Sexual repression

“ The resistance against sexuality aims, therefore, at preventing the sexual act; it also seeks to crowd the libido away from the sexual function. We see, for example, in hysteria, how the specific repression blocks the real path of transference; therefore, the libido is obliged to take another path, and that an earlier one, namely, the incestuous road which ultimately leads to the parents. Let us speak, however, of the incest prohibition, which hindered the very first sexual transference. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why is frigidity so widespread among women and sexual impotency so rare among men? We saw that under the adverse conditions caused by the Industrial Revolution women could, by the millions, abandon sexual gratification, convince the world and themselves that, biologically speaking, they were asexual beings. There was never the faintest suspicion that man, on the other hand, would or could abandon his sexual nature, no matter how difficult the going became. Men might develop neuroses, they might even take odd sexual directions, develop perversions, if their parents were sufficiently neurotic. ”

“ These agencies stimulate an excessive [99] stream of sexual desire, with all its physical accompaniments, in boys and men: the natural and inevitable result is an overwhelming impulse toward illicit satisfaction in self-abuse or sexual immorality. Society in self-defense and the interest of its youth must wage war upon this mercenary exploiting of the sex impulse. Licentious thinking is the great foe of continence ”

“ According to Ricardi, many frigid prostitutes practice with pleasure clitoris-masturbation, cunnilictio, and, especially, sapphism, preferring these perversions to the normal sexual act. Moreover, among prostitutes and female criminals there is no lack of lovers of martyrization, of flagellation, even to the drawing of blood, of tyrannical treatment, and of the initiation of children into the mysteries of sex. ”

“ These two things, the mind domination of the Church, and the body domination of the State are the causes of sex slavery.
First of all, it has introduced into the world the constructed crime of obscenity: it has set up such a peculiar standard of morals that to speak the names of the sexual organs is to commit the most brutal outrage. It reminds me that in your city you have a street called "Callowhill." Once it was called Gallows' Hill, for the elevation to which it leads, now known as "Cherry Hill," has been the last touching place on earth for the feet of many a victim murdered by the Law. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There a correct knowledge of sexual intermediates is widely disseminated and the courts deal out justice to the woman-man. Even the Paris apache realizes that these bisexuals are worthy of commiseration and not responsible for their idiosyncrasies. But English-speaking countries give carte blanche to every prude actuated to pillage and even murder us women-men. We are outlaws ”

“ At other times he felt no pederastic desires and liked the society of women, notwithstanding which he would, not without a certain amount of wit, defend the form of sexual perversion which occupies our attention. ”

“ Looking at the social evil from any point of view, it seems to me that ignorance, dense ignorance, is largely responsible for the existence of that darkest blot on our boasted civilization—the social-sexual evil. No matter how we look at the established facts regarding prostitution, they all point to the need of sexual instruction for the protection of the youth of both sexes. ”

“ Prostitution," he concludes, "has a strong tendency towards emphasizing the naturally selfish attitude of men towards women, and encouraging them in the delusion, born of unregulated passions, that the sexual act itself is the aim and end of the sex life. Prostitution can therefore make no claim to afford even a temporary solution to the sex problem. It fulfils only that mission which has made it a 'necessary evil'—the mission of palliative to the physical rigors of celibacy and monogamy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They must look elsewhere than to semi-bearded hags for their sacrificial victims on whom to load the sins of mankind, and the blame for the decline and fall of nations. Since, next to hags, they consider sexual cripples as the most loathsome of humans, they make the latter the scape-goats of present-day society. While they no longer burn them at the stake or bury them alive (as provided in old European law) they are permitted by twentieth century statutes to imprison inoffensive androgynes for twenty years. ”

“ Prostitution and all the modern sexual degeneration which marches under the hypocritical flag of Christianity, civilization and monogamy, have so far developed the pornographic spirit that men living in centers of debauchery, centers which are unfortunately extending more and more from town to country, lose all conception of the noble qualities natural to the feminine sentiment and to true love, or only preserve a few shreds of it which they treat with ridicule. ”

“ But they refused to do anything toward ameliorating the condition of the world's most oppressed class. It seemed to be their opinion that the world must have its scapegoat—to punish, vicariously, for the world's own sins. For centuries, sexual intermediates had served the world in that capacity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is sad to see ladies of high position defending such barbarous institutions as proxenetism (the business of keeping brothels) and the regulation of prostitution, imagining that they thereby protect their daughters against seduction. Such aberration can only be explained by suggestive influence on the part of men. Among men, and especially among many physicians, the belief in the efficacy of regulation depends on a mixture of blind routine, faith in authority and want of judgment, combined perhaps with more or less unconscious eroticism. ”

“ Thus it comes that so often, side by side with a rapid progress of civilization, an increase of sexual aberration may be observed. Depravity, which formerly was almost exclu- sively adduced to account for sexual perversion, now combines with the rapid growth of culture, and for the same reasons, and on account of the rapid progress of intellectual development, unavoidably brings along with
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it an increase of mental and nervous disease. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Experts allege that traces of psycho-sexual aberration are latent in many persons where it would be least expected, and it is, prima facie, likely enough that these latent tendencies in both men and women should become active under the cover of an agitation in favour of purity and anti-sexuality, to the point of gratifying itself with the thought of torture inflicted upon men. ”

“ Listen to the heart-rending stories of girls in the houses of prostitution. Each has her story of circumstantial events to relate. Circumstances of varied gravity have caused the multitudes of “fallen women” to occupy their degraded sphere of shame and debauch. Many of these have never been predisposed to a sexual livelihood by an erotic disposition, and they only stay by compulsion and fear of reproach that must follow if they return to society. ”

“ Always times of upheaval and change afford opportunities for escape in violent expression, and while we bewail the disorder and confusion, the many sexual crimes that are overwhelming us, we ought to take warning at our folly in having set up for ourselves the new fashionable god of "escape from sex."
Women are the worst sinners. ”

“ We can but consider all legislation and all police measures which are intended to regulate the sexual intercourse in the human family, as absolute failures, as inhuman, in fact as down-right detrimental to the race. Exacting laws have never improved the morals of any race or nation; hypocrisy and secret evasion are the only results obtained. It would be better by far if steps were taken to enlighten the masses on the questions of sexual heredity and degeneration. ”

“ But returning to the present day, both gynecologists and alienists record numerous cases of great pathological increase in the intensity of the sexual impulse in women. According to Lombroso, such continued ardency of sexual desire occurs chiefly in women with an inherited tendency to crime and to prostitution, whose natures exhibit a commingling of lasciviousness with barbarism. He gives examples of such women, one of whom surrendered herself to her husband’s laborers ”

“ The danger that unnatural vices, if tolerated by the law, would increase until whole nations acquired them, does not seem to be formidable. The position of women in our civilisation renders sexual relations among us occidentals different from those of any country—ancient Greece and Rome, modern Turkey and Persia—where antiphysical habits have hitherto become endemic.
IX.
In modern France, since the promulgation of the Code Napoleon, sexual inversion has been tolerated under the same restrictions as normal sexuality. ”

“ Men themselves will see that they are bound to put a check upon lust, and forbid the exercise of physical sex to the injury of another individual. Serious consideration will then be given to the ways in which sexual power may be rightfully exercised, and preserve its distinctly human features of affection and mutual responsibility. Whilst social sentiment is growing towards such recognition, it is our duty as women unflinchingly to oppose prostitution—i.e., mercenary indiscriminate sexual intercourse—and to refuse utterly to countenance it. ”

“ The immeasurable depth of degradation into which those women fall, whose sex is thoroughly debased, who have intensified the physical instincts of the brute by the mental power for evil possessed by the human being, indicates the mighty character of sexual power over the nature of woman for corruption. ”

“ Photography and all the perfected methods of reproduction of pictures, the increasing means of travel which facilitate clandestine sexual relations, the industrial art which ornaments our apartments, the increasing luxury and comfort of dwellings, beds, etc., are, at the present day, so many factors in the science of erotic voluptuousness. Prostitution itself has become adapted to all the pathological excrescences of vice. In a word, the artificial culture of the human sexual appetite has given rise to a veritable high school of debauchery. ”