Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (48 page)

The case was picked up in midstream by the
London Times
and immediately became a political and media football. Everyone had an opinion. Not only were Rukhmabai’s stream of letters about her case and the dark fate of Indian child brides generally published and intensely discussed, but so were the opinions of Hindu nationalists, marriage-law reform advocates, and various members of the British ruling class. The controversy tied the bodies of Hindu girls to the stability of British rule in India. To Rukhmabai, the issue was inequality: Indian girls were being sacrificed to a system that robbed them of an education and personal freedom. Given that “there is not the smallest chance” that Indians would change their “abominable customs” on their own, she agitated for the British government to step in and raise the legal age of marriage. Rukhmabai’s views were not shared by Indian nationalists, who regarded British tampering with local marriage practices as an assault on Indian pride. Britain had earlier pledged not to interfere with local religious practices, and in their opinion Rukhmabai’s troubles were no cause to reverse that policy.

A HINDU WEDDING

In the late nineteenth century, the age at which a girl could legally consent to sexual relations was a contentious question in England and the United States. The issue put male upper-class sexual prerogatives against popular fears of young girls being sold into “white slavery.” The age-of-consent issue was also at the center of a major legal case in India, where a “Hindoo” girl refused to submit to a marriage forced on her as a child. The case, which was followed closely by newspapers in England, resulted in the Indian age of consent being raised from ten to twelve.
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THE BRITISH MUSEUM

British opinion on the Rukhmabai case was divided. Even as the British viceroy cabled messages to his colleagues that “it would never do to allow her to be put into prison,” a British ex-judge in India opined in a letter to the
Times
that “in Eastern climates girls are precocious, and, unless early settled in her home, the girl is almost certain to disgrace her family.” He went on to observe that the “real mistake was educating [Rukhmabai] so as to make her unfit company for her husband.” On balance, the Rukhmabai affair probably hardened English resistance to Indian self-rule. If Indian men could not manage their domestic lives better than this, the thinking went, then they had no business taking on the more subtle challenges of statecraft.

Then another story came along that changed minds. In 1890, the British media reported that an eleven-year-old Indian bride named Phulmonee had been literally “raped to death” by her thirty-five-year-old husband. This case had the requisite blood and guts to give reformers what they needed to convince the colonial government to take action. Under a new law, girls could still marry as young as ten, but consummation would have to wait for two years. The law was a victory for reformers, but whether or not it was ever seriously enforced is another question. Hindu nationalists continued to mount intense resistance, resentful of what they saw as top-down interference in the life of their country.

Returning for a moment to Roman Polanski: While he was fighting for his freedom in California in 1977, loud and influential voices in France were agitating to
lower
that country’s age of consent from fifteen to thirteen. At the time, several men were in custody for having sex with thirteen-and fourteen-year-old boys and girls. Intellectual heavyweights Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Médecins Sans Frontières cofounder and later foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, and Jack Lang, later minister of culture and (still later) education, all described the arrests, and the age of consent law under which they were made, as scandalous. The law did not change, but Polanski nevertheless found a safe haven in Paris.
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THE SCIENTIFIC RESPONSE TO PROSTITUTION

Nowhere has science (quack and otherwise) been more mixed up with morals law than with regard to prostitution. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, prostitution was tolerated because brothels were seen as public sanitation facilities—in effect, disposal units for sexual sin. No less a moral force than Saint Thomas Aquinas likened whorehouses to cesspools in a palace: “Take away the cesspool,” he warned, “and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place.” Prostitutes themselves were damned, but they served an important purpose. Rather than taking a boy for pleasure or wrecking the honor of decent women, sexually restless men deposited their shameful desires into those whose bodies were for sale, leaving the rest of female society unstained. Better that a few prostitutes be infected with sin and descend to hell than everyone else, and better that brothels should be owned by the state and the church than to let the profits go to private operators.

By the nineteenth century, those perceptions had changed completely. The intolerance of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation left authorities with little room to permit, much less participate in, the flesh trade. Intense outbreaks of venereal diseases (primarily syphilis), especially among military troops, also changed public perceptions of prostitutes. No longer were they viewed as lockboxes for vice and infection, but as the
sources
of disease—distributors of contagion into respectable society. Unlike as in earlier periods, when authorities had tried to eradicate prostitution completely, governments and police took a new approach. The question was not whether prostitutes could be wiped away—everyone agreed that was never going to happen—but how to contain the health hazards they posed. In Europe, and for a brief moment in the United States, that meant legalizing them by various degrees and subjecting them to punishing medical inspections.

That these efforts were hypocritical is an understatement. Male customers (who were no less likely to be carrying venereal diseases) were never targets of government public-health regulation. The focus was on lower-class females. On nothing more than an anonymous tip from a neighbor, a poor girl or woman could be officially labeled a whore and subjected to humiliating (and often infectious) medical exams while her customers faced no risk. This double standard, by which male promiscuity was treated as a normal impulse and female prostitution a public health hazard, was an accepted fact of life. Also seen as natural, at least by lawmakers, was the fact that poor and working-class females, who made up the bulk of the prostitute population, should bear the brunt of official torment. Good women were passive, with no sexual needs; the bad ones were sexually aggressive. The law was there to protect men from the women men paid to service them.

France was the first country to institute a comprehensive state regulation system after its soldiers returned infected from the Napoleonic wars. All females suspected of prostitution—which included girls as young as ten—were required to register themselves and submit to periodic medical exams, for which they were charged. The inspections were savage and the treatments poor. The cold, filthy metal instruments used by police doctors probably resulted in the transmission of a variety of harmful infections. Any female who was found to be carrying venereal disease (or who could not pay the doctor to write up good results) was incarcerated in a grim hospital for treatment. Women who plied their trade without being registered were to be jailed.

The French system was broadly copied throughout Europe, but it did little to slow the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Men remained outside the system, and thousands of prostitutes evaded inspection. By 1870, there were at least as many unregistered prostitutes operating in France, Belgium, Russia, Poland, and Italy as there were on the official lists. The proximity of government bureaucrats to a trade that was still in the legal shadows also begged for corruption: The bribing of police, doctors, and judges was commonplace. Police protected well-paying brothel-keepers and came down hard on freelance streetwalkers. Townspeople also made secret accusations against neighbors they disliked, resulting in police dragging the accused women through the streets to be registered and inspected. In Warsaw in the 1880s, police detained and examined four thousand to five thousand women every year, but only about seven hundred to twelve hundred ended up on the lists. The rest were simply women caught in the wrong place and time.

In Prussian Berlin, three months in jail awaited both unregistered prostitutes and those on the list who infected their customers. As everywhere, the burden fell on the women, and those unlucky enough to find themselves on the list had to undergo (in the words of opponents of the French system) “instrument rapes” every week. Additionally, registered prostitutes were obliged to let police into their houses at any time, and were banned from theaters, schools, and other places where respectable people gathered. There were penalties on the books for clients who passed diseases on to the women they paid, but the charge was impossible to prove. Any man so accused could simply ask: “How do you know it was me?”

The Berlin system invited abuses, but at least it stuck to the goal of disease prevention. The scheme in Vienna, on the other hand, was more nuanced and misogynistic. Many there held to the “scientific” view that females were prone to irrationality and were weak in the face of their carnal needs. Women with honor overcame this by limiting their sexual activity to the dry business of producing legitimate children, but their reputations could be lost whenever they displayed sexual desire. According to an 1851 police policy statement, every woman in the city with an active sex life was a potential whore and a threat to public morals. The statement broke prostitutes down as follows:

1.
Normal prostitutes, who made their living by selling sex for money;

2.
Occasional prostitutes . . . who had sex with men with no expectation of money, presents or lasting relationships;

3.
Mistresses;

4.
Concubines.

That did not leave many women out. By the end of the century, police estimated that thirty thousand to fifty thousand Viennese women fit into one of the above categories, but only about two thousand were under medical control. All female prisoners, regardless of whether or not they had been jailed for morals offenses, were put on the list, but that still was not nearly sufficient to remedy the discrepancy. Police therefore started a bizarre hunt for “hidden prostitutes,” in which most women in the metropolis were at least potential targets. The police used agents provocateurs to flirt with women in the streets. If the women responded with interest, they were arrested, jailed, and put on the list. Additionally, anyone with a bone to pick with his or her neighbors was invited to make accusations.

On one occasion, a “young girl” was reported by her neighbors for leaving her house in “striking” clothes and coming home late. The girl was taken to court, where it was revealed that she had once had an older lover. She went on the list. Another girl who had been anonymously accused of secret prostitution had the support of all her neighbors, but that did little good. When the caretaker of her house defended her in court, the police threatened to arrest him. The girl was put in jail for two days. Men who received women in their homes were also questioned, though they were never arrested for consorting with prostitutes. One man complained that police had demanded to know the names and addresses of all the women who had visited his apartment. When he refused, he was told he would be brought to court for questioning.
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ENGLAND: THE BIG TEST

The sleepy members of the House of Commons can be excused for not having paid much attention to the last item of official business late one night in June 1864. The legislation, called the Contagious Diseases Act (CDA), seemed like one of a series of recent measures aimed at preventing illness among cattle. The bill was read without debate and became law on July 29. Although the CDA was passed quietly enough, it would soon set off a noisy twenty-year national debate that galvanized Britain’s early feminist movement, energized the careers of muckraking journalists, and focused the world’s attention on the different sexual standards the United Kingdom applied to its men and women. For the first time ever, Britain had a law establishing state regulation of prostitution.

During the first few years of its existence, the CDA seemed like a reasonable tool for improving public health. British troops had returned from the Crimean War in sorry shape. More of them had died in the hospital than on the battlefield, and one out of three soldiers had a sexually transmitted disease. The problem was especially bad in the port and garrison towns, where returning troops and sailors had only one thing on their minds. Said one admiral: