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CHAPTER VII

HOW MANHOOD IS WRECKED

From the study of man in his relation to the world, in his relation to society, in his relation to himself, and from the study of the Bible, we see what Nature and God intended man to be. In both sacred and profane history we study the biographies of noble men of the past. On the farm and in the shop, behind the counter, as members of the bar, in Congress and in the Senate, on the platform and in the pulpit, we find today men who are examples of true manhood. Having received a good heredity, they lived in harmony with Nature and law, chose the right and rejected the wrong, and lived the Christ life.

But when we study the mass of people, we find that only a small percentage approaches perfection on either the physical, mental or moral plane. See the enervated and stunted fathers, the nervous and sickly mothers, the puny and weak children, the lustful sons and fallen daughters, the poorly developed bodies and dwarfed minds, the paupers and the criminals, the epileptics, the feeble-minded and the insane! Why should such a large per cent of our population be aimless, purposeless, shiftless ne'er-do-wells? Why our race degeneracy, our threatened race extinction? Bad heredity is not the only cause. The causes are numerous. Many are ignorant of the nature and functions of the organs of their bodies. Only a few have studied the most essential laws of health. Many live in unappeased hunger, and many more are improperly fed. Alcohol, tobacco, and harmful drugs are doing their deadly work. The sin of sensuality, with its attendant diseases, is the most prolific source of blighted manhood. Contrast the average man with males of the lower animals—the stallion, the bull, the lion and the tiger. What dignity, pride, elastic bearing and majesty! They are not the victims of sexual abuse. Instinctively they conserve their sexual energy.

Children are largely the results of uncontrolled desire. They were conceived in lust. Their prenatal rights were not respected, owing to ignorance and a resultant lack of control on the part of their parents. There can be no doubt that lascivious tendencies can be transmitted.

Among the poor, large families are ofter crowded into one or two rooms. Decent privacy is impossible. Bad habits of thought and sexual associations are often formed in mere childhood. Even in the homes of the richer classes the environment of childhood is often no better. The obscene language and perverted sexual practices of servants, both men and women, in the presence of children and taught personally to them can not be put in print. Many parents are criminally negligent. They neither teach their children truths pertaining to sex nor do they quarantine against misinformation, obscenity and stories of sexual perverts.

Tobacco and alcohol have a tendency to awaken passion, and, as a rule, men addicted to these habits are more passionate than those free from them. The use of cigarettes often hastens by several months the approach of puberty, and premature puberty is always a misfortune, for several secretions take place before the body is prepared to absorb and retain them. There waste produces stunted, dwarfed and lustful men.

Sex desire is aroused by physical and mental influences, of which the mental is far the greater. The maintenance of passion is impossible without mental consent and aid. In a high state of passion, desire will instantly subside if the mind is wholly and suddenly withdrawn from all thought of sex. Under the influence of the mind sexual secretions may be increased to five or ten times their normal amount.

Vulgarity and impure thinking are inseparable; one grows out of the other. No one can deliberately tell vulgar stories, or listen to others telling them without mental and moral injury. Some form of punishment should be meted out to the habitual user of vulgar language, as well as to those who circulate suggestive pictures and books.

There are forms of dancing that are supervised and given under wholesome conditions that do not fall under the following criticism. Every healthy, vigorous, manly man knows that the sex impulse is hard enough to control when there are only natural temptations to combat. The embrace in many of the modern dances is strikingly suggestive. Most of these dances are at night where no moral or religious restraints are felt or exercised. The libertine is admitted on a social and moral place with the purest and best girl who dances. The jazzy music and corresponding movements, the stimulating refreshments, and the close and sensual embrace, all conspire to awaken the sex nature. Such dancing leads to passion and complicates the social and sex problems of both men and women and endangers their moral interests.

Trashy vaudeville performances with “leg shows” and suggestive dancing are no small factor in the development of sensuality. No normal man, in the prime of life, can sit for hours and be entertained in this manner and remain pure in his thoughts. Some films exhibited in the movies are quite as suggestive.

Many men who never have been immoral with women, and have struggled to keep the demon of sensuality out of their thoughts, meet with their greatest temptation in the presence of improperly dressed women or at the sight of obscene pictures. Sensual postcards and similar pictures placed on billboards are agencies of sex stimulation that should everywhere be prohibited by law. A mother with a fully exposed breast, nursing and innocent, beautiful baby, is no temptation to any normal man. But the partially concealed breasts of an attractively formed woman no well-sexed man can look upon, admire, think about and remain untempted.

Young men and women can not engage in indiscreet social relations and retain perfect sex control. For years spooning postcards, spooning picture films and sensational songs and novels have been teaching young people that these relations are natural and that they are agreeable to and expected by each sex in their social relations. Such social relations are breeders of sensuality and are the chief cause of young people's immorality.

All these different agencies of sex stimulation bring about a mental condition that gives a low and degraded attitude towards sex and strongly inclines to some form of sexual gratification. In separate chapters the author will consider at length how manhood is wrecked through abuses of the sex instinct.

from "Personal Help for Men" by Wm. A. McKeever, T.W. Shannon, and Louise Francis Spaller. Published by the S.A. Mullikin Co, Cincinnati, OH, 1924; pp 91-98.