The Zombie Field Guide
Z-Type: People Needing to Masturbate
Two quotes from Margaret Sanger’s The Pivot of Civilization. The first quote is from the introduction, written by the famous writer and absolutely not polymathic H. G. Wells, one of the many, many, many men with whom Margaret Sanger was having wild monkey sex at the time, presumably on principle. The second quote is a sequence of three contiguous and complete paragraphs, quoted from the chapter “Science the Ally.” These three paragraphs taken together are enough to throw open a window and gawk upon Margaret Sanger’s surprised but unremarkable progressive and eugenicist politics, her astonishingly overly-rationalized desire to have people stop referring to her sexual promiscuity as sin, and her brief but hilarious description of today’s entry in our Zombie Field Guide:
Z-Type: People Needing to Masturbate (PNM).
First up, Wells. And after this, let’s never again pretend we’re talking about something else when we’re talking about this.
The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: “We cannot go on making power for you to spend upon international conflict. You must stop waving flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”
^ Check out the useless eaters.
Next up, Margaret.
Physiologically as well as psychologically the development of the human being, the sane mind in the sound body, is absolutely dependent upon the functioning and exercise of all the organs in the body. The “moralists” who preach abstinence, self-denial, and suppression are relegated by these findings of impartial and disinterested science to the class of those educators of the past who taught that it was improper for young ladies to indulge in sports and athletics and who produced generations of feeble, undeveloped invalids, bound up by stays and addicted to swooning and hysterics. One need only go out on the street of any American city to-day to be confronted with the victims of the cruel morality of self-denial and “sin.” This fiendish “morality” is stamped upon those emaciated bodies, indelibly written in those emasculated, underdeveloped, undernourished figures of men and women, in the nervous tension and unrelaxed muscles denoting the ceaseless vigilance in restraining and suppressing the expression of natural impulses.
Birth Control is no negative philosophy concerned solely with the number of children brought into this world. It is not merely a question of population. Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and of human development.
It points the way to a morality in which sexual expression and human development will not be in conflict with the interest and well-being of the race nor of contemporary society at large. Not only is it the most effective, in fact the only lever by which the value of the child can be raised to a civilized point; but it is likewise the only method by which the life of the individual can be deepened and strengthened, by which an inner peace and security and beauty may be substituted for the inner conflict that is at present so fatal to self-expression and self-realization.
The emphasis above is mine. The word “all” is implicitly emphasized in the book, where, in context, it clearly refers to sexual organs, panting hard on the heals of a discussion on sexual glands and sexual organs. I also emphasized the description of the Zombie that Margaret Sanger makes clear we will all turn into without regular organ exercise.
Specification: An emaciated body; an emasculated, underdeveloped, undernourished figure; lurching through life with “the nervous tension and unrelaxed muscles denoting the ceaseless vigilance in restraining and suppressing the expression of natural impulses.”
Nomination: Z-Type: People Needing to Masturbate (PNM).
I think we all know what has to be done.
