Sexual ethics

by Auguste Forel

Every woman who is healthy and strong should be proud of becoming a mother. If sexual intercourse were frankly and naturally treated as one of the most important acts in human life, the paternity of the child would be easily ascertainable. A woman should not wait until the birth of the child before speaking of it, but should promptly make a formal declaration as to its parentage to the registrar of births as soon as she becomes aware of her pregnancy. This would be easily practicable if all girls received proper instruction regarding the most important function of their lives. Instead of this, everything is now concealed from them, and they are brought up in gross ignorance of their sexual nature and duties.

If every pregnancy were at once legally recognised in this way, and if the law would determine the responsibilities of both parents towards their offspring, untrammelled by marriage laws and with the well-being of society as its only aim, the most pressing need of our time, from the standpoint of sexual ethics, would be satisfied. A complete equality can only be attained by naming all children after the mother. This is, moreover, the only rational and just system. It was formerly the custom among many primitive peoples.

None of these reforms, however, need in any way debar the formation of voluntary marriage contracts. Such contracts are, indeed, distinctly advisable, for the voluntary resolve of two people to remain faithful to one another, and to build up a permanent home for their children, is at once the best, truest, and most natural foundation of marriage.

But no one can foresee the future, and therefore simple facilities for divorce must be provided in case it becomes intolerable or inexpedient for the two persons to live together any longer. A divorce must take place if one or both of the parties wish for it. The State and the Law must only have the right to demand the fulfilment by the parents of all obligations towards their children. Marriage contracts for a fixed period are therefore as such not immoral. Such agreements have even been recommended by the Christian philosopher Charles Secrétan, in his book Le Droit de la Femme.

Sterile marriages, or other sex relationships, must be free. The law has no concern with them as long as they do not involve injury to any one’s property, health, or personal will. They are in themselves ethically indifferent.

On the other hand, all sexual intercourse which is bought or sold, such as marriage for money, the keeping of paid mistresses, and the whole system of prostitution, is immoral, because it is corrupting and devoid of love, and amounts simply to plunder by the aid of money. Prostitution is a hotbed of sexual vices and abnormal practices. By its means the sexual instinct is perverted and led astray into every imaginable bypath, while women are degraded in the basest of all slaveries.

Most repulsive of all, from the point of view of ethics, is the trade in prostitutes known as the “white slave traffic,” with its criminal devices for the enticement, intimidation, and seduction of young girls. The traffic in waitresses for cafés and beer-gardens is often little better. It is sad enough to reflect that these loathsome outgrowths of sexual immorality often still enjoy the protection of the State, and that many medical men defend their continuance under the pretext of hygiene. It is just in this very respect that we see that social hygiene and ethics are one and the same thing. Only the idiotic one-sidedness of your specialist could declare such a monstrosity as State-established prostitution to be hygienic. A system which makes for the mental and physical ruin of the race cannot be hygienic, and the delusion that by its aid men are protected from venereal disease is in direct conflict with the actual facts.

Moreover, sexual intercourse which is bought and sold has no relation to love. As a mode of gratifying the sex instinct it stands even lower in the moral scale than the habit of self-abuse. And any man who makes use of prostitution becomes an accomplice in creating this miserable class of outcasts whom we speak of as “unfortunates.” In short, whoremongery and prostitution are a social cancer, and therefore in the highest degree immoral. They furnish an instance of the manner in which money corrupts our whole civilisation. This corrupting influence, with its robbery of one man by another, makes itself felt in every department of life, and is exercised by every form of private capital.

The climax of immorality in the cult of Mammon is reached, however, by the capital employed in maintaining the two great evils of alcohol and prostitution, both of which act as bloodsuckers upon the vitality of the individual, the race, and all that is holiest in men. These two forms of capital work hand in hand, fashioning the goddess of love in the likeness of a lewd, sordid harlot, with the man as at once her ravisher and her victim. They are also the worst enemies of our descendants, whose procreation is often undertaken in a moment of intoxication, and whose lives are exposed to the risk of alcoholic degeneration or venereal disease!