Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Vi Part 11

The extent to which s.e.xual abstinence and the struggles it involves may hamper and absorb the individual throughout life is well ill.u.s.trated in the following case. A lady, vigorous, robust, and generally healthy, of great intelligence and high character, has reached middle life without marrying, or ever having s.e.xual relationships. She was an only child, and when between three and four years of age, a playmate some six years older, initiated her into the habit of playing with her s.e.xual parts. She was, however, at this age quite devoid of s.e.xual feelings, and the habit dropped naturally, without any bad effects, as soon as she left the neighborhood of this girl a year or so later. Her health was good and even brilliant, and she developed vigorously at p.u.b.erty. At the age of sixteen, however, a mental shock caused menstruation to diminish in amount during some years, and simultaneously with this diminution persistent s.e.xual excitement appeared spontaneously, for the first time. She regarded such feelings as abnormal and unhealthy, and exerted all her powers of self-control in resisting them. But will power had no effect in diminishing the feelings. There was constant and imperious excitement, with the sense of vibration, tension, pressure, dilatation and tickling, accompanied, it may be, by some ovarian congestion, for she felt that on the left side there was a network of s.e.xual nerves, and retroversion of the uterus was detected some years later. Her life was strenuous with many duties, but no occupation could be pursued without this undercurrent of s.e.xual hyperaesthesia involving perpetual self-control. This continued more or less acutely for many years, when menstruation suddenly stopped altogether, much before the usual period of the climacteric. At the same time the s.e.xual excitement ceased, and she became calm, peaceful, and happy. Diminished menstruation was a.s.sociated with s.e.xual excitement, but abundant menstruation and its complete absence were both accompanied by the relief of excitement. This lasted for two years. Then, for the treatment of a trifling degree of anaemia, she was subjected to a long, and, in her case, injudicious course of hypodermic injections of strychnia. From that time, five years ago, up to the present, there has been constant s.e.xual excitement, and she has always to be on guard lest she should be overtaken by a s.e.xual spasm. Her torture is increased by the fact that her traditions make it impossible for her (except under very exceptional circ.u.mstances) to allude to the cause of her sufferings. "A woman is handicapped," she writes. "She may never speak to anyone on such a subject. She must live her tragedy alone, smiling as much as she can under the strain of her terrible burden." To add to her trouble, two years ago, she felt impelled to resort to masturbation, and has done so about once a month since; this not only brings no real relief, and leaves irritability, wakefulness, and dark marks under the eyes, but is a cause of remorse to her, for she regards masturbation as entirely abnormal and unnatural. She has tried to gain benefit, not merely by the usual methods of physical hygiene, but by suggestion, Christian Science, etc., but all in vain. "I may say," she writes, "that it is the most pa.s.sionate desire of my heart to be freed from this bondage, that I may relax the terrible years-long tension of resistance, and be happy in my own way. If I had this affliction once a month, once a week, even twice a week, to stand against it would be child's play. I should scorn to resort to unnatural means, however moderately. But self-control itself has its revenges, and I sometimes feel as if it is no longer to be borne."

Thus while it is an immense benefit in physical and psychic development if the eruption of the disturbing s.e.xual emotions can be delayed until p.u.b.erty or adolescence, and while it is a very great advantage, after that eruption has occurred, to be able to gain control of these emotions, to crush altogether the s.e.xual nature would be a barren, if not, indeed, a perilous victory, bringing with it no satisfaction. "If I had only had three weeks' happiness," said a woman, "I would not quarrel with Fate, but to have one's whole life so absolutely empty is horrible." If such vacuous self-restraint may, by courtesy, be termed a virtue, it is but a negative virtue. The persons who achieve it, as the result of congenitally feeble s.e.xual apt.i.tudes, merely (as Gyurkovechky, Furbringer, and Lowenfeld have all alike remarked) made a virtue of their weakness. Many others, whose instincts were less weak, when they disdainfully put to flight the desires of s.e.x in early life, have found that in later life that foe returns in tenfold force and perhaps in unnatural shapes.[104]

The conception of "s.e.xual abstinence" is, we see, an entirely false and artificial conception. It is not only ill-adjusted to the hygienic facts of the case but it fails even to invoke any genuinely moral motive, for it is exclusively self-regarding and self-centred. It only becomes genuinely moral, and truly inspiring, when we transform it into the altruistic virtue of self-sacrifice. When we have done so we see that the element of abstinence in it ceases to be essential, "Self-sacrifice," writes the author of a thoughtful book on the s.e.xual life, "is acknowledged to be the basis of virtue; the n.o.blest instances of self-sacrifice are those dictated by s.e.xual affection. Sympathy is the secret of altruism; nowhere is sympathy more real and complete than in love. Courage, both moral and physical, the love of truth and honor, the spirit of enterprise, and the admiration of moral worth, are all inspired by love as by nothing else in human nature. Celibacy denies itself that inspiration or restricts its influence, according to the measure of its denial of s.e.xual intimacy. Thus the deliberate adoption of a consistently celibate life implies the narrowing down of emotional and moral experience to a degree which is, from the broad scientific standpoint, unjustified by any of the advantages piously supposed to accrue from it."[105]

In a sane natural order all the impulses are centred in the fulfilment of needs and not in their denial. Moreover, in this special matter of s.e.x, it is inevitable that the needs of others, and not merely the needs of the individual himself, should determine action. It is more especially the needs of the female which are the determining factor; for those needs are more various, complex and elusive, and in his attentiveness to their gratification the male finds a source of endless erotic satisfaction. It might be thought that the introduction of an altruistic motive here is merely the claim of theoretical morality insisting that there shall be a firm curb on animal instinct. But, as we have again and again seen throughout the long course of these Studies, it is not so. The animal instinct itself makes this demand. It is a biological law that rules throughout the zoological world and has involved the universality of courtship. In man it is only modified because in man s.e.xual needs are not entirely concentrated in reproduction, but more or less penetrate the whole of life.

While from the point of view of society, as from that of Nature, the end and object of the s.e.xual impulse is procreation, and nothing beyond procreation, that is by no means true for the individual, whose main object it must be to fulfil himself harmoniously with that due regard for others which the art of living demands. Even if s.e.xual relationships had no connection with procreation whatever-as some Central Australian tribes believe-they would still be justifiable, and are, indeed, an indispensable aid to the best moral development of the individual, for it is only in so intimate a relationship as that of s.e.x that the finest graces and apt.i.tudes of life have full scope. Even the saints cannot forego the s.e.xual side of life. The best and most accomplished saints from Jerome to Tolstoy-even the exquisite Francis of a.s.sisi-had stored up in their past all the experiences that go to the complete realization of life, and if it were not so they would have been the less saints.

The element of positive virtue thus only enters when the control of the s.e.xual impulse has pa.s.sed beyond the stage of rigid and sterile abstinence and has become not merely a deliberate refusal of what is evil in s.e.x, but a deliberate acceptance of what is good. It is only at that moment that such control becomes a real part of the great art of living. For the art of living, like any other art, is not compatible with rigidity, but lies in the weaving of a perpetual harmony between refusing and accepting, between giving and taking.[106]

The future, it is clear, belongs ultimately to those who are slowly building up sounder traditions into the structure of life. The "problem of s.e.xual abstinence" will more and more sink into insignificance. There remain the great solid fact of love, the great solid fact of chast.i.ty. Those are eternal. Between them there is nothing but harmony. The development of one involves the development of the other.

It has been necessary to treat seriously this problem of "s.e.xual abstinence" because we have behind us the traditions of two thousand years based on certain ideals of s.e.xual law and s.e.xual license, together with the long effort to build up practices more or less conditioned by those ideals. We cannot immediately escape from these traditions even when we question their validity for ourselves. We have not only to recognize their existence, but also to accept the fact that for some time to come they must still to a considerable extent control the thoughts and even in some degree the actions of existing communities.

It is undoubtedly deplorable. It involves the introduction of an artificiality into a real natural order. Love is real and positive; chast.i.ty is real and positive. But s.e.xual abstinence is unreal and negative, in the strict sense perhaps impossible. The underlying feelings of all those who have emphasized its importance is that a physiological process can be good or bad according as it is or is not carried out under certain arbitrary external conditions, which render it licit or illicit. An act of s.e.xual intercourse under the name of "marriage" is beneficial; the very same act, under the name of "incontinence," is pernicious. No physiological process, and still less any spiritual process, can bear such restriction. It is as much as to say that a meal becomes good or bad, digestible or indigestible, according as a grace is or is not p.r.o.nounced before the eating of it.

It is deplorable because, such a conception being essentially unreal, an element of unreality is thus introduced into a matter of the gravest concern alike to the individual and to society. Artificial disputes have been introduced where no matter of real dispute need exist. A contest has been carried on marked by all the ferocity which marks contests about metaphysical or pseudo-metaphysical differences having no concrete basis in the actual world. As will happen in such cases, there has, after all, been no real difference between the disputants because the point they quarreled over was unreal. In truth each side was right and each side was wrong.

It is necessary, we see, that the balance should be held even. An absolute license is bad; an absolute abstinence-even though some by nature or circ.u.mstances are urgently called to adopt it-is also bad. They are both alike away from the gracious equilibrium of Nature. And the force, we see, which naturally holds this balance even is the biological fact that the act of s.e.xual union is the satisfaction of the erotic needs, not of one person, but of two persons.

[92]

This view was an ambiguous improvement on the view, universally prevalent, as Westermarck has shown, among primitive peoples, that the s.e.xual act involves indignity to a woman or depreciation of her only in so far as she is the property of another person who is the really injured party.

[93]

This implicit contradiction has been acutely pointed out from the religious side by the Rev. H. Northcote, Christianity and s.e.x Problems, p. 53.

[94]

It has already been necessary to discuss this point briefly in "The s.e.xual Impulse in Women," vol. iii of these Studies.

[95]

"Die Abstinentia s.e.xualis," Zeitschrift fur s.e.xualwissenschaft, Nov., 1908.

[96]

P. Janet, "La Maladie du Scrupule," Revue Philosophique, May, 1901.

[97]

S. Freud, s.e.xual-Probleme, March, 1908. As Adele Schreiber also points out (Mutterschutz, Jan., 1907, p. 30), it is not enough to prove that abstinence is not dangerous; we have to remember that the spiritual and physical energy used up in repressing this mighty instinct often reduces a joyous and energetic nature to a weary and faded shadow. Similarly, Helene Stocker (Die Liebe und die Frauen, p. 105) says: "The question whether abstinence is harmful is, to say the truth, a ridiculous question. One needs to be no nervous specialist to know, as a matter of course, that a life of happy love and marriage is the healthy life, and its complete absence cannot fail to lead to severe psychic depression, even if no direct physiological disturbances can be demonstrated."

[98]

Max Flesch, "Ehe, Hygine und s.e.xuelle Moral," Mutterschutz, 1905, Heft 7.

[99]

See the Section on Touch in the fourth volume of these Studies.

[100]

"I have had two years' close experience and connexion with the Trappists," wrote Dr. b.u.t.terfield, of Natal (British Medical Journal, Sept. 15, 1906, p. 668), "both as medical attendant and as being a Catholic in creed myself. I have studied them and investigated their life, habits and diet, and though I should be very backward in adopting it myself, as not suited to me individually, the great bulk of them are in absolute ideal health and strength, seldom ailing, capable of vast work, mental and physical. Their life is very simple and very regular. A healthier body of men and women, with perfect equanimity of temper-this latter I lay great stress on-it would be difficult to find. Health beams in their eyes and countenance and actions. Only in sickness or prolonged journeys are they allowed any strong foods-meats, eggs, etc.-or any alcohol."

[101]

Fere, L'Instinct s.e.xuel, second edition, p. 332.

[102]

Rural life, as we have seen when discussing its relation to s.e.xual precocity, is on one side the reverse of a safeguard against s.e.xual influences. But, on the other hand, in so far as it involves hard work and simple living under conditions that are not nervously stimulating, it is favorable to a considerably delayed s.e.xual activity in youth and to a relative continence. Ammon, in the course of his anthropological investigations of Baden conscripts, found that s.e.xual intercourse was rare in the country before twenty, and even s.e.xual emissions during sleep rare before nineteen or twenty. It is said, also, he repeats, that no one has a right to run after girls who does not yet carry a gun, and the elder lads sometimes brutally ill-treat any younger boy found going about with a girl. No doubt this is often preliminary to much license later.

[103]

The numerical preponderance which celibate women teachers have now gained in the American school system has caused much misgiving among many sagacious observers, and is said to be unsatisfactory in its results on the pupils of both s.e.xes. A distinguished authority, Professor McKeen Cattell ("The School and the Family," Popular Science Monthly, Jan., 1909), referring to this preponderance of "devitalized and uns.e.xed spinsters," goes so far as to say that "the ultimate result of letting the celibate female be the usual teacher has been such as to make it a question whether it would not be an advantage to the country if the whole school plant could be sc.r.a.pped."

[104]

Corre (Les Criminels, p. 351) mentions that of thirteen priests convicted of crime, six were guilty of s.e.xual attempts on children, and of eighty-three convicted lay teachers, forty-eight had committed similar offenses. This was at a time when lay teachers were in practice almost compelled to live a celibate life; altered conditions have greatly diminished this cla.s.s of offense among them. Without going so far as crime, many moral and religious men, clergymen and others, who have led severely abstinent lives in youth, sometimes experience in middle age or later the eruption of almost uncontrollable s.e.xual impulses, normal or abnormal. In women such manifestations are apt to take the form of obsessional thoughts of s.e.xual character, as e.g., the case (Comptes-Rendus Congres International de Medecine, Moscow, 1897, vol. iv, p. 27) of a chaste woman who was compelled to think about and look at the s.e.xual organs of men.

[105]

J. A. G.o.dfrey, The Science of s.e.x, p. 138.

[106]

See, e.g., Havelock Ellis, "St. Francis and Others," Affirmations.

CHAPTER VII.

PROSt.i.tUTION.

I. The Orgy:-The Religious Origin of the Orgy-The Feast of Fools-Recognition of the Orgy by the Greeks and Romans-The Orgy Among Savages-The Drama-The Object Subserved by the Orgy.

II. The Origin and Development of Prost.i.tution:-The Definition of Prost.i.tution-Prost.i.tution Among Savages-The Conditions Under Which Professional Prost.i.tution Arises-Sacred Prost.i.tution-The Rite of Mylitta-The Practice of Prost.i.tution to Obtain a Marriage Portion-The Rise of Secular Prost.i.tution in Greece-Prost.i.tution in the East-India, China, j.a.pan, etc.-Prost.i.tution in Rome-The Influence of Christianity on Prost.i.tution-The Effort to Combat Prost.i.tution-The Mediaeval Brothel-The Appearance of the Courtesan-Tullia D'Aragona-Veronica Franco-Ninon de Lenclos-Later Attempts to Eradicate Prost.i.tution-The Regulation of Prost.i.tution-Its Futility Becoming Recognized.

III. The Causes of Prost.i.tution:-Prost.i.tution as a Part of the Marriage System-The Complex Causation of Prost.i.tution-The Motives a.s.signed by Prost.i.tutes-(1) Economic Factor of Prost.i.tution-Poverty Seldom the Chief Motive for Prost.i.tution-But Economic Pressure Exerts a Real Influence-The Large Proportion of Prost.i.tutes Recruited from Domestic Service-Significance of This Fact-(2) The Biological Factor of Prost.i.tution-The So-called Born-Prost.i.tute-Alleged Ident.i.ty with the Born-Criminal-The s.e.xual Instinct in Prost.i.tutes-The Physical and Psychic Characters of Prost.i.tutes-(3) Moral Necessity as a Factor in the Existence of Prost.i.tution-The Moral Advocates of Prost.i.tution-The Moral Att.i.tude of Christianity Towards Prost.i.tution-The Att.i.tude of Protestantism-Recent Advocates of the Moral Necessity of Prost.i.tution-(4) Civilizational Value as a Factor of Prost.i.tution-The Influence of Urban Life-The Craving for Excitement-Why Servant-girls so Often Turn to Prost.i.tution-The Small Part Played by Seduction-Prost.i.tutes Come Largely from the Country-The Appeal of Civilization Attracts Women to Prost.i.tution-The Corresponding Attraction Felt by Men-The Prost.i.tute as Artist and Leader of Fashion-The Charm of Vulgarity.

IV. The Present Social Att.i.tude Towards Prost.i.tution:-The Decay of the Brothel-The Tendency to the Humanization of Prost.i.tution-The Monetary Aspects of Prost.i.tution-The Geisha-The Hetaira-The Moral Revolt Against Prost.i.tution-Squalid Vice Based on Luxurious Virtue-The Ordinary Att.i.tude Towards Prost.i.tutes-Its Cruelty Absurd-The Need of Reforming Prost.i.tution-The Need of Reforming Marriage-These These Two Needs Closely Correlated-The Dynamic Relationships Involved.

I. The Orgy.

Traditional morality, religion, and established convention combine to promote not only the extreme of rigid abstinence but also that of reckless license. They preach and idealize the one extreme; they drive those who cannot accept it to adopt the opposite extreme. In the great ages of religion it even happens that the severity of the rule of abstinence is more or less deliberately tempered by the permission for occasional outbursts of license. We thus have the orgy, which flourished in mediaeval days and is, indeed, in its largest sense, a universal manifestation, having a function to fulfil in every orderly and laborious civilization, built up on natural energies that are bound by more or less inevitable restraints.

The consideration of the orgy, it may be said, lifts us beyond the merely s.e.xual sphere, into a higher and wider region which belongs to religion. The Greek orgeia referred originally to ritual things done with a religious purpose, though later, when dances of Baccha.n.a.ls and the like lost their sacred and inspiring character, the idea was fostered by Christianity that such things were immoral.[107] Yet Christianity was itself in its origin an orgy of the higher spiritual activities released from the uncongenial servitude of cla.s.sic civilization, a great festival of the poor and the humble, of the slave and the sinner. And when, with the necessity for orderly social organization, Christianity had ceased to be this it still recognized, as Paganism had done, the need for an occasional orgy. It appears that in 743 at a Synod held in Hainault reference was made to the February debauch (de Spurcalibus in februario) as a pagan practice; yet it was precisely this pagan festival which was embodied in the accepted customs of the Christian Church as the chief orgy of the ecclesiastical year, the great Carnival prefixed to the long fast of Lent. The celebration on Shrove Tuesday and the previous Sunday const.i.tuted a Christian Baccha.n.a.lian festival in which all cla.s.ses joined. The greatest freedom and activity of physical movement was encouraged; "some go about naked without shame, some crawl on all fours, some on stilts, some imitate animals."[108] As time went on the Carnival lost its most strongly marked Baccha.n.a.lian features, but it still retains its essential character as a permitted and temporary relaxation of the tension of customary restraints and conventions. The Mediaeval Feast of Fools-a New Year's Revel well established by the twelfth century, mainly in France-presented an expressive picture of a Christian orgy in its extreme form, for here the most sacred ceremonies of the Church became the subject of fantastic parody. The Church, according to Nietzsche's saying, like all wise legislators, recognized that where great impulses and habits have to be cultivated, intercalary days must be appointed in which these impulses and habits may be denied, and so learn to hunger anew.[109] The clergy took the leading part in these folk-festivals, for to the men of that age, as Meray remarks, "the temple offered the complete notes of the human gamut; they found there the teaching of all duties, the consolation of all sorrows, the satisfaction of all joys. The sacred festivals of mediaeval Christianity were not a survival from Roman times; they leapt from the very heart of Christian society."[110] But, as Meray admits, all great and vigorous peoples, of the East and the West, have found it necessary sometimes to play with their sacred things.

Among the Greeks and Romans this need is everywhere visible, not only in their comedy and their literature generally, but in everyday life. As Nietzsche truly remarks (in his Geburt der TraG.o.die) the Greeks recognized all natural impulses, even those that are seemingly unworthy, and safeguarded them from working mischief by providing channels into which, on special days and in special rites, the surplus of wild energy might harmlessly flow. Plutarch, the last and most influential of the Greek moralists, well says, when advocating festivals (in his essay "On the Training of Children"), that "even in bows and harps we loosen their strings that we may bend and wind them up again." Seneca, perhaps the most influential of Roman if not of European moralists, even recommended occasional drunkenness. "Sometimes," he wrote in his De Tranquillilate, "we ought to come even to the point of intoxication, not for the purpose of drowning ourselves but of sinking ourselves deep in wine. For it washes away cares and raises our spirits from the lowest depths. The inventor of wine is called Liber because he frees the soul from the servitude of care, releases it from slavery, quickens it, and makes it bolder for all undertakings." The Romans were a sterner and more serious people than the Greeks, but on that very account they recognized the necessity of occasionally relaxing their moral fibres in order to preserve their tone, and encouraged the prevalence of festivals which were marked by much more abandonment than those of Greece. When these festivals began to lose their moral sanction and to fall into decay the decadence of Rome had begun.

All over the world, and not excepting the most primitive savages-for even savage life is built up on systematic constraints which sometimes need relaxation-the principle of the orgy is recognized and accepted. Thus Spencer and Gillen describe[111] the Nathagura or fire-ceremony of the Warramunga tribe of Central Australia, a festival taken part in by both s.e.xes, in which all the ordinary rules of social life are broken, a kind of Saturnalia in which, however, there is no s.e.xual license, for s.e.xual license is, it need scarcely be said, no essential part of the orgy, even when the orgy lightens the burden of s.e.xual constraints. In a widely different part of the world, in British Columbia, the Salish Indians, according to Hill Tout,[112] believed that, long before the whites came, their ancestors observed a Sabbath or seventh day ceremony for dancing and praying, a.s.sembling at sunrise and dancing till noon. The Sabbath, or periodically recurring orgy,-not a day of tension and constraint but a festival of joy, a rest from all the duties of everyday life,-has, as we know, formed an essential part of many of the orderly ancient civilizations on which our own has been built;[113] it is highly probable that the stability of these ancient civilizations was intimately a.s.sociated with their recognition of the need of a Sabbath orgy. Such festivals are, indeed, as Crawley observes, processes of purification and reinvigoration, the effort to put off "the old man" and put on "the new man," to enter with fresh energy on the path of everyday life.[114]

The orgy is an inst.i.tution which by no means has its significance only for the past. On the contrary, the high tension, the rigid routine, the gray monotony of modern life insistently call for moments of organic relief, though the precise form that that orgiastic relief takes must necessarily change with other social changes. As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, "just as men need suffering in order to become strong so they need joy in order to become good." Charles Wagner, insisting more recently (in his Jeunesse) on the same need of joy in our modern life, regrets that dancing in the old, free, and natural manner has gone out of fashion or become unwholesome. Dancing is indeed the most fundamental and primitive form of the orgy, and that which most completely and healthfully fulfils its object. For while it is undoubtedly, as we see even among animals, a process by which s.e.xual tumescence is accomplished,[115] it by no means necessarily becomes focused in s.e.xual detumescence but it may itself become a detumescent discharge of acc.u.mulated energy. It was on this account that, at all events in former days, the clergy in Spain, on moral grounds, openly encouraged the national pa.s.sion for dancing. Among cultured people in modern times, the orgy tends to take on a purely cerebral form, which is less wholesome because it fails to lead to harmonious discharge along motor channels. In these comparatively pa.s.sive forms, however, the orgy tends to become more and more p.r.o.nounced under the conditions of civilization. Aristotle's famous statement concerning the function of tragedy as "purgation" seems to be a recognition of the beneficial effects of the orgy.[116] Wagner's music-dramas appeal powerfully to this need; the theatre, now as ever, fulfils a great function of the same kind, inherited from the ancient days when it was the ordered expression of a s.e.xual festival.[117] The theatre, indeed, tends at the present time to a.s.sume a larger importance and to approximate to the more serious dramatic performances of cla.s.sic days by being transferred to the day-time and the open-air. France has especially taken the initiative in these performances, a.n.a.logous to the Dionysiac festivals of antiquity and the Mysteries and Moralities of the Middle Ages. The movement began some years ago at Orange. In 1907 there were, in France, as many as thirty open-air theatres ("Theatres de la Nature," "Theatres du Soleil," etc.,) while it is in Ma.r.s.eilles that the first formal open-air theatre has been erected since cla.s.sic days.[118] In England, likewise, there has been a great extension of popular interest in dramatic performances, and the newly inst.i.tuted Pageants, carried out and taken part in by the population of the region commemorated in the Pageant, are festivals of the same character. In England, however, at the present time, the real popular orgiastic festivals are the Bank holidays, with which may be a.s.sociated the more occasional celebrations, "Maffekings," etc., often called out by comparatively insignificant national events but still adequate to arouse orgiastic emotions as genuine as those of antiquity, though they are lacking in beauty and religious consecration. It is easy indeed for the narrowly austere person to view such manifestations with a supercilious smile, but in the eyes of the moralist and the philosopher these orgiastic festivals exert a salutary and preservative function. In every age of dull and monotonous routine-and all civilization involves such routine-many natural impulses and functions tend to become suppressed, atrophied, or perverted. They need these moments of joyous exercise and expression, moments in which they may not necessarily attain their full activity but in which they will at all events be able, as Cyples expresses it, to rehea.r.s.e their great possibilities.[119]

II. The Origin and Development of Prost.i.tution.

The more refined forms of the orgy flourish in civilization, although on account of their mainly cerebral character they are not the most beneficent or the most effective. The more primitive and muscular forms of the orgy tend, on the other hand, under the influence of civilization, to fall into discredit and to be so far as possible suppressed altogether. It is partly in this way that civilization encourages prost.i.tution. For the orgy in its primitive forms, forbidden to show itself openly and reputably, seeks the darkness, and allying itself with a fundamental instinct to which civilized society offers no complete legitimate satisfaction, it firmly entrenches itself in the very centre of civilized life, and thereby const.i.tutes a problem of immense difficulty and importance.[120]

It is commonly said that prost.i.tution has existed always and everywhere. That statement is far from correct. A kind of amateur prost.i.tution is occasionally found among savages, but usually it is only when barbarism is fully developed and is already approaching the stage of civilization that well developed prost.i.tution is found. It exists in a systematic form in every civilization.

What is prost.i.tution? There has been considerable discussion as to the correct definition of prost.i.tution.[121] The Roman Ulpian said that a prost.i.tute was one who openly abandons her body to a number of men without choice, for money.[122] Not all modern definitions have been so satisfactory. It is sometimes said a prost.i.tute is a woman who gives herself to numerous men. To be sound, however, a definition must be applicable to both s.e.xes alike and we should certainly hesitate to describe a man who had s.e.xual intercourse with many women as a prost.i.tute. The idea of venality, the intention to sell the favors of the body, is essential to the conception of prost.i.tution. Thus Guyot defines a prost.i.tute as "any person for whom s.e.xual relationships are subordinated to gain."[123] It is not, however, adequate to define a prost.i.tute simply as a woman who sells her body. That is done every day by women who become wives in order to gain a home and a livelihood, yet, immoral as this conduct may be from any high ethical standpoint, it would be inconvenient and even misleading to call it prost.i.tution.[124] It is better, therefore, to define a prost.i.tute as a woman who temporarily sells her s.e.xual favors to various persons. Thus, according to Wharton's Law-lexicon a prost.i.tute is "a woman who indiscriminately consorts with men for hire"; Bonger states that "those women are prost.i.tutes who sell their bodies for the exercise of s.e.xual acts and make of this a profession";[125] Richard again states that "a prost.i.tute is a woman who publicly gives herself to the first comer in return for a pecuniary remuneration."[126] As, finally, the prevalence of h.o.m.os.e.xuality has led to the existence of male prost.i.tutes, the definition must be put in a form irrespective of s.e.x, and we may, therefore, say that a prost.i.tute is a person who makes it a profession to gratify the l.u.s.t of various persons of the opposite s.e.x or the same s.e.x.