The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization: Translated from the Sixth German EditionBloch, Iwan
Philosophy
The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization: Translated from the Sixth German Edition
Bloch, Iwan
Sex; Sexual ethics
This theory is strongly supported, and indeed elevated to the rank of a
natural law, by the circumstance that in the higher animals the sense of
smell, in the course of phylogenetic development, has attained a
continually greater significance in relation to sexuality; and by the
fact that, according to the discovery of Zwaardemaker, there exists
widely diffused throughout Nature a =distinct group= of sexual odours,
the so-called =capryl odours=, which have a natural biological connexion
with the _vita sexualis._ These capryl odours, which already in plants
play a sexual part, are in animals and in the human species localized in
or near the genital organs (odoriferous glands of the beaver, the
musk-ox, etc., the secretions of the male foreskin and the female
vagina), or in other cases are found in the general secretions, such as
the sweat. Recently Gustav Klein has succeeded in proving that a
definite group of glands in the female genital organs (glandulæ
vestibulares majores, or glands of Bartholin) must be regarded as a
vestige from the time of periodic sexual excitement (rutting). At that
time in the human species, as now in the lower animals, the sexual
impulse was periodic in its activity, and the secretion of these
odoriferous glands of the human female then served as a means of
alluring members of the male sex. At the present time these glands have
for the most part lost their significance as specific stimuli. Now it is
rather the exhalation from the entire surface of the female body which
exercises the erotic influence. Cases in which such stimuli proceed
exclusively from the female genital organs are regarded by Klein as a
phylogenetic vestige of the primitive relations between the rutting
odours of the female and sexual excitement in the male. Friedrich S.
Krauss, in his “Anthropophyteia” (1904, vol. i., p. 224), reproduces a
Southern Slavonic story in which a man is described who obtained sexual
gratification only by enjoying the =natural= smell of the female genital
organs. The remarkable classification of Indian women according to the
various odours proceeding from their genital organs must not be
forgotten in this connexion.
That this primitive phenomenon of love has even to-day a certain
significance, although, in consequence of the enormous development of
the brain and the predominance of purely psychical elements in man, its
influence has been very notably diminished, is shown by the existing
physiological connexion proved by Fliess to exist between the nose and
the genital organs. On the inferior turbinate bones there exist certain
“genital areas,” which, under the influence of sexual stimulus and
excitement, as in coitus, during menstruation, etc., swell up. From
these areas it is also possible to influence directly certain conditions
of the genital organs.
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