[Sidenote: Personal and social hygiene.]
It is convenient to group under personal sex-hygiene all hygienic
knowledge concerning sexual processes in their personal as
distinguished from their social aspects. The distinction between these
two aspects of sex-hygiene is essentially on the same basis as that
between personal and public hygiene. For example, indigestion and
overwork are matters of personal hygiene, while tuberculosis and
typhoid are problems of public hygiene because the individual case
leads through infection to disease of others. Similarly, such
individual disorders as masturbation and deranged menstruation concern
personal health directly, while venereal diseases are clearly included
in social sex-hygiene.
[Sidenote: Personal sex-hygiene needed.]
If there were no other reasons for sex-instruction, I believe that it
would be worth while to teach such hygienic knowledge of self and sex
as would guard young people against harmful habits and unhealthful care
of their sexual mechanisms; and which, moreover, would guide them
across the threshold of adolescence with some helpful understanding of
the significance of the metamorphosis. Many men and women suffer from
injured, if not ruined, health because they did not know, especially
between ten and fourteen years, the laws of personal sex-hygiene, which
concern health in ways not involving sexual relationship. Many boys and
some girls are injured both physically and mentally by the habit of
masturbation. Numerous girls are injured physically and many mentally
because they have not learned in advance the nature and hygiene of
menstruation. Many boys are injured both in mind and character because
they have no scientific guidance which helps them understand themselves
during the stormy transition from youth into manhood. Moreover, there
are certain simple hygienic commands that children under twelve should
receive from parents and teachers. In all these lines the bearings of
personal hygienic instruction are so obvious that we need not at this
time stop to consider in more detail this first reason or problem for
sex-instruction of young people.