RESULTS OF YOUTHFUL IMPURITY.
It is difficult to exaggerate the evils which result from the present
system under which boys grow to manhood without any adult guidance in
relation to the laws of sex.
It has already been stated that the immediate physical results of
self-abuse are small evils indeed compared with the corruption of mind
which comes from perverted sex ideas. They are, however, by no means
negligible; and are, in some cases, very serious. The great prevalence
of self-abuse among boys, combined with the inevitable uncertainty as
to the degree of a boy's freedom from, or indulgence in, this vice,
makes it very difficult to institute a reliable comparison between
those who are chaste and those who are unchaste. Greater significance
attaches, I think, to a comparison in individual cases of a boy's
condition during a period of indulgence in masturbation and his
condition after its total, or almost total, relinquishment. I have no
hesitation in saying that the difference in a boy's vitality and
spiritual tone after relinquishing this habit is very marked. The
case _D_ quoted in Chapter I. is, in this respect, typical.
In my pamphlet, _Private Knowledge for Boys_, I have quoted a striking
passage from Acton on the Reproductive Organs, in which he contrasts
the continent and the incontinent boy. But in the case of men like Dr.
Acton--specialists in the diseases of the male reproductive organs--it
must be remembered that it is mostly the abnormal and extreme cases
which come under their notice: a fact which is liable to affect their
whole estimate. The book can be recommended to adults who wish to see
the whole subject of sex diseases dealt with by a specialist who
writes with a high moral purpose.
My own estimate is given in the pamphlet already referred to. After
quoting Dr. Acton's opinion, I add:--
"You will notice that Dr. Acton is here describing an extreme case. I
want to tell you what are the results in a case which is not extreme.
My difficulty is that these results are so various. The injury to the
nerves and brain which is caused by sexual excitement and by the loss
of semen leaves nothing in the body, mind or character uninjured. The
_extent_ of the injury varies greatly with the strength of a boy's
constitution and with the frequency of his sin. The _character_ of the
injury varies with the boy's own special weaknesses and tendencies. If
he is naturally shy and timid, it makes him shyer and more timid. If
he is stupid and lazy, it makes him more stupid and lazy. If he is
inclined to consumption or other disease, it destroys his power of
resisting such disease. In extreme cases only does it actually change
an able boy into a stupid one, an athletic boy into a weak one, and a
happy boy into a discontented one; but in all cases it _weakens_ every
power a boy possesses. Its most prominent results are these: loss of
will-power and self-reliance, shyness, nervousness and irritability,
failure of the reasoning powers and memory, laziness of body and mind,
a diseased fondness for girls, deceitfulness. Of these results, the
loss of will-power leaves the boy a prey not only to the temptations
of impurity, but to every other form of temptation: the deceitfulness
destroys his self-respect and turns his life into a sham."
Of incomparably greater importance than Acton's wide but abnormal
experience and my own narrow but normal experience is the experience
of Dr. Clement Dukes, which is very wide and perfectly normal. No man
has probably been in so good a position for forming an estimate as he
has been. Dr. Dukes thus sums up his opinion: "The harm which results
is moral, intellectual, and physical. _Physically_ it is a frequent
drain at a critical time of life when nature is providing for growth
and development, and is ill able to bear it; it is a powerful nervous
shock to the system ill-prepared to meet it.... It also causes
muscular and mental debility, loss of spirit and manliness, and
occasional insanity, suicide and homicide. Moreover it leads to
further uncontrollable passions in early manhood.... Further, this
vice enfeebles the _intellectual_ powers, inducing lethargy and
obtuseness, and incapacity for hard mental work. And last, and most of
all, it is an _immorality_ which stains the whole character and
undermines the life."
In this passage Dr. Dukes refers to the intellectual and moral harm of
self-abuse as well as to its physical consequences. Intimately
connected as these are with one another, I am here attempting to give
them separate treatment. It is, however, impossible to treat perverted
sex-knowledge and self-abuse separately; for though in young boys they
are found independently of one another, and sometimes co-exist in
elder boys without any intimate conscious association, their results
are identical. In the following pages, therefore, I shall refer to
them jointly as impurity.
The earliest evil which springs from impurity is the destruction of
the intimacy which has hitherto existed between the boy and his
parents. Closely associated with this is that duplicity of life which
results from secrets which may be shared with the coarse but must be
jealously concealed from everyone who is respected. Untold harm
follows these changes in a lad. Hitherto he has had nothing to conceal
from his mother--unless, indeed, his parents have been foolish enough
to drive him into deception by undue severity over childish mistakes,
and accidents, and moral lapses. Every matter which has occupied his
thoughts he has freely shared with those who can best lead him into
the path of moral health.
Henceforth all is changed. The lad has his own inner life which he
must completely screen from the kind eyes which have hitherto been his
spiritual lights. Concealment is soon found to be an easy thing. Acts
and words are things of which others may take cognisance; the inner
life no one can ever know. A world is opened to the lad in which the
restraints of adult opinion are not felt at all and the guidance and
inspiration of a father's or mother's love never come. How completely
this is the case in regard to impurity the reader will hardly doubt if
he remembers that all parents believe their boys to be innocent, and
that some 90 per cent. of them are hopelessly hoodwinked. But this
double life is not long confined to the subject of purity. The
concealment which serves one purpose excellently can be made to serve
another; and henceforth parents and adult friends need never know
anything but what they are told. It is a sad day for the mother when
first she realises that the old frankness has gone; it is a very, very
much sadder day for the boy. There is no fibre of his moral being but
is, or will be, injured by this divorce of home influences and by this
ever-accumulating burden of guilty memories. "His mother may not know
why this is so," writes Canon Lyttelton; "the only thing she may be
perfectly certain of is that the loss will never be quite made up as
long as life shall last."
Another injury done by impurity to the growing mind of the lad is
that, in all matters relating to sex, he learns to look merely for
personal enjoyment. In every other department of life he is moved by
a variety of motives: by the desire to please, the desire to excel, by
devotion to duty, by the love of truth, and by many other desires.
Even in gratifying the appetite most nearly on the same plane as the
sexual appetite--namely, that of hunger--he has more or less regard
for his own well-being, more or less consideration for the wishes of
others, and a constant desire to attain the standard expected of him.
Meanwhile, as regards the sexual appetite--the racial importance of
which is great; and the regulation of which is of infinite importance
for himself, for those who may otherwise become its victims, for the
wife he may one day wed, and for the children, legitimate or
illegitimate, that he may beget--his one idea is personal enjoyment.
One deplorable result of this idea will be adverted to in the next
chapter.
When boyish impurity involves a coarse way of looking at sexual
relations, as it always must when these are matters of common talk and
jest, the boy suffers a loss which prejudicially affects the whole
tone of his mind and every department of his conduct--I mean the loss
of reverence. It is those things alone which are sacred to us, those
things about which we can talk only with friends, and about which we
can jest with no one, that have inspiration in them, that can give us
power to follow our ideals and to lay a restraining hand on the brute
within us. Fortunately the self-control which manifests itself in
heroism, in good form, and in the sportsmanlike spirit is sacred to
almost all. To most, a mother's love is sacred. To many, all that is
implied in the word religion. To a few, sexual passion and the great
manifestations of human genius in poetry, music, painting, sculpture,
and architecture. Exactly in proportion as these things are profaned
by jest and mockery, is the light of the soul quenched and man
degraded to the level of the beast. Considering how large a part the
sex-passion plays in the lives of most men and women; considering how
it permeates the literature and art of the World and is--as the basis
of the home--the most potent factor in social life, its profanation is
a terrible loss, and the habit of mind which such profanation
engenders cannot fail to weaken the whole spirit of reverence. I must
confess that the man who jests over sex relations is to me
incomparably lower than the man who sustains clean but wholly
illegitimate sex relations; and while I am conscious of a strong
movement of friendship towards a lad who has admitted impurity in his
life but retains reverence for purity, it is hard to feel anything but
repulsion towards one who profanes the subject of sex with coarse and
ribald talk.
As a result of the two evils of which I have now spoken, together with
the physical effects of masturbation, young men become powerless to
face the sexual temptations of manhood; and many, who in all other
relations of life are admirable, sink in this matter into the mire of
prostitution or the less demoralising, but far crueller, sin of
seduction.
Thrown on the streets, usually through no fault of her own, often
merely from an over-trustful love, the prostitute sinks to the lowest
depths of degradation and despair. It is not merely that she sells to
every comer, clean or bestial, without even the excuse of appetite or
of passion, what should be yielded alone to love; but it is also that
to do this she poisons body and mind with spirit-drinking, leads a
life of demoralising indolence and self-indulgence, is cut off from
all decent associations, and sinks, under the combined influence of
these things and of fell disease, into a loathsome creature whom not
the lowest wants; sinks into destitution, misery, suicide, or the
outcast's early grave. Writing of the young man who is familiar with
London, the Headmaster of Eton says: "He cannot fail to see around him
a whole world of ruined life--a ghastly varnish of gaiety spread over
immeasurable tracts of death and corruption; a state of things so
heart-rending and so hopeless that on calm consideration of it the
brain reels, and sober-minded people who, from motives of pity, have
looked the hideous evil in the face, have asserted that nothing in
their experience has seemed to threaten them so nearly with a loss of
reason."
Into the contamination of this inferno, into active support of this
cruel infamy, many and many a young man is led by the impurity of his
boyhood. Such at least is the conclusion of some who know boys best.
Thus Dr. Dukes writes:
"This evil, of which I have spoken so long and so freely, is, I
believe, _the root of the evil of prostitution_ and similar vices; and
if this latter evil is to be mitigated, it can only be, to my mind,
by making the life of the schoolboy purer.
"How is it possible to put a stop to this terrible social evil? How is
it possible to _elevate women_ while the demand for them for base
purposes is so great? We must go to the other end of the scale and
make men better; we must train young boys more in purity of life and
chastity BEFORE their passions become uncontrollable.
"Whereas the cry of every moralist and philanthropist is, 'Let us put
a stop to this prostitution, open and clandestine.' This cannot be
effected at present, much as it is to be desired; the demand for it is
too great, even possibly greater than the supply. If we wish to
eradicate it, we must go to the fountainhead and make those who create
the demand purer, so that, the demand falling off, the supply will be
curtailed."[C]
[Footnote C: _The Preservation of Health_, p. 161.]
To this I venture to add that by teaching chastity we not merely
decrease the demand for prostitutes, but we greatly diminish the
supply. Few girls, if any, take to the streets until they have been
seduced; and the antecedents of seduction are the morbid exaggeration
of the sexual appetite, the lack of self-control, and the selfish
hedonism which youthful impurity engenders.
The selfishness, and consequent blindness to cruelty, of which I
write, manifests itself quite early. A boy of chivalrous feeling,
whose blood would boil at any other form of outrage on a girl, will
read a newspaper account of rape or indecent assault with a pleasure
so intense that indignation and disgust are quite crowded out of his
mind.
If, repelled by the coarseness of the streets, the young man allows
lust or passion to lead him into seduction, he commits a crime the
consequences of which are usually cruel in the extreme; for in most
cases the seduced girl sinks of necessity into prostitution. So blind,
so callous does impurity make even the refined and generous, that many
a young man who can be a good son, a good brother, a noble friend, a
patriotic citizen, will doom a girl whose only fault is that she is
physically attractive--and possibly too affectionate and trusting--to
torturing anxiety, to illness, to the horrible suffering of undesired
travail, to disgrace, and in nineteen cases out of twenty to ostracism
and the infamy of the streets. Murder is a small thing compared with
this. Who would not rather that his daughter were killed in her
innocence than that she should be doomed to such a fate?
Many young men are ignorant of the fact that sexual relations with
prostitutes frequently result in the foulest and most terrible of
diseases. Venereal diseases, as these are called, commence in the
private parts themselves, but the poison which they engender soon
attacks other parts of the body and often wrecks the general health.
It gives rise to loathsome skin disease, to degeneration of the
nervous system and paralysis, to local disease in the heart, lungs,
and digestive organs, and to such lowering of vitality as renders the
body an easy prey to disease generally. No one is justified in looking
upon this risk as a matter of merely private concern. Health is of
supreme importance not merely to the personal happiness and success of
the man himself, but also to the services he can render to his
friends, to his nation, and to humanity. Even if a young man is
foolish enough to risk his happiness and success for the sake of
animal enjoyment, he cannot without base selfishness and disloyalty
disregard the duties he owes to others. Further, the man who suffers
from venereal disease is certain to pass its poison on to his wife and
children--cursing thus with unspeakable misery those whom of all
others it is his duty to protect and bless.
One cannot help feeling at times that the blessings of home--and of
the monogamy which makes home possible--are terribly discounted by a
condition of things which offer a young man no other alternatives to
chastity than these terrible evils. Now that year by year the rising
standard of living and the increased exactions which the State makes
on the industrious and provident cause marriage to be a luxury too
expensive for many, and delayed unduly for most, the problem of social
purity becomes ever greater and more urgent. The instruction of the
young in relation to sex provides the only solution, and is, I venture
to think, incomparably the most important social reform now needed.
I am confident that a boy who receives wise training and sex guidance
from his early days will never find lust the foul and uncontrollable
element which it is to-day in the lives of most men; that in a few
generations our nation could be freed from the seething corruption
which poisons its life; and that, while freer scope could be given to
the ineffable joys of pure sexual love, very much could be done to
diminish the awful misery and degradation engendered by lust.
If children had from their infancy an instinctive and growing desire
for alcohol, with secret and unrestrained means of gratifying it; if
by its indulgence this desire grew into an overmastering craving; if
throughout childhood they received no word of warning or guidance from
the good, but were tempted and corrupted by the evil, we should have a
nation in which most men and women were drunkards, ready to break all
laws--human and divine--which stood in the way of an imperious need; a
nation in which, among those who declined to yield to iniquity, the
craving for drink caused unceasing and life-long struggle.
On the young man of to-day we lay a burden which no ordinary man was
ever yet able to bear. His boyhood and youth become, through
ignorance, the prey of lust; his passions become tyrannous; his will
is enslaved. Even if he contracts marriage, his troubles are not at an
end, for man, _as an animal_, is neither monogamous nor wholly
constant. His neglected sex-education makes him far more susceptible
to physical attractions than to those qualities which make a wife a
good companion, a good housekeeper, and a good mother; and but too
often, as a result, the beneficent influence of marriage is transient;
the domestic atmosphere ceases to be congenial; both husband and wife
become susceptible to other attachments, and the old struggle begins
all over again.