Moll ( Konträre Sexualempfindung, third edition, 1899, p. 325) refers to the frequency with which servant-girls (between the ages of 18 and 30) carry on sexual practices with young boys (between 5 and 13) committed to their care. More than a century earlier Tissot, in his famous work on onanism, referred to the frequency with which servant-girls corrupt boys by teaching them to masturbate; and still earlier, in England, the author of Onania gave many such cases. We may, indeed, go back to the time of Rabelais, who (as Dr. Kiernan reminds me) represents the governesses of Gargantua, when he was a child, as taking pleasure in playing with his penis till it became wet, and joking with each other about it. ( Gargantua, book i, chapter ix.) The prevalence of such manifestations among servant-girls witnesses to their prevalence among lower-class girls generally. In judging such acts, even when they seem to be very deliberate, it is important to remember that at this age unreasoning instinct plays a very large part in the manifestations of the sexual impulse. This is clearly indicated by the phenomena observed in the insane. Thus, as we have seen (page 214), Schröter has found that, among girls of low social class under 20 years of age, spontaneous periodical sexual manifestations at menstrual epochs occurred in as large a proportion as 72 per cent. Among girls of better social position these impulses are inhibited, or at all events modified, by good taste or good feeling, the influences of tradition or education; it is only to the latter that children should be intrusted.
Hoche mentions a case in which a man was accused of repeatedly exhibiting his sexual organs to the servant-girl at a house; she enjoyed the spectacle ( Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1896, No. 2). It may well be that in some cases of self-exhibition the offender has good reason, on the ground of previous experience, for thinking that he is giving pleasure. "When we used to go to bathe while I was at school," writes a correspondent, "girls from a poor quarter of the lower town (some quite 16) often followed us and stood to watch about a hundred yards from the river. They used to 'giggle' and 'pass remarks.' I have seen girls of this class peeping through chinks of a palisade around a bathing-place on the Thames." A correspondent who has given special attention to the point tells me of the great interest displayed by young girls of the people in Italy in the sexual organs of men.
Curiosity—whether in the form of the desire for knowledge or the desire for sensation—is, of course, not confined to young girls and women of lower social strata, though in them it is less often restrained by motives of self-respect and good feeling. "At the age of 8," writes a correspondent, "I was one day playing in a spare room with a girl of about 12 or 13. She gave me a penholder, and, crouching upon her hands and knees, with her posterior toward me, invited me to introduce the instrument into the vulva. This was the first time I had seen the female parts, and, as I appeared to be somewhat repelled, she coaxed me to comply with her desire. I did as she directed, and she said that it gave her pleasure. Several times after I repeated the same act at her request. A friend tells me that when he was 10 a girl of 16 asked him to lace up her boots. While he was kneeling at her feet his hand touched her ankle. She asked him to put his hand higher, and repeated 'Higher, higher,' till he touched the pudenda, and finally, at her request, put his finger into the vestibule. This girl was very handsome and amiable, and a favorite of the boy's mother. No one suspected this propensity." Again, a correspondent (a man of science) tells me of a friend who lately, when dining out, met a girl, the daughter of a country vicar; he was not specially attracted to her and paid her no special attention. "A few days afterward he was astonished to receive a call from her one afternoon (though his address is not discoverable from any recognized source). She sat down as near to him as she could, and rested her hand on his thigh, etc., while talking on different subjects and drinking tea. Then without any verbal prelude she asked him to have connection with her. Though not exactly a Puritan, he is not the man to jump at such an offer from a woman he is not in love with, so, after ascertaining that the girl was virgo intacta, he declined and she went away. A fortnight or so later he received a letter from her in the country, making no reference to what had passed, but giving an account of her work with her Sunday-school class. He did not reply, and then came a curt note asking him to return her letter. My friend feels sure she was devoted to auto-erotic performances, but, having become attracted to him, came to the conclusion she would like to try normal intercourse."
Wolbarst, studying the prevalence of gonorrhea among boys in New York (especially, it would appear, in quarters where the foreign-born elements—mainly Russian Jew and south Italian—are large), states: "In my study of this subject there have been observed 3 cases of gonorrheal urethritis, in boys aged, respectively, 4, 10, and 12 years, which were acquired in the usual manner, from girls ranging between 10 and 12 years of age. In each case, according to the story told by the victim, the girl made the first advances, and in I case, that of the 4-year-old boy, the act was consummated in the form of an assault, by a girl 12 years old, in which the child was threatened with injury unless he performed his part." (A. L. Wolbarst, Journal of the American Medical Association, Sept. 28, 1901.) In a further series of cases ( Medical Record, Oct. 29, 1910) Wolbarst obtained similar results, though he recognizes also the frequency of precocious sexuality in the young boys themselves.
Gibb states, concerning assaults on children by women: "It is undeniably true that they occur much more frequently than is generally supposed, although but few of the cases are brought to public notice, owing to the difficulty of proving the charge." (W. T. Gibb, article "Indecent Assaults upon Children," in A. McLane Hamilton's System of Legal Medicine, vol. i, p. 651.) Gibb's opinion carries weight, since he is medical adviser for the New York Society for the Protection of Children, and compelled to sift the evidence carefully in such cases.
It should be mentioned that, while a sexual curiosity exercised on younger children is, in girls about the age of puberty, an ill-regulated, but scarcely morbid, manifestation, in older women it may be of pathological origin.
Thus, Kisch records the case of a refined and educated lady of 30 who had been married for nine years, but had never experienced sexual pleasure in coitus. For a long time past, however, she had felt a strong desire to play with the genital organs of children of either sex, a proceeding which gave her sexual pleasure. She sought to resist this impulse as much as possible, but during menstruation it was often irresistible. Examination showed an enlarged and retroflexed uterus and anesthesia of vagina. (Kisch, Die Sterilität des Weibes, 1886, p. 103.) The psychological mechanism by which an anesthetic vagina leads to a feeling of repulsion for normal coitus and normal sexual organs, and directs the sexual feelings toward more infantile forms of sexuality, is here not difficult to trace.
It is not often that the sexual attempts of girls and young women on boys—notwithstanding their undoubted frequency—become of medico-legal interest. In France in the course of ten years (1874 to 1884) only 181 women, who were mostly between 20 and 30 years of age, were actually convicted of sexual attempts on children below 15. (Paul Bernard, "Viols et attentats a la Pudeur," Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, 1887.) Lop ("Attentats à la Pudeur commis par des Femmes sur des Petits Enfants," id. , Aug., 1896) brings together a number of cases chiefly committed by girls between the ages of 18 and 20. In England such accusations against a young woman or girl may easily be circumvented. If she is under 16 she is protected by the Criminal Law Amendment Act and cannot be punished. In any case, when found out, she can always easily bring the sympathy to her side by declaring that she is not the aggressor, but the victim. Cases of violent sexual assault upon girls, Lawson Tait remarks, while they undoubtedly do occur, are very much rarer than the frequency with which the charge is made would lead us to suspect. At one time, by arrangement with the authority, 70 such charges at Birmingham were consecutively brought before Lawson Tait. These charges were all made under the Criminal Law Amendment Act.
In only 6 of these cases was he able to advise prosecution, in all of which cases conviction was obtained. In 7
other cases in which the police decided to prosecute there was either no conviction or a very light sentence. In at least 26 cases the charge was clearly trumped up. The average age of these girls was 12. "There is not a piece of sexual argot that ever had before reached my ears," remarks Mr. Tait, "but was used by these children in the descriptions given by them of what had been done to them; and they introduced, in addition, quite a new vocabulary on the subject. The minute and detailed descriptions of the sexual act given by chits of 10 and 11
would do credit to the pages of Mirabeau. At first sight it is a puzzle to see how children so young obtained their information." "About the use of the word 'seduced,'" the same writer remarks, "I wish to say that the class of women from amongst whom the great bulk of these cases are drawn seem to use it in a sense altogether different from that generally employed. It is not with them a process in which male villainy succeeds by various arts in overcoming female virtue and reluctance, but simply a date at which an incident in their lives occurs for the first time; and, according to their use of the phrase, the ancient legend of the Sacred Scriptures, had it ended in the more ordinary and usual way by the virtue of Joseph yielding to the temptation offered, would have to read as a record of the seduction of Mrs. Potiphar."
With reference to Lawson Tait's observation that violent assaults on women, while they do occur, are very much rarer than the frequency with which such charges are made would lead us to believe, it may be remarked that many medico-legal authorities are of the same opinion. (See, e.g. , G. Vivian Poore's Treatise on Medical Jurisprudence, 1901, p. 325. This writer also remarks: "I hold very strongly that a woman may rape a man as much as a man may rape a woman.") There can be little doubt that the plea of force is very frequently seized on by women as the easiest available weapon of defense when her connection with a man has been revealed. She has been so permeated by the current notion that no "respectable" woman can possibly have any sexual impulses of her own to gratify that, in order to screen what she feels to be regarded as an utterly shameful and wicked, as well as foolish, act, she declares it never took place by her own will at all. "Now, I ask you, gentlemen," I once heard an experienced counsel address the jury in a criminal case, "as men of the world, have you ever known or heard of a woman, a single woman, confess that she had had sexual connection and not declare that force had been used to compel her to such connection?" The statement is a little sweeping, but in this matter there is some element of truth in the "man of the world's" opinion. One may refer to the story (told by Etienne de Bourbon, by Francisco de Osuna in a religious work, and by Cervantes in Don Quixote, part ii, ch. xlv) concerning a magistrate who, when a girl came before him to complain of rape, ordered the accused young man either to marry her or pay her a sum of money. The fine was paid, and the magistrate then told the man to follow the girl and take the money from her by force; the man obeyed, but the girl defended herself so energetically that he could not secure the money. Then the judge, calling the parties before him again, ordered the fine to be returned: "Had you defended your chastity as well as you have defended your money it could not have been taken away from you." In most cases of "rape," in the case of adults, there has probably been some degree of consent, though that partial assent may have been basely secured by an appeal to the lower nervous centers alone, with no participation of the intelligence and will.
Freud ( Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, p. 87) considers that on this ground the judge's decision in Don Quixote is "psychologically unjust," because in such a case the woman's strength is paralyzed by the fact that an unconscious instinct in herself takes her assailant's part against her own conscious resistance. But it must be remembered that the factor of instinct plays a large part even when no violence is attempted.
Such facts and considerations as these tend to show that the sexual impulse is by no means so weak in women as many would lead us to think. It would appear that, whereas in earlier ages there was generally a tendency to credit women with an unduly large share of the sexual impulse, there is now a tendency to unduly minimize the sexual impulse in women.
[156]
I have had occasion to refer to the historic evolution of male opinion regarding women in previous volumes, as, e.g. , Man and Woman, chapter i, and the appendix on "The Influence of Menstruation on the Position of Women"
in the first volume of these Studies.
[157]
The terminology proposed by Ziehen ("Zur Lehre von den psychopathischen Konstitutionen," Charité Annalen, vol. xxxxiii, 1909) is as follows: For absence of sexual feeling, anhedonia; for diminution of the same, hyphedonia; for excess of sexual feeling, hyperhedonia; for qualitative sexual perversions, parhedonia. "Erotic blindness" was suggested by Nardelli.
[158]
O. Adler, Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, 1904, p. 146.
[159]
A correspondent tells me that he knows a woman who has been a prostitute since the age of 15, but never experienced sexual pleasure and a real, non-simulated orgasm till she was 23; since then she has become very sensual. In other similar cases the hitherto indifferent prostitute, having found the man who suits her, abandons her profession, even though she is thereby compelled to live in extreme poverty. "An insensible woman," as La Bruyère long ago remarked in his chapter "Des Femmes," "is merely one who has not yet seen the man she must love."
[160]
Guttceit ( Dreissig Jahre Praxis, vol. i, p. 416) pointed out that the presence or absence of the orgasm is the only factor in "sexual anesthesia" of which we can speak at all definitely; and he believed that anaphrodism, in the sense of absence of the sexual impulse, never occurs at all, many women having confided to him that they had sexual desires, although those desires were not gratified by coitus.
[161]
Op. cit. , p. 164.
[162]
Havelock Ellis, "Madame de Warens," The Venture, 1903.
[163]
It is interesting to observe that finally even Adler admits ( op. cit. , p. 155) that there is no such thing as congenital lack of aptitude for sexual sensibility.
[164]
"I am not entirely satisfied with the testimony as to the alleged sexual anesthesia," a medical correspondent writes.
"The same principle which makes the young harlot an old saint makes the repentant rake a believer in sexual anesthesia. Most of the medical men who believe, or claim to believe, that sexual anesthesia is so prevalent do so either to flatter their hysterical patients or because they have the mentality of the Hyacinthe of Zola's Paris."
[165]
Differences in the Nervous Organization of Man and Woman, 1891; chapter xiii, "Sexual Instinct in Men and Women Compared."
[166]
Matthews Duncan considered that "the healthy performance of the functions of child-bearing is surely connected with a well-regulated condition of desire and pleasure." "Desire and pleasure," he adds, "may be excessive, furious, overpowering, without bringing the female into the class of maniacs; they may be temporary, healthy, and moderate; they may be absent or dull." (Matthews Duncan, Goulstonian Lectures on Sterility in Woman, pp. 91, 121.)
[167]
Geoffrey Mortimer, Chapters on Human Love, 1898, ch. xvi.
[168]
I do not, however, attach much weight to this possibility. The sexual instinct among the lower social classes everywhere is subject to comparatively weak inhibition, and Löwenfeld is probably right in believing the women of the lower class do not suffer from sexual anesthesia to anything like the same extent as upper-class women. In England most women of the working class appear to have had sexual intercourse at some time in their lives, notwithstanding the risks of pregnancy, and if pregnancy occurs they refer to it calmly as an "accident," for which they cannot be held responsible; "Well, I couldn't help that," I have heard a young widow remark when mildly reproached for the existence of her illegitimate child. Again, among American negresses there seems to be no defect of sexual passion, and it is said that the majority of negresses in the Southern States support not only their children, but their lovers and husbands.
II.
Special Characters of the Sexual Impulse in Women—The More Passive Part Played by Women in Courtship—
This Passivity only Apparent—The Physical Mechanism of the Sexual Process in Women More Complex—The Slower Development of Orgasm in Women—The Sexual Impulse in Women More Frequently Needs to be Actively Aroused—The Climax of Sexual Energy Falls Later in Women's Lives than in Men's—Sexual Ardor in Women Increased After the Establishment of Sexual Relationships—Women bear Sexual Excesses better than Men—The Sexual Sphere Larger and More Diffused in Women—The Sexual Impulse in Women Shows a Greater Tendency to Periodicity and a Wider Range of Variation.
So far I have been discussing the question of the sexual impulse in women on the ground upon which previous writers have usually placed it. The question, that is, has usually presented itself to them as one concerning the relative strength of the impulse in men and women. When so considered, not hastily and with prepossession, as is too often the case, but with a genuine desire to get at the real facts in all their aspects, there is no reason, as we have seen, to conclude that, on the whole, the sexual impulse in women is lacking in strength.
But we have to push our investigation of the matter further. In reality, the question as to whether the sexual impulse is or is not stronger in one sex than in the other is a somewhat crude one. To put the question in that form is to reveal ignorance of the real facts of the matter. And in that form, moreover, no really definite and satisfactory answer can be given.
It is necessary to put the matter on different ground. Instead of taking more or less insolvable questions as to the strength of the sexual impulse in the two sexes, it is more profitable to consider its differences. What are the special characters of the sexual impulse in women?
There is certainly one purely natural sexual difference of a fundamental character, which lies at the basis of whatever truth may be in the assertion that women are not susceptible of sexual emotion. As may he seen when considering the phenomena of modesty, the part played by the female in courtship throughout nature is usually different from that played by the male, and is, in some respects, a more difficult and complex part. Except when the male fails to play his part properly, she is usually comparatively passive; in the proper playing of her part she has to appear to shun the male, to flee from his approaches—even actually to repel them.[169]
Courtship resembles very closely, indeed, a drama or game; and the aggressiveness of the male, the coyness of the female, are alike unconsciously assumed in order to bring about in the most effectual manner the ultimate union of the sexes. The seeming reluctance of the female is not intended to inhibit sexual activity either in the male or in herself, but to increase it in both. The passivity of the female, therefore, is not a real, but only an apparent, passivity, and this holds true of our own species as much as of the lower animals. "Women are like delicately adjusted alembics," said a seventeenth-century author. "No fire can be seen outside, but if you look underneath the alembic, if you place your hand on the hearts of women, in both places you will find a great furnace."[170] Or, as Marro has finely put it, the passivity of women in love is the passivity of the magnet, which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron toward it. An intense energy lies behind such passivity, an absorbed preoccupation in the end to be attained.
Tarde, when exercising magistrate's functions, once had to inquire into a case in which a young man was accused of murder. In questioning a girl of 18, a shepherdess, who appeared before him as a witness, she told him that on the morning following the crime she had seen the footmarks of the accused up to a certain point. He asked how she recognized them, and she replied, ingenuously but with assurance, that she could recognize the footprints of every young man in the neighborhood, even in a plowed field.[171] No better illustration could be given of the real significance of the sexual passivity of women, even at its most negative point.
"The women I have known," a correspondent writes, "do not express their sensations and feelings as much as I do. Nor have I found women usually anxious to practise 'luxuries.' They seldom care to practice fellatio; I have only known one woman who offered to do fellatio because she liked it. Nor do they generally care to masturbate a man; that is, they do not care greatly to enjoy the contemplation of the other person's excitement. (To me, to see the woman excited means almost more than my own pleasure.) They usually resist cunnilinctus, although they enjoy it. They do not seem to care to touch or look at a man's parts so much as he does at theirs. And they seem to dislike the tongue-kiss unless they feel very sexual or really love a man." My correspondent admits that his relationships have been numerous and facile, while his erotic demands tend also to deviate from the normal path.
Under such circumstances, which not uncommonly occur, the woman's passions fail to be deeply stirred, and she retains her normal attitude of relative passivity.
It is owing to the fact that the sexual passivity of women is only an apparent, and not a real, passivity that women are apt to suffer, as men are, from prolonged sexual abstinence. This, indeed, has been denied, but can scarcely be said to admit of doubt. The only question is as to the relative amount of such suffering, necessarily a very difficult question. As far back as the fourteenth century Johannes de Sancto Amando stated that women are more injured than men by sexual abstinence. In modern times Maudsley considers that women "suffer more than men do from the entire deprivation of sexual intercourse" ("Relations between Body and Mind," Lancet, May 28, 1870). By some it has been held that this cause may produce actual disease. Thus, Tilt, an eminent gynecologist of the middle of the nineteenth century, in discussing this question, wrote: "When we consider how much of the lifetime of woman is occupied by the various phases of the generative process, and how terrible is often the conflict within her between the impulse of passion and the dictates of duty, it may be well understood how such a conflict reacts on the organs of the sexual economy in the unimpregnated female, and principally on the ovaria, causing an orgasm, which, if often repeated, may possibly be productive of subacute ovaritis." (Tilt, On Uterine and Ovarian Inflammation, 1862, pp. 309-310.) Long before Tilt, Haller, it seems, had said that women are especially liable to suffer from privation of sexual intercourse to which they have been accustomed, and referred to chlorosis, hysteria, nymphomania, and simple mania curable by intercourse. Hegar considers that in women an injurious result follows the nonsatisfaction of the sexual impulse and of the "ideal feelings," and that symptoms thus arise (pallor, loss of flesh, cardialgia, malaise, sleeplessness, disturbances of menstruation) which are diagnosed as
"chlorosis." (Hegar, Zusammenhang der Geschlechtskrankheiten mit nervösen Leiden, 1885, p. 45.) Freud, as well as Gattel, has found that states of anxiety ( Angstzustände) are caused by sexual abstinence. Löwenfeld, on careful examination of his own cases, is able to confirm this connection in both sexes. He has specially noticed it in young women who marry elderly husbands. Löwenfeld believes, however, that, on the whole, healthy unmarried women bear sexual abstinence better than men. If, however, they are of at all neuropathic disposition, ungratified sexual emotions may easily lead to various morbid conditions, especially of a hysteroneurasthenic character. (Löwenfeld, Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, second edition, 1899, pp. 44, 47, 54-60.) Balls-Headley considers that unsatisfied sexual desires in women may lead to the following conditions: general atrophy, anemia, neuralgia and hysteria, irregular menstruation, leucorrhea, atrophy of sexual organs. He also refers to the frequency of myoma of the uterus among those who have not become pregnant or who have long ceased to bear children. (Balls-Headley, art. "Etiology of Diseases of Female Genital Organs," Allbutt and Playfair, System of Gynæcology, 1896, p. 141.) It cannot, however, be said that he brings forward substantial evidence in favor of these beliefs. It may be added that in America, during recent years, leading gynecologists have recorded a number of cases in which widows on remarriage have shown marked improvement in uterine and pelvic conditions.
The question as to whether men or women suffer most from sexual abstinence, as well as the question whether definite morbid conditions are produced by such abstinence, remains, however, an obscure and debated problem.
The available data do not enable us to answer it decisively. It is one of those subtle and complex questions which can only be investigated properly by a gynecologist who is also a psychologist. Incidentally, however, we have met and shall have occasion to meet with evidence bearing on this question. It is sufficient to say here, briefly, that it is impossible to believe, even if no evidence were forthcoming, that the exercise or non-exercise of so vastly important a function can make no difference to the organism generally. So far as the evidence goes, it may be said to indicate that the results of the abeyance of the sexual functions in healthy women in whom the sexual emotions have never been definitely aroused tend to be diffused and unconscious, as the sexual impulse itself often is, but that, in women in whom the sexual emotions have been definitely aroused and gratified, the results of sexual abstinence tend to be acute and conscious.
These acute results are at the present day very often due to premature ejaculation by nervous or neurasthenic husbands, the rapidity with which detumescence is reached in the husband allowing insufficient time for tumescence in the wife, who consequently fails to reach the orgasm. This has of late been frequently pointed out.
Thus Kafemann ( Sexual-Probleme, March, 1910, p. 194 et seq. ) emphasizes the prevalence of sexual incompetence in men. Ferenczi, of Budapest ( Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 1910, ht. 1 and 2, p. 75), believes that the combination of neurasthenic husbands with resultantly nervous wives is extraordinarily common; even putting aside the neurasthenic, he considers it may be said that the whole male sex in relation to women suffer from precocious ejaculation. He adds that it is often difficult to say whether the lack of harmony may not be due to retarded orgasm in the woman. He regards the influence of masturbation in early life as tending to quicken orgasm in man, while when practised by the other sex it tends to slow orgasm, and thus increases the disharmony. He holds, however, that the chief cause lies in the education of women with its emphasis on sexual repression; this works too well and the result is that when the external impediments to the sexual impulse are removed the impulse has become incapable of normal action. Porosz ( British Medical Journal, April 1, 1911) has brought forward cases of serious nervous trouble in women which have been dispersed when the sexual weakness and