Sexual immorality

“ However, even if we assume for a moment that the savages in question reached their present view of sexual immorality in the way I have surmised, there still remains the question, How did they originally come to regard certain relations of the sexes as immoral? For clearly the notion that such immorality interferes with the course of nature must have been secondary and derivative: people must on independent grounds have concluded that certain relations between men and women were wrong and injurious before they extended the conclusion by false analogy to nature. ”

“ Sexual immorality among juveniles has become a world-wide problem of increasing importance, but the great majority of the young people of this Dominion are healthy-minded and well-behaved.
2. As sexual immorality is generally clandestine, is often not criminal, and even when criminal may not be detected, there are not any statistics from which it can be shown whether, or to what extent, it has increased. ”

“ Much has been heard of late respecting criminal immorality—i.e., the abuse of the sexual powers, which human law recognises as crime. The boundary of criminal immorality has of late been extended in the hope of protecting young girls. When fathers and mothers begin to realize what the destruction of their children by lust really means, natural horror is felt at the corruption or torture of young children of either sex, and a storm of righteous indignation compels an attempt to provide a remedy. ”

“ The coarser and more heinous sexual crimes are growing more frequent, although due allowance must be made for the increase of population. Indeed, the bulk of the records of the general sessions appears to be concerned with sexual immorality of almost every kind. ”

“ Many persons have expressed the opinion that sexual immorality among young people arises, in part, from the fact that mothers are frequently absent from their homes at times when their children need their care and guidance. ”

“ We reiterate that this case involves the espousal of sexually immoral acts (here adultery) plus actual scenes of a suggestive and obscene nature.' (Emphasis in original.)
The opinion elsewhere, as indeed is also the case with §§ 122 and 122-a themselves when independently read in their entirety, is instinct with the notion that mere abstract expressions of opinion regarding the desirability of sexual immorality, unaccompanied by obscenity [6] or incitement, are not proscribed. ”

“ These examples may suffice to shew that among many races sexual immorality, whether in the form of adultery, fornication, or incest, is believed of itself to entail, naturally and inevitably, without the intervention of society, most serious consequences not only on the culprits themselves, but also on the community, often indeed to menace the very existence of the whole people by destroying the food supply. ”

“ It is simply an instinct adapted to the reproduction of the species. The common confusion of sexuality with immorality is, I repeat, entirely erroneous. A man without sexual feeling must of course be extraordinarily “moral” in his sex relationships, and yet he can be the greatest scoundrel [38] imaginable. His sexual coldness and indifference have not the smallest ethical value. ”

“ This evil is shown in the broad distinction now drawn between different kinds of sexual immorality, and the results which follow such distinction.
Some persons who would shrink from the guilt of being the authors of a first seduction, or of running the risks of legal prosecution, will not hesitate to engage in ‘ordinary immorality’—that is, they will without scruple purchase the temporary use of a consenting woman for a little money; they will justify the transaction by the plea that what women will sell men may buy ”

“ The truth is that the civilized world at large is very far from a working code of sexual morals which will be practiced because of promised rewards rather than because of probable punishments. It is natural, then, that the sex-education movement should have started with a proclamation of physical punishments for immorality rather than an offer of ethical and psychical rewards for morality. ”

“ To one who looks at sexual morality as a question of right conduct which brings its own rewards, it is a shock to find so many thinking people who accept calmly the traditional views of the relation of the sexes and seem to take no interest in the immorality of men except as it is likely to lead to venereal disease or to illegitimacy which [229] demands forced marriage or monetary payments. ”

“ Parents would often refrain, on the plea that innocence must not be disturbed, from teaching their children anything about sex. So impure and evil a subject must not be referred to. Such unpleasant problems as venereal disease must be hidden out of sight, although prostitution and venereal disease continue to flourish. The Victorian, in fact, carried out the Puritan doctrine that all sex is evil, by outwardly pretending that, unless married, he possessed no sexual instinct. ”

“ This is the manner in which society has made the way easy for woman's sexual error. Reflecting upon this, I confess to admiration for a sex which in the face of these difficulties has ever maintained such a well-deserved reputation for purity, and shown us that mankind turns instinctively to good rather than evil. Punishment is part of the crime, with society. To women for a sexual offense it measures out a punishment relentless and life-long. ”

“ Among factors bearing on the causes of sexual intemperance and venereal peril, possibly none stands out as clearly and prominently as the so-called double standard of morals. We all know that society has adopted and hypocritically approved a double code of sexual morality for men and women. ”

“ But, why love of men should be something immoral, I cannot understand; purposeless activity of the sexual instinct (if the immoral is to be seen in all that is useless and unnatural) is also found in intercourse with prostitutes, and even in marriage where means to prevent conception are used; and it seems to me that the sexual intercourse of men must be placed on the same level with all sexual congress that has not procreation as an end. ”

“ By violation of sexually immature individuals, the jurist understands all the possible immoral acts with persons under fourteen years of age that are not comprehended in the term rape. The term violation, in the legal sense of the word, comprehends the most horrible perversions and acts, which are possible only to a man who is controlled by lust and morally weak, and, as is usually the case, lacking in sexual power. ”

“ Bestiality is not rare in women who are also subject to this filthy, obnoxious and degenerative practice. Even if we put aside cases of torture inflicted on small animals and if we avoid all prejudices, we can still, in all normality, consider bestiality as a crime, manifested by the depraved mind. In fact, considered from the point of view of law and humanity, bestiality is one of the most indecent of all the pathological aberrations of the sexual appetite. Human imagination only has marked it with the stigma of moral depravement and has made it a crime. ”

“ The delicate brain, which is being molded, with the other organs of the body, receives its cast largely from those mental and nervous sensations and actions of the mother which are the most intense. One of the most certain effects of sexual indulgence at this time is to develop abnormally the sexual instinct in the child. Here is the key to the origin of much of the sexual precocity and depravity which curse humanity. Sensuality is born in the souls of a large share of the rising generation. What wonder that prostitution flourishes in spite of Christianity and civil law? ”

“ When we get to the bottom of the matter, we often find that the primary cause of the evil is a sexual passion embellished and idealized afterwards by all kinds of noble motives, but in reality more or less unconsciously hypocritical. ”

“ There is no occurrence in the whole vast and diversified range of sexual evil, from the first lewd thought in the mind of the budding child, the very suspicion of which makes the parent tremble, down to the last ghastly and bloody spasm of lust which rends its hapless victim in some rusurban woodland, that is not fed mainly from this mystery and mother of abominations to whose care civilization has remitted the entire subject. ”

“ Perverted sexual habits often arise from [57] a craving for variety, or as makeshifts adopted when the opportunity for normal sex intercourse is denied. Our efforts must be directed towards removing these causes by raising the general standard of social morals.
Religious morality has been the cause of untold mischief in this matter of sexual perversions by representing as great sins and crimes actions which are in reality the result of a diseased mental state.
The habit of self-abuse is also extremely variable in its origin. ”

“ Then the strange and mysterious subject of sexual vice comes in. It has often seemed to me one of the most dark arrangements of this singular world that a female child of the poor should be permitted to start on its immortal career with almost every influence about it degrading, its inherited tendencies overwhelming toward indulgence of passion, its examples all of crime or lust, its lower nature awake long before its higher, and then that it should be allowed to soil and degrade its soul before the maturity of reason, and beyond all human possibility of cleansing! ”

“ My second aim was to put a stop to the continuous string of murders of these stepchildren, the assassins laboring under the delusion that homosexuality is due to deepest moral depravity, and feeling that they are mandatories of society in ridding the world of these "monsters." My third aim was to save hundreds of these superlatively melancholy sexual intermediates from suicide as the result of bitter persecution by those who pride themselves on the fact that in their own case, sex has been thoroughly differentiated. ”

“ But the fallacy of drawing general conclusions from this fact is shown by the additional fact that in idiots and imbeciles premature awakening of the sexual life is also of common occurrence. In cases such as were formerly described as moral insanity, but which in Germany to-day are classed with imbecility, sexual assaults on others are very common at an early age. ”

“ Legal enactment makes a distinguishment in crime on the ground of sex, and the public conscience, being formed by legal enactment, of course endorses the distinction. Morality stamps as sin any sexual action which inflicts any real injury on an individual or on society, whether the act be incepted by man or woman, or be done with the full volition of both. ”

“ In this way prostitution becomes the high-school for all the refinements of sexual perversion. It not only offers special objects required by individuals tainted by heredity with various perversions, but it artificially develops perverse habits in the normal man. The manipulations of sadism or masochism are even utilized to revive a sexual appetite weakened by abuse. Individuals who have become impotent often try to excite themselves by observing the coitus of others. ”

“ Individuals of feeble, cynical, egoistic or abnormal natures, whose number is legion in the corrupt centers of modern civilization, yield to their perversion and often come before the tribunals, or else become objects of public contempt. As it is this class which generally become known, it is assumed by too hasty generalization that sexual perverts are necessarily cynical, vicious or weak-minded individuals ”

“ The vision of imagination has penetrated all draperies, and carried with it the lascivious sense which the unobstructed eye would not. Sensuality has been promoted rather than suppressed. The exhibition of the naked human body is the beginning of sexual morality. ”

“ If it was not for the sin of sexual lust, there would be no slavery of woman, torturing of her, and at the same time, pampering and perversion of her; there would be no quarrels, fights, or killings based on jealousy, would be no reducing of woman to the tool of satisfaction of the body lust, the prostitution; would be no unnatural vices; no weakening of bodily and spiritual powers, no those terrible diseases that afflict humans now; there would be no neglected children or infanticide. ”

“ The great variety of unnatural ways of gratifying the sexual passion is only an evidence of human depravity; and the entailed diseases must be unreservedly studied, that, as much as possible, these abominable conditions may be confined within a certain limit, which should be legally set apart and licensed, that the chaste and elevated portions of society may find protection. ”

“ Can the reader conjure up any worse fate for a youth than to make the startling discovery that he, though extremely conscientious and offenceless, is a type of sexual cripple that has always been regarded by the sexually full-fledged—because of their ignorance and Phariseeism—as the lowest of the low, a monster of wickedness, and an outcast from society? ”

“ Out of the unchallenged policies of continence, abstinence, "chastity" and "purity," we have reaped the harvests of prostitution, venereal scourges and innumerable other evils. Traditional moralists have failed to recognize that chastity and purity must be the outward symptoms of awakened intelligence, of satisfied desires, and fulfilled love. They cannot be taught by "sex education." They cannot be imposed from without by a denial of the might and the right of sexual expression. ”

“ Such competent studies as have been made do conclude that so complex and numerous are the causes of sexual vice that it is impossible to assert with any assurance that 'obscenity' represents a ponderable causal factor in sexually deviant behavior. ”