Shrouding Sex in Mystery Brings Disaster

Date

1925-05

Source

Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition, Collected Documents Series, C16:259
"Shrouding Se in Mystery Brings Disaster," Physical Culture, May 1925, p. 32

Identifier

Text

Shrouding Sex in Mystery Brings Disaster

We hear a great deal about the freedom that belongs to the children of today the freedom that is theirs because they have demanded it. It makes us older ones tremble a little wondering what they will do with it now that they have it. How many of us I wonder, realize that almost everything depends upon the guidance which we, as parents, give to the children entrusted to us. Perhaps the greatest torch that we can hand on to the young lives of today in a hope of leading their feet to safety, is a wholesome knowledge of sex. The age-long teaching that sex is something not to be imparted by parents to their children, but shrouded in mystery, has done more to bring disaster in the lives of young boys and girls than almost anything else.

Sex is a salient thing in the life of the adolescent. Yet how many boys and girls are left to glean this important knowledge from sources that distort and misrepresent through ignorance, the truth that should have been given them in the same spirit that religion and integrity was given.

It is always the rising generation that is the material of which progress is made. It is the ideas that we give this generation that will shape not only the lives of our boys and girls today but the lives of those who belong to posterity.

We have come to know that we cannot gather perfect fruit except from perfect trees. Today we are facing a new dawn and we must meet it with nothing less than the truth. Truth about sex, truth about marriage, truth about parenthood. It is the only way to attain a perfect freedom.

Upon our shoulders rests the responsibility of creating a new sex morality. The vital difference between a morality thus created and the so-called morality of the past is that the new standard will be based upon knowledge and freedom while the old was founded upon ignorance.

When we have raised the standard of sex ideals and purged the human mind of its unclean conception of sex, the fountain of the race will have been cleansed. We will have a race that is morally and spiritually free.