in efforts to teach chastity, sex itself must not be made to appear
an evil thing. This is a grave mistake and all too common since the rise
of the sex-hygiene movement. Undoubtedly a considerable amount of the
celibacy in sensitive women may be traced to ill-balanced mothers and
teachers who, in word and attitude, build up an impression that sex is
indecent and bestial, and engender in general a damaging suspicion of
men.[115]
Level heads are necessary in the sex ethics campaign. Whereas the
venereal diseases will probably, with a continuation of present progress
in treatment and prophylaxis, be brought under control in the course of
a century, the problem of differential mating will exist as long as the
race does, which can hardly be less than tens of millions of years.
Lurid presentation, by drama, novel, or magazine-story, of dramatic and
highly-colored individual sex histories, is to be avoided. These often
impress an abnormal situation on sensitive girls so strongly that
aversion to marriage, or sex antagonism, is aroused. Every effort should
be made to permeate art--dramatic, plastic, or literary--with the
highest ideals of sex and parenthood. A glorification of motherhood and
fatherhood in these ways would have a portentous influence on public
opinion.
"The true, intimate chronicle of an everyday married life has not been
written. Here is a theme for genius; for only genius can divine and
reveal the beauty, the pathos, and the wonder of the normal or the
commonplace. A felicitous marriage has its comedy, its complexities, its
element, too, of tragedy and grief, as well as its serenity and fealty.
Matrimony, whether the pair fare well or ill, is always a great
adventure, a play of deep instincts and powerful emotions, a drama of
two psyches. Every marriage provides a theme for the literary artist. No
lives are free from enigmas."[116]
More "temperance" in work would probably promote marriage of able and
ambitious young people. Walter Gallichan complains that "we do not even
recognize love as a finer passion than money greed. It is a kind of
luxury, or pleasant pastime, for the sentimentally minded. Love is so
undervalued as a source of happiness, a means of grace, and a completion
of being, that many men would sooner work to keep a motor car than to
marry."
Men should be taught greater respect for the individuality of women, so
that no high-minded girl will shrink from marriage with the idea that it
mean
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