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How was it that this contempt of the body and degradation of sex-things went on far into the Middle Ages of Europe, and ultimately created an organized system of hypocrisy, and concealment and suppression of sex-instincts, which, acting as cover to a vile commercial Prostitution and as a breeding ground for horrible Disease, has lasted on even to the edge of the present day?
The bright outlook of æsthetics rather than the dark one of asceticism should prevail, for sex-instincts and processes are essentially pure and beautiful phases of that wonderful something we call "life." Sex-education should aim to give this attitude by presenting life as fundamentally free from the degradation arising from misuse and misunderstanding of sex.
The bland assumption that a man has a perfect right to play on a woman's sex-instincts till they are beyond control, and then call her the guilty one because they are beyond control, is based on the age-old determination not to recognize the full humanity of women. They are "different" from men. So they are. I have admitted it. But the likeness is much greater than the difference.
This demand is really incompatible with our civilization, and those who make it should try to understand that what they ask is, in fact, the reversal of all advance in real self-control in matters of sex. Let us abandon the pretence that it is "wicked" for either a man or a woman to have strongly-developed sex-instincts.
Such people are nearly always either men, or women who have married young and happily and borne many children, and had a very full and interesting outside life as well! Such women will assure me with the utmost complacency that the sex-instincts of a woman are very easily controllable, and that it is preposterous to speak as if their repression really cost very much.
Finally, sex-education will not enforce universal sexual morality in conformity with our accepted code, but it will help many individuals through decisive battles with sex-instincts. Such are some of the lines along which extreme claims and hopes for sex-education have been and are still being made.
Continuity of germplasm; The sex chromosome; The internal secretions and the sex complex; The male and the female type of body; How removal of sex glands affects body type; Sex determination; Share of egg and sperm in heredity; Nature of sex sexual selection of little importance; The four main types of secretory systems; Sex and sex-instincts of rats modified by surgery; Dual basis for sex; Opposite-sex basis in every individual; The Free-Martin cattle; Partial reversal of sex in man.
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