From: barry@netcom.com (Kenn Barry)
Subject: Re: sex in the good ol' days
Organization: QQQCLC
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 05:43:14 GMT

In article <1992Nov16.202344.25055@midway.uchicago.edu> mec6@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>Maybe Kayembee will post some quotes from the 
>material he has?  We could compare it then.  Will he be so generous?

	Hmm, two requests for this, one by email, one on the net - I
call that popular demand! Anyway, this is fun stuff, in a weird way.

	The following quotes are from _What A Young Man Ought To Know_,
by Sylvanus Stall, D.D., a 1904 edition of a book copyrighted 1897. One
comment from me before I give Dr. Stall the floor: this book has a
somewhat plaintive and querulous tone which suggests to me that Dr.
Stall saw himself as bucking the odds; i.e., his remarks were
probably considered somewhat conservative even in their own time.

	This first is an anecdote of an anxious father taking a young
son to a physician:

		After the examining physician had discovered that the
	child had the sense of hearing, the father was asked two
	questions: 'Does your child recognize the value of money?' to
	which the father replied in the negative. The other question was,
	'Does your child pray?' The father replied that the child could
	not pray, for he did not speak. To illustrate his meaning the
	physician said, 'When you have prayers at home, or when in
	Sunday-school or church, does your child kneel down, clasp his
	hands, raise his face toward heaven or in any other way place
	himself in an attitude of prayer?' The reply was in the negative.
	After dismissing the parent with his child, this eminent
	physician turned to his class of three hundred students and said:
	'Young gentlemen, the absence of these two qualities, the one
	intellectual and the other moral, are clear indications of idiocy,
	and the absence of either one makes the sanity of a child a
	question of grave doubt. [...] to pray is as natural to a child
	as the desire for food.'

	On the subject of novels:

		To be pure in body and in life one must be pure in mind.
	Perhaps nothing contributes more to the defilement of the mind
	than the reading of impure books. [...] the results they effect
	are the same in kind as masturbation and self-pollution [...]
	even lacking but slightly in degree. The appeal to the amative
	and sexual nature is so universal in novels that it might be
	safely laid down as a rule that no young men or young women should
	be permitted to read a novel before they arrive at the age of
	twenty-five.

	And the arts:

		Banish from your room and your possession all
	photographs and pictures whether known as works of art or shielded
	under some similarly deceptive and euphonious title, but which
	are nevertheless 'nude and nasty,' and which consequently beget
	impure thoughts, pollute the imagination and debase that which is
	noblest and best in the beholder, it matters not whether the
	pictures are suspended from the walls of an art gallery or
	grace (disgrace) the parlors of the wealthy.

	Premarital sex with one's bride-to-be:

		That you are not severely rebuked, or resisted, or even
	if consent was indicated by passivity, remember that you are
	nevertheless the criminal betrayer of one whose confidence you
	have gained, but whose respect you deliberately sacrifice, and
	whose name and reputation you sully, and whose character you
	seriously mar. Even though she should by her own consent prove
	herself as debased and degraded as Potiphar's wife, your own
	sense of honor and manhood should enable you to say, like
	Joseph: 'How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against
	God?' Flee from such a woman. To make her your wife would be
	deliberately to blight your life, to blast your happiness, and
	render impossible the happiness and blessing that would
	probably and reasonably be yours if married to a pure-minded and
	virtuous woman.

	Dancing:

		The insufficient dressing, the undue exposure of the
	persons of the females in the dance, the suggestive attitudes,
	the personal contact, the passionate excitement, and the undue
	license allowed while whirling upon the floor to the strains of
	music are such as cannot help but arouse in any strong, vigorous,
	normally-developed young man the strongest sensual tendencies
	and propensities of his nature.

	[Hmmm, score one for Dr. Stall :-)]

	Theatre:

		Here the low, the drunken, and the sensual hiss at what
	is pure and holy, and applaud that which appeals to their basest
	passions.

	Card-playing (with or without betting):

		Sacred things will first lose their hold upon you,
	business and daily duties will begin to grow irksome, the
	enchantment will continue to grow stronger, and before you are
	aware you will be upon the swift current which rages among the
	rocks of dissipation, dishonesty, deceit, and then sweeps on to
	eternal destruction.


	Overall, the book spends most of its length on the horrors of
venereal disease, and of masturbation, to which it attributes mental and
physical illness. It is not frank enough to discuss details of the
marriage bed, as the other recently-posted excerpt did. Another reason,
perhaps, to doubt the authenticity of that excerpt. But it is as vivid
in its description of the effects of syphilis as any army training film.

	I think I'll take modern life and morality. May not be perfect,
but it's awfully hard to figure out what Dr. Stall's ideal young man was
supposed to do for fun.

-  Nothing fails like success  -             Kenn Barry
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