Sex Hygiene
This word hygiene has its root in the word Hygeia. Hygeia was the daughter of one of the gods of the Classic Mythology, and was the goddess of health. Sex hygiene is then, sex health, or sex normality.
Is there special danger of abnormal conditions or disease in the sex life of children and young people? We must answer this question before we can determine whether our time is well spent in the study which shall follow.
To determine this we must make a brief study of the unfolding human life and note some of its component parts and their relative relations and values in the organism.
We can best do this by a study of [the accompanying chart]. The lower line of the triangle represents the body, or physical life; the left side the feelings; the right side the intellect. If body, feelings and intellect were equal in any human being, then, we would have a perfect triangle, or a normal human life. But this is not true in any child or young person. This diagram illustrates the relative relations of these three elements of being as the child advances toward mature life.
Note—For want of space the triangle is reduced from original drawing.
The early years of a child’s life is almost purely physical and the physical plays a large part in the life of the girl or boy till they are well advanced in their ’teens, as you will see by a study of this figure.
Each side of this triangle is three inches long. The lines that run across the triangle represent feeling at the various stages of the child’s life. You can see that in the early years the feelings and the physical are very close together and are the dominating impulses of the life.
The reader should bear in mind that the word feeling is not here used in the restricted sense of referring to physical feelings only, but to all the feelings which surge through the being from whatever source. We should not lose sight of the fact, however, that, because of the important part that is played in the organism during the teens by the impulses from a given nerve center, all feelings will be colored more or less by the outfloodings of that nerve center. As we have suggested, the child till well advanced in years is largely a creature of feeling, and what mind it has is what may be called a picture mind, or a mind for seeing things. How easy it will be for all the feelings of the being to become inoculated with impurity and place before this picture mind of the child such distorted views of life as will vitiate the entire organism! How important it is that a higher intelligence, that is the father and mother, create pure, noble and beautiful pictures and place them before this picture, or seeing mind, of the child.