le for girls who by reason of
their economic or social status are peculiarly exposed to sexual
temptation and danger.

Training for motherhood, a great gap in our educational system, is a
closely related theme, of incomparable importance, but beyond the scope
of this work.

(2) Boys should learn early the rewards of continence: that the
conservation of the sexual secretions is the indispensable condition of
manly growth in stature, muscular powers, voice, heart, and brain. They
should learn the possibility and healthiness of continence--always
understanding that mental continence is the prerequisite of physical
continence.

They should know in good time that nocturnal emissions are quite normal,
when not too frequent, and indicate not lost manhood or the danger of it,
but merely the fact that the sexual glands are now for the first time all
developed and active. This is one of the simplest and most commonplace
facts in the whole range of sex knowledge, yet, through ignorance of it,
unknown multitudes of boys have suffered anxiety sometimes amounting to
terror, have become moody and dejected, lost interest in work and studies;
and finally thousands of them, ashamed to ask counsel or enlightenment
from any decent source, have had recourse to the venereal quack, who so
artfully spreads his snares for them in daily paper and widely circulated
pamphlet. Once the victim is in his hands there is almost no limit to the
evil that may result.[38] High-school principals tell of watching the
faces of their boys during a lecture on sex hygiene and noting the visible
signs of relief and new hope when the lecturer explained the true nature
and meaning of emissions.

So far as the so-called "sexual necessity" is concerned, let boys
understand that it is unknown among animals; that its completest
embodiment is found in degenerates and imbeciles; and that athletes,
thinkers, priests, scholars, warriors, the finest men of every type, hold
their passions strictly subject to their wills. Let them know that the
world is well supplied with wretches whom this very "sexual necessity" has
robbed of their precious virile powers, but that the cases of impotence
through chastity are certainly unproved and probably non-existent except
in the imagination of people who want to believe in them. And finally that
numberless fathers of big healthy families were as chaste as the wives who
bore their children.

Boys should learn that the man who insis