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Butler, "The Double Standard of Morality," Oct. 1886
And do you see the logical necessity involved in this? It is that a
large section of female society has to be told off--set aside, so to
speak, to minister to the irregularities of the excusable man. That
section is doomed to death, hurled to despair; while another section of
womanhood is kept strictly and almost forcibly guarded in domestic
purity. Thus even good and moral men have so judged in regard to the
vice of sexual immorality as to concede in social opinion all that the
male profligate can desire. This perverse social and public opinion is
no small incentive to immorality. It encourages the pernicious belief
that men may be profligate when young without serious detriment to
their character in after-life. This is not a belief that is borne out by facts.
Marriage does not transform a man’s nature, nor uproot habits
that have grown with his years: the licentious imagination continues its
secret blight, though the outward conduct may be restrained. The man
continues to be what he was, selfish and unrestrained, though he may
be outwardly moral in deference to the opinion of that "society" which
having previously excused his vices, now expects him to be moral.
And what of that other being, his partner--his wife--into whose
presence he brings the secret consciousness, it may be the hideous
morbid fruits, of his former impurity? Can any man, with any pretension
to true manliness, contemplate calmly the shame--the cruelty--of the
fact that such marriages are not exceptional, especially in the upper
classes?
The CONSEQUENCES of sins of impurity far out-last the sin
itself, both in individuals and in communities. Worldly and impure men
have thought, and still think, they can separate women, as I have said,
into two classes,--the protected and refined ladies who are not only to
be good, but who are, if possible, to know nothing except what is good;
and those poor outcast daughters of the people whom they purchase
with money, and with whom they think they may consort in evil
whenever it pleases them to do so, before returning to their own
separated and protected homes.
The double standard of morality owes its continued existence
very greatly to the want of a common sentiment concerning morality on
the part of men and women, especially in the more refined classes of
society. Men are driven away at an early age from the society of
women and thrown upon the society of each other only--in schools,
colleges, barracks, etc.; and thus they have concocted and cherished
a wholly different standard of moral purity from that generally existing
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