Parenting & Family Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus lands the punch by pretending to defend sex education while making it sound like a remedy for incompetence. The line turns on a sly reversal: sex education is "legitimate" not because it liberates or informs, but because girls "cannot be taught soon enough" a negative fact - how children do not arrive. He frames knowledge as debunking, not empowerment, which is classic Kraus: education as anti-myth warfare in a society drunk on euphemism.

The subtext is barbed and gendered. "Girls" are singled out as the ones needing instruction, which can read as paternalistic, even accusatory: women are cast as the primary dupes of romantic ideology or bourgeois prudishness. Yet the deeper target is the culture that keeps them ignorant. Kraus is skewering a moral order that demands female innocence, then punishes women for the consequences of that innocence. The "soon enough" carries urgency: ignorance isn't quaint; it's dangerous.

Context matters: fin-de-siecle Vienna, where sexual hypocrisy was practically municipal infrastructure. Kraus, as the great public prosecutor of bad language and bad faith, treats the stork story as more than a silly lie. It's a linguistic crime scene: polite society laundering biology into metaphor to preserve its self-image. By focusing on "how children don't come into the world", he suggests that the real obscenity isn't sex, but the social machinery that replaces fact with sentiment and calls it virtue.