Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4: Sexual Selection In ManEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4: Sexual Selection In Man
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
A different current of feeling began to appear with the new
emotional movement during the eighteenth century. Rousseau called
attention to the importance of the olfactory sense, and in his
educational work, _Emile_ (Bk. II), he referred to the odor of a
woman's "_cabinet de toilette_" as not so feeble a snare as is
commonly supposed. In the same century Casanova wrote still more
emphatically concerning the same point; in the preface to his
_Mémoires_ he states: "I have always found sweet the odor of the
women I have loved"; and elsewhere: "There is something in the
air of the bedroom of the woman one loves, something so intimate,
so balsamic, such voluptuous emanations, that if a lover had to
choose between Heaven and this place of delight his hesitation
would not last for a moment" (_Mémoires_, vol. iii). In the
previous century, in England, Sir Kenelm Digby, in his
interesting and remarkable _Private Memoirs_, when describing a
visit to Lady Venetia Stanley, afterward his wife, touches on
personal odor as an element of attraction; he had found her
asleep in bed and on her breasts "did glisten a few drops of
sweatlike diamond sparks, and had a more fragrant odor than the
violets or primroses whose season was newly passed."
In 1821 Cadet-Devaux published, in the _Revue Encyclopédique_, a
study entitled "De l'atmosphère de la Femme et de sa Puissance,"
which attracted a great deal of attention in Germany as well as
in France; he considered that the exhalations of the feminine
body are of the first importance in sexual attraction.
Prof. A. Galopin in 1886 wrote a semiscientific book, _Le Parfum
de la Femme_, in which the sexual significance of personal odor
is developed to its fullest. He writes with enthusiasm concerning
the sweet and health-giving character of the natural perfume of a
beloved woman, and the mischief done both to health and love by
the use of artificial perfumes. "The purest marriage that can be
contracted between a man and a woman," he asserts (p. 157) "is
that engendered by olfaction and sanctioned by a common
assimilation in the brain of the animated molecules due to the
secretion and evaporation of two bodies in contact and sympathy."
In a book written during the first half of the nineteenth century
which contains various subtle observations on love we read, with
reference to the sweet odor which poets have found in the breath
of women: "In reality many women have an intoxicatingly agreeable
breath which plays no small part in the love-compelling
atmosphere which they spread around them" (_Eros oder Wörterbuch
über die Physiologie_, 1849, Bd. 1, p. 45).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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