The whole new wisdom proceeds according to the simple principle which has proved its value in the field of popular hygiene. The health of the nation has indeed been greatly improved since the alarming ignorance in the matters of prophylaxis in disease has been systematically fought by popular information. If the mosquito or the hookworm or the fly is responsible for diseases from which hundreds of thousands have to suffer, there can be no wiser and straighter policy than to spread this knowledge to every corner of the country. The teachers in the schoolroom and the writers in the popular magazines cannot do better than to repeat the message, until every adult and every child knows where the enemy may be found and helps to destroy the insects and to avoid the dangers of contact. This is the formula after which those reformers want to work who hold the old-fashioned policy of silence in sexual matters to be obsolete. Of course they aim toward a mild beginning. It may start with beautiful descriptions of blossoms and of fruits, of eggs and of hens, before it comes to the account of sexual intercourse and human embryos, but if the talking is to have any effect superior to not talking, the concrete sexual relations must be impressed upon the imagination of the girl before she becomes sixteen years of age.
Here is the real place for the psychological objection. It is not true that you can bring such sexual knowledge into the mind of a girl in the period of her development with the same detachment with which you can deposit in her mind the knowledge about mosquitoes and houseflies. That prophylactic information concerning the influence of the insects on diseases remains an isolated group of ideas, which has no other influence on the mind than the intended one, the influence of guiding the actions in a reasonable direction. The information about her sexual organs and the effects on the sexual organism of men may also have as one of its results a certain theoretical willingness to avoid social dangers. But the far stronger immediate effect is the psychophysiological reverberation in the whole youthful organism with strong reactions on its blood vessels and on its nerves. The individual differences are extremely great here. On every social level we find cool natures whose frigidity would inhibit strong influences in these organic directions. But they are the girls who have least to fear anyhow. With a much larger number the information, however slowly and tactfully imparted, must mean a breaking down of inhibitions which held sexual feelings and sexual curiosity in check.
The new ideas become the centre of attention, the whole world begins to appear in a new light, everything which was harmless becomes full of meaning and suggestion, new problems awake, and the new ideas irradiate over the whole mental mechanism. The new problems again demand their answers. Just the type of girl to whom the lure might become dangerous will be pushed to ever new inquiries, and if the policy of information is accepted in principle, it would be only wise to furnish her with all the supplementary knowledge which covers the multitude of sexual perversions and social malpractices of which to-day many a clean married woman has not the faintest idea. But to such a girl who knows all, the surroundings appear in the new glamour. She understands now how her body is the object of desire, she learns to feel her power, and all this works backward on her sexual irritation, which soon overaccentuates everything which stands in relation to sex. Soon she lives in an atmosphere of high sexual tension in which the sound and healthy interests of a young life have to suffer by the hysterical emphasis on sexuality. The Freudian psychoanalysis, which threatens to become the fad of the American neurologists, probably goes too far when it seeks the cause for all neurasthenic and hysteric disturbances in repressed sexual ideas of youth. But no psychotherapist can doubt that the havoc which secret sexual thoughts may bring to the neural life, especially of the unbalanced, is tremendous. Broken health and a distorted view of the social world with an unsound, unclean, and ultimately immoral emphasis on the sexual relations may thus be the sad result for millions of girls, whose girlhood under the policy of the past would have remained untainted by the sordid ideas of man as an animal.
Yet the calamity would not be so threatening if the effect of sexual instruction were really confined to the putrid influence on the young imagination. The real outcome is not only such a revolution in the thoughts, but the power which it gains over action. We have only to consider the mechanism which nature has provided. The sexual desire belongs to the same group of human instincts as the desire for food or the desire for sleep, all of which aim toward a certain biological end, which must be fulfilled in order to secure life. The desire for food and sleep serves the individual himself, the desire for the sexual act serves the race. In every one of these cases nature has furnished the body with a wonderful psychophysical mechanism which enforces the outcome automatically. In every case we have a kind of circulatory process into which mental excitements and physiological changes enter, and these are so subtly related to each other that one always increases the other, until the maximum desire is reached, to which the will must surrender. Nature needs this automatic function; otherwise the vital needs of individual and race might be suppressed by other interests, and neglected. In the case of the sexual instinct, the mutual relations between the various parts of this circulatory process are especially complicated. Here it must be sufficient to say that the idea of sexual processes produces dilation of blood vessels in the sexual sphere, and that this physiological change itself becomes the source and stimulus for more vivid sexual feelings, which associate themselves with more complex sexual thoughts. These in their turn reinforce again the physiological effect on the sexual organ, and so the play goes on until the irritation of the whole sexual apparatus and the corresponding sexual mental emotions reach a height at which the desire for satisfaction becomes stronger than any ordinary motives of sober reason.
This is the great trick of nature in its incessant service to the conservation of the animal race. Monogamic civilization strives to regulate and organize these race instincts and to raise culture above the mere lure of nature. But that surely cannot be done by merely ignoring that automatic mechanism of nature. On the contrary, the first demand of civilization must be to make use of this inborn psychophysical apparatus for its own ideal human purposes, and to adjust the social behaviour most delicately to the unchangeable mechanism. The first demand, accordingly, ought to be that we excite no one of these mutually reinforcing parts of the system, neither the organs nor the thoughts nor the feelings, as each one would heighten the activities of the others, and would thus become the starting point of an irrepressible demand for sexual satisfaction. The average boy or girl cannot give theoretical attention to the thoughts concerning sexuality without the whole mechanism for reinforcement automatically entering into action. We may instruct with the best intention to suppress, and yet our instruction itself must become a source of stimulation, which necessarily creates the desire for improper conduct. The policy of silence showed an instinctive understanding of this fundamental situation. Even if that traditional policy had had no positive purpose, its negative function, its leaving at rest the explosive sexual system of the youth, must be acknowledged as one of those wonderful instinctive procedures by which society protects itself.
The reformer might object that he gives not only information, but depicts the dangers and warns against the ruinous effects. He evidently fancies that such a black frame around the luring picture will be a strong enough countermotive to suppress the sensual desire. But while the faint normal longing can well be balanced by the trained respect for the mysterious unknown, the strongly accentuated craving of the girl who knows may ill be balanced by any thought of possible disagreeable consequences. Still more important, however, is a second aspect. The girl to whom the world sex is the great taboo is really held back from lascivious life by an instinctive respect and anxiety. As soon as girl and boy are knowers, all becomes a matter of naked calculation. What they have learned from their instruction in home and school and literature and drama is that the unmarried woman must avoid becoming a mother. Far from enforcing a less sensuous life, this only teaches them to avoid the social opprobrium by going skilfully to work. The old-fashioned morality sermon kept the youth on the paths of clean life; the new-fashioned sexual instruction stimulates not only their sensual longings, but also makes it entirely clear to the young that they have nothing whatever to fear if they yield to their voluptuousness