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In the new century,
women's arguments against the Double Moral Standard which allowed men their
sexual peccadillos but insisted that a woman's virtue and honor was defined
by sexual chastity could be presented as not just a private issue but one
with repercussions for the nation and the 'race'. Given the increasing
emphasis on the importance of motherhood to the nation, women could and did
point out that women were rendered infertile or bore sickly children as a
result of diseases which were the consequence of male vice. 'These beastly
men, they give you their foul diseases’. Suffragettes saw syphilis as
promoted by the sexual system including centuries of control of
prostitutes now called sex workers. It was a central issue in which they
were fighting that continues today in many countries.
The African TV soap operas of AIDS have long replaced the suffragette novels
of syphilis. The social change now is the forced return to mutual
monogamy during our epoch when marriage as a devote institution is
collapsing. It’s monogamy or infection.
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