A New Set of Sex Mores

The retraining courses for workers proposed by the present Administration may be a necessary step toward the Great Society, but, in our opinion, they should not stop at professional skills. There is also an art, a skill of living, and, as everybody knows from modern literature, movies and advice columns, this is the era of incommunicability between men and women. Everything has become more and more complicated. How can we cope with the complexities of modern world policies, social upheavals and automation if we must also confront the complications in modern conjugal techniques? The Great Society clearly needs reorientation courses for husbands and wives as well. To provide them, we dare propose a bold and sweeping change: tritalamonomy.

The word derives from the Greek and it should mean "the rule of the three beds." It is a word that we had to make up, because the Greeks led a simpler life and did not have need for it. They did not even have the problem; the happenings on their pottery are much clearer than the movies of Bergman or Antonioni or Truffaut. So it is left to us to explain that by tritalamonomy we mean the custom of having every person, male or female, marry three times: the first time at the age of 15 with a 30-year-old, the second time at 30 with a 15-year-old and the third time at 45 with another 45-year-old.

The 15-year-old, of course, marries a 30-year-old who has been freed, after 15 years of marriage, by a spouse now 45 and, after 15 more years, leaves his or her 30-year-old spouse free to marry another 15-year-old, while he or she, now 45, marries another 45-year-old. This last marriage would have renewal options at the end of the 15-year term. Anyway, from 60 on, every citizen who can live in sin would be congratulated, in a tritalamonomic society, not censured.

The advantages of tritalamonomy over our present system can be understood only if we place it in the proper historical perspective. We live now in what is called "the second industrial revolution" and/or "the sexual revolution" (of which, we suspect, there were far more than two in history). Once again "a specter is haunting the world," but this one would make Marx and Engels blush under their beards. The old values are crumbling and the average man is afraid to lose his chains, because he senses that man will always need a set of moral principles by which to judge others. So what we propose is not to do away with mores, as some sexual revolutionists suggest, but to replace them. The old mores totter because they were based on a digest of folksy precepts and revelations that would be dismissed as "hearsay" in any modern court of justice. We propose an entirely new set based on scientific research and the opinions of the experts.

Kinsey and following sexologists discovered that early adolescence in the human male and early maturity in the human female are the ages of maximum sexual potency and receptivity. Early adolescence in the human female and early maturity in the human male are ages of relatively milder desires. This means that all our sex and marriage practices up to now have been wrong. This means that our ignorance of this fundamental law of nature may well be the cause of all our troubles.

So we do something about it: We propose mores based on this fundamental law of nature.

To see how it would work, in practice, let's consider, for instance, the case of a boy. He grows up in a big happy family of parents and their spouses-in-Law (as their ex-husbands and wives would be called), and when he reaches 15, his family, school P.T.A., Y.M.C.A., P.A.L. and similar associations will gently and teasingly pressure him into looking around for a wife (or a mistress in decadent western European countries). He will be nudged at parties, balls, family gatherings, church benefit sales, wherever he would be likely to meet 30-year-old women who have just ended their first marriage to a man now 45. Actually, the pressure is only meant to suggest that initiative is his manly prerogative, for immediately after marriage the woman will take over as the head of the family and remain in charge for the next 15 years. Leadership, in the tritalamonomic family, does not depend on sex, but on age and responsibilities. Each sex has a turn at the helm from 30 to 45 years of age. Each sex comes prepared to the task from 15 years of marriage as a junior partner. At the beginning of the first marriage, the junior partner is just an adolescent, accustomed to being bossed around; at the end, that is, approaching 30, he or she can afford forbearance thinking that, anyway, that marriage will soon be over. Many divorces today are caused by questions of leadership in families where industrial and sexual revolutions have blurred the once obvious reasons for male dominance. Other divorces are caused by panic, when a partner realizes that he or she is (continued on page 152)Sex Mores(continued from page 81) stuck with a disenchanting spouse. In a tritalamonomic culture, there would be no cause for this kind of problem. Marriage would last only 15 years, unless renewed, and it would take continued enchantment and what would be called an "unnatural" attachment to keep a couple together, after the term, among neighbors who do not see the reason for it.

Tritalamonomy would help the individual and it would help society. It is well known, among the experts, that much of today's juvenile delinquency comes from sexual frustration. The adolescent feels urges he does not know how to define. He feels, nevertheless, that society is against it, so he deduces that society is against him, therefore he is against society. Tritalamonomy defines the urges and makes them not only respectable but even dutiful, thereby purging them of all their morbid fascination. We can be confident that a tritalamonomic world would be a world without momism, with little antifeminism, little homosexuality, nice female characters in literature and on the stage, unobtrusive leather jackets and silent motorcycles.

The 30-year-old woman who marries a 15-year-old boy will overcome most of her present internal conflicts, even if she does not know it and does not want to admit it. The sexual conflicts have already been revealed by surveys and advice columns. Of course, sex is not all in marriage, although it helps a lot, as the experts have been discovering with great wonderment for the last 5000 years. There is also a sentimental element to consider. There is, for instance, in any newly emancipated group, class or sex, the latent hostility toward the deposed tyrant, the need for a new leadership, the fear of not finding it--all the dark forces that combine in making so many modern women press on their husbands the role of immature adolescents. Well, in a tritalamonomic culture this problem, too, would be solved. When a woman reaches 30 and thinks she has all that capacity for love-give, she will be matched with an immature adolescent with a complementary great avidity for love-take. She will have to do all she tries to do now with often disastrous results, and with justification and a much better chance of success. She will have to understand, advise, help, console and pay the bills, work, see her husband through his schooling and start him in his professional career. If she will put on saintly airs and a martyred expression, she will be believed and applauded, not just dismissed as a nagger and a bore, as it so often happens in modern society, even when she is a saint and a martyr.

On the other hand, she is less likely to assume this role. Her previous husband, the one she was married to from 15 to 30 years of age, gave her lessons in family leadership, experience in masculine capabilities and needs and, as a mature man of 45, he has presumably left her with the feeling that men can be respectable. Today many fathers cannot command this feeling because in times of rapid changes they seem old-fashioned too soon, and if a husband tries to achieve it, he can be sued for mental cruelty.

A 30-year-old woman, however, is only half a generation away from a youth of 15 and eager to forget it. Given a pretext, she will adopt fashion, tastes, ideas, jargon that make her look younger, thereby reducing the distance. She would find added incentives to use cosmetics, dietary foods, gymnasiums, beauty parlors and other services of increasing importance to the free-enterprise system. Between half generations communication is still possible, rebellions still avoidable, Beatlemania and allied phenomena still unnecessary.

Yet the greatest social advantage of tritalamonomy would be its response to the challenge of automation. Today machines can already do better than men with many years of schooling, and only more schooling can keep future generations ahead of future machines. We know today what a hostile world a "dropout" of 15 faces. Every year, according to statistics, we pile up an additional 200,000 of this potentially explosive human refuse. What will happen when they are joined by dropouts who are 25 years old? Shouldn't conservative groups who worry so much about subversion of our social order worry a little about such huge subversive forces? Shouldn't they start financing tritalamonomic cells, chapters, communities, promoting and contributing to tritalamonomic candidates?

Surely the lengthening dependence of the human offspring on their parents has gone far enough. Parents, too, should appreciate a society where they can marry their children off at 15 and let their spouses worry about ending their schooling and starting their professional careers. After all, we appreciate the beauty of our children especially when they are small. After 15, 20, 25, somebody else appreciates it better and has more use for it. He or she should be made to pay for it. Evening gowns and sports cars should not be paid for by parents, but by those they are meant to thrill or impress. The 40s should be a second youth for parents: years of travel, horizon broadening, new experiences.

After having been married for 15 years to an experienced woman, completed his schooling, found good employment, stayed out of trouble and slept conjugally relaxed at night, a man of 30 thinks he has mastered the essentials in life and love. This, then, is his time and his turn to teach, and the natural thing to do would be to set up another household, with a pupil: a girl of 15.

Here the same relationship he had with his first wife would be reversed. He would lead the family, pay the bills, survey the situation from the height of his experience, understand, solve, teach, instruct and train, unselfishly, for the good of the future half generation.

Since the years from 15 to 30 are the ones of maximum strength and elasticity in a woman's body, and the years from 30 to 45 the ones of maximum strength and elasticity in a man's brain, reproduction would take place during this marriage: the first for the woman, the second for the man. The children would grow up in a household ruled by the undisputed authority of the father, as in the natural order, and only when they were old enough would they be told of the improvements that progress brought. Husbands-in-law and wives-in-law of first, second and third degree would be frequent visitors, since some of them would be of the same age and probably congenial. Young children would have the feeling of security that comes from so many adults around to pester; older children would have playmates and confidants among the younger spouses-in-law of their parents. The delicate, lacelike pattern of a tritalamonomic family (see diagram at right) would provide its members with the most intriguing possibilities for gossiping, and writers of television serials with a much wider range of possible plots.

Besides, the bigger size and the wider ramifications of such a family would be a great help when it comes to finding a husband or a wife for a 45er who is about to end his second marriage. Forty-fivers in our present culture fill the advice columns with their lamentations. In a tritalamonomic culture (see diagram at right) they would have ex-spouses who are 60ish who have ex-spouses who are 45ish who have ex-spouses who are 60ish and 30ish who have ex-spouses who are 45ish, etc. etc. Marriages can be kept in the family and rearranged in partnerships more suitable to the changed needs and attitudes of its members. (It is easy to imagine, for instance, how a 30-year-old who has set his eyes on an appetizing adolescent gets busy trying to arrange meetings for his or her 45-year-old spouse with another 45er.)

Forty-five is a difficult age in monogamous societies, because many men and women approach it with the fear of having missed their youth and proceed with reckless speed to try to catch up with it. Under tritalamonomy, by the time a citizen is 45, he or she has had two adequate partners. The last years of the second marriage, with a spouse approaching 30, have been particularly rewarding and even trying, especially for men, the ones who most frequently complain that their wives "do not understand them." The prospect of a restful, adult companionship should appeal to every realistic 45er, at least for the first few years. After that, if nature does not provide the brakes, there will always be the forbearance, the understanding and the humoring of a spouse who can much forgive for having much loved.

We must remember that the 45er would lose his or her spouse to a 15-year-old, so to be jealous of her or him would be like an admission of not having acquired, in 30 years, different attitudes and capabilities. Besides, it could be explained to the 15-year-old that for his or her 30-year-old spouse to see now and then her or his 45-year-old ex-spouse does not really constitute adultery. To be jealous of a 45er would be like an admission of not possessing the gifts of youth that are asked of a 15-year-old. The "consolation adultery" or "platonic adultery" (as the one that involves an ex-spouse would be called) could be compared advantageously with the "bourgeois adultery" of our pretritalamonomic era. The latter is clearly contrary to every modern principle of distributive justice. The lover, or the mistress, gets all the tender, romantic, passionate moments, while the legitimate spouse gets all the nagging, the dull talk about maintenance, money and the in-laws. In a "consolation adultery," a wife-in-law may have an evening out with her ex-husband, but his present wife will ask her to baby-sit the next evening. Or a husband-in-law may have an evening out with his ex-wife, but he must also be available when her present husband calls and says, "Listen, pal. Elaine is at the dish-throwing stage. Will you please come and help me out?"

When it will be difficult to take away something from a family without paying a fair price in family life, adultery will be greatly discouraged and a new morality easily observed.

And this should satisfy both sexual revolutionists and defenders of institutions, for it would synthetize their theses and antitheses by institutionalizing the revolution. It happened before. What should give fresh hope this time is that, after so many attempts to adapt mankind to ethics, tritalamonomy attempts to adapt ethics to mankind.