This word hygiene has its root in the word Hygeia. Hygeia was the
daughter of one of the gods of the Classic Mythology, and was the
goddess of health. Sex hygiene is then, sex health, or sex normality.
Is there special danger of abnormal conditions or disease in the sex
life of children and young people? We must answer this question before
we can determine whether our time is well spent in the study which
shall follow.
To determine this we must make a brief study of the unfolding human
life and note some of its component parts and their relative relations
and values in the organism.
We can best do this by a study of the accompanying chart. The lower
line of the triangle represents the body, or physical life; the left
side the feelings; the right side the intellect. If body, feelings and
intellect were equal in any human being, then, we would have a perfect
triangle, or a normal human life. But this is not true in any child or
young person. This diagram illustrates the relative relations of these
three elements of being as the child advances toward mature life.
[Illustration: Note――For want of space the triangle is reduced from
original drawing.]
The early years of a child’s life is almost purely physical and the
physical plays a large part in the life of the girl or boy till they
are well advanced in their ’teens, as you will see by a study of this
figure.
Each side of this triangle is three inches long. The lines that run
across the triangle represent feeling at the various stages of the
child’s life. You can see that in the early years the feelings and the
physical are very close together and are the dominating impulses of the
life.
The reader should bear in mind that the word feeling is not here used
in the restricted sense of referring to physical feelings only, but to
all the feelings which surge through the being from whatever source.
We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that, because of the
important part that is played in the organism during the teens by the
impulses from a given nerve center, all feelings will be colored more
or less by the outfloodings of that nerve center. As we have suggested,
the child till well advanced in years is largely a creature of feeling,
and what mind it has is what may be called a picture mind, or a mind
for seeing things. How easy it will be for all the feelings of the
being to become inoculated with impurity and place before this picture
mind of the child such distorted views of life as will vitiate the
entire organism! How important it is that a higher intelligence, that
is the father and mother, create pure, noble and beautiful pictures and
place them before this picture, or seeing mind, of the child.