andpoint of a Behaviourist.
Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1919.

CHAPTER II

HOW OUR INSTITUTIONS FIT INDIVIDUAL SEX PSYCHOLOGY

Social institutions controlling sex activities based on the assumption
that _all_ women are adapted to as well as specialized for reproduction;
Neurotic tendencies which unfit women for marriage--the desire for
domination; Sexual anaesthesia another neurotic trait which interferes
with marital harmony; The conditioning of the sexual impulse to the
parent ideal and the erotic fetish as factors which determine mating;
Homosexual tendencies and their part in the sex problem; The conflict
between the desire for marriage and egoistic ambitions; The social
regulations from the viewpoint of individual psychology.

The institutionalized forms of social control into which the old sex
taboos have developed impose upon all members of the group a uniform
type of sexual relationship. These socially enforced standards which
govern the sex life are based upon the assumption that men and women
conform closely to the masculine and feminine ideals of tradition. The
emphasis is much more strongly placed on feminine conformity, however;
a great many sexual activities are tolerated in the male that would be
unsparingly condemned in the female. Thus the sex problem becomes in
large measure a woman's problem, not only because of her peculiar
biological specialization for reproduction, which involves an enormous
responsibility but also because her life has for so many generations
been hedged in by rigid institutionalized taboos and prohibitions.

The traditional conception of marriage and the family relation implies
that all women are adapted to as well as specialized for motherhood. In
reality, if the biological evidence of intersexuality be as conclusive
as now appears, there are many women who by their very nature are much
better adapted to the activities customarily considered as pre-eminently
masculine, although they are still specialized for childbearing. There
is no statistical evidence of any high correlation between the sexual
and maternal impulses. Indeed, a great many traits of human behaviour
seem to justify the inference that these two tendencies may often be
entirely dissociated in the individual life. Dr Blair Bell (as noted in
Part I, Chapter III) believes that it is possible to differentiate women
possessing a maternal impulse from those lacking such tendencies by the
very anatomical struc