"Would you," the interrogator should ask in all equity, "dawdle voluptuously in the shining, sunken, marble tub of the most gaudy hostelry on Park Avenue?"
Again, modern chemistry being what it is, and business being ingenious, it is a safe inference that the tub in the palatial hotel and the tub in its humble competitor would be made ready by the identical advertised product—one having the same statistical effect upon the muck and microbes of the rich as upon the grime and germs of the impecunious. And, even if such were not the case, the Park Avenue situation per se cannot be ruled out.
But I fear the bathtub analogue is hardly intended to be examined for what it is. There is no integrity of thought behind it. Its author does not pause to consider that millions already do plunge daily into common tubs—swimming pools, which are, presumably, well chlorinated. Nor does he go on to inquire as to whether his reader uses the dishes in restaurants and drugstores and whether, before using them, he inspects the dishwashing facilities and practices. There is a lack of fairness in the man. He himself—for reasons he would never dare to inspect—regards prostitutes as he regards the standing pool of some rank stranger's bath; and he deems it as his mission in life to promulgate this obscene and entirely unrealistic simile in the hope (and the good expectation) that all his young readers will, for the rest of their lives, upon encountering the flossiest of doxies, think instanter of stale tub water.
The fact of the matter is that the bright and capable girl who engages in prostitution will be found, on any count, cleaner and shinier, better soaped, scrubbed, polished and perfumed than the average for all wives in the land. Statistically, she may be slightly more venereal than her married sisters, but only slightly—and, since we have given her brightness and capability, it is equally certain (statistically) that she will be more likely to be under treatment and so incapable of communicating afflictions which, as noted above, have themselves somewhat lost their menacing aspect. In short, were a woman to be chosen by lot from (a) the general married group or (b) the group of alert tarts, and were the criterion to be bodily aesthetic desirability, there would be no doubt as to which group one should draw from. Tubs are tubs.
It is at best a trifling matter.
The positive first item on the Forbisher-Laroche list (if you're interested) and the first which Dave and I set down on our own impromptu schedule, was "fun." The idea that sexual congress, erotic play, coition—call it what you will—is fun has very nearly vanished from Western society. To all persons who approach prostitution with the standing-tub-water philosophy, even the most faithful and the most sanctified relations between man and wife will hardly be even appetizing—since, by their acknowledged images, such people will find themselves condemned to a single tub of water in which they will be obliged to bathe all their lives. This, of course, is the inevitable penalty paid by every denigrator of sex activities: his own, under his best auspices, will still forever seem vile. Also this is the outlook of churches. It explains why the churchly so rarely have any fun and why, if they do, they make sure someone pays for it later—preferably a heretic, and, if possible, in blood.
But (to go to the opposite pole for reference—a course which is implicit in all considerations of the well-educated man) even amongst the heretics—amongst sophisticated, intellectual, emancipated citizens—the concept of fun in relation to sexual activity is absent, or nearly so. These people—husbands, wives, bachelors, spinsters, teen-agers and precocious children—readers of popular slick magazines and the newsprint digests, subscribers to book clubs, members of frank discussion groups—rely for their sex facts upon certain nationally advertised texts which are dispatched through the mails in plain wrappers. All such volumes are offered as authoritative manuals of the art of love—no holds barred; rather the contrary.
I have read perhaps a dozen of these treatises with close attention and I am prepared to agree that their claims are not exaggerated. They do present, in considerable detail and with never a minced word, what might be termed the classic figures of love-making. And yet their readers—persons who are presumed to be doing skull-practice for an imminent marital event—will not find in any of these works a suggestion that the subject in hand involves what I have called fun.
The verbal diagrams suggest, instead, that an extremely intricate and arduous business is being considered—one to be approached in precisely the same fashion as an inquiry into the manly art of self-defense made by a nervous weakling who is about to be exposed, more or less against his will, to an environment swarming with tough, aggressive stevedores and millhands.
In all these treatises, emphasis is put upon the likelihood of early failure—the mere hope of subsequent success—and the stratagems which, if meticulously pursued, may ultimately bring about success. The directions read like those for boxing, savate, or judo. An encounter of the most dire solemnity is envisaged. Painful knockdowns and other traumatizing incidents are constantly described. Yet it is pointed out repeatedly that a genuine knockout will result inevitably in Unhappiness, Infidelity, Divorce, Frigidity, Impotence, Neurosis, Neurasthenia, Psychosis, Premature Senility, Suicide, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.