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)
that, as he points out, even now sexual separation of the sexes commonly
occurs.[189]
There are thus a great number of constantly recurring occasions in savage
life when continence must be preserved, and when, it is firmly believed,
terrible risks would be incurred by its violation--during war, after
victory, after festivals, during mourning, on journeys, in hunting and
fishing, in a vast number of agricultural and industrial occupations.
It might fairly be argued that the facility with which the savage places
these checks on sexual intercourse itself bears witness to the weakness of
the sexual impulse. Evidence of another order which seems to point to the
undeveloped state of the sexual impulse among savages may be found in the
comparatively undeveloped condition of their sexual organs, a condition
not, indeed, by any means constant, but very frequently noted. As regards
women, it has in many parts of the world been observed to be the rule, and
the data which Ploss and Bartels have accumulated seem to me, on the
whole, to point clearly in this direction.[190]
At another point, also, it may be remarked, the repulsion between the
sexes and the restraints on intercourse may be associated with weak sexual
impulse. It is not improbable that a certain horror of the sexual organs
may be a natural feeling which is extinguished in the intoxication of
desire, yet still has a physiological basis which renders the sexual
organs--disguised and minimized by convention and by artistic
representation--more or less disgusting in the absence of erotic
emotion.[191] And this is probably more marked in cases in which the
sexual instinct is constitutionally feeble. A lady who had no marked
sexual desires, and who considered it well bred to be indifferent to such
matters, on inspecting her sexual parts in a mirror for the first time in
her life was shocked and disgusted at the sight. Certainly many women
could record a similar experience on being first approached by a man,
although artistic conventions present the male form with greater truth
than the female. Moreover,--and here is the significant point,--this
feeling is by no means restricted to the refined and cultured. "When
working at Michelangelo," wrote a correspondent from Italy, "my upper
gondolier used to see photographs and statuettes of all that man's works.
Stopping one day before the Night and Dawn of S. Lorenzo, sprawling naked
women, he exclaimed: 'How hideous they are!' I pressed him to explain
himself. He went on: 'The ugliest man naked is handsomer than the finest
woman naked. Women have crooked legs, and their sexual organs stink. I
only once saw a naked woman. It was in a brothel, when I was 18. The sight
of her "natura" made me go out and vomit into the canal. You know I have
been twice married, but I never saw either of my wives without clothing.'
Of very rank cheese he said one day: 'Puzza come la natura d'una donna.'"
This man, my correspondent added, was entirely normal and robust, but
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