he helpful, and the aesthetic processes in human life.
We should emphasize sexual health and morals, not disease and
immorality. Concerning immoral living in general, young people should
know only enough for necessary warning. Curiosity derived from
extensive knowledge of immorality has drawn many a young man into the
whirlpool of sexual depravity. It is beyond question that in sexual
lines there is the danger that Pope saw when he declared that vice is a
monster that seen too oft, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Sex-education should guard against such dangerous familiarity with
vice.

Sec. 11. _The Sixth Problem for Sex-education: Sexual Vulgarity_

[Sidenote: Present attitude.]

Even a limited study of the prevailing attitude towards sex and
reproduction convinces one that back of the greatest sexual problems of
our times is the almost universal secrecy, disrespect, vulgarity, and
irreverence concerning every aspect of sex and reproduction. Even
expectant motherhood is commonly concealed as long as possible, and all
reference to the developing new life is usually accompanied with
blushes and tones suggestive of some great shame. Nothing sexual is
commonly regarded as sacred. Love and marriage, motherhood and birth,
are all freely selected as themes for sexual jests, many of them so
vulgar that no printed dictionary supplies the necessary words. And I
am not simply referring to the great masses of uneducated people, for
the saddest fact is that a very large proportion of intelligent people
have not an open-minded and respectful attitude concerning sex and
reproduction.

[Sidenote: Vast change of attitude needed.]

Now, unless we can devise some way to counteract the prevailing narrow,
vulgar, disrespectful, and irreverent attitude towards all aspects of
sex and reproduction; unless we can make people see sexual processes in
all their normal aspects as noble, beautiful, and splendid steps in the
great plan of nature; unless we can substitute a philosophical and
aesthetic view of sex relationship for the time-worn interpretation of
everything sexual as inherently vulgar, base, ignoble, and demanding
asceticism for those who would reach the highest spiritual development;
unless we can begin to make these changes in the prevailing attitude
towards sex and reproduction, we cannot make any decided advance in the
attempt to help solve sexual problems by special instruction.

First of all, sex-education must