miration by its efficiency in promoting Dame Nature’s aims.
Prostitution has no such selective effect on the males as it has on the females. It may have a slight effect in delaying, or in exceptional cases obviating, marriage. But whereas prostitutes never constitute more than a small percentage of the female population, their patrons constitute an important percentage of the male population: estimates (admittedly unreliable) running as high as ninety per cent in America, and higher in Europe. Nor can it be said there is any less ultimate fecundicity among the more frequent male fornicators than among the less frequent, or among the minority who take monogamy seriously. Other vices, however, homosexuality in particular, do lessen reproduction by males of weak strains,[1]although having no probably effect on female reproduction.
The presumptive effect of prostitution on the average emotional constitution of woman can as reasonably be assumed to be a loss as again. If we could free ourselves from the still prevalent view of woman as property; if marriage could
- ↑ Against the Freudian supposition that homosexuality is a normal incident of the development of the individual, I wish to set the conjecture, at least as plausible, that it is the mark of an hereditary taint, where it is not produced by extremely pathological social conditions, and that even in these latter cases, it develops under the guidance of an influential tainted stock. Although homosexuality is frequent among women, that it acts as a preventive of marriage and child bearing in more than an inconsiderable number of cases does not seem probable.
