out
to sea without a chart; as soldiers who fight a campaign without a map. I
do not think this is too much to say of the way in which a large number of
the men and women that I know--even those of this generation--have been
expected to tackle one of the greatest problems that the human race has
to solve.

May I sketch what I imagine is the experience of most people? At some point
in our lives we begin to be curious; we ask a question; we are met with a
jest or a lie, or with a rebuke, or with some evasion that conveys to
us, quite successfully, that we ought not to have asked the question. The
question generally has to do with the matter of birth--the birth of babies,
or kittens, or chickens; some point of curiosity connected with the birth
of young creatures is generally the first thing that awakens our interest.
When we meet with evasion, lies, or reproof, we naturally conclude that
there is something about the birth of life into the world that we ought not
to know, and since it is apparently wrong of us even to wish to know it,
it is presumably disgusting. We seek to learn from other and more grimy
sources what our parents might have told us, and, learning, arrive at the
conclusion that in the relations of men and women there is also something
that is repulsive. And since, in spite of this, our interest does not cease
but becomes furtive curiosity, we also conclude that there is something
depraved and disgusting about ourselves.

Now, all of these three conclusions are lies; and, therefore, we set out in
life equipped with a lie in our souls. It is not a good beginning. It means
that almost at once those of us who persist in our desire to know are in
danger of losing our self-respect. We learn that there is something in sex
that is base--so base that even our own parents will not speak to us about
it; and because of that, and because a child instinctively does accept,
during the first few years of its existence, what its parents or guardians
say, we assume that there must be something bad in us, since we so
persistently desire to know what is so evil that nobody will speak of it at
all. Or if anyone does allude to it, it is with unwholesome furtiveness and
a rather silly kind of mirth, so as to increase in the minds of many of us
the sense that there must be something in our nature that we cannot respect
because nobody else finds it beautiful or respectable.

Our next step, especially if we are conscientious peopl