Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

But not so with the brain. We cannot get rid of the negatives there, but we can keep them suppressed. And how well they may be hidden and not allowed to shut out good thinking, depends entirely upon the length and frequency of the practice of self-abuse.

But one thing is certain: if the boy will at once stop the habit, get away from all those boys and things which bring out these injurious brain pictures, he can forget the past and look only at the future.

This is the cure and the only cure.

But there are a lot of details which, when understood, help a boy to do all this. First, never sleep with another person, man or boy. In a former Chat I told you that to sleep with another person was unhealthful; that it prevented your skin from breathing fresh air and that you could absorb the poisons from another’s skin.

Sleeping with another person causes extra warmth under the clothing; this affects the sex organs—sends blood to them and causes a feeling of attraction towards these delicate organs. Often this will end in an emission—an unnatural one, due to the heat, not to an effort to empty overloaded sacks. Again, many boys will be tempted to talk and play with each other. These boys may be ignorant and innocent at first, but in the end it means self-abuse.

Thousands of boys have been started on the habit through sleeping one with another. One may have been innocent and ignorant, one vicious—no matter; the result is the same.

Never trust yourself in bed with a boy or man. No matter if you are so situated that there is only one bed to be had. Sleep on the floor, anywhere; go without sleeping rather than have that “first time” happen to you. And it is so easy to avoid all this danger when you know the facts. The trouble has been that these matters have been withheld from your knowledge. It was so easy to tell you to be good and then send you to bed with a vicious boy.

There are things in trousers called men, so vile that they wait in hiding for the innocent boy. These things are generally well dressed, well mannered—too well mannered in fact—and pass as gentlemen; but they are really human skunks hatched from rattlesnakes’ eggs. They hang around fashionable summer hotels, city boarding houses and hotels where families live. They fool your mothers and sisters; are always ready to play the gallant in parlor games, croquet with the girls and often are much sought after as dancers.

Look out for these vermin, be suspicious of any man in trousers who avoids real men, who never enters or takes interest in manly sports, who tries to see you alone and prefers to go in bathing with boys instead of men. Don’t go to drive or walk with these things, for all the time they are only waiting to teach boys to help them in self-abuse or something far nastier.

So never sleep with a man, except your father. If you should be so situated that you find yourself in bed with a man, keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the slightest word or act out of the way, HIT him; hit him so hard that he will carry the scar for life. Don’t be afraid, these skunks are all cowards.