Strongly contrasting with these people are others, equally numerous, among whom chastity is valued very highly. Many primitive tribes cherish jealously the virtue of their women. The Mandan maidens are described as beautiful and unapproachable; the wayward Chippewa lass can never hope to marry a warrior; the Kaffir girl is chaste and modest; the Sumatran single woman guards her honor like a Vestal.
These are statements of travelers and
explorers, but even making due allowance for exaggeration, the truth stands out clearly, that
among existing peoples, primitive and cultured, all degrees of sentiment in regard to female
purity may be found manifested, from the one extreme of declaring it a disgrace, to the
opposite extreme of giving it precedence over all other virtues, and making it an
indispensable condition of moral excellence.
Neither does the evidence warrant the contention sometimes heard that regard for
chastity rises pari passu with civilization. "Some peoples who are in other respects among the
lowest, are in this respect among the highest", says Spencer in his analysis of the subject, and
this may also be gathered from the examples just cited.
Our main purpose in giving these illustrations has been to dispose effectually of the
stubborn fallacy which declares our modern conventional conceptions of sex morality to be
innate. Sentiments showing such a bewildering lack of uniformity in the different varieties of
the human species, cannot be called innate without doing violence to the term.
Leaving aside these and similar attempts to bolster up our unfair system with false
assertions, let us now submit the system itself to a critical examination.
Our so called double standard ordains that woman should abstain from all sexual intercourse outside of wedlock,
and practice intercourse exclusively with one man in wedlock. Now, if all women should
actually conform to this demand, realizing it absolutely, it follows that no man would be able
to indulge in sexual connections outside of wedlock, for sheer lack of a female partner. This
conclusion is no mere sophism. It cannot possibly be evaded.
To say that single men are free
to indulge in sexual intercourse, while women, both single and married, must guard their
purity, is to commit one's self to a reductio ad absurdum! Given a community of unapproachably
chaste women, according to the ideal set up by our "moral law", and where is the single
man to find a companion for his extra marital intrigues? Manifestly, universal female chastity
would entail universal male chastity.
Thus our double standard, which has resulted in such contradictory and mutually
destructive demands upon the female sex, turns out on closer scrutiny to be a miserable
paradox.
There is only one way leading out of this logical labyrinth namely, to set aside a class
of women and exempt them from the requirement of purity. They will supply a channel for
drawing off the uncontrollable excess of sexual passion in men, and thus allow the balance
of woman-kind to preserve their "honor". Such a compromise does exist in reality, and our
prostitute is the representative of this scapegoat class. "Herself the supreme type of vice", says
Lecky in a familiar eloquent passage, "she is ultimately the efficient guardian of virtue. But
for her the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted. On that one
ignoble and degraded form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world
with shame".
Only at such an expense, with the aid of such an expedient, can the monstrous,
self contradictory double standard be maintained at all. Without this subterfuge it must
inevitably collapse. All women cannot remain chaste unless all men remain chaste. This
proposition is an unassailable logical stronghold. A lapse from purity on the part of any man
implies a like lapse on the part of some woman. The sexes are thus seen to stand and fall
together. Prostitution is the ransom we are paying for our iniquitous sex morality. It is the
modern Minotaur, grown to gigantic dimensions like all things modern, devouring his annual
tribute of thousands of our maidens.