Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in WomenEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
In the article "Generation," contained in another medical work
belonging to the middle of the nineteenth century,--Rees's
_Cyclopedia_,--we find the following statement: "That a mucous
fluid is sometimes found in coition from the internal organs and
vagina is undoubted; but this only happens in lascivious women,
or such as live luxuriously."
Gall had stated decisively that the sexual desires of men are
stronger and more imperious than those of women. (_Fonctions du
Cerveau_, 1825, vol. iii, pp. 241-271.)
Raciborski declared that three-fourths of women merely endure the
approaches of men. (_De la Puberté chez la Femme_, 1844, p. 486.)
"When the question is carefully inquired into and without
prejudice," said Lawson Tait, "it is found that women have their
sexual appetites far less developed than men." (Lawson Tait,
"Remote Effects of Removal of the Uterine Appendages,"
_Provincial Medical Journal_, May, 1891.) "The sexual instinct is
very powerful in man and comparatively weak in women," he stated
elsewhere (_Diseases of Women_, 1889, p. 60).
Hammond stated that, leaving prostitutes out of consideration, it
is doubtful if in one-tenth of the instances of intercourse they
[women] experience the slightest pleasurable sensation from first
to last (Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 300), and he considered
(p. 281) that this condition was sometimes congenital.
Lombroso and Ferrero consider that sexual sensibility, as well as
all other forms of sensibility, is less pronounced in women, and
they bring forward various facts and opinions which seem to them
to point in the same direction. "Woman is naturally and
organically frigid." At the same time they consider that, while
erethism is less, sexuality is greater than in men. (Lombroso and
Ferrero, _La Donna Delinquente, la Prostituta, e la Donna
Normale_, 1893, pp. 54-58.)
"It is an altogether false idea," Fehling declared, in his
rectorial address at the University of Basel in 1891, "that a
young woman has just as strong an impulse to the opposite sex as
a young man.... The appearance of the sexual side in the love of
a young girl is pathological." (H. Fehling, _Die Bestimmung der
Frau_, 1892, p. 18.) In his _Lehrbuch der Frauenkrankheiten_ the
same gynecological authority states his belief that half of all
women are not sexually excitable.
Krafft-Ebing was of opinion that women require less sexual
satisfaction than men, being less sensual. (Krafft-Ebing, "Ueber
Neurosen und Psychosen durch sexuelle Abstinenz," _Jahrbücher für
Psychiatrie_, 1888, Bd. viii, ht. I and 2.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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