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.