g that will make us either weak or
unnatural. Remember that your sex organs have a very powerful, even
if invisible, effect upon your whole being, and up to the time that
you are really old enough to love some one to whom you want to
actually belong, you must _let your sex machinery_ grow strong and
ready for its good, happy work when the right time comes. The sex
organs during your youth do not need frequent exercise in the same
sense that your muscles do. They are active all the time with their
internal secretions which strengthen both you and them.

Don't ever let any one drag you into nasty talk or thought about sex.
It is _not_ a nasty subject. It should mean everything that is
highest and best and happiest in human life, but it can be easily
perverted and ruined and made the cause of horrible suffering of both
mind and body.

There are two very terrible sexual diseases--syphilis and gonorrhea.
They are both frightfully infectious and very difficult to cure.
These diseases are usually acquired by sex contact with a diseased
person, but they can also be gotten by using public drinking cups,
towels, water-closets, or in any way by which an infected moist
article can come in contact with one's skin. The worst thing about
these diseases is that they are such invisible enemies. After the
outside appearance of the disease is gone, they often go reaching
farther and farther into the body, making awful results that hang on
for years. Men who get diseased frequently give the infection to
their wives, often causing them to be so ill that surgical operations
are necessary, by which their sex organs are so crippled that they
can never be mothers; and, worst of all, innocent unborn babies are
infected and come into the world sick or deformed or blind.

Men often get these dreadful diseases by having sex relations with
women who are called prostitutes or "bad women," that is, they are
women who are not in love with any one, but who make money by selling
their sex relations to men who pay for them. Many prostitutes become
diseased, and there is, as yet, no way for either them or the men who
visit them to be positively safe from infection. But the doctors are
making progress in their study of these diseases, and they are
finding out how to control and cure them, just as they have in the
case of tuberculosis.

But even if presently these venereal diseases, as they are called,
can be entirely cured and prevented, prostitution w