“when a woman was known to have accepted money for this purpose on several successive occasions, when she was openly recognized as being engaged in this occupation, when an arrest had occurred and the offence had thus been definitely discovered, or when in any other way it was proved to the satisfaction of the police” (vol. i., p. 11).
But in this way he entirely excluded the so-called “secret” prostitution—that is to say, he excluded by far the largest category of prostitution.
As soon as we take this latter into consideration, we find it necessary to have a wider conception of the term “prostitution.” This is recognized by the French physician Rey in his little book on “Public and Secret Prostitution” (German edition, p. 1; Leipzig, 1851). He regards as prostitution the act “by which a woman allows the use of her body by any man, without distinction, and for a payment made or expected.”
In this admirable definition we see the two most important characteristics of prostitution: complete indifference with regard to the person of the man demanding the use of her body, and the fact that the act is done for reward. The only point omitted from consideration is the condition mentioned by Parent-Duchatelet—namely, the frequent repetition of the act of prostitution with different men.
Schrank combines all these characteristics of prostitution in a much briefer phrase, by defining them as “professional acts of fornication performed with the human body,” by which, in the first place, we include male and female homosexual prostitution, which are not covered by the definitions previously quoted, and, in the second place, Schrank’s definition lays stress on the fact that in genuine prostitution the monetary reward is the aim of the act of prostitution much more than any kind of enjoyment. Where enjoyment plays a prominent part, in addition to the earning of money, we are no longer concerned with genuine prostitution. Even a prostitute, who in other respects is typically a woman of that class, ceases at that moment and for that time to be a prostitute, when her earnings become a secondary consideration, and the man to whom she gives herself the principal consideration.
For this reason, strictly speaking, a large proportion of secret prostitutes and numerous members of the half-world cannot be reckoned as prostitutes in the proper sense of the term—at any rate, not always; not when, for instance, the man who supports and pays them is at the same time their “lover”;[284] they then belong for the time being to the not less dangerous province of “wild love.” But in practice this distinction cannot be strictly maintained, for the same woman will very frequently undertake a genuine act of prostitution.
It is only the “sale of the sweet name of love,” as the celebrated politician Louis Blanc expresses it, which constitutes prostitution—the complete lack of all spiritual and all personal relationships on the one side, and the ignominious predominance of the mercantile character of the sexual union on the other. Hence there may be prostitution in marriage, although this always remains widely different from the sale of the body to numerous and frequently changing individuals.
The “prostitution” of primeval times, in which social relationships were so utterly different from ours, unquestionably resembled rather the wild love of the present day than our own prostitution. It was sexual promiscuity, not professional fornication. According to Heinrich Schurtz, prostitution is indeed not an exclusive product of higher civilization, but occurs also among primitive peoples, and appears everywhere where the unrestricted sexual intercourse of youth—wild love—is prevented, without early marriage taking its place. But what he describes as prostitution—for example, the living of several unmarried girls in the houses of men—is still no more than a peculiar form of wild love. Still, according to the reports of numerous travellers, there are among primitive peoples also purchasable women, and this must be explained, just as in our own case, from the combined influence of individual, social, and economic conditions.
To my mind there is no doubt that the so-called “religious” prostitution is to be regarded as at least a germinal form and predecessor of the prostitution of the present day. In this case also we had to do with professional fornication; only, although the temple-girls, just like our modern prostitutes, gave themselves indifferently to any man that offered the money paid for this service, that money did not, in the case of religious prostitution, go to the girl herself, but to the deity, or to the crafty priests who represented him; thus the priests really played the part of our modern brothel-keepers. It is absolutely unquestionable that in this religious prostitution a more ideal element also played a part. This subject was discussed at considerable length above ([pp. 100]-[112]).
Prostitution is everywhere a product of the growth of large towns; its peculiar characteristics are developed only in large towns. To the country it was always foreign until those beautiful times of the middle ages, in which prostitution was regarded as a necessary of life, like eating and drinking, and was organized in guilds, so that everywhere “women-houses” were instituted for the public, unconstrained use of all classes, for peasant and prince. At that time quite small towns also had their brothels. The appearance of syphilis, and the awakening of modern individualism, brought these conditions to an end; the brothels disappeared everywhere; and this tendency to a continuous decrease of barrack prostitution, to a progressive diminution in the number of brothels, has continually strengthened. On the whole, the rural districts to-day do not know prostitution; there we have only free love and wild love. The existence of prostitution is confined to the large towns, because in these all the necessary conditions are fulfilled, and, above all, because in large towns the possibilities for the gratification of the sexual impulse by marriage or by free love are in the case of men much more limited than they are in the country. In the town there is even a demand for prostitutes, but not in the country. It is true that the demand on the part of men does not correspond to the extension which modern prostitution has assumed in the large towns; this demand corresponds, as it were, to a portion only of prostitution. In his admirable work on the campaign against prostitution (Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, vol. ii., pp. 311-313) F. Schiller proves that prostitution has not increased merely in proportion to the increase in the male population, but that in reality, in recent decades, it has increased, on the whole, in a much greater proportion than the population, and that different towns exhibit the most remarkable contrasts in the respective ratios of prostitutes to male population.