Q Dear Miss Abigail:
Please share some good out-of-date advice from Dr. Edwin W. Hirsch regarding the “power to love.” Thank you!
Signed,
Viloura
A Dear Viloura:
Aha! You’ve been fooled by deceiving book titles of years past, artfully constructed to disguise the true, sometimes embarrassing contents. Dr. Hirsch’s 1934 guide titled The Power to Love is not about love in the way you are probably imagining it to be ~ it is about married love~ otherwise known as sex, for you slow folks. Here’s a taste of some of our dear doctor’s thoughts on the subject.
1934: Sexual Fear
Though much blame lies at the door of those debased persons who prey on the weaknesses of human nature and who delight in poisoning immature minds, all the misgivings people have in regard to sexual matters are not due to charlatanry or to the false and erroneous ideas supplied by friends, books, newspapers, physicians, or teachers. Man has inherited many of his weird ideas of sex and its sinfulness from his savage ancestors. Sex and all the phenomena with which it is connected bewildered uncivilized man. He worshipped and revered the sexual act and the parts connected therewith, because it was the greatest mystery, the unknown, the source of all life. The sexual act was the source of pleasure and power. When children came forth, there were more subjects to work, more assets, so to speak. Laudations were then showered on the sexual proclivities. When famine came and the children and elders were a burden to feed, then sexual activity was the cause of his trouble. But since in the struggle for the survival of the fittest the majority of men suffered more than they profited, the sexual organs received more condemnation than praise. Misfortune and sex were associated more often than sex and good, so that ultimately man blamed the sexual for the evils that befell him. One generation passed this idea along to the next, and the man of the wilderness came to look askance at sex without ever having read a single book on sexual weakness. And so in spite of every effort made by hygienists to educate the manhood of the nation in things sexual and so sweep out all the stupefying rot that lodges within their brains, little progress will be made until the real nature of the sexual impulse is understood.
Source: Hirsch, Edwin W. The Power to Love. New York: Citadel Press, 1934.
~ pp. 176-77 ~