(p. 62) No one can be called sexually mature, it would seem, until he accepts his own sex nature without guilt; incorporates that nature in a rational life-plan; and is able to make sexual experience the basis of a sustained, mutually fulfilling, and creative relationship with the opposite sex.
A third fact regarding our sexual behaviors is only beginning to penetrate. This is the fact that sexual behaviors do not rise far above or fall far below the level of our nonsexual behaviors. Sex is one channel through which we express our character. It is not a thing apart from that character. We do not find, for example, that a person whose sexual behavior is marked by a will to dominate and exploit others is a person who, in other areas of his life, has a mature gift for equality. Nor do we find that the person who regards sex as filthy has, in other respects, a finely rational power to measure the worth of things. Psychiatrists are revising some of their first estimates regarding the role of sex. They are beginning to note that while it remains true that a traumatic sex experience can so arrest development that an individual’s whole relationship to life will be distorted, it is equally true that a traumatic experience in some other area of life will have a similar effect and will, in part, express itself through the channel of sexual behavior.
(pp. 83-84) This need for a total orientation is becoming so clear in the area of sex education---to take one example---that many well-intentioned parents and teachers are left in some bewilderment as to what they must do. In an awakened concern, some years ago, about the sex problems of young people, many high schools and colleges instituted courses on sex education. Almost exclusively, at first, the aim was to teach "facts about sex." However, as time has goneon and experience has accumulated, a new insight has begun to prevail. Thus, Dr. Benjamin Gruenberg writes, "The behavior of the child or adult---specifically, here, the sex behavior---is not in any significant degree the result of the formal or informal instruction he has received...'sex education is an integral part of character and personality education'...not a subject of instruction.
In other words, rescuing people from sex ignorance is far from enough. "So long as people generally," he continues, "assumed that human behavior was chiefly a matter of correct ideas, good intentions, and voluntary conformity, deviations from the sex-social conventions could be treated as specific failures or wilfulnesses." With a deepened awareness of the character disturbances that may prevent a normal maturing of the individual, we can no longer be satisfied to treat sexual deviations as specific failures to be remedied by specific admonition or instruction. We begin to realize, instead, that they must be treated as part of a larger context of character. Only as the total character matures will sex problems reach a mature solution.
What is true in the area of sex education is true also in other areas. All along the line, in fact, we are beginning to act out a new insight: namely, that each person is a whole person and that it will be in his wholeness that he will reveal such fixations and emotional disturbances as keep him immature.
(p. 172) It is similarly mixed with reference to other linkages: to the sexual linkage, for example. In our business civilization there is less overt tyranny of one sex over another than has been the rule in human history---which means that a double influence toward psychological maturity is exerted: men are less able than they once were to satisfy their need for significance through childish forms of domination; and women are more able to develop their full individual powers, so that they are less driven, to try to win security and significance through childish forms of submission. All this promises the gradual development of a type of enriched companionship between men and women in which the maturity of each will be encouraged. On the other hand, our business civilization has made sex---like everything else---into a commodity to be made attractive to as wide a consumer public as possible. This has meant that a woefully immature brand of sex has been put on the market by everyone from motion picture producers to makers of underwear, from perfume advertisers to writers of “slick” romances. Also, it must be observed, an economics that is devoted to earning money rather than to the ordering of a household almost inevitably makes human relations---even those of husband and wife---secondary to considerations of profit and prestige. Has our economy, then, fostered sexual maturity or immaturity? The answer is mixed.