the rational ground that they are
under obligations to nobody. They are under no taboo, marriage being the
first application of the sex taboo. Farnell[1173] says that the first
sense of _parthenos_ was not "virgin," but unmarried. The Oriental
goddess of impure love was parthenos. Artemis was perhaps, at first, a
goddess of people who had not yet settled marriage mores, but had the
mother family, amongst whom women were powerful. In the development of
the father family fathers restricted daughters in order to make them
more valuable as wives. Here comes in the notion of virginity and
pre-nuptial chastity. This is really a negative and exclusive notion. It
is an appeal to masculine vanity, and is a singular extension of the
monopoly principle. His wife is to be his from the cradle, when he did
not know her. Here, then, is a new basis for the sex honor of women and
the jealousy of men. Chastity for the unmarried meant--no one; for the
married--none but the husband. The mores extended to take in this
doctrine, and it has passed into the heart of the mores of all civilized
peoples, to whom it seems axiomatic or "natural." It has often been
declared absurd that sex honor, especially for women, should be made to
depend on a negative. It seems to make an ascetic and arbitrary standard
for everyday life. In fact, however, the negation is imposed by the
nature of the sex passion and by the conditions of human life. The
passion tends to excess. What is "natural" is therefore evil. Negation,
restraint, renunciation, are imposed by expediency. Perhaps it is the
only case in which man is driven to error and evil by a great force in
his nature, and is thus forced, if he would live well, to find a
discipline for himself in intelligent self-control and in arbitrary
rules. This would justify the current usage of language in which
"morals" refers especially to the sex relation.

+373. Chastity for men.+ In modern times there is a new extension of
idealization, by which it is attempted to extend to men the same
standard of chastity and duty of chastity as to women. Two questions are
here confused: (_a_) whether unmarried men and women are to be bound by
the same obligation of chastity; (_b_) whether married men and women are
to be bound by the same rule of exclusion. The Hindoo lawgivers demand
the same fidelity from husband and wife.[1174] In the treatise on
_Economics_ which is ascribed to Aristotle,[1175] although there is no
dogmatic