ly and unscientifically the psychopathological
literature of sex by such authors as Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, and
Freud, are probably unsafe teachers of sex-hygiene. Especially is this
true of the women of this type whose introspective morbidity has led
them to diagnose their own functional disturbances as the direct result
of "over-sexuality" and restraint from normal sexual expression--a
diagnosis that is probably wrong nine times in ten cases. Such a woman
is a very dangerous teacher of sex-hygiene for adolescent girls; and a
positive menace to older unmarried women who, if free from absorbing
work, may spend their leisure in becoming more or less restless under
the unsocial, if not unphysiologic, conditions of unwelcome celibacy.
This is no imaginary danger. The reader of this will not be interested
in details, but the author has received from physicians and others
reliable information concerning several extremely abnormal women of the
above-described type who are taking an active interest in the
sex-instruction of young people and are actually suggesting to their
friends among young women the dangerous and untrue doctrine that
prolonged celibacy for women results in repressed sexuality that surely
leads to ill health. Such ideas, it is true, are traceable to certain
well-known radical writers on the psychopathology of sex; but we must
remember that the great majority of physicians and other scientific
investigators who have studied such problems refuse to believe that
repressed sex instincts in either men or women do the harm that a few
extremists have claimed. But even if it were known beyond the shadow of
a doubt that repressed sex instincts may injure people, it would be
unwise to intrust young people to instruction by teachers who have a
hypochondriacal interest in such a doctrine of repression. Such
suggestions can do only harm to the vast majority of persons who
receive them. To say the least, it is unfortunate that the
psychopathology of sex has become so widely circulated among those who
are not well trained in physiology and psychiatry.

[Sidenote: Teachers who emphasize sexual abnormality.]

The third kind of people who should not be intrusted with teaching
sex-hygiene are the men and women who, without a scientific
perspective, have plunged into the literature of sexual abnormality
until they have come to think that knowledge concerning perverted life
is an important part of sex-education for young