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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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