How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

rorm of social cooperation, becomes an arena in which one sex is subordinated, the other made dominant. If you win, you prove your virility, you are a man. If you lose the battle of sex you are a failure in all else. The war threw some interesting side-lights on this phase of life. Men who had been subjected to the horrors of barrage and bombardment for weeks, when granted leave rushed to the first woman they could find. Ordinary aesthetic standards were thrown to the winds, and men who were most cautious at home entirely disregarded all precautions. Sexual orgies are a common accompani¬ ment of all wars and all great periods of depression. When the ordinary guarantees of peace and security are abrogated, men and women both tend to find solace in the intoxication of love’s embrace. Emergency Exits of the Soul The human lot is often a difficult one. Man’s brain has fashioned certain emergency exits through which the human spirit can escape into a temporary nirvana of peace or superiority. We have already discussed the value of the Roman circus and modern sports in this connection. Religion and sex throughout the ages have been the asylums of the faint-hearted. Whenever you find a human being who is fanatically religious or fanatically sex-frenzied, you may almost be certain that he is running away from some of the ordinary obligations and responsibilities of being a human being, and seeking a false sense of superiority either by establishing his self¬ esteem by a fictional intimacy with God, or an equally fictional superiority over his sexual partner. It is for this reason that religion and sex have much in common : frequently in the complicated history of man they have been the two most comfortable avenues of escape from intolerable realities. The great movements of history are frequently mirrored in the lives of individuals. Discouraged and disheartened men and women are to be found among those who make frantic efforts to establish their virility, just as