How about kissing? Will you kindly explain why it is so dangerous and all that?
A woman has written the following article on a subject that is of interest to young men as well as to young women and it is so sensible, so clear, so instructive, that it deserves to be widely circulated:
"I get a great many letters from young girls who want to know what they shall do about the kissing proposition. They say that it is practically a case of no kiss, no beau, for the young men who take them about demand a good-night kiss as pay for their courtesies, and if they refuse, it is, indeed, goodnight, in the slang phrase for they never see these osculatory youths again.
"Now the innate modesty and delicacy of those girls revolt at yielding their lips to men to whom they are not even engaged; to men who do not even pretend to be in love with them. It violates their sense of what is proper, but, at the same time, they do not want to be regarded as prudes or Puritans. Still less do they desire to be wall flowers left out of all the fun and parties, and numbered with those forlorn damsels who never have any attention from men.
"So the girl is torn between her instinctive sense of what is right and her knowledge of expediency, and she wants to know what she shall do and how she shall answer the eternal argument of man when he is trying to persuade a woman into doing the thing that he knows she should not do. To kiss or not to kiss, that’s the question that troubles her.
"There can be but one answer to give a girl to this problem. It is no, no, no! A maiden’s lips should be kept inviolate, and the first man’s kiss that is pressed upon them should be the kiss of love from the man she expects to marry. For a girl to give her lips to every Tom, Dick and Harry who takes her to a moving picture show or escorts her home from a dance is something unthinkable…
"It is a pity that girls can never be made to realize that the most alluring and attractive thing about them is the aura of innocence and unsophistication that surrounds them. It is the whiteness, the untrodden snowness of their souls that is their chief charm, and they never make so fatal a mistake as when they throw this away.
"If girls were only wise enough to realize how fascinating aloofness is, and what an appeal unsullied purity makes to the masculine imagination, they would keep every man at arm’s length at least until he had come out and popped the question. They would not think for a minute of putting up with cheap familiarities from men that rob them of their freshness and make them little shop-worn bits of humanity that have been pawed over like the goods on a bargain table. Girls should never forget that it is the shy and shrinking violet that is man’s favourite flower not the brazen sunflower.
"My girl correspondent says that she does not know how to answer a man when he begs her to kiss him and tells her that there is no harm in it, and that his arguments make her feel foolish because she seems to be making a great ado over very little matter. There is one answer that every girl can make to a man’s request for a kiss.
"She can ask him if he would like his sister to kiss any man goodnight who happened to call on her. She can ask him what he would advise his sister to do if his sister were in her place. And she can ask him if he would like to think that the girl that he is going to marry some day had kissed a hundred men who were mere casual acquaintances.
"Such questions will make any decent man writhe. A man will tell his own sister quickly enough what he thinks on the subject and his own lips would grow cold and stiff on his sweetheart’s if he remembered that her soft young mouth had belonged to a long procession of men before him. "Girls can never bear in mind too constantly the fact that not all men play fair with women, and that men are not always just or logical in judging them. A man might spend hours, days and months persuading a girl to do something that is wrong, and have a contempt for her ever afterwards for yielding to him. He will argue down her every instinct and scruple and principle against kissing him, and the minute she does he will lose his reverence for her as for something utterly fine and delicate…
"Girls should also bear in mind that a wedding ring on the hand is worth a basket of them in the dim distance, and that the girls who have the most beaux generally get the fewest and the poorest makeshifts of husbands. A girl observes that those girls who are free and easy in their manners, who exact no sort of respect from men and permit them to indulge in familiarities and take liberties with them, girls who drink and smoke with men, and listen to and tell off-coloured stories, girls who are good sports — these girls are what we call popular, and are generally surrounded by a horde of men. Especially while they are young and good looking, and full of high spirits.
"But what the girl does not notice is that this type of young girl very seldom marries, and when she does she almost invariably marries a crooked stick who wasn’t worth picking up. The fast girl, the girl without modesty or delicate womanly reserve, may be the kind of a girl that men like to play with, but she isn’t the sort of woman that they want for a wife and for the mother of their children.
"That is why you are so often surprised at the marriages that men make. Men whom you have known of as gay rounders bob up with a wife who is a Sunday school teacher. Men who have been noted chorus girl chasers go to some country village and marry girls who never saw a brighter lamp than a kerosene lamp. They don’t want the lips on which a thousand kisses have rained. They want the lips that have never been kissed at all.
Well said!
Even if I included my family (which I presume it doesn’t…) I doubt it’d add up to 15. I guess I should be thankful.
