[Sidenote: The old silence and the new enlightenment.]
The time-honored policy has been one of silence and mystery concerning
all things sexual. Everything in that line has long been considered
impure and degraded and, therefore, the less said and the less known,
the better, especially for young people. Such has been the almost
universal attitude of parents until within the present century, when
many have awakened to the fact that the policy of silence has been a
gigantic failure, because it has not preserved purity and innocence and
because it has allowed grave evils, both hygienic and moral, to develop
under the cloak of secrecy.
[Sidenote: Children will not remain ignorant.]
"I don't believe in teaching my boys and girls any facts concerning
sex. I prefer to keep them innocent until they have grown up." In these
decisive words a prominent woman closed a statement of her firm
conviction that the world-wide movement for the sex-instruction of
young people is a stupendous mistake. Poor deluded mother! How does she
expect to keep her children ignorant of the world of life around them?
Is she planning to transplant them to a deserted island where they may
grow up innocently? Or is she going to keep the children in some
cloister within whose walls there will be immunity from the
contamination of the great busy world outside? Or is she going to have
them guarded like crown princes, and if so, where are absolutely safe
guards to be found? Such are the questions which rush into the minds of
those who have studied the problem of keeping children ignorant of the
most significant facts of life. It is usually an easy matter to protect
children against smallpox and typhoid and some other diseases, but no
parent or educator has yet found out how we may be sure to keep real
live children ignorant of sex knowledge. They seem to absorb such
forbidden facts as naturally and as freely as the air they breathe.
Ask any large group of representative men--ministers, or doctors, or
teachers, or men of business, or the world's toilers--whether any of
them knew the essential facts of sexual life before they were twelve
years of age, and ninety-seven in every hundred will answer quickly in
the affirmative. Ask any large group of women, excepting those whose
girlhood has been guarded with exceptional care, and the overwhelming
majority will acknowledge that they knew the essential facts before
they were fifteen years old. Once more, ask these same men and women
whether their early knowledge of sex came from pure and reliable
sources or from vulgar playmates and depraved servants; and with rare
exceptions it is found that vulgarity made the strongest impression in
the first lessons concerning the great facts of life. Such being the
truth, it is nonsense for parents to sit in complacency because they
feel sure that their children are safely protected against any vulgar
first lessons concerning sex; for no one can know that children are
safely guarded from others who may corrupt their innocent minds. As an
illustration, a few years ago the mothers of a group of little girls in
one of the best-managed private schools felt that with careful
supervision both in school and home there was no danger of forbidden
knowledge reaching the children. But one day a new pupil innocently
exhibited to her mother a miniature notebook with unprintable notes on
sexual topics. The resulting investigation revealed a secret club
organized by the pupils for the purpose of passing to each member
through notebooks all newly acquired information, which had a peculiar
value because it must be kept secret from teachers and parents. That
club had been in existence during two school years. This is only a
sample case of many which have proved that if children are allowed the
freedom that developing individuality demands, their mothers must not
feel too sure that their darlings are protected against knowledge of
life, and perhaps of life in its most degraded aspects.
[Sidenote: The vital question for parents.]
Here, then, is the fact that every parent should ponder seriously:
Normal children are almost certain to get sexual information not later
than the early adolescent years, and usually from unreliable and vulgar
sources. It is, therefore, not a question whether children of school
ages should be taught the important facts of sex, but whether parents
and trained teachers rather than playmates and other unreliable persons
should be the instructors. Which will parents choose for their own
children? Thousands of intelligent parents have already faced this
question, and have decided that their children shall have early
sex-instruction in home or school or both in order that there will be
little danger of vulgar impressions taking a deep hold on child minds.
Granted, then, that children should be given some reliable instruction
concerning things sexual, who should be the teacher, what should be
taught, and when should the instruction be given? These are the
fundamental questions now being considered by the parents and educators
who have accepted sex-education as necessary. Upon the final answers to
such questions the decision of many parents will depend. I shall
attempt to answer them in later lectures.
[Sidenote: Sex mystery has prevented progress.]
The policy of maintaining mystery and secrecy concerning sex has failed
with adults even more sadly than with children. Health and morals have
suffered incalculable injury. The sexual evils of our time are not as
bad as were those of the ancient civilizations, but we have little
reason to be proud of the slight progress made. But why should we
expect the human to make progress when sexual problems have been kept
in darkness? The wonder is that, with the prevailing dark outlook on
sexual life throughout the past nineteen centuries, the world has not
developed more sexual vice. Innate animalistic appetites have tended to
lead downward, and surely the policy of silence has offered no
counteracting influence towards higher living. While religion and
ethics, by means of certain rules of conduct, have maintained certain
sexual standards, they have not kept vast numbers of humans from
falling far below those standards into utter degradation. The modern
teachers of religion and ethics have prevented general sexual
degradation, but they have failed to give human sexuality any decided
uplift. The reason for this failure is the policy of mystery and
silence. The teachers of religion and ethics have preferred to let
general and more or less abstruse rules govern conduct in sexual lines.
Until recent years there have been few sermons in which common sexual
problems have been presented so that the preacher's meaning has been
clear to all. On the contrary, there has been universal mystery and
evasion concerning the greatest facts of life.
[Sidenote: Sexual instincts offer no guidance.]
Many people have justified the mystery thrown around sexual processes
on the theory that the reproductive instincts of mature people are
sufficient guides for conduct. This involves a misunderstanding of
sexual instincts of the higher mammals which are often unscientifically
cited as models for human imitation. In these animals sexual union is
instinctively determined, because normally the sexual hunger or
excitement of both sexes is stimulated and controlled by the
physiological condition of the female at the times favorable for
fertilization (_i.e._, at the oestrual periods). For example, a pair of
dogs living in close companionship show signs of mutual sexual desires
only for a few days at the semi-annual oestrual or fertile periods of
the female. It occasionally happens that the males of various wild and
domesticated mammals exhibit signs of automatic sexual excitement
(_i.e._, not caused by the stimulus arising from the physiological
condition of the female); but in such cases of male excitement outside
of the mating or oestrual periods, the normal females invariably offer
instinctive opposition to attempted union by abnormally or
automatically excited males. Thus, directly and indirectly, there is
instinctive control and limitation of sexual union among the animals
that are most closely related to the human race.
It is biologically possible that similar conditions may have existed in
the earliest human life, but that is pure speculation and has no
bearing on the practical problems of sex in human life to-day. The fact
is that the simple physiological stimuli which produce sexual
excitement in both sexes of animals have practically no influence in
determining human sexual union. On the contrary, memory associations
consciously connected with the opposite sex, especially those
associations that are centered in affection, may at any time in the
normal individual of either human sex afford the basis for a chain of
mental states leading to sexual excitement and union. There is not, as
in the animals, instinctive dependence on the physiological conditions
that are favorable for fertilization. In fact, spontaneous
physiological demands play in civilized human life a minor part in
initiating sexual excitement. The reason why some humans seem to have
unusual sexual intensity is not so much a matter of exceptionally
strong sexuality as of susceptibility to the numerous sexual stimuli
with which modern life abounds. For this reason, a man who has formed
lewd memory associations is more susceptible to sexual stimulations,
_e.g._, by obscene pictures, vulgar words, unusual dress or actions of
women, close physical association as in dancing, and certain forms of
music. It is not at all uncommon that individuals who are
hyper-sensitive to sexually suggestive stimuli are really functionally
weak.
[Sidenote: Intelligent control only.]
It follows from the facts outlined above that instinctive control of
sexual actions applies to animals but not to human life. On the
contrary, human control must be on the basis of intelligent choice.
This means the greatest task of human life, for it requires voluntary
control of instinctive demands which are intensified by numerous
stimuli or temptations that are exclusively human. No wonder that
natural sex hunger left uncontrolled leads human beings to excesses and
degradation that no species of animals with their guiding instincts
could possibly reach.
[Sidenote: Individual responsibility.]
The absence from human life of any instinctive control of sexual
actions leaves a great responsibility on each individual whose natural
desires lead impulsively and insistently towards sexual union and must
be restrained, controlled, and directed by voluntary choice. In short,
all individuals who are intelligent beings are personally responsible
for voluntary control of their sexual desires with reference to the
ethical, social, and eugenic interests and rights of all other
individuals now and in the future.
[Sidenote: Sexual knowledge necessary.]
With such an understanding of instincts in relation to human sexual
actions, we cannot wonder that the old policy of mystery has failed so
completely. Since human beings are left to control the most powerful
appetite by intelligence, it is evident that a policy based on silence,
ignorance, and mystery must fail. The only safe and sure road to the
needed control of sexual actions is to be found in knowledge, and the
widespread recognition of this fact has led to the new movement for
general enlightenment regarding sexual processes in their various
relations to human life.
[Sidenote: Education as a solution of sex problems.]
It is not surprising that we have turned to seek an educational
solution for the problems of sex. Education has become the modern
panacea for many of our ills--hygienic, industrial, political, and
social. We have found people losing health for various reasons and we
have proposed hygienic instruction as a prophylactic. We have analyzed
many problems of the industries, and now we are beginning to seek their
solution in industrial education. We have noted that numerous social
and political misunderstandings check progress of individuals and
nations, and we are coming to think the pathway upwards is to be found
in better knowledge of social and political science. And, in like
manner, in every phase of this modern life of ours we are looking to
knowledge as the key to all significant problems. It is truly the age
of education, not simply the education offered in schools and colleges,
but education in the larger sense, including the learning of useful
knowledge from all sources whatsoever.
With such unbounded confidence in the all-sufficiency of education, it
is most natural that we should turn to it in these times when we have
come to realize the existence of amazing sexual problems caused either
by ignorant misuse, or by deliberate abuse, of the sexual functions
which biologically are intrusted with the perpetuation of human life
and which psychologically are the source of human affection in its
supreme forms. If education is to solve the civic, hygienic, and
industrial problems of to-day and to-morrow, why should it not also
help with the age-old sexual evils? So reasoning, we have naturally
turned to education as one, but not the only, method of attack on the
sexual problems which have degraded and devitalized human life of all
past times, but which somehow have kept out of the limelight of
publicity until our own times.