Sex hygiene

“ As to the relation between sex-hygiene and sex-ethics as phases of the larger sex-education, there has been much discussion. Several writers have contended that there is some conflict between sanitary and moral ends, but have failed to convince most readers that hygiene and ethics should not be associated in teaching. In fact, the most impressive sex-hygiene is that relating to social disease, and its value is chiefly in the ethical appeal for protection of innocent wives and children. ”

“ Abnormal conditions of mind and body in regard to sex can almost always be traced to general physical ill health or to an unhealthy moral environment. Cure and prevention require two kinds of treatment within reach of parents and teachers: (1) build up the child's physical condition; and (2) give him other interests. Proper physical care, and work adjusted to body and mind, may be relied upon to do infinitely more to promote sex hygiene than instruction, either at home or at school, in immoral sex diseases. That sex morality is weak and untrustworthy which is based upon fear of sex diseases. ”

“ Such limited personal instruction might suffice if sex-education were limited to sex-hygiene. A few hygienic commands in pre-adolescent years and one impressive talk in early puberty might teach the boy or girl how not to interfere with health; but it is improbable that such brief instruction will make a permanent impression which will insure hygienic practice of the precepts laid down. If we hold that sex-hygiene is important, then it must be drilled into the learner from several points of view. ”

“ It is convenient to group under personal sex-hygiene all hygienic knowledge concerning sexual processes in their personal as distinguished from their social aspects. The distinction between these two aspects of sex-hygiene is essentially on the same basis as that between personal and public hygiene. For example, indigestion and overwork are matters of personal hygiene, while tuberculosis and typhoid are problems of public hygiene because the individual case leads through infection to disease of others. ”

“ The second kind of people who should not teach sex-hygiene are the men and women who are the unfortunate victims of sexual abnormality, either physical or psychical, that more or less influences their outlook on life. Certain neurotic and hysterical men or women who lack thorough physiological training and whose own sexual disturbances have led them to devour omnivorously and unscientifically the psychopathological literature of sex by such authors as Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and Freud, are probably unsafe teachers of sex-hygiene. ”

“ Many men and women suffer from injured, if not ruined, health because they did not know, especially between ten and fourteen years, the laws of personal sex-hygiene, which concern health in ways not involving sexual relationship. ”

“ Certainly, the exploitation of woman’s work against the social evil by moving-picture show concerns will not deter their efforts for an instant.
Teaching of Sex Hygiene It is perhaps in the proper teaching of sex hygiene in the schools, to working men and women, to college and other groups of young men and women, and to foreigners, that women expect to accomplish most for the elevation of moral standards and for the elimination of venereal diseases.
In Minnesota the single standard of morals has been widely supported by the club women and sex hygiene has been urged for the schools. ”

“ This last twenty-five years is the first time in the history of the world that any definite effort has been made to teach sex hygiene; and if each one of us will do our duty as we see it—and we must see it clearly now—and pass on our convictions (because no one has a right to receive anything for themselves or their particular group, and hold it, but each person has a tremendous responsibility to pass on to others their influence, their knowledge) , we shall awaken a world-wide conscience regarding this thing. ”

“ Sometime in the adolescent period all young people should learn the essential facts regarding the two social diseases and their relation to immoral living. There is the widespread impression that those advocating sex-education believe in giving great prominence to the social diseases; but in opposition to this I cite the report of a committee of the American Federation for Sex Hygiene, published in the Journal of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, January, 1913, and later reprinted as a pamphlet by the American Social Hygiene Association. ”

“ Now, sex-education as thus defined is more extensive than sex-hygiene, which term was originally applied to instruction concerning sex. Sex-hygiene obviously refers to health as influenced by sexual processes, and as such it is a convenient subdivision of the science of health. ”

“ The culminating stages of any complete scheme for formal sex-education of young people will be sex-hygiene considered in its strict sense as that special phase of sex-education which deals with problems of health, and sex-ethics which determines the responsibility of individuals for control of sexual instincts. ”

“ Sex enlightenment runs rampant at present. It haunts the stage, lurks in innumerable societies and crops out in newspapers and magazines.
But, although the world is full of sex discussion, the emphasis is generally laid upon sex-hygiene and upon the knowledge of the relations of the sex function to mental and physical development. Sex-hygiene is nowadays held to be a proper subject of pedagogy and is taught in many schools and colleges. But the emotion of Love is still very little studied, and it is still wrapped in complete darkness. ”

“ However, the fact that sex-education, under the name of "sex-hygiene," was at first a sanitary propagandism need not interfere with the larger development of sex-education. It now seems probable that before many years pass we shall learn how to make a satisfactory combination of both the sanitary and moral sides of sex-education, and so it is best that the educational movement started on the foundation of the undisputed facts of sanitary science which have made a powerful impression on the people who do and who do not recognize a code of sexual morals. ”

“ This applies especially to young people who are not in schools. While I have stressed biological nature-study as offering the ideal basis for the broadest kind of sex-education, I realize that there are cases where such study cannot be held prerequisite to some aspects of sex-hygiene that young people should know. However, we should aim to make such cases the exceptions and not the rule. Some good may be accomplished by teaching certain facts of sex-hygiene frankly and directly to those who have absolutely no knowledge of nature-study and biology ”

“ Considering, as we have done, the sex problems in their many aspects, we are forced to the conclusion that sex-education will prove adequate only when it combines instruction from the several points of view. It must be much more than the sex-hygiene with which the sex-instruction movement started. We need sexual knowledge that will conserve health, that will develop social and ethical and eugenic responsibility for sexual actions, that will lead to increased happiness as well as to improved health, and that will give a nobler and purer view of life's possibilities. ”

“ Parents may be incited to do their duty in placing sex information before their children whenever conditions demand such knowledge. And principals and teachers, particularly principals, whenever they have the acuteness to detect the tendency to wrong-doing, will no longer hesitate to utter the word of warning in season. As for the extravagant claims made for the teaching of sex-hygiene, I have too much faith in the good sense of the American people to believe that it will ever be generally and regularly taught in American schools. ”

“ Sex-hygiene as a natural part of a series of lessons in general hygiene is most satisfactory when preceded by biological nature-study or high-school biology in which life-histories of organisms have been studied for the sake of attitude. At present we lack satisfactory textbooks for this kind of correlation. There is a strong reaction against independent courses of hygiene in high schools, and the next plan is becoming more common. ”

“ Such a woman is a very dangerous teacher of sex-hygiene for adolescent girls; and a positive menace to older unmarried women who, if free from absorbing work, may spend their leisure in becoming more or less restless under the unsocial, if not unphysiologic, conditions of unwelcome celibacy. ”

“ John S. Fulton, Director General of the XV International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, criticized severely the extremely radical statistics that were presented on charts at the sex-hygiene exhibit of the Congress, and were later published in Wilson's "Education of the Young in Sex-hygiene."
[2] There is danger in quoting to young men the estimates as to prevalence of social diseases and, therefore, of promiscuity. Fear of consequences will not control one who is led to believe that he is doing what most men do. ”

“ What has been said in general about practical observance of the laws of sex hygiene in the preceding chapter for boys, applies to girls as well. If anything the sex precautions taken in infancy should be even more closely followed, as girls are by nature less robust than boys. If children could be raised in entire accordance with natural laws, the sexual instinct of girls as well as boys would probably remain dormant during the period stretching from infancy to puberty. ”

“ These sexual problems toward whose solution special instruction of young people may help are stated here in the order in which they have attracted attention as reasons for sex-education. Thus, for instance, personal sex-hygiene was the chief reason recognized twenty years ago; social diseases began to attract public attention ten years ago; commercial prostitution has been especially prominent in the discussions of the past five years; and only recently has there been emphasis on sex-education with reference to eugenics. ”

“ The standard toward which we are working in sex education involves the dissemination throughout the school curriculum of such information as we now give in a single talk. In addition to such nature-study work and simple biology and physiology and hygiene as should be included in the lower grades, there should be instruction in biology and in personal hygiene required for all upper-grammar and all high-school students, as soon as well qualified teachers are available. In personal hygiene a proper amount of sex hygiene should be incorporated ”

“ Rarely do they feel adequate to meet them. Yet they desire that their girls, and the boys too, should be guarded from the dangers that threaten them.
Years ago we invited the school teachers of the neighborhood to a conference on sex problems and offered them speakers and literature. The public has since then become aroused on the subject of sex hygiene, and possibly, in some instances, the pendulum has swung too far; but we are convinced that this obligation to the young cannot be ignored without assuming grave risks. ”

“ Teaching these truths in the public schools.—The violation of the laws of sex is the chief cause of physical, mental and moral degeneracy. The degenerate classes are increasing at an appalling rate. Correct sex-instruction in childhood is the most important and effective step in the solution of this problem. There is a growing conviction among the students of sociology that sex-hygiene should be taught in the public schools. There are some teachers in all departments of school work, who, in morals at least, are not fitted for this delicate work. ”

“ After meeting hundreds of women and girls in heart to heart talks, I came to the sincere conviction that lectures on sex hygiene which do not give a thorough understanding of conception in its definite bearings on practical life and also of its possibilities of prevention--that such lectures miss their main aim in bringing help to distressed humanity.... ”

“ Our brief survey of the hygienic problems caused by sexual promiscuity and its characteristic diseases is sufficient to indicate one great problem for sex-education. Such social-hygiene problems have been most responsible for the recent and rapid rise of the movement for sex-education, and they must be recognized in any adequate scheme for instruction of young people. ”

“ But in efforts to teach chastity, sex itself must not be made to appear an evil thing. This is a grave mistake and all too common since the rise of the sex-hygiene movement. Undoubtedly a considerable amount of the celibacy in sensitive women may be traced to ill-balanced mothers and teachers who, in word and attitude, build up an impression that sex is indecent and bestial, and engender in general a damaging suspicion of men. ”

“ I am especially anxious to avoid the narrow viewpoint of numerous writers on sex-hygiene who seem to overlook the fact that sexual functioning is only a prominent incident in the cycle of sexual influences in the lives of most people. Human life, and especially marriage, should no longer be regarded from the mere biological point of view as for the sole purpose of reproductive activity. ”

“ School can teach nature’s sex laws.—It is, however, a very serious problem, how to give the needed instruction in sex hygiene in all the schools, public, private, and endowed. No one is competent to-day to lay down a fixed and final program. ”