It is becoming evident to all students of the sex-problem that the remedy
for many of the difficulties arising therefrom is a wholesome and
efficient sex-education.
In many cases the parents are not the persons most fitted to give this
education. They may not possess the art of imparting knowledge, and often
there is a certain reticence between parent and child, which when present
creates a bar to the proper handling of this question. The child goes to
school to learn, and the school must take its share of this
responsibility. Where this is not done the effect is deplorable. In the
preparatory school sex has hardly appeared. But in any school where there
are older boys or girls, and where sex-education is not given, knowledge
is rapidly obtained. Officially sex is ignored until, on rare occasions,
it is detected. Severe punishment is then meted out, and perhaps the
offender is even expelled, although the school is really penalizing the
results of its own system.
It is unnecessary to labour the apology that the absence of sex-education
ensures innocence. In no school is this the case. If it were, with growing
boys and girls, it would be unnatural. Sex-instinct is bound to grow as
the physical body grows, and to ignore this fact is to create the
conception that sex-instinct is immoral. We then obtain the usual attitude
adopted in public schools--that sex is to be indulged behind closed doors
and sex literature sniggered at in dark corners. The boy grows up with a
totally unclean view of sex. He becomes either an intolerable prude, or
else he approaches sex-experience with an entirely twisted conception of
sex-morality. One is continually meeting instances of this perverted
imagination. Not only boys, but men, will regard an outspoken book on sex,
perhaps written with the purest of motives, as "hot stuff," something to
be greedily devoured when the eye of respectable authority is conveniently
removed. Recently, a man was told that a certain clergyman was a member of
a group of students studying sex-psychology. He expressed the opinion,
with a knowing leer, that "some parsons are not such fools after all."
These crude examples of the result of driving sex into a dark corner
exactly represent what one is up against in school, and in the world, when
one begins to deal with sex openly and cleanly as a natural and
non-repressible instinct. Really these people are a type of prude, much
as they would resent this classification, for they persist in regarding
sex as something which is rather naughty. They even imagine that to take
away from it the cloak of unnaturalness with which they have surrounded it
is to rob it of all its attraction. This is ridiculously untrue. Sex is
attractive because it is romantic, and, so long as one does not go to the
opposite extreme of regarding it merely through the musty glasses of
scientific classification, it becomes no less attractive when it is open
and natural, and ceases to be the cause of giggling asides.
Before any moral sense in the sex-problem can be established there must be
a fundamental cleaning of this cess-pool, this strange medley of official
silence, unnatural repression, and unclean secretiveness. The main road to
a moral sense is sex-education. And it is necessary, therefore, to
conclude this outline of principles by suggesting some conditions which
should govern such instruction.
It is obvious that sex-education must be advanced on the process of a
sliding scale. Before puberty sex should not appear on the horizon of the
child's consciousness. The precocious child must of course be specially
dealt with, but usually the first lessons in sex should commence with the
period of mental puberty. Before that time the small child jokes only
about the normal excretory functions, and this can be adjusted by
emphasizing the unmanly and unnecessary character of such forms of humour.
A child has usually an exaggerated impression of the value of the adult
standard, an impression which it must be confessed is too often subject to
subsequent disillusionment. While it remains, however, it can be used, and
it can be pointed out that "grown-ups" do not consider the excretory
system has any more claim to ridicule than the process of digestion or
sleep. Vulgarity and coarseness are not symptoms even of immoral
sexuality.
The problem commences, then, with puberty. And here a warning should be
uttered against that school of reformers which tends to the view that sex
can be regarded as naturally and as publicly as natural history or
chemistry. This attitude ignores the fact that there is such a quality as
sexual appetite. And consequently, sex education should be rather a matter
for individuals than for public instruction. We have remarked that the
parent may not infrequently be an unfortunate educator. But where these
objections do not arise, the home is an admirable atmosphere for sensible
teaching. The Catholic Church possesses the invaluable medium of the
Confessional, and where the Confessor can give sound sex instruction no
better opportunity can be imagined. There remains the school, but even
here better work will be done in the study than the classroom.
The immediate problem in the early post-puberty age is the tendency
towards solitary practices. It must be recognized that this is usual with
all children, and that there is no evidence to show that, save in extreme
exceptions, physical harm results. All attempt at _alarmist prudism_ must
be abandoned. Sane instruction will tend rather to emphasize that sex
abuse is due to a weakness of will-power, and that man is most manly, i.e.
most removed from the animal, in the exercise of will-power. All education
should contain that subject which is at present consistently ignored,
namely, the art of thought-control. The child will be interested to follow
certain simple rules of mental exercise, and where this is followed the
liability to indulge in sex-acts diminishes. It is this element which must
be emphasized, the fact, that is, that solitary practices are usually the
result of an inability to exercise the will and control the mind.
At a slightly later period, the public-school age, there emerges the
tendency, in addition to onanism, for promiscuous practices, usually of a
homogenic nature. A further stage of sex-education must now be opened out,
namely the principle that physical sex expression must be the expression
only of love. The problem now becomes necessarily more acute, but there is
this element which tends to lessen the difficulties of the instructor's
task. The individual is always interested about himself; he is naturally
egotistical. The youth will gladly listen to what can be told him of his
own nature. He must be shown the immense superiority of mind both over the
emotional and physical natures. This may involve a slight dethronement of
the public school appreciation of sport. So long as it is slight such a
dethronement will be a reform in itself. The boy in his middle teens must
be taught that man is greater in his mental than in his physical activity;
he must be reminded that he is inferior to many animals on the physical
level. The application of this doctrine to sex is that sex-expression for
the purpose of physical curiosity or excitement is a denial of the
monopoly of love, which belongs to the emotional and mental capacities.
The young man and the girl, who has left school, will be ready to receive
the whole standard of sex-morality as has been outlined in this manual.
The chief trouble now becomes over-sentimentality, the tendency to develop
emotionally at the expense of the mind. And it becomes, therefore,
essential to remind the pupil that where there are continual passing and
promiscuous sexual or love affairs, the mind is being shut out from its
natural functions. To be attracted sexually towards any pretty girl, to
develop sexual relations with different women from week to week, is simply
a form of mental unbalance. The emotions are in the saddle. For directly
the mind begins to operate there is introduced the element of permanency
and constancy. The deepest and most real pleasures only begin in the realm
of mentality. The man who hears music only to beat time or remember a
catchy tune is shut out of the immense joy of the intellectual love of
music. So the young man who lives in a fever of hot-house sexuality, of
absorbing intrigues in the dance-room, or the morbid atmosphere of the
street corner, is shut out of all the exquisite joys of love. He does not
know this, any more than the irreligious man knows what he loses through
an absence of the spiritual sense. But he must be told.
The basic principle of sex values is that sex is immoral so far as the
physical side outweighs in proportion the emotional and mental--so far
indeed, as the act becomes the motive and not the incident. Sex may be
dedicated only to love; divorced from love, it is an abuse. There can be
no exceptions to this rule, and we can only clarify our ideas as to what
is and what is not love. Perhaps this maxim, which we learn by gradual
experience, will help us. Sex passion quickly burns itself out. The
pleasures derived from passion will be of a purely temporary nature,
without the satisfaction which alone comes from permanence. All physical
things are less permanent than the mental. There is no joy, no divine
nature in sex, save where from the ashes of passion rises the phoenix of
the "sexual" but the super-passionate attachment. And this permanent
possession can only come, whether in marriage or outside, where the mind,
healthily developed and exercised, is taking its true place in the
expression of pure love.
_Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and
Aylesbury._
Footnotes:
[1] _The Origin of Sexual Modesty_, by Edward Westermarck.
[2] _Vide_ R. V. Jellyman (1838) 8 C and P, 604.
[3] Until recently incest was not a civil offence.
[4] The second object of marriage is declared to be "a remedy against
sin...; that such persons as have not the gift of continency marry and
keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body."
[5] 1 Cor. vii. 8, 9. "Burn" means sex-obsession as mentioned on page 38.
[6] "Where the decree Tametsi of the Council of Trent has not been
proclaimed, marriage is constituted by mere consent freely exchanged
between persons who are by natural and canonical law competent and able to
intermarry."--Geary's _Marriage and Family Relations_. (Now altered by _Ne
temere_-decree, but the principle remains.)
[7] We have already commented on the strange inconsistency of regarding
the sex-act as evil _per se_ outside marriage, and as a virtue in
marriage.
[8] I am using "celibacy" to imply complete physical chastity.
[9] With the curious inconsistency, already referred to, that in marriage
non-celibacy is a virtue.
[10] Except by Act of Parliament.
[11] The Majority Report of the Divorce Commission is a good instance of
the unnecessary hardship which results from half-hearted proposals of this
kind. Divorce is to be allowed, for example, after desertion for three
years; why not for two? Or again, the wife of an incurable drunkard is to
be free to obtain divorce, while the unhappy wife of a man who suffers
from violent fits of intermittent drunkenness is to be denied this relief.
[12] I refrain from adding "economic" reasons, for I believe that the
State should remove, as far as possible, all such obstacles against
healthy parents begetting children.
[13] Procuration for the purpose of prostitution is of course an entirely
different matter.
[14] No actual physical harm need result from an incestuous union. The
only effect which seems to be caused is that the characteristics to be
hereditarily transmitted are doubled. Thus with only a small grain of
insanity in a family the chances of aggravated insanity appearing in the
offspring of a brother and sister would be considerable.
[15] Spiritual affinity was a bar, so that not only could not godparents
marry each other, but there could be no valid unions between a godparent
and the child's father or mother. (Geary's _Marriage and Family
Relations_.)
[16] Some apology must be made for the use of this hybrid term. The
unwarrantable confusion of Greek and Latin terminology must, however, be
laid at the door of popular use.
[17] _Psychology of Sex_; Vol. _Sexual Inversion_. Dr. Hirschfeld in his
_Statistischen Vatersuchunge ueber den Prozentensetz der Homosexuellen_,
considers that out of 100,000 inhabitants, 94,600 on the average are
sexually normal, 1,500 exclusively homosexual, and 3,900 bisexual.
[18] The existence of this danger was admitted in a debate in the House of
Lords on August 15, 1921, on The Criminal Law Amendment Bill. The Earl of
Malmesbury, speaking on a proposal to apply criminal prosecution to
homosexual offences among women, declared that "the opportunity for
blackmail will be vastly and enormously increased." Other speakers
concurred in this view, and it was partly on this ground that the proposal
was thrown out.
It is hardly necessary to point out that if blackmail would be encouraged
by such legislation, it must equally be encouraged by the present law
regarding similar offences between males.
[19] _The Intermediate Sex._
[20] I cannot enter here into that further theory which may be described
as "expression through a phantasy."
End of Project Gutenberg's An Outline of Sexual Morality, by Kenneth Ingram