Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 Sex in...

Our inquiry has also, it may be hoped, incidentally tended to show that in practically dealing with the question of prostitution it is pre-eminently necessary to remember the warning which, as regards many other social problems, has been embodied by Herbert Spencer in his famous illustration of the bent iron plate. In trying to make the bent plate smooth, it is useless, Spencer pointed out, to hammer directly on the buckled up part; if we do so we merely find that we have made matters worse; our hammering, to be effective, must be around, and not directly on, the offensive elevation we wish to reduce; only so can the iron plate be hammered smooth.[219] But this elementary law has not been understood by moralists. The plain, practical, common-sense reformer, as he fancied himself to be—from the time of Charlemagne onwards—has over and over again brought his heavy fist directly down on to the evil of prostitution and has always made matters worse. It is only by wisely working outside and around the evil that we can hope to lessen it effectually. By aiming to develop and raise the relationships of men to women, and of women to women, by modifying our notions of sexual relationships, and by introducing a saner and truer conception of womanhood and of the responsibilities of women as well as of men, by attaining, socially as well as economically, a higher level of human living—it is only by such methods as these that we can reasonably expect to see any diminution and alleviation of the evil of prostitution.

Hormayr's Taschenbuch, 1835, p. 255. Hagelstange, in a chapter on mediæval festivals in his Süddeutsches Bauernleben im Mittelalter, shows how, in these Christian orgies which were really of pagan origin, the German people reacted with tremendous and boisterous energy against the laborious and monotonous existence of everyday life.

This was clearly realized by the more intelligent upholders of the Feast of Fools. Austere persons wished to abolish this Feast, and in a remarkable petition sent up to the Theological Faculty of Paris (and quoted by Flogel, Geschichte des Grotesk-Komischen, fourth edition, p. 204) the case for the Feast is thus presented: "We do this according to ancient custom, in order that folly, which is second nature to man and seems to be inborn, may at least once a year have free outlet. Wine casks would burst if we failed sometimes to remove the bung and let in air. Now we are all ill-bound casks and barrels which would let out the wine of wisdom if by constant devotion and fear of God we allowed it to ferment. We must let in air so that it may not be spoilt. Thus on some days we give ourselves up to sport, so that with the greater zeal we may afterwards return to the worship of God." The Feast of Fools was not suppressed until the middle of the sixteenth century, and relics of it persisted (as at Aix) till near the end of the eighteenth century.

A Méray, La Vie au Temps des Libres Prêcheurs, vol. ii, Ch. X. A good and scholarly account of the Feast of Fools is given by E. K. Chambers, The Mediæval Stage, Ch. XIII. It is true that the Church and the early Fathers often anathematized the theatre. But Gregory of Nazianzen wished to found a Christian theatre; the Mediæval Mysteries were certainly under the protection of the clergy; and St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the schoolmen, only condemns the theatre with cautious qualifications.

A. E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, pp. 273 et seq., Crawley brings into association with this function of great festivals the custom, found in some parts of the world, of exchanging wives at these times. "It has nothing whatever to do with the marriage system, except as breaking it for a season, women of forbidden degree being lent, on the same grounds as conventions and ordinary relations are broken at festivals of the Saturnalia type, the object being to change life and start afresh, by exchanging every thing one can, while the very act of exchange coincides with the other desire, to weld the community together" (Ib., p. 479).

The Greek drama probably arose out of a folk-festival of more or less sexual character, and it is even possible that the mediæval drama had a somewhat similar origin (see Donaldson, The Greek Theatre; Gilbert Murray, loc. cit.; Karl Pearson, The Chances of Death, vol. ii, pp. 135-6, 280 et seq.).

"This is, in fact," Cyples declares (The Process of Human Experience, p. 743), "Art's great function—to rehearse within us greater egoistic possibilities, to habituate us to larger actualizations of personality in a rudimentary manner," and so to arouse, "aimlessly but splendidly, the sheer as yet unfulfilled possibilities within us."

Even when monotonous labor is intellectual, it is not thereby protected against degrading orgiastic reactions. Prof. L. Gurlitt shows (Die Neue Generation, January, 1909, pp. 31-6) how the strenuous, unremitting intellectual work of Prussian seminaries leads among both teachers and scholars to the worst forms of the orgy.

Guyot, La Prostitution, p. 8. The element of venality is essential, and religious writers (like Robert Wardlaw, D. D., of Edinburgh, in his Lectures on Female Prostitution, 1842, p. 14) who define prostitution as "the illicit intercourse of the sexes," and synonymous with theological "fornication," fall into an absurd confusion.