Part 3
_Birth Control._--The question of birth control, disputed as it is, should be mentioned here. Knowledge of methods of artificial prevention of conception is now widely known among the rich, and largely among the well-to-do. It is in many localities a crime to furnish this information; even a doctor may not disseminate it. The poor, who need the information most, do not generally possess it; and at least one great religion teaches that it is immoral.
Any form of abortion, or killing the growing embryo still in the womb, has aspects resembling murder. Its morality is a matter for investigation. But the prevention of conception is on another footing entirely. Continued continence is impractical and contrary to the best interests of the individuals who compose the social group; contra-conceptual devices are harmless, and economically and physically necessary in many instances. The laws on the subject will be repealed by an enlightened community.
V.
EDUCATION FOR LIFE
_In Our Schools._--The conventional taboo upon all matters connected 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.