ development of the sexual instinct
in man, she wrote:
It has reached its present abnormal development by selfindulgence
in the past, all sexual thoughts, desires and
imaginations having created their own thought forms, into
which have been wrought the brain and body molecules,
which now give rise to passion on the material plane. 46
This refutation of the naturalness of men’s sexual abuse of women
was potentially revolutionary in its implications for the relations
between men and women. The strength with which feminists
were still promoting self-control for men suggests that little
headway had been made despite the influence of the social purity
movement, in fighting the mythology of men’s lack of control.
The burgeoning of the sex reform tendency which promoted the
same old idea had made the struggle doubly difficult. There
were other aspects of male sexuality besides uncontrollability
which came in for criticism from feminists. One was the brutish
insensitivity of men both in sex and in their relations with women
in general. Lady Sybil Smith wrote that now that women had
more power of selection as a result of machinery bringing about
an economic change in the position of women, they would be
able to seek the qualitites they really desired in men, not strength
alone but ‘sympathy, gentleness and self-control’. 47 In future
generations of men, according to her analysis, these qualities
would become more and more developed. Christabel Pankhurst
criticised the tendency of men to seperate sex from loving
emotion. She stated that ‘sexual intercourse where there exists
no bond of love and spiritual sympathy is beneath human
dignity’. 48
The correspondence columns of the Freewoman magazine
in 1911 and 1912 carried a debate on sexuality between the
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