The section foreman who takes pleasure in driving his men at a killing pace, the detective engaged daily in the task of man hunting, the so-called "strict" parent who beats his children, the surgeon who never tires of performing operations, the futile reformer who is constantly trying to deprive some one of some form of enjoyment, the jealous husband who deprives his wife of many pleasures, the jealous wife who relishes the thought that her husband is giving up his club or his former associates for her sake, are sadists, some of them partly normal and useful, some of them morbid or ridiculous. =The Mob.= Sadism is one of the great "mob characteristics." Why do we run to fires and to the scene of an accident? To help? No. To enjoy the sight of some one's life or property being destroyed. If our impulses were humane or charitable we should be relieved, nay exultant, when we learn that the conflagration has only destroyed a curtain or a shade, when we see the man bowled over by a taxi getting up and walking away, little the worse for the experience. Notice on the contrary the indignation of the average man when the fire "does not amount to anything", when the "victim" of an accident escapes unharmed. =Is the Male More Cruel?= It has been said that sadism was a masculine trait, masochism a feminine characteristic. Like the majority of generalisations on the subject of sex differences, it is inaccurate. Man, the hunter, is more aggressive in love, but his aggressiveness need not include cruelty. His strength, in modern life, is put to quite a different use, to protect the weaker female, not to overwhelm her. Woman is supposed to be more submissive but mythology, legend and history present to us thousands of cases in which the female of the human species betrayed many sadistic instincts, not infrequently associated with her love activities. Even in the animal world, while we behold males apparently submitting the female to much suffering, we find not a few cases, for instance in the insect world, of females killing or even devouring their mate immediately after the love communion. CHAPTER XX LOVE THAT CRAVES SUFFERING. MASOCHISM The man whom Krafft-Ebing selected as the typical masochist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, was born in Lemberg, January 27, 1836. He was extremely frail in infancy and childhood. He compensated for his physical inferiority thru unusual mental activity, for at the age of nineteen he won his degree of doctor of law. At twenty he was appointed instructor in German history at an university. At the age of twenty-five he was the author of several books of history. He then turned to fiction, first of the historical and then of the purely psychological type. A morbid tendency was observable in his very first books, a tendency which became more and more marked and which led him to write almost exclusively descriptions of perverse love entanglements.