Case 72. A notary, known from his youth to those about him as peculiar and misanthropic. During his school-days he was given to masturbation. According to his own story, he excited his sexual desire by spreading out on the cover of his bed pieces of toilet-paper that he had used, induced erection by regarding and smelling them, and then practiced masturbation. After his death, by the side of his bed, there was found a large basket of such papers, with the dates marked on them. Here there were probably fancies of the nature of the above-mentioned acts. (d) _Masochism in Women._—In woman voluntary subjection to the opposite sex is a physiological phenomenon. Owing to her passive _rôle_ in procreation and long-existent social conditions, ideas of subjection are, in woman, normally connected with the idea of sexual relations. So to speak, they form the harmonics which determine the tone-quality of feminine feeling. Any one conversant with the history of civilization knows in what a state of absolute subjection woman was always kept until a relatively high degree of civilization was reached;[75] and an attentive observer of life may still easily recognize how the custom of unnumbered generations, in connection with the passive _rôle_ with which woman has been endowed by Nature, has given her an instinctive inclination to voluntary subordination to man; he will notice that exaggeration of customary gallantry is very distasteful to women, and that a deviation from it in the direction of masterful behavior, though loudly reprehended, is often accepted with secret satisfaction.[76] Under the veneer of polite society the instinct of feminine servitude is everywhere discernible. Thus it is easy to regard masochism in general as a pathological growth of specific feminine mental elements,—as an abnormal intensification of certain features of the psycho-sexual character of woman,—and to seek its primary origin in that sex (_v. infra_, p. 145). It may, however, be held to be established that, in woman, an inclination to subordination to man (which may be regarded as an acquired, purposeful arrangement, a phenomenon of adaptation to social requirements) is to a certain extent a normal manifestation. The reason that, under such circumstances, the “poetry” of the symbolic act of subjection is not reached, lies partly in the fact that man has not the vanity of that weakling who would use blows to display his power (as the love-serving knights did with the ladies of the Middle Ages), but prefers to demonstrate his real advantages. The barbarian has his wife plow for him, and the civilized lover speculates about her dowry; she willingly endures both.