Showing posts with label causes of prostitution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label causes of prostitution. Show all posts

Thursday, 14 October 2010

The Causes of Prostitution

Noticing that Belle De Jour is promoting her latest book at Waterstones, I am reminded of Dr. William Acton, the Victorian moralist. He famously outlined the causes of prostitution thus:
"The demand for prostitution arises, then, from ill-regulated and uncontrolled desire, and may be referred to the following heads:
  • The natural instinct of man.
  • His sinful nature.
  • The artificial state of society rendering early marriages difficult if not impossible.
  • The unwillingness of many, who can afford marriage, to submit to its restraint, and incur its obligations.
  • To a man's calling preventing him from marrying, or debarring him when married from conjugal intercourse.
The unrestrained want and lawless demand, call for the infamous supply; but want and demand are insufficient of themselves to create supply; there are strong provoking causes, but not creative. We must go a step further to discover the sources of supply. It is derived from the vice of women, which is occasioned by:
  • Natural desire.
  • Natural sinfulness.
  • The preferment of indolent ease to labour.
  • Vicious inclinations strengthened and ingrained by early neglect, or evil training, bad associates, and an indecent mode of life.
  • Necessity, imbued by the inability to obtain a living by honest means consequent on a fall from virtue.
  • Extreme poverty.

To this black list may be added love of drink, love of dress, love of amusement, while the fall from virtue may result either from a woman's love being bestowed on an unworthy object, who fulfils his professions of attachment by deliberately accomplishing her ruin, or from the woman's calling peculiarly exposing her to temptation. ...

I don't think he'd be a natural reader for Belle De Jour's Guide to Men.