Marriage, Women and Divorce by George Jean Nathan - Second Half

Before the introduction of the telephone into general family use, the young girl of the house, meeting her young man in the paternal parlor, was naturally subject to the nervousness, shyness, bashfulness, etc. common on such occasions to nine well-bred young women out of every ten. After weeks of such conferences the friendship of the twain would progress so far as the hand-holding stage; after months, so far as the first kiss; after a year or two, probably so far as the proposal of marriage. The great barriers to intimacy that modesty, awkwardness and personal idiosyncrasy and reserve always throw up operated here; and our mothers thus took so long to bring our fathers around with the ring that we children, as yet unborn and so comprehending the drollery of love, almost gave up in despair our chances of ever seeing the Ziegfeld “Follies” and Ernest Poole initiated into an American Institute of Arts and Letters.
These barriers the telephone gradually did away with, broke down. It is not so easy—nor so safe—to look a man in the eye and tell him to go to hell as it is to drop a nickel in a slot at 206th Street, call up Rector ten miles away, and then do it. Similarly, it is not so easy for a flapper to sit next to a man on a sofa and, without blushing, tell him to press his ruby lips to hers. The telephone gives the flapper courage—and more. It conceals blushes; it gives the strength that is always afforded by remoteness; it removes, in a sense, the personal equation. It permits a girl to lie in her bed and talk with a man lying in his bed; it permits her, half-clothed, to talk with him a moment after its ring has made him hop nude out of his bathtub. Its delicate suggestiveness is not lost in these instances. Its whisper is the whisper of the clandestine note of the 1870’s hidden in the hole of the old oak; its voice is the voice of the chaperon asleep. The most modest girl in America, the girl who blushes even at a man’s allusions to his chilblains, once she gets her nose in a telephone mouthpiece acquires a sudden and surprising self-assurance and aptitude at wheeze. Every time a young girl calls up a man for the first time, the devil instructs Tyson to lay aside for him, a year hence, a seat in the first row.

How little it takes to make the beautiful ridiculous: two flies engaged in amour on the nose of the finest Rembrandt . . . Washington’s farewell to his men read aloud by a veteran of the Home Guard of 1917—18 . . . a lovely woman engaging an asparagus.

[From The Theatre, the Drama, the Girls, 1921, pp. 218—47.]

Love in Youth—and Later

IT is possible that a man may love only one woman in his life. So, for that matter, is it equally possible that a man may get through life with only one pair of trousers. The possibility is hardly open to question, but the probability one fears, particularly in the case of an artist like myself, is remote. It is quite possible that a man may remain physically loyal to one woman throughout his life, but it is extremely improbable that he can remain always mentally and emotionally loyal to her. A man’s taste in women changes with the passing of time as inevitably as does his taste in literature and neckties. The man who whispers into the ear of a sweet one that she is the only woman he will ever have a penchant for is, accordingly, one of three sorts: a deliberate fraud and liar; an unconscious fraud and liar; or, finally, a man over sixty who, at once deliberately and unconsciously, is telling the melancholy truth.
There are perhaps young men in the twenties who fall in love, as the phrase is, marry the refreshment of their choice, and live with her in peace and comfort until the embalmer enters upon the scene. And so, too, are there perhaps older men who negotiate the same feat. But the mere fact that they spend their lives with one woman and are biologically faithful to her and are relatively content with their lot does not mean—as anyone knows whose eye is gifted in the penetration of externals—that their taste does not occasionally and refractorily wander to some other woman. The wandering of fancy—I will have to admit this much—may be perfectly innocent and eminently moral, but it is there in the backs of their heads none the less and, being there, it offers proof of the theory that though a man may conceivably be a saint in the matter of monogamous uprightness, his taste often resides in a harem.
A man’s taste in the fair sex nine times out of ten changes every so often with what is sometimes, even to him, an alarming suddenness. The girl a man of twenty-one admires usually seems to him, in the retrospect of forty, to have been a gimcrack of pretty low grade. If he has married her at twenty-one, true enough, he often doesn’t so regard her as the years chase each other down the corridor of the late thirties and middle forties, but that proves nothing. It simply proves that marriage has warped his honest critical talents, has caused him to suspend judgment for the sake of his own vanity and self-esteem, and has made him bury his head in the sand in order to deceive himself that no brilliant caravan ever crosses the desert. But I doubt that one can find a single unmarried man—or, for that matter, married man, provided he has married the girl in question and will tell the truth—who would confess that the girl he fancied in his younger years is exactly the sort of pea-chick he would fancy today, that she is his ideal in every respect, and that it is inconceivable that he could have eyes, ears and aesthetic taste for any other.
A man is not a single, definite, fixed creature all his life: he is a dozen different creatures. He is no more the same man at forty that he was at twenty or thirty than he is the same at sixty he was at forty or fifty. I will admit exceptions, of course; there are a few men who punch the emotional time-clock relatively early in life and stick obediently to the same job until they are carted away to the glueworks. But the average man—and the artist much more so—changes periodically as certainly as the weather changes, even in California. He may always vote the straight Republican ticket; he may always eat an apple before he goes to bed; he may always smoke just so many cigars a day and no more; but his views of women alter every so often. The man who marries in his forties, let us say, thus marries that woman in whom he finds less to laugh at derisorily than in any of the women he has previously known. This diminution of objections to her is what captivates and hamstrings him, and is what our friends, the poets, call love. It is actually less love, in the commonly accepted sense of the word, than it is the man’s respect for his improved intelligence in taste. The lad of twenty who jumps to the nearest minister and gets himself married offers his wife the dubious tribute of an amateur taste. He is like a small boy who has learned how to turn a somersault and who confidently offers himself as a professional partner to a star circus acrobat. But the man of maturer years who takes unto his bosom a wife offers her the high compliment of a post-graduate taste and emotion.
Although a suspicion of superficiality, smartiness and lack of sound sense always hovers over epigrammatic expression—for what good reason I have never been able to make out—it seems to me (I recall that I once encountered the idea in some book or other) that the woman an adult man marries is generally a compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart. That is to say that while the man would not have married his first sweetheart on a wager and while he knows full well that she had as many faults as a second-hand toothbrush, he yet hocus-pocuses her into a romantic legend to fill the actual lack of romance in his life and embodies that legend, in so far as he is able to, in the person of the woman he marries in later years. There is no contradiction here. For though a man’s taste in women changes, he often likes to flatter his romantic donkeyishness that it doesn’t change—that, in other words, his ideal in women is still the young, wide-eyed girl in gingham who used to throw her broad straw bonnet with the sunflower on it over her shoulder and swing on the garden gate.
For every man who succumbs to the charms of a girl early in life and devotes the rest of his life to admiring her charms and those of no other girl, there are a thousand whose eyes rove hither and thither during their days on earth. In this polygamy of taste lies, indeed, man’s, and particularly the artist’s, tribute to the fair sex.

[From Monks Are Monks, 1929, pp. 20—4.]

Mens Nana in Corpore Sano

THAT, taking one with another, women’s minds are less clean than men’s is a fact which, while sufficiently recognized by men in the mass, has yet strangely, so far as I know, not found its commentator and analyst on paper. We have had a few general epigrams on the subject, and we have thought, now and again, that we were about to read some sharp and penetrating affidavit on the matter, but in both cases delicate evasion and polite half-statement have been the only reward of our curiosity. In the interests of lovely truth, therefore, let us make bold to pursue the inquiry a bit further.
Any man who moves about in feminine society and who is not deaf in both ears can testify to the fact that women’s conversation, whatever the specific nature of its initial impulse, sooner or later is inevitably bound to get around to sex. The manoeuvre may be contrived indirectly and with a certain spurious show of neo-Victorian modesty—in some instances; but once it gains a measure of confidence it stalks into the topic like a bouncer into a barroom. Whereas men, when they enter into the subject, customarily enter into it, often somewhat disconcertingly, with what may metaphorically be described as both feet, women begin by skirting around its edges, by tossing out innuendo, and by playing ping-pong with suggestiveness before getting to the main business of the conversational meeting. A man will say, frankly, openly, and plainly, what is in his mind; a woman will by verbal by-play and insinuation convert what would otherwise be forthrightly clean into something that is vaguely dirty. Women seldom, in sex matters, use the straight-forward, clean-cut, appropriate terms. They rely upon circumlocutions and synonyms which, like burlesque-show strippers, are twice as suggestive as the naked words. They drape their colloquies in gauze veils and, slowly and with deliberately timed oral movements and gestures, remove them, to their twofold—or sevenfold—eroticism.
For this, the still remaining double standard of sex—it still remains for all the vociferous verbal and physical promiscuity of a relative handful of females and for all the editorial fulminations in liberal publications edited by unwanted old maids or fed-up married men who have eyes for their stenographers and obliquely wish to give their wives the gate—the still operative double standard, as I say, is doubtless responsible. Women, under its terms, are denied the privilege of directness and honesty and must perforce take refuge in an arsenal of allusive hints and winks. Their thoughts may be the same as men’s thoughts, but the forbidden direct articulation of them serves by repression to make them gradually stagnant and fungus-covered. A man, as the saying is, gets them off his chest and is done with them; a woman is not equally permitted to get them off her mind, and there they remain to crawl about with their increasingly slimy worminess.
This enforced repression seeking vicarious outlet is indicated, among other things, by the stuff that women read. Who are the chief consumers of cheap sex novels and magazines of so-called snappy fiction? The sales statistics show, and emphatically, that they are women—young, medium, and pretty old. The phrase, “shop-girl fiction,” tells its own story. On the higher literary but equally sexy level, who have been and are the chief worshippers of D. H. Lawrence, particularly in his Lady Chatterley’s Lover mood? The answer is too obvious to be recorded.
Women think of sex in the daytime as well as at night, whereas men in general seldom find their thoughts hovering about the topic when the sun is shining. Even Frenchmen and the Viennese hardly begin before twilight. And speculation is inflammation. I have known many men in my lifetime, but I have yet to encounter one who talked or thought about sex at lunch. The majority of women, on the other hand, even those who have to work for a living, allow their imaginations and conversation to play around it from the first application of the morning lipstick to the last dab of cold cream at night. Like hatred, sex must be articulated or, like hatred, it will produce a disturbing internal malaise. The edicts of polite society are responsible to no small degree for women’s dirty minds.
Any psychoanalyst or practitioner of psychopathology will tell you that, out of every ten customers and patients, nine are women. And out of the nine, at least eight will be found to be troubled with sex complexes. These sex complexes, the aforesaid professors need hardly tell you, are the result of repressions, and the aforesaid repressions are responsible for all kinds of mental quirks. The injunction, “Get it out of your mind,” suggests the nature of the mind and its thoughts. These thoughts are not healthy, but diseased. Concentration on sex, though sometimes unsuspected, has brought with it a species of mental corruption.
Plays dealing with abnormality always find their chief customers among women. When The Captive was, previous to its enforced withdrawal by the police, shown in New York, the box-office statistics revealed that five women to every man attended it, and the matinees were patronized almost exclusively by women.
Such pornographic literary trash as Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, the Mlle. Hull’s The Sheik, and Arlen’s The Green Hat finds itself in the best-seller class solely because of women.
The sex moving pictures, with Mae West’s alone excepted (and they are humorous rather than erotically stimulating), are patronized overwhelmingly, the exhibitors’ records assure us, by women.
The heroines of men are Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell. The heroines of women are Du Barry, Pompadour and Gabriele d’Annunzio.
I have lately had the privilege of scrutinizing the account books of the four leading purveyors of so-called erotica in New York City. Not the cheap dispensers of contemptible pink-backs, but the sellers of books that, for one reason or another, are not supposed to be read by the moral element in the community. The account books of the first, covering the period from January 1, 1934, to July 1, 1934, showed that his customers number 1,810 women as against 254 men. The books of the second, covering a like period, showed 927 women as against forty-six men. Those of the third, covering the time from January 1, 1934, to September 1, 1934, showed 737 women and only thirty-four men. And those of the fourth, covering the period from February 1, 1934, to August 1, 1934, disclosed 462 women as against just fourteen men. I am not acquainted with the sellers of pink-backs, and so, unfortunately, cannot offer statistics in that quarter. But the story on the somewhat higher sex level is sufficiently illuminating. Men usually outgrow their taste for pornography after they have completed, at an early age, the prescribed course of Only a Boy, Fanny Hill and Green Girls in Paris. But women’s taste for pornography seems seldom to abate.
Perhaps in no clearer way may we appreciate the dubious quality of the feminine mind than by referring to the question of motion picture censorship and observing the peculiar aberrations of that mind when it serves on the various state censorship committees whose business it is to pass on the morality of the films. Through various esoteric channels, I have managed to glean certain facts and certain information in this direction that offer tasty reading. I herewith present my findings:
1. The male members of three of these censorship boards—there are state boards at the present time in New York, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and for Sunday films, in Massachusetts—found nothing particularly dirty in such words and phrases as “naked,” “twin beds,” “mistress,” “birth control” and “long, lonely nights,” but were compelled to demand their deletion upon the insistence of women members of the boards.
2. It was the women on the boards of two state censorship bodies who, against the male members’ indifference, forced the elimination from certain films of such innocent spectacles as women’s underclothing hanging on a clothes line and a husband appearing in his wife’s presence clad in his undershirt and B.V.D.’s.
3. The deletion of such childishly harmless lines as “I wonder if Molly’s mother has told her everything” (spoken by the husband on his wedding night), as “You made her so dizzy she had to go in and lie down” (spoken after a kiss), as “I’m from America”—“What part?”—“All of me,” as “If you think Americans are good at the Black Bottom, just watch those Africans,” and as “Come in, young man, don’t be frightened. It’s much warmer here than on the balcony,” was ordered not by male committee members but by female.
4. Although the male censors could not discern anything excessively foul in a view of a nude little baby, of a girl sitting on a couch with a man’s head in her lap, of a man in pajamas, of a girl drawing her feet up on a bench, of nightgowns arranged on a bed, of a nude figure carved on a pipe, and of table book-ends showing a female figure’s single nude breast, the women censors apparently could.
5. The censorship ladies also saw something extremely filthy in the following lines: “Corinne thinks a mistress is something you read about in a French novel”; “You know, experience should have taught you, my dear, that the name Smith is always suspicious on the hotel register”; “You mustn’t think of the man in me, only the artist”; “It wasn’t love”; “What’s your name?”—“Eve”—“Mine’s Adam”; “Is friend husband out of town again?”; and “This girl, painted as a harlot, met death with a smile.”
Under beautiful rose-beds, it would seem, there are often sewers.

[From Passing Judgments, 1935, pp. 89—96.]

Why Men Marry

A FEW nights ago, there were gathered together in one of the esoteric salles à boire of New York, a dozen middle-aged men. All save two were benedicks. As the mineral water began to work its magic on those at the board, the two bachelors bade of their fellows to tell them honestly the reasons that had prompted them to marry the women they had married. What, in other words, precisely had it been about these women that had fetched the men and converted them into husbands. The ten husbands pondered the question gravely and then, in turn, gave out the underlying provocative causes, which I set down seriatim:

1. Because the woman had shared a taste for F. W. Bain’s translations of the Hindu Digit of the Moon and Bubbles of the Foam, could play the piano, and had Japanese eyes.
2. Because the woman disliked public restaurants and jazz music, and liked to stay home nights.
3. Because the woman had a beautiful, soft speaking voice and hated golf and all golf players.
4. Because the man had been thrown over by the woman he really loved.
5. Because the woman had $50,000 in the bank which the man needed to buy a partnership in the firm for which he was working.
6. Because the woman dressed in the way the man admired; because she hadn’t bobbed her hair; and because she shared the man’s wish to make a trip to Cairo.
7. Because the man was tired of living at his club and because he felt that he was getting old.
8. Because the woman had been attentive to him during an illness of two months’ duration.
9. Because the woman had an even temper; because she spoke three languages fluently; and because she was the only woman the man had ever met who didn’t wear her fingernails sharply pointed like a Chinaman’s.
10. Because she was the best-looking girl at the resort where the man spent his summers.

Although these may at first glance seem to be excessively superficial reasons for the men’s marrying the respective women, I thoroughly believe that they represent accurately the basic reasons that often shove men into the state of hymeneal blessedness. It is upon such a profound philosophical basis that the great institution of marriage is frequently founded; it is upon such a basis that the lions and unicorns of genealogy proudly prance and lift their heads to heaven.

[From the American Mercury, December 1925, p. 492.]

Why Men Marry? 2

Men marry for a variety of reasons, few of them self-appreciated and self-apprehended. The reasons they believe they marry for are seldom the real ones. Men, even quite young men, often marry for no other reason than that they are lonely and seek a consoling companionship. Older men frequently marry not because they are immediately lonely or seek companionship but because they fear loneliness in their later years. This is particularly—almost inevitably—true in cases where the man is alone in the world, without living parents or close relatives. He is, like a child, afraid of the dark that lies ahead. Love, money, all the other usual theoretical considerations, have nothing to do with his marrying or with the woman he marries. He just wants to get married, and that is that.
“Love at first sight—there is no other kind of love, for all men’s analysis,” an eminent Viennese psychologist has lately observed. Although the illustrioso’s remark has been widely ridiculed, there is a deal of truth in it. If it isn’t love, or at least something quickly leading to love, at first sight, it isn’t love. It may be respect, or admiration, or understanding, or camaraderie, or animal magnetism, or anything else of the sort, but it is not love. And it is this first sight, impromptu emotional galvanism that often draws men into marriage without the slightest sober reflection on such matters as have occupied the Viennese Professor Baber’s solemn inquiry. A man’s eye has much oftener propelled him into wedlock than his heart, and both combined have sucked him into matrimony twenty thousand times oftener than his cerebrum.
Men also marry out of disappointment. The beaten man, the humiliated man, the disappointed man, the man who has taken it on the chin in one way or another, is a veritable gull for almost any woman gunning for a mate. And this is even more true in the case of women. The woman who has been hurt, the woman who has been disappointed, is ready to take on the first even faintly eligible man who comes her way.

News Item—John Edwards, husband of Maria Sanborn Hotchkiss, writer and prominent figure in public life, committed suicide by shooting himself through the brain early last evening in his apartment on upper Madison Avenue, where he lived with his wife. They had been married ten years. Mr. Edwards was forty-five years old and was connected with the Hercules Cement Company, 302 West Thirteenth Street.
A maid, Martha Jones, discovered the suicide. She found Mr. Edwards’ body lying on the floor of the bedroom, a bullet hole in his right temple. He was clad in pajamas. He left no note. The head office manager of the company which employed him said that he appeared to be in excellent health when he showed up for work yesterday morning, that he had never missed a day at the office, and that his accounts were in perfect order.
His wife, Miss Hotchkiss, is, in addition to her literary and lecturing work, active in local political and civic—as well as in national—affairs. She was recently appointed chairman of the women’s division of the local Unemployment Relief Committee, is chairman of the women’s branch of the Civil Liberties Union, vice-president of the Association for the Betterment of Foreign Relations, Secretary of the Ohio Society, and has served on the O. Henry Annual Short Story Award Committee. She was elected to the State Assembly in 1934, and is at present chairman of the Manhattan Women’s Democratic Club and women’s Democratic leader in her district. She is head of the Women’s Amalgamated Charities, vice-president of the Order of Bookfellows, a trustee of the Girls’ Service League of America, recording secretary of the Good Roads Association, Inc., of the United States, an active worker for the Home Mission Council, the Humane Association of America, the American Library Association and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, a member of the Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, vice-president of the Pan-American Society, secretary and treasurer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and assistant secretary of the National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor. She is also vice-president of the Women’s Peace Society and the National Recreation Association, a director of the Roerich Museum and the Sociological Society of America, and a member of the National Council of the Sons and Daughters of Liberty, the American Vocational Association, and the National League of Women Voters.
The police were at a loss to assign a motive for the suicide.

[From The Bachelor Life, 1941, pp. 189—201.]

Mens Nana in Corpore Sano

THAT, taking one with another, women’s minds are less clean than men’s is a fact which, while sufficiently recognized by men in the mass, has yet strangely, so far as I know, not found its commentator and analyst on paper. We have had a few general epigrams on the subject, and we have thought, now and again, that we were about to read some sharp and penetrating affidavit on the matter, but in both cases delicate evasion and polite half-statement have been the only reward of our curiosity. In the interests of lovely truth, therefore, let us make bold to pursue the inquiry a bit further.
Any man who moves about in feminine society and who is not deaf in both ears can testify to the fact that women’s conversation, whatever the specific nature of its initial impulse, sooner or later is inevitably bound to get around to sex. The manoeuvre may be contrived indirectly and with a certain spurious show of neo-Victorian modesty—in some instances; but once it gains a measure of confidence it stalks into the topic like a bouncer into a barroom. Whereas men, when they enter into the subject, customarily enter into it, often somewhat disconcertingly, with what may metaphorically be described as both feet, women begin by skirting around its edges, by tossing out innuendo, and by playing ping-pong with suggestiveness before getting to the main business of the conversational meeting. A man will say, frankly, openly, and plainly, what is in his mind; a woman will by verbal by-play and insinuation convert what would otherwise be forthrightly clean into something that is vaguely dirty. Women seldom, in sex matters, use the straight-forward, clean-cut, appropriate terms. They rely upon circumlocutions and synonyms which, like burlesque-show strippers, are twice as suggestive as the naked words. They drape their colloquies in gauze veils and, slowly and with deliberately timed oral movements and gestures, remove them, to their twofold—or sevenfold—eroticism.
For this, the still remaining double standard of sex—it still remains for all the vociferous verbal and physical promiscuity of a relative handful of females and for all the editorial fulminations in liberal publications edited by unwanted old maids or fed-up married men who have eyes for their stenographers and obliquely wish to give their wives the gate—the still operative double standard, as I say, is doubtless responsible. Women, under its terms, are denied the privilege of directness and honesty and must perforce take refuge in an arsenal of allusive hints and winks. Their thoughts may be the same as men’s thoughts, but the forbidden direct articulation of them serves by repression to make them gradually stagnant and fungus-covered. A man, as the saying is, gets them off his chest and is done with them; a woman is not equally permitted to get them off her mind, and there they remain to crawl about with their increasingly slimy worminess.
This enforced repression seeking vicarious outlet is indicated, among other things, by the stuff that women read. Who are the chief consumers of cheap sex novels and magazines of so-called snappy fiction? The sales statistics show, and emphatically, that they are women—young, medium, and pretty old. The phrase, “shop-girl fiction,” tells its own story. On the higher literary but equally sexy level, who have been and are the chief worshippers of D. H. Lawrence, particularly in his Lady Chatterley’s Lover mood? The answer is too obvious to be recorded.
Women think of sex in the daytime as well as at night, whereas men in general seldom find their thoughts hovering about the topic when the sun is shining. Even Frenchmen and the Viennese hardly begin before twilight. And speculation is inflammation. I have known many men in my lifetime, but I have yet to encounter one who talked or thought about sex at lunch. The majority of women, on the other hand, even those who have to work for a living, allow their imaginations and conversation to play around it from the first application of the morning lipstick to the last dab of cold cream at night. Like hatred, sex must be articulated or, like hatred, it will produce a disturbing internal malaise. The edicts of polite society are responsible to no small degree for women’s dirty minds.
Any psychoanalyst or practitioner of psychopathology will tell you that, out of every ten customers and patients, nine are women. And out of the nine, at least eight will be found to be troubled with sex complexes. These sex complexes, the aforesaid professors need hardly tell you, are the result of repressions, and the aforesaid repressions are responsible for all kinds of mental quirks. The injunction, “Get it out of your mind,” suggests the nature of the mind and its thoughts. These thoughts are not healthy, but diseased. Concentration on sex, though sometimes unsuspected, has brought with it a species of mental corruption.
Plays dealing with abnormality always find their chief customers among women. When The Captive was, previous to its enforced withdrawal by the police, shown in New York, the box-office statistics revealed that five women to every man attended it, and the matinees were patronized almost exclusively by women.
Such pornographic literary trash as Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, the Mlle. Hull’s The Sheik, and Arlen’s The Green Hat finds itself in the best-seller class solely because of women.
The sex moving pictures, with Mae West’s alone excepted (and they are humorous rather than erotically stimulating), are patronized overwhelmingly, the exhibitors’ records assure us, by women.
The heroines of men are Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell. The heroines of women are Du Barry, Pompadour and Gabriele d’Annunzio.
I have lately had the privilege of scrutinizing the account books of the four leading purveyors of so-called erotica in New York City. Not the cheap dispensers of contemptible pink-backs, but the sellers of books that, for one reason or another, are not supposed to be read by the moral element in the community. The account books of the first, covering the period from January 1, 1934, to July 1, 1934, showed that his customers number 1,810 women as against 254 men. The books of the second, covering a like period, showed 927 women as against forty-six men. Those of the third, covering the time from January 1, 1934, to September 1, 1934, showed 737 women and only thirty-four men. And those of the fourth, covering the period from February 1, 1934, to August 1, 1934, disclosed 462 women as against just fourteen men. I am not acquainted with the sellers of pink-backs, and so, unfortunately, cannot offer statistics in that quarter. But the story on the somewhat higher sex level is sufficiently illuminating. Men usually outgrow their taste for pornography after they have completed, at an early age, the prescribed course of Only a Boy, Fanny Hill and Green Girls in Paris. But women’s taste for pornography seems seldom to abate.
Perhaps in no clearer way may we appreciate the dubious quality of the feminine mind than by referring to the question of motion picture censorship and observing the peculiar aberrations of that mind when it serves on the various state censorship committees whose business it is to pass on the morality of the films. Through various esoteric channels, I have managed to glean certain facts and certain information in this direction that offer tasty reading. I herewith present my findings:
1. The male members of three of these censorship boards—there are state boards at the present time in New York, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and for Sunday films, in Massachusetts—found nothing particularly dirty in such words and phrases as “naked,” “twin beds,” “mistress,” “birth control” and “long, lonely nights,” but were compelled to demand their deletion upon the insistence of women members of the boards.
2. It was the women on the boards of two state censorship bodies who, against the male members’ indifference, forced the elimination from certain films of such innocent spectacles as women’s underclothing hanging on a clothes line and a husband appearing in his wife’s presence clad in his undershirt and B.V.D.’s.
3. The deletion of such childishly harmless lines as “I wonder if Molly’s mother has told her everything” (spoken by the husband on his wedding night), as “You made her so dizzy she had to go in and lie down” (spoken after a kiss), as “I’m from America”—“What part?”—“All of me,” as “If you think Americans are good at the Black Bottom, just watch those Africans,” and as “Come in, young man, don’t be frightened. It’s much warmer here than on the balcony,” was ordered not by male committee members but by female.
4. Although the male censors could not discern anything excessively foul in a view of a nude little baby, of a girl sitting on a couch with a man’s head in her lap, of a man in pajamas, of a girl drawing her feet up on a bench, of nightgowns arranged on a bed, of a nude figure carved on a pipe, and of table book-ends showing a female figure’s single nude breast, the women censors apparently could.
5. The censorship ladies also saw something extremely filthy in the following lines: “Corinne thinks a mistress is something you read about in a French novel”; “You know, experience should have taught you, my dear, that the name Smith is always suspicious on the hotel register”; “You mustn’t think of the man in me, only the artist”; “It wasn’t love”; “What’s your name?”—“Eve”—“Mine’s Adam”; “Is friend husband out of town again?”; and “This girl, painted as a harlot, met death with a smile.”
Under beautiful rose-beds, it would seem, there are often sewers.

[From Passing Judgments, 1935, pp. 89—96.]

Burlesques

THE ATHEIST
"I worship no one," cried the atheist. "Divinities are senseless, useless, barriers to progress and ambition, a curse to man. Gods, fetiches, graven images, idols—faugh!"

On the atheist's work-table stood the photograph of a beautiful girl.

MAXIM
The young man, sitting at the feet of a philosopher, noticed a cynic smile tugging at the silence of the philosopher's lips.

"I was thinking," observed with an alas presently the philosopher, "that one is always a woman's second lover."

THE GREATER LOVE
"I love you," said the wife to her husband, looking up from the book she was reading, "because you are a successful man."

"I love you," said she to her lover, drawing his head close to hers, "because—because you are a failure."

SIC PASSIM
"For what qualities in a man," asked the youth, "does a woman most ardently love him?"

"For those qualities in him," replied the old tutor, "which his mother most ardently hates."

THE GOOD FAIRY
A fairy, in the form of a beautiful woman, came to a young man and whispered, "One wish will I grant you."

The young man gazed into the deep eyes of the beautiful woman and, with thoughts playing upon her rare loveliness, breathed, "I wish for perfect happiness for all time!"

And the fairy in the form of the beautiful woman granted him his wish.

She left him.

THE PHILOSOPHER
They had quarrelled.

Suddenly, her eyes flashing, she turned on him. "You think you are sure of me, don't you?" she cried. And in her tone at once were defiance and irony.

But the man vouchsafed nothing in reply. For he well enough knew that when a woman flings that question at a man, the woman herself already knows deep in her heart that the man is—perfectly.

OFFSPRING
Egotism and Carnality married and gave birth to a child.

They named it Love.

BUT—

"But——" interposed the young woman.

A gleam came into the eyes of the man who coveted and who had long and vainly laid subtle siege against her.
He appreciated now that it was merely a matter of time.

CONJECTURE
The pretty girl looked up at the stars, wondering....

The stars looked down at the pretty girl, wondering....

THE MIRROR
In a great lonely house on a far lonely roadway lived in seclusion among her waxen flowers and cracking walls and faded relics of a far yesterday, a hateful and withered and bitter old woman. To the lonely house on the lonely roadway came one day out of the world to live with the old woman her young and beautiful and very lovely granddaughter. And one day—it was not so long afterward—the very lovely girl, rummaging about the great house, came upon a tall mirror, the mirror that the withered and bitter old woman had long been wont to use and that for all these many lonely years had seen and reflected naught but acrimony and decay and despair and ugliness. And the very lovely girl looked into the mirror—and suddenly cried out. For what the mirror reflected was not her very lovely self, but something hateful and withered and bitter....

THE LOVER
"Three brilliant men are my suitors," said the beautiful young woman. "And I would marry the one who loves me most. Tell me how I may know that one."

"Pick the one who, when he is with you, is the most stupid," replied her old nurse.

ECCE HOMO
A homely woman smiled at a man. And the man, puzzled and speculating what was wrong with him, slouched on.

A pretty woman smiled at a man. And the man, with the mien of a cock, threw out his chest and strutted on.

THE COQUETTE
A rose, an orchid and a little white clover were pressed between the leaves of a coquette's diary.

"She loves me more than she loves either of you," cried the rose, "because I am the first flower my master ever gave her!"

"She loves me more than she loves either of you," protested the orchid, "because I am the last flower my master ever gave her!"

The little white clover smiled to itself and said nothing. For the little white clover knew that its mistress had picked it herself.

THE ETERNAL MASCULINE
"Whatever happens, wherever I go, wherever I am, I shall think of you," he said as he drew her to him and kissed her goodbye.

Three days out at sea he met another. And that night on the silver hurricane deck, under shelter of the life boats, true to his word and promise, he thought of her. He thought how cold her kisses were compared with those of this lovely creature.

ROMANCE
There were many ardent suitors for her hand. And they sent her orchids and violets and lilies and roses. All save one, a poor young fellow, who sent her but a simple little bunch of daisies.

She married the man who sent orchids.

THE SPIDER AND THE FLY

"Won't you come into my parlour?" said the spider to the fly.

"What nice hair you have," said the woman to the man.

FINIS
Somewhere, a funeral bell was tolling.

Somewhere, a thousand and one miles away, a woman was asking her lover for the third time in five minutes if he really loved her.

[From A Book Without a Title, 1918]