The Law is for All

56 The Law is for All perversions perish, just as a coiled spring straightens itself when the external compulsion is removed. They revert to their natural sex-characters, which only in rare cases are other than simple, pure, and refined. More, sex itself ceases to play Principal Boy in the Pantomime of Life. Other interests resume their proper proportions. We may now inquire why the Book is at pains to admit as to love “when” and “where” we will. Few people, surely, have been seriously worried by restrictions of time and place. One can only think of lovers who live with fearsome families or in inhospitable lodgings, on a rainy night, buffeted from one police-bullied hotel to another. Perhaps this permission is intended to indicate the propriety of performing the sexual act without shame or fear, not waiting for darkness or seeking secrecy, but by daylight in public places, as serenely as if it were a natural incident in a morning stroll. Custom would soon surfeit curiosity, and copulation attract less attention than a new fashion in frocks. For the existing inter­ est in sexual matters is chiefly because, common as the act is, it is closely concealed. Nobody is excited by seeing others eat. A “naughty” book is as dull as a volume of sermons; only genius can vitalize either. Beyond this, once love is taken for granted, the morbid fasci­ nation of its mystery will vanish. The pander, the prostitute, the parasite will find their occupa­ tion gone. Disease will go straight to the doctor instead of to the quack, as it does; the altars of Mrs. Grundy run red with the blood of her faithful! The ignorance or carelessness of a raw youth will no longer hound him to hell. A blighted career or a ruined constitution will no more be the penalty of a moment’s exuberance. Above all, the world will begin to appreciate the true nature of the sexual process, its physical insignificance as one among many parts of the body, its transcendent importance as the vehicle of the True Will and the first of the sheaths of the Self.