en it was made generally known that a
postoffice official had said that any discussion of sex was obscene,
there followed such a rattling fire of reprobation and condemnation even
from many startled conventionalists, who could support the thing but
could not look it in the face, that the maker of the now historic phrase
was moved to deny that he had said it officially. In fact, there are
many signs, most of them still small, on the distant horizon, it is
true, which indicate that we are becoming alive to the fact that it is
imperative that sex should be discussed.

This is an age of radical ideas. Radicalism in politics, in religion, in
ethics is ripe; which is only another way of saying that we are
beginning to dare to think. Probably the most apparent, if not the most
significant, sign of the general radicalism, is the tendency to exalt
the science of life to an even higher plane than that which it occupied
in the days of Hellenic supremacy. We are beginning to understand that
right living is a purely physical matter, and that morals are only laws
of health; and if there are yet but few who dare take so radical a view
of morals as that, still there are quite as few who will not admit
freely that nothing can be immoral which is beneficial to the human
body.

Of course, it is unthinkable, even from the point of view of the most
conventional of orthodox Christians, that there can be any immorality in
sex, for sex in itself is absolutely a work of the deity, hence of the
highest morality, if it can have any such attribute at all. As well
might one give digestion a moral quality. Morality is surely a matter of
personal conduct. One may say that it is immoral to eat so much as to
injure one's health, but it is not a matter of record that any
considerable body of persons declares the stomach to be an immoral
organ, or the digestive function to be an immoral one, or any discussion
of digestion immoral. Then why sex or sex functions?

It is true that Comstockery has us to designate our legs, limbs, though
not at the present time with any legal penalty for not doing so; it
prescribes the word stomach for polite usage in describing that part of
the body which lies subjacent to the actual stomach, anterior to the
spinal column and posterior to the abdominal wall; it forbids a visible
bifurcated garment for the "limbs" of a female; and it does a variety of
other absurd things, all going to show that in some singular fashion it