Sex War

For the unscientific extravagances to which his doctrine has led him, Bernarr Macfadden, U. S. apostle of body-worship, blatant exponent of "physical culture," has more than once called upon himself the censure of the American Medical Association (TIME, Nov. 10).

Now it appears that England has an intellectual counterpart of Apostle Macfadden in Capt. Anthony M. Ludovici. A lecturer and conversationalist, one-time secretary to the late Sculptor Auguste Rodin, married, 43, Captain Ludovici is ostensibly an opponent of British Feminism,* but his book/- dwells upon the physiological aspects of the argument with all the insistence and most of the exaggeration of a typical Macfadden editorial in breastfeeding, pride in body and "the happy congress of man and wife."

Captain Ludovici is answered in much the same vein from a far-flung Anglo-Amazonian outpost by the second wife of the Hon. Bertrand Arthur William Russell, lately-retired scholar of Cambridge University.

Seeing folk about him champing on false teeth, peering through eyeglasses, taking nightly physics and laxatives, Author Ludovici argues, with hysterical prolixity, the physical degeneracy of the race. He sees in operation the sinister influences of remedial Medicine and the "body-despising" ideals of Christians and Feminists. Says he: "There is no such thing today as a guilty conscience about bodily depravity. ... A clean mouth full of natural teeth, firmly set in unimpaired gums; a clean fresh tongue, not even slightly furred by incipient chronic indigestion; a sweet breath and the natural fragrance of a healthily functioning body--who knows love as Nature intended him to know it if he has not known these things? How many modern men and women can know love in this form ?" Counters Mrs. Russell: "Was love more delightful, then, in the old days when baths were unknown, when 'sweet breath' in a woman was so rare as to be sung by poets and the reek of stale sweat was barely stifled by a strong perfume? John Donne wrote verses to the flea he saw nestling in his lady's bosom. There is scarcely a fine gentleman today who could face the prospect of making love to one of the fine ladies of the past six or seven hundred years in Europe. ... I do not believe in the theory that the rougher our physique the more intense our bodily delights."

Author Ludovici imputes to Feminists aspirations to "rise above sex" into flat-breasted, man-scorning, virginal creatures tasing only the joys of disembodied spirits and reproducing their kind first by artificial fertilization and Caesarean sections, ultimately by ectogenesis (germs extracted, united, placed in incubator), for which only a small stud of docile males (1 to 2,000 females) would be needed and permitted to survive.

Retorts Mrs. Russell: "Artemis is slim and bold; Athene is stately. We have done well to worship at their shrines. But the call of Demeter the Fruitful is insistent." And she continues, surely to the surprise of her opponent, to endorse, not only free love and polyandry (in theory), but four children per voluntary, physically-competent mother, judiciously planned for economically, judiciously timed by contraceptive methods between confinements.

"I read recently," she writes, in an article [against birth control] by G. K. Chesterton that sex without gestation and parturition is like blowing the trumpets and waving the flags without doing any of the fighting. From a woman such words, although displaying inexperience, might come with dignity; from a man they are unforgivable, intolerable insult. What is man's part but a perpetual waving of flags and blowing of trumpets and avoidance of the fighting."

Captain Ludovici is convinced that sex equality is "a manifest absurdity." He calls for a rigorous Eugenics (including infanticide) ; for masculine will power, leadership and brains "sufficient to overshadow any female brain that is placed alongside;" for reversal of pres ent social values that enable the unfit to draw the fit down to their level; for the development of higher faculties in this new, robust man, especially psychic faculties.

Mrs. Russell, looking into a future based upon sex equality, discerns the first appearance upon earth of a civilization that will never decay.

*It has been observed by travelers that British women are divisible, broadly speaking, into three classes: "the horse-faced, the mouse-faced, the applecheeked." It is observed by statisticians that there are some two million "surplus" or unmarried British women. A third observation, to which the foregoing may or may not bear relation, is that English women have agitated Feminism--i.e., assertion of the equality, if not superiority, of women to men--longer, more militantly and along more extreme lines than women in any other modern nation.

/- Additions to E. P. Dutton & Co.'s famed "Today and Tomorrow" series, at $1.00 the copy: Lysistrata by Anthony M. Ludovici, Hypatia by the Hon. Mrs. Bertrand (Dora) Russell.