Is sex necessary?

So many children have come to me and said, “What shall I tell my parents about sex?” My answer is always the same: “Tell them the truth. If the subject is approached in a tactful way, it should be no more embarrassing to teach a parent about sex than to teach him about personal pronouns. And it should be less discouraging.”

In discussing sex enlightenment for parents, first of all, definitions are needed. What do we mean by “parents”? Do we mean all adults who have had children? Do we mean adults who have had children, they knew not why? Or do we mean married people who have given birth to one or more offspring but have never gone into the matter very thoroughly? For the purposes of this article, it will be assumed that by “parents” we mean all adult persons permeated with a strong sense of indecency.

I have talked with hundreds of children about the problem of educating their parents along sex lines. So many of them have told me that they honestly tried to give their elders the benefit of their rich experience in life, but that the parents usually grew flushed and red and would reply, “Nice people don’t talk about such things.” It is true that a great gap exists between generations. The fact that children are embarrassed to have their parents along when they are attending certain movies or plays is indicative of how hard it is to overcome the old fear of allowing one’s elders to learn anything. A child never knows at what point in a play his uninformed old father will start to giggle. It is hard for children to break through and really come in touch with their elders. “Nice people don’t talk about such things!” is the defense which old people put up against life itself, when they feel it crowding in all around their heads. Parents hesitate to discuss things calmly and intelligently with their children for two reasons: first, they have a kind of dread of learning something they don’t want to know; and second, they feel that if they must learn anything at all they would like to be spared the humiliation of learning it from their offspring. Actually, middle age (and even senescence) is marked by a great curiosity about life. There is a feeling that life is slipping away quickly, and that it would be terrible to have the end come before everything in life has been revealed. The beauty of life, always apparent, implies a mystery which is disturbing right up to the bitter end. The spectacle of old men wistfully attending sex lectures (as they frequently do) suggests that the strong suspicion exists in them that somewhere they will hear the magic word by which human affairs will become clarified, somewhere they will glimpse the ultimate ecstasy. Children who allow their fathers and mothers, to whom they owe their very existence, to go on wondering about sex, are derelicts to duty.

If young folks lack the tact or intelligence requisite to enlightening their parents, the task should be intrusted to some one else. Yet it is hard to say to whom. A child should think twice before sending his father around to public school to secure sex information from his teacher. Women teachers, to borrow a phrase, are apt to be “emotionally illiterate.” Many teachers have had no sex life and are just waiting for somebody like your father to show up.

One’s father and mother are never too old to be told facts. Indeed, it is most unkind to keep them in ignorance and allow them to nourish the doubts and horrors of their imagination. The majority of parents pick up their knowledge of the facts of life from smoking-car conversations, bridge-club teas, and after-dinner speakers. They receive it from their vicious adult companions who are only slightly less ignorant than they are and who give them a hopelessly garbled version. They pick it up, too, from the gutter.

This matter of picking up information from the gutter is an interesting topic in itself. Quite the most remarkable case history that has come to my notice is that of François Delamater, a parent thirty years of age, who went deliberately to the gutter for his sex education. He had heard, as all people do hear some time or other, that sex can be learned from the gutter, so he set out to make a comprehensive survey of the gutters of eighteen large American cities. For a long time he found out nothing, although he was a very curious man. By a peculiar piece of fortune, however, he happened to be walking in Cincinnati one day and met a man who was leading a tame stork. The man was in the gutter. The stork carried in its bill a live baby, in swaddling clothes. Smelling a rat, Mr. Delamater stopped the man and inquired where the baby came from. The man replied that he didn’t know.

“For that matter,” continued Mr. Delamater, “where does any baby come from?”

The man shook his head. Then he relented and told Mr. Delamater that he had merely been hired to lead the stork around the streets to advertise a moving picture called “Her Husband’s First-born.” The whole incident so confused the mind of the thirty-year-old parent that he eventually evolved the strange theory that babies are born within the father, an erroneous notion that dwarfed his emotions and modified his character.

It is of the utmost importance, in imparting sex knowledge to one’s parents that it be done in such a way as not to engender fear or anxiety. The phraseology should be chosen carefully, and efforts should be made to explain everything clearly but without the use of words which have a tendency to make old people nervous. The word “erotic” is such a word. When it is necessary to speak of Man’s erotic tendencies, it is best to substitute another word. In the first place, an overwhelming majority of parents do not know the exact meaning of the word “erotic,” and to know an inexact meaning is worse than nothing. Many are apt to confuse it vaguely with “exotic.” I have known parents to go through whole books by authors like Havelock Ellis or Mary Ware Dennett without understanding a single paragraph, because they thought Man’s “eroticism” referred to his desire to be in some foreign place like Spain. Those parents that actually do detect the difference between the sound of the two words will immediately become nervous, inattentive, and dispirited. They will make some excuse to leave the room, and will wander out, probably to the ice-box to get themselves a cold snack, which they will eat while in a sulky frame of mind. Later they will look up the word in the dictionary, but will forget it by the time they hear it again in conversation or read it in print. Furthermore, all their taste for sex will be gone.

Just what to tell parents is, of course, a vital question, not to be answered dogmatically. Before a child can conscientiously approach such subjects as pedestalism, the recessive knee, begonia-ism, frigidity in men, birth control, sublimation, and the swastika fixation, he must clear the boards. The simple phases of sex should be imparted in a direct manner: it is best to explain things in a matter-of-fact way, rather than resort to such cloudy analogies as birds and flowers. Strange to say, the habits of birds and flowers have done as little to clarify the human scene as almost any other two manifestations in nature. Further, there is always the danger, in setting up plant or animal life as an example, that one’s parents will place a literal interpretation on things. I am thinking particularly of the case—which all sociological students know about—of Nina Sembrich, the fifteen-year-old high-school girl who attempted to impart knowledge to her father by telling him about bees. (Nina’s mother was dead, or she would have told her too.) She traced, in rather minute detail, the renascence of earth in spring, the blossoming of the trees, the activity of the bees and their function in distributing the pollen, the fertilization of the seed and its growth during the warm languorous summer days, finally the fruition and harvest.

It was a beautiful story, redolent of orchards and sunny hillsides, instinct with life—a story that had a soporific effect on Mr. Sembrich, lulling him as the buzz of a bee lulls one in hot daisy fields. The upshot of it was that he gathered a rather strange impression from the narrative and somehow got the idea that to have babies you had to keep bees. He bought several hives, installing them in the little sitting-room on the second floor, where Mrs. Sembrich had kept her sewing-machine when she was alive. The acquisition of the apiary further complicated matters for Mr. Sembrich by reason of the fact that bees themselves enjoy a rather extraordinary sexual scheme—theirs is a complex society, infinitely more diverting and harder to understand than our own. Observed by a slightly nervous person who is trying to profit by a simple analogy—as Mr. Sembrich was—bees are capable of causing the utmost confusion.

If you will recall what you know about bees, you will readily understand what I mean. In a colony of bees, certain individuals have no sex whatsoever; these are the “workers.” The male bees are “drones.” The queen (or “mother”) bee develops her sexual character only after being arbitrarily chosen for the purpose, walled up, and fattened on special food. Mr. Sembrich marveled at these things.

Basing his hopes entirely on what he had seen, he made his first overt act, which was to give up his business (he was a merchant tailor) on the assumption that to be endowed with masculine characteristics one had to be a drone. In this, of course, he was justified to some degree; for it is quite true that very busy men rarely are fully equipped for a complete or happy sex life. Business men commonly find a vicarious gratification for their erotic nature in card index systems. Often, their satiable appetite for life is dissipated in the process of dictating a single sales letter. Only men who devote virtually their entire attention to love ever glimpse its full glory or experience its bewildering intensity. (And they make so little money they might just as well not.)

Mr. Sembrich, therefore, was not without justification in becoming a drone, since life was what he wanted to find out about. But it was when he undertook to fatten up a lady of his acquaintance into a “mother” that he ran into difficulties. He locked her in the kitchen and plied her with rich desserts. He even urged honey on her—a rather literal expedient even for a man in his mental condition. The lady not only failed to become a mother, but she took sick and died, surrounded by a group of Mr. Sembrich’s “workers,” whom he had hired to help feed her. With a dead woman in the kitchen and a lot of bees upstairs in the sitting-room, the household became unbearable as a place to live and bring up his daughter Nina, so Mr. Sembrich fled, still ignorant of the essential knowledge of life.⁠[17]

Another case, not exactly paralleling the Sembrich affair, is the case of two parents who failed to learn something to their advantage because they happened to be at dinner. It happened this way. Charles Updegraff had sent his son, Junior, to spend the summer at a boys’ camp. There, in addition to learning how to swim, paddle, and make fires, Junior learned about sex, so that he returned home fine and brown and a credit to the Updegraffs. (The Updegraffs had swum, paddled, made fires, and so on, for generations.) Now, at Camp Whortleberry (that was the name of the camp) the authorities had adopted what is known as the “pet method” for imparting sex knowledge to the boys. Each boy was given charge of a pet of some kind, and the pets were given carte blanche. Junior Updegraff drew a pair of sunfish. To augment the actual pet study, the boys were also given lectures by the camp director, who knew in a general way what he was talking about. Thus, when the summer was over the boys’ minds were full of a strange assortment of facts and oddments, some of them rather amusing. Young Junior had hardly been home an hour when he thought he would do his old man a good turn by telling him what he knew about sunfish. The Updegraffs were at table.

“Pop,” he said, “do you want the low down on a sunfish?”

Mrs. Updegraff hastily interrupted. “Better wait till after dinner, son,” she said.

(Note: parents have always been held back by the superstitious idea that it is wrong to learn anything while eating.)

“What’s the matter with right now?” asked Junior. “I was just going to tell Pop about our pet study course. I know a lot of things.”

“Wait till we’re through eating,” said Mrs. Updegraff.

“Why should I? A mouse is an embryo twenty days, a lop-sided apple is that way because it’s been fertilized only on one side, male animals grow bright colored in the mating season, and so it goes. Sunfish....”

“Junior!” said Mrs. Updegraff, sharply. “Not till after dinner. Sunfish can wait!”

“No they can’t!” cried Junior, warming up to his subject. “The father sunfish makes the nest, then....”

“We don’t want to hear about it,” snapped Junior’s mother. “Tell us about your canoe trips.”

“I never went on no canoe trips.”

“Why not?”

“Always was watching the sunfish.”

The matter was dropped and the meal continued in silence. After dinner Mr. Updegraff, secretly very much interested, hung around in the hope that his son would again open up the subject of sunfish. The boy never did. He was only a child and children are easily discouraged.

I suspect that the church is responsible, in large measure, for the ideas of life now held by adults. Sex is still sin to the evangelical clergy. A kiss is thinkable only when sanctified by the church. A child who permits his parents to continue in the belief that the elevation of the soul depends on the renunciation of the flesh, is hardly doing his duty by them. Sometimes it may be advisable to quote to your parents from standard works on the subject of sex. Great care must be taken, though, to avoid abruptness, as far as possible. Thus there is some doubt in my mind whether a child ought to approach its mother on a hot afternoon when she is tired and bedraggled, and say to her: “Ma, under favorable conditions a husband and wife should remain sexually attractive to each other during the whole period of their sexual potency.”

That’s no way for a child to talk.

Some children have told me that instead of quoting from books they have tried leaving the books lying around, opened at pertinent pages. Even this failed to work in most cases. The mothers usually just picked up the book, dusted it, closed it, and fitted it neatly in some nearby shelf. They thought it was dusty.