We Must Be Frank with Our Children... (Yes, We Must Speak Frankly About Sexual Matters)

... This is a grave question among our social questions, one which in this East we still leave to drift and waver, deceiving ourselves about it and burying it under a thick cloak of hypocrisy:

Is it permissible that the boy and the girl remain ignorant of sexual problems, and of the responsibility of directing their senses in this complicated, troubled life?

This is the question that "The Woman's Voice" poses today, for the great physicians and the great social thinkers to answer:
— The Editors —

Dr. Mustafa Khalidi

We must speak to our children with simplicity, frankness, and truth about sexual matters, because this subject is a delicate one, bound up most closely with their future lives — rather than leave doubt and suspicion in their souls. We must keep our children from drawing distorted, mistaken sexual information from bad companions and by other unpraiseworthy ways.

The sexual education of children must be suited to their age, and our success in conveying this information depends on the capability of the educator and his understanding of the subject. In my view it is advisable to explain to the child, in an easy and simple way, the reproductive life of man.

Arabic letters stand in urgent need of books for children on this subject.

Dr. Georges Hanna

To speak frankly with the boy and the girl about their sexual life and its developments is a very necessary thing. The sexual apparatus differs from the digestive apparatus and the respiratory and circulatory apparatus only in function. The functions of the body are bound up with one another, and functional independence simply does not exist.

The boy and the girl know that they have an eye to see with, an ear to hear with, and a stomach to digest their food; but they know nothing of their sexual life. And if the boy, with the social and educational advantages he enjoys, especially in the East, does grasp the nature of his sexual organs — a grasp deprived of sound practical guidance — that is not the case with the girl. And this grasp in the boy is no less dangerous than the absence of it in the girl. How often have tragic incidents occurred through the meeting of this waywardness on one side with total ignorance on the other.

The age of adolescence is the most dangerous period of life. The boy at this age reaches the threshold of manhood, and the girl is taken by surprise by the phenomenon of "menstruation." Health duty and social duty alike require that the two of them be enlightened about the organic and functional changes that will come over them, so that these surprises do not shock them and leave upon their bodily and psychological life a mark hard to cure and whose dangers are hard to escape. For this reason I insist on the necessity of sexual instruction for students of both sexes in the schools, at the hands of male and female teachers competent in learning and in character. And I hope this subject will be taken up in earnest and given due consideration.

Dr. Nihad Jureidini

Man came into being distinguished by nature with a love of learning, of inquiring, and of solving the things that seem obscure to him. This thirst appears at its plainest in the child: you see him begin his life by getting to know everything around him with every power given to him. And the child has a special inclination to learn about sexual questions; any guidance that does not take account of this inclination is corrupt guidance.

Sexual education among us has been greatly neglected — indeed it has been distorted in a way of which the least that can be said is that it is misleading, so that inquiry into it has become a forbidden thing. I still remember a mother who was bathing her little daughter while her son, who had not passed his third year, stood close by. No sooner did his eyes fall upon his little sister than astonishment seized him, and he began questioning his mother about the differences he had discovered. The mother did nothing but scold him and drive him away; the child suffered a painful shock and searched in vain for the sin he had committed.

This, most often, is how our first contact with sexual life begins. The child grows up with a false picture stamped on his imagination, hard to erase; fear takes hold of him, and this fear is renewed whenever the memory of that scene returns to him. The father does not clear up the matter, the mother does not repair what she has spoiled, and the child does not dare to broach the subject a second time. The child grows older, but his thirst to solve this obscure secret — which the mother's attitude has made all the more tangled — increases with the days; so he turns to his friends, where the result is a mistaken, corrupt understanding of sexual matters, an understanding coupled with fear — that fear which weakens the child's personality, indeed paralyzes it utterly.

Sexual matters hold a lofty place in the life of the individual and of society, and they are the foundation of the emotional life by whose balance the individual's personality is balanced and grows sound and strong. Acquaintance with them must begin in childhood, and the greatest responsibility falls upon the parents, because the first idea stamped on the child's imagination will be sound if the parents' attitude is sound, and corrupt if their attitude is corrupt. Parents, then, must give this side of life the greatest importance, and proceed with their children in teaching them sexual matters at a steady, continuous, frank pace that suits their mentality at every stage of their growth — so that when the young man's mind ripens, his information about these matters ripens with it, and he acquires a sound conception that makes him look upon them not as something forbidden but as a natural matter, just as he looks upon any other organ in his physiological being.

Dr. Nasib Barbir

I ask: does our neglecting to talk these things over with them, to tell them the truths frankly, and our withholding of counsel from them, keep them from understanding what we wished to hide? Are they barred from frequenting the moving-picture houses, from attending the provocative romantic dramas, from reading the licentious books with which the bookshops overflow — all of which create in the young man's soul, however strong his temper, however high his upbringing, however proud his spirit, a picture of sexual matters that is not the truth, but distorted and harmful, if not deadly? There is no doubt that adolescence is a dangerous age — nay, the most dangerous stage in a person's life. In it his inclinations show themselves according to his impressions: if we meet him with good, good follows; if with evil, evil. The adolescent — student or worker, poor or rich — turns in his every movement and stillness and thought toward sexual inquiry, not to learn the truths but most often to put them into practice, whether he wills it or not, because he is driven to it by the sexual instinct — that instinct which we must tend with polish and refinement if we are to keep the young man's future sound in health. In this way we cut off the road of corruption before the weak of soul, and cut off from the weak of mind grievous diseases beside which death itself is easier. And this can only be done if we explain to them the truths about the reproductive organs and their diseases; then there grows in them the faculty of courage and of facing the fact as it is, so that if some harm befalls them they speak frankly to their family and hasten to the remedy before the disease grows rampant.

In times past they used to hide from adolescents everything relating to the reproductive organs, their connection with psychological and health conditions, and their regrettable — indeed grievous — effects upon public health and upon society, believing that merely to broach this subject held danger — and what danger! — for the young man and the girl and for their futures, since it would awaken in them the reproductive sense and they would go astray. And they would come, of course, to prop up their opinion with examples that had happened to some Zayd among men or to some Bakr — examples true only of that Zayd and that Bakr, because such a one is sick in thought and soul and senses, and the abnormal case is no measure. The measures of virtue with them lay in the boy's and the girl's ignorance of everything connected with sex, and the family's delight grew the more their child displayed the utmost degrees of ignorance and simple-mindedness, in the belief that this was purity, all purity, and goodness, all goodness. And they did not know what hidden habits there were — more evil and more calamitous than the deadly diseases, for they destroy bodies, dissolve souls, waste minds, and kill sound offspring.

But today we live in a society entirely different from that ignorant society. Having changed so many of our worn-out customs and marched forward up the ascents of progress and civilization, we must change these measures as well, so that there enters into the very core of our teaching programs the subject of hygiene in its fullest sense, in which we explain

to the darlings of our hearts the truth of their existence and the functions of their organs — an explanation sufficient for the student to grasp what he wishes to know of secrets, satisfying his hunger, so that he adds to his manifold scientific culture a preventive, social culture of health that spares him woes and calamities.

Therefore the student must — I do not say may — acquire a complete acquaintance with all this, because I believe it is forbidden, utterly forbidden, that those like them, and of their age, should remain bare of information and far from the truth about the diseases of society; for we know that our duty requires us to strengthen the whole through the sound individual, and to protect the whole from the sick individual.