MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I note with great displeasure that the Enemy has, for the time being, put a
forcible end to your direct attacks on the patient's chastity. You ought to have
known that He always does in the end, and you ought to have stopped before you
reached that stage. For as things are, your man has now discovered the dangerous
truth that these attacks don't last forever; consequently you cannot use again
what is, after all, our best weapon—the belief of ignorant humans, that there is
no hope of getting rid of us except by yielding. I suppose you've tried
persuading him that chastity is unhealthy?
I haven't yet got a report from you on young women in the neighbourhood. I
should like it once, for if we can't use his sexuality to make him unchaste we
must try to use it for promotion of a desirable marriage. In the meantime I
would like to give you some hint about the type of woman—I mean the physical
type—which he should be encouraged to fall in love with if "falling in love" is
the best we can manage.
In a rough and ready way, of course, this question is decided for us by spirits
far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you and I. It is the business of these
great masters to produce in every age a general misdirection of what may be
called sexual "taste". This they do by working through the small circle of
popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the
fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the
other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most
likely. Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent
of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard)
disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might
suppose.
As regards the male taste we have varied a good deal. At one time we
have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men's
vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the
most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, we have selected an exaggeratedly
feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the
general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a
premium. At present we are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded
the age of the waltz, and we now teach men to like women whose bodies are
scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even
more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of
growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less
able to bear children.
And that is not all. We have engineered a great increase in the licence which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely
drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and
propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than
nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world
is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to
nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to
something which does not exist—making the r?le of the eye in sexuality more and
more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.
What follows you can easily forecast!
That is the general strategy of the moment. But inside that framework you will
still find it possible to encourage your patient's desires in one of two
directions. You will find, if you look carefully into any human's heart, that he
is haunted by at least two imaginary women—a terrestrial and an infernal Venus,
and that his desire differs qualitatively according to its object.
There is one type for which his desire is such as to be naturally amenable to the
Enemy—readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, coloured all
through with that golden light of reverence and naturalness which we detest;
there is another type which he desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally,
a type best used to draw him away from marriage altogether but which, even
within marriage, he would tend to treat as a slave, an idol, or an accomplice.
His love for the first might involve what the Enemy calls evil, but only
accidentally; the man would wish that she was not someone else's wife and be
sorry that he could not love her lawfully.
But in the second type, the felt evil is what he wants; it is that "tang" in the flavour which he is after. In the face, it is the visible animality, or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty which he
likes, and in the body, something quite different from what he ordinarily calls
Beauty, something he may even, in a sane hour, describe as ugliness, but which,
by our art, can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession.
The real use of the infernal Venus is, no doubt, as prostitute or mistress. But
if your man is a Christian, and if he has been well trained in nonsense about
irresistible and all-excusing "Love", he can often be induced to marry her. And
that is very well worth bringing about. You will have failed as regards
fornication and solitary vice; but there are other, and more indirect, methods
of using a man's sexuality to his undoing. And, by the way, they are not only
efficient, but delightful; the unhappiness produced is of a very lasting and
exquisite kind,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter TWENTY
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