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M. Guyon is an able exponent of the extreme left wing of sexual reform. He
approaches the problems of sex from the point of view of 'integral rationalism', according to which sexual pleasure is healthy and desirable and therefore legitimately obtainable in any and every form, provided there is no interference with the rights of others; any attempt to curtail the opportunities for such pleasure, whether on religious, moral or legal grounds, being an unwarrantable interference with the liberty of the individual, which should be resisted by all who realize the immense importance of adequate sexual satisfaction for physical and mental well-being. The thesis is attractive in virtue of its bold and stark simplicity, and a reading of M. Guyon's book provides us with a salutary stimulus, inasmuch as it is calculated to make us realize very forcibly the tremendous gulf that exists between our actual attitude to sex, determined as this is by centuries of superstition and taboo, and the attitude that might ensue from a rational hedonism—an attitude such as might consistently have been adopted by some of the nineteenth-century hedonists, but which they would certainly have lacked the courage to advocate.
The purely rationalistic approach requires, however, to be supplemented by the psychological one, and it is here that M. Guyon's treatment, for all its brave discarding of the lumber of tradition, is apt to appear a little naïve. True, he sometimes recognizes that the power of the individual rationalist, even as regards the conduct of his own life, is limited, as when he says: 'The social organism is powerfully dominated by the taboo, and for the larger part of the time sexual freedom is an empty shibboleth. A strong head is needed if a man is to impose his own concept of sexual activity on a refractory world. … The person who thinks he has freed himself will find he has made a mistake, for he will discover that he is faced by a society organized to secure the supremacy