The climax of public discussions was reached when
America had its season of Brieux' "Damaged Goods."
Its topic is entirely different, as it deals exclusively with
the spreading of contagious diseases and the prevention
of their destructive influence on the family. Yet the
doubt whether such a dramatized medical lesson be-
[35]
PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
longs on the metropolitan stage has here exactly the
same justification. Nevertheless, it brings its new set of
issues. Brieux' play does not deserve any interest as
a drama. With complete sincerity the theatre pro-
gramme announces, "The object of this play is a study
of the disease of syphilis in its bearing on marriage."
The play was first produced in Paris in the year 1901.
It began its great medical teaching in America in the
spring of 1913. Even those who have only superficial
contact with medicine know that the twelve years which
lie between those dates have seen the greatest progress
in the study of syphilis which has ever been made. It
is sufficient to think of the Wassermann test, the Ehrlich
treatment, the new discoveries concerning the relations
of lues and brain disease, and many other details in
order to understand that a clinical lesson about this
disease written in the first year of the century must be
utterly antiquated in its fourteenth year. We might
just as well teach the fighting of tuberculosis with the
clinical textbook of thirty years ago.
How misleading many of the claims of the play are
ought to have struck even the unscientific audience.
The real centre of the so-called drama is that the father
and the grandmother of the diseased infant are willing
to risk the health of the wet nurse rather than to allow
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SEX EDUCATION
the child to go over to artificial feeding. The whole
play loses its chief point and its greatest pathetic speech
if we do not accept the Parisian view that a sickly child
must die if it has its milk from the bottle. The Boston
audience wildly applauded the great speech of the
grandmother who wants to poison the nurse rather
than to sacrifice her grandchild to the drinking of
sterilized milk, and yet it was an audience which surely
was brought up on the bottle. It would be very easy
to write another play in which quite different medical
views are presented, and where will it lead us if the
various treatments of tuberculosis, perhaps by the
Friedmann cures, or of diphtheria, perhaps by chiro-
practice or osteopathy, are to be fought out on the stage
until finally the editors of Life would write a play
around their usual thesis that the physicians are de-
stroying mankind and that our modern medicine is
humbug. As long as the drama shows us human ele-
ments, every one can be a party and can take a stand
for the motives of his heart. But if the stage presents
arguments on scientific questions in which no public is
able to examine the facts, the way is open for any one-
sided propaganda.
Moreover, what, after all, are the lessons which the
men are to learn from these three hours of talk on syph-
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
ilis? To be sure, it is suggested that it would be best
if every young man were to marry early and remain
faithful to his wife and take care that she remain faith-
ful to him. But this aphorism will make very little
impression on the kind of listener whose tendency would
naturally turn him in other directions. He hears in the
play far more facts which encourage him in his selfish
instincts. He hears the old doctor assuring his patient
that not more than a negligible 10 per cent, of all men
enter married life without having had sexual inter-
course with women. He hears that the disease can be
easily cured, that he may marry quite safely after three
years, that the harm done to the child can be removed,
and that no one ought to be blamed for acquiring the
disease, as anybody may acquire it and that it is only a
matter of good or bad luck. The president of the Medi-
cal Society in Boston drew the perfectly correct con-
sequences when in a warm recommendation of the play
he emphasized the importance of the knowledge about
the disease, inasmuch as any one may acquire it in a
hundred ways which have nothing to do with sexual
life. He says anybody may get syphilis by wetting a
lead pencil with his lips or from an infected towel or
from a pipe or from a drinking glass or from a cigarette.
This is medically entirely correct, and yet if Brieux had
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SEX EDUCATION
added this medical truth to all the other medical sayings
of his doctor, he would have taken away the whole
meaning of the play and would have put it just on
the level of a dramatized story about scarlet fever or
typhoid.
Yet here, too, the fundamental mistake remains the
psychological one. The play hopes to reform by the
appeal to fear, while the whole mental mechanism of
man is so arranged that in the emotional tension of the
sexual desire the argument of the fear that we may have
bad luck will always be outbalanced by the hope and
conviction that we will not be the one who draws the
black ball. And together with this psychological fact
goes the other stubborn feature of the mind, which no
sermon can remove, that the focussing of the attention
on the sexual problems, even in their repelling form,
starts too often a reaction of glands and with it sexual
thoughts which ultimately lead to a desire for satis-
faction.
The cleverest of this group of plays strictly intended
for sexual education as Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's
Profession" or plays of Pinero and similar ones would
belong only indirectly in this circle is probably
Wedekind's "Spring's Awakening." It brought to
Germany, and especially to Berlin, any education which
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
the Friedrichstrasse had failed to bring. To prohibit
it would have meant the reactionary crushing of a dis-
tinctly literary work by a brilliant writer; to allow it
meant to fill the Berlin life for seasons with a new spirit
which showed its effects. The sexual discussion became
the favourite topic; the girls learned to look out for their
safety: and it was probably only a chance that at the
same time a wave of immorality overflooded the youth
of Berlin. The times of naive flirtation were over; any
indecency seemed allowable if only conception was
artificially prevented. The social life of Berlin from
the fashionable quarters of Berlin West to the factory
quarters of Berlin East was never more rotten and more
perverse than in those years in which sexual education
from the stage indulged in its orgies.
The central problem is not whether the facts are dis-
torted or not, and whether the suggestions are wise or
not, and whether the remedies are practicable or not.
All this is secondary to the fundamental question of
whether it is wise to spread out such problems before
the miscellaneous public of our theatres. No doubt a
few of the social reformers are sprinkled over the au-
diences. There are a few in the boxes as well as in the
galleries who discern the realities and who hear the
true appeal, even through those grotesque melodramas.
[40]
SEX EDUCATION
But with the overwhelming majority it is quite differ-
ent. For them it is entertainment, and as such it is
devastating. It is quite true that many a piquant
comic opera shows more actual frivolity, and no one
will underestimate the shady influence of such volup-
tuous vulgarities in their multicoloured stage setting.
Yet from a psychological point of view the effect of the
pathetic treatment is far more dangerous than that of
the frivolous. A good many well-meaning reformers
do not see that, because they know too little of the
deeper layers of the sexual imagination. The intimate
connection between sexuality and cruelty, perversion
and viciousness, may produce much more injurious
results in the mind of the average man when he sees
the tragedy of the white slave than when he laughs at
the farce of the chorus girl. Moreover, even the infor-
mation which such plays divulge may stimulate some
model citizens to help the police and the doctors, but
it may suggest to a much larger number hitherto un-
known paths of viciousness. The average New Yorker
would hear with surprise from the Rockefeller Report
on Commercialized Prostitution in New York City that
the commission has visited in Manhattan a hundred
and forty parlour houses, twenty of which were known
to the trade as fifty-cent houses, eighty as one-dollar
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
houses, six as two-dollar houses, and thirty -four as five-
and ten-dollar houses. Yet the chances are great that
essentially persons with serious interests in social
hygiene turn to such books of sober study. But to cry
out such information to those Broadway crowds which
seek a few hours' fun before they go to the next lobster
palace or to the nearest cabaret cannot possibly serve
social hygiene.
Worst of all, the theatre, more than any other source
of so-called information, has been responsible for the
breakdown of the barriers of social reserve in sexual
discussions, and that means ultimately in erotic be-
haviour. The book which the individual man or
woman reads at his fireside has no socializing influence,
but the play which they see together is naturally dis-
cussed, views are exchanged, and all which in old-
fashioned times was avoided, even in serious discussion,
becomes daily more a matter of the most superficial
gossip. Wheir recently at a dinner party a charming
young woman whom I had hardly met before asked
me, when we were at the oysters, how prostitution is
regulated in Germany, and did not conclude the subject
before we had reached the ice cream, I saw the natural
consequences of this new era of theatre influence.
Society, which with the excuse of philanthropic so-
[42]
SEX EDUCATION
ciology favours erotically tainted problems, must sink
down to a community in which the sexual relations be-
come chaotic and turbulent. Finally, the theatre is
not open only to the adult. Its filthy message reaches
the ears of boys and girls, who, even if they take it
solemnly, are forced to think of these facts and to set
the whole mechanism of sexual associations and com-
plex reactions into motion. The playwriters know
that well, but they have their own theory. When I
once remonstrated against the indecencies which are
injected into the imagination of the adolescent by the
plays, Mr. Bayard Veiller, the talented author of "The
Fight," answered in a Sunday newspaper. He said
that he could not help thinking of the insane man who
objected to throwing a bucket of salt water into the
ocean for fear it would turn the ocean salt. "Does
not Professor Miinsterberg know that you can't
put more sex thoughts into the minds of young men
and women, because their minds contain nothing
else?" If the present movement is not brought to
a stop, the time may indeed come when those young
minds will not contain anything else. But is that
really true of to-day, and, above all, was it true of
yesterday, before the curtain was raised on the red-
light drama?
[43]
PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
VI
How is it possible that with such obvious dangers and
such evident injurious effects, this movement on the
stage and in literature, in the schools and in the homes,
is defended and furthered by so many well-meaning
and earnest thinking men and women in the com-
munity? A number of causes may have worked to-
gether there. It cannot be overlooked that one of the
most effective ones was probably the new enthusiasm
for the feministic movement. We do not want to dis-
cuss here the right and wrong of this worldwide ad-
vance toward the fuller liberation of women. If we
have to touch on it here, it is only to point out that
this connection between the sound elements of the
feministic movement and the propaganda for sex edu-
cation on the new-fashioned lines is really not neces-
sary at all. I do not know whether the feminists are
entirely right, but I feel sure that their own principles
ought rather to lead them to an opposition to this break-
ing down of the barriers. It is nothing but a super-
ficiality if they instinctively take their stand on the side
of those who spread broadcast the knowledge about
sex.
The feminists vehemently object to the dual stand-
ard, but if they help everything which makes sex an
[44]
SEX EDUCATION
object of common gossip, it may work indeed toward a
uniform standard; only the uniformity will not consist
in the men's being chaste like the women, but in the
women's being immoral like the men. The feministic
enthusiasm turns passionately against those scandalous
places of women's humiliation; and yet its chief in-
fluence on female education is the effort to give more
freedom to the individual girl, and that means to re-
move her from the authority and discipline of the par-
ental home, to open the door for her to the street, to
leave her to her craving for amusement, to smooth the
path which leads to ruin. The sincere feminists may
say that some of the changes which they hope for are so
great that they are ready to pay the price for them and
to take in exchange a rapid increase of sexual vice and
of erotic disorderliness. But to fancy that the libera-
tion of women and the protection of women can be
furthered by the same means is a psychological illusion.
The community which opens the playhouses to the
lure of the new dramatic art may protect 5 per cent, of
those who are in danger to-day, but throws 50 per cent,
more into abysses. The feminists who see to the depths
of their ideals ought to join full-heartedly the ranks of
those who entirely object to this distribution of the in-
fectious germs of sexual knowledge.
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
Some stray support may come to the new movement
also from another side. Some believe that this great
emphasis on sexual interests may intensify aesthetic
longings in the American commonwealth. No doubt
this interrelation exists. No civilization has known a
great artistic rise without a certain freedom and joy in
sensual life. Prudery always has made true aesthetic
unfolding impossible. Yet if we yielded here, we would
again be pushed away from our real problem. The
aesthetic enthusiast might think it a blessing for the
American nation if a great aesthetic outburst were se-
cured, even by the ruin of moral standards : a wonderful
blossoming of fascinating flowers from a swampy soil
in an atmosphere full of moral miasmas. To be sure,
even then it is very doubtful whether any success could
be hoped for, as a lightness in sexual matters may be a
symptom of an artistic age, but surely is not its cause.
The artist may love to drink, but the drink does not
make an artist. An aesthetic community may reach
its best when it is freed from sexual censorship, but
throwing the censor out of the house would not add
anything to the aesthetic inspiration of a society which
is instinctively indifferent to the artistic calling.
Above all, the question for us is not whether the sexual
overeducation may have certain pleasant side effects:
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SEX EDUCATION
we ask only how far it succeeds in its intended chief
effect of improving morally the social community.
In fact, neither feminism nor eestheticism could
have secured this indulgence of the community in the
new movement, if one more direct argument had not
influenced the conviction of some of our leaders. They
reason around one central thought namely, that the
old policy of silence, in which they grew up, has been
tried and has shown itself unsuccessful. The horrible
dimensions which the social evil has taken, the ruinous
effects on family life and national health, are before us.
The old policy must therefore be wrong. Let us try
.with all our might the reform, however disgusting its
first appearance may be. This surely is the virile
argument of men who know what they are aiming at.
And yet it is based on fundamental psychological mis-
apprehensions. It is a great confusion of causes and
effects. The misery has this distressing form not
on account of the policy of silence, but hi spite
of it, or rather it took the tremendous dimensions
of to-day at the same time that the dam of silence
was broken and the flood of sexual gossip rushed
in.
We find exactly this relation throughout the history
of civilized mankind. To be sure, some editorial writ-
[47]
PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
ers behave as if the erotic calamity of the day were
something unheard of, and as if it demanded a new
remedy. The historical retrospect leaves no doubt
that periods of sexual tension and of sexual relaxation,
of hysteric erotic excitement and of a certain cool in-
difference have alternated throughout thousands of
years. And whenever an age was unusually immoral
and lascivious, it was always also a period in which
under the mask of scientific interest or social frankness
or aesthetic openmindedness the sexual problems were
matters of freest discussion. The periods of aus-
terity and restraint, on the other hand, were always
characterized also by an unwillingness to talk about
sexual relations and to show them in their animal nak-
edness. Antiquity knew those ups and downs, medi-
aeval times knew them, and in modern centuries the
fluctuations have been still more rapid. As soon as a
moral age with its policy of silence is succeeded by an
immoral age, it is certainly a very easy historical mis-
construction to say that the immorality resulted from
the preceding conspiracy of silence and that the im-
morality would disappear if the opposite scheme of
frankest speech were adopted. But the fact that this
argument is accepted and that the overwhelming ma-
jority hails the new regime with enthusiasm is nothing
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SEX EDUCATION
but an almost essential part of the new period, which
has succeeded the time of modesty.
Sexual discussion and sexual immorality have always
been parts of one circle; sexual silence and moral re-
straint form another circle. The change from one to
the other has come in the history of mankind, usually
through new conditions of life, and the primary factor
has not been any policy of keeping quiet in respect or
of gossiping in curiosity, but the starting point has
generally been a change in the life habits. When new
wealth has come to a people with new liberties and new
desires for enjoyment, the great periods of sexual fri-
volity have started and brought secondarily the dis-
cussions of sex problems, which intensified the immoral
life. On the other hand, when a nation in the richness
of its life has been brought before new great responsi-
bilities, great social earthquakes and revolutions, great
wars for national honour, or great new intellectual or
religious ideals, then the sexual tension has been re-
leased, the attention has been withdrawn from the
frivolous concerns, and the people have settled down
soberly to a life of modesty and morality, which brought
with it as a natural consequence the policy of reverence
and silence. The new situation in America, and to a
certain degree all over the world, has come in, too, not
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
through the silence of the preceding generation, but
by the sudden change from agricultural to industrial
life, with its gigantic cumulation of capital, with its
widespread new wealth, with its new ideas of social
liberty, with its fading religion, with its technical won-
ders of luxury and comfort. This new age, which
takes its orders from Broadway with its cabarets and
tango dances, must ridicule the silence of our fathers
and denounce it as a conspiracy. It needs the sexual
discussions, as it craves the lurid music and the
sensual dances, until finally even the most earnest
energies, those of social reform and of hygiene, of
intellectual culture and of artistic effort, are forced
into the service of this antimoral fashion.
Some sober spectators argue that as things have gone
to this extent, it might be wise to try the new policy as
an experiment, because matters cannot become worse
than they are to-day. But those who yield to the new ad-
vice so readily ought again to look into the pages of
history, or ought at least to study the situation in some
other countries before they proclaim that the climax
has been reached. It may be true that it would not be
possible to transform still more New York hotels into
dancing halls, since the innovation of this fashion, which
suggests the dancing epidemics of mediaeval times, has
[50]
SEX EDUCATION
reached practically every fashionable hostelry. Yet
we may be only at the beginning, as in this vicious circle
of craving for sensual life and talking about sexual prob-
lems the erotic transformation of the whole social be-
haviour is usually a rapid one. The Rococo age
reached many subtleties, which we do not dream of as
yet, but to which the conspiracy against silence may
boldly push us. Read the memoirs of Casanova, the
Italian of the eighteenth century, whose biography
gives a vivid picture of a time ir which certainly no one
was silent on sexual affairs and in which life was essen-
tially a chain of gallant adventures; even the sexual
diseases figured as gallant diseases. In the select
American circles it is already noticeable that the favour-
ites of rich men get a certain social acknowledgment.
The great masses have not reached this stage at pres-
ent, which is, of course, very familiar in France. But if
we proceed in that rapid rhythm with which we have
changed in the last ten years, ten years hence we may
have substituted the influence of mistresses for the
influence of Tammany grafters, and twenty years hence
a Madame Pompadour may be dwelling not far from
the White House and controlling the fate of the nation
with her small hands, as she did for two decades when
Louis XV was king. History has sufficiently shown
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY
that these are the logical consequences of the sensuali-
zation of a rich people, whose mind is filled with sexual
problems. Are we to wait, too, until a great revolution
or a great war shakes the nation to its depths and ham-
mers new ideas of morality into its conscience? Even
our literature might sink still deeper and deeper. If we
begin with the sexual problem, it lies in its very nature
that that which is interesting to-day is to-morrow stale,
and new regions of sexuality must be opened. The
fiction of Germany in the last few years shows the whole
pathetic decadence which results. The most abstruse
perversions, the ugliest degenerations of sexual sinful-
ness, have become the favourite topics, and the best
sellers are books which in the previous age would have
been crushed by police and public opinion alike, but
which in the present time are excused under scientific
and sociological pretences, although they are more cor-
rupt and carry more infection than any diseases against
which they warn.
VII
What is to be done? In one point we all agree : Those
who are called to do so must bend their utmost energy
toward the purification of the outer forms of com-
munity life and of the public institutions. Certain
[52]
SEX EDUCATION
eugenic ideas must be carried through relentlessly;
above all, the sexual segregation of the feeble-minded,
whose progeny fills the houses of disorder and the ranks
of the prostitutes. The hospitals must be wide open
for every sexual disease, and all discrimination against
diseases which may be acquired by sexual intercourse
must be utterly given up in order to stamp out this
scourge of mankind, as far as possible, with the medical
knowledge of our day. Every effort must be made to
suppress places through which unclean temptations are
influencing the youth. Parents and doctors should
speak in the intimacy of private talk earnest words of
warning. The fight against police corruption and graft
must be relentlessly carried on so as to have the viola-
tion of the laws really punished.
Many means may still seem debatable among those
who know the social and medical facts. Certainly some
of the eugenic postulates go too far. It is, for instance,
extremely difficult to say where the limit is to be set
for permissible marriages. There may be no doubt
that feeble-mindedness ought not to be transmitted to
the next generation, but have we really a right to pre-
vent the marriage of epileptics or psychasthenics?
Can we be surprised then that others already begin to
demand that neurasthenics shall not marry? Even the
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PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL SANITY