only information, but
depicts the dangers and warns against the ruinous effects. He
evidently fancies that such a black frame around the luring picture
will be a strong enough countermotive to suppress the sensual desire.
But while the faint normal longing can well be balanced by the trained
respect for the mysterious unknown, the strongly accentuated craving
of the girl who knows may ill be balanced by any thought of possible
disagreeable consequences. Still more important, however, is a second
aspect. The girl to whom the world sex is the great taboo is really
held back from lascivious life by an instinctive respect and anxiety.
As soon as girl and boy are knowers, all becomes a matter of naked
calculation. What they have learned from their instruction in home and
school and literature and drama is that the unmarried woman must avoid
becoming a mother. Far from enforcing a less sensuous life, this only
teaches them to avoid the social opprobrium by going skilfully to
work. The old-fashioned morality sermon kept the youth on the paths of
clean life; the new-fashioned sexual instruction stimulates not only
their sensual longings, but also makes it entirely clear to the young
that they have nothing whatever to fear if they yield to their
voluptuousness but make careful use of their new physiological
knowledge. From my psychotherapeutic activity, I know too well how
much vileness and perversity are gently covered by the term flirtation
nowadays in the circle of those who have learned early to conceal the
traces. The French type of the demi-vierge is just beginning to play
its role in the new world. The new policy will bring in the great day
for her, and with it a moral poisoning which must be felt in the whole
social atmosphere.

III

We have not as yet stopped to examine whether at least the propaganda
for the girl's sexual education starts rightly when it takes for
granted that ignorance is the chief source for the fall of women. The
sociological student cannot possibly admit this as a silent
presupposition. In many a pathetic confession we have read as to the
past of fallen girls that they were not aware of the consequences. But
it would be utterly arbitrary to construe even such statements as
proofs that they were unaware of the limits which society demanded
from them. If a man breaks into a neighbour's garden by night to
steal, he may have been ignorant of the fact that shooting