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!”
Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his own secret
aspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that the
unconsecrated, while sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are
free from his other weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of
resourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The vast
majority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are there, not
to engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble agreeably
upon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish
experimentalists, precisely, who throng the midway at a world’s fair,
and go to smutty shows, and take in sex magazines, and read the sort of
books that our vice crusading friend reads. They like to conjure up the
charms of carnality, and to help out their somewhat sluggish
imaginations by actual peeps at it, but when it comes to taking a
forthright header into the sulphur they usually fail to muster up the
courage. For one clerk who succumbs to the houris of the pave, there
are five hundred who succumb to lack of means, the warnings of the sex
hygienists, and their own depressing consciences. For one
“clubman”—i.e., bagman or suburban vestryman—who invades the women’s
shops, engages the affection of some innocent miss, lures her into
infamy and then sells her to the Italians, there are one thousand who
never get any further than asking the price of cologne water and
discharging a few furtive winks. And for one husband of the Nordic race
who maintains a blonde chorus girl in oriental luxury around the
corner, there are ten thousand who are as true to their wives, year in
and year out, as so many convicts in the death-house, and would be no
more capable of any such loathsome malpractice, even in the face of
free opportunity, than they would be of cutting off the ears of their
young.
I am sorry to blow up so much romance. In particular, I am sorry for
the suffragettes who specialize in the double standard, for when they
get into pantaloons at last, and have the new freedom, they will
discover to their sorrow that they have been pursuing a chimera—that
there is really no such animal as the male anarchist they have been
denouncing and envying—that the wholesale fornication of man, at least
under Christian democracy, has little more actual existence than honest
advertising or sound cooking. They have followed the porno maniacs in
embracing a piece of buncombe, and when the day of deliverance comes it
will turn to ashes in their arms.
Their error, as I say, lies in overestimating the courage and
enterprise of man. They themselves, barring mere physical valour, a
quality in which the average man is far exceeded by the average jackal
or wolf, have more of both. If the consequences, to a man, of the
slightest descent from virginity were one-tenth as swift and barbarous
as the consequences to a young girl in like case, it would take a
division of infantry to dredge up a single male flouter of that lex
talionis in the whole western world. As things stand today, even with
the odds so greatly in his favour, the average male hesitates and is
thus not lost. Turn to the statistics of the vice crusaders if you
doubt it. They show that the weekly receipts of female recruits upon
the wharves of sin are always more than the demand; that more young
women enter upon the vermilion career than can make respectable livings
at it; that the pressure of the temptation they hold out is the chief
factor in corrupting our undergraduates. What was the first act of the
American Army when it began summoning its young clerks and college boys
and plough hands to conscription camps? Its first act was to mark off a
so-called moral zone around each camp, and to secure it with trenches
and machine guns, and to put a lot of volunteer termagants to
patrolling it, that the assembled jeunesse might be protected in their
rectitude from the immoral advances of the adjacent milkmaids and poor
working girls.