Period between sixteen and eighteen years.—When the boy or girl, at the age of sixteen to eighteen, are about to leave their families, they will have to be warned against yielding to the frequent sexual temptations. At this time the boy, and to a certain extent in our modern industrial world also the girl, leaves the family to go out into the world to commence the struggle for existence. There, in the office or in the factory, the boy and the girl will be surrounded by many temptations. Innumerable chances will be offered to them to surrender their chastity. It must, therefore, be impressed upon them how necessary and important it is for them to be careful and not to allow the hot temper of youth for the woman, respectively for the man, to get the better of their prudence.
They have to be warned of the dangers of venereal diseases and have to be shown the fearful results of promiscuous intercourse.[BQ] We will speak to them openly about the dangers of venereal diseases. The diseases of society just as those of the body, says Stuart Mills, can not be prevented without speaking openly about them. The social diseases must be spoken in the open and not with bated breath, and must be spoken to the woman no less than to the man.
The social diseases have been declared shameful and no one is allowed to know or to mention them. Many excellent people look upon venereal diseases as a merited punishment for the sins of immorality. In the popular conception, venereal diseases are diseases of debauchery only. There is, on the part of the public, an indifference, even an active opposition, to sex-enlightenment, due to the erroneous idea that venereal diseases are the exclusive appanage of vice. The people are ignorant of the fact that millions of guiltless persons contract these diseases through common utensils and particularly in marriage. These dreadful diseases embrace among their victims a vast number of virtuous wives and innocent children. The number of virtuous wives suffering from venereal diseases is much larger than the entire number of prostitutes in our country. The wife and unborn child are surely innocent in every sense of the word. They are incapable of foreseeing and powerless to prevent the threatening injury.
Syphilis, especially, is not purely a sexual disease. It is often acquired in the most innocent manner. An almost inperceptible lesion in the mouth or throat of the syphilitic exudes a virus which may be conveyed to another person, by a pen, pencil, drinking-glass, by surgical and dental instruments and by kissing.
Some years ago the author treated a pure, innocent, seventeen-year-old nurse-girl for syphilis of the pharynx who contracted the disease from the syphilitic infant she was taking care of. Both the host of the infection and the victim were thus perfectly innocent.
Such innocent people surely do not deserve punishment and ought to be protected. The traditional shameful character with which the venereal diseases have been invested by popular prejudice is surely absent in this class of cases. The only practical protection is the removal of the mist of ignorance.[BR] Ignorance of the results of venereal diseases is often ruinous.
Especially is ignorance, prevailing about gonorrhoea, often very disastrous. Gonorrhoea is commonly considered a benign local disease. Young men think it a joke to have gonorrhoeal infection several times in their lives. They have imbibed false views in regard to the trivial character of this venereal infection. They think gonorrhoea is not more serious than a bad cold. The young man who happens to have escaped gonorrhoeal infection is the target of his friends’ jests. Yet gonorrhoeal infection may make a tragedy of marriage by destroying the woman’s conceptional capacity and rendering her irrevocably sterile, in this way producing childlessness, and by sending thousands of women to the operating table to be condemned to the mutilation of their generative organs to save their lives.
If the proper knowledge of all these dangers would be imparted to her, it is inconceivable that any woman, with a fair amount of judgment, would permit the approach of a possibly tainted man. Every girl, who knew all the dangers of contracting such a disease, would be more capable of understanding the seriousness of her taking a false step and would guard herself against it. If the girl knew of the prevalence of venereal diseases among men, and her great danger from this source, she would not so easily debase herself and sully her vestal purity. Only full knowledge can adequately assist her. Experience has shown again and again that thousands suffer physical and moral wreckage by trusting the blind instinct as the sole and sufficient guide for its regulation. The girl ought to know that the sexual instinct is imperious in its demands. If she yields to an ardent lover she runs danger to contract a serious disease.
The ignorance prevailing about the dangers of venereal diseases is also responsible for the levity with which marriages with profligates are contracted. By a strange irony of fate, the diseases of vice, transplanted to the bed of virtue, often become intensified in virulence. Still with many girls the man who has most promiscuously and profusely scattered his “wild oats” has been looked upon as the most favored one among possible husbands. How there can be anything alluring to marry a man with a past, when there is the great peril that the young bride may get up on the morning after the wedding-day an invalid for life, can only be explained by the lack of knowledge of the gravity of venereal diseases. If the mother knew that a man who has led an unclean life is not a safe husband for her daughter, if she were aware of the fact that dissipated men do not make desirable husbands, she would look more for virtue than money in the future son-in-law. If the girl knew the host of indeterminable lesions which may follow in the wake of various venereal diseases, if she knew all the dangers lurking for her and her offspring, she would never condone moral depravity in her husband and the father of her children. Her whole nature would revolt against the wedlock with a man whose body is a sink of corruption. It will be she who will have to suffer most. It is upon the woman that the burden of shame and suffering, of disease and death, is chiefly laid.
The danger of sexual exploitation of young girls by certain men is much greater, the less the girls are instructed about the social dangers and the physiological consequences of a chance acquaintance. The girl ought to be taught that one mistake blasts a young girl’s life. Let a young woman stray but once from the path of virtue, or let there be even one breath of suspicion against her virtue, whether well founded or not, and there is no forgiveness to her in this world. She has suffered an irretrievable loss. Her greatest enemy in such a case is woman herself. Society admits the acknowledged libertine to its most exclusive circles, but forever ostracises the woman whose one false step has been found out. The man may emerge from the mire of dissipation without a spot or blemish upon his character, for the woman, there is no return. Shame and degradation follow her even to the grave.