What are the reasons for chastity before and fidelity after marriage?
(1) The most glaring danger for a man in unchastity is disease. The venereal diseases are among the most terrible known to man; they are highly contagious-one contact, and that not necessarily actual intercourse, sufficing for infection-and at present only very partially curable. Practically all prostitutes become infected before long; the youngest and prettiest are usually diseased; the chance of indulging in promiscuous intimacies without catching some form of infection is slight. The only sure way of escape from this imminent danger is by the exclusive love of one man and one woman. Moreover, these diseases are, in their effects, transmissible from husband to wife and from wife to children. Many women's diseases, a large part of their sterility, of miscarriages and infant deaths, a large proportion of the paralysis, insanity, and blindness in the world, are due to the sins of a husband or parent. Thus the penalty for a single misstep may be very grim; and the worst of it is that it must often be shared by the innocent. [Footnote: See Prince Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage. W. L. Howard, Plain Facts on Sex Hygiene.]
(2) For a girl the danger of disease is not all. There is the additional danger of pregnancy, which means, and must mean, for her not only pain and risk of life, but lasting shame and disgrace. Even paid prostitutes, who are willing to employ dangerous methods to prevent conception, and soon become nearly sterile through disease or overindulgence, often have to resort to illegal operations, at the risk of their lives, and not infrequently come to childbirth. The virgin who gives herself to her lover under the spell of his ardent wooing is very much more likely to conceive. It cannot be too bluntly stated that the barest contact may suffice for conception; for a momentary intimacy two lives, or three, have often been ruined.
(3) The reason why society cannot afford to be lenient with illegitimacy is that there is no proper provision for rearing children born out of wedlock. The woman and the child usually need the financial support of the man; they always need his love and care. If the man marries the girl he has wronged, there is not only the disgrace still attaching to her (and rightly to him, still more), but the fact of a hasty and unintended and probably more or less unhappy marriage. Certainly in every such case the girl has a right to demand that the man shall marry her; whether or no she will wish him to, or will prefer to bear her burden and disgrace alone, is for her to determine. But this is sure that any man who takes the chance of ruining a foolish and ignorant or oversusceptible girl "and all for a bit of pleasure, as, if he had a man's heart in him, he 'd ha' cut his hand off sooner than he'd ha' taken it" [Footnote: George Eliot's Adam Bede, from which these words are taken, ought to be read by every boy and girl.]- ought to be despised and socially ostracized by his fellows. Except for the penalty of disease, women have always borne the brunt of sexual follies, though men have been the more to blame. It is high time that this injustice were remedied to such extent as law and public opinion can do it.
(4) The employment of paid prostitutes for man's gratification keeps in existence the unhappiest and most degraded class in the world. Brutalized and worn by their abnormal life, treated with coarse indignities which they cannot resent, deprived of their birthright of genuine love, of wifehood and motherhood, stricken with disease and doomed to an early death, thousands of the prettiest, reddest-blooded, most promising young girls of our land, the girls who ought to be bearing healthy children and rearing the future citizens of the State, now walk the streets painted and gaudily bedecked, seeking their miserable livelihood, and snaring the heedless and restless youth of the cities, the "young men void of understanding," to their common degradation. This human wastage is worse upon the race than war; and all the more pathetic because it consists of girls scarcely past the threshold of their maidenhood. When we consider further the indescribably horrible cruelty of the "white-slave trade," which the insatiable lust of men has brought into being, we may begin to realize to what the absence of restraint upon this appetite has led.
It is quite conceivable that within the near future the venereal diseases will be rendered entirely curable by the progress of medicine. It is possible that some certain and harmless method of preventing conception will be found and become so universally known that the danger of unintentional childbirth will become practically nonexistent. Such a situation would remove the most obvious reasons for chastity, and would insure a rapid growth of free-love sentiment. It would be pointed out that free love would do away with the shameful existence of the paid prostitutes, and that thus all four of the basic reasons above given for chastity would no longer exist. To discuss such possibilities may seem premature. But as a matter of fact, even now every one who indulges in "free" love hopes to escape disease and conception. And there is an increasing propaganda insisting on the removal of the old conventions and the permission of promiscuous love. The spirit of adventure is in the air; and with even a good chance of escaping the penalties, there are many who will seize their opportunities for enjoyment, preferring a present pleasure with its spice of risk to a dull negation of desire. We must then go on with the argument and point out that even where these terrible results are escaped, the way of free love is not the happiest way.
(5) Freedom from restraint in inter-sex relations inevitably leads, in the majority of men and women, to an overindulgence which seriously impairs health and efficiency. The one salient motive for the opposition of ancient codes to sex license was the necessity of preserving the virility of the young men for war. Today athletes are enjoined to chastity. But, indeed, if a man would succeed in anything, he must check this so easily overdeveloped impulse. Promiscuity means a continually renewed stimulus; the passion, which quickly becomes normal and intermittent when it spends itself upon one object, is apt to become an abnormal and almost continuous craving when it is solicited by a succession of novel and piquant attractions. The advocates of free love assert that it is unnatural repression that creates an undue and morbid longing; that freedom to satisfy the instinct would tend to keep it in its properly subordinate place. But the contrary is, in reality, true. More usually, as Rabelais has it, "the appetite comes during the eating." The absence of temptation will leave an instinct dormant which free opportunity to indulge will develop into a dominant appetite. And nothing more quickly drafts strength or ambition than absorption in sex pleasures; we need to put our energies into something that instead of being inimical is forwarding to the rest of our interests.
(6) Sexual intemperance coarsens, blunts delight in the less violent and more delicate emotions. The pleasures of sex, though of the keenest, are not lasting, like those of the intellect, of religion, art, and manly achievement. But if recklessly indulged in, they inevitably sap our interest in these other ideals. Except where they spring from and reinforce true affection, they are an opiate, taking us into a dream world that makes actual life stale and tasteless. "Hold off from sensuality," says Cicero; "for if you give yourself up to it, you will be unable to think of anything else." There is so much else that is worthwhile, life has so many possible values, that for our own final happiness, we cannot afford to let this instinct usurp too great a place. The vision of God is worth many hours of transient and shallow excitement; and that vision comes only to the pure in heart.
(7) But even for the greatest pleasure in sex itself, incontinence is a blunder. The one telling argument for free love is the sweetness of the delights that the chaste must miss; the bodily intimacy that soothes the lonely heart, the adventurous excitement of breaking down barriers, of dominance and surrender, with its quickened breathing and heightened sense of living. But the plea comes usually from the inexperienced; it is the yearning of youth toward the lure of the untried ways, of the untasted joys. Actually, where passion is unbridled, the halo and the vision quickly vanish; the sated impulse becomes a restless craving for more violent stimulation, a thirst that no mere physical intimacy can ever assuage; or it leaves the heart cloyed and despondent and resourceless. This is the natural history of undisciplined passion; it cheapens love, it robs it quickly of its exquisiteness and charm. The faithful lover, on the other hand, by checking premature intimacies, and keeping true to the one woman who calls or will some day call out all his love, knows a steady joy that bulks in the end far greater than the flaring and fitful and quickly disillusioned passions of unearned love. Where the veil of mystery is not too rudely drawn aside, the ability to respond to the charm of girlhood and of ripe womanhood may be long retained; the pleasures of sex that count for most in the end are not the moments of passion, but the daily enjoyment of companionship with the opposite sex, the assurance and comfort of mutual fidelity, the love that feeds on daily caresses, endearing words, and acts of tender service. And these lasting joys do not accrue to the man or woman who is not willing to wait, or who squanders his potentialities of love in reckless and fundamentally unsatisfying debauchery. This is the paradox of love; whoso would find its best gifts must be willing to deny himself its gaudiest. The old love of twos, the loyalty of man and wife that bring to each other pure hearts and bodies, is best.
(8) There are, besides, certain practical consequences of which experience warns. Free love would mean that the pretty and well- developed girls, the handsomer and physically stronger men, would be besieged with solicitations and almost inevitably debauched by excess of temptation, while the less attractive would starve for love. It would mean jealousies, deserted lovers, and broken hearts. Free love is especially hard on a woman; she readily becomes attached, and craves loyalty. Inconstancy, though it is so natural to man as often to need the pressure of law and convention for its repression, is not only the worst enemy of his own happiness, but the inevitable source of friction and clash between men and between women. If freedom to break the troth that love instinctively plights is allowed, the chances are numerous that one or the other will some day discover another "affinity" that, at least for the time, seems closer and better suited to him; unless a stern loyalty prevents, one or two or three hearts may be broken. Our monogamous code-whose iological value is clearly indicated by its adoption by most of the higher animals (not counting the domesticated animals, whose morals have been hopelessly ruined)-stands among the wisest of our ideals.