Sex-education: A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its relation to human lifeBigelow, Maurice A. (Maurice Alpheus)
Science
Sex-education: A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its relation to human life
Bigelow, Maurice A. (Maurice Alpheus)
Sex instruction
It will be most helpful if we consider the problem of selecting
teachers with a view to rejecting those who certainly should not
undertake the special hygienic and ethical teaching, for teachers who
are good in other subjects and who are fortunately free from certain
disqualifications discussed in the following, may by means of study
adapt themselves for the final and most important stages of
sex-education.
There are five types of teachers who should be regarded as disqualified
for teaching personal sex-hygiene and sex-ethics.
[Sidenote: Embarrassed teachers.]
First, those men and women who are unable to speak of sex-hygiene as
calmly and seriously as they do of any other phase of hygiene had
better not undertake the instruction of young people. There are many
such men and women among teachers who, so far as scientific training is
concerned, ought to be good teachers of sex-hygiene. As an illustration
of this attitude that leaves the wrong impression with students, it is
reported that a good teacher of hygiene recently prefaced a brief talk
to college girls as follows: "I shall now consider a process that no
cultured woman ever mentions except with bated breath. I refer to
menstruation."
[Sidenote: Abnormal teachers.]
The second kind of people who should not teach sex-hygiene are the men
and women who are the unfortunate victims of sexual abnormality, either
physical or psychical, that more or less influences their outlook on
life. Certain neurotic and hysterical men or women who lack thorough
physiological training and whose own sexual disturbances have led them
to devour omnivorously and unscientifically the psychopathological
literature of sex by such authors as Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and
Freud, are probably unsafe teachers of sex-hygiene. Especially is this
true of the women of this type whose introspective morbidity has led
them to diagnose their own functional disturbances as the direct result
of "over-sexuality" and restraint from normal sexual expression--a
diagnosis that is probably wrong nine times in ten cases. Such a woman
is a very dangerous teacher of sex-hygiene for adolescent girls; and a
positive menace to older unmarried women who, if free from absorbing
work, may spend their leisure in becoming more or less restless under
the unsocial, if not unphysiologic, conditions of unwelcome celibacy.
This is no imaginary danger. The reader of this will not be interested
in details, but the author has received from physicians and others
reliable information concerning several extremely abnormal women of the
above-described type who are taking an active interest in the
sex-instruction of young people and are actually suggesting to their
friends among young women the dangerous and untrue doctrine that
prolonged celibacy for women results in repressed sexuality that surely
leads to ill health. Such ideas, it is true, are traceable to certain
well-known radical writers on the psychopathology of sex; but we must
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