PROSTITUTION
(_A chapter for men_)
There are some things so unthinkable that they only continue because
people refuse to think of them. Sweating and slums are two such things,
but the supreme example in the modern world is prostitution.
It is not the prostitute who is unthinkable. She is only the tragic
figure in the center of a devil's drama. It is society's attitude to
her that is unthinkable. By men she is used for their pleasure and then
despised and scorned. By women she is held an outcast, and yet she is
the main buttress of the immunity of ordinary women from danger and
temptation. She is the creation of men who traffic in lust and yet is
held shameless by her patrons. She is the product of the social sins
for which we are all responsible, and yet is considered the most sinful
of us all. Often she was beguiled into her first mistake by the
pretence of love, and because to that pretence she made a natural and
sincere response. Sometimes she was cajoled into her mistake by older
fiends in the shape of women. Sometimes she suffered physical violence
at the hands of male fiends. Often she plunged into sin in desperation
because in the modern world she could not get a living wage in return
for honest work. Sometimes she made a wild, reckless dash towards
excitement because she could no longer endure the stifling, drab, and
hideous monotony coupled with privation which we allow to become the
lot of millions.
To her men show only their worst side, and women generally their
hardest. If she often regards both alike as devils, who shall blame
her! Those who share her sin leave her to face alone the suffering
that follows. For them society has a place even when their habits are
known. For her it has no place except a shameful one. Of real love, of
motherhood, or of family life she may know nothing. Even of normal
human relations she remains often ignorant.
He in whom we profess to have seen God was ready to forgive and willing
to love such women. We hold it wrong to forgive and impossible to love.
For a few short years in early youth she may have money in plenty, and
then slowly she begins to sink. Her health becomes sapped. Often
loathsome disease makes her a victim. As the shadows begin to gather
she will often turn to drink that for an hour she may recover the
delusion of well-being. Slowly but certainly the morass drags her down.
Often she does not reach thirty. If she lives it is to face a state in
which, toothless, wrinkled, and obscene, she is seen only by those who
visit the murkiest parts of our cities. She dies unmoored and unloved,
and is hurried into an unknown grave.
And she exists because men say they _must_ indulge their passions and
women believe it. She is the incarnation not of her own but of
society's shame. She is the scapegoat for thousands who live on in
careless comfort. Every man who touches her pushes her farther down,
and our hollow pretence of social morality is built upon her quivering
body.
Will you men who read this please think about her! Think till you are
horrified, disgusted, and ashamed. Think till you realize this
unthinkable thing. And then remember that she exists only because of
us. We as a sex have created this infamy. We as a sex still continue to
condone it.
And there is only one cure for it. It is that we should stop uttering
or believing the lie that we must indulge our passions and should act
upon the truth that continence outside marriage is perfectly possible,
and that we owe it to women, to ourselves, and to God to achieve it.