They reply that the typist’s worn-out looks, her lost beauty, her faded youth, her hopeless expression and outlook, are not the result of a life of immorality, therefore she is honourable, therefore she need not be rescued, therefore everything is all right, therefore nothing need be done.
But enough! The wide-awake will see at once that there is cant in the very frown that is vouchsafed to sexual prostitution—cant, the inevitable ingredient of every movement and every counter-movement in these islands.[120]
The evils of prostitution are no greater and no more tragic than those of any other form of exploitation of the individual. That which unnecessarily aggravates the horrors of the public courtesan’s life in England is not necessarily the natural consequences of the life itself, but the whole attitude of the community and of the legislature to the question of prostitution in general.[121]
Society in England seems resolutely determined not to face and answer the question: Is prostitution necessary or unnecessary? If it is necessary to the kind of civilization we have evolved, then the only honourable, the only humane, the only magnanimous course to take, is to face it bravely and honestly, and do all we can for those women who are contributing their lives to a public service, just as we do all we can for soldiers and sailors in war-time, and for all public workers who perform useful and dangerous duties for the public weal. If it is unnecessary, then steps should be taken to find out why it continues to exist, what flaw in our social system accounts for its survival, despite the fact that it is superfluous; and how that flaw can be best removed.
The general consensus of opinion among European legislators and the European public must be to the effect that prostitution is necessary. It is inconceivable that it should be allowed to survive as flourishingly as it does in England and on the Continent, if public opinion and the legislators in each country could find no excuse for it. What is still more inconceivable, however, is the diabolical hypocrisy of a public, which at the same time tacitly assents to it as a social need, and yet covers with shame and contempt those who devote their lives to making it possible.
Truth to tell, there are many grave reasons why prostitution[122] still constitutes a necessary adjunct to our topsy-turvy, hare-brained social system, and as long as it remains as topsy-turvy and hare-brained as it is, the prostitute will continue to be indispensable. In view of this fact, it is but rational, not to mention humane, to regard with more solicitude and charity those who from what motive, or through what circumstances soever, supply the means for its existence.
I will touch but lightly on two aspects of society which seem to contribute chiefly to the causes making prostitution a public necessity. I refer to (a) the virgin ideal in marriage, or parthenogamy, and (b) the economic system which compels thousands among the men of the struggling classes to marry at a date very much later than their physiological development would indicate as reasonable.[123]
(a) In order to preserve the custom of parthenogamy in conjunction with (b) it is obvious that there must be some safety-valve, some outlet for the expression of virile passions, which while being normal is capable of safeguarding a certain large body of virgins annually, and of preserving them from pre-connubial amours. The fact that, at present, this safety-valve or outlet, though countenanced by society, is entirely neglected, despised and concealed by the public, and is thus allowed to breed many evils which are not necessary to prostitution per se, is not so much a reflection on the prostitute as upon the administration which leaves this department of social life utterly uncared for and unorganized.
(b) Apart altogether from the fact that late marriages resulting from economic pressure necessitate the existence of some relief measure which will preclude the deleterious alternative of repression, or unnatural vice, in young men; for the adolescent, as we have seen in the Chapter on Marriage, it is highly desirable that there should be some school, some opportunity for experience in sexual relations, as there was in ancient Greece, for instance, in which the young male, in addition to finding the means of healthily delaying marriage, may also acquire that mastery in the mysteries of life without which his future marriage may very seriously suffer. It is one of the most scandalous features of modern society that, while this relief measure and this school are allowed to exist, nothing is done to protect either the women who supply its personnel, or the young men who resort to it, from all the worst consequences of promiscuity and vice.
The old moralists or moralizers of the nineteenth century, now thank goodness rapidly becoming extinct, used to justify this scandal by arguing that the dangers attending the recourse to the prostitute served a good purpose in two respects: (1) They offered a strong inducement to sexual abstinence among young men, and (2) they cast the well-merited stigma of shame and disease upon those women who ministered to these young men’s ungovernable passions.