Now we come to the period that affected you most profoundly in your sexual development, puberty. Can you remember how your life and body were changed from the time you were twelve to fourteen?—that is, when you were first endowed with sexual capacity. Whether you were a boy or girl, your sex glands (gonads) began pouring their hormones into the blood stream in great quantities. Perhaps you did not realize it at the time but you began feeling more tense, more energetic, and began exhibiting what might be called “animal spirits.” Farmers shake their heads sadly at their youngsters during this period and resign themselves to the fact that the youths won’t be over “Fool’s Hill” until they are sixteen.
It probably was during your early teens that you had your first great “love” affair, if you were normal. Puppy love is one of the sweetest loves that one ever has. It usually makes its appearance at about the time the girl begins to menstruate and the boy becomes capable of having sexual emissions.
This first love of yours was romantic and idealistic. Probably you “fell in love” with a girl in the next aisle, passed notes to her and picked flowers on the way to school for her. You walked home together after school and if you did manage to conquer your embarrassment and kiss, it is a kiss you will never forget.
You did not realize that those hormones pulsing through your body were responsible for this “crush” and did not realize why you were more tense and energetic. To reduce the tension, though, you looked at each other and something about your past conditioning made each of you find something appealing in the other. Sometimes these first “loves” endure but more likely you are soon both in “love” with new “flames” that suddenly appeared more appealing. Puppy love, you see, is an early version of infatuation.
As a child your sexual feelings were diffused over the body surface but with puberty those feelings came more and more to be localized in certain sensitive areas of the body, called “erogenous zones,” if you had normal contacts with the other sex. In the case of girls whose contact with sex is carefully guarded, however, it is quite possible that sex desire may remain diffused until marriage and the loss of virginity.
The appearance of the menstrual discharge can be a profoundly frightening event for a girl unless she has been prepared to expect it. Often it marks the beginning of fears that carry over even into marriage.
Take the case of Alice, a school superintendent’s daughter, who was reared in a stern atmosphere of morality. When she asked where babies came from her mother first rebuked her and when she persisted in inquiring the mother said they were brought in the medical bags of physicians. When she reached the age of menstruation, for which her mother had not prepared her, she thought a terrible calamity had befallen her. She naïvely believed for several months that she was having a baby. Later the only information she ever acquired on sex was through bull sessions with other girls at college, and there the information was misleading. She was fearful of sex and when, during her freshman year, a boy tried to kiss her she reacted very strongly. She felt that she must not be a nice girl or a boy would not think of trying to kiss her. Her mother had told her that nice girls did not kiss boys.
Today Alice is twenty-nine and still not married. Furthermore she seems like a very poor prospect. She has reacted frigidly to all overtures of grown men to kiss her even though she feels she should marry. To her “sex” is animal passion and its only rightful function is reproduction. She has so many repressions about sex that she cannot act normally in the presence of someone of the opposite sex.
Here is how the repressions operate with Alice. She does her best not to think about sex. She avoids situations or circumstances that would involve sex by staying away from people of the opposite sex, by not going to dances and by refraining from doing things that would in any way bring sex to mind. Her life is a desperate hide-and-seek with sex. Furthermore her repression is so effective that she won’t even admit that a sexual problem exists for her.