Sex and its mysteries / by George Ryley Scott.

  • Scott, George Ryley, 1886-1955
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sex and its mysteries / by George Ryley Scott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    generation the average married man or woman. The bulk know a good deal more. It is questionable if there is to be found a child over six years who will greet with anything but a guffaw of derision the story of the baby coming in the doctor's bag. The subject of sex is discussed in lectures at Y.M.C.A.'s, talks at P.S.A.'s : it is even touched upon tentatively in the school curriculum. There is for the buying a small library of books dealing with sexual matters, ranging all the way from What a Young Man Ought to Know, flaunted gaily in shops and on bookstalls, to Forel's and Krafft-EDing's works sur- reptitiously hawked by bootlegging second-hand dealers. The illustrated tabloids and the cinema, with their portraiture of various stages of semi-nudity; the cult of mixed bathing and the popularity of the witch- doctor's costumes on seaside and health-resort prom- enades, complete the process of disillusion. As year succeeds year the stripping of woman's mysterious charm proceeds gaily. Foremost in the game, of course, is woman herself. Blindly and with gusto she goes on her way committing hari-kari. Thus knowledge of sexual matters has in this decade reached such a pitch and become so ecumenic that ignorance is not so much deplorable as dangerous. The youth whose adolescence has been surrounded by fences which have successfully prevented his con- tamination by those of his fellows who are sophisticated in elementary sex physiology is in distinct clanger the moment he is set loose. The girl whose incursions into sexology are limited to the knowledge that once a month she is to suffer inconvenience, when suddenly thrown into modern life, runs considerable risks of being branded with the stigma of shame. The moral attitude towards sex thus becomes mon-