NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/alt/feminism/4565

Text File | 1992-11-17 | 5.9 KB | 128 lines

Newsgroups: alt.feminism
Path: sparky!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!umn.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!barry
From: [e-mail] (Kenn Barry)
Subject: Re: sex in the good ol' days
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Organization: QQQCLC
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 05:43:14 GMT
Lines: 117

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>Maybe Kayembee will post some quotes from the
>material he has?  We could compare it then.  Will he be so generous?

    Hmm, two requests for this, one by email, one on the net - I
call that popular demand! Anyway, this is fun stuff, in a weird way.

    The following quotes are from _What A Young Man Ought To Know_,
by Sylvanus Stall, D.D., a 1904 edition of a book copyrighted 1897. One
comment from me before I give Dr. Stall the floor: this book has a
somewhat plaintive and querulous tone which suggests to me that Dr.
Stall saw himself as bucking the odds; i.e., his remarks were
probably considered somewhat conservative even in their own time.

    This first is an anecdote of an anxious father taking a young
son to a physician:

        After the examining physician had discovered that the
    child had the sense of hearing, the father was asked two
    questions: 'Does your child recognize the value of money?' to
    which the father replied in the negative. The other question was,
    'Does your child pray?' The father replied that the child could
    not pray, for he did not speak. To illustrate his meaning the
    physician said, 'When you have prayers at home, or when in
    Sunday-school or church, does your child kneel down, clasp his
    hands, raise his face toward heaven or in any other way place
    himself in an attitude of prayer?' The reply was in the negative.
    After dismissing the parent with his child, this eminent
    physician turned to his class of three hundred students and said:
    'Young gentlemen, the absence of these two qualities, the one
    intellectual and the other moral, are clear indications of idiocy,
    and the absence of either one makes the sanity of a child a
    question of grave doubt. [...] to pray is as natural to a child
    as the desire for food.'

    On the subject of novels:

        To be pure in body and in life one must be pure in mind.
    Perhaps nothing contributes more to the defilement of the mind
    than the reading of impure books. [...] the results they effect
    are the same in kind as masturbation and self-pollution [...]
    even lacking but slightly in degree. The appeal to the amative
    and sexual nature is so universal in novels that it might be
    safely laid down as a rule that no young men or young women should
    be permitted to read a novel before they arrive at the age of
    twenty-five.

    And the arts:

        Banish from your room and your possession all
    photographs and pictures whether known as works of art or shielded
    under some similarly deceptive and euphonious title, but which
    are nevertheless 'nude and nasty,' and which consequently beget
    impure thoughts, pollute the imagination and debase that which is
    noblest and best in the beholder, it matters not whether the
    pictures are suspended from the walls of an art gallery or
    grace (disgrace) the parlors of the wealthy.

    Premarital sex with one's bride-to-be:

        That you are not severely rebuked, or resisted, or even
    if consent was indicated by passivity, remember that you are
    nevertheless the criminal betrayer of one whose confidence you
    have gained, but whose respect you deliberately sacrifice, and
    whose name and reputation you sully, and whose character you
    seriously mar. Even though she should by her own consent prove
    herself as debased and degraded as Potiphar's wife, your own
    sense of honor and manhood should enable you to say, like
    Joseph: 'How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against
    God?' Flee from such a woman. To make her your wife would be
    deliberately to blight your life, to blast your happiness, and
    render impossible the happiness and blessing that would
    probably and reasonably be yours if married to a pure-minded and
    virtuous woman.

    Dancing:

        The insufficient dressing, the undue exposure of the
    persons of the females in the dance, the suggestive attitudes,
    the personal contact, the passionate excitement, and the undue
    license allowed while whirling upon the floor to the strains of
    music are such as cannot help but arouse in any strong, vigorous,
    normally-developed young man the strongest sensual tendencies
    and propensities of his nature.

    [Hmmm, score one for Dr. Stall :-)]

    Theatre:

        Here the low, the drunken, and the sensual hiss at what
    is pure and holy, and applaud that which appeals to their basest
    passions.

    Card-playing (with or without betting):

        Sacred things will first lose their hold upon you,
    business and daily duties will begin to grow irksome, the
    enchantment will continue to grow stronger, and before you are
    aware you will be upon the swift current which rages among the
    rocks of dissipation, dishonesty, deceit, and then sweeps on to
    eternal destruction.


    Overall, the book spends most of its length on the horrors of
venereal disease, and of masturbation, to which it attributes mental and
physical illness. It is not frank enough to discuss details of the
marriage bed, as the other recently-posted excerpt did. Another reason,
perhaps, to doubt the authenticity of that excerpt. But it is as vivid
in its description of the effects of syphilis as any army training film.

    I think I'll take modern life and morality. May not be perfect,
but it's awfully hard to figure out what Dr. Stall's ideal young man was
supposed to do for fun.

-  Nothing fails like success  -             Kenn Barry
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