In Berlin, since 1904, there has existed a central police organization for the suppression of the international traffic in girls, the activity of which extends throughout the Empire. Every case of this traffic which comes to the notice of the police in Germany is reported to the central police organization. This draws up a list of all the traders in girls whose names are definitely known. It has started an album containing photographs of traders who have been punished, and it exchanges experiences with the police of other countries. It is to be hoped that in comparison with the other countries of Europe the number of German girls exported to brothels abroad will continually grow smaller, and that the local measures undertaken in Galicia and the Argentine will have a good effect in limiting, and ultimately suppressing, this traffic.
Henne am Rhyn has shown that to and from other countries—for example, from England to Belgium and Germany (Hamburg), from Galicia to Turkey, from Italy to North America, etc.—individual girls are transported. According to Felix Baumann, the number of traders in girls in New York approaches 20,000. They have close relations to the police, and they employ young handsome men, called “cadets,” to attract the girls. The abolition of brothels would here also be the best means of abolishing the traffic in girls.
Having now learned the sources of prostitution, we must proceed to give a brief account of the places in which it is carried on. Here we have first of all to distinguish public from secret prostitution.
As regards public prostitution, there are only two principal varieties to consider: street prostitution, where the women seek their victims in the streets, in order to carry them off either to their own dwellings or to houses of accommodation; and brothel prostitution. At the present day in most countries public street prostitution is far the most general form, and this is especially true as regards Germany, where in a few towns only brothels continue to exist. In many places this street prostitution—for example, in the Friedrichstrasse of Berlin, and also on the boulevards of Paris—gives rise to conditions which recall the worst days of imperial Rome. The contact between public life and professional prostitution is unquestionably a great evil. The activity of prostitutes in the open streets, the shameless and lascivious display of their sexual charms, their bold solicitation coram publico, the stimulating character of professional unchastity—all these poison our public life, obliterate the boundary between cleanliness and contamination, and display daily a picture of sexual corruption—alike before the eyes of the pure, blameless girl, those of the honourable wife, and those of the immature boy. Aptly has this street prostitution been termed the cloaca of our social life, which empties into the open street, whereas at least brothel prostitution only represented a hidden cloaca, whose offensive odour need not annoy all the world, as inevitably happens in the case of street prostitution. In addition, we have to consider the serious dangers involved in the practice of professional fornication in private dwellings and houses of accommodation, as they involve the decent families living in such houses. What do the children living in such houses see and hear? Frequently prostitutes are admitted to confidential family intercourse, and they seduce the daughters of poor people to join them in the practice of prostitution, and the sons to a vicious life or to become souteneurs. That the danger of contamination of the lower classes of the population by means of prostitution is by no means imaginary, is clearly shown by numerous examples from actual life. I subscribe to all that the advocates of brothels say in this respect.
And yet brothels are a still greater evil! They constitute an incomparably more dangerous centre of sexual corruption, a worse breeding-ground of sexual aberrations of every kind, and last, not least, the greatest focus of sexual infection. With reference to the last point, the matter will be discussed more fully in the chapter dealing with the question of regulation in connexion with the suppression of venereal diseases.
The brothel is the high-school of refined sexual lust and perversity. The detailed proof of this I must leave to the descriptions of the two writers most experienced in the life of brothels, Léo Taxil[302] and Louis Fiaux.[303]
It is a fact well known to all that many young men learn in brothels for the first time the manifold and artificial ways in which natural sexual intercourse can be replaced by perverse methods of sexual activity. Here, in the brothel, psychopathia sexualis is systematically taught. And what the old debauchee demands from the prostitute and pays her for, perverse intercourse, is spontaneously offered to the youthful initiate, because competition between the prostitutes, and the hope of a higher payment, lead them to do so. The opinion of the French authors just mentioned is perfectly credible—that there are young men who in this way have learned about perverse sexuality before they were fully acquainted with natural sexuality, and who thus have permanently acquired more inclination for these mysteries of Venus than for a natural and normal sexual intercourse.
“Brothel-jargon,” or “brothel-slang,” contains a number of words almost peculiar to this dialect, by which the contra-natural, abnormal methods of sexual intercourse are denoted in a more or less cynical manner; for example, faire feuille de rose = anilinctus; sfogliar la rosa (to pluck the leaves from the rose) = pædicare; faire tête-bêche = reciprocal cunnilinctus of two tribades; punta di penna = masturbatio labialis; pulci lavoratrici (learned fleas!) = tribades, etc.
A learned investigator like Fiaux is led by his observations of many years to the conclusion that brothels constitute not only the most dangerous form of public prostitution, but the most dangerous kind of prostitution that exists at all, and that it is urgently necessary that they should be abolished in all countries as soon as possible.
In addition to the two varieties and localities of “public” prostitution—that is, prostitution carried on under the observation of the police—there is a much more extensive secret prostitution, in connexion with which, however, the word “secret” must always be accepted with reserve, since in its case also it comes more or less under the eye of the public. This secret prostitution is, for example, accessible at numerous places, and these are very different one from another. Secret prostitution also has its types, its peculiarities—in short, its definite local colouring, according to the place in which it is practised. Let us give a brief account of the various localities of secret prostitution.