with sex is nowhere more strikingly illustrated, than in the vast
dumbness upon the subject in our ordinary system of education. Great
strides have been made in some subjects taught; methods and matter
taught concerning the physical universe, ancient and later times,
languages, and mathematics, have improved amazingly in recent years.
But, after all, our happiness or unhappiness in life depends more
upon our sex life than upon all of these subjects put together. What
do our schools teach upon this vital subject? To answer concisely and
succinctly, Nothing.
There is often a course in personal hygiene; but this avoids
all matters connected with sex. Human physiology is taught only
descriptively: that is, the child is taught to distinguish between his
cerebellum and his small toe. But the important generative organs,
their normal functions, their use and abuse, is left an immense gap
in our pedagogic systems. This is based upon ideas which any educator
will at once denounce: namely, that the body is vile, that it is nasty,
that it is shameful, that it is wrong to talk about it, that it will
stimulate undesirable conduct to have scientific information imparted
about it. Meanwhile, we have the conduct without the stimulus. Yet the
very educators who see that these root-ideas of the taboo are wrong,
hem and haw when it comes to advocating proper sexual education.
Surreptitiously the matter is being partially remedied by subjects
known vaguely as nature study: especially botany, zoology, and
physiology. Here we have the proper introduction to the study of human
sexual organs and their development. The world of botany, with its
flowers and trees constantly around us, does not provoke our sense of
shame; the promiscuity of a pine tree, with its manifold wind-scattered
pollen, does not shock even a ladies’ club. The strange development
of sex in the plant kingdom is a good start for the subject. Below
the comparatively simple fertilization of the flowering plants, we
have the lower forms, with their queer complicated matings. Ferns and
club mosses, to take objects easily observable, contain many a lesson,
with their sex-producing thallic stage, and the tiny male fertilizer
wiggling itself upward toward the female ovum in a drop of water. Among
the flowering plants, the elaborate devices of nature to secure cross
fertilization, by flower arrangement and adaptations to insects, are
amazing and thought-provoking. The presence of hermaphroditic flowers
will loosen something of the rooted taboo idea that so-called sexual
perversions are innately shameful things. The development of the young
from the fertilizated ovum to the production of the seed and of the
plant gives a symbolic picture to the learning mind of what he is to
expect in the human world.
Zoology offers the next step; and here the sense of shame comes in.
There is ordinarily held to be something shameful in observing a cock
treading a hen, or any sexual act among animals. Yet the slow hatching
of the eggs by a hen is not regarded as shameful; and the pet cat’s
production of a litter of kittens, or the dog’s bringing forth puppies,
or the cow’s calving, are simple steps that lead the way directly
toward an understanding of human sexual nature. The sense of shame
connected with seeing the mating of chickens or animals is a thing
which may with benefit be lost; it is no more unclean than the opening
of a flower, or the sight of a rainbow after a storm. From zoology
may be gathered a direct sense of sexual functions, organs, and their
products; the second main step in the school of education of the young.
The third step will be a study of human physiology, including the
generative organs. These will not be emphasized; and the initial
tendency to giggle at this part of the subject will disappear in the
cool detachment of the teacher’s presentation. If thought best, this
subject may be taught independently to boys and girls. The teaching
should be comprehensive both as to the organs and their use and abuse.
_In the Home._--Pending a wholesale adoption of this in our schools,
and even after such adoption, these subjects should be taught to the
growing child, as soon as he manifests curiosity about them, in the
home. The normal child asks quite early, “Where did I come from?” The
conventional answer about the stork or the rosebush is soon enough
corrected, by the child’s reading or his companions; the result of
parental deception will be to shake the child’s faith in his parents.
The simple truth is best: just as the flower holds its little egg,
which the bee quickens to life by bringing a gift from the father
flower; just as the mother hen has her egg, fertilized, in her body,
and brings it forth, sets on it, and produces her young; just as the
mother cat carries her egg, duly fertilized, in her body, and brings
out the kittens; just so the mother carried baby in a little egg just
under her heart, and at the proper time brought her out. It need not
all be taught at once; but without evasion the story ought to be filled
in.
This will call first, of course, for education of the parents. You who
are a parent or a prospective parent, make it your business to acquaint
yourself thoroughly with the whole history and evolution of sex and
its practices; all knowledge gained will aid you in directing your own
life, as well as holding a torch to those who come after you.
As the child approaches and undergoes adolescence, it is even more
necessary that, preferably both parents, and certainly the one of his
own sex, should deal fully, frankly, and without shame, with all the
details of the child’s sexual development. Knowledge is the surest
protection the child can have. The duty of the wise teacher is to
enlighten his pupils thoroughly about the possible ways before him,
and what good or ill will be gained by following each. With this
information thoroughly comprehended, the child may be depended upon,
in the majority of cases, to decide far more correctly and helpfully
problems connected with the sexual urge, than the child who grows up
in darkness, as far as his parents are concerned, and receives his
information from doubtful sources, with the slime of the nasty mind
upon the clean theme.
_Education in Love._--Yet all of this is too elementary, to be enough
for the adolescent, and for the young man and woman. For love is more
than a matter of human psychology and its functioning: love is an
art. There must be education, ultimately, in the art of love. Savage
races usually have such education; the great initiation ceremonies and
dances, at the time of puberty of the young men and women, are merely
the culmination of an education in love-making that is given frankly
and openly to all in the tribe.
The average man or woman, barring such stray and often fouled hints
as he receives from friends and companions no wiser than he in the
subject, enters upon mating or the marriage state with no understanding
of what he is called upon to do. In the usual marriage today, the
girl is presumptively at least virginal, and the young man is not.
He has had his contact, perhaps, with prostitutes, who have mastered
the technique of stimulating passion in the man and of suppressing
it in themselves, until they desire to release it in themselves. He
has no understanding of the needs of the virginal nature before him.
Frequently he is profoundly disappointed in the fact that his shy
and embarrassed young wife, who looks to him for the enlightenment
he cannot give, does not stimulate him as the prostitute did. The
prostitute regarded him as a matter of business, and did not call upon
him to put forth his best efforts to see that she was physiologically
satisfied. The wife’s ideas are a vague blank upon this subject; but
her physiological need is there.
This poem is a concentrated statement of the usual outstanding
differences:
Love, to man, is leaping fire,
Dying with his fed desire.
But in woman it will glow
Most, when man would have it go.
Hope no more of man than this,
Maiden, when you take his kiss,--
That his loving will be done
When its victory is won.
Do not scold her drowsy ardor,
Lover; she will cling the harder,
Taught that your love, even at ending,
Lights a life for her long tending.
The life lit at the end is her own life, as well as the generated
child’s. In other words, there is a profound physiological difference
in man and woman, in the practice of love. The average man comes to his
passion quickly; and, after his orgasm, it dies as quickly. The average
woman mounts far more slowly toward the crest of her passion; and long
after the man’s normal passion is gone, she is desirous. Maidenly shame
will make her incapable of explaining this, even if she understands it.
The duty is on the man to understand the delicate human instrument, and
to see that the chords are not jangled.
For love, it must be repeated, is an art. It should never be a hurried
routine on the man’s part, which leaves the woman unsatisfied; least
of all, should it be a hastened satisfaction of his own desire, upon
an inexperienced woman, who may thereby suffer a shock that renders
her frigid for life. Medical records contain case after case where the
experiences of the nuptial night have wrecked the whole subsequent
content of the woman, or, indeed, her reason itself. Young wives
who commit suicide on the honeymoon are often impelled by the man’s
initial and sometimes unconscious brutality. Love is an art, calling
for infinite tact and understanding on the part of the man, as well
as the woman. Both lovers may go into it timidly at first; there will
come soon enough, if love develops normally, when it will be splendid
and wholesome and naked and unashamed. In the matured love, there is
all consideration for the wellbeing of the beloved one, and a complete
giving on both parts, with no withholding.
It will require an immense change in popular conceptions before any
wholesale education in the art of love can be given in this country,
indispensable though it may be to a right living and a happy loving.
But the wise individual will educate himself, by extensive reading
of literature upon the subject, and by personal contact with those
in position to know. It is Utopian to expect such education now; the
general history of Utopian ideas, however, has been that they were
proposed, cried down and persecuted, and ultimately adopted.
VI.
PENALTIES OF MISTAKES
_Restraint in Youth._--There is no more common gossip, at the time the
young man reaches puberty, than that sexual intercourse is at once
necessary to him. This is a false teaching that not only reaches him
from his companions, but is also spread by many of the old-fashioned
medical men and more up-to-date quack doctors. The youth man is told
that, if he does not indulge, his organs will wither and atrophy; that
he will suffer that largely imaginary ill, “loss of manly vigor” or
“loss of manhood,” and will, by his restraint render himself thereafter
unable to be a father.
This is, luckily for the race, a stupid falsehood. Until full physical
growth is reached, the body needs to reabsorb the seminal fluid,
and use it for growth. The young adolescent who proceeds at once to
gratification of his awakening desires in many cases never reaches
his possible physical height and size, but remains to some extent a
stunted weakling. The case is similar to excessive practice of smoking
or drinking before growth is fully attained; the body is at time
stunted permanently. The same thing is true of the adolescent girl who
marries and has a child too young, or has a child without marriage.
Such children are proverbially weaklings; Macbeth can think of no
lower phrase to apply to himself, if he fails to meet the ghost of
Banquo in some terrible form, than that he be called “the baby of a
girl.” The offspring of immature men and women are more than immature;
self-restraint, during the body-forming period of adolescence, is the
only way of securing a rounded flowering into manhood.
The matter of sexual restraint for life, however, is on a vastly
different footing. A certain misguided medical backing can be found
to support the idea that a man or woman can abstain for life, without
damage to them. There are occasional high bloodless ascetics, who
can change the suppressed sexual desire into a mysticism soothing
to themselves and to others of the human race. But for the ordinary
man and woman, a life of abstinence is a physiological crime. Such
people are warped, and twisted out of normal humanness; they are
afflicted with ingrowing sex, as unnatural as an ingrowing nail. A
life of abstinence runs counter to the deep physiological demands
implanted in every individual; it is, on a large scale, suicidal to
the race; in an individual case, it is destructive of a rounded normal
development. The woman, denied for life, becomes the thing caricatured
as the “old maid,” bitter against the slightest sexual failing in
another woman; she is often the waspish school teacher, who teaches
successive generations of young people that anything connected with
the body is nasty. The man becomes the unnatural old grouch. Not the
typical bachelor: for he is an example, as a rule, not of lifelong
abstinence, but of furtive indulgences, without permanence, and without
a development of the higher forms of romantic and conjugal love. In
both man and woman, a life of abstinence is worse than a mistake: it
is, in the truest sense, a perversion.
If abstinence for life is unnatural, abstinence during adolescence is
valuable for more than the reason given, namely, that the seminal fluid
is needed for reabsorption into the growing body. A further reason
comes from the necessary conditions of adolescent sexual experience. It
is rarely practicable for the youth or young girl to marry this early;
it is certainly not wise, for usually the normal youth goes through a
series of tentative love illusions before one of the opposite sex is
encountered who is especially fitted to become a life partner of more
rather than less permanence. Since the young man or woman will hardly
marry at this time, the intercourse enjoyed must be socially illicit.
If both parties to the intercourse are untried in love, there is no
actual danger of disease; although, with such untried lovers, ignorant
of contra-conceptual methods as a rule, the danger of unintended
pregnancies is great, which will result either in an unwise marriage,
or in a heavy social burden on the girl.
The more usual method is for the young man to go to a prostitute,
or to a more or less private mistress. Here the danger of venereal
disease, to be elaborated hereafter, comes with especial force. All the
medical inspection in the world cannot keep a prostitute clean. The
very customer preceding the young man in question may have transmitted
to her the germs of syphilis, gonorrhea, or some other affliction;
and on many occasions the first sexual experience has cost the young
man one of the diseases, whose influence and poisons plague him not
infrequently for life, and may reappear as a hideous blight upon his
descendants. The same is true of the woman not a regular prostitute;
there is no medical inspection as a rule for such a woman, and the
young man must take the heavy risk.
Self control during adolescence can be acquired by various contributory
methods. A hearty indulgence in all forms of athletics and field
sports goes a long way toward draining off the erotic energy crying
elsewhere for direct liberation. A devotion to any branch of learning,
a hobby of any kind, acquaintance with the world of nature, all these
keep the mind in safer channels. On the other side of the fence are
excessive attendance at burlesque shows, over-stimulating movies,
typical gang-life with premature smoking, drinking, and sophisticated
gossip, and reading which tends to inflame the erotic nature. The
wise young man will avoid these, not in a panicky way, but calmly and
intelligently, until he has stored his body with the wealth of physical
strength, and his mind with the wealth of counter-irritating knowledge.
_Over Indulgence._--Over indulgence in anything is the chief sin,
from the standpoint of the individual. Too much ice cream is no less
costly than too much sexual intercourse. We have mentioned onanism,
which is almost universal among the young of both sexes, as a first
experiment in erotic experiences. This habit, if abandoned soon or
rigorously controlled, does not do any of the dreadful things the
medical quacks assert of it: it does not, physiologically, weaken the
spinal cord, cause lost manly vigor, or bring about insanity. These
may follow excessive indulgence in onanism, not because the onanism
causes them--its result is merely an intensification of the unsocial
side of one’s nature, and a punishing weakness or general debility;
but because, in the weakened state, other ills find easy lodgment; and
because, being told that these things will follow, the individual of
little intelligence self-induces the ills by a sort of auto-suggestion
or self-hypnotism. The cleanest course is to avoid onanism altogether;
the next best thing is to go in vigorously for physical and mental
distractions, and rigorously control it or end it.
Over-indulgence in heterosexual intercourse, that is, intercourse
with members of the opposite sex, is just as costly. This may either
be socially illicit intercourse, or intercourse in the marital
state. At times a married couple contains one or both members with
a tendency toward nymphomania, or excessive desire for men, in the
woman, or toward satyriasis, or excessive desire for women, in the
man. If the tendency is too powerful, society is saved, because the
parties so weaken themselves that reproduction is impossible, and
death or complete physical or mental incapacity results. If it is
merely a tendency, it should be and must be controlled. Every man and
every woman must determine for themselves the frequency of sexual
intercourse, including that in the married state, which satisfies
the erotic desires, while maintaining the individual at the peak of
his powers as man or woman. The average man does not need sexual
intercourse more than twice a week; once is enough, in many cases.
During the woman’s monthly incapacity, this should be restrained.
If this rule of common sense is disregarded, the bodies will be so
weakened that any sort of disease may secure a foothold.
_Veneral Diseases._--Many medical authorities who speak loosely, and
many lay purists, say flatly that any illicit intercourse is attended
with punishment in the shape of venereal disease. A typical phrasing
of this was Bryan’s, in a recent popular magazine of over a million
circulation. This is, of course, untrue. If both parties to the
intercourse are healthy, and it be not excessively promiscuous, there
is no more danger of venereal infection than with one’s married mate.
We have not considered the ethics of what is commonly called seduction;
that is, the intercourse of an older man or woman with a younger
woman or man, the latter being either married or unmarried. It is of
course inethical, in such cases, to take advantage of the young woman
or man. Ideally, in all such cases the younger party should be well
over legal age, of at least average intelligence, and with a definite
understanding of the course she or he is about to enter upon. Any
intercourse achieved by deceit or trickery, or taking advantage of the
other person, is inethical. The matter should be faced squarely, and
the responsibility should be a joint one.
The two chief venereal diseases are gonorrhea and syphilis. This book
has been permeated with an outcry against popular lies concerning the
sexual organs and their functions, lies which secure their chance to
become widespread through the harmful social taboo upon intelligent
discussion of the subject. Now we come to another of these lies, as
harmful as any of the previous ones: namely, that gonorrhea is “no
worse than a cold.” This is common gossip among men and some women, and
many a good-hearted old family medico will reassure the troubled young
man or woman with the same poisonous mental soothing syrup. Gonorrhea,
once contracted, is extremely difficult to eradicate. It is easily
communicated to the party with whom one has sexual intercourse; many a
man, acquiring it from a prostitute or general woman, has infected his
innocent wife; many a man has infected an otherwise clean prostitute
or general woman. Medical inspection of prostitutes answers only half
of the need. There should at least be medical inspection of each male
customer of the prostitute, before the intercourse.
There is more penalty than this to gonorrhea. The germs of the disease,
or _gonococci_, often attack the eyes of children of parents, one or
both of whom are afflicted with the disease. Twenty-five per cent of
all cases of blindness are attributed to gonorrhea; for blindness to
children is one of the byproducts of this disease mis-ranked as “no
worse than a cold.”
Syphilis, the other chief venereal disease, has been called by
eugenists one of the racial poisons. Any competent medical treatise
will go into details concerning its three stages, its powerful hold,
once contracted, and the details of symptoms and the long, painful,
and expensive method of cure. Enough to say here that it causes
general debility, affects every tissue and organ, causes skin and
bone diseases, as well as arterial diseases. In its later stages it
produces paralysis, blindness, deafness, disorders of speech, mental
enfeeblement, and locomotor ataxia (a wasting disease of the spinal
cord). And this does not exhaust the list. The penalty of careless
pleasure is heavy.
The British Royal Commission engaged in the study of venereal diseases
reported, for the year 1912, the following:
Personnel. Working Days Lost.
Home Army 107,582 216,445
Navy 119,520 269,210
Men in the army and navy are required to live frequently an unnatural
life, remote from their wives and regular mates; this stimulates
the so-called sexual perversions, and all forms of illicit sexual
intercourse. Yet the figures for civil life, acquired by many
authoritative commissions, are almost as high.
Worse than the physical ills, in both cases, are the mental ills that
follow the acquiring and gradual development of these diseases. The man
or woman becomes imbued with the idea of his physical unworthiness,
luckily for mankind, but destructively to himself or herself. If
intercourse is indulged in while the disease is in the system, this
requires a brutalizing and hardening of the moral nature, sufficient
to allow the man or woman to run the risk of infecting another woman
or man with the horrible diseases and their attendant evils. The
governments of the world are now stepping into this tabooed field, and
doing much toward eradicating the diseases. In their first stages, a
cure is comparatively sure; in the latter stages, the case is often
hopeless. It is well, therefore, to act promptly, on any suspicion of
having acquired the disease. Go, not to some medical quack, but to
a reputable physician; and sooner or later you may be able to clean
yourself of the serious mistake in your sex life. Having once passed
through the living hell of venereal affection, it is a safe bet that
you will not willingly undergo it again.
VII.
THE PURITY IDEAL