Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to SocietyEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to Society
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
the same writer remarks elsewhere (p. 195) "when a mere ceremony
can really sanctify what is base and transform lust and greed
into the sincerity of sexual affection. If, to enter into sexual
connections with a man for a solely material end is a disgrace to
humanity, it is a disgrace under the marriage bond just as much
as apart from the hypocritical blessing of the church or the law.
If the public prostitute is a being who deserves to be treated as
a pariah, it is hopelessly irrational to withhold every sort of
moral opprobrium from the woman who leads a similar life under a
different set of external circumstances. Either the prostitute
wife must come under the moral ban, or there must be an end to
the complete ostracism under which the prostitute labors."
The thinker who more clearly and fundamentally than others, and
first of all, realized the dynamical relationships of
prostitution, as dependent upon a change in the other social
relationships of life, was James Hinton. More than thirty years
ago, in fragmentary writings that still remain unpublished, since
he never worked them into an orderly form, Hinton gave vigorous
and often passionate expression to this fundamental idea. It may
be worth while to quote a few brief passages from Hinton's MSS.:
"I feel that the laws of force should hold also amid the waves of
human passion, that the relations of mechanics are true, and will
rule also in human life.... There is a tension, a crushing of the
soul, by our modern life, and it is ready for a sudden spring to
a different order in which the forces shall rearrange themselves.
It is a dynamical question presented in moral terms.... Keeping a
portion of the woman population without prospect of marriage
means having prostitutes, that is women as instruments of man's
mere sensuality, and this means the killing, in many of them, of
all pure love or capacity of it. This is the fact we have to
face.... To-day I saw a young woman whose life was being consumed
by her want of love, a case of threatened utter misery: now see
the price at which we purchase her ill-health; for her ill-health
we pay the crushing of another girl into hell. We give that for
it; her wretchedness of soul and body are bought by prostitution;
we have prostitutes made for that.... We devote some women
recklessly to perdition to make a hothouse Heaven for the
rest.... One wears herself out in vainly trying to endure
pleasures she is not strong enough to enjoy, while other women
are perishing for lack of these very pleasures. If marriage is
this, is it not embodied lust? The happy Christian homes are the
true dark places of the earth.... Prostitution for man, restraint
for woman--they are two sides of the same thing, and both are
denials of love, like luxury and asceticism. The mountains of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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