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)
Mantegazza devoted great attention to this point in several of
the works he published during fifty years, and was decidedly of
the opinion that the sexual emotions are much stronger in women
than in men, and that women have much more enjoyment in sexual
intercourse. In his _Fisiologia del Piacere_ he supports this
view, and refers to the greater complexity of the genital
apparatus in women (as well as its larger surface and more
protected position), to what he considers to be the keener
sensibility of women generally, to the passivity of women, etc.;
and he considers that sexual pleasure is rendered more seductive
to women by the mystery in which it is veiled for them by modesty
and our social habits. In a more recent work (_Fisiologia della
Donna_, cap. viii) Mantegazza returns to this subject, and
remarks that long experience, while confirming his early opinion,
has modified it to the extent that he now believes that, as
compared with men, the sexual emotions of women vary within far
wider limits. Among men few are quite insensitive to the physical
pleasures of love, while, on the other hand, few are thrown by
the violence of its emotional manifestations into a state of
syncope or convulsions. Among women, while some are absolutely
insensitive, others (as in cases with which he was acquainted)
are so violently excited by the paradise of physical love that,
after the sexual embrace, they faint or fall into a cataleptic
condition for several hours.
"Physical sex is a larger factor in the life of the woman.... If
this be true of the physical element, it is equally true of the
mental element." (Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, _The Human Element in
Sex_, fifth edition, 1894, p. 47.)
"In the female sex," remarks Clouston, "reproduction is a more
dominant function of the organism than in the male, and has far
larger, if not more intense, relationships to feeling, judgment,
and volition." (Clouston, _Neuroses of Development_, 1891.)
"It may be said," Marro states, "that in woman the visceral
system reacts, if not with greater intensity, certainly in a more
general manner, to all the impressions, having a sexual basis,
which dominate the life of woman, if not as sexual emotions
properly so called, as related emotions closely dependent on the
reproductive instinct." (A. Marro, _La Pubertà_, 1898, p. 233.)
Forel also believed (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 274) that women are
more erotic than men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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