It is becoming evident to all students of the sex-problem that the remedy for many of the difficulties arising therefrom is a wholesome and efficient sex-education.

In many cases the parents are not the persons most fitted to give this education. They may not possess the art of imparting knowledge, and often there is a certain reticence between parent and child, which when present creates a bar to the proper handling of this question. The child goes to school to learn, and the school must take its share of this responsibility. Where this is not done the effect is deplorable. In the preparatory school sex has hardly appeared. But in any school where there are older boys or girls, and where sex-education is not given, knowledge is rapidly obtained. Officially sex is ignored until, on rare occasions, it is detected. Severe punishment is then meted out, and perhaps the offender is even expelled, although the school is really penalizing the results of its own system.

It is unnecessary to labour the apology that the absence of sex-education ensures innocence. In no school is this the case. If it were, with growing boys and girls, it would be unnatural. Sex-instinct is bound to grow as the physical body grows, and to ignore this fact is to create the conception that sex-instinct is immoral. We then obtain the usual attitude adopted in public schools—that sex is to be indulged behind closed doors and sex literature sniggered at in dark corners. The boy grows up with a totally unclean view of sex. He becomes either an intolerable prude, or else he approaches sex-experience with an entirely twisted conception of sex-morality. One is continually meeting instances of this perverted imagination. Not only boys, but men, will regard an outspoken book on sex, perhaps written with the purest of motives, as “hot stuff,” something to be greedily devoured when the eye of respectable authority is conveniently removed. Recently, a man was told that a certain clergyman was a member of a group of students studying sex-psychology. He expressed the opinion, with a knowing leer, that “some parsons are not such fools after all.”

These crude examples of the result of driving sex into a dark corner exactly represent what one is up against in school, and in the world, when one begins to deal with sex openly and cleanly as a natural and non-repressible instinct. Really these people are a type of prude, much as they would resent this classification, for they persist in regarding sex as something which is rather naughty. They even imagine that to take away from it the cloak of unnaturalness with which they have surrounded it is to rob it of all its attraction. This is ridiculously untrue. Sex is attractive because it is romantic, and, so long as one does not go to the opposite extreme of regarding it merely through the musty glasses of scientific classification, it becomes no less attractive when it is open and natural, and ceases to be the cause of giggling asides.

Before any moral sense in the sex-problem can be established there must be a fundamental cleaning of this cess-pool, this strange medley of official silence, unnatural repression, and unclean secretiveness. The main road to a moral sense is sex-education. And it is necessary, therefore, to conclude this outline of principles by suggesting some conditions which should govern such instruction.

It is obvious that sex-education must be advanced on the process of a sliding scale. Before puberty sex should not appear on the horizon of the child’s consciousness. The precocious child must of course be specially dealt with, but usually the first lessons in sex should commence with the period of mental puberty. Before that time the small child jokes only about the normal excretory functions, and this can be adjusted by emphasizing the unmanly and unnecessary character of such forms of humour. A child has usually an exaggerated impression of the value of the adult standard, an impression which it must be confessed is too often subject to subsequent disillusionment. While it remains, however, it can be used, and it can be pointed out that “grown-ups” do not consider the excretory system has any more claim to ridicule than the process of digestion or sleep. Vulgarity and coarseness are not symptoms even of immoral sexuality.

The problem commences, then, with puberty. And here a warning should be uttered against that school of reformers which tends to the view that sex can be regarded as naturally and as publicly as natural history or chemistry. This attitude ignores the fact that there is such a quality as sexual appetite. And consequently, sex education should be rather a matter for individuals than for public instruction. We have remarked that the parent may not infrequently be an unfortunate educator. But where these objections do not arise, the home is an admirable atmosphere for sensible teaching. The Catholic Church possesses the invaluable medium of the Confessional, and where the Confessor can give sound sex instruction no better opportunity can be imagined. There remains the school, but even here better work will be done in the study than the classroom.

The immediate problem in the early post-puberty age is the tendency towards solitary practices. It must be recognized that this is usual with all children, and that there is no evidence to show that, save in extreme exceptions, physical harm results. All attempt at alarmist prudism must be abandoned. Sane instruction will tend rather to emphasize that sex abuse is due to a weakness of will-power, and that man is most manly, i.e. most removed from the animal, in the exercise of will-power. All education should contain that subject which is at present consistently ignored, namely, the art of thought-control. The child will be interested to follow certain simple rules of mental exercise, and where this is followed the liability to indulge in sex-acts diminishes. It is this element which must be emphasized, the fact, that is, that solitary practices are usually the result of an inability to exercise the will and control the mind.

At a slightly later period, the public-school age, there emerges the tendency, in addition to onanism, for promiscuous practices, usually of a homogenic nature. A further stage of sex-education must now be opened out, namely the principle that physical sex expression must be the expression only of love. The problem now becomes necessarily more acute, but there is this element which tends to lessen the difficulties of the instructor’s task. The individual is always interested about himself; he is naturally egotistical. The youth will gladly listen to what can be told him of his own nature. He must be shown the immense superiority of mind both over the emotional and physical natures. This may involve a slight dethronement of the public school appreciation of sport. So long as it is slight such a dethronement will be a reform in itself. The boy in his middle teens must be taught that man is greater in his mental than in his physical activity; he must be reminded that he is inferior to many animals on the physical level. The application of this doctrine to sex is that sex-expression for the purpose of physical curiosity or excitement is a denial of the monopoly of love, which belongs to the emotional and mental capacities.

The young man and the girl, who has left school, will be ready to receive the whole standard of sex-morality as has been outlined in this manual. The chief trouble now becomes over-sentimentality, the tendency to develop emotionally at the expense of the mind. And it becomes, therefore, essential to remind the pupil that where there are continual passing and promiscuous sexual or love affairs, the mind is being shut out from its natural functions. To be attracted sexually towards any pretty girl, to develop sexual relations with different women from week to week, is simply a form of mental unbalance. The emotions are in the saddle. For directly the mind begins to operate there is introduced the element of permanency and constancy. The deepest and most real pleasures only begin in the realm of mentality. The man who hears music only to beat time or remember a catchy tune is shut out of the immense joy of the intellectual love of music. So the young man who lives in a fever of hot-house sexuality, of absorbing intrigues in the dance-room, or the morbid atmosphere of the street corner, is shut out of all the exquisite joys of love. He does not know this, any more than the irreligious man knows what he loses through an absence of the spiritual sense. But he must be told.

The basic principle of sex values is that sex is immoral so far as the physical side outweighs in proportion the emotional and mental—so far indeed, as the act becomes the motive and not the incident. Sex may be dedicated only to love; divorced from love, it is an abuse. There can be no exceptions to this rule, and we can only clarify our ideas as to what is and what is not love. Perhaps this maxim, which we learn by gradual experience, will help us. Sex passion quickly burns itself out. The pleasures derived from passion will be of a purely temporary nature, without the satisfaction which alone comes from permanence. All physical things are less permanent than the mental. There is no joy, no divine nature in sex, save where from the ashes of passion rises the phoenix of the “sexual” but the super-passionate attachment. And this permanent possession can only come, whether in marriage or outside, where the mind, healthily developed and exercised, is taking its true place in the expression of pure love.

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Footnotes:

[1] The Origin of Sexual Modesty, by Edward Westermarck.

[2] Vide R. V. Jellyman (1838) 8 C and P, 604.

[3] Until recently incest was not a civil offence.

[4] The second object of marriage is declared to be “a remedy against sin...; that such persons as have not the gift of continency marry and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.”

[5] 1 Cor. vii. 8, 9. “Burn” means sex-obsession as mentioned on page 38.

[6] “Where the decree Tametsi of the Council of Trent has not been proclaimed, marriage is constituted by mere consent freely exchanged between persons who are by natural and canonical law competent and able to intermarry.”—Geary’s Marriage and Family Relations. (Now altered by Ne temere-decree, but the principle remains.)

[7] We have already commented on the strange inconsistency of regarding the sex-act as evil per se outside marriage, and as a virtue in marriage.

[8] I am using “celibacy” to imply complete physical chastity.

[9] With the curious inconsistency, already referred to, that in marriage non-celibacy is a virtue.

[10] Except by Act of Parliament.

[11] The Majority Report of the Divorce Commission is a good instance of the unnecessary hardship which results from half-hearted proposals of this kind. Divorce is to be allowed, for example, after desertion for three years; why not for two? Or again, the wife of an incurable drunkard is to be free to obtain divorce, while the unhappy wife of a man who suffers from violent fits of intermittent drunkenness is to be denied this relief.

[12] I refrain from adding “economic” reasons, for I believe that the State should remove, as far as possible, all such obstacles against healthy parents begetting children.

[13] Procuration for the purpose of prostitution is of course an entirely different matter.

[14] No actual physical harm need result from an incestuous union. The only effect which seems to be caused is that the characteristics to be hereditarily transmitted are doubled. Thus with only a small grain of insanity in a family the chances of aggravated insanity appearing in the offspring of a brother and sister would be considerable.

[15] Spiritual affinity was a bar, so that not only could not godparents marry each other, but there could be no valid unions between a godparent and the child’s father or mother. (Geary’s Marriage and Family Relations.)

[16] Some apology must be made for the use of this hybrid term. The unwarrantable confusion of Greek and Latin terminology must, however, be laid at the door of popular use.

[17] Psychology of Sex; Vol. Sexual Inversion. Dr. Hirschfeld in his Statistischen Vatersuchunge Über den Prozentensetz der Homosexuellen, considers that out of 100,000 inhabitants, 94,600 on the average are sexually normal, 1,500 exclusively homosexual, and 3,900 bisexual.

[18] The existence of this danger was admitted in a debate in the House of Lords on August 15, 1921, on The Criminal Law Amendment Bill. The Earl of Malmesbury, speaking on a proposal to apply criminal prosecution to homosexual offences among women, declared that “the opportunity for blackmail will be vastly and enormously increased.” Other speakers concurred in this view, and it was partly on this ground that the proposal was thrown out.

It is hardly necessary to point out that if blackmail would be encouraged by such legislation, it must equally be encouraged by the present law regarding similar offences between males.

[19] The Intermediate Sex.

[20] I cannot enter here into that further theory which may be described as “expression through a phantasy.”