The Social Emergency: Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
Science
The Social Emergency: Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
Sex instruction
It is necessary to take into account all phases of the social emergency.
The question is not merely one of physiology, or pathology, or diseases,
or wages, or industrial education, or recreation, or knowledge, or
commercial organization, or legal regulation, or lust, or social customs,
or cultivation of will power, or religion. It is all of this and more. The
danger is that we shall see only one or two sides of a many-sided problem.
A solution may appear adequate because it leaves essential factors out of
consideration.
One physiological factor in the situation is of fundamental importance,
namely, the discrepancy between the age of sexual maturity and the
prevailing age of marriage,--an artificial condition largely determined by
social customs, by modern educational systems, and by standards of living.
While society has set forward, generation after generation, the age at
which marriage seems feasible, the age of puberty has remained virtually
the same. This unnatural condition--as artificial as the clothes we
wear--is a phase of the emergency which should be considered by those who
condemn as unnatural and forced the education of adolescent boys and girls
in sexual hygiene and morals. Partly as a result of this has come the
general acceptance of the double standard of chastity which has bitterly
condemned the girl--made her an outcast of society--and excused the boy
for the same offense, on the false plea of physiological necessity.
With the sanction of this double standard, tacitly accepted by society,
thousands of prostitutes have been harbored and protected. What shall we
do with them? We may drive them out of certain districts and certain
houses, and even certain cities, but they are still with us, and we are
responsible for them. If they are denied resorts where men seek them, they
will seek men. Most of them are unable, without special training, to earn
a living in any other way, and many of them would not if they could. A
majority are mentally defective and should be wards of society. Any plan
which fails to take care of these women--adequately, permanently, and
humanely--ignores one of the greatest of the problems which history, with
the sanction of society, has made a factor of the present emergency.
The medical phase of the present situation is not often ignored, except by
those who hold that there is no such thing as disease. All countries are
alarmed over the prevalence of venereal infection. Definite information,
however, concerning the extent of these diseases, the sources and
conditions of contagion, and the complications and results, is not to be
had; because society still persists in treating venereal diseases as not
subject to public registration and control, in spite of their terrible
attacks on tens of thousands of innocent victims.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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