Page 38 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Culture
opposed the open flouting of conventional moral- ity and even challenged—not so much on Christian grounds but on the basis of good taste—the mini-sex- ual revolution led by the psychologists, flappers, and sex-educationists of his day. He complained in the first series of Prejudices (1919) that the literature on “sex hy- giene,” once “timorous,” was now spouting titles such as “What Every Child of Ten Should Know.” Sex manuals assumed one significant pedagogical error:
they are founded upon an attempt to explain a romantic mystery in terms of an exact science. Nothing could be more absurd: as well attempt to interpret Beethoven in terms of mathemati- cal physics—as many a fatuous contrapuntist, indeed, has tried to do. Thy mystery of sex pres- ents itself to the young, not as a scientific prob- lem to be solved, but as a romantic emotion to
be accounted for. The only result of the current endeavor to explain its phenomena by seeking parallels in botany is to make botany obscene.
The loss of mystery also resulted in marriages where the bride “knows as much as the midwife of 1885,” an awareness that was highly embarrassing to the sector of romantic men to which Mencken confessed to belong. His objection to the loss of romance in the pursuit of sexual fulfillment was not moral but aesthetic:
In the relations between the sexes all beauty is founded upon romance, all romance is founded upon mystery, and all mystery is founded upon ignorance, or, failing that, upon the deliber- ate denial of the known truth. To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anaesthesia. ... But how can this condition of mind survive
38 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
Miguel Davilla