Degradation Is Us

“The commercial prostitution of love
is the last outcome of our whole social system,
and [it is] loves' most clear condemnation.
[This condemnation] flaunts in our streets,
it hides itself in the garment of respectability
under the name of matrimony,
it eats in actual physical disease and death
right through our midst; 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 [and relatively chaste] 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 (written circa 1900)