Sexual Morality

Sexual Morality

From Studies in the Psychology of Sex - Volume 6

By Havelock Ellis

An Early 20th Century StudyMarriage and MoralityPractical Morality Based on CustomTrial MarriageThe Theory of the MatriarchateThe Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Inequality of WomanThe Ambiguous Influence of ChristianityInfluence of Teutonic Custom and FeudalismThe Vanishing Subjection of WomanInaptitude of the Modern Man to DomineerThe Growth of Moral Responsibility in WomenThe Increase of Women Who WorkInvasion of the Modern Industrial Field by WomenThe Sexual Responsibility of Women and Its ConsequencesThe "Self-Sacrifice" of WomenProcreation the Sole Sexual Concern of the State

It has been necessary to deal fully with the phenomena of prostitution because, however aloof we may personally choose to hold ourselves from those phenomena, they really bring us to the heart of the sexual question in so far as it constitutes a social problem. If we look at prostitution from the outside, as an objective phenomenon, as a question of social dynamics, it is seen to be not a merely accidental and eliminable incident of our present marriage system but an integral part of it, without which it would fall to pieces. This will probably be fairly clear to all who have followed the preceding exposition of prostitutional phenomena. There is, however, more than this to be said. Not only is prostitution to-day, as it has been for more than two thousand years, the buttress of our marriage system, but if we look at marriage, not from the outside as a formal institution, but from the inside with relation to the motives that constitute it, we find that marriage in a large proportion of cases is itself in certain respects a form of prostitution.