Sexual energies coalesced around New York City circa 1913 as Charlotte Perkins Gilman once again took Comstockery to task in the wake of the Anti- Venereal Disease Campaign, which opined a new risk to impressi(ona)ble youth who suffered under a “conspiracy of silence” created by a culture of censorship. Comstock knew he was losing the war against obscenity. His conviction rate during the last three years of his life and reign fell from 76 percent to 40 percent. Only forty-five defendants served jail time between 1912 and 1915. Comstock, therefore, adopted a different tactic in enforcing censorship law: He strove to destroy the obscene text rather than punish the obscene writer, publisher, bookseller, or distributor. Yet the damage was done. Threat of shame from search and seizure alone was debilitating, much less the process of prosecution, regardless of whether conviction was imminent. Comstock made shame commonplace in sexual hygiene discourse. Supporters and activists on behalf of the Anti-VD Campaign capitalized on fear rhetoric and the culture of shame to justify the need for public sex education programs in the military, the school system, or hospitals and health clinics. Evidence of their public health education tactics are perhaps best encapsulated in the deluge of Anti-VD Campaign films produced during the 1910s: Damaged Goods (1914), The Black Stork (1915), Open Your Eyes (1919), The Solitary Sin (1919), Fit to Win (1919), Wild Oats (1919), End of the Road (1919), and The Gift of Life (1920), among many, many others. The first of these American sex hygiene films, the now-lost film Damaged Goods, established the tone and message of the campaign itself. The film became a cultural icon, a kind of pulp fiction film or “cult classic.”

Itself an adaptation from a theatrical play, Damaged Goods became so popular that Upton Sinclair collaborated with the original playwright, Eugene Brieux, to adapt the play/film into a novel of the same name. Even Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Annie Nathan Meyer knew of the film and the play (and possibly the novel), and they explicitly write against its seduction narrative, which victimizes young male syphilitics and vilifies their young female sexual partners. During a period of censorship in America, the syphilis scare sanctioned sex education as a public health initiative yet the etiology of medical discourse located syphilis in the sensualized female body, and especially the body of the prostitute.