Society as a whole
has yet to fight its way through an almost impenetrable forest of sexual
taboos." Drysdale's words have lost none of their truth even to-day:
"There are few things from which humanity has suffered more than the
degraded and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been
attached to the genital and excretory organs. The former have been
regarded, like their corresponding mental passions, as something of a
lower and baser nature, tending to degrade and carnalize man by their
physical appetites. But we cannot take a debasing view of any part of
our humanity without becoming degraded in our whole being."(7)
Drysdale moreover clearly recognized the social crime of entrusting to
sexual barbarians the duty of legislating and enforcing laws detrimental
to the welfare of all future generations. "They trust blindly to
authority for the rules they blindly lay down," he wrote, "perfectly
unaware of the awful and complicated nature of the subject they are
dealing with so confidently and of the horrible evils their unconsidered
statements are attended with. They themselves break through the most
fundamentally important laws daily in utter unconsciousness of the
misery they are causing to their fellows...."
Psychologists to-day courageously emphasize the integral relationship
of the expression of the sexual instinct with every phase of human
activity. Until we recognize this central fact, we cannot understand the
implications and the sinister significance of superficial attempts
to apply rosewater remedies to social evils,--by the enactment of
restrictive and superficial legislation, by wholesale philanthropies and
charities, by publicly burying our heads in the sands of sentimentality.
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