How strong was the feeling that a husband or a wife is an article of
property, greatly depreciated in value at second-hand, and not to be
used or touched by any person but the proprietor, may be learnt from
Shakespear. His most infatuated and passionate lovers are Antony and
Othello; yet both of them betray the commercial and proprietary
instinct the moment they lose their tempers. "I found you," says Antony,
reproaching Cleopatra, "as a morsel cold upon dead Caesar's trencher."
Othello's worst agony is the thought of "keeping a corner in the thing
he loves for others' uses." But this is not what a man feels about the
thing he loves, but about the thing he owns. I never understood the full
significance of Othello's outburst until I one day heard a lady, in
the course of a private discussion as to the feasibility of "group
marriage," say with cold disgust that she would as soon think of lending
her toothbrush to another woman as her husband. The sense of outraged
manhood with which I felt myself and all other husbands thus reduced to
the rank of a toilet appliance gave me a very unpleasant taste of what
Desdemona might have felt had she overheard Othello's outburst. I was so
dumfounded that I had not the presence of mind to ask the lady whether
she insisted on having a doctor, a nurse, a dentist, and even a priest
and solicitor all to herself as well. But I had too often heard men
speak of women as if they were mere personal conveniences to feel
surprised that exactly the same view is held, only more fastidiously, by
women.
All these views must be got rid of before we can have any healthy
public opinion (on which depends our having a healthy population) on
the subject of sex, and consequently of marriage. Whilst the subject is
considered shameful and sinful we shall have no systematic instruction
in sexual hygiene, because such lectures as are given in Germany,
France, and even prudish America (where the great Miltonic tradition
in this matter still lives) will be considered a corruption of that
youthful innocence which now subsists on nasty stories and whispered
traditions handed down from generation to generation of school-children:
stories and traditions which conceal nothing of sex but its dignity, its
honor, its sacredness, its rank as the first necessity of society and
the deepest concern of the nation. We shall continue to maintain the
White Slave Trade and protect its exploiters by, on the one hand,
tolerating the white slave as the necessary breakwater of marriage; and,
on the other, trampling on her and degrading her until she has nothing
to hope from our Courts; and so, with policemen at every corner, and law
triumphant all over Europe, she will still be smuggled and cattle-driven
from one end of the civilized world to the other, cheated, beaten,
bullied, and hunted into the streets to disgusting overwork, without
daring to utter the cry for help that brings, not rescue, but exposure
and infamy, yet revenging herself terribly in the end by scattering
blindness and sterility, pain and disfigurement, insanity and death
among us with the certainty that we are much too pious and genteel to
allow such things to be mentioned with a view to saving either her or
ourselves from them. And all the time we shall keep enthusiastically
investing her trade with every allurement that the art of the novelist,
the playwright, the dancer, the milliner, the painter, the limelight
man, and the sentimental poet can devize, after which we shall continue
to be very much shocked and surprised when the cry of the youth, of the
young wife, of the mother, of the infected nurse, and of all the other
victims, direct and indirect, arises with its invariable refrain: "Why
did nobody warn me?"