ype
of woman. From the height of his presumption, he then despises woman
and does not perceive that it is himself whom he despises; for on the
whole, from the sexual point of view, the dependent woman of to-day
conforms herself to man and becomes what he makes her. The number of
coitus, their details, the size and form of the sexual organs, the
pleasure of having cut out other men, and especially the pathological
perversions of the sexual appetite, form the chief object of the
thoughts and conversations of pornographic minds. Each tries to outdo
the others in sexual enormities, and the virtuosity of these gentlemen
in this domain is only surpassed by their ignorance and incapacity in
all others.

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. Many men have admitted this to me, after being much
astonished when I was obliged to give them quite another conception of
love and woman, without introducing the least trace of religion. No
doubt certain better individuals, fallen by chance into debauchery,
speak respectfully of a mother or a sister, for whom they profess an
almost religious worship. They regard these as beings apart, as
species of a lost race of demigods, and they do not perceive that they
discredit them and drag them in the mud by their contempt and
pornographic conception of woman in general, a conception which is
moreover often altered to profound pessimism.

In the relatively moral circles of society, our description would no
doubt be taxed with exaggeration, because natures a little more
refined have the habit of acting like the ostrich who hides his head
in the sand, that is to say of turning their eyes away from the
pornographic swamp with disgust so as not to see it, and thus avoid it
instinctively. But this maneuver serves no purpose: the facts remain
as they are.

Eroticism is no more a vice than sexual anaesthesia is a virtue. Even
when they are chaste, men of libidinous nature require a strong will
to resist all the artificial seductions which excite their sensuality.
This is why the