Let us now turn to the consideration of love. Is love, like fear, an emotion with a purpose? There are certainly many general prejudices against this idea. We have been taught from early childhood that love is what happens to an individual when he meets the “right” object of his devotion. The cloak of mystery with which love has become invested has been maintained by most of our literature, our movies, and the other arts. We speak of “falling in love” and “falling out of love” in almost the same sense of unexpected, unexplainable coincidence as we would speak of falling over an unseen object. Indeed, it often appears to us as just such an accident. We speak glibly of love as being eternal, unrequited, unfortunate, adolescent, all encompassing, or blind, as though there were different types of love instead of merely different types of lovers. Can it be that love is the result of some mysterious influence that acts upon two people whom good fortune has thrown together? Are we in fact merely the passive agents of love? Let us confine our inquiry temporarily to the sexual drive, which has been considered the least “manageable” element in the emotion-complex we call love. If we can show that even fundamental organic sexuality is under our control, that we use it to suit our purpose, perhaps we can accept more easily the idea of the purposive nature of love itself.
The Function of Sexuality
It has long been our unfortunate practice to explain human sexuality by analogy with animal sexuality. Even our linguistic habits bear this out when we consider the use of the terms wolf, (gay) dog, lion (with women), bull, the Old English cuckold (cf. cuckoo), the Spanish cabron, and bitch in many languages. We seem ever ready to account for (and to blame and excuse) our sexual behavior in terms of a primitive, instinctual, animal-like drive, over which we exert a degree of “control,” depending upon the extent to which we are “civilized.” This is a very comfortable type of rationalization, if only we can forget certain biological facts:
- Animal sexuality is limited in specie and sex. This is not true in human sexuality. One has merely to cite the examples of sodomy and homosexuality to prove this point.
- Animal sexuality is limited by time through the estrus cycle in the female. That is, the female is ready for love only when in heat. And the male is aroused exclusively by the covetous female. The adult human, however, is always biologically ready for sexual activity.
- Animal sexuality is limited by the necessary presence and function of the sex glands. Castration produces a neuter or sexless animal. The human being may undergo removal of ovaries or testes after puberty with little change in sexuality. He is capable of sexual excitement before his sex glands mature in puberty, and after they cease to function at the climacteric. Fourth: Animal-sexuality is characterized not only by limitation but also by compulsion. Once the male is aroused, he must perform and can be stopped only by physical force.
One may, of course, dispute these facts with evidence from the observations of the sexual behavior of certain animals. But it should be noted that those animals which, in regard to sex, behave more like human beings, are affected by conditions similar to those which are characteristic for humans, namely, by close social relationships. Domestic animals and animals living in close groups deviate in many regards from other species. The greatest deviations from sexual limitations and compulsions are found in organisms living in closest group formations, namely, bees and ants. These have reached a point of almost complete mastery of sex. They, by their own efforts, can determine which offspring will be male and which female and, as a lone exception in the animal kingdom, they can even produce sexless beings (worker bees), merely by dietary methods. The primates, apes and monkeys, behave sexually much like human beings. Their sexuality, like that of human beings, is not limited to specific periods. Their freedom from cyclicity is regarded as the result of a tendency to gain dominance by sexual aggression - a motivation that is independent of any hormonally determined sexual behavior. Since the dominance drive is active at all times, sexual behavior is observed in these animals at any time of the sexual cycle. According to the same source, homosexual behavior in monkeys is not a sexual abnormality or perversion. In most cases it has nothing to do with sex drive. It is an expression of dominance and submission, and sexual gender makes no difference in dominance behavior. It is apparent that we humans also are neither limited nor compelled in the expression of sexuality by the biologic needs of our bodies. As we learned to control nature around us, so we became independent of natural urges within ourselves. Sexually we are polymorphous-capable of heterosexual, homosexual, and auto-sexual behavior at almost any age and no matter what the state of our sex glands. And we can refrain from any sex activity if we so choose. Many theories have been advanced to explain how the fundamental biologic sexual drive is modified in human beings. We can find one idea held in common by the proponents of most of these theories. They feel that somewhere along the course of development of the individual, he is subjected to some experience which shapes the future expression of his sexuality. The experience may be thought of as a psychic trauma which “fixates” his “libido,” or as a stimulus which results in the “conditioning” of the “native sex drive.” In either case, the individual is thought of as being acted upon by his environment. This is a very comforting idea. If one accepts it, he is given theoretical justification for any type of indulgence the only prerequisite being that he shall have suffered from some sexually “traumatic” experience in his past. (And who hasn’t!) The only difficulty is, that of the many individuals exposed to the same sexual experience in childhood and adolescence, only a few will deviate into the sexual perversions, and, of these, no two will show identical patterns of sexual behavior.