With regard to (2) hardly any one at this time of day would seriously
doubt the desirability of giving adequate teaching to boys and girls.
That is a point on which we have sufficiently touched, and which need
not be farther discussed here. But beyond this it is important, and
especially perhaps, as things stand now, for girls--that each youth or
girl should personally see enough of the other sex at an early period to
be able to form some kind of judgment of his or her relation to that
sex and to sex-matters generally. It is monstrous that the first case
of sex-glamor--the true nature of which would be exposed by a little
experience--should, perhaps for two people, decide the destinies of a
life-time. Yet the more the sexes are kept apart, the more overwhelming
does this glamor become, and the more ignorance is there, on either
side, as to its nature. No doubt it is one of the great advantages
of co-education of the sexes, that it tends to diminish these evils.
Co-education, games and sports to some extent in common, and the doing
away with the absurd superstition that because Corydon and Phyllis
happen to kiss each other sitting on a gate, therefore they must live
together all their lives, would soon mend matters considerably. Nor
would a reasonable familiarity between the sexes in youth--tempered, as
it would be, by previous education and by the subsidence of the
blind passion--necessarily mean an increase of casual or clandestine
sex-relations. But even if casualties of this kind did occur they
would not be the fatal and unpardonable sins that they now at least for
girls--are considered to be. Though the recognition of anything like
common pre-matrimonial sex-intercourse would probably be foreign to the
temper of a northern nation; yet it is open to question whether Society
here, in its mortal and fetichistic dread of the thing, has not, by
keeping the young of both sexes in ignorance and darkness and seclusion
from each other, created worse ills and suffering than it has prevented,
and whether it has not indeed intensified the particular evil that it
dreaded, rather than abated it.
In the next place (3) we come to the establishment in marriage itself of
a freer and broader and more healthy relationship than generally exists
at the present time. Attractive as the ideal of the exclusive attachment
is, it runs the fatal risk, as we have already pointed out, of lapsing
into a mere stagnant double selfishness. But, in this world, Love is fed
not by what it takes, but by what it gives; and the very excellent dual
love of man and wife must be fed also by the love they give to others.
If they cannot come out of their secluded haven to reach a hand to
others, or even to give some boon of affection to those who need it
more than themselves, or if they mistrust each other in doing so, then
assuredly they are not very well fitted to live together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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