“In the sensual life, imponderabilia play a leading part, and many an effort towards improvement, many a reform, has been shattered against them, simply because the would-be reformer has overlooked the finer threads which connect the human soul with the institutions and customs of the material world.”—Willy Hellpach.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XII
Difference between free love and wild love — The danger of wild love — Forms the bridge to prostitution — Its connexion with the sensual life and with seduction — The peculiarities of modern epicureanism — Restless character of the sensual life — The life of “amusement” — The erotic aim of this life — Sexual excesses of the present day — Heedlessness of wild love — Influence of large towns on the sensual life — Nocturnal life — Character of the pleasures of large towns — Increase of sexual tension — Pursuit of pleasure among the common people — The increasing number of young embezzlers — Public seduction — Professional seduction — History of the art of love — Its gradual spiritualization — Seducer types — Don Juan and Casanova — British Don-Juanism — The domineering erotic, and the erotic genius — Kierkegaarde, “Diary of a Seducer” — Pseudo Don-Juanism — Printed guide-books to the sensual life for the modern man of pleasure — Influence of the mode of life upon the sexual life — Alcohol as the incorporation of evil in this respect — Analysis of its influence on the vita sexualis — Its peculiar duplex influence — Utilization of this influence by prostitutes and seducers — Alcoholism and venereal diseases — Absinthe in France — Share of alcohol in producing offences against morality — Encouragement of wild love by alcohol — Connexion of illegitimate births with alcoholic excess — Increase of wild love at the present day — “Intimacy” (“das Verhältnis”) — Its gradual degeneration — History of the origination of the “intimacy,” and psychological explanations thereof — Increasing similarity between the nature of the “intimacy” and the conditions of prostitution — Causes — Frequent changes of “intimates” — The diffusion of venereal diseases by means of wild love — Rôle of lies, mistrust, and hatred therein — Produces disbelief in love — Wild love and coercive marriage — Causes of sexual corruption — Need for the campaign against wild love and sexual libertinism — Hellmann’s book on sexual libertinism — Attitude of the medical man towards “extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse — Increasing aversion to wild love — The increase in free ideal love unions — Wild love as the transitional stage to prostitution.
CHAPTER XII
In the previous chapter we repeatedly drew attention to the fact that free love is not identical with the sexual promiscuity indulged in at the present day to such an alarming extent and with such disastrous consequences—sexual promiscuity in the form of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, irregular in character, and dependent almost entirely upon chance.
I am an ardent advocate of “free love,” by which I understand sexual union based upon intimate love, personal harmony, and spiritual affinity, entered on by the free resolve of both parties, involving the assumption of all the duties entailed by such free unions, and with satisfactory mutual assurances regarding health. But with corresponding emphasis I must condemn, from the standpoint of the physician and from that of public hygiene, and also on ethical grounds, the now so widely diffused “extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse, for which, in order to distinguish it from the entirely different extra-conjugal “free” love, I suggest the term “wild love.”
This wild love is the true cancer of our society, for its chief characteristic is that it constitutes an enduring connexion and means of transition between hygienically and ethically unexceptionable sexual intercourse and prostitution, and thus involves the unceasing risk of transferring to the former all the dangers of the latter. In this sense, wild love can really be regarded as a kind of irradiation of the whole nature of prostitution into the entirety of sexual relations in general. Thus, it remains a powerful hindrance to all ennoblement and resanation of the amatory life, and it is an invincible source of the moral and physical degeneration and the infective contamination of the nation.
Wild love is intimately connected with the artificial sensual life of our time, and with the manifold varieties of seduction[219] arising from that life. Wild love, the sensual life, and seduction, form, as it were, a triad, each member of which is the principal predisposing condition of the others.