Sexism; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
2. The notions of vice crusaders, nonconformist divines, Y. M. C. A.
secretaries, and other such libidinous poltroons as to what they would
do themselves if they had the courage.
3. The ditto of certain suffragettes as to ditto.
Here you have the genesis of a generalization that gives the less
critical sort of women a great deal of needless uneasiness and vastly
augments the natural conceit of men. Some pornographic old fellow, in
the discharge of his duties as director of an anti-vice society, puts
in an evening ploughing through such books as “The Memoirs of Fanny
Hill,” Casanova’s Confessions, the Cena Trimalchionis of Gaius
Petronius, and II Samuel. From this perusal he arises with the
conviction that life amid the red lights must be one stupendous whirl
of deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or Piccadilly at night
are out for revels that would have caused protests in Sodom and
Nineveh, that the average man who chooses hell leads an existence
comparable to that of a Mormon bishop, that the world outside the Bible
class is packed like a sardine-can with betrayed salesgirls, that every
man who doesn’t believe that Jonah swallowed the whale spends his whole
leisure leaping through the seventh hoop of the Decalogue. “If I were
not saved and anointed of God,” whispers the vice director into his own
ear, “that is what I, the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing.
The late King David did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late
King Edward VII was not beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his name
has its suggestions. Millions of others go the same route.... Ergo, Up,
guards, and at ’em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants! Order out the
seachlights and scaling-ladders! Swear in four hundred more policemen!
Let us chase these hell-hounds out of Christendom, and make the world
safe for monogamy, poor working girls, and infant damnation!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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