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
Curves similar to those shown facing page 32 represent
in general terms a simplified view of what my research leads me to
believe to be the normal, spontaneous sex tide in women of our race.
As one young married woman confided to me, her longing for bodily
union with her husband, as distinct from her longing for his daily
companionship, seemed to well up naturally like "clockwork," and
this during his long absence. But human beings vary remarkably in
every particular, and just as no two people have the same features,
so no two people would have _absolutely_ identical curves were
they recorded in sufficient detail. Many a woman is particularly
conscious of only one sex-impulse in each moon-month. Of such
women, some feel the period which comes before menstruation, and
some feel the one which follows it. In those who generally feel only
one, the second period is sometimes felt when they are particularly
well, or only when they read exciting novels, or meet the man
they love at a time coinciding with the natural, but suppressed,
time of desire. There are a few women, who seem to be really a
little abnormal, who feel the strongest desire actually during the
menstrual flow.
If anyone who reads this thinks to test my view by questioning a
number of women, the result will probably appear very conflicting,
partly because it is not often that women will tell the truth about
such a thing, and partly because in the larger number of women
either one or the other period is the more acute and is the one
they observe in themselves--if they have observed anything. But a
delicate and more accurate investigation of such cases will often
bring to light the existence of the second crest of vitality. Once
the fundamental idea is grasped, much that appeared obscure or of
no significance becomes plain and full of meaning. One lady doctor
with whom I discussed my view at once said that it illuminated many
observations she had made on her patients, but had not brought
together or explained.
There is but little evidence to be found in scientific works on
sex, but an interesting instance is mentioned by Forel ("The Sexual
Question," Engl. Transl. page 92) in another connection. He says:
"A married woman confessed to me, when I reproached her for being
unfaithful to her husband, that she desired coitus at least once
a fortnight, and that when her husband was not there she took the
first comer." Forel did not see any law in this. We may perhaps all
see in her want of self-control a grievous _moral_ abnormality, but
in her fortnightly periods of desire she fits perfectly into the
physiological law which, it appears to me, governs the normal sex
tides of our race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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