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Swiss physician Samuel Tissot's Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism (1760), which advanced the notion that loss of sperm is hazardous to men's health, was among the first of a succession of influential books to propagate the belief that sexual overindulgence could lead to debility and madness.

Tissot's alarmist vision of carnality was inconsistent with cavalier sexual attitudes prevalent in 18th-century Europe and America. By the 1830s, however, a growing body of medical literature was focused on the "secret vice"-- masturbation-- and on sexual excess of all kinds.

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"Sexual excess" could mean sex of any kind. One source of anxiety was release of semen, not only through masturbation or promiscuity, but through marital sex, nocturnal emissions, and spermatorrhea, a condition causing the penis to leak sperm. American anti-masturbation firebrands included health-food entrepreneur Sylvester Graham, who believed married couples should only have intercourse once a month, and cornflake purveyor John Harvey Kellogg, author of Plain Facts for Old and Young. Ellen White, founder of the Seventh Day Adventist movement, warned in her Appeal to Mothers (1864) that not only did masturbation lead to blindness, insanity, "affections of the spine," and an array of diseases, it caused the head to "decay inwardly."

Authorities urged parents to police their children's sex play, with special vigilance reserved for same-sex activity. "It is not a good practice for boys to be allowed to sleep together, especially those of different families," Drs. I. De Ver Warner and Lucien Warner assured their readers in Man in Health and Disease (1879). "Boys will do in bed, under cover of darkness, what they would not do at other times."

In this climate, social purity crusaders like Anthony Comstock thrived. The Comstock Act of 1873 not only banned contraceptives from the US mails, but "every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice" giving information about contraception or abortion.

As John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman point out in Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, abstention from sex was advocated in the 19th century not simply by Puritanical chastity-hounds, but by early feminists who held that women should be autonomous and motherhood voluntary. At a time when contraception was demonized, abstinence was the preferred method of birth control.

Contraception wasn't all that was demonized. Mary Wood-Allen (Marriage: Its Duties and Privileges, 1901) urged women never to give in to "voluptuous spasms." Female orgasm was deemed to impede conception and promote depravity. Men were given similarly repressive advice. In Ten Sex Talks for Boys (1914), Irving Steinhardt of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis proclaimed, in caps: "the sexual relation is absolutely unnecessary to you or to any other man."

But by the end of the 19th century, common sense and better science had gained the upper hand. The National Education Association endorsed sex education in 1912. Four years later, Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood. In 1917, the White House Conference on Child Welfare affirmed the propriety of "sex instruction" in public schools. The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People, a booklet published in 1918 by Mary Ware Dennett, offered sane advice about sex, described the physiology of sex in plain language, and presented venereal disease in terms of precautions and treatment. Dennett bravely claimed that the harm caused by masturbation was simply "the worry caused by doing it, when one believed it to be wrong." Despite the strictures of the Comstock Act, The Sex Side of Life was sold by the YMCA and used as a public school textbook in Bronxville, New York.

But the first formal American sex education programs-- usually presented as "social hygiene"-- were seldom enlightened. In Not in Front of the Children, Marjorie Heins notes that early American sex-ed classes "preached celibacy outside marriage through a combination of moral injunctions and scare tactics." Some high schools subjected students to films, slides and film-strips showing such fleshly atrocities as untreated syphilitic lesions.

As of 1970, sex education was a required element in public school curricula in only six states. In the decade that followed, sex education spread through school systems, constantly shadowed by efforts to turn back the clock.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com