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)
A well-known physician in Chicago tells me that on making inquiry
of 25 middle-class married men in succession be found that 16 had
been first seduced by a woman. An officer in the Indian Medical
Service writes to me as follows: "Once at a club in Burma we were
some 25 at table and the subject of first intercourse came up.
All had been led astray by servants save 2, whom their sisters'
governesses had initiated. We were all men in the 'service,' so
the facts may be taken to be typical of what occurs in our
stratum of society. All had had sexual relations with respectable
unmarried girls, and most with the wives of men known to their
fathers, in some instances these being old enough to be their
lovers' mothers. Apparently up to the age of 17 none had dared to
make the first advances, yet from the age of 13 onward all had
had ample opportunity for gratifying their sexual instincts with
women. Though all had been to public schools where homosexuality
was known to occur, yet (as I can assert from intimate knowledge)
none had given signs of inversion or perversion in Burma."
In Russia, Tchlenoff, investigating the sexual life of over 2000
Moscow students of upper and middle class (_Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Oct.-Nov., 1908), found that in half
of them the first coitus took place between 14 and 17 years of
age; in 41 per cent, with prostitutes, in 39 per cent, with
servants, and in 10 per cent, with married women. In 41 per cent,
the young man declared that he had taken the initiative, in 25
per cent, the women took it, and in 23 per cent, the incitement
came from a comrade.
The histories I have recorded in Appendix B (as well as in the
two following volumes of these _Studies_) very well illustrate
the tendency of young girls to manifest sexual impulses when
freed from the constraint which they feel in the presence of
adult men and from the fear of consequences. These histories show
especially how very frequently nurse-maids and servant-girls
effect the sexual initiation of the young boys intrusted to them.
How common this impulse is among adolescent girls of low social
class is indicated by the fact that certainly the majority of
middle-class men can recall instances from their own childhood.
(I here leave out of account the widespread practice among nurses
of soothing very young children in their charge by manipulating
the sexual organs.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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