Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice To Maiden, Wife, And Mother, Love, Courtship, And MarriageJefferis, B. G. (Benjamin Grant)
Science
Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice To Maiden, Wife, And Mother, Love, Courtship, And Marriage
Jefferis, B. G. (Benjamin Grant)
Marriage; Medicine, Popular; Sexual ethics
4. COURTING WITHOUT INTENDING TO MARRY.--Nearly all this wide-spread crime
and suffering connected with public and private licentiousness and
prostitution, has its origin in these unmeaning courtships--this premature
love--this blighting of the affections, and every young man who courts
without intending to marry, is throwing himself or his sweetheart into
_this hell upon earth_. And most of the blame rests on young men, because
they take the liberty of paying their addresses to the ladies and
discontinuing them, at pleasure, and thereby mainly cause this vice.
5. SETTING THEIR CAPS.--True, young ladies sometimes "set their caps,"
sometimes court very hard by their bewitching smiles and affectionate
manners; by the natural language of love, or that backward reclining and
affectionate roll of the head which expresses it; by their soft and
persuasive accents; by their low dresses, artificial forms, and many other
unnatural and affected ways and means of attracting attention and exciting
love; but women never court till they have been in love and experienced its
interruption, till their first and most tender fibres of love have been
frostbitten by disappointment. It is surely a sad condition of society.
[Illustration: "HASTY FAMILIARITY IS FRAUGHT WITH MANY DANGERS."]
6. TRAMPLING THE AFFECTIONS OF WOMEN.--But man is a self-privileged
character. He may not only violate the laws of his own social nature with
impunity, but he may even trample upon the affections of woman. He may even
carry {151} this sinful indulgence to almost any length, and yet be
caressed and smiled tenderly upon by woman; aye, even by virtuous woman. He
may call out, only to blast the glowing affections of one young lady after
another, and yet his addresses be cordially welcomed by others. Surely a
gentleman is at perfect liberty to pay his addresses, not only to a lady,
but even to the ladies, although he does not once entertain the thought of
marrying his sweet-heart, or, rather his victim. O, man, how depraved! O,
woman, how strangely blind to your own rights and interests!
7. AN INFALLIBLE SIGN.--An infallible sign that a young man's intentions
are improper, is his trying to excite your passions. If he loves you, he
will never appeal to that feeling, because he respects you too much for
that. And the woman who allows a man to take advantage of her just to
compel him to marry her, is lost and heartless in the last degree, and
utterly destitute of moral principle as well as virtue. A woman's riches is
her virtue, that gone she has lost all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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