Not a great deal has changed in sex education since Symonds wrote his Memoirs:
Truly we civilized people of the nineteenth century are more backward than the African savages in all that concerns this most important fact of human life. We allow young men and women to contract permanent relations involving sex, designed for procreation, without instructing them in the elementary science of sexual physiology. We do all that lies in us to keep them chaste, to develop and refine their sense of shame, while we leave them to imagine what they like about the nuptial connection. Then we fling them naked into bed together, modest, alike ignorant, mutually embarrassed by the awkward situation, trusting that they will blunder upon the truth by instinct…. I have known cases of marriage spoiled form the commencement by this idiotic system of let-alone education.
Emily Rutherford 