t to defend
prostitution, though they generally exclude women from its operation, as a
sex to whom it fails to apply and by whom it is not required.

But on the other hand we have another stream of platitude. On this side
there is usually little attempt either to deny or to affirm the theory of
the opposing party, though they would contradict its conclusions. Their
theory, if they have one, would usually seem to be that sexual activity is
a response to stimulation from without or from within, so that if there is
no stimulation there will be no sexual manifestation. They would preach,
they tell us, a strenuous ideal; they would set up a wholesome dictate of
hygiene. The formula put forward on this basis usually runs: Continence is
not only harmless but beneficial. It is a formula which, in one form or
another, has received apparently enthusiastic approval in many quarters,
even from distinguished physicians. We need not be surprised. A
proposition so large and general is not easy to deny, and is still more
difficult to reverse; therefore it proves welcome to the
people--especially the people occupying public and professional
positions--who wish to find the path of least resistance, under pressure
of a vigorous section of public opinion. Yet in its vagueness the
proposition is a little disingenuous; it condescends to no definitions and
no qualifications; it fails even to make clear how it is to be reconciled
with any enthusiastic approval of marriage, for if continence is beautiful
how can marriage make it cease to be so?

Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted, sprang from a common
source far back in the primitive human world. All the emanations of the
human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were
mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with
immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations
of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the
things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror
and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with
magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet
none to which they were impelled to give more thought. The manifold echoes
of that primitive conception of sex, and all the violent reactions that
were thus evolved and eventually bound up with the original impulse,
compose the streams of tradition that feed our