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Title: Free Love
Author: Madeleine Vernet
Date: 1907
Language: en
Topics: free love
Source: Retrieved on 10th September 2021 from https://forgottenanarchism.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/free-love-madeleine-vernet/

Madeleine Vernet

Free Love

I.

Is it really necessary to try and prove that love can only be free, when

artists paint it as a winged child, and poets, in their gay, fantastic

or sad songs, depict it as capricious, fickle, changing, always looking

for new horizons and new sensations?

…Love is a child of Bohemia!

And that is true. No-one can guarantee the stability of love. More than

any other human feeling, it is changing and transient because it is not

only an affection of the heart, but also a sensual desire and a physical

need.

Let’s not mistake love for marriage. Marriage is a social convention;

love, a natural law. Marriage is a contract; love, a kiss. Marriage is a

prison; love is self-development. Marriage is the prostitution of love.

In order to preserve its beauty and dignity, love must be free; and it

can only be free if it obeys a single rule. There cannot be on this

issue any material or moral considerations: two beings love each other,

desire each other, tell each other so; they must have the absolute right

to give themselves to one another, without the intervention of any

reason foreign to their desires, just like they must have the most

absolute right to leave each other when they no longer desire each

other. And I am not saying “when they no longer lover each other”, but

indeed when they no longer desire each other. These are two distinct

things. We can stop desiring a woman but still love her; we can no

longer wish to be her lover, but stay true to our friend.

This is too well-known a psychological fact for me to insist, but the

aspect I would like to stress is how this issue applies to women.

Women’s sexuality, it is commonly accepted, does not exist or is

subordinated to the sexuality of the male – whether legal or not –

companion she chose. She must live and feel through him, be passionate

if he is, remain indifferent if he is cold.

To this day, man has considered sensual desire ruling him essentially,

refusing to recognize women as beings morally and physically organized

as he is.

This is the first issue I will address in this study on Free Love.

I said before that, to study the great natural laws seriously, it was

necessary to go back to primitive sources and study nature in animal

life. Among animals, females have their own sexual life; they have

sexual needs, sexual desires which she satisfies, with the same freedom

and frequency as males.

No-one will contest that the physiological rules which animals obey are

the same as for humans. Why not then admitting for women the same

physiological similitude with animals that we admit exists between men

and animals? Why refuse women their own sexual lives? Why make love an

exclusively male need?

To this day, self-proclaiming himself on this issue as on every other,

man has answered: “Because women don’t have needs; because she does not

desire; because she doesn’t suffer from the privation of carnal

satisfactions.” But what does he know, whether women have needs or not?

Who better than women can judge and decide on this?

For my part, I still have in mind this sentence from a doctor: “Celibacy

for women is just as monstrous as celibacy for priests. To condemn women

to countenance is unfair, as it is to prevent the integral development

of the female being.” Therefore, as this doctor confesses, prolonged

virginity of women cause a stop in their intellectual and physical

evolution.

And, if there really are some women without needs, frigid women, without

sensual desires, what does it prove? There are also men who are

disinterested in sensuality. But they are not a majority; and, if I can

claim so, it is not the majority of women either who are disinterested

in love.

Nowadays, by the way, with the kind of education they get, women

themselves can be a bad judge of their sensations and desires. They

don’t analyse their internal lives, and often suffer without knowing

why.

The exuberantly healthy virgin whose boiling blood burn her cheeks and

redden her lips might not even know it is her virginity which makes her

nervous, disquieted, dreamy. She might not even know that it is the need

for love which makes her cry or laugh without reason; but the fact she

doesn’t know how to define it doesn’t make it less true that it is this

natural law of love which is attacking her.

Brutally, what she ignores, marriage will teach her; marriage to which

she went blindly, only because she evoked two cuddling arms in which to

find a refuge. Then, when at least she “knows”, when, initiated into

sexual life, her flesh has become consciously vibrant, she will realise

she is linked to a man who she might not even love any more. And,

according to her temper, she will go towards her lover and resign

herself to conjugal duty.

And if she resigns herself, if she accepts the duty without love, even

if she confessed to others and to herself that she has no desires, that

she has no lustful needs, she would simply be fooling others and

herself. Sexual needs will have existed in her, but, for a lack of the

conditions to its development, it will have atrophied and fallen asleep.

If this same woman had lived freely; if, leaving the companion who did

not meet her desires, she had gone to the one who would have made her

fully live her life as a lover, it is most likely that she would have

never become a cold woman.

In our current customs, it is much easier for a man to judge whether he

is frigid or not. Free to express his desires, he will be able to make

an informed judgement for or against sensuality – after having known the

embrace of different women. But women – condemned only ever to know one

man – cannot actually know if what she did not experience in this man’s

arms, she wouldn’t have felt in another’s.

Consequently, we cannot say exactly what women are from a sensual point

of vie. However, if we refer to animal life, we will see that the

anomaly of non-sensuality rarely presents itself in females. It never

happens in wild species, and, if it happens in domesticated species, it

is because domestication has deformed them. We can actually observe that

female dogs, deprived of sexual satisfaction, fades away and shortens

her lifespan y a fourth.

No doubt if women lived normally, if they hadn’t been also deformed by

physical and moral constraints, no doubt the number of frigid women

would be much restricted. However, even if there were only 50% of truly

sensual women, I think these 50% are allowed a full life, and it is

simply unfair to condemn them to the mutilation of part of themselves

for the simple reason that there are 50% others fully content with their

fate.

Absolute freedom in love – for women as well as men – is nothing but

elementary justice. This does not force the frigid to become passionate,

but this will allow the passionate no longer to suffer in the captivity

of social and conventional laws.

I said earlier that we should not confuse love and marriage. Well,

before leaving the issue of physiology, I will go further and say we

shouldn’t confuse love and desire.

Love is the complete communion of two brains, two hearts, two

sensualities. Desires is nothing more that the fancy of two skins

shivering from the same voluptuousness. Nothing is as fleeting and

unstable as desire, yet none of us are foreign to it. If every woman is

honest to herself, they will confess that they have already sometimes

thrown themselves at men they’ve only met for a few hours – or even a

short moment – and whose feelings and whose name they didn’t know. But

only a touch, a glance, the sound of a voice even, was enough to spark

desire; and, whether we like it or not, the woman who felt such a desire

went with this previously unknown man whom she will have forgotten the

day after.

We cannot better master our sexual desire than the pangs of hunger. Both

are inherent to our physicality: they are the result of two natural

needs, just as legitimate as one another. And hunger is not mastered, it

is quenched.

And I insist further on the difference between love and desire, because

we are always inclined to confuse them, or assimilate them to each

other, and this confusion often leads to sad and grievous results.

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” the Gospels say.

Certainly, yes, the flesh is weak. What time does desire need to become

an act? And is this act always made willingly and consciously? There are

times when the notion of reality disappears, when nothing exists in us

anymore other than the feeling of the moment.

Those who have live in nature know it full well: when in springtime the

sap flows back up to the branches, when the scents of life gush out all

around – from the earth, the sun, wood, and plants – desire too runs

under the skins and make breasts shiver. And, in the heavy summer

nights, in the hot and scented nights, who would deny that the need for

voluptuousness is more intense? Passionate people who, on such a night,

have been alone, know it well and they will tell you how much they

suffered from their loneliness on such nights.

Since there are days and hours when sensuality is exacerbated in a way,

it is not surprising in the least that “the flesh is weak”. You only

need complicit chances to place two individuals of different sexes

facing each other.

But this is not love, it is only desire. Desire which, sometimes, wears

all the appearances of love, but which, once quenched, leaves the two

lovers as perfect strangers to one another, like the hungry man leaves

table without regret once his hunger is appeased.

Do not conclude from this last sentence that I condemn desire. Why would

I condemn it since I just proved it was naturally linked to our sexual

life? The only thing I wanted was to firmly ascertain the difference

between desire and love.

II.

So, marriage, love, desire, are three different things:

marriage is the chain which makes a man and a woman prisoners of one

another.

love is the full communion of both of them.

desire is the fancy of two sensualities.

I leave marriage aside, as I oppose it, to go back to the issue of free

love.

I said that love must be fully free , for women as well as for men. And

I add more: love can only truly exist if it is free. Without absolute

freedom, love becomes prostitution, whatever name we call it.

Selling our bodies for such and such a price, to a large number of

clients, is not the only form of prostitution. Prostitution is not only

for women, men also prostitute themselves. He prostitutes himself

whenever, for any reason, he caresses someone without feeling desire.

Not only is legal marriage prostitution when it is an act speculation of

one partner on another, but it is always a form of prostitution since

the virgin doesn’t know what she’s doing when she marries. As for

marital duty, it is nothing other than prostitution again. Prostitution

is being submissive to a husband; prostitution is resignation and

passivity. Prostitution is also a free union, when it passes from love

to habit. Prostitution is every relation between sexes outside of desire

and love.

One of the reasons why love must be absolutely free is precisely this

similarity between desire and love I mentioned earlier when asking

people not to confuse both terms.

Rationally, can two people contract any commitment when they are unable

to know whether they will be able to fulfil it? Can we bond two elements

when we don’t know what affinity there is between them?

In legal marriage, someone is always fooled: the wife, and sometimes

someone disappointed: the husband who doesn’t find in his wife the woman

he believed he could find. Yet, they are bound to one another.

And even marriage can be based on reciprocal love and still soon become

a burden on both spouses. This means that love was only desire which

possession extinguished. And if the spouses had given themselves to each

other freely, before making it legal, the experiment would have proved

them they were not made for living together, and it is likely they would

have made it legal. This if proof of the need for free love.

From desire, love can bloom, but you can never be sure it will. When

love becomes sensual after it has gone through the brain and heart, it

has much better chances of lasting, but when it is based only on sexual

desire, it is likely to be soon extinguished, if it doesn’t reach the

brain and heart while it lasts.

Finally, since I am doing an analytical study, I must go to the bottom

of the truth, and say that sexual desire alone can unite two people for

a very long time without ever engendering full love. A man and woman can

have intimate relations without ever being pulled together by anything

else than this sexual desire. Their feelings and ideas can be in

complete disagreement while their flesh vibrates in harmony.

And this, I would like to point out, can in no way be compared to

prostitution, since the feeling which brings together these people –

although exclusively sensual – is sincere on both parts. There can only

be prostitution where there is selling, constraint, ignorance or

passivity. This is not the case since both lovers are attracted to each

other by the same feeling, and that they feel pleasure and satisfaction

in the relationship freely accepted by both of them.

But the truth I just exposed leads to condemning monogamy. From a

diversity of feelings stems a diversity of desires, and if we accept

this diversity as an essentially natural law, we cannot support the

injunction to monogamy. Monogamy is yet again a type of prostitution:

prostitution of a man to a woman and of a woman to a man.

There can therefore be on this issue of people’s sexual lives only one

moral law for both sexes: the absolute freedom of love.

The union of the flesh, which cannot be ruled by a single rule,

identical for every individual, which is subjected to no immutable

determining law, must not consequently create duties or constitute

rights, if we want to preserve the full freedom of love.

Isn’t it most illogical to link the word ‘duty’ to the word ‘love’? Do

we not already sense there the whole irony of this sentence from morals

books for children: “The first duty of a child is to love their

parents.” Do we not say, in everyday morals: “A mother must love her

children. A wife must love her husband.”

These words are absurd. Can love, of whatever order, ever be a duty? Is

it not natural for achild to love the mother who raised them; for a

woman to love the child who cost her some pain and suffering and who is

a dear reminder of caresses received? Is it not natural also for a woman

to love her chosen companion, the friend who made her his wife? If a

child doesn’t love their mother, if a mother doesn’t love her children,

if a woman doesn’t love her companion, what can we do? Nothing. All the

sanctions from the penal code, all the moral and religious declarations

will not make love spark if it hasn’t been born naturally.

Just as it cannot create duties, love cannot give birth to rights. A

husband’s rights on his wife, a wife’s rights on her husband, are

oppression and oppression is love. A slave cannot love their master;

they can only fear them and try to please them.

The fact that a woman loved a man and had sex with him should grant him

no privilege over this woman; no more than the fact of having sex should

be, for this woman, a reason to have authority on her partner. They were

free before they met, they loved each other freely, man and woman must

find themselves free after their relation, once desire no longer

attracts them to each other, and that love ceased uniting them.

To sum up this whole study, I would conclude thus:

Love must be entirely free, no moral law must rule it or submit it in

any way.

No difference must be made between sexes concerning love.

Finally, sexual relations must not create obligations, duties or

rights between people.

III.

I know that, when they read it for the first time, my theory on love

will seem completely immoral to many people. Some of them will see it as

the consecration of debauchery, the apology of licentiousness, the

excuse for all disorders.

But if they try to think and study the issue, they will agree that free

love, far from being a source of immorality, will become a natural

regulating body of morality.

First of all, what is immorality? To define it, we must once again get

rid of the atavism which makes us consider as natural law what is only

social conventions.

In my opinion, immorality is everything which constrains individuals

with purely conventional rules, it is everything which hinders the

development of human beings (…)

Immorality is prostitution – legal or otherwise; it is is forced

celibacy for women; it is selling the female body; it is the submission

of wives; t is the lie of a husband toward someone he has stopped

loving.

But free love cannot be immoral, as it is a natural law; sexual desire

cannot be immoral since it is a natural need of our physical existence.

If sexual need is immoral, we can then call hunger, sleep, in a word,

every physiological phenomenon which rules the human body immoral.

If we consider our current habits, what source of immorality can we not

uncover? Loveless marriages in which men buy a dowry and women buy a

situation; adulteries from husbands and wives; rapes of all kinds; flesh

trade, lies from our flesh and our brains, different contracts which

give unknowing women to lechers and poor women to exploiters who

speculate on their hunger.

If free love became the rule, there certainly couldn’t be more

immorality than already exists. Admitting that the situation would not

change in depth, it would be at least more honest in its form.

But I am personally convinced that free love will be the moral

emancipation of individuals, because it will free people from both sexes

from physical constraints and servitudes. Why should we believe free

individuals to be immoral? There is no immorality among free animals.

They do not know any of the physical disorders which are the prerogative

of humans, precisely because animals do not submit to any law apart from

natural law.

What creates immorality is the forced lies of humans to other humans and

to themselves; and free love, by freeing humans from lies, will

precisely put an end to disorders and debauchery.

When people will be truly free, when they will be regenerated by a

better education, they will find in themselves a natural balance of

their physical and moral faculties and will become normal and healthy

beings.

We have in ourselves an instinctive feeling which looks after us; the

instinct of self-preservation. When we are no longer hungry, we stop

eating, because we know the problems that might arise if we don’t; when

we are tired from walking, we have the common sense to rest; when

tiredness burns our eyelids, we know full well we should be sleeping. In

the same way, we will find a natural regulation to our sexual lives in

sexual exertion itself.

Animals obey this feeling of self-preservation; why would humans be

inferior to them? I wouldn’t want to insult humanity by holding on to

that last hypothesis.

No, the full development of a free individual could not be something

immoral; What is truly immoral is to distort our understanding by

distorting nature’s fundamental truths; immorality is to prevent someone

from living a healthy and strong life in the name of dogmas, laws,

conventions contrary to the harmony and beauty of life.