Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

Of course the HABIT of self-abuse means ruin to both brain and body. It is degrading to your true self, causes a loss of self-respect and makes a coward of every boy and man.

How can it do otherwise? The mere loss of the bubbling spring of manly life, the seminal fluid, would bring about this cowardice in a bravely born boy. Self-abuse is a cowardly way to treat the growing man in you, and it throws that cowardice right back in your face, makes you a real, can’t-help-it coward. All this is true of the HABIT. But this one fact I want to impress upon you—don’t think because you have succumbed to the desire a few times, that you are lost, going to become insane, or show upon your features the wrong acts of youthful ignorance.

No, don’t worry yourself ill, don’t become frightened at these misstatements, at what the advertising doctors say in their lying circulars and daily papers. All their statements are lies and used to get your money and ruin your health and happiness.

Little slips now and then before you have reached full knowledge of what is right should be forgotten, but the HABIT kept up will, of course, bring you to uselessness and make for failure in life.

Let us see how the practice is usually started. I have told you all about the irritation which arises from an unclean penis and a secondary irritation from an unemptied bowel. Also about too warm bed-clothing. In most boys these irritations call attention to the organ. Then there is an itching. This the boy seeks to relieve by scratching or handling his penis. All this sends blood to the organ. The blood enters the spongy penis and causes an erection. Soon the boy finds a new and strange sensation and finally performs the act.

What should he do when this strange sensation comes over him? He should immediately rise from the bed and pulling back the foreskin—if he is not circumcised—plunge the organ and surrounding parts into cold water. But you see he has never been told, and so the “first time” happens.

This is his first attempt at self-abuse. And it is rightly called self-abuse, for it is an abuse of a boy’s greatest power—manhood, muscle-force, brain-health.

I know that some of your teachers and parents will object to my telling you that a few mistakes in boyhood will not ALWAYS ruin you. All the fakers and Quacks will certainly object, for the truth will drive them out of business. But I intend giving you the truth in these matters. It is the only way for you to start right and know how to keep right. I have no patience with those who would build up a great scare for you when young to have you find out later that it was only a warning but not the real facts. I am going to hit out from the shoulder in this matter; no feints or ducking in going at the truth.

I have seen hundreds of men and youths complete nervous wrecks from fear that the few times they practiced self-abuse when boys, meant that they were doomed to go to the asylum or death. And all this misery and often a missing of good opportunities in life, were due to the fact that they were told hobgoblin stories which remained with them and rose to frighten them at the most sensitive age in life—early manhood.

No more of this wrong treatment should be allowed. If these boys of the past generation had been told how to care for their sex organs, as you have, more than one-half would never have succumbed even once to the temptation of self-abuse.