[BO] In the girl a certain kind of nocturnal ejaculation also takes place, manifested by an abundant discharge from the Bartholinian glands and the expulsion of Kristeller’s slimy plug from the cervix. These phenomena during sleep are usually of a vague kind in young girls and are seldom impressed upon their consciousness. The real pollution that awakens the sleeper and leaves its traces in the individual’s memory occurs usually only in boys, and in the female sex only, after a perfect orgasm has been experienced in the state of wakening.
[BP] Vide B. S. Talmey; Contribution to the study of the Aetiology of Varicocele; New York Medical Journal, July 14, 1894.
[BQ] To be sure this will mean preaching the morality of fear, and it may be objected that “burglary is wrong, irrespective whether the burglar does or does not get caught.” But the teaching of pure ethics is best left to the minister, who is the natural teacher of morality. The latter, with all the authority of religion, cannot prevent sex irregularities. Rev. J. M. Wilson (Journ. of Education, 1881) says: “Emotional religious appeals are far from rooting out sensuality and sometimes even stimulate licentiousness.” This is a confession of the ministry that, as far as chastity is concerned, pure ethics seem to have been a complete failure. Hence, the pedagogue and physician will have to give other, more appealing reasons for the avoidance of a promiscuous life. Besides this, the morality of fear is a pretty good working morality. The Bible (Exodus xx, 5 and 12, and xxii, 23, the observance of a command carries its reward and the transgression of a prohibition its punishment) often preaches the morality of fear, and upon the Biblical morality all the western civilizations are founded. Morality is the arrest of the instincts by the intellect, and the intellect always asks for the ethical “why.” The instincts are the voices of the past generations, reverberating like distant echoes in the cells of the nervous system. To overcome this powerful inheritance, the intellect needs a sound, valid reason, and the best reason will be, if we can show the violator of the usages of society that he is not only injuring himself but that he does harm to others. An immoral act must harm somebody. A man alone in the world can not be immoral. If humanity suddenly perished, leaving only one man on earth, there would be no morality left for him. There is no moral precept which is not a social precept, no other duty except toward one’s neighbor. If human sanitation and the universal intelligent use of venereal prophylaxis could banish venereal diseases from this planet, there would be no medical sex-problem, although there might still remain some sex-problems for the sociologists to solve.
But venereal diseases are still here among us. If prostitution could be expelled from our earth, the generations following such a happy catastrophe would be free of venereal diseases. But as humanity seems to be now constituted, we shall have to wait a long time for the spontaneous disappearance of this plague. Even in the ideal state of society, dreamt of by our economic determinists, prostitution will still be in existence, as long as we continue to breed mental defects. Only a very small percentage of prostitution is due to economic conditions. In the great majority of cases it is absence of every moral principle and will-power which determine the girls to embrace this unhappy profession. Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky (Etudes anthropométriques sur les voleuses et prostituées) found that professional prostitutes are imperfect beings, affected by arrest of development, generally due to morbid heredity, and present mental and physical signs of degeneracy in accord with their imperfect evolution. They accept their abject trade agreeably and do not want to change it. Laziness and absence of moral sense are the principal traits characteristic of the prostitute. Dr. Olga Bridgman (Jour. Amer. Med. Assoc., August 16, 1913) found among a hundred and four sexually immoral girls, examined at admission at the State training school for girls at Geneva, one hundred and one or ninety-seven per cent. feeble-minded and only three normal. Dr. Edith E. Spaulding, Physician, Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, Sherborn, Mass. (The Amer. Social Hygiene Assoc. Bulletin, May, 1914), has completed a study of the mental and physical factors in the cases of 244 girls leading a life of prostitution. Of these over ninety-nine per cent. had one of the venereal diseases, fifty per cent. had both syphilis and gonorrhoea. Of the total number 60 per cent. showed syphilis and 89 per cent. gonorrhoea. The mental and environmental factors disclosed by this investigation are no less valuable and interesting. In only 15 per cent. did environmental conditions alone seem to have determined the entrance into a life of prostitution, the remaining eighty-five per cent. showed some underlying mental or physical defect.
All these investigations tend to show that defective mentality is responsible for the presence of prostitution. Prostitution, therefore, will always be with us, as long as we allow mental defectives to propagate. With the presence of prostitution, the venereal scourge will rage among us, unless we can convince men to stay away from contamination.
[BR] This course will mean a much larger task than merely lobbying a bill through the legislature for the eradication of prostitution, the common remedy of the reformer. It will come only by the slowest and most difficult of processes and by that hardest of all work in the world, i. e., thinking.
The off-hand reformers are too impatient with the slow and toilsome process of competent and judicious sex-education. For them a law, forbidding the marriage of the diseased, suffices to eradicate hereditary syphilis and ophthalmia neonatorum. As a rule, their laws often intensify the very ills they seek to cure. To the average reformer life is presented in a stark and rigid outline. He has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of values. Even when he acquiesce in the slow, patient, laborious study of sex, he is blandly unconscious of distinctions. He at once exaggerates matters. He can not see that the truth about sex may be imparted to the child by parents, family physician or teacher, but that it cannot be acquired by the child from the platform, stage, novel or the ubiquitous magazine.
[BS] Lewis (D. Amer. Jour. Derm., 1906) has known girls of thirteen and fourteen years of age quæ conceptaverunt without realizing their condition. The author examined once a gravid girl of seventeen years who had no idea what pregnancy means and where hers resulted from.
[BT] Woodruff (Expansion of Races, p. 193) estimates about one million prostitutes in this country. Roe asserts that the average life of these girls is about five years. This means that two hundred thousand prostitutes die every year in the United States and are replaced by new ones, or two hundred thousand girls are led into a life of shame, every year, in this country.
[BU] Belaschko’s statistics show that fifty-five per cent. of all the venal women in Berlin come from the great cities and forty-five per cent. from the country. Thirty-four per cent. of these girls belonged to middle-class families and three per cent. of them were graduates from high schools.