Part 1
LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 91 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
Manhood: The Facts of Life Presented to Men
Clement Wood
HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS
Copyright, 1924 Haldeman-Julius Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
MANHOOD: THE FACTS OF LIFE PRESENTED TO MEN
CONTENTS
Page
1. The Threshold of Manhood 7 Adolescence 7 Education in Life 8 Training of the Adolescent 10 Growth of Sentiment 12 Sex in Life 13
2. The Evolution of Love 15 Primitive Man 15 Natural Love 17 Romantic Love 18 Conjugal Love 19 Freud’s Analysis 20
3. The Ethics of Mating 24 Toward Equality 24 Choice of a Mate 26 As to Children 28 Double and Single Codes 29 Duration of Courtship 30
4. Proper Mating 33 The Purpose of Mating 33 Eugenics 34 Eugenics in the Future 37 Birth Control 39
5. Education for Life 40 In Our Schools 40 In the Home 42 Education in Love 44
6. Penalties of Mistakes 47 Restraint in Youth 47 Over Indulgence 50 Venereal Diseases 52
7. The Purity Ideal 56 Chastity 56 Morality Today and Tomorrow 58 The Ideal of Purity 62
MANHOOD: THE FACTS OF LIFE PRESENTED TO MEN
I.
THE THRESHOLD OF MANHOOD
_Adolescence._--It is usual to say that youth, from its pinnacle, surveys the promised land of manhood as Moses on the mountain top saw another promised land. But Moses was old, and was prohibited entry into the land; youth is young, and, but for premature death, will know every detail of the valley of manhood for long years. Youth sees the valley, which has its heights too, not clearly, but through mists of illusion: especially romantic mists of misconception of love and of his probability of success, and gross mists due to early perverted education. This book will aid in clearing away some of these mists, that the true beauty of the valley may better appear.
The period of adolescence usually occurs between fourteen and sixteen, although it may be hastened or retarded in exceptional cases. The altered physical nature is reflected in the mental and spiritual nature. G. Stanley Hall, in his notable work, “Adolescence,” speaks of this period as “a new birth,” and proceeds:
“Powers and faculties, essentially non-existent before, are now born, and of the older instincts and impulses some are reinforced and greatly developed, while others become subordinate, so that new relations are established, and the ego finds a new center.”
Heredity has played its chief part; the childish environment, especially the intricate and often hidden ties between son and parents, has started the development; now a physical change takes place in the youth, which slowly lifts him from boyhood to manhood. Physically, mentally, morally, the man is being slowly shaped; out of the plastic material of youth, as played upon by the outside world, the youth himself is shaping what the man will be. A puppy is born with its eyes closed; the usual youth faces life with his eyes largely closed. Tactful and skilful handling by others, intelligent direction by himself, may make a rounded and developed man of him; cramming, bullying, and ignorance or false teaching concerning the things which most vitally concern him, may warp and twist him for the rest of his days.
_Education in Life._--In much of the world, education in sexual matters is the accepted thing. Savage tribes usually have it. Oriental civilizations practice it today. Our ancestors, down to Christianity, knew it. But the pendulum went so far in this direction that Christianity adopted the opposite extreme. The body, it held, was worthless, along with all of this world; only the next world was important. Everything of the body was vile, everything of the soul sacred. Out of this grew the taboo or prohibition of discussion upon this vital subject, from which Christian culture has suffered ever since.
For this teaching is not true; the earth, the body, are not vile. Man in a wholesale way can not long live a lie; accordingly, the practice of men from the beginning contradicted the theory, and the excessive devotion to things of the body wormed its way throughout mankind, and even to the inmost heights of the church itself. The parent, if he or she is to aid the son best to face life, must face reality here, and disregard the taboo; the parent must educate the son about his body.
Suppose the parent keeps silent, as too many do; does this mean that the son will grow up, a pure and unstained Galahad, until somehow instinctively, on his marriage night, the truth is revealed to him in a lightning flash of inspiration? The contrary is usually the case. Boys will and must learn of sex and their bodies. They learn from chance hints dropped by their elders; they learn from books, even the Bible and the dictionary; most of all, they learn from the more corrupt and less restrained of their companions. Undirected, they are almost sure to get a gutter conception of sex: masturbation or onanism, relations with other boys, and relations with women without real love, will be taught the average boy during grammar school days, if he is not guarded by the one sure defense, a knowledge of the facts.
This knowledge is the more valuable, if to it be added to a restrained example on the part of his parents. If the boy has a father whose life he can admire, if the girl has a mother whose actions are restrained, this example is a louder preachment than words spoken or read. The simple mysteries of life can be pointed out in the life-stories of plants and animals; the mystery of new-hatched birds and animals becomes a clean and simple symbol of the boy’s own origin, and points to him the role that he will, in the normal course of nature, fulfil.
_Training of the Adolescent._--The first great essential in training the adolescent is keeping the body fit. The sexual nature will be strong enough; have no fear of that. Nature’s method is, in the male, an insatiable desire; in the female, an almost insatiable receptivity. A female gnat can create 1,000,000,000 individuals in one month; a normal woman could have more than thirty children, and a normal man could be father to many thousands. The conditions of our life have made this unnecessary and indeed economically impossible; the task is to rein human reproduction, not to stimulate it. Normal exercise drains off excess energy, and postpones the boy’s inevitable sexual insistence. This is even more true of the boy forced to work in office, workshop, or factory during the day. Beyond the negative restraint thus bred, there is a positive result in bodily well-being. For the man will regret to the end of his days if he has let himself develop into a weakling. Sport is an admirable regimen, both for its self-development and for its production of social spirit, or team work, which is so essential to a happy participation in human society.
Keeping the mind fit is almost as important; and that means adequate education, especially in the facts of the universe; in acquiring a scientific framework in which to fit the facts, and in cultivating hobbies of investigation in appropriate places in this frame. Too much coddling of the ego is incompatible with a real understanding of the vastness of the universe, and of the relative permanent unimportance of the individual. Out of this will grow the moral virtues, truth, straightforwardness, desire for the noble and good, and that temporary unselfishness which is the highest form of selfishness.
At adolescence, the boy’s organs of generation alter especially. In addition to the deepening in his voice, the squareness of his shoulders, the increased firmness in the muscles, there comes the growth of hair under the arms and elsewhere on the body, and the increased size of the reproductive organs. The boy who understands this in advance is forearmed. During the whole adolescent stage, the seminal fluid is pre-eminently needed by the growing body. The body secretes it, and reabsorbs it; that which it cannot absorb is rejected by a natural process, usually during sleep. The boy, unprepared for this, will surely be worried by it; misinformation from ignorant companions, the advertisements of quack doctors, will alarm him with threats of loss of manly vigor and other mainly imaginary ills. If the boy indulges his sexual nature at this time, in onanism or intercourse, the body may be and in most cases is permanently weakened and stunted. There is a time for all things; and the time for sexual reservation is during the growing period of adolescence.
The growth of sentiment at this period will induce the boy to turn to the poets, the philosophers, and the nobler forms of literature; for he is shaping high ideals, which will to some extent control his life afterwards. All of these are helpful, if contact with them is based upon a root knowledge of his own body and of the scientific facts of the universe. Armed with a knowledge of sex, he cannot be too severely harmed by the smutty gossip of companions, or by pornographic books and pictures which may come before his attention. The ignorant boy is unhealthily stimulated by such books; the sting is taken out of them by a comprehension of the facts of life.
_Growth of Sentiment._--Now begins an alteration in his way of regarding women. As a child, he has not bothered especially about his difference from girls; now they become collectively the desired ones, and he is sure sooner or later to pick out one of them as his beloved one. As Mantegazza says in his “The Book of Love,” “Rarely is the first love true love”; the youth fixes his affections on the most convenient and nearest girl, as a rule; only a process of trial and error will eliminate those unsuitable as life companions from those suitable.
If he has been properly aided in his thinking, he will neither make the mistake of shrining woman as a deity, or of debasing her as a mere sex vehicle; or, worse yet, combining these two false notions into a morality which isolates a few women as angels, and lowers others into demons. The truth is that they are neither essentially lower nor higher than he himself; they are shoulder to shoulder with him, in a relative equality. A father can do much here, in the way in which he treats his own wife. Children insensibly absorb the real home attitude of their parents; if this be vicious, all the moral platitudes in the world cannot school the boy.
Along with this attitude at home, the wise parent will keep an eye upon his son’s companions. He will not look for fine clothes or the reverse, but for straightforward manly boys and decent girls, the more intelligent the better.
_Sex in Life._--Early in the history of life, at about the stage of the barnacles, the primitive female gave birth to a male separate from herself, and the long procession of the males had commenced. The influence of female sexual selection, which controlled down to the time of man, slowly evolved the male from his diminutive size and limited functions to a being as large as herself, or larger; and the development of an artistic sense in her gave what is called male efflorescence, or the gorgeous colors of male birds, the beards and manes of goats, men, lions, and horses, the branching antlers of stags, and many another ornamental sex differentiation. When the stage of man is reached, sex has assumed an importance which cannot easily be over-estimated. On the obvious side, it concerns much of the contact during the period of adolescent and young maturity, in all of the details connected with the selection and winning of a mate. After the mate is obtained, it plays its important part in controlling the whole love life of the man and woman. Underneath all this, it is the driving force that impels to many of life’s activities. A man makes and increases a competency or a fortune, builds a house, succeeds in his private or public business, to earn the good will and continued love of some woman; tunnels are driven through mountains, oceans united by great canals, hills levelled and deserts watered into rose gardens, largely for the same motive.
Reproduction is one of the primary tendencies of life; to prohibit it is a perversion. Enforced celibacy of a priesthood or brotherhood or sisterhood of religious persons is contrary to the obvious tendency of life, and is a serious biological blunder. Below the stage of man, throughout all the plant and animal kingdoms, this omnipresent reproductive instinct, supplemented by the later mating instinct, is exercised without conscious volition. In man, the instincts are still present, but the conscious will has taken hold of the reins, and guides toward the consummation desired. These instincts are essential to life and its continuity; they are normal, clean, universal. They are not shameful things, but splendid things. The shame lies in man’s mis-vision of them as things vile; the splendor lies in their conscious and intelligent voluntary use.
II.
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE
_Primitive Man._--The modern world accepts the fact of man’s evolution from the animal world, without understanding things that necessarily flow from this. Among animals, sexual relations take place at proper times and places, in such unions as have proven most valuable to the particular species; we attach no blame to these. Among animals, moreover, there is no conception of any relationship between coitus or mating, and parturition or the birth of the child. The fact of paternity is unknown.
One of the secondary sexual characteristics developed by female selection was increased brain mass, evincing greater shrewdness. Thus female choice developed in the higher mammals, and especially in man, a reasoning power; and this in the end dethroned her. Among primitive races, paternity is unknown; there are races existing today which do not understand it. An African chief was asked by a puzzled Christian missionary, “But have you no children?” In good-natured tolerance he corrected his inquisitor; “Among us, men do not have children.” When the idea slowly dawned on man’s mind that he was related to his child, we may be sure that the promiscuity, widespread among races, of early sexual matings had been broadened to include at least some mating pairs. For, in a state of promiscuity, fatherhood could not be established; any one of a number of males might be the father of the child. With a mating couple, the thing was different; and the idea came, and came again.
Savage reasoning is a slow and tortuous thing. When the man protested, “But I am kin to the child!” the wise ones of the tribe would answer, “But you were not sick!” In their minds childbirth (and hence relationship to the child) was always accompanied by sickness. Accordingly, the awkward savage mind invented a queer custom known as the _couvade_, still found among certain backward tribes. By means of this, when the wife became ill in childbirth, the husband took to his bed, and was nursed just as assiduously by the medicine men as the wife was. He could now answer, triumphant, “I have been sick! This proves that I am kin to my child.”
This idea, once gaining ground, completely overturned the former status of women and men, which had been largely a matriarchate, or mother-rule. Up to this time, woman had had the sole choice of mates, and the leading place in the tribe; for the young were hers, and fatherhood was unknown. Now, with paternity acknowledged, the man, part kin to the child, thereby had the right to part control over it. His wishes conflicted with the mother’s; this led, for the first time in the history of life, to a conflict between the male and the female. No male animal ever fights or abuses his female; it is left for man, made, he confesses, in the image of his creator, to oppress his mate. The male was stronger; and he soon reduced to subjection not only the child, but his wife as well. The patriarchal period, or age of father-rule, commenced; the subjection of women started, the blackest period in human history.
_Natural Love._--Love, the innate interest in male and female to secure fertilization and cross-reproduction, appears first as natural love, or sheer animal passion. Religion itself has one of its roots deep in the erotic nature of man; the widespread primitive worship of the love force and of sexual symbols is evidence of this. The phallic origin of such symbols as the cross and the trinity, the yonic derivation of the sacred seven-branched candlestick, are instances known to every anthropologist.
It must not be forgotten that, in its natural state, natural love is worthy to be called pure and noble. It embraced both monogamy and polygamy, depending upon the wishes of the parties concerned. It must never be overlooked that monogamy has developed as a female ideal, not a male one. For the compulsion on the male is: Fertilize! That on the female: Select! The male’s biological imperative is to fertilize as many females as he can; that of the female, is to select only the best and finest male as her mate. Monogamy spread as a property right, to insure that the sons of a man should be legitimate, in order that they might inherit his property. But this meant monogamy for the wife only; the husband was still at liberty to have concubines and harlots.
There are those who state that the coming of Christianity elevated woman, especially in the worship of the Virgin Mary. After all, she is distinctly inferior in power to the great mother goddesses, Demeter (dea-mater, goddess-mother), Cybele, Astarte, Ashtoreth, who sprang up during the matriarchate. In fact, early Christianity definitely lowered pagan conceptions of womanhood. Christ himself said, “there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” This lifted the mutilated man above the man who was mate of a woman. Paul praised celibacy above mating. Early Christian authorities were even more outspoken. Tertullian exclaims, “Woman, you are the gate to hell!” Again, “Celibacy must be chosen, even though the human race should perish.” Hieronymus says, “Matrimony is always a vice.” Origines declares, “Matrimony is impure and unholy; a means of sensual passion.” Christianity; then, had swung the pendulum too far toward giving all worth to things of the next world, and holding things of this world as vile. The growth of common intelligence has altered this, and the purity and nobility of natural love is now generally recognized.
_Romantic Love._--The savage had no conception of romantic love, and neither did the classical world. It grew amid the unnatural conditions of the age of roving knighthood, with its long separation of mated couples, and the danger to isolated highborn women from attacks. Romantic love was a sublimation, or emotional substitute, for the intense sexual need grown during such absences; it grew in proportion to the greater equality and independence of women during the period. It differs from natural love in one thing: natural love requires the possession of the person of the beloved; romantic love is satisfied with the presence of the beloved.
There was often the touch of outlawed love in romantic matings. At the Court of Viscountess Ermengarde of Narbonne it was stated and approved that:
“Nature and custom have erected an insuperable barrier between conjugal affection and the love which unites two lovers. It would be absurd to draw comparisons between two things which have neither resemblance nor connection.”
Here it is assumed that the love between two lovers must be an outlawed thing, apart from the love of wife and husband, or conjugal love. The romances of great geniuses, Abelard and Heloise, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Tasso and Eleanora, and a hundred others, go to indicate, with the romantic literature of the whole world, that love is a higher law, that will and should prevail over the laws of men and the conventions of society. In this it is in harmony with the teachings of biology and a sound sociology.
_Conjugal Love._--Also a late growth is the love of husband and wife, or conjugal love. This requires monogamy, and a certain strong self-control. It is, as has been indicated, often at war with romantic love. In certain lands, as generally in France today, the two are separated, and wife and mistress are rarely united in the same person. Anglo-Saxon custom is the reverse of this, and there is a strong tendency here to unite the love for a lover with the love for a wedded mate. There is no doubt but that this is the higher, although the more difficult, solution of the conflict. More will be said on this subject later.
_Freud’s Analysis of Love Development._--Freud, who with his disciple Jung has delved deeply into the hidden origins of the love force, has divided the normal development of love in the human being into three stages:
1. Auto-eroticism, or self love.
2. Homosexuality, or love of the same sex.
3. Heterosexuality, or love of the opposite sex.
The infant at first secures its erotic pleasure through the practice of sucking to obtain its food. The instincts have not yet been separated; the same act that satisfies hunger also satisfies love and other primitive instincts. Soon the child begins to recognize the pleasure in suckling apart from obtaining food, and, even after he has had enough to eat, he will continue the motions of suckling, because of the satisfaction that this gives to the erotic instinct. Then the child discovers his own body, and passes into the stage of auto-eroticism, narcissism, or self-love. He obtains a pleasure from handling his genitals and other parts of his body--a pleasure for which he is soon punished, by his elders, as something naughty. Normally he will grow out of this stage into the next; but he may become fixed erotically at this stage, and continue for life an auto-erotic. Such rare cases find their sole sexual pleasure in onanism; and some vestiges of the stage persist throughout life.
The second stage is when the child realizes that there are other people in the world, children especially, and that he can obtain erotic pleasure from contact with genitals similar to his own. Of course, he does not yet know that the opposite sex has differing organs; and he attributes to every child organs the same as his own. This gives rise to the period of homosexuality. In its lowest manifestation, this is put into physical practice. It should normally be sublimated; that is, the child should develop as an emotional substitute a strong affection for members of his own sex. Strong friendships between boys and boys, boys and men, and men and men, as well as between females of various ages, are the ways in which this force is drained off constructively. For, despite the opinion of Edward Carpenter and others among moderns, and Sappho, Socrates and others among ancients, that this is a high form of love, whose disciples are called Urnings or heaven-creatures, it is clear that those who never pass beyond homosexuality are instances of development arrested at the second stage. In the normal development of the child today, this is entirely sublimated into friendships.