The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole
social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our
streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name
of matrimony, ... it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of
women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the
hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to
gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged
by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell
for money every most precious thing -- even the life-long labor of their
brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?
-- Edward Carpenter (1844-1929)
Related:
most of us learned about love the hard way. Even warnings are probably
usele for somehow, despite the severest warnings of parents and friends,
hundreds, thousands of women have forgotten themselves at the last minute
and succumbed to the lies, promises, flatteries, or mere attentions of
lusting, lovely men, landing themselves in complicated predicaments from
which some of them never recovered during their entire lives....