For example, in Berlin prostitution has increased to an extent almost double that of the increase in male population. A similar relationship is to be observed in other large towns. Everywhere the supply of prostitutes exceeds the demand; and we cannot doubt that by this great supply the need for prostitutes is to a large extent at first aroused. Street-walkers and brothels allure many men to sexual intercourse who otherwise would not have felt any need for it.
But, on the other hand, the existence of a voluntary demand for prostitutes on the part of men is a fact which cannot be denied. In this sense prostitution has been described as mainly a “man’s question.”
Here we touch upon an extremely difficult problem, and one which, as far as I can see, no one before myself has definitely stated, perhaps because no one has ventured to do it—and yet, for our knowledge of prostitution, the question is one of great importance.
What precisely is the “need of man for prostitution” of which Blaschko speaks? Is it merely the sexual impulse? Or is there any other factor in operation?
Certainly the sexual impulse, simple sensuality, plays a large part in this male demand for prostitutes; but this does not explain the fact why married men, and so many men who, if not married, have yet opportunities for other sexual intercourse, have recourse to prostitutes; it does not explain the fact, by which I am myself continually and anew astonished, of the peculiar attractive force which prostitutes exercise upon cultured men with delicate æsthetic and ethical perceptions. Is there any deeper physiological relationship here involved?
I answer this question unconditionally in the affirmative.
It is not by chance that prostitution is mainly a product of civilization, that it finds in civilization its proper vital conditions, whereas in primitive states it cannot properly thrive.
In primitive times, unrestrained by the (just) demands of a higher civilization, and by the social morality intimately associated therewith, men could, without fear or regret, satisfy their wild impulses, no less in the sexual sphere than in others; they could give free play to those peculiar biological instincts of a sexual nature which lie hidden in every man. Their sexual “supra- and sub-consciousness,” to use the happy phrase which Chr. von Ehrenfels invented to denote the dualism of modern sexuality, were still monistic. To-day, however, the primitive instincts are repressed by the necessities of civilized life, and by the coercive force of conventional morality; but these instincts still slumber in every one. Each one of us has also his sexual sub-consciousness. Sometimes it awakens, demands activity, free from all restraint, from all coercion, from all convention. In such moments it seems as if the man were an entirely different being. Here the “two souls” in our breast become a reality. Is this still the celebrated man of learning, the refined idealist, the sensitive æsthetic, the artist who has enriched us with the most magnificent and the purest works of poetry or of plastic art? We recognize him no longer, because in such moments something quite different has awakened to life; another nature stirs within him and urges him with an elemental force to do things from which his “supra-consciousness,” the consciousness of the civilized man, would draw back in horror.
Such a delicate sensitive nature, open to the finest spiritual activities, as that of the Danish poet J. P. Jakobsen, must feel this contrast in an especially painful manner; it is precisely such natures—those in which the extremes we have described appear most sharply and most clearly—which afford us proof of the existence of a double consciousness. The primitive instinct breaks out, like a monomania—of which old psychiatric doctrine of “monomania” we are involuntarily reminded when we see how even men of light and leading, men who in other respects live only in the highest regions of the spirit, are subjected to the domination of this purely instinctive sexualism, so that they lead a “secret” inner life, of whose existence the world has no suspicion.
In “Niels Lyhne” J. P. Jakobsen has admirably characterized this double life.