Premier Blum's Sex System

MARRIAGE -- Leon Blum -- Lippincott ($2.50).

If Stanley Baldwin or Ramsay MacDonald had written Marriage, they would never have got to be Prime Ministers. Because Leon Blum is a Frenchman, authorship of this plain-speaking sex treatise, although known to Frenchmen for nearly 30 years, did him no political harm, may indeed have increased confidence in his ability to give leadership to an important French institution. Now, however, with Marriage still selling like wildfire. Premier Blum wishes people would forget he ever wrote the book. The national tittering is beginning to get on his nerves. What Frenchmen titter at is the self-portrait of youthful Poet-Journalist-Socialist Blum sowing his wild oats. What is not so titillating or so new. but only a little on the old-fashioned side of Gallic good sense, is his sex theory. A succes de scandale in England since the first translation appeared there last month, in the U. S. Marriage will likely perk up more ears than it burns.

Sex reform, declares Socialist Blum, need not wait for social revolution, can be won "simply through progress in ideas about morality." Veering even more sharply from orthodox Marxist sex doctrine is his belief that, since the "upper and middle classes" control public opinion and show the highest sex illiteracy, education must begin at the top. And of this group, since its men are already groping along the right track, "it is upon girls . . . that I rely for carrying out the reform which I suggest.''

Sample guides for girls: A woman is no less rash than a man if she marries before she has sown her wild oats. Sowing season: ten to 15 years, beginning at the age of 15. Purpose: to exhaust the "polygamous instinct." which is probably stronger in women than men. Harmony in marriage depends on "bodily adaptation," which depends on the sexual tact of the husband, which depends on his premarriage initiation, which is usually bad. To end this vicious circle, let girls of good will turn teachers. "You must finish with love before you become good, unless you want love to take you by surprise at an age when to love is not a very good thing to do."

In sex education, a lover is "preferable to a professor of physiology."

Too many virgins and too many prostitutes are two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Separate rooms are superior to double or twin beds.

Rousseau's maxim: "Among moral peoples, girls are of easy virtue and wives of strict virtue. Among immoral peoples, the contrary is the case."

No library philosopher. Author Blum quotes sparingly from such pioneers of sex thought as Balzac, Rousseau, Stendhal, prefers his own sex data gathered "for years." Liveliest example of data-gathering by M. Blum, who "used to be very fond of following women," is his description of how in two hours before her train, a charming pickup gave him an insight into the "amorous unrest" of young brides. Later he learned she was the wife of an old college friend.

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