Sexual indulgence

“ The delicate brain, which is being molded, with the other organs of the body, receives its cast largely from those mental and nervous sensations and actions of the mother which are the most intense. One of the most certain effects of sexual indulgence at this time is to develop abnormally the sexual instinct in the child. Here is the key to the origin of much of the sexual precocity and depravity which curse humanity. Sensuality is born in the souls of a large share of the rising generation. What wonder that prostitution flourishes in spite of Christianity and civil law? ”

“ Excessive sexual indulgence is infinitely more harmful than too little. A body, misused by excess, will go to pieces, even without venereal diseases. Impotence, barrenness, spinal affections, insanity, at least [Pg 165] intellectual weakness, and many other diseases, are the usual consequences. Temperance is as necessary in sexual intercourse as in eating and drinking, and all other human wants. ”

“ Even supposing that a certain recklessness of sexual indulgence would be done away with under better circumstances which afforded access to other means of pleasure than the purely physical, this over-indulgence leads quite as often to sterility and disease as to excess of offspring. ”

“ The nervousness and mental development of our people, preclude anything but moderation in sexual indulgence; and whenever fast living, brain-working, nervous people indulge to satiety in sexual pleasure, they are in danger of grave consequences, such as our ancestors never knew of, as the results of excessive sexual indulgence. ”

“ The purpose of the proscription by theological morality of illegitimate intercourse and of masturbation is to effect the prevention of all varieties of sexual indulgence except under the form of marriage, and, if possible, under the form of marriage blessed by the Church. ”

“ They have their sex impulses, and will follow them, and the only question is, shall they follow them wisely or unwisely? The religious people decide that sexual indulgence is wrong, and they impose a penalty—and what is that penalty? A poor, unwanted little waif of a soul, which never sinned, and had nothing to do with the matter, is brought into a hostile world, to suffer neglect, and perhaps starvation—in order to punish parents who did not happen to be sufficiently strong willed to practice continence in marriage! ”

“ Nor are many persons sufficiently aware of the ruinous extent to which the amative propensity is indulged by married persons. The matrimonial ceremony does, indeed, sanctify the act of sexual intercourse, but it can by no means atone for nor obviate the consequences of its abuse. Excessive indulgence in the married relation is, perhaps, as much owing to the force of habit, as to the force of the sexual appetite. ”

“ No wife should indulge her husband when he is under the influence of alcoholic stimulants, for idiocy and other serious maladies are liable to be visited upon the offspring.
7. RESTRAINT DURING PREGNANCY.—There is no question but what moderate indulgence during the first few months of pregnancy does not result in serious harm; but people who excessively satisfy their ill-governed passions are liable to pay a serious penalty.
8. MISCARRIAGE.—If a woman is liable to abortion or miscarriage, absolute abstinence is the only remedy. No sexual indulgence during pregnancy can be safely tolerated. ”

“ In by-gone times, and among heathen, as at present in a remote valley of our own great land, so jealous of the honor of its people, and so lenient towards their crimes, women have been openly held as concubines, to possess an abundance of whom were as worthy as to number [Pg 92] one’s children. What variance in this from the secret amours and liaisons of our own time, so easy to indulge in, so difficult to detect, in consequence of the almost universal knowledge of the means of preventing or escaping the natural consequences of illicit sexual indulgence? ”

“ According, however, to the dominant artificial conditions, man assumes it as his right to give free rein to his sexual desires and 169to gratify them without regard to consequences, whereas woman, narrowly confined within the boundaries imposed by law and convention, cannot so readily yield to her inclination in the direction of physical love, and must forcibly control that inclination. Moreover, a powerful check on the free indulgence of the sexual impulse is imposed on woman by the consequences of such indulgence, consequences which exist for woman only. ”

“ In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural’, so ‘healthy’, and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. ”

“ Among the married it means legal prostitution, leads to marital excess, poor health of parents, loss of vitality, puny, scrawny, short-lived children and to “race suicide.”
Should coition take place during pregnancy?—Among the lower animals sexual indulgence never occurs during pregnancy. We are told that the savage races observe this law. Doctors differ on this subject. All agree that it should seldom occur. There is a growing conviction among some of the most eminent physicians that man should observe the law that nature demands of the lower animals and that savage man respects. ”

“ The evils of abstinence among men are certainly in this country more serious than those of indulgence, while the evils resulting from a total absence of experience in sexual matters among young men are perhaps the worst of all. ”

“ Prostitution is a sin wholly of their own making. All the misery, all the lust, as well as all the blighting consequences, are chargeable wholly to the uncontrolled sexual passion of the male. To reform sinful women, reform the men. ”

“ Every physician can furnish numerous case histories to substantiate the statement that continual sexual abstinence is prejudicial to the health and happiness of the man and woman, and is the causation of hundreds of semiderelicts and psychoneurotics. Furthermore, the rising tide of insanity in this country would be stemmed were religion and sex permanently divorced. ”

“ The man who, for some reason or another, cannot obtain normal coitus should content himself with nocturnal emissions, and the woman with voluptuous dreams, and should both abstain from active and voluntary excitations. For my part, I consider prostitution, or "love" which is bought, as a variety of compensatory masturbation, and not as normal copulation. Coitus with a prostitute, generally infected with venereal disease, who receives new clients continually, has as little affinity with love as with the normal object of the sexual appetite—reproduction ”

“ When so strict is the law of Brahmacharya, what shall we say of those guilty of the unpardonable sin of illegitimate sexual enjoyment? The evil that arises from adultery and prostitution is a vital question of religion and morality and cannot be fully dealt with in a treatise on health. ”

“ The infliction upon women is the result of infidelity, or a sacrifice of chastity to loose gratification. As a preliminary, they retire to the bunda, or penitentiary, and are there secluded from all sexual intercourse. ”

“ The inability to regulate satisfactorily the number of offspring is also a potent factor. This, coupled with the superstition against copulation during pregnancy and lactation, drives married men out of the home to seek sexual gratification. ”

“ In the first direction, when a human wants, by remaining chaste, to devote all his efforts to serving God, then any sexual intercourse will be considered the sin of sexual lust, even aimed at the birth and upbringing children, the most pure and faithful marriage will be an innate sin for a person who has chosen the way of chastity. ”

“ Let it be remembered that sexual desire is not in itself dishonorable or sinful, any more than hunger, thirst, or any other lawful and natural desire is. It is the gratification by unlawful means of this appetite which renders it so corrupting and iniquitous. ”

“ For a person who has chosen the way of serving God by means of procreation, an inborn sin will be considered any sexual intercourse without the aim of procreating, as is happens in cases of prostitution, random affairs, and with the marriages of convenience, of profit, of amatory exploits. ”

“ Naturally, where illegitimate intercourse is forbidden, those who do indulge are far more careful, and especially in guarding against venereal infection, lest the illness should betray them to others. A communication made to me very recently suggests the need for great caution in our judgment in these matters. A foreign university professor gives his students very fine lectures on the sexual life, laying great stress on the beauty and importance of sexual abstinence. ”

“ It is well known that terror or pain in either sex will temporarily destroy all physical pleasure. In married life, injury from childbirth, or brutal or awkward conjugal approaches, may cause unavoidable shrinking from sexual congress, often wrongly attributed to absence of sexual passion. ”

“ Now, we learn from experience, that when a perversion is traced back to its origination in a chastisement endured during childhood, this chastisement was as a rule the customary whipping of the buttocks. Far less frequently, and indeed hardly over, are we told that any other form of punishment has initiated a sexual perversion. ”

“ Comparative Malice of the Sins of Consummated Lust.— (a) In the abuse of an act, the worst evil is the disregard of what nature itself determines as the fundamentals upon which all else depends, just as in speculative matters the worst error is that which goes astray about first principles. Now, the prime dictates of nature as to sexual intercourse are that it serve the race and the family. Hence, the sin of unnatural lust (which injures the race by defeating its propagation) and the sin of incest (which injures the family by offending piety) are the worst of carnal vices. ”

“ And, in order to combat the habit of sin, a person should start with not increasing in himself that sin of sexual lust in which he is now. If the person is chaste, let him not violate his chastity; if he is married, let he remains faithful to his spouse; if he has intercourse with many, let he continues to live that way but not to invent unnatural sexual practices. Let he do not change his condition and do not increase his sin of sexual lust. If only people did that, their sufferings would end. ”

“ The second is the fact that motherhood calls for tremendous psychological and sometimes physical sacrifices; it means that a woman has to reverse the natural law of self-preservation and put her children’s welfare ahead of her own. 105 This is deeply frightening to some women and, unless they are properly educated, can cause them to fear their feminine sexual impulses to the point where they are unable to enjoy love-making.
The third reason is that women have, in effect, two organs of gratification, the clitoris and the vagina. ”

“ The crime of rape presumes a temporary, powerful excitation of sexual desire, induced by excess in alcohol, or by some other condition. It is highly improbable that a man morally intact would commit this most brutal crime. ”

“ The sin of sexual lust is different from all other sins: while the complete abstinence from other innate sins is impossible and only their reduction is attainable, the complete abstinence from sexual sin is doable. ”

“ Sacrilege, of course, aggravates every other kind of carnal sin, and thus there is sacrilegious sodomy, sacrilegious adultery, sacrilegious incest, etc.
2523. Fornication.—Fornication is the copulation of an unmarried man with an unmarried woman who is not a virgin.
(a) It is copulation, or sexual intercourse suited for generation of children. Thus, it differs from lewdness, which consists in unconsummated acts, and from sodomitic intercourse, which is consummated but unsuited for generation. Onanism is an aggravating circumstance of fornication, or rather a new sin of unnatural intercourse. ”

“ It is important to remark that the evil results of sexual abstinence in women, in the opinion of many of those who insist upon their importance, are by no means merely due to unsatisfied sexual desire. ”

“ And, knowing that sexual lust is an evil for me, I know, too, the temptation that used to lead me into it, and I can no longer yield to it. I know now that the chief cause of this temptation lies not in powerlessness of people to resist sexual lust but in the separation of men and women from those to whom they were once united. I know now that the forsaking of those to whom men and women have been once united is the ‘divorce’ that Christ forbids, for it brings depravity into the world. ”

“ There are married women, who feel and express disgust at sexual intercourse with their husbands, and who allow such acts to take place only as a sacrifice, believing themselves doing something sinful or wrong. ”

“ According to Ricardi, many frigid prostitutes practice with pleasure clitoris-masturbation, cunnilictio, and, especially, sapphism, preferring these perversions to the normal sexual act. Moreover, among prostitutes and female criminals there is no lack of lovers of martyrization, of flagellation, even to the drawing of blood, of tyrannical treatment, and of the initiation of children into the mysteries of sex. ”

“ Such competent studies as have been made do conclude that so complex and numerous are the causes of sexual vice that it is impossible to assert with any assurance that 'obscenity' represents a ponderable causal factor in sexually deviant behavior. ”

“ Parents would often refrain, on the plea that innocence must not be disturbed, from teaching their children anything about sex. So impure and evil a subject must not be referred to. Such unpleasant problems as venereal disease must be hidden out of sight, although prostitution and venereal disease continue to flourish. The Victorian, in fact, carried out the Puritan doctrine that all sex is evil, by outwardly pretending that, unless married, he possessed no sexual instinct. ”