The “Sex Is Healthy” Myth
HOW often have you heard or read that it is psychologically and physically unhealthy for someone to go without sexual relations? College newspapers especially like to run articles making this point. The idea is not new. It was prevalent in the late nineteenth century too. The Rev. Arthur Devine, writing in 1897 in his essay “The Virtue of Chastity,” challenged it:
I shall notice one or two other excuses that are so false and misleading, but, nevertheless, are often used for the worst of purposes–that is, the falsehood that ‘all young men exceed the bounds of morality,’ and that those amongst them who have lived pure and chaste have been mere ‘prigs,’ ‘milksops,’ ‘weaklings,’ ‘muffs,’ men whose society must have been uncommonly ‘slow’ (to use the slang phraseology of the vicious). On the contrary, many can look to old acquaintances who as young men lived pure, chaste lives, uncontaminated by the grosser vices which constitute dissipation, and these, in the words of Mr. Hime, who refers to them, ‘were the first specimens of the young men at the time I refer to in the University . . . and were acknowledged superior to the large majority of their class fellows in all respects–physically as well as morally and intellectually. (more…)
