“Ponder the matter and you’ll discover that there has never been any other cause for all our difficulties. One power, quietly gathering strength, has always ended up trying to overwhelm the other, and has always succeeded. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, my friends: abolish marriages. Away with those abhorrent chains; enough of these bitter regrets; no more of these hardships, these crimes, the consequences of these monstrous abuses, you’ll be rid of them all the day you’re done with these laws: for laws alone create the crime; and the crime is gone as soon as the law ceases to exist. No more enclaves within the State, no more conspiracies, no more shocking inequalities of wealth; but children … population? … We’ll deal with those articles next.
“We begin by establishing a fact which we are prone to consider incontrovertible: that, during the carnal act, extremely little thought is devoted to the creature which may be its result; he who were stupid enough to preoccupy himself with the question would most assuredly cut his pleasure in half. Manifestly, he is a blithering ass who with this idea in his head goes to see a woman, and no less an ass he who when seeing a woman gets this idea. It is erroneous that propagation is supposed to be one of Nature’s laws, if we imagine such nonsense our pride alone is to blame. Nature permits propagation, but one must take care not to mistake her tolerance for an enjoinder. Nature stands in not the slightest need of propagation; and the total disappearance of mankind—this being the worst consequence of a refusal to propagate—would grieve her very little, she would no more pause in her career than if the whole species of rabbits or chickens were suddenly to be wiped off the face of the earth. Thus, we no more serve Nature in reproducing ourselves than we offend her in not doing so. Be amply persuaded of it, this wonderful propagation, inflated into a virtue by our preposterously overdrawn self-esteem, if viewed from the standpoint of Nature’s functionings, becomes entirely superfluous, and a subject over which we ought to trouble ourselves as little as possible. Brought together by the instincts of pleasure, two beings of unlike sex ought to put their best efforts into enjoying themselves as thoroughly as ever they can; their task is to employ all their faculties and attentions to improving and increasing their pleasure; and the eventual outcome of this pleasure-taking? devil take the bloody consequences, that’s the proper attitude, for Nature herself couldn’t care less about them.7
“With regard to the father, he is in no wise concerned with whatever issue may occur, if issue there should be. And, with the assumption that women are held in common, which is what they should be and had better be soon, what concern could he conceivably have? He spits a little sperm into a receptacle everyone else relieves himself into, a womb where what can germinate does germinate; how is this gesture to turn into the grave obligation to look after a fertilized egg? No, he has no more duties to observe toward a foetus than he would toward something deposited by an insect and which some shit he dropped at the foot bf a tree caused to hatch several days later; in both cases I have cited, the problem is simply one of some matter of which a man needs to get rid and which subsequently becomes whatever it happens to become. The embryo is to be considered the woman’s exclusive property; as the sole owner of this fruit rather jestingly called precious, she can dispose of it as she likes. She can destroy it in the depths of her womb if it proves a nuisance to her. Or after it ripens and is born, if she is for any reason displeased with it or irked at having produced it, she can destroy it then; whatever the circumstances, infanticide is her sacred right. Her spawn is hers, entirely hers, and no one else can claim this bit of property belonging to no one else, utterly useless to Nature, and hence the mother may feed it or she may strangle it, depending upon her preference. Ah, you’ve no need to fear a dearth of children; there will be only too many women who’ll be eager to bring up what they whelp; and if it’s manpower for defending the country or tilling the soil you’re anxious about, you will always have more of it than you’ll know what to do with, To these ends, create public schools where, as soon as they are weaned, the young may be reared; installed therein as ward of the State, the child can forget even his mother’s name. After he has grown up, let him in his turn couple indiscriminately, democratically, with his mates and brethren, doing as his parents did before him.
“Given these principles, you now see what adultery amounts to, and whether it is possible or true that a woman can do wrong in surrendering herself to whoever catches her fancy. Determine for yourselves whether everything would not continue very nicely even with the overthrow of every last one of our laws. But these laws—are they so very general? Do all races and peoples have the same respect for these miserable ties? It might serve to make a rapid historico-geographical survey if we feel that our attitude would benefit from the support of a few precedents.
“So then, we notice that in Lapland, in Tartary, in America, they consider it an honor to prostitute their wives to wayfaring strangers.
“The Illyrians hold special conclaves for the purposes of debauchery; at them, they force their wives to give themselves to all comers; the thing is performed within public view.
“Adultery was publicly authorized among the Greeks. The Romans lent one another their spouses. Cato made his available to Hortensius, for the latter had no fertile wife of his own.
“In Tahiti, Cook discovered a society in which all the women give themselves indifferently to all the assembled men. But if a later consequence of this rite is pregnancy, the woman smothers the child the instant it is born: splendid evidence, this, that there do after all exist people of sufficient intelligence to set their pleasures on a higher plane than the futile laws enjoining us to increase numerically! Differing only in a few particulars, a similar society thrives at Constantinople.8
“The blacks of what we call the Spice Coast and of Riogabar prostitute their wives to their own children.
“Singha, Queen of Angola, published a law which established the vulgivaguibilité of women: one which, that is to say, made their cunts as free universally to be fucked as air is to be breathed. A chapter of this same edict made it incumbent upon women to take the measures necessary to thwart pregnancy; evidence having been adduced thereof, disobedience was punished capitally: the culprit was ground in a mortar. A severe law, perhaps, but useful, being exceedingly favorable to the conservation of the integrity of the community whereof the size is to be limited if the somber consequences of excessive numbers are to be avoided.
“But there are milder means for keeping population trimmed to neat and sensible dimensions: they would be by encouraging and recompensing sapphism, sodomy, and infanticide, as in Sparta theft was honored. Thus might the scales be maintained in balance, without there being the need to obliterate women’s fruit even while it is in the womb, as is common practice in Angola and Formosa.
“For example, in France, where the population is far too large, while establishing the vulgivaguibilité I am partisan to, one would also have to set a maximum figure to child-production, to drown the surplus, and, as I have just said, to venerate the. presently unlawful commerce between persons of the same sex. The government, under these ideal conditions invested with entire authority over these children and over the regulation of their number, would be able automatically to calculate the strength of its defensive soldiery by the number of warriors it had raised, and no longer would the State have cities full of thirty thousand starving wretches to feed in time of famine. It is going a bit too far when one respects a little fertilized matter to the point of imagining that one cannot, when need be, destroy it before birth or even a good while after that.
“There is, in China, a society similar to those of Tahiti and Byzantium. I allude to the society called that of the Complacent Husbands. They will marry girls only upon condition those girls have prostituted themselves to others; their homes are asylums of multiform luxury. They drown the offspring begot of this trade.
“In Japan there exist women who, though married, with their husbands’ approval frequent the vicinity of
temples and station themselves by the highways; they expose their breasts, as Italian harlots do, and are constantly prepared to satisfy whatever needs of whatever clients chance brings their way.
“At Cambay there is to be seen a pagoda, destination of pilgrims, and thither every woman betakes herself with utmost piety: there, they prostitute themselves, and no husband carps at their behavior. They who finally accumulate a certain capital from their work usually purchase young slaves whom they ready for like employment and then take along to the pagoda, and thus are fortunes amassed.9
“In Pegu, the husband is supremely contemptuous of a virgin wife’s favors; he enlists the aid of a friend, who clears the obstructions away; often, he will request help from a well-disposed and total stranger. But the same traditions do not apply to the initiation of a young boy. For the inhabitants of Pegu, this pleasure is prized above all others.
“The female Indians of Darien prostitute themselves to anyone at all. If they are married, the husband accepts the charge of the child; if they are unwed, pregnancy would dishonor them, so they have themselves aborted or in their coupling observe those precautions which are guarantee against this inconvenience.
“In faraway Cumana, newly wedded girls lose their maidenheads to priests; the husband will have nought to do with them until this ceremony has been performed. That inestimable treasure, virginity, thus owes its value simply to national prejudices, as do so many other things which we are reluctant to view for what they are in reality.
“For how long did not the feudal lords of several European provinces, in Scotland above all, exploit the same right? Prejudices, superstitions, fads … this modesty … this virtue … this adultery.
“No, not by any means do all peoples accord in cherishing maidenheads. The more gallant adventures a girl in North America has had, the more suitors court her. They spurn a virgin, her virginity is a grave handicap to a girl: it demonstrates undesirability.
“In the Balearic Islands, the husband is the last to enjoy his wife: every acquaintance, every chum, all the relatives precede him in this ceremony; a very strange and suspect person he would be thought, who resisted this prerogative. The same custom used to be observed in Iceland and by the Nazamaeans, an Egyptian tribe: after the wedding feast, the naked spouse went and lay one after the other with the wedding guests, and from each received a present.
“We know that among the Massagetes every woman was held in common: when a man encountered one who pleased him, he bade her mount his chariot; in the matter she had no say at all, he hung his weapons on the shaft and that was enough to keep others away.
“It was not by devising marriage laws but the reverse, by establishing the perfect community of women, that the Norse were powerful enough to humble Europe three or four times over, and to flood it with their emigrations.
“Marriage, it thus appears, is noxious to population, and the globe is covered with peoples who despise the institution. Hence, in the eyes of Nature, it is contrary to individual happiness and generally to all things and practices which are capable of promoting and assuring man’s earthly felicity. Well, if it is adultery that smashes marriages, adultery that shatters laws, adultery that so emphatically concords with Nature’s laws, adultery might very easily pass for a virtue instead of a crime.
“Oh, tender creatures, divine artifacts created for the pleasures of men, cease to believe that you were made for the enjoyment of only one man; utterly unafraid, beneath your proud heel grind to dust these absurd ties which, chaining you in the arms of a husband, are bar to the happiness you await from the lover you cherish. Consider rather that it is only by resisting his advances that you outrage Nature. Having made you the more sensitive, the more fiery of the two sexes, in your heart Nature ingrained the desire to indulge unrestrainedly all your passions. Did she invite you to be the captive of a single man when she gave you force enough to drain the balls of four or five in a row? Scorn the vain canons which victimize you; they’re the contrivances of your enemies, for ’tis plain, is it not, that they weren’t invented by you? Since it is sure that you’d have been ill-disposed to approve them had your opinion been consulted, what right have these swine to exact obedience thereto? Remember that after a certain age you’ll no longer please, and that in your later years you’ll shed many a bitter tear if you’ve let youth go by without enjoying it; and what shall you obtain in return for this discretion, this shyness, this self-denial, what will be your reward when the loss of your charms robs you of the power to claim any consideration at all? Your husband’s esteem?—fie! what an inadequate consolation! what miserly recompense for such enormous sacrifices! Furthermore, what assurance have you of their equity? what’s to prove to you that your constancy is as efficacious and as valuable as you suppose? Must your husband necessarily imitate your fidelity? Ah, there you see it for what it is: gratuitous; you feed yourself on pride. Oh, you women who are made to be loved, the scantiest pleasure provided by a lover outweighs all the relief you’ll derive from self-abuse: sheer illusions, those solitary pleasure-takings, no one believes in them, no one will recognize your valor, you’ll earn no one’s thanks, no one’s gratitude; and in every case destined to be a victim, you’ll perish that of prejudice instead of a victim of love. Love? Serve that master, young beauties, whilst you are young serve it fearlessly, this bountiful, this endearing god who created you to worship him; ’tis upon his altars, ’tis in the arms of his faithful you’ll earn restitution for the minor annoyances which distinguish the debut of your career. Think only of taking the first step, thereafter the rest is easy, accomplish the gesture and the scales will fall from your eyes: you’ll see that ’tis not modesty puts the bright flush into your youthful fair cheeks, but rather indignation at having for one instant allowed yourselves to be bound by the contemptible restrictions atrocious parents or jealous husbands dared impose upon you for even the space of a single afternoon.
“In the present lamentable state of affairs—and this composes the second part of my exposition—this appalling state of discomfort and pressure and stress, for the time being we can do no better than provide some advice to women on how to cope with the situation and how best to behave in its light, and then to consider, through a probing examination, whether indeed any inconvenience results from this alien offspring the husband finds himself constrained to adopt.