We certainly do need balance.
The word chastity conveys to the mind (and this is not confined to the undeveloped person, but is general) the idea of a woman who is devoid of the sex-impulse. Chastity, like the word virtue, suggests to our minds no relationship to the character, or inner nature of a person; it has come to be applied to the physical anatomy, and we are not surprised when we realize that the word is seldom used in connection with the male. It is strictly a female attribute—nay, we may almost say, "organ."
If a woman, for any reason whatsoever, whether through lack of opportunity; through hereditary causes; or through repression, or—which occurs more frequently—as a commercial expediency, believing that her person will thus bring more in the matrimonial market—if, as we say, for any reason, however sordid, a woman escapes bodily sex-contact, she is called "chaste" and her "virtue" is extolled.
This is, of course, not a far cry from the ancient days when a bridegroom had the right to turn the bride away from his door, should the evidence of her virginity be lacking; whereupon the poor creature was stoned to death, a sacrifice on the altar of Egoism, the arch-enemy of both sexes.
And although it seems a long, long time from that day to this, we may look back over the Ages, and see the thread unbroken, connecting the Past with the Present; uniting the women of those days with their sisters of today; and we find the answer to this far-off outrage upon the spiritual function of sex, in the horrors of our white slavery, among which horrors, the greatest is not alone the barter and sale of that which should be recognized as sacred, but the perversions, the deceptions and the subterfuges which it entails. One instance, related by a trained nurse who had been in attendance upon a girl sixteen years of age, will suffice to illustrate this. The girl, encouraged by her mother, related with amusement and satisfaction, how the child had "sold her virtue" on seven different occasions, procuring for the same, proven by the requisite evidences, sums which were considered quite exorbitant in view of the fact that the market was always over-crowded with similar sales.
Thus, the law of supply and demand is ever preserved; and human beings keep right on selling their royal birthright for a mess of pottage; inviting disease, decay and death when they might have glorious, blissful life.
Mankind has failed to look for virtue in the interior nature; failed to look for beauty of soul, being ever ready to pay the highest price for the counterfeit, and the result is that a practice of mutual deception has been the rule.
Some years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote a story about a girl in the wretched environment of middle-class England. He called it the story of a "pure woman," and his appraisal of the heroine as a pure woman brought out a storm of reproach and horrified criticism, particularly from the clergy, because it chanced that this poor girl had given birth to a child out of wedlock; and notwithstanding that the author made it quite clear that she had been the victim of circumstances and coercion, the act itself condemned her to unchastity in the eyes of the clerical critics.
When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have ever held toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheld almost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on one hypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized in the story of the Holy Mother and the Child the One primordial, and indestructible key to salvation—the birth of the god-man through the recognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union.
But, notwithstanding the medieval trend of religious mysticism (there is a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism) which seemed to regard all human love as a weakness, when not actually sinful as in sex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychic aspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardently described in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness."