The new morality condemns marriage and prostitution as forms crushing erotic life
Evidence
Its basic theme can be expressed as follows: the most personal and intimate meaning of erotic life is destroyed by the forms in which our culture has reified and trapped it. Marriage, which is entered for a thousand nonerotic reasons, is destroyed from within by a thousand unyielding traditions and legalized cruelties; where it is not wrecked, it loses all individuality and leads to stagnation. Prostitution has almost turned into a legal institution which forces the erotic life of young people into a dishonorable direction which contradicts and caricatures its innermost nature. Marriage and prostitution alike appear as oppressive forms which thwart immediate and genuine life. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 862
Categorization
- XREF: The reader’s other curated work on moral panics over immodesty (ADDENDUM piece on ‘Complaints About Immodesty’): the ‘new morality’ critique exemplifies the pattern of attacking existing sexual forms. — connects to: Prostitution reduces sex to species-generic content matched by money — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 360; Universal social inhumanity takes revenge on marriages that seemed exempt — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 27; Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1179 (+2 more)
- SEED: This life-versus-form critique of marriage (destroyed by legalized cruelties, erasing individuality) parallels modern arguments about institutionalized partnership—a candidate for an essay connecting Simmel’s erotic critique to contemporary marriage debates.
Related
- Marriage, designed to regulate female eroticism, instead destroys it (similarity 0.82)