Part 5 (1/2)
CHAPTER VII
PROSt.i.tUTION
(_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 prost.i.tution.
It is not the prost.i.tute who is unthinkable. She is only the tragic figure in the center of a devil's drama. It is society's att.i.tude 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 b.u.t.tress of the immunity of ordinary women from danger and temptation. She is the creation of men who traffic in l.u.s.t 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 G.o.d 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 mora.s.s 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 pa.s.sions 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 s.e.x have created this infamy. We as a s.e.x 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 pa.s.sions and should act upon the truth that continence outside marriage is perfectly possible, and that we owe it to women, to ourselves, and to G.o.d to achieve it.
CHAPTER VIII
A GIRL'S EARLY DAYS
By early days I mean the years between sixteen and twenty-one or thereabouts, and I am sure there ought to be a chapter in this book on this subject, though I am not at all sure that I can write it. I only make the attempt because I have been urged to try, and because a book that did not recognize how distressing the ”emotional muddles” of this period often are, would be a very unsympathetic production.
Most men very quickly become clearly conscious of desires springing from their s.e.xual natures, but most girls only do so very slowly. What a girl is conscious of at this period is a new stress of emotion. She finds herself easily elated and easily depressed. She has moods she cannot understand or manage, and vague yearnings after she knows not what. Sometimes she will give way to outbreaks of temper, and afterwards feel acutely ashamed. Other people say of her that she is ”difficult” or wayward, or trying; and she knows it herself better than any of them. Sometimes she is irritable. Sometimes she will hear herself saying things she never meant to say, and will wonder afterwards why she did it. In society she often feels shy, awkward, and self-conscious, and then will hate herself for being like that. She may try an a.s.sumed boldness of manner to hide her shyness, and yet that plan is not a great success. She has longings for the society of others, and then having found social intercourse difficult, is tempted to withdraw into herself. She is very easily wounded in her affections, and often suffers from the effect of little slights of which the authors are quite unconscious. On some days she will feel that the world is a wonderful and splendid place, and life a glorious delight. And then on others life will seem mysterious and puzzling, and the world cruel and hard. She understands with painful clearness what Robert Louis Stevenson meant when he talked about ”the coiled perplexities of youth.”
It is during these years that girls wake up to the attraction of men, and yet they find that relations with men are difficult things to manage. The conventions of society often seem quite senseless, and yet the policy of defying them does not turn out well. And so, as I have said, this is a difficult period for many girls.
It is true that many get through it very happily. They may have good health, happy homes, plenty of good friends, and many interests. For them it is a time of adventure, romance, and vivid joy. They correspond to the common conception of the fresh, happy, charming girl. But many others do not get through happily at all, and it is because their case is common that this chapter is called for.
I have already said as strongly as I can that it is of enormous importance for girls to know the facts of life, and to get to know them from some clean and natural source. By the beginning of this period they ought to have been told about the wonderful and beautiful ways in which G.o.d has ordained that new human lives should be produced, and therefore they ought to be in a position to understand themselves. And if girls are not possessed of this knowledge I can only say that the sooner they take steps to acquire it in a wholesome way the better for themselves. Only take care to whom you turn. Let it be a woman of a reverent and wise mind with a large and wholesome nature. There are others.
Those who do come to understand themselves in this way will realize that the cause of their emotional complications is partly physical and partly psychological. Both body and mind are awakening, with the inevitable result that new instincts, emotions, and desires have to be reckoned with. That is a universal experience for all of both s.e.xes, and is just the price of entering on a larger world. Life _is_ much more complex and mysterious than we at first imagined. It may be much more varied and splendid than we at first supposed. And therefore inevitably it is also more difficult and more confusing. But it does really help us to realize that our early complex troubles have a natural and normal cause and that they are related to great possible gains.
At this point in life, further, the instinct for independence becomes often exceedingly strong. All the conventions of society and the received rules for conduct are apt to appear mere tyrannous annoyances, cramping the free expression of personality. Society itself seems rather like a monster threatening to absorb and confine us. To be compelled to consider others, and even to bow to authority, is to many very bitter. ”I will at all costs be myself” is the natural cry of a human being at this stage, and because the world makes it difficult to carry out that resolve life has a strain in it. Yet here also there is something good. If each generation in turn did not thus demand freedom and self-expression the world would drift into senile decay. We cannot be independent of society. We cannot have an untrammeled freedom. And we all learn that sooner or later. But because the urge towards newness of life does reappear with every generation we do move on, though slowly. And if the price of this pulse of life in adolescents is restlessness, irritation, and even occasional depression the gain is worth the price.
For girls the process is often specially difficult. The task that confronts a girl at this stage is the task of accepting herself ”as a woman.” I know it is not an easy task or so many girls would not be heard saying that they would rather have been boys. No doubt one reason why girls feel this is that often their parents, and especially their mothers, have shown a preference for the boys in the family and have accorded to them a favored position. The psychologists report that an ”inferiority complex” has thus been formed in many a girl's mind.
And thus a very real wrong is done to them.
And yet this is not the whole explanation of the matter. In many girls there is a rebellion against their s.e.x. Many hate the physical signs of their developing natures. It seems to them they are being called to a part in life which they have no wish to play. And if particular emotional stresses accompany that development, that may seem to them only one further reason for being annoyed at the nature of things.
I am sure too that the conventional notions of what a woman should be must often prove very annoying, if not enraging. Many men still cherish the idea of woman as a sort of household ornament--gentle and ”sweet”.
Many have not accommodated themselves to the notion that a woman should know the blunt facts about this hard life and this disordered world.