Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

Those of you who have not had proper instruction in the care of the sex organs and felt the irritation so much that you relieved yourselves, don’t think about the past; don’t worry, don’t read the scare-books and the advertisements of the Quacks.

Keep a clean body and a clean mind. But you cannot keep a clean mind if you allow the accumulation of secretions to remain anywhere in your system. The mind can be cleaned just as well as the bowels or penis. You can flush the brain so that nothing but pure thoughts and right thinking flow through it. This is done by good reading, good desires and a constant study of yourself and what certain impulses mean. Evil impulses WILL get into the brain; flush them out. Look ahead, never backward. No man ever succeeded in life by looking behind himself. Look forward in all things. Don’t worry and work yourself ill by remembering the time when you did give way to the desire; just try to think of the times ahead that you will NOT.

Keep in your mind whatsoever things are upright, just and manly. This does not mean that you should be a “goody-goody” or a “sissy.” No, these two specimens of half-boys are detestable to all real men and women. So are the other kind—the vulgar and vile. Proper thoughts and clean acts in boyhood all go to make a man of character, of honor, give you the inward grace of a gentleman which cannot manifest itself outwardly save in good manners, modesty of bearing and fearlessness. Let your mind be stored with evil thoughts, indecent pictures made up in your mind, then act upon all these foul things, and nothing can bring you to the point of being a man and gentleman. Never.

And the reason is this: The memory is something like photographic films, like millions of them, some exposed, some unused. Every thought is registered on your memory films. Every tiny brain cell is a film ready to take a picture the moment it is exposed to a thought. You can have a pile of bright, good, inspiring ones so big and thick that they hide forever those films which have registered evil and wrong thoughts.

Every debasing thought or waking dream of filth leaves its photographic negative somewhere in your brain. Every thought or mind picture remains there to come forward again and again, if it is not darkly and deeply hidden by manly thoughts and ambitious dreams of what you want to do to make something of yourself and do something for the world.

It is in these facts that the great injury of self-abuse enters. You cannot commit the vicious act without having in your mind some kind of nasty and unnatural pictures. You first bring this picture to your consciousness which accompanies the act.

This picture you may think is only a passing one, but it has left its negative in your brain. It will stay there to some time reappear, unless it is packed so far behind natural and manly thoughts that it cannot possibly throw itself before your consciousness.

From this explanation you can see that if the habit of self-abuse and all the pictures in your mind which accompany the habit are continued, your brain cells will soon be occupied by these negatives, and there will be a constantly decreasing space for right thoughts. Now comes the time when the youth finds it hard to apply himself to his work or studies. His mind will wander; he is called stupid, he becomes discouraged and leaves school or work. Yet, he can, at this period in his life, be brought back to be a normal youth. He can start right by knowing that if he will at once put all evil thoughts away he can hide the brain pictures which have been holding him down.

You should remember it is not so much the PHYSICAL injury self-abuse does; not the “losing a pound of blood” every time he abuses himself; it is the brain power he is weakening, the filling of brain cells with pictures which shut out proper thoughts.

Of course it hurts your growing strength, keeps you weak and finally affects your whole nervous system, but the youth has wonderful powers of recovery from PHYSICAL injury, and if he has not kept up the habit, all this injury may be repaired.