[33] R. Hellmann, _Ueber Geschlechtsfreiheit_, p. 14. [34] This belief seems frequent among young girls in Continental Europe. It forms the subject of one of Marcel Prevost's _Lettres de Femmes_. In Austria, according to Freud, it is not uncommon, exclusively among girls. [35] Yet, according to English law, rape is a crime which it is impossible for a husband to commit on his wife (see, e.g., Nevill Geary, _The Law of Marriage_, Ch. XV, Sect. V). The performance of the marriage ceremony, however, even if it necessarily involved a clear explanation of marital privileges, cannot be regarded as adequate justification for an act of sexual intercourse performed with violence or without the wife's consent. [36] Hirschfeld, _Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, 1903, p. 88. It may be added that a horror of coitus is not necessarily due to bad education, and may also occur in hereditarily degenerate women, whose ancestors have shown similar or allied mental peculiarities. A case of such "functional impotence" has been reported in a young Italian wife of twenty-one, who was otherwise healthy, and strongly attached to her husband. The marriage was annulled on the ground that "rudimentary sexual or emotional paranoia, which renders a wife invincibly refractory to sexual union, notwithstanding the integrity of the sexual organs, constitutes psychic functional impotence" (_Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1906, fasc. vi, p. 806). [37] The reasonableness of this step is so obvious that it should scarcely need insistence. "The instruction of school-boys and school-girls is most adequately effected by an elderly doctor," Näcke remarks, "sometimes perhaps the school-doctor." "I strongly advocate," says Clouston (_The Hygiene of Mind_, p. 249), "that the family doctor, guided by the parent and the teacher, is by far the best instructor and monitor." Moll is of the same opinion. [38] I have further developed this argument in "Religion and the Child," _Nineteenth Century and After_, 1907. [39] The intimate relation of art and poetry to the sexual impulse has been realized in a fragmentary way by many who have not attained to any wide vision of auto-erotic activity in life. "Poetry is necessarily related to the sexual function," says Metchnikoff (_Essais Optimistes_, p. 352), who also quotes with approval the statement of Möbius (previously made by Ferrero and many others) that "artistic aptitudes must probably be considered as secondary sexual characters." CHAPTER III. SEXUAL EDUCATION AND NAKEDNESS.