If the girl further knew the physiological consequences of her transgression, if she knew that she may become gravid, and thus publish to the world her folly, such cases as are often seen in maternity hospitals of girls between the ages of twelve to fifteen years being already pregnant, without knowing the sex relation, would never be met with.[BS] Many of these girls have no adequate idea of the result of congressus, because no one has told them.
The prophylactic value of education, which has been applied to the prevention of almost all communicable diseases, would surely also be seen in this dreadful disease, this cancer of the body politic, meretricious venery, this plague of prostitution which poisons the very sources of the family and of the state. But for the prevailing ignorance of the girls, regarding the dangers and pitfalls that beset their lives’ pathway, one million girls would not have been led into a life of shame in this country.[BT] These unfortunate girls do not all come from the slums of the great cities, as the economic determinists would like to make us believe, but many come from refined country homes.[BU] Most of these devotees of meretricious venery have become so through the fundamental vice of laziness and defective mentality. It is sentimentality pure and simple always to speak of betrayed innocence or dire poverty.[BV] A vicious disposition, love of pleasure, and the gratification of the erotic desires,[BW] are, as a rule, responsible for the majority of girls embracing the profession of prostitution. But the most serious among the factors which work together to bring many a girl to ruin, is ignorance and the lack of proper instruction. If the girl knew that the career of the venal woman lasts scarcely five to ten years,[BX] and that it is a large sewer, a garbage dump and a crematory, she would surely not be so easily led to embrace this vile profession. If the girl knew these facts, it is inconceivable that even the mentally defective girl would prefer this short life of silks and satins and then annihilation to a respectable life, even of poverty.
The girl, therefore, must be warned against the allurements of meretricious venery. She must be told that the average duration of the career of the venal woman is very short, and that embracing this profession is almost tantamount to committing suicide. Before the girl has made the fatal step, she has to be shown the great slavery and misery prostitution brings upon those who embrace it as a profession, and that the career of the prostitute lasts no longer than five to ten years in the average. Then come ruin and the morgue.
But the young girls are started in life entirely ignorant of all the dangers about them, and the result is the vast army of unfortunates. In this way venereal diseases persist, sexual crimes abound, degeneracy remains and countless victims, year after year, pay the penalty of ignorance.
The best prophylaxis of impurity is the avoidance of intoxicating beverages, chance acquaintances, vanity and pleasure-seeking. The girl’s attention has to be called to the danger lying in the habit of drinking intoxicating liquors. A girl has only to taste a drop of liquor in a strange man’s company, and her chastity is in the greatest danger to desert her for good. It will not take very long before this girl will indulge in the excessive use of alcohol, which dulls the moral sense of men and women.[BY]
The girl has further to beware of the danger of chance acquaintances. Young men of such acquaintances, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, will do all in their power to induce a girl to drink intoxicating liquors, and, when she has become excited by the unaccustomed beverage, they will ruin her chastity.
The girl must particularly be warned of the great danger lying in vanity of personal appearance. Many a girl has sold her virtue for fine clothes and outside finery, many a girl has sold her health, morality and even her soul for a few showy bawbles.
Last but not least, there is danger in pleasure-seeking and in an absorbing love of gaiety.[BZ] The seducer, says Block (Zeitschr. f. Bekämpf. d. Geschtskr., Vol. X, p. 75), is really not the particular man but the big city. The luxurious hotels, restaurants, music-halls, theatres, etc., and the elegant clothes of the rich allure the poor shop-girls, milliners, dressmakers and servant girls to the career of the mistress in such big numbers that a pure girl over twenty-five years of age is rarely found in this class in the big cities in Europe.
Alcohol, vanity and pleasure-seeking thus lead to the evil of impurity and to a life of ruin, desolation, sickness and degradation. A girl must, therefore, be made acquainted with all these pitfalls, in the outside world, before she leaves her mother’s protecting presence. She has to learn above all the high and holy function of her genital apparatus and of the sickness, shame and sorrow which are sure to follow any profanation of these functions. The subject of venereal prophylaxis has been altogether too largely taboo among us, hence the venereal diseases continue to rot the core of society, leaving blindness, deformity, invalidism and death in their train disseminate.
Even the girl who is sent to college has to know all the dangers and pitfalls in the outside world. In addition she has to be warned against the sex-overvaluation by the unhealthy sensualists of indulgence, found in the modern literature of the so-called feminists. All those novels, that are written by the modern woman, says Howard, show an itching of the sexual centre. The passion is there, but perverted, unsatisfied, masturbatic. They wish to make man the weak slave of his or her erotic excitement. They call it in German “Sich ausleben,” “to live out your life.”