lively.
The young and vigorous woman, who has lived a chaste
life,
sometimes feels when she commences sexual
relationships as though
she really required several husbands, and needed
intercourse at
least once a day, though later when she becomes
adjusted to
married life she reaches the conclusion that her
desires are not
abnormally excessive. The husband has to adjust
himself to his
wife's needs, through his sexual force when he
possesses it, and,
if not, through his skill and consideration. The
rare men who
possess a genital potency which they can exert to
the
gratification of women without injury to themselves
have been, by
Professor Benedikt, termed "sexual athletes," and he remarks that
such men easily dominate women. He rightly regards
Casanova as
the type of the sexual athlete (_Archives
d'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, Jan., 1896). Näcke reports the case of
a man whom he
regards as a sexual athlete, who throughout his life
had
intercourse once or twice daily with his wife, or if
she was
unwilling, with another woman, until he became
insane at the age
of seventy-five (_Zeitschrift für
Sexualwissenschaft_, Aug.,
1908, p. 507). This should probably, however, be
regarded rather
as a case of morbid hyperæsthesia than of sexual
athleticism.
At this stage we reach the fundamental elements of the art of love. We
have seen that many moral practices and moral theories which have been
widely current in Christendom have developed traditions, still by no means
extinct among us, which were profoundly antagonistic to the art of love.
The idea grew up of "marital duties," of "conjugal rights."[400] The
husband had the right and the duty to perform sexual
intercourse with his
wife, whatever her wishes in the matter might be, while the wife had the
duty and the right (the duty in her case being usually put first) to
submit to such intercourse, which she was frequently
taught to regard as
something low and merely physical, an unpleasant and
almost degrading
necessity which she would do well to put out of her
thoughts as speedily
as possible. It is not surprising that such an attitude towards marriage
has been highly favorable to conjugal unhappiness, more especially that of
the wife,[401] and it has tended to promote adultery and divorce. We might
have been more surprised had it been otherwise.
The art of love is based on the fundamental natural fact of courtship; and
courtship is the effort of the male to make himself
acceptable to the
female.[402] "The art of love," said Vatsyayana, one of the greatest of
authorities, "is the art of pleasing women." "A man must never permit
himself a pleasure with his wife," said Balzac in his _Physiologie du
Mariage_, "which he has not the skill first to make her desire." The whole
art of love is there. Women, naturally and
instinctively, seek to make
themselves desirable to men, even to men whom they are supremely
indifferent to, and the woman who is in love with a man, by an equally
natural instinct, seeks to shape herself to the measure which individually
pleases him. This tendency is not really modified by the fundamental fact
that in these matters it is only the arts that Nature
makes which are
truly effective. It is finally by what he is that a man arouses a woman's
deepest emotions of sympathy or of antipathy, and he is often pleasing her
more by displaying his fitness to play a great part in the world outside
than by any acquired accomplishments in the arts of
courtship. When,
however, the serious and intimate play of physical love begins, the
woman's part is, even biologically, on the surface the more passive
part.[403] She is, on the physical side, inevitably the instrument in
love; it must be his hand and his bow which evoke the
music.
In speaking of the art of love, however, it is
impossible to disentangle
completely the spiritual from the physical. The very
attempt to do so is,
indeed, a fatal mistake. The man who can only perceive the physical side
of the sexual relationship is, as Hinton was accustomed to say, on a level
with the man who, in listening to a sonata of Beethoven on the violin, is
only conscious of the physical fact that a horse's tail is being scraped
against a sheep's entrails.
The image of the musical instrument constantly
recurs to those
who write of the art of love. Balzac's comparison of
the
unskilful husband to the orang-utan attempting to
play the violin
has already been quoted. Dr. Jules Guyot, in his
serious and
admirable little book, _Bréviaire de l'Amour
Expérimental_, falls
on to the same comparison: "There are an immense
number of
ignorant, selfish, and brutal men who give
themselves no trouble
to study the instrument which God has confided to
them, and do
not so much as suspect that it is necessary to study
it in order
to draw out its slightest chords.... Every direct
contact, even
with the clitoris, every attempt at coitus [when the
feminine
organism is not aroused], exercises a painful
sensation, an
instinctive repulsion, a feeling of disgust and
aversion. Any
man, any husband, who is ignorant of this fact, is
ridiculous and
contemptible. Any man, any husband, who, knowing it,
dares to
disregard it, has committed an outrage.... In the
final
combination of man and woman, the positive element,
the husband,
has the initiative and the responsibility for the
conjugal life.
He is the minstrel who will produce harmony or
cacophony by his
hand and his bow. The wife, from this point of view,
is really
the many-stringed instrument who will give out
harmonious or
discordant sounds, according as she is well or ill
handled"
(Guyot, _Bréviaire_, pp. 99, 115, 138).
That such love corresponds to the woman's need there
cannot be
any doubt. All developed women desire to be loved,
says Ellen
Key, not "en mâle" but "en artiste" (_Liebe und Ehe_, p. 92).
"Only a man of whom she feels that he has also the artist's joy
in her, and who shows this joy through his timid and
delicate
touch on her soul as on her body, can keep the woman
of to-day.
She will only belong to a man who continues to long
for her even
when he holds her locked in his arms. And when such
a woman
breaks out: 'You want me, but you cannot caress me,
you cannot
tell what I want,' then that man is judged." Love is indeed, as
Remy de Gourmont remarks, a delicate art, for which,
as for
painting or music, only some are apt.
It must not be supposed that the demand on the lover and husband to
approach a woman in the same spirit, with the same
consideration and
skilful touch, as a musician takes up his instrument is merely a demand
made by modern women who are probably neurotic or
hysterical. No reader of
these _Studies_ who has followed the discussions of
courtship and of
sexual selection in previous volumes can fail to realize that--although we
have sought to befool ourselves by giving an
illegitimate connotation to
the word "brutal"--consideration and respect for the female is all but
universal in the sexual relationships of the animals
below man; it is only
at the furthest remove from the "brutes," among civilized men, that sexual
"brutality" is at all common, and even there it is chiefly the result of
ignorance. If we go as low as the insects, who have been disciplined by
no family life, and are generally counted as careless
and wanton, we may
sometimes find this attitude towards the female fully
developed, and the
extreme consideration of the male for the female whom
yet he holds firmly
beneath him, the tender preliminaries, the extremely
gradual approach to
the supreme sexual act, may well furnish an admirable
lesson.
This greater difficulty and delay on the part of women in responding to
the erotic excitation of courtship is really very
fundamental and--as has
so often been necessary to point out in previous volumes of these
_Studies_--it covers the whole of woman's erotic life, from the earliest
age when coyness and modesty develop. A woman's love
develops much more
slowly than a man's for a much longer period. There is real psychological
significance in the fact that a man's desire for a woman tends to arise
spontaneously, while a woman's desire for a man tends
only to be aroused
gradually, in the measure of her complexly developing
relationship to him.
Hence her sexual emotion is often less abstract, more
intimately
associated with the individual lover in whom it is
centred. "The way to my
senses is through my heart," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to her lover Imlay,
"but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours." She
spoke for the best, if not for the largest part, of her sex. A man often
reaches the full limit of his physical capacity for love at a single step,
and it would appear that his psychic limits are often
not more difficult
to reach. This is the solid fact underlying the more
hazardous statement,
so often made, that woman is monogamic and man
polygamic.
On the more physical side, Guttceit states that a
month after
marriage not more than two women out of ten have
experienced the
full pleasure of sexual intercourse, and it may not
be for six
months, a year, or even till after the birth of
several children,
that a woman experiences the full enjoyment of the
physical
relationship, and even then only with a man she
completely loves,
so that the conditions of sexual gratification are
much more
complex in women than in men. Similarly, on the
psychic side,
Ellen Key remarks (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 111):
"It is
certainly true that a woman desires sexual
gratification from a
man. But while in her this desire not seldom only
appears after
she has begun to love a man enough to give her life
for him, a
man often desires to possess a woman physically
before he loves
her enough to give even his little finger for her.
The fact that
love in a woman mostly goes from the soul to the
senses and often
fails to reach them, and that in a man it mostly
goes from the
senses to the soul and frequently never reaches that
goal--this
is of all the existing differences between men and
women that
which causes most torture to both." It will, of
course, be
apparent to the reader of the fourth volume of these
_Studies_ on
"Sexual Selection in Man" that the method of stating the
difference which has commended itself to Mary
Wollstonecraft,
Ellen Key, and others, is not strictly correct, and
the chastest
woman, after, for example, taking too hot a bath,
may find that
her heart is not the only path through which her
senses may be
affected. The senses are the only channels to the
external world
which we possess, and love must come through these
channels or
not at all. The difference, however, seems to be a
real one, if
we translate it to mean that, as we have seen reason
to believe
in previous volumes of these _Studies_, there are in
women (1)
preferential sensory paths of sexual stimuli, such
as,
apparently, a predominence of tactile and auditory
paths as
compared with men; (2) a more massive, complex, and
delicately
poised sexual mechanism; and, as a result of this,
(3) eventually
a greater amount of nervous and cerebral sexual
irradiation.
It must be remembered, at the same time, that while
this
distinction represents a real tendency in sexual
differentiation,
with an organic and not merely traditional basis, it
has about it
nothing whatever that is absolute. There are a vast
number of
women whose sexual facility, again by natural
tendency and not
merely by acquired habits, is as marked as that of
any man, if
not more so. In the sexual field, as we have seen in
a previous
volume (_Analysis of the Sexual Impulse_), the range
of
variability is greater in women than in men.
The fact that love is an art, a method of drawing music from an
instrument, and not the mere commission of an act by
mutual consent, makes
any verbal agreement to love of little moment. If love were a matter of
contract, of simple intellectual consent, of question
and answer, it would
never have come into the world at all. Love appeared as art from the
first, and the subsequent developments of the summary
methods of reason
and speech cannot abolish that fundamental fact. This is scarcely realized
by those ill-advised lovers who consider that the first step in
courtship--and perhaps even the whole of courtship--is for a man to ask a
woman to be his wife. That is so far from being the case that it
constantly happens that the premature exhibition of so large a demand at
once and for ever damns all the wooer's chances. It is lamentable, no
doubt, that so grave and fateful a matter as that of
marriage should so
often be decided without calm deliberation and
reasonable forethought. But
sexual relationships can never, and should never, be
merely a matter of
cold calculation. When a woman is suddenly confronted by the demand that
she should yield herself up as a wife to a man who has not yet succeeded
in gaining her affections she will not fail to find--
provided she is
lifted above the cold-hearted motives of self-interest--
that there are
many sound reasons why she should not do so. And having thus squarely
faced the question in cool blood and decided it, she
will henceforth,
probably, meet that wooer with a tunic of steel
enclosing her breast.
"Love must be _revealed_ by acts and not _betrayed_
by words. I
regard as abnormal the extraordinary method of a
hasty avowal
beforehand; for that represents not the direct but
the reflex
path of transmission. However sweet and normal the
avowal may be
when once reciprocity has been realized, as a method
of conquest
I consider it dangerous and likely to produce the
reverse of the
result desired." I take these wise words from a
thoughtful "Essai
sur l'Amour" (_Archives de Psychologie_, 1904) by a non-psychological Swiss writer who is recording his
own
experiences, and who insists much on the
predominance of the
spiritual and mental element in love.
It is worthy of note that this recognition that
direct speech is
out of place in courtship must not be regarded as a
refinement of
civilization. Among primitive peoples everywhere it
is perfectly
well recognized that the offer of love, and its
acceptance or its
refusal, must be made by actions symbolically, and
not by the
crude method of question and answer. Among the
Indians of
Paraguay, who allow much sexual freedom to their
women, but never
buy or sell love, Mantegazza states (_Rio de la
Plata e
Tenerife_, 1867, p. 225) that a girl of the people
will come to
your door or window and timidly, with a confused
air, ask you, in
the Guarani tongue, for a drink of water. But she
will smile if
you innocently offer her water. Among the Tarahumari
Indians of
Mexico, with whom the initiative in courting belongs
to the
women, the girl takes the first step through her
parents, then
she throws small pebbles at the young man; if he
throws them back
the matter is concluded (Carl Lumholtz, _Scribner's
Magazine_,
Sept., 1894, p. 299). In many parts of the world it
is the woman
who chooses her husband (see, e.g., M.A. Potter,
_Sohrab and
Rustem_, pp. 169 et seq.), and she very frequently
adopts a
symbolical method of proposal. Except when the
commercial element
predominates in marriage, a similar method is
frequently adopted
by men also in making proposals of marriage.
It is not only at the beginning of courtship that the
act of love has
little room for formal declarations, for the demands and the avowals that
can be clearly defined in speech. The same rule holds
even in the most
intimate relationships of old lovers, throughout the
married life. The
permanent element in modesty, which survives every
sexual initiation to
become intertwined with all the exquisite impudicities of love, combines
with a true erotic instinct to rebel against formal
demands, against
verbal affirmations or denials. Love's requests cannot be made in words,
nor truthfully answered in words: a fine divination is still needed as
long as love lasts.
The fact that the needs of love cannot be expressed
but must be
divined has long been recognized by those who have
written of the
art of love, alike by writers within and without the
European
Christian traditions. Thus Zacchia, in his great
medico-legal
treatise, points out that a husband must be
attentive to the
signs of sexual desire in his wife. "Women," he says, "when
sexual desire arises within them are accustomed to
ask their
husbands questions on matters of love; they flatter
and caress
them; they allow some part of their body to be
uncovered as if by
accident; their breasts appear to swell; they show
unusual
alacrity; they blush; their eyes are bright; and if
they
experience unusual ardor they stammer, talk beside
the mark, and
are scarcely mistress of themselves. At the same
time their
private parts become hot and swell. All these signs
should
convince a husband, however inattentive he may be,
that his wife
craves for satisfaction" (_Zacchiæ Quæstionum
Medico-legalium
Opus_, lib. vii, tit. iii, quæst. I; vol. ii, p. 624
in ed. of
1688).
The old Hindu erotic writers attributed great
importance alike to
the man's attentiveness to the woman's erotic needs,
and to his
skill and consideration in all the preliminaries of
the sexual
act. He must do all that he can to procure her
pleasure, says
Vatsyayana. When she is on her bed and perhaps
absorbed in
conversation, he gently unfastens the knot of her
lower garment.
If she protests he closes her mouth with kisses.
Some authors,
Vatsyayana remarks, hold that the lover should begin
by sucking
the nipples of her breasts. When erection occurs he
touches her
with his hands, softly caressing the various parts
of her body.
He should always press those parts of her body
towards which she
turns her eyes. If she is shy, and it is the first
time, he will
place his hands between her thighs which she will
instinctively
press together. If she is young he will put his
hands on her
breasts, and she will no doubt cover them with her
own. If she is
mature he will do all that may seem fitting and
agreeable to both
parties. Then he will take her hair and her chin
between his
fingers and kiss them. If she is very young she will
blush and
close her eyes. By the way in which she receives his
caresses he
will divine what pleases her most in union. The
signs of her
enjoyment are that her body becomes limp, her eyes
close, she
loses all timidity, and takes part in the movements
which bring
her most closely to him. If, on the other hand, she
feels no
pleasure, she strikes the bed with her hands, will
not allow the
man to continue, is sullen, even bites or kicks, and
continues
the movements of coitus when the man has finished.
In such cases,
Vatsyayana adds, it is his duty to rub the vulva
with his hand
before union until it is moist, and he should
perform the same
movements afterwards if his own orgasm has occurred
first.
With regard to Indian erotic art generally, and more
especially
Vatsyayana, who appears to have lived some sixteen
hundred years
ago, information will be found in Valentino,
"L'Hygiène conjugale
chez les Hindous," _Archives Générales de Médecine_, Ap. 25,
1905; Iwan Bloch, "Indische Medizin," Puschmann's _Handbuch der
Geschichte der Medizin_, vol. i; Heimann and
Stephan, "Beiträge
zur Ehehygiene nach der Lehren des Kamasutram,"
_Zeitschaft für
Sexualwissenschaft_, Sept., 1908; also a review of
Richard
Schmidt's German translation of the _Kamashastra_ of
Vatsyayana
in _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1902, Heft 2. There
has long