It shows that no man wants to live unto himself alone. If it shows, too, that some of the methods used in the search for union are mistaken ones, that is our chance to correct the mistakes and improve the methods. This is the lesson to be learned from the Kinsey report. Too often parents have been inclined to think of sex as something that suddenly develops in their children after they grow up and preferably not until they are married, especially in the case of their daughters. Technically boys are held to this standard, too, but actually their occasional departures from it are glossed over rather leniently with a slight smile and a tolerant comment to the effect that, after all, boys will be boys and can hardly be expected not to sow a few wild oats.
Daughters are different.
Fearful parents have managed to drill into them the idea that sex is a pretty nasty, dangerous business to be avoided as one would shun the devil until the marriage ceremony and a wedding ring on the third finger of the left hand somehow sanctified and made it holy. Thus boys have grown up regarding sex with a smirk, and the girls they married brought a hangover of fear or disgust with the whole thing to the difficult adjustment required of them by the honeymoon. Nearly fifty years ago Freud tried to teach the world to look at sex differently, but the world was shocked by his revelations just as it is now shocked by Dr. Kinsey's findings which confirm the phenomenon of early sexual arousal in all of us. Freud showed us that, sexual drives exist in the infant and child as surely as the ripe, red apple exists in the small black seed that is planted in the ground to boar its crop years later. The love that poets write about has the simplest and most humble of beginnings.