Second Men's Sexual Ethics

The Second Men's Sexual Ethics made intimacy serve two distinct purposes: casual relations could enrich everyday life, while a deeper union of minds carried spiritual and reproductive significance. Rather than making exclusivity the measure of love, the Second Men prized the experience each partner brought to a relationship and extended the idea of partnership from couples to groups.

Intellectual and Emotional Foundations

The system grew from the Second Men's dissatisfaction with the limits of individual experience. They valued each person as an end in themselves, yet also saw each individual as a stage toward more developed forms of humanity. Their culture longed for minds to apprehend one another directly and for an ideal community to be joined through shared experience. That aspiration shaped their understanding of intimacy: sexual relations were not treated as a single, undifferentiated category, but were understood according to the degree of mental union they expressed.

Intimacy, Conception, and Choice

In the account of Second Men's physiology, conception depended on a close relation between mental and bodily life. Sexual relations without a genuine union of minds did not result in conception; they were regarded instead as a pleasurable form of friendship, associated with tenderness, wit, and physical delight. By contrast, intercourse during the intense communion of people whose minds were joined almost always resulted in conception. Intimacy thus had different consequences according to the relationship in which it occurred, rather than simply according to whether partners were married.

This distinction shaped reproductive practice. People in intimate relationships often needed contraception, whereas casual acquaintances did not. Psychologists developed a technique of autosuggestion that could reliably and harmlessly either facilitate conception or prevent it. The account presents the technique as a practical means of choosing whether a profound union would also lead to parenthood, without making contraception an obstacle to intimacy.

Partnership Beyond Exclusivity

At the height of their world-culture, both men and women were encouraged to have as much casual intercourse as they needed for personal enrichment. The Second Men also deprecated strict monogamy as an ideal for their more profound unions. They understood such unions as an expression of the wider communion of minds they hoped to achieve, and regarded accumulated sexual and spiritual experience as something a lover could contribute to a beloved. This ethic did not rule out lasting couples: a deep union could become a lifelong partnership, but lifelong exclusivity was not its defining principle.

The Second Men's long lives made relationships capable of taking forms that the account contrasts with the shorter lives of the First Men. Couples sometimes deliberately interrupted a longstanding partnership by changing partners, then resumed it with renewed vitality. Other people formed permanent marriages among groups of both sexes. Such groups might exchange members with another group, disperse, and come together again years later, bringing new experience into their shared life. The account calls this a marriage of groups and presents it as an enlarged form of intimate participation. It argues that the First Men's shorter lives did not allow enough time for such complex sexual or spiritual bonds to develop richly.

Distinctions and Comparisons

The Second Men's account distinguishes physical intimacy from both mental communion and parenthood: casual relations could be valued without being treated as a promise of conception, while conception was associated with a particular depth of shared experience. A separate episode involving a woman among islanders also distinguishes embraces from the prospect of motherhood: she says that although islanders had been intimate with her, she could not permit herself to conceive with them because she regarded them as children at heart. That episode is not presented as a Second Men's custom, but it echoes the broader distinction between intimacy and the conditions someone considers necessary for parenthood.

A later human arrangement offers a further contrast without establishing a direct line of descent from Second Men's practice. In that society, small groups of ninety-six people are organized as lasting super-individual minds; sexual relations among group members are described as fostering intimacy and temperamental harmony, while the group's identity can persist even as its membership changes. The Second Men's ethics, by comparison, are presented through their own culture's ideal of mind-to-mind communion, flexible partnership, and reproductive choice. Together, these accounts show how the book repeatedly treats sexual arrangements as social forms connected to the organization of minds and communities, not merely as private pairings.