It is especially hard to understand how any medical men could recommend to a young man to resort to illicit relations for health and to jeopardize his own health and that of his future family. If it is justified to recommend illicit relations to a young man, as a cure for masturbation and its resulting neurasthenia, instead of explaining to him that a healthy hygiene and the exercise of his will-power will make easy the control of the desire without any loss of health, then why not recommend the same remedy to young women. Continence is no more injurious to the man than to the woman. The conventional view that incontinence in men is a necessary condition of health must be corrected. Instead of the popular fallacy that a young man is physically the worse for a clean moral life, the entire weight of evidence of the world’s foremost medical scholars is unreservedly of the opinion that he is physically better for it.[EK] It is recognized by the highest authorities that continence is perfectly compatible with the most perfect health. Chastity properly understood is health, it never does any harm to mind or body.[EL] It is the consensus of the opinions of most of the great medical thinkers that it is not prejudicial to the health of a man to keep his body clean until he has found a true mate in life.[EM]
The boy who has just passed adolescence ought, therefore, to learn that the injudicious premature use of the organs of generation is prejudicial to his health and is beset with great dangers.[EN] There is a great distinction between puberty and nubility, and the boy must learn to check his sensual impulses until marriage which is not so very hard to accomplish.
There are enough sexual stoics in the world to prove by practical experience that continence is not only possible but also practicable. Caesar says of the ancient Teutons: “Ante annum vicesimum sextum feminis notionem habere inter res turpissimas habeatur.” “It was considered one of the most shameful things to have any relations with a woman before the twenty-sixth year of age” (Bellum Gallicum). Yet no one will dispute that the ancient Teutons were strong and healthy. These ancient barbarians seem to have learned by experience that before this time sexual maturity is not yet complete. The same thing was found in modern times by Eulenburg (Zeitschr. f. Bekämpf. d. Geschlechtskrankheiten, 1907, p. 194), that the combined statistics teach that complete sexual maturity is reached by the woman only after the twentieth year of age, and by the man not before the twenty-fifth year.
Besides the historic proof there are daily examples which show the compatibility of chastity with health at any age. Many young men, engaged to be married, remain chaste for long periods without detriment to their health, although often living in continuous sexual excitement. Patients suffering from venereal diseases abstain during long periods of treatment without any impairment of their general health. Men remain chaste and healthy during long periods when their wives are ill or during the periods of confinements. Athletes, training for some physical contest, remain in enforced continence and yet healthy. Seafaring men are often continent for long periods without injury. It is not known that the discoverers of the North Pole have greatly suffered by their enforced continence.
These few examples tend to show that abstinence is not detrimental to health. In fact, no other condition of life is more thoroughly consistent with perfect mental and physical vigor than absolute chastity. The instinct only needs to be controlled. Continence is only a matter of habit. When the young man has not been debased by vile practices, it is usually a comparatively easy task to be continent and requires no extraordinary efforts. Every year of voluntary effort, at chastity, renders the task easier by force of habit.[EO]
Hence when the young man has been taught the advisability of sensual control, when the positive assurance has been given to him that total abstinence can be maintained without loss of power and when his fears of impairing his health have been dispelled, he will exercise his will-power and refrain from a departure from moral standards, especially when the dearth of wholesome information regarding the dangers of such a departure has been removed.
In large cities sensual control is made very hard for the young man. The unfortunate phase of the life in a big city is the early introduction of the youth to temptations and vicious conditions. Vice is obtruding upon him at every nook and corner. A vile so-called literature, a suggestive perverse art and an obscene stage panders his sensual curiosity.
But because, forsooth, it is hard to control that does not mean that he has to yield to temptation. It is true that the sexual appetite may assume imperiousness, but only in a certain class of men, in hereditary weaklings, whose imagination is constantly fed by lascivious thoughts and sensual images.
But the cause of the unchastity of boys is not that they become sensually mature earlier than they could judiciously enter into matrimony, the trouble lies in the fact that boys cannot see why they should abstain from a tickling amusement, which in their opinion does nobody any harm. Herein lies the greatest obstacle to continence. The youth does not know the ethical why, especially in our modern times with its religious laxity. The ethics of religion, even in its best days, had not had the power to control sensual passion and to create total abstinence, although religion, especially Christianity, has preached the same for the last two thousand years. In modern times with the almost divine worship of the personality of the individual the religious motive for chastity seems to fail entirely.
Hence the ethics of evolution and the ethics of sex-hygiene must be tried. If the theory of evolution is right, and the purpose of our being in this world is to assert life, then the aim of life can not be the single individual but the species, which can only be preserved by the right offspring. The child or what is the same the family[EP] will have to furnish the motive for man’s continence. The importance of the chastity of women to the family has been recognized from the earliest history. It is now time to teach the man the importance of his chastity to the family, state and nation. He has to know his responsibility just as the woman knows hers. Rational chastity must be founded upon the sentiment of human responsibility. The average man in his heart does not acknowledge to himself that there is any competent reason why he should control his passion beyond the sentimental idea of the justice of men’s remaining chaste if they require it of women. It must, therefore, be shown to the man that there is also an important racial reason for him to abandon promiscuous life.[EQ]