The books in the field of social hygiene which have most scrupulously and successfully avoided everything that might be sexually stimulating are not the ones bought by the largest numbers.  The demand for erotic publications is so great as to warn us in advance that the new freedom will prove dangerous for many whose minds are already unclean.  The propaganda for social purity is unlike many others, in that there is special danger of doing injury to the very ones in special need of help.  The fact that the young, the ignorant, the hysterical, and the sexually abnormal, as well as commercialized agencies, are using the newfound license in dangerous ways is reason enough for the liberal and whole-hearted support of the American Social Hygiene Association and affiliated societies.

These private organizations are striving to meet the present social emergency.  They are temporary expedients.  Their chief aim is public education.  They should frustrate the efforts of all dangerous agencies and hasten the day when the home, the church, and the school shall meet their full responsibilities in the teaching of sexual hygiene and morals.

CHAPTER II

VARIOUS PHASES OF THE QUESTION

By William Trufant Foster

It is necessary to take into account all phases of the social emergency.  The question is not merely one of physiology, or pathology, or diseases, or wages, or industrial education, or recreation, or knowledge, or commercial organization, or legal regulation, or lust, or social customs, or cultivation of will power, or religion.  It is all of this and more.  The danger is that we shall see only one or two sides of a many-sided problem.  A solution may appear adequate because it leaves essential factors out of consideration.

One physiological factor in the situation is of fundamental importance, namely, the discrepancy between the age of sexual maturity and the prevailing age of marriage,—­an artificial condition largely determined by social customs, by modern educational systems, and by standards of living.  While society has set forward, generation after generation, the age at which marriage seems feasible, the age of puberty has remained virtually the same.  This unnatural condition—­as artificial as the clothes we wear—­is a phase of the emergency which should be considered by those who condemn as unnatural and forced the education of adolescent boys and girls in sexual hygiene and morals.  Partly as a result of this has come the general acceptance of the double standard of chastity which has bitterly condemned the girl—­made her an outcast of society—­and excused the boy for the same offense, on the false plea of physiological necessity.