Chapter 3
The other girl in the play is Sylvia. Her fate is very different. She needs melodramatic money for her sick mother. Her earnings in the department store are not enough. The sly owner of a treacherous employment agency has given her a card over the counter, advising her to come there, when she needs extra employment. The agency keeps open in the evening. She tells her mother that she will seek some extra work there. The mother warns her that there are so many traps for decent girls, and she answers that she is not afraid and that she will be on the lookout. She goes there, and the skilful owner of the agency shows her how miserable the pay would be for any decent evening work, and how easily she can earn all the money she needs for her mother if she is willing to be paid by men. At first she refuses with pathos, but under the suggestive pressure of luring arguments she slowly weakens, and finally consents to exchange her street gown for a fantastic costume of half-nakedness. The feelings of the audience are saved by the detective who breaks in at the decisive moment, but the arguments of the advocates of sexual education cannot possibly be saved after that voluntary yielding. Sylvia knows what she has to expect, and no more intense perusal of literature on the subject of prostitution would have changed her mind. What else in the world could have helped her in such an hour but a still stronger feeling of instinctive repugnance? If Sylvia was actually to put her fate on a mere calculation, with a full knowledge of all the sociological facts involved, she probably reasoned wrongly in dealing with this particular employment agency, but was on the whole not so wrong in deciding that a frivolous life would be the most reasonable way out of her financial difficulties, as her sexual education would include, of course, a sufficient knowledge of all which is needed to avoid conception and infection. She would therefore know that after a little while of serving the lust of men she would be just as intact and just as attractive. If society has the wish to force Sylvia to a decision in the opposite direction, only one way is open: to make the belief in the sacred value of virtue so deep and powerful that any mere reasoning and calculation loses its strength. But that is possible only through an education which relies on the instinctive respect and mystical belief. Only a policy of silence could have saved Sylvia, because that alone would have implanted in her mind an ineffable idea of unknown horrors which would await her when she broke the sacred ring of chastity.
The climax of public discussions was reached when America had its season of Brieux' "Damaged Goods." Its topic is entirely different, as it deals exclusively with the spreading of contagious diseases and the prevention of their destructive influence on the family. Yet the doubt whether such a dramatized medical lesson belongs on the metropolitan stage has here exactly the same justification. Nevertheless, it brings its new set of issues. Brieux' play does not deserve any interest as a drama. With complete sincerity the theatre programme announces, "The object of this play is a study of the disease of syphilis in its bearing on marriage." The play was first produced in Paris in the year 1901. It began its great medical teaching in America in the spring of 1913. Even those who have only superficial contact with medicine know that the twelve years which lie between those dates have seen the greatest progress in the study of syphilis which has ever been made. It is sufficient to think of the Wassermann test, the Ehrlich treatment, the new discoveries concerning the relations of lues and brain disease, and many other details in order to understand that a clinical lesson about this disease written in the first year of the century must be utterly antiquated in its fourteenth year. We might just as well teach the fighting of tuberculosis with the clinical textbook of thirty years ago.
How misleading many of the claims of the play are ought to have struck even the unscientific audience. The real centre of the so-called drama is that the father and the grandmother of the diseased infant are willing to risk the health of the wet nurse rather than to allow the child to go over to artificial feeding. The whole play loses its chief point and its greatest pathetic speech if we do not accept the Parisian view that a sickly child must die if it has its milk from the bottle. The Boston audience wildly applauded the great speech of the grandmother who wants to poison the nurse rather than to sacrifice her grandchild to the drinking of sterilized milk, and yet it was an audience which surely was brought up on the bottle. It would be very easy to write another play in which quite different medical views are presented, and where will it lead us if the various treatments of tuberculosis, perhaps by the Friedmann cures, or of diphtheria, perhaps by chiropractice or osteopathy, are to be fought out on the stage until finally the editors of _Life_ would write a play around their usual thesis that the physicians are destroying mankind and that our modern medicine is humbug. As long as the drama shows us human elements, every one can be a party and can take a stand for the motives of his heart. But if the stage presents arguments on scientific questions in which no public is able to examine the facts, the way is open for any one-sided propaganda.
Moreover, what, after all, are the lessons which the men are to learn from these three hours of talk on syphilis? To be sure, it is suggested that it would be best if every young man were to marry early and remain faithful to his wife and take care that she remain faithful to him. But this aphorism will make very little impression on the kind of listener whose tendency would naturally turn him in other directions. He hears in the play far more facts which encourage him in his selfish instincts. He hears the old doctor assuring his patient that not more than a negligible 10 per cent. of all men enter married life without having had sexual intercourse with women. He hears that the disease can be easily cured, that he may marry quite safely after three years, that the harm done to the child can be removed, and that no one ought to be blamed for acquiring the disease, as anybody may acquire it and that it is only a matter of good or bad luck. The president of the Medical Society in Boston drew the perfectly correct consequences when in a warm recommendation of the play he emphasized the importance of the knowledge about the disease, inasmuch as any one may acquire it in a hundred ways which have nothing to do with sexual life. He says anybody may get syphilis by wetting a lead pencil with his lips or from an infected towel or from a pipe or from a drinking glass or from a cigarette. This is medically entirely correct, and yet if Brieux had added this medical truth to all the other medical sayings of his doctor, he would have taken away the whole meaning of the play and would have put it just on the level of a dramatized story about scarlet fever or typhoid.
Yet here, too, the fundamental mistake remains the psychological one. The play hopes to reform by the appeal to fear, while the whole mental mechanism of man is so arranged that in the emotional tension of the sexual desire the argument of the fear that we may have bad luck will always be outbalanced by the hope and conviction that we will not be the one who draws the black ball. And together with this psychological fact goes the other stubborn feature of the mind, which no sermon can remove, that the focussing of the attention on the sexual problems, even in their repelling form, starts too often a reaction of glands and with it sexual thoughts which ultimately lead to a desire for satisfaction.
The cleverest of this group of plays strictly intended for sexual education--as Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession" or plays of Pinero and similar ones would belong only indirectly in this circle--is probably Wedekind's "Spring's Awakening." It brought to Germany, and especially to Berlin, any education which the Friedrichstrasse had failed to bring. To prohibit it would have meant the reactionary crushing of a distinctly literary work by a brilliant writer; to allow it meant to fill the Berlin life for seasons with a new spirit which showed its effects. The sexual discussion became the favourite topic; the girls learned to look out for their safety: and it was probably only a chance that at the same time a wave of immorality overflooded the youth of Berlin. The times of naive flirtation were over; any indecency seemed allowable if only conception was artificially prevented. The social life of Berlin from the fashionable quarters of Berlin West to the factory quarters of Berlin East was never more rotten and more perverse than in those years in which sexual education from the stage indulged in its orgies.
The central problem is not whether the facts are distorted or not, and whether the suggestions are wise or not, and whether the remedies are practicable or not. All this is secondary to the fundamental question of whether it is wise to spread out such problems before the miscellaneous public of our theatres. No doubt a few of the social reformers are sprinkled over the audiences. There are a few in the boxes as well as in the galleries who discern the realities and who hear the true appeal, even through those grotesque melodramas. But with the overwhelming majority it is quite different. For them it is entertainment, and as such it is devastating. It is quite true that many a piquant comic opera shows more actual frivolity, and no one will underestimate the shady influence of such voluptuous vulgarities in their multicoloured stage setting. Yet from a psychological point of view the effect of the pathetic treatment is far more dangerous than that of the frivolous. A good many well-meaning reformers do not see that, because they know too little of the deeper layers of the sexual imagination. The intimate connection between sexuality and cruelty, perversion and viciousness, may produce much more injurious results in the mind of the average man when he sees the tragedy of the white slave than when he laughs at the farce of the chorus girl. Moreover, even the information which such plays divulge may stimulate some model citizens to help the police and the doctors, but it may suggest to a much larger number hitherto unknown paths of viciousness. The average New Yorker would hear with surprise from the Rockefeller Report on Commercialized Prostitution in New York City that the commission has visited in Manhattan a hundred and forty parlour houses, twenty of which were known to the trade as fifty-cent houses, eighty as one-dollar houses, six as two-dollar houses, and thirty-four as five-and ten-dollar houses. Yet the chances are great that essentially persons with serious interests in social hygiene turn to such books of sober study. But to cry out such information to those Broadway crowds which seek a few hours' fun before they go to the next lobster palace or to the nearest cabaret cannot possibly serve social hygiene.
Worst of all, the theatre, more than any other source of so-called information, has been responsible for the breakdown of the barriers of social reserve in sexual discussions, and that means ultimately in erotic behaviour. The book which the individual man or woman reads at his fireside has no socializing influence, but the play which they see together is naturally discussed, views are exchanged, and all which in old-fashioned times was avoided, even in serious discussion, becomes daily more a matter of the most superficial gossip. When recently at a dinner party a charming young woman whom I had hardly met before asked me, when we were at the oysters, how prostitution is regulated in Germany, and did not conclude the subject before we had reached the ice cream, I saw the natural consequences of this new era of theatre influence. Society, which with the excuse of philanthropic sociology favours erotically tainted problems, must sink down to a community in which the sexual relations become chaotic and turbulent. Finally, the theatre is not open only to the adult. Its filthy message reaches the ears of boys and girls, who, even if they take it solemnly, are forced to think of these facts and to set the whole mechanism of sexual associations and complex reactions into motion. The playwriters know that well, but they have their own theory. When I once remonstrated against the indecencies which are injected into the imagination of the adolescent by the plays, Mr. Bayard Veiller, the talented author of "The Fight," answered in a Sunday newspaper. He said that he could not help thinking of the insane man who objected to throwing a bucket of salt water into the ocean for fear it would turn the ocean salt. "Does not Professor Muensterberg know that you can't put more sex thoughts into the minds of young men and women, because their minds contain nothing else?" If the present movement is not brought to a stop, the time may indeed come when those young minds will not contain anything else. But is that really true of to-day, and, above all, was it true of yesterday, before the curtain was raised on the red-light drama?
VI
How is it possible that with such obvious dangers and such evident injurious effects, this movement on the stage and in literature, in the schools and in the homes, is defended and furthered by so many well-meaning and earnest thinking men and women in the community? A number of causes may have worked together there. It cannot be overlooked that one of the most effective ones was probably the new enthusiasm for the feministic movement. We do not want to discuss here the right and wrong of this worldwide advance toward the fuller liberation of women. If we have to touch on it here, it is only to point out that this connection between the sound elements of the feministic movement and the propaganda for sex education on the new-fashioned lines is really not necessary at all. I do not know whether the feminists are entirely right, but I feel sure that their own principles ought rather to lead them to an opposition to this breaking down of the barriers. It is nothing but a superficiality if they instinctively take their stand on the side of those who spread broadcast the knowledge about sex.
The feminists vehemently object to the dual standard, but if they help everything which makes sex an object of common gossip, it may work indeed toward a uniform standard; only the uniformity will not consist in the men's being chaste like the women, but in the women's being immoral like the men. The feministic enthusiasm turns passionately against those scandalous places of women's humiliation; and yet its chief influence on female education is the effort to give more freedom to the individual girl, and that means to remove her from the authority and discipline of the parental home, to open the door for her to the street, to leave her to her craving for amusement, to smooth the path which leads to ruin. The sincere feminists may say that some of the changes which they hope for are so great that they are ready to pay the price for them and to take in exchange a rapid increase of sexual vice and of erotic disorderliness. But to fancy that the liberation of women and the protection of women can be furthered by the same means is a psychological illusion. The community which opens the playhouses to the lure of the new dramatic art may protect 5 per cent. of those who are in danger to-day, but throws 50 per cent. more into abysses. The feminists who see to the depths of their ideals ought to join full-heartedly the ranks of those who entirely object to this distribution of the infectious germs of sexual knowledge.
Some stray support may come to the new movement also from another side. Some believe that this great emphasis on sexual interests may intensify aesthetic longings in the American commonwealth. No doubt this interrelation exists. No civilization has known a great artistic rise without a certain freedom and joy in sensual life. Prudery always has made true aesthetic unfolding impossible. Yet if we yielded here, we would again be pushed away from our real problem. The aesthetic enthusiast might think it a blessing for the American nation if a great aesthetic outburst were secured, even by the ruin of moral standards: a wonderful blossoming of fascinating flowers from a swampy soil in an atmosphere full of moral miasmas. To be sure, even then it is very doubtful whether any success could be hoped for, as a lightness in sexual matters may be a symptom of an artistic age, but surely is not its cause. The artist may love to drink, but the drink does not make an artist. An aesthetic community may reach its best when it is freed from sexual censorship, but throwing the censor out of the house would not add anything to the aesthetic inspiration of a society which is instinctively indifferent to the artistic calling. Above all, the question for us is not whether the sexual overeducation may have certain pleasant side effects: we ask only how far it succeeds in its intended chief effect of improving morally the social community.
In fact, neither feminism nor aestheticism could have secured this indulgence of the community in the new movement, if one more direct argument had not influenced the conviction of some of our leaders. They reason around one central thought--namely, that the old policy of silence, in which they grew up, has been tried and has shown itself unsuccessful. The horrible dimensions which the social evil has taken, the ruinous effects on family life and national health, are before us. The old policy must therefore be wrong. Let us try with all our might the reform, however disgusting its first appearance may be. This surely is the virile argument of men who know what they are aiming at. And yet it is based on fundamental psychological misapprehensions. It is a great confusion of causes and effects. The misery has this distressing form not on account of the policy of silence, but in spite of it, or rather it took the tremendous dimensions of to-day at the same time that the dam of silence was broken and the flood of sexual gossip rushed in.
We find exactly this relation throughout the history of civilized mankind. To be sure, some editorial writers behave as if the erotic calamity of the day were something unheard of, and as if it demanded a new remedy. The historical retrospect leaves no doubt that periods of sexual tension and of sexual relaxation, of hysteric erotic excitement and of a certain cool indifference have alternated throughout thousands of years. And whenever an age was unusually immoral and lascivious, it was always also a period in which under the mask of scientific interest or social frankness or aesthetic openmindedness the sexual problems were matters of freest discussion. The periods of austerity and restraint, on the other hand, were always characterized also by an unwillingness to talk about sexual relations and to show them in their animal nakedness. Antiquity knew those ups and downs, mediaeval times knew them, and in modern centuries the fluctuations have been still more rapid. As soon as a moral age with its policy of silence is succeeded by an immoral age, it is certainly a very easy historical misconstruction to say that the immorality resulted from the preceding conspiracy of silence and that the immorality would disappear if the opposite scheme of frankest speech were adopted. But the fact that this argument is accepted and that the overwhelming majority hails the new regime with enthusiasm is nothing but an almost essential part of the new period, which has succeeded the time of modesty.
Sexual discussion and sexual immorality have always been parts of one circle; sexual silence and moral restraint form another circle. The change from one to the other has come in the history of mankind, usually through new conditions of life, and the primary factor has not been any policy of keeping quiet in respect or of gossiping in curiosity, but the starting point has generally been a change in the life habits. When new wealth has come to a people with new liberties and new desires for enjoyment, the great periods of sexual frivolity have started and brought secondarily the discussions of sex problems, which intensified the immoral life. On the other hand, when a nation in the richness of its life has been brought before new great responsibilities, great social earthquakes and revolutions, great wars for national honour, or great new intellectual or religious ideals, then the sexual tension has been released, the attention has been withdrawn from the frivolous concerns, and the people have settled down soberly to a life of modesty and morality, which brought with it as a natural consequence the policy of reverence and silence. The new situation in America, and to a certain degree all over the world, has come in, too, not through the silence of the preceding generation, but by the sudden change from agricultural to industrial life, with its gigantic cumulation of capital, with its widespread new wealth, with its new ideas of social liberty, with its fading religion, with its technical wonders of luxury and comfort. This new age, which takes its orders from Broadway with its cabarets and tango dances, must ridicule the silence of our fathers and denounce it as a conspiracy. It needs the sexual discussions, as it craves the lurid music and the sensual dances, until finally even the most earnest energies, those of social reform and of hygiene, of intellectual culture and of artistic effort, are forced into the service of this antimoral fashion.