is accepted in principle, it would be only wise
to furnish her with all the supplementary knowledge which covers the
multitude of sexual perversions and social malpractices of which
to-day many a clean married woman has not the faintest idea. But to
such a girl who knows all, the surroundings appear in the new
glamour. She understands now how her body is the object of desire, she
learns to feel her power, and all this works backward on her sexual
irritation, which soon overaccentuates everything which stands in
relation to sex. Soon she lives in an atmosphere of high sexual
tension in which the sound and healthy interests of a young life have
to suffer by the hysterical emphasis on sexuality. The Freudian
psychoanalysis, which threatens to become the fad of the American
neurologists, probably goes too far when it seeks the cause for all
neurasthenic and hysteric disturbances in repressed sexual ideas of
youth. But no psychotherapist can doubt that the havoc which secret
sexual thoughts may bring to the neural life, especially of the
unbalanced, is tremendous. Broken health and a distorted view of the
social world with an unsound, unclean, and ultimately immoral emphasis
on the sexual relations may thus be the sad result for millions of
girls, whose girlhood under the policy of the past would have remained
untainted by the sordid ideas of man as an animal.

Yet the calamity would not be so threatening if the effect of sexual
instruction were really confined to the putrid influence on the young
imagination. The real outcome is not only such a revolution in the
thoughts, but the power which it gains over action. We have only to
consider the mechanism which nature has provided. The sexual desire
belongs to the same group of human instincts as the desire for food or
the desire for sleep, all of which aim toward a certain biological
end, which must be fulfilled in order to secure life. The desire for
food and sleep serves the individual himself, the desire for the
sexual act serves the race. In every one of these cases nature has
furnished the body with a wonderful psychophysical mechanism which
enforces the outcome automatically. In every case we have a kind of
circulatory process into which mental excitements and physiological
changes enter, and these are so subtly related to each other that one
always increases the other, until the maximum desire is reached, to
which the will must surrender. Nature needs this automatic fu