Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2: Sexual InversionEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2: Sexual Inversion
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
"Till now I had been absolutely untouched by any moral scruples.
I had the usual acquiescence in the religious beliefs in which I
had been trained; it did not enter my head that there was any
divine law, one way or the other, concerning the allurements of
the imagination. From my thirteenth year slight hints of
uneasiness began to creep into my conscience. I began perhaps to
understand that the formulas of religion, to which I had listened
all my life with as little attention as possible, had some
meaning which now and then touched the circumstances of my own
life. I had not yet realized that my past foretold my future, and
that women would be to me a repulsion instead of an attraction
where things sexual were concerned. I had the full conviction
that one day I should be married; I had also some fear that as I
grew to manhood I might succumb to the temptations of loose
women. I had an incipient revulsion from such a fate, and this
seemed to me to indicate that moral stirrings were at work within
me. One night I was amorously attacked in my bedroom by two of
the domestics. I experienced an acute horror which I hid under
laughter; my resistance was so desperate that I escaped with a
tickling. I had been accustomed to sit on the servants' knees, a
habit I had innocently retained from childhood; I can now recall
in detail the approaches these women had been used to make me. At
the time I was utterly oblivious that anything was intended.
"I was equally oblivious to things that had a nearer relation to
my own feelings. In passing along a side-street one night I was
overtaken by a man who began conversation on the weather. He
asked me if I were not cold, began passing his hand up and down
my back; then came a question about caning at school, whether
certain parts of me were not sore, leading to an investigating
touch. I put his hand aside shyly, but did not resent the action.
Presently he was for exploring my trousers pockets and I began to
think him a pickpocket; repulsed in that direction, he returned,
to rubbing my back. The sensation was pleasant. I now took him
for a pimp who wished to take me to a prostitute, and as at that
time I had begun to realize that such pleasures were not to my
taste I was glad to find myself at my destination, and said
good-bye sharply, leaving him standing full of astonishment at
his failure with one who had taken his advances so pleasantly. I
could not bring myself to believe that others had the same
feelings as myself. Later I realized my escape, not without a
certain amount of regret, and constructed for my own pleasure a
different termination to the incident.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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