Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to SocietyEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6: Sex in Relation to Society
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
In a somewhat similar manner, Henri de Régnier, in his novel,
_Les Rencontres de Monsieur Bréot_ (p. 50), represents Bercaillé
as deliberately preferring to take his pleasures with
servant-girls rather than with ladies, for pleasure was, to his
mind, a kind of service, which could well be accommodated with
the services they are accustomed to give; and then they are
robust and agreeable, they possess the _naïveté_ which is always
charming in the common people, and they are not apt to be
repelled by those little accidents which might offend the
fastidious sensibilities of delicately bred ladies.
Bloch, who has especially emphasized this side of the appeal of
prostitution (_Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, pp. 359-362),
refers to the delicate and sensitive young Danish writer, J.P.
Jakobsen, who seems to have acutely felt the contrast between the
higher and more habitual impulses, and the occasional outburst of
what he felt to be lower instincts; in his _Niels Lyhne_ he
describes the kind of double life in which a man is true for a
fortnight to the god he worships, and is then overcome by other
powers which madly bear him in their grip towards what he feels
to be humiliating, perverse, and filthy. "At such moments," Bloch
remarks, "the man is another being. The 'two souls' in the breast
become a reality. Is that the famous scholar, the lofty idealist,
the fine-souled æsthetician, the artist who has given us so many
splendid and pure works in poetry and painting? We no longer
recognize him, for at such moments another being has come to the
surface, another nature is moving within him, and with the power
of an elementary force is impelling him towards things at which
his 'upper consciousness,' the civilized man within him, would
shudder." Bloch believes that we are here concerned with a kind
of normal masculine masochism, which prostitution serves to
gratify.
_IV. The Present Social Attitude Towards Prostitution._
We have now surveyed the complex fact of prostitution in some of its most
various and typical aspects, seeking to realise, intelligently and
sympathetically, the fundamental part it plays as an elementary
constituent of our marriage system. Finally we have to consider the
grounds on which prostitution now appears to a large and growing number of
persons not only an unsatisfactory method of sexual gratification but a
radically bad method.
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