The Sin of Yielding to Impure Desire

"To prevent the immense evils of self-pollution, therefore, in our boys and students ... They should always subsist on a plain, simple, unstimulating, vegetable, and water diet; and care should be taken that they do not eat too fast, and are not excessive, in quantity. They should never be kept too long a time in a sitting, confined, or inactive posture. They should never sleep on feathers."
—Sylvester Graham, Lectures on Chastity (1834)

America's recent experience with abstinence-only sex education is merely the latest chapter in our long, sometimes ridiculous (to modern eyes, anyway) history of efforts to control humankind's most basic drive. While the earliest sex-ed pamphlets in the U.S. addressed theology and nutrition, they were also obsessed with the "immense evils" of masturbation. Graham (who used wheat flour to create the cracker that now bears his name) traveled the East Coast in the 1830s warning audiences that "self pollution" was responsible for everything from warts and constipation to insanity and death. Health reformers in 19th-century America associated bodily discipline with ideal manhood, and used sex-ed manuals to propagate that message. The Reverend John Todd's highly popular 1835 Student's Manual encouraged young men to overcome the "secret vice" of masturbation because ejaculation decreased energy and productivity. An article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal that same year likewise warned that ejaculation "should be made but sparingly," since "sturdy manhood ... loses its energy and bends under too frequent expenditure of this important secretion."

 

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The rapid urbanization of the late 1800s and early 1900s was accompanied by an increased interest in organized sex ed. As Americans moved from farms—where children might politely observe the mating of the family livestock—to cities rife with temptation, public officials began to see a greater need for classroom instruction about the facts of life. The National Education Association first discussed the subject in 1892, passing a resolution that called for "moral education in the schools." In 1913, Chicago became the first major city to implement sex ed for high schools. The program didn't last long, though. The Catholic Church soon launched a campaign against the initiative, helping force Ella Flagg Young, the superintendent of schools, to resign.

It took rampant STDs during WWI to get the federal government involved in sex ed. In 1918, Congress passed The Chamberlain-Kahn Act, which allocated money to educate soldiers about syphilis and gonorrhea. During this time, Americans began to view sex ed as a public-health issue. The American Hygiene Association, founded in 1914 as part of the Progressive-era social purity movement, helped teach soldiers about sexual hygiene throughout the war. Instructors used a machine called the stereomotorgraph to show soldiers microscopic slides of syphilis and gonorrhea organisms, as well as symptoms of the diseases on the body of an actual soldier.

The earliest sex-education film, Damaged Goods, warned soldiers of the consequences of syphilis. In the film, a man has sex with a prostitute the night before his wedding, gets syphilis, passes the disease on to his newborn baby, and then commits suicide. The film received positive reviews, with one critic writing, "American boy(s)...should be made to see it for they are to become the American manhood, and the cleaner physically, the better." A 1919 report from the U.S. Department of Labor's Children's Bureau likewise suggested that soldiers would have been better off if they had received sex instruction in school. "The worries and doubts and brooding imposed on boys and girls of the adolescent period as a result of lack of simple knowledge is a cruelty on the part of any society that is able to furnish that instruction," wrote the author of the report.