Tantra in the West: American Tantra


"The birth of Oneida Community was preceded by the conceptions of Male
Continence and Complex Marriage.  Both systems, although given religious
justification, were invented by Noyes in order to overcome the suffering
which was then the common experience of women in childbirth.  'We are
opposed', [Noyes] wrote in _Bible Communism_, 'to random procreation,
which is unavoidable in the marriage system.  But we are in favour of
intelligent, well-ordered procreation.  The physiologists say that the
race cannot be raised from ruin till propagation is made a matter of
science; but they point out no way of making it so.  Procreation is
controlled and  reduced to a science in the case of valuable domestic
brutes; but marriage and fashion forbid any such system among human
beings.  We believe the time will come when involuntary and random
propagation will cease, and when scientific combination will be applied
to human generation as freely and successfully as it is to that of other
animals.  The way will be open for this when amativeness can have its
proper gratification without drawing after it procreation as a necessary
sequence.  And at all events, we believe that good sense and benevolence
will very  soon sanction and enforce the rule that women shall bear
children only when they choose.  They have the principal burdens of
breeding to bear, and they rather than men should have their choice of
time and circumstances, at least till science takes charge of the
business.'

"But 'amativeness' was seldom satisfied by monogamy, which 'gives to
sexual appetite only a scanty and monotonous allowance, and so produces
the natural vices of property, contraction of taste, and stinginess or
jealousy.  It makes no provision for the sexual appetite at the vry time
when that appetite is strongest.  By the custom of the world, marriage,
in the average of cases, takes place at about the age of twenty-four;
whereas puberty commences at the age of fourteen.  For ten years,
therefore, and that in the very flush of life, the sexual appetite is
starved.  This law of society bears hardest on females, because they
have less opportunity of choosing their time of marriage than men.'

"The obvious remedy for these abuses was male continence combined with
complete freedom of intercourse.  Such a system would also remove that
descrepancy between community of goods and private possession of persons
that must always be obnoxious to a logical-minded individual like Noyes;
for was it not absurd that man 'should be allowed and required to love
in all directions, and yet be forbidden to express love except in one
direction'?

"Complex marriage meant, in theory, that any man and woman might freely
cohabit within the limits of the community.  In practice, however, there
was less freedom than might have been expected.  The partners in this
new form of relationship were obliged to obtain each other's consent,
'not by private conversation or courtship, but through the intervention
of some third person or persons'.  The exclusive attachment of two
persons was regarded as selfish and 'idolatrous' and was  strongly
discouraged.  It was usually broken up by means of 'mutual criticism' -
and so were the innocent 'partialities' of one child for another.  While
no one was obliged , under any circumstances, to receive the attentions
of someone he or she did not like, the propagation of children was
controlled by the elder members of the community.  They advised that the
young of one sex should be paired off with the aged of the other sex;
and at one time twenty-four men and twenty women were specially 
selected in order to conduct a eugenic experience designed 'to produce
the usual number of offspring to which people in the middle classes are
able to afford judicious moral and spiritual care, with the advantage of
a liberal education.

"On the whole the system was remarkably successful.  Apart from a few
sorrows due to the breaking-up of an exclusive attachment, the sexual
relations of the members inspired them with a lively intrest in each
other, and Pierrepont Noyes - one of the sons of John Humphrey -
believes 'that the opportunity for romantic friendships also played a
part in rendering life more colourful than elsewhere.  Even elderly
people, whose physical passions had burned low, preserved the fine
essence of earlier associations.'"

_Heavens on Earth, by Mark Holloway, pgs. 185-187.