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)
If this is not the case he must either be regarded as a
radically abnormal person or as carried away by passion to a point of
temporary insanity.
The intimate connection of love with pain, its tendency to approach
cruelty, is seen in one of the most widespread of the occasional and
non-essential manifestations of strong sexual emotion, especially in
women, the tendency to bite. We may find references to love-bites in the
literature of ancient as well as of modern times, in the East as well as
in the West. Plautus, Catullus, Propertius, Horace, Ovid, Petronius, and
other Latin writers refer to bites as associated with kisses and usually
on the lips. Plutarch says that Flora, the mistress of Cnæus Pompey, in
commending her lover remarked that he was so lovable that she could never
leave him without giving him a bite. In the Arabic _Perfumed Garden_ there
are many references to love-bites, while in the Indian _Kama Sutra_ of
Vatsyayana a chapter is devoted to this subject. Biting in love is also
common among the South Slavs.[76] The phenomenon is indeed sufficiently
familiar to enable Heine, in one of his _Romancero_, to describe those
marks by which the ancient chronicler states that Edith Swanneck
recognized Harold, after the Battle of Hastings, as the scars of the bites
she had once given him.
It would be fanciful to trace this tendency back to that process of
devouring to which sexual congress has, in the primitive stages of its
evolution, been reduced. But we may probably find one of the germs of the
love-bite in the attitude of many mammals during or before coitus; in
attaining a firm grip of the female it is not uncommon (as may be observed
in the donkey) for the male to seize the female's neck between his teeth.
The horse sometimes bites the mare before coitus and it is said that among
the Arabs when a mare is not apt for coitus she is sent to pasture with a
small ardent horse, who excites her by playing with her and biting
her.[77] It may be noted, also, that dogs often show their affection for
their masters by gentle bites. Children also, as Stanley Hall has pointed
out, are similarly fond of biting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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