The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution

IV. The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution

We have now surveyed the complex fact of prostitution in some of its most various and typical aspects, seeking to realise, intelligently and sympathetically, the fundamental part it plays as an elementary constituent of our marriage system. Finally we have to consider the grounds on which prostitution now appears to a large and growing number of persons not only an unsatisfactory method of sexual gratification but a radically bad method.

The movement of antagonism towards prostitution manifests itself most conspicuously, as might beforehand have been anticipated, by a feeling of repugnance towards the most ancient and typical, once the most credited and best established prostitutional manifestation, the brothel. The growth of this repugnance is not confined to one or two countries but is international, and may thus be regarded as corresponding to a real tendency in our civilization. It is equally pronounced in prostitutes themselves and in the people who are their clients. The distaste on the one side increases the distaste on the other. Since only the most helpless or the most stupid prostitutes are nowadays willing to accept the servitude of the brothel, the brothel-keeper is forced to resort to extraordinary methods for entrapping victims, and even to take part in that cosmopolitan trade in "white slaves" which exists solely to feed brothels.[211] This state of things has a natural reaction in prejudicing the clients of prostitution against an institution which is going out of fashion and out of credit. An even more fundamental antipathy is engendered by the fact that the brothel fails to respond to the high degree of personal freedom and variety which civilization produces, and always demands even when it fails to produce. On one side the prostitute is disinclined to enter into a slavery which usually fails even to bring her any reward; on the other side her client feels it as part of the fascination of prostitution under civilized conditions that he shall enjoy a freedom and choice the brothel cannot provide.[212] Thus it comes about that brothels which once contained nearly all the women who made it a business to minister to the sexual needs of men, now contain only a decreasing minority, and that the transformation of cloistered prostitution into free prostitution is approved by many social reformers as a gain to the cause of morality.[213]

The decay of brothels, whether as cause or as effect, has been associated with a vast increase of prostitution outside brothels. But the repugnance to brothels in many essential respects also applies to prostitution generally, and, as we shall see, it is exerting a profoundly modifying influence on that prostitution.

The changing feeling in regard to prostitution seems to express itself mainly in two ways. On the one hand there are those who, without desiring to abolish prostitution, resent the abnegation which accompanies it, and are disgusted by its sordid aspects. They may have no moral scruples against prostitution, and they know no reason why a woman should not freely do as she will with her own person. But they believe that, if prostitution is necessary, the relationships of men with prostitutes should be humane and agreeable to each party, and not degrading to either. It must be remembered that under the conditions of civilized urban life, the discipline of work is often too severe, and the excitements of urban existence too constant, to render an abandonment to orgy a desirable recreation. The gross form of orgy appeals, not to the town-dweller but to the peasant, and to the sailor or soldier who reaches the town after long periods of dreary routine and emotional abstinence. It is a mistake, even, to suppose that the attraction of prostitution is inevitably associated with the fulfilment of the sexual act. So far is this from being the case that the most attractive prostitute may be a woman who, possessing few sexual needs of her own, desires to please by the charm of her personality; these are among those who most often find good husbands. There are many men who are even well content merely to have a few hours' free intimacy with an agreeable woman, without any further favor, although that may be open to them. For a very large number of men under urban conditions of existence the prostitute is ceasing to be the degraded instrument of a moment's lustful desire; they seek an agreeable human person with whom they may find relaxation from the daily stress or routine of life. When an act of prostitution is thus put on a humane basis, although it by no means thereby becomes conducive to the best development of either party, it at least ceases to be hopelessly degrading. Otherwise it would not have been possible for religious prostitution to flourish for so long in ancient days among honorable women of good birth on the shores of the Mediterranean, even in regions like Lydia, where the position of women was peculiarly high.[214]

It is true that the monetary side of prostitution would still exist. But it is possible to exaggerate its importance. It must be pointed out that, though it is usual to speak of the prostitute as a woman who "sells herself," this is rather a crude and inexact way of expressing, in its typical form, the relationship of a prostitute to her client. A prostitute is not a commodity with a market-price, like a loaf or a leg of mutton. She is much more on a level with people belonging to the professional classes, who accept fees in return for services rendered; the amount of the fee varies, on the one hand in accordance with professional standing, on the other hand in accordance with the client's means, and under special circumstances may be graciously dispensed with altogether. Prostitution places on a venal basis intimate relationships which ought to spring up from natural love, and in so doing degrades them. But strictly speaking there is in such a case no "sale." To speak of a prostitute "selling herself" is scarcely even a pardonable rhetorical exaggeration; it is both inexact and unjust.[215]

This tendency in an advanced civilization towards the humanization of prostitution is the reverse process, we may note, to that which takes place at an earlier stage of civilization when the ancient conception of the religious dignity of prostitution begins to fall into disrepute. When men cease to reverence women who are prostitutes in the service of a goddess they set up in their place prostitutes who are merely abject slaves, flattering themselves that they are thereby working in the cause of "progress" and "morality." On the shores of the Mediterranean this process took place more than two thousand years ago, and is associated with the name of Solon. To-day we may see the same process going on in India. In some parts of India (as at Jejuri, near Poonah) first born girls are dedicated to Khandoba or other gods; they are married to the god and termed muralis. They serve in the temple, sweep it, and wash the holy vessels, also they dance, sing and prostitute themselves. They are forbidden to marry, and they live in the homes of their parents, brothers, or sisters; being consecrated to religious service, they are untouched by degradation. Nowadays, however, Indian "reformers," in the name of "civilization and science," seek to persuade the muralis that they are "plunged in a career of degradation." No doubt in time the would-be moralists will drive the muralis out of their temples and their homes, deprive them of all self-respect, and convert them into wretched outcasts, all in the cause of "science and civilization" (see, e.g., an article by Mrs. Kashibai Deodhar, The New Reformer, October, 1907). So it is that early reformers create for the reformers of a later day the task of humanizing prostitution afresh.

There can be no doubt that this more humane conception of prostitution is to-day beginning to be realized in the actual civilized life of Europe. Thus in writing of prostitution in Paris, Dr. Robert Michels ("Erotische Streifzüge," Mutterschutz, 1906, Heft 9, p. 368) remarks: "While in Germany the prostitute is generally considered as an 'outcast' creature, and treated accordingly, an instrument of masculine lust to be used and thrown away, and whom one would under no circumstances recognize in public, in France the prostitute plays in many respects the part which once give significance and fame to the hetairæ of Athens." And after describing the consideration and respect which the Parisian prostitute is often able to require of her friends, and the non-sexual relation of comradeship which she can enter into with other men, the writer continues: "A girl who certainly yields herself for money, but by no means for the first comer's money, and who, in addition to her 'business friends,' feels the need of, so to say, non-sexual companions with whom she can associate in a free comrade-like way, and by whom she is treated and valued as a free human being, is not wholly lost for the moral worth of humanity." All prostitution is bad, Michels concludes, but we should have reason to congratulate ourselves if love-relationships of this Parisian species represented the lowest known form of extra-conjugal sexuality. (As bearing on the relative consideration accorded to prostitutes I may mention that a Paris prostitute remarked to a friend of mine that Englishmen would ask her questions which no Frenchman would venture to ask.)

It is not, however, only in Paris, although here more markedly and prominently, that this humanizing change in prostitution is beginning to make itself felt. It is manifested, for instance, in the greater openness of a man's sexual life. "While he formerly slinked into a brothel in a remote street," Dr. Willy Hellpach remarks (Nervosität und Kultur, p. 169), "he now walks abroad with his 'liaison,' visiting the theatres and cafés, without indeed any anxiety to meet his acquaintances, but with no embarrassment on that point. The thing is becoming more commonplace, more—natural." It is also, Hellpach proceeds to point out, thus becoming more moral also, and much unwholesome prudery and pruriency is being done away with.

In England, where change is slow, this tendency to the humanization of prostitution may be less pronounced. But it certainly exists. In the middle of the last century Lecky wrote (History of European Morals, vol. ii, p. 285) that habitual prostitution "is in no other European country so hopelessly vicious or so irrevocable." That statement, which was also made by Parent-Duchâtelet and other foreign observers, is fully confirmed by the evidence on record. But it is a statement which would hardly be made to-day, except perhaps, in reference to special confined areas of our cities. It is the same in America, and we may doubtless find this tendency reflected in the report on The Social Evil (1902), drawn up by a committee in New York, who gave it (p. 176) as one of their chief recommendations that prostitution should no longer be regarded as a crime, in which light, one gathers, it had formerly been regarded in New York. That may seem but a small step in the path of humanization, but it is in the right direction.

It is by no means only in lands of European civilization that we may trace with developing culture the refinement and humanization of the slighter bonds of relationship with women. In Japan exactly the same demands led, several centuries ago, to the appearance of the geisha. In the course of an interesting and precise study of the geisha Mr. R. T. Farrer remarks (Nineteenth Century, April, 1904): "The geisha is in no sense necessarily a courtesan. She is a woman educated to attract; perfected from her childhood in all the intricacies of Japanese literature; practiced in wit and repartee; inured to the rapid give-and-take of conversation on every topic, human and divine. From her earliest youth she is broken into an inviolable charm of manner incomprehensible to the finest European, yet she is almost invariably a blossom of the lower classes, with dumpy claws, and squat, ugly nails. Her education, physical and moral, is far harder than that of the ballerina, and her success is achieved only after years of struggle and a bitter agony of torture.... And the geisha's social position may be compared with that of the European actress. The Geisha-house offers prizes as desirable as any of the Western stage. A great geisha with twenty nobles sitting round her, contending for her laughter, and kept in constant check by the flashing bodkin of her wit, holds a position no less high and famous than that of Sarah Bernhardt in her prime. She is equally sought, equally flattered, quite as madly adored, that quiet little elderly plain girl in dull blue. But she is prized thus primarily for her tongue, whose power only ripens fully as her physical charms decline. She demands vast sums for her owners, and even so often appears and dances only at her own pleasure. Few, if any, Westerners ever see a really famous geisha. She is too great to come before a European, except for an august or imperial command. Finally she may, and frequently does, marry into exalted places. In all this there is not the slightest necessity for any illicit relation."

In some respects the position of the ancient Greek hetaira was more analogous to that of the Japanese geisha than to that of the prostitute in the strict sense. For the Greeks, indeed, the hetaira, was not strictly a porne or prostitute at all. The name meant friend or companion, and the woman to whom the name was applied held an honorable position, which could not be accorded to the mere prostitute. Athenæus (Bk. xiii, Chs. XXVIII-XXX) brings together passages showing that the hetaira could be regarded as an independent citizen, pure, simple, and virtuous, altogether distinct from the common crew of prostitutes, though these might ape her name. The hetairæ "were almost the only Greek women," says Donaldson (Woman, p. 59), "who exhibited what was best and noblest in women's nature." This fact renders it more intelligible why a woman of such intellectual distinction as Aspasia should have been a hetaira. There seems little doubt as to her intellectual distinction. "Æschines, in his dialogue entitled 'Aspasia,'" writes Gomperz, the historian of Greek philosophy (Greek Thinkers, vol. iii, pp. 124 and 343), "puts in the mouth of that distinguished woman an incisive criticism of the mode of life traditional for her sex. It would be exceedingly strange," Gomperz adds, in arguing that an inference may thus be drawn concerning the historical Aspasia, "if three authors—Plato, Xenophon and Æschines—had agreed in fictitiously enduing the companion of Pericles with what we might very reasonably have expected her to possess—a highly cultivated mind and intellectual influence." It is even possible that the movement for woman's right which, as we dimly divine through the pages of Aristophanes, took place in Athens in the fourth century B. C., was led by hetairæ. According to Ivo Bruns (Frauenemancipation in Athen, 1900, p. 19) "the most certain information which we possess concerning Aspasia bears a strong resemblance to the picture which Euripides and Aristophanes present to us of the leaders of the woman movement." It was the existence of this movement which made Plato's ideas on the community of women appear far less absurd than they do to us. It may perhaps be thought by some that this movement represented on a higher plane that love of distruction, or, as we should better say, that spirit of revolt and aspiration, which Simmel finds to mark the intellectual and artistic activity of those who are unclassed or dubiously classed in the social hierarchy. Ninon de Lenclos, as we have seen, was not strictly a courtesan, but she was a pioneer in the assertion of woman's rights. Aphra Behn who, a little later in England, occupied a similarly dubious social position, was likewise a pioneer in generous humanitarian aspirations, which have since been adopted in the world at large.

These refinements of prostitution may be said to be chiefly the outcome of the late and more developed stages in civilization. As Schurtz has put it (Altersklassen und Männerbünde, p. 191): "The cheerful, skilful and artistically accomplished hetaira frequently stands as an ideal figure in opposition to the intellectually uncultivated wife banished to the interior of the house. The courtesan of the Italian Renaissance, Japanese geishas, Chinese flower-girls, and Indian bayaderas, all show some not unnoble features, the breath of a free artistic existence. They have achieved—with, it is true, the sacrifice of their highest worth—an independence from the oppressive rule of man and of household duties, and a part of the feminine endowment which is so often crippled comes in them to brilliant development. Prostitution in its best form may thus offer a path by which these feminine characteristics may exert a certain influence on the development of civilization. We may also believe that the artistic activity of women is in some measure able to offer a counterpoise to the otherwise less pleasant results of sexual abandonment, preventing the coarsening and destruction of the emotional life; in his Magda Sudermann has described a type of woman who, from the standpoint of strict morality, is open to condemnation, but in her art finds a foothold, the strength of which even ill-will must unwillingly recognize." In his Sex and Character, Weininger has developed in a more extreme and extravagant manner the conception of the prostitute as a fundamental and essential part of life, a permanent feminine type.

There are others, apparently in increasing numbers, who approach the problem of prostitution not from an æsthetic standpoint but from a moral standpoint. This moral attitude is not, however, that conventionalized morality of Cato and St. Augustine and Lecky, set forth in previous pages, according to which the prostitute in the street must be accepted as the guardian of the wife in the home. These moralists reject indeed the claim of that belief to be considered moral at all. They hold that it is not morally possible that the honor of some women shall be purchaseable at the price of the dishonor of other women, because at such a price virtue loses all moral worth. When they read that, as Goncourt stated, "the most luxurious articles of women's trousseaux, the bridal chemises of girls with dowries of six hundred thousand francs, are made in the prison of Clairvaux,"[216] they see the symbol of the intimate dependence of our luxurious virtue on our squalid vice. And while they accept the historical and sociological evidence which shows that prostitution is an inevitable part of the marriage system which still survives among us, they ask whether it is not possible so to modify our marriage system that it shall not be necessary to divide feminine humanity into "disreputable" women, who make sacrifices which it is dishonorable to make, and "respectable" women, who take sacrifices which it cannot be less dishonorable to accept.

Prostitutes, a distinguished man of science has said (Duclaux, L'Hygiène Sociale, p. 243), "have become things which the public uses when it wants them, and throws on the dungheap when it has made them vile. In its pharisaism it even has the insolence to treat their trade as shameful, as though it were not just as shameful to buy as to sell in this market." Bloch (Sexualleben unserer Zeit, Ch. XV) insists that prostitution must be ennobled, and that only so can it be even diminished. Isidore Dyer, of New Orleans, also argues that we cannot check prostitution unless we create "in the minds of men and women a spirit of tolerance instead of intolerance of fallen women." This point may be illustrated by a remark by the prostitute author of the Tagebuch einer Verlorenen. "If the profession of yielding the body ceased to be a shameful one," she wrote, "the army of 'unfortunates' would diminish by four-fifths—I will even say nine-tenths. Myself, for example! How gladly would I take a situation as companion or governess!" "One of two things," wrote the eminent sociologist Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, January, 1907), "either prostitution will disappear through continuing to be dishonorable and will be replaced by some other institution which will better remedy the defects of monogamous marriage, or it will survive by becoming respectable, that is to say, by making itself respected, whether liked or disliked." Tarde thought this might perhaps come about by a better organization of prostitutes, a more careful selection among those who desired admission to their ranks and the cultivation of professional virtues which would raise their moral level. "If courtesans fulfil a need," Balzac had already said in his Physiologie du Mariage, "they must become an institution."

This moral attitude is supported and enforced by the inevitable democratic tendency of civilization which, although it by no means destroys the idea of class, undermines that idea as the mark of fundamental human distinctions and renders it superficial. Prostitution no longer makes a woman a slave; it ought not to make her even a pariah: "My body is my own," said the young German prostitute of to-day, "and what I do with it is nobody else's concern." When the prostitute was literally a slave moral duty towards her was by no means necessarily identical with moral duty towards the free woman. But when, even in the same family, the prostitute may be separated by a great and impassable social gulf from her married sister, it becomes possible to see, and in the opinion of many imperatively necessary to see, that a readjustment of moral values is required. For thousands of years prostitution has been defended on the ground that the prostitute is necessary to ensure the "purity of women." In a democratic age it begins to be realized that prostitutes also are women.

The developing sense of a fundamental human equality underlying the surface divisions of class tends to make the usual attitude towards the prostitute, the attitude of her clients even more than that of society generally, seem painfully cruel. The callous and coarsely frivolous tone of so many young men about prostitutes, it has been said, is "simply cruelty of a peculiarly brutal kind," not to be discerned in any other relation of life.[217] And if this attitude is cruel even in speech it is still more cruel in action, whatever attempts may be made to disguise its cruelty.

Canon Lyttelton's remarks may be taken to refer chiefly to young men of the upper middle class. Concerning what is perhaps the usual attitude of lower middle class people towards prostitution, I may quote from a remarkable communication which has reached me from Australia: "What are the views of a young man brought up in a middle-class Christian English family on prostitutes? Take my father, for instance. He first mentioned prostitutes to me, if I remember rightly, when speaking of his life before marriage. And he spoke of them as he would speak of a horse he had hired, paid for, and dismissed from his mind when it had rendered him service. Although my mother was so kind and good she spoke of abandoned women with disgust and scorn as of some unclean animal. As it flatters vanity and pride to be able with good countenance and universal consent to look down on something, I soon grasped the situation and adopted an attitude which is, in the main, that of most middle-class Christian Englishmen towards prostitutes. But as puberty develops this attitude has to be accommodated with the wish to make use of this scum, these moral lepers. The ordinary young man, who likes a spice of immorality and has it when in town, and thinks it is not likely to come to his mother's or sisters' ears, does not get over his arrogance and disgust or abate them in the least. He takes them with him, more or less disguised, to the brothel, and they color his thoughts and actions all the time he is sleeping with prostitutes, or kissing them, or passing his hands over them, as he would over a mare, getting as much as he can for his money. To tell the truth, on the whole, that was my attitude too. But if anyone had asked me for the smallest reason for this attitude, for this feeling of superiority, pride, hauteur, and prejudice, I should, like any other 'respectable' young man, have been entirely at a loss, and could only have gaped foolishly."

From the modern moral standpoint which now concerns us, not only is the cruelty involved in the dishonor of the prostitute absurd, but not less absurd, and often not less cruel, seems the honor bestowed on the respectable women on the other side of the social gulf. It is well recognized that men sometimes go to prostitutes to gratify the excitement aroused by fondling their betrothed.[218] As the emotional and physical results of ungratified excitement are not infrequently more serious in women than in men, the betrothed women in these cases are equally justified in seeking relief from other men, and the vicious circle of absurdity might thus be completed.

From the point of view of the modern moralist there is another consideration which was altogether overlooked in the conventional and traditional morality we have inherited, and was indeed practically non-existent in the ancient days when that morality was still a living reality. Women are no longer divided only into the two groups of wives who are to be honored, and prostitutes who are the dishonored guardians of that honor; there is a large third class of women who are neither wives nor prostitutes. For this group of the unmarried virtuous the traditional morality had no place at all; it simply ignored them. But the new moralist, who is learning to recognize both the claims of the individual and the claims of society, begins to ask whether on the one hand these women are not entitled to the satisfaction of their affectional and emotional impulses if they so desire, and on the other hand whether, since a high civilization involves a diminished birthrate, the community is not entitled to encourage every healthy and able-bodied woman to contribute to maintain the birthrate when she so desires.

All the considerations briefly indicated in the preceding pages—the fundamental sense of human equality generated by our civilization, the repugnance to cruelty which accompanies the refinement of urban life, the ugly contrast of extremes which shock our developing democratic tendencies, the growing sense of the rights of the individual to authority over his own person, the no less strongly emphasized right of the community to the best that the individual can yield—all these considerations are every day more strongly influencing the modern moralist to assume towards the prostitute an attitude altogether different from that of the morality which we derived from Cato and Augustine. He sees the question in a larger and more dynamic manner. Instead of declaring that it is well worth while to tolerate and at the same time to condemn the prostitute, in order to preserve the sanctity of the wife in her home, he is not only more inclined to regard each as the proper guardian of her own moral freedom, but he is less certain about the time-honored position of the prostitute, and moreover, by no means sure that the wife in the home may not be fully as much in need of rescuing as the prostitute in the street; he is prepared to consider whether reform in this matter is not most likely to take place in the shape of a fairer apportionment of sexual privileges and sexual duties to women generally, with an inevitably resultant elevation in the sexual lives of men also.

The revolt of many serious reformers against the injustice and degradation now involved by our system of prostitution is so profound that some have declared themselves ready to accept any revolution of ideas which would bring about a more wholesome transmutation of moral values. "Better indeed were a saturnalia of free men and women," exclaims Edward Carpenter (Love's Coming of Age, p. 62), "than the spectacle which, as it is, our great cities present at night."

Even those who would be quite content with as conservative a treatment as possible of social institutions still cannot fail to realize that prostitution is unsatisfactory, unless we are content to make very humble claims of the sexual act. "The act of prostitution," Godfrey declares (The Science of Sex, p. 202), "may be physiologically complete, but it is complete in no other sense. All the moral and intellectual factors which combine with physical desire to form the perfect sexual attraction are absent. All the higher elements of love—admiration, respect, honor, and self-sacrificing devotion—are as foreign to prostitution as to the egoistic act of masturbation. The principal drawbacks to the morality of the act lie in its associations more than in the act itself. Any affectional quality which a more or less promiscuous connection might possess is at once destroyed by the intrusion of the monetary element. In the resulting degradation the woman has the largest share, since it makes her a pariah and involves her in all the hardening and depraving influences of social ostracism. But her degradation only serves to render her influence on her partners more demoralizing. Prostitution," he concludes, "has a strong tendency towards emphasizing the naturally selfish attitude of men towards women, and encouraging them in the delusion, born of unregulated passions, that the sexual act itself is the aim and end of the sex life. Prostitution can therefore make no claim to afford even a temporary solution to the sex problem. It fulfils only that mission which has made it a 'necessary evil'—the mission of palliative to the physical rigors of celibacy and monogamy. It does so at the cost of a considerable amount of physical and moral deterioration, much of which is undoubtedly due to the action of society in completing the degradation of the prostitute by persistent ostracism. Prostitution was not so great an evil when it was not thought so great, yet even at its best it was a real evil, a melancholy and sordid travesty of sincere and natural passional relations. It is an evil which we are bound to have with us so long as celibacy is a custom and monogamy a law." It is the wife as well as the prostitute who is degraded by a system which makes venal love possible. "The time has gone past," the same writer remarks elsewhere (p. 195) "when a mere ceremony can really sanctify what is base and transform lust and greed into the sincerity of sexual affection. If, to enter into sexual connections with a man for a solely material end is a disgrace to humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much as apart from the hypocritical blessing of the church or the law. If the public prostitute is a being who deserves to be treated as a pariah, it is hopelessly irrational to withhold every sort of moral opprobrium from the woman who leads a similar life under a different set of external circumstances. Either the prostitute wife must come under the moral ban, or there must be an end to the complete ostracism under which the prostitute labors."

The thinker who more clearly and fundamentally than others, and first of all, realized the dynamical relationships of prostitution, as dependent upon a change in the other social relationships of life, was James Hinton. More than thirty years ago, in fragmentary writings that still remain unpublished, since he never worked them into an orderly form, Hinton gave vigorous and often passionate expression to this fundamental idea. It may be worth while to quote a few brief passages from Hinton's MSS.: "I feel that the laws of force should hold also amid the waves of human passion, that the relations of mechanics are true, and will rule also in human life.... There is a tension, a crushing of the soul, by our modern life, and it is ready for a sudden spring to a different order in which the forces shall rearrange themselves. It is a dynamical question presented in moral terms.... Keeping a portion of the woman population without prospect of marriage means having prostitutes, that is women as instruments of man's mere sensuality, and this means the killing, in many of them, of all pure love or capacity of it. This is the fact we have to face.... To-day I saw a young woman whose life was being consumed by her want of love, a case of threatened utter misery: now see the price at which we purchase her ill-health; for her ill-health we pay the crushing of another girl into hell. We give that for it; her wretchedness of soul and body are bought by prostitution; we have prostitutes made for that.... We devote some women recklessly to perdition to make a hothouse Heaven for the rest.... One wears herself out in vainly trying to endure pleasures she is not strong enough to enjoy, while other women are perishing for lack of these very pleasures. If marriage is this, is it not embodied lust? The happy Christian homes are the true dark places of the earth.... Prostitution for man, restraint for woman—they are two sides of the same thing, and both are denials of love, like luxury and asceticism. The mountains of restraint must be used to fill up the abysses of luxury."

Some of Hinton's views were set forth by a writer intimately acquainted with him in a pamphlet entitled The Future of Marriage: An Eirenicon for a Question of To-day, by a Respectable Woman (1885). "When once the conviction is forced home upon the 'good' women," the writer remarks, "that their place of honor and privilege rests upon the degradation of others as its basis, they will never rest till they have either abandoned it or sought for it some other pedestal. If our inflexible marriage system has for its essential condition the existence side by side with it of prostitution, then one of two things follows: either prostitution must be shown to be compatible with the well-being, moral and physical, of the women who practice it, or our marriage system must be condemned. If it was clearly put before anyone, he could not seriously assert that to be 'virtue' which could only be practiced at the expense of another's vice.... Whilst the laws of physics are becoming so universally recognized that no one dreams of attempting to annihilate a particle of matter, or of force, yet we do not instinctively apply the same conception to moral forces, but think and act as if we could simply do away with an evil, while leaving unchanged that which gives it its strength. This is the only view of the social problem which can give us hope. That prostitution should simply cease, leaving everything else as it is, would be disastrous if it were possible. But it is not possible. The weakness of all existing efforts to put down prostitution is that they are directed against it as an isolated thing, whereas it is only one of the symptoms proceeding from a common disease."

Ellen Key, who during recent years has been the chief apostle of a gospel of sexual morality based on the needs of women as the mothers of the race, has, in a somewhat similar spirit, denounced alike prostitution and rigid marriage, declaring (in her Essays on Love and Marriage) that "the development of erotic personal consciousness is as much hindered by socially regulated 'morality' as by socially regulated 'immorality,'" and that "the two lowest and socially sanctioned expressions of sexual dualism, rigid marriage and prostitution, will gradually become impossible, because with the conquest of the idea of erotic unity they will no longer correspond to human needs."

We may sum up the present situation as regards prostitution by saying that on the one hand there is a tendency for its elevation, in association with the growing humanity and refinement of civilization, characteristics which must inevitably tend to mark more and more both those women who become prostitutes and those men who seek them; on the other hand, but perhaps through the same dynamic force, there is a tendency towards the slow elimination of prostitution by the successful competition of higher and purer methods of sexual relationship freed from pecuniary considerations. This refinement and humanization, this competition by better forms of sexual love, are indeed an essential part of progress as civilization becomes more truly sound, wholesome, and sincere.

This moral change cannot, it seems probable, fail to be accompanied by the realization that the facts of human life are more important than the forms. For all changes from lower to higher social forms, from savagery to civilization, are accompanied—in so far as they are vital changes—by a slow and painful groping towards the truth that it is only in natural relations that sanity and sanctity can be found, for, as Nietzsche said, the "return" to Nature should rather be called the "ascent." Only so can we achieve the final elimination from our hearts of that clinging tradition that there is any impurity or dishonor in acts of love for which the reasonable, and not merely the conventional, conditions have been fulfilled. For it is vain to attempt to cleanse our laws, or even our by-laws, until we have first cleansed our hearts.

It would be out of place here to push further the statement of the moral question as it is to-day beginning to shape itself in the sphere of sex. In a psychological discussion we are only concerned to set down the actual attitude of the moralist, and of civilization. The practical outcome of that attitude must be left to moralists and sociologists and the community generally to work out.

Our inquiry has also, it may be hoped, incidentally tended to show that in practically dealing with the question of prostitution it is pre-eminently necessary to remember the warning which, as regards many other social problems, has been embodied by Herbert Spencer in his famous illustration of the bent iron plate. In trying to make the bent plate smooth, it is useless, Spencer pointed out, to hammer directly on the buckled up part; if we do so we merely find that we have made matters worse; our hammering, to be effective, must be around, and not directly on, the offensive elevation we wish to reduce; only so can the iron plate be hammered smooth.[219] But this elementary law has not been understood by moralists. The plain, practical, common-sense reformer, as he fancied himself to be—from the time of Charlemagne onwards—has over and over again brought his heavy fist directly down on to the evil of prostitution and has always made matters worse. It is only by wisely working outside and around the evil that we can hope to lessen it effectually. By aiming to develop and raise the relationships of men to women, and of women to women, by modifying our notions of sexual relationships, and by introducing a saner and truer conception of womanhood and of the responsibilities of women as well as of men, by attaining, socially as well as economically, a higher level of human living—it is only by such methods as these that we can reasonably expect to see any diminution and alleviation of the evil of prostitution. So long as we are incapable of such methods we must be content with the prostitution we deserve, learning to treat it with the pity, and the respect, which so intimate a failure of our civilization is entitled to.

About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books.

This book is part of the public domain. Havelock Ellis (2004). Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13615/pg13615-images.html

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org, located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.