Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex DifficultiesStopes, Marie Carmichael
Science
Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties
Stopes, Marie Carmichael
Man-woman relationships; Marriage; Sex (Psychology); Sex differences; Sex in marriage
So unaware of the elements of the physiological reactions of women
are many modern men that the case of Mrs. G. is not exceptional.
Her husband was accustomed to pet her and have relations with her
frequently, but yet he never took any trouble to rouse in her the
necessary preliminary feeling for mutual union. She had married as
a very ignorant girl, but often vaguely felt a sense of something
lacking in her husband's love. Her husband had never kissed her
except on the lips and cheek, but once at the crest of the wave of
her sex-tide (all unconscious that it was so) she felt a yearning to
feel his head, his lips, pressed against her bosom. The sensitive
inter-relation between a woman's breasts and the rest of her
sex-life is not only a bodily thrill, but there is a world of poetic
beauty in the longing of a loving woman for the unconceived child
which melts in mists of tenderness toward her lover, the soft touch
of whose lips can thus rouse her mingled joy. Because she shyly
asked him, Mrs. G.'s husband gave her one swift unrepeated kiss
upon her bosom. He was so ignorant that he did not know that her
husband's lips upon her breast melt a wife to tenderness and are one
of a husband's first and surest ways to make her physically ready
for complete union. In this way he inhibited her natural desire,
and as he never did anything to stir it, she never had any physical
pleasure in their relation. Such prudish or careless husbands,
content with their own satisfaction, little know the pent-up
aching, or even resentment, which may eat into a wife's heart, and
ultimately may affect her whole health.
Often the man is also the victim of the purblind social customs
which make sex-knowledge _tabu_.
It has become a tradition of our social life that the ignorance
of woman about her own body and that of her future husband is a
flower-like innocence. And to such an extreme is this sometimes
pushed, that not seldom is a girl married unaware that married
life will bring her into physical relations with her husband
fundamentally different from those with her brother. When she
discovers the true nature of his body, and learns the part she has
to play as a wife, she may refuse utterly to agree to her husband's
wishes. I know one pair of which the husband, chivalrous and loving,
had to wait years before his bride recovered from the shock of the
discovery of the meaning of marriage and was able to allow him a
natural relation. There have been not a few brides whom the horror
of the first night of marriage with a man less considerate has
driven to suicide or insanity.
That girls can reach a marriageable age without some knowledge
of the realities of marriage would seem incredible were it not a
fact. One highly-educated lady intimately known to me told me that
when she was about eighteen she suffered many months of agonising
apprehension that she was about to have a baby because a man had
snatched a kiss from her lips at a dance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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