Chapter VI: The Price of Error

_Youthful Restraint._—While full sex-knowledge is advised at an early age, sexual practices are by no means so desirable. The adolescent girl should save her strength until she has acquired full bodily maturity. This is best, not only for herself, but for her children. The children of immature women are, in nine cases out of ten, weaklings. The girl is not bodily prepared for this great strain. She has not enough strength of body or mind to give to the proper development of the child she is carrying. Since the girl herself is not fully grown, since her mind is young and still largely unformed, and her body just stepping out of childhood and groping toward womanhood, how can she expect to give birth to a child fully equipped with all the potentialities of ripe maturity? The offspring of girls are necessarily more than immature, since, obviously, the child cannot possess more than its parents give it. Therefore, self-restraint, during the body-forming period of adolescence, is the only way of securing a rounded flowering into womanhood, and the surety of healthy children.

Sexual restraint during adult life is an entirely different matter. There is a certain misguided medical backing available to support the theory that men and women can abstain for life without damage to them. There are occasional high bloodless ascetics who can change the suppressed desire into a mysticism soothing to themselves and to others of the race. But for the average man and woman, a life of abstinence is a physiological crime. Such people are warped and twisted out of any chance of normal happiness. Such living runs diametrically opposite to the true physiological needs implanted in every human being. On a large scale, it is suicidal to the race; individually, it is destructive of a rounded normal development. The woman who remains denied for life acquires all the caricatured attributes of the “old maid.” She acquires a sour disposition, and is the bitterest gossip concerning even the normal sexual practices of other women. She is the waspish snappy school teacher to whom the guiding of the youthful mind is assigned, with ultimate harm to it. In both men and women, a life of abstinence is worse than a mistake: it is, in its truest sense, a perversion.

While abstinence for life is unnatural, there is still another reason, beyond the purely physical inadvisability, for abstinence during adolescence. This reason has to do with the mental side of love, as well as the physical. Young people, stepping into the dawn of love-life, are naturally prone to fasten their affections on the first person they see. Or, at least, to fall in love easily, and lightly. The normal girl yields to a series of tentative love illusions before she meets with a man who is fitted to become a husband for whom her love will be more or less permanent. The adolescent girl falls madly in love with a man because he is a “divine dancer,” because his hair curls in a provocative way, because of a thousand transient reasons, none of which is a good basis for future marital happiness. Even if the cause of her love is founded on a firmer reason, even if the young man she loves is in every way compatible to her eighteen-year-old psychology, it is unwise to marry so early. He may be everything desirable in the eyes of the young girl, they may like the same things, have the same tastes in literature, etc., but, still, waiting is wiser. For, the man who completely satisfies the eighteen-year-old girl may fall far below the standards of the same girl, when she views him from the pinnacle of twenty-five. The adolescent girl is unformed mentally as well as physically. Her standards are necessarily much lower than they will be five or more years later. She cannot be expected, nor is she able, to look ahead toward the time when her judgments will be matured, and to choose accordingly. We repeat that self-restraint is to be greatly desired during the adolescent years.

In general, no girl of today should marry before she is twenty-five. She can safely wait until she is thirty. By the time she is twenty-five, she has reached a maturity of judgment that will allow her to choose a permanent mate with whatever wisdom she can bring to bear upon the subject. By that time, she is able to find men several years older than herself more companionable, and this is as it should be. The young girl, while she may have occasional “crushes” on older men, seeks her friends and companions from among the boys who are of her own age. Her regard for older men is more hero-worship than real affection. This would lead her, if she chose a mate during these formative years, to pick one from among the boys of her own age. And this is wrong. Men age much less rapidly than women. Women are older by intuition and psychology than men. Theirs is the burden of the future of the race, which may account for their more adult attitude. So that, if a couple marry when they are nineteen or twenty, and are the same age, ten years later the woman will be much more mature in her outlook on life than the man of the same age. Here is where the first seeds of discord are sown. Whereas, if the girl waits until she is twenty-five, she has had time to realize this fact, and has already altered her ideas concerning men, and chooses for her friends men who are three, four, or even ten years older than herself. A girl of twenty-five marrying a man of thirty stands a much better chance of achieving permanent happiness than a girl of the same age marrying a man of equal years.

Self-control during adolescence can be acquired without any unpleasant effects, and without seeming a burden upon the young people. A whole-hearted indulgence in all types of athletic exercise 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 hand, the way to stimulate these undesirable emotions is attendance at suggestive shows, reading licentious books, and indulging in giggled conversations with other girls upon the subject of sex. The current tendency for young girls toward drinking is also bad, since it stimulates the erotic energy. The wise young girl will avoid all this, not prudishly, but calmly and intelligently, until she has stored her body with the wealth of physical strength and her mind with the wealth of counter-irritating knowledge. The average young girl does most of these things because she fears the ridicule of her companions if she refuses. Her answer can be simple. If she calmly points out that she knows all of the decent facts about sex, and therefore does not need the insinuated half-knowledge that pornographic plays and books give, she will gain the respect, not the mockery, of her friends.

_Over-Indulgence._—Over-indulgence, in anything, is the gravest and almost the only sin, from the standpoint of the individual. If the young girl eats too much of her favorite sweet, she is almost sure to pay for it by stomach ache, or indigestion. This stands equally true for all ages. We have mentioned onanism. To be sure, most adults deny this fact, and lyingly state that such was not the habit when they were young. How much better, then, to admit it as a part of all youthful experience, and combat it wisely and intelligently, and not to raise horrified hands, and make the young person feel that she has committed a heinous crime, the more dreadful because she is the first offender? The wisest and best course is to avoid onanism altogether. If that is not possible, at first, go in vigorously for physical and mental distractions, and rigorously control it, until such a time as you can entirely end it.

Over-indulgence in intercourse 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 mental or physical incapacity results. If it is merely a tendency, it should and must be controlled. Every man and every woman must determine for himself and herself the frequency of intercourse. Women, in general, are less harmed by excess than men are. But this does not mean that women cannot carry it to excess. There is less chance for her doing it, if she confines her life to one man than if she chooses many men. The general result of a woman’s over-indulgence is weakened nervous conditions, which may even terminate in a complete mental breakdown, or in insanity.

_Venereal Diseases._—The two chief venereal diseases are gonorrhea and syphilis. So far, we have voiced a loud outcry against popular lies concerning sex. Now we will consider another of these lies, as harmful as any of the previous ones: namely, that gonorrhea is “no worse than a cold.” This is commonly accepted among most men and many women, and many a good-hearted old family doctor will reassure the troubled young man or woman with the same poisonous mental soothing syrup. Gonorrhea, once contracted, is extremely difficult to eradicate. Many a man, acquiring it from a prostitute or promiscuous woman, has infected his innocent wife; many a man has infected an otherwise clean woman. Worse, many an innocent girl, thinking because her friend is a gentleman and nice in every way, has only to be repaid by this disease.

There is a greater penalty than this attached to the disease. The germs of the disease often attack the eyes of children of parents one or both of whom are afflicted with the disease. Twenty-five percent of all cases of blindness are attributed to gonorrhea. This blindness of children is one of the by-products of a disease casually dismissed 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. We will only point out 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 costly.

Fortunately, the governments of the world are now taking a hand in eradicating this worst of all diseases. In its first stages, a cure is comparatively sure; in the later stages, the case is often hopeless.