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)
"I was now so possessed by masculine attraction that I became a
lover of all the heroes I read of in books. Some became as vivid
to me as those with whom I was living in daily contact. For a
time I became an ardent lover of Napoléon (the incident of his
anticipation of the nuptials with his second wife attracting me
by its impetuous brutality), of Edward I, and of Julius Cæsar.
Charles II I remember by a caressing cruelty with which my
imagination gifted him. Jugurtha was a great acquisition.
Bothwell, Judge Jefferies, and many villains of history and
fiction appealed to me by their cruelty.
"I had become an adept in the mental construction necessary for
the satisfaction of my desires. And yet up to that date I had
never seen the nude body of a full-grown adult. I had no
knowledge of the extent to which hair in certain instances
develops on the torso; indeed, my efforts at characterization
centered, for the most part, around the thighs and generative
organs. At this time one of my schoolfellows saw a common
workman, known to me by name, bathing in a stream with some
companions; all his body was, my informant told me, covered with
hair from throat to belly. In face the man was coarse and
repulsive, but I now began to regard him as a lovely monstrosity,
and for many nights embraced the vision of him passionately, with
face buried in the jungle growth of hair that covered his chest.
I was, for the first time, conscious of deliberately (and
successfully) willing not to see his face, which was distasteful
to me. At the same time another schoolfellow told me, concerning
a master who bathed with the boys, that hair showed above his
bathing-drawers as high as the navel. I now began definitely to
construct bodies in detail; the suggestion of extensive hairiness
maddened me with delight, but remained in my mind strongly
associated with cruelty; my hairy lovers never behaved to me with
tenderness; everything at this period, I think, tended to draw me
toward force and violence as an expression of amativeness. A
schoolfellow, a few years my senior, of a cruel, bullying
disposition, took a particular delight in inflicting pain on me:
he had particularly pointed shoes, and it was his custom to make
me stand with my back to him while he addressed me in petting and
caressing tones; just when his words were at their kindliest he
would inflict a sharp stroke with the toe of his boot so as to
reach the most tender part of my fundament; the pain was
exquisite; I was conscious that he experienced sexual pleasure (I
had seen definite signs of it beneath his clothing), and, though
loathing him, I would, after I had suffered from his kicks, throw
myself into his imaginary embraces and indulge in a perfect rage
of abject submission. Yet all the time I would gladly have killed
him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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