Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-attraction: for the use of Physicians and Students of Medical JurisprudenceTalmey, Bernard Simon
Science
Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-attraction: for the use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence
Talmey, Bernard Simon
Sex
[AK] This is often the case even among the noblest of men; among women,
even among the worst, as the demi-mondaines, the heart has to be also
somewhat engaged.
[AL] In a lesser degree, the same may be said of the man, only the care
for procuring food distracts his attention from the ultimate aim of
life.
[AM] It is really amusing to notice how the radical writers put up a
target and fire at it to their heart’s content. They take the church
or state marriage and direct their poisoned arrows against it. As
if the biologist, when speaking of animal and human marriage, could
ever mean the conventional marriage. Neither does he understand by
monogamy the condition generally known by this term. The biological
monogamic marriage of a certain couple is their exclusive cohabitation
for a certain length of time. If during this time they refrain
from cohabitating with others they are for the time being living
biologically in monogamic marriage. The cock in the barn-yard is
polygamous, the steer in the herd is promiscuous, but the cow is
monogamous. Once she has been impregnated she will not admit any other
male until the end of the period of gestation and lactation, and the
new period of rut has set in. From the beginning of one impregnation to
the beginning of the other, almost a year, she is monogamic. This is
the case with almost all females among the higher animals, and woman
does not make any exception to this rule. Even the girl who professes
free love, except she be a nymphomaniac, would not continue to live
with her lover, if she found that while living with her he had had love
affairs with others. She would divorce him forthwith, and sometimes
such a divorce would be accompanied by quite a little scandal. Most of
the erotic murders committed by men upon women and most of the cases
of women throwing acid into the faces of men, we so often read in the
Parisian papers, are perpetrated by those whose marriage relations
have never been sanctioned by church or state. This fact reveals
another error of the radicals who picture the peaceful parting of
their free-loving couples in such glowing colors. They simply leave
each other when they do not love any longer. But in practice love does
not depart from both parties simultaneously, and the party which is
still attached to the other will resent the desertion no less than if
they would have been legally married. The reason is that normal men
and women, except in early youth, perhaps, are never varietists. The
varietist who lacks the instinct of exclusiveness is a psychopathic
sensualist. No alienist could have given a better description of the
symptoms of the psychopathic sensualist than that found in E. C.
Walker’s (The moloch of the monogamic ideal) picture of the sufferings
of the varietist, not of the suffering of total abstinence—in this case
there may be some physiological basis—but of the suffering for lack of
variety. And those pathological specimens are presented to us as normal
men and women.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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