<< Age of Adolescence and Sexual Outlet >>

For many centuries, men have wanted to know whether early involvement in sexual activity, or high frequencies of early activity, would reduce one’s capacities in later life. It has been suggested that the duration of one’s sexual life is definitely limited, and that ultimate high capacity and long-lived performance depend upon the conservation of one’s sexual powers in earlier years. The individual’s ability to function sexually has been conceived as a finite quantity which is fairly limited and ultimately exhaustible. One can use up those capacities by frequent activity in his youth, or preserve his wealth for the fulfillment of the later obligations and privileges of marriage.

Medical practitioners have sometimes ascribed infertility to wastage of sperm. Erectal impotence is supposed to be the penalty for excessive sexual exercise in youth (e.g., as in Vecki 1901, 1920; Liederman 1926, Efferz in Bilderlexikon 1930 (3):118, Robinson 1933, pp. 61, 135, 142, et al., Rice 1946). The discovery of the hormones has provided ammunition for these ideas, and millions of youths have been told that in order “to be prepared” one must conserve one’s virility by avoiding any wastage of vital fluids in boyhood (Boy Scout Manual, all editions, 1911-1945; W. S. Hall 1909; Dickerson 1930:109ff; 1933:15ff; U. S. Publ. Health Serv. 1937). Through all of this literature, an amazing assemblage of errors of anatomy, physiology, and endocrinology has been worked together for the good of the conservationist’s theories. Why the ejaculation of prostatic and vesicular secretions should involve a greater wastage of gonadal hormones than the outpouring of secretions from any of the other glands — than the spitting out, for instance, of salivary secretions — is something that biologists would need to have explained. The authors of various popular manuals, however, seem able to explain it “so youth may know,” and conserve their glandular secretions.

The Greek writers Empedocles and Diodes, and others including Plato after them, are said (Allbutt 1921, May 1931) to have believed that semen came from the brain and spinal marrow and that excessive copulation would, in consequence, injure the senses and the spine. Today, it is not unusual to find exactly the same superstitions about the origin of semen, and the consequently debilitating effects of ejaculation, among adolescent boys and among certain of their elders who want to believe such things. Many teen-age boys, on the contrary, have held to the equally unproved opinions that the exercise of one’s sexual functions, either in masturbation or in intercourse, may develop genital size and increase one’s erectal capacity, and that abstinence for any long period of time may impair one’s capacities for subsequent performance.

There have been few scientific data available to answer these questions, but that has not interfered with their being answered. It not infrequently happens that the volume of discussion on a subject bears an inverse relation to the amount of exact information which is available. The assurance with which generalizations and conclusions are drawn, may reach its maximum when the least effort has been made to investigate the data which are basic to an understanding of the situation. If, as in the present instance, a whole system of moral philosophy is involved, the conclusions become foregone and by dint of much repetition assume the status of axioms which are accepted by laymen and scientists alike. But this is a question of the physical and physiologic outcome of physical and physiologic activities, and as such it is a question which can be investigated only by scientific procedures.

Early in the course of the present study, Dr. Glenn V. Ramsey, while securing the histories of younger boys, noted differences in their then current sexual frequencies which seemed to be correlated with the degree of maturity of each boy. Following that lead, we have subsequently examined the histories of the whole population involved in the present study, and find that there is, in actuality, a relationship between the age at onset of adolescence, the age of first sexual performance, the frequencies of early sexual activity, the frequencies of sexual activity throughout most of the life span of the individual, and the sources on which he depends for his sexual outlet. While chronologic age is of prime importance in determining the mean frequencies of sexual activity for populations in different age groups, the biologic factors which account for variation in the age of onset of adolescence seem to be of definite importance in effecting variation within any single group. The data which substantiate these generalizations should provide one more instance of the difference between a priori reasoning and conclusions based on statistically accumulated fact.

>>