After the stork story, there come incorrect versions of reproduction from boy companions. Then come notes at school, picture cards, comic weeklies, quack advertisements, and unwholesome vaudeville acts. These destructive influences come, for the most part, entirely unsolicited, in response to a normal desire for knowledge and clean entertainment. Boys seldom go to their first shows to see what is vulgar or sensual. They go for clean fun, gymnastics, magicians, and other legitimate amusements. The unwholesome features are thrust upon them.
As a result of these influences on the impressionable mind of the growing boy, he comes to regard sex as low and vile instead of sacred. He acquires a vulgar vocabulary which he necessarily uses in his thinking and sometimes in his conversation. The silence and evasive answers of adults withhold healthful knowledge and increase curiosity. Curiosity often leads to investigation, which often results disastrously.
The specific evil results are of three kinds: (1) masturbation; (2) needless mental suffering due largely to ignorance; (3) illicit intercourse.
Masturbation is prevalent among boys. Two hundred and thirty-two replies were received to a question asked college students regarding their severest temptations of school days. Of these, one hundred and thirty-two said that masturbation had been one of their severest temptations and one hundred and thirty-one said they had yielded to it.[42] Similar inquiries have brought similar results. The sum total of vitality lost to humanity by this practice is great.
There is much needless mental suffering among boys and young men due to ignorance and false ideas advanced by quacks. Groundless fear, brooding anxiety, and despair sometimes start before adolescence and often last into the twenties. Physical peculiarities of no consequence sometimes cause boys to fear that they are abnormal. Unaware of the fact that spontaneous nocturnal emissions are to be expected, many suffer mental anguish. According to one writer, a single New York dealer had 3,000,000 "confidential" letters, "written to advertising medical companies and doctors, mostly by youth with their heart's blood."[43] Large sums of money are obtained by quacks everywhere for treating normal conditions. Many men have applied to the Advisory Department of the Oregon State Board of Health after years of worry. Although those who apply are no longer boys, most of their troubles began in boyhood. A large proportion of the suffering could have been avoided by simple instruction in sexual hygiene.
Social vice often occurs in adolescent boyhood, both as a direct result of unmastered passion and as an indirect result of individual vice. In some cases, the habits a boy forms in his early 'teens make him a subject of venereal disease in later life. A doctor writes, "I am aware that it is popularly supposed that self-abuse and sexual intercourse are antagonistic—by many, the one is regarded as a necessary alternative of the other. So far from being a protective, the former is a most powerful provocative of the latter. According to my own observation, it is not the strongly sexed, the most virile young men, who are most given to licentiousness, but those whose organs have been rendered weak and irritable from this unnatural exercise—in whom the habit of sensual indulgence has been set up, and in whom self-control has not been developed by exercise."[44] This combination of silence, misinformation, and bad influence causes a damnable attitude of mind on the part of the boy toward women, love, marriage, and the home.[45]
The experience of a Chicago business man with his sixteen-year-old son is told in a recent popular magazine. Whether an actual occurrence or not, it is typical of conditions in most any city.
I do not desire to convey the idea that our boy was a wicked boy. He was not. He was just the average type of what we call the "upper middle-class" boy. He was merely tuned to the low moral tone of the city. Vice to him was not a monster of hideous mien. He had seen it from childhood.... I knew that a greater part of his ideas on patriotism, on women, on the sanctity of marriage were but reflections of views he had heard expressed, often tritely and cleverly, and cynicism born of hearing such things flaunted over the footlights or dished out as "clever" in the newspapers.
In the father's earnest efforts to understand the remedy for the situation, he is reminded of his own experience when he began life in the city. He continues:—
The boy's words awakened memories. I recalled the sense of shocked and shamed decency I felt when first I came to the city, a boy almost, and fresh from the country; how I tossed in my bed trying to see as right things that every one in the city appeared to accept as a matter of course, but that, from earliest boyhood I had been taught to regard as wicked. I could not for many months become accustomed to seeing immodestly dressed women on or off the stage, or to hearing half-veiled indecency flaunted from the stage, blazoned in the newspapers, or used even in ordinary conversation. I could not get used to ... scenes and actions directly forbidden as unforgivable at home.[46]