Читать книгу The Changing Face of Sex - Wayne P. Anderson PhD - Страница 14

Comstock’s belief that abstinence was the only good sexual standard as a basis for laws was also supported by many in the medical profession. One major player in this game was John Harvey Kellogg, who ran the Adventist Battle Creek Sanitarium and Health Spa established to promote holistic health. He had some very progressive ideas about diet and exercise along with a very negative attitude toward sexual behavior.

He and his brother William invented the process for making cornflakes with the goal of lowering sex drive. John Harvey believed that the eating of meat increased one’s sexual desires and cornflakes was a good substitute. William, on the other hand, saw the commercial potential of cornflakes especially with a little sugar added, and he and John Harvey split up over this.

John Harvey went on to write Plain Facts for Young and Old (1881), a book that is loaded with myths about the terrible effects of masturbation, birth control and too-frequent intercourse.

A fictionalized story of his life is given in the book and movie The Road to Wellsville. He believed many diseases were caused by sexual intercourse and claimed that in their 40 years of marriage he and his wife had never had sexual intercourse. He advocated putting carbolic acid on the clitoris of girls to prevent “harmful” female masturbation.

Similar information is given in William Walling’s Sexology (1904). The last paragraph on female masturbation begins, “We could give facts almost without number in reported cases, to show the prevalence and destructive nature of this vice among girls in our own country,but we forbear; the subject is painful and revolting even to contemplate. We believe we have said enough to terrify parents into the needful precautions against it.”