The Art of Love

An excerpt from the PREFACE: NO treatise on the sex question is complete without an extended consideration of the art of love. My former books on sex, while often briefly dealing with some aspects of the mechanical or physical side of sex, have chiefly been concerned with its psychology. A book, to be of use to beginners in marriage, must be very plain in its language and ignore no detail. The only modern book I know which attempts this is one for which I...
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An excerpt from the PREFACE:

NO treatise on the sex question is complete without an extended consideration of the art of love. My former books on sex, while often briefly dealing with some aspects of the mechanical or physical side of sex, have chiefly been concerned with its psychology.

A book, to be of use to beginners in marriage, must be very plain in its language and ignore no detail. The only modern book I know which attempts this is one for which I wrote an introduction several years ago, "Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living," by H. W. Long, M. D. It would be folly to attempt, and I would not have it thought that I expect to improve upon this book, so far as it goes. The book referred to, however, is very brief, deals almost exclusively with the mechanical and physical sides of sex, gives little by way of illustration from actual cases, and refers very little or not at all to the literature on this subject.

While the book here presented will not be an exhaustive treatise, it is my purpose to treat the subject adequately for all ordinary purposes, to correlate the psychic and physical sides of the love relation, to illustrate details to some extent by cases that have come under my own observation, and to discuss quotations from the older literature on the subject; for there is a literature on this subject, fairly complete, though kept almost entirely from the professional and publice eye, while such books on the relations of married people which have been generally known have dealt almost exclusively with Platonic relations and aesthetic considerations; and such attempts as have been made to elucidate the actual physical sex relation have been abstract or general.

To show the psychic modifications that must be made in the average young man and woman, and then to show the physical adaptations necessary for them to become and remain true married lovers, is my present purpose, made difficult by a deeply intrenched ignorance and prejudice, by a whole psychology of erroneous sex thinking, and by a pathological physiology of married love. Not a week goes by in which I do not find couples, long married, whose psychic barriers have never been broken down, and whose ignorance of the physical adaptations necessary for love's perfect consummation is nothing short of amazing.

If ignorance were bliss it might be folly to be wise; but where ignorance leads to prostitution, divorce, ill health, neurosis, unhappiness, it were better to be wise, even at the price or some shocks to the sensibilities of those reared under and adhering to the old traditions.

And yet I shall show that, while the older idealistic writers left everything to instinct and made the whole subject of married love so refined and remote that few blundered into right ways of physiological living, there were people who lived happily and physiologically, there was a literature two thousand years ago, so precise and complete that had it been heeded no one could have gone astray....