he generally received opinion, I believe that a child may
preserve his sexual innocence more easily in a town than in the
country. There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this rule. But
the functions of the sexual life are generally more concealed in
the towns than in the fields. Modesty (whether or not of the
merely superficial and exterior kind) is more developed among
urban populations. In speaking of sexual things in the towns
people veil their thought more; even the lower class in towns
employ more restraint, more euphemisms, than peasants. Thus in
the towns a child may easily fail to comprehend when risky
subjects are talked of in his presence. It may be said that the
corruption of towns, though more concealed, is all the deeper.
Maybe, but that concealment preserves children from it. The town
child sees prostitutes in the street every day without
distinguishing them from other people. In the country he would
every day hear it stated in the crudest terms that such and such
a girl has been found at night in a barn or a ditch making love
with such and such a youth, or that the servant girl slips every
night into the coachman's bed, the facts of sexual intercourse,
pregnancy, and childbirth being spoken of in the plainest terms.
In towns the child's attention is solicited by a thousand
different objects; in the country, except fieldwork, which fails
to interest him, he hears only of the reproduction of animals and
the erotic exploits of girls and youths. When we say that the
urban environment is more exciting we are thinking of adults, but
the things which excite the adult have usually no erotic effect
on the child, who cannot, however, long remain asexual when he
sees the great peasant girls, as ardent as mares in heat,
abandoning themselves to the arms of robust youths. He cannot
fail to remark these frank manifestations of sexuality, though
the subtle and perverse refinements of the town would escape his
notice. I know that in the countries of exaggerated prudery there
is much hidden corruption, more, one is sometimes inclined to
think, than in less hypocritical countries. But I believe that
that is a false impression, and am persuaded that precisely
because of all these little concealments which excite the
malicious amusement of foreigners, there are really many more