They would have so many problems to puzzle over: How often
ought I to eat? What ought I to eat? Is it wrong to eat fruit, which I
like? Ought I to eat grass, which I don't like? Instinct notwithstanding,
we may be quite sure that only a small minority would succeed in eating
reasonably and wholesomely. The sexual secrecy of life is even more
disastrous than such a nutritive secrecy would be; partly because we
expend such a wealth of moral energy in directing or misdirecting it,
partly because the sexual impulse normally develops at the same time as
the intellectual impulse, not in the early years of life, when wholesome
instinctive habits might be formed. And there is always some ignorant and
foolish friend who is prepared still further to muddle things: Eat a meal
every other day! Eat twelve meals a day! Never eat fruit! Always eat
grass! The advice emphatically given in sexual matters is usually not less
absurd than this. When, however, the matter is fully open, the problems of
food are not indeed wholly solved, but everyone is enabled by the
experience of his fellows to reach some sort of situation suited to his
own case. And when the rigid secrecy is once swept away a sane and natural
reticence becomes for the first time possible.
This secrecy has not always been maintained. When the Catholic Church was
at the summit of its power and influence it fully realized the magnitude
of sexual problems and took an active and inquiring interest in all the
details of normal and abnormal sexuality.
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