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
Numerous exact, scientific, ethnological, and psychological
investigations concerning the sexes, among the most important of which
we may mention those of Darwin, Allan, Münsterberg, C. Vogt,
Ploss-Bartels, Jastrow, Lombroso and Ferrero, Shaw, Havelock Ellis, and
Helen Bradford Thompson, have confirmed the existence of these
differences in the nature of the two sexes. Many individual points still
remain obscure, but the above-mentioned sexual difference is everywhere
recognizable, and can never be entirely eradicated, even by a higher
psychical differentiation. Even the author of the “Critique of
Femininity,” who would open an unlimited perspective to the freedom of
individuality, is still compelled to admit that the majority of women
differ from men, no less in character than in intellect.
Havelock Ellis, in his classical work “Man and Woman” (London, 1892),
has given a summary of the psychical differences between the sexes,
based upon the most recent anthropological and psychological
investigations. This work forms the foundation for all later researches.
Of the individual psychical phenomena in man and woman, the sensory
sensations first demand consideration. In these no absolute and general
superiority of one sex over the other can be shown to exist. The
assumption that women have a more delicate power of sensory receptivity
cannot be sustained; indeed, the contrary appears the truer view. It is
true that women can be more readily excited by sensory stimuli, but they
do not possess a more delicate sensory receptivity.
As regards the general =intellectual endowment= of the sexes, the
interesting experimental researches of Jastrow into the psychology of
woman show that she possesses a greater interest in her immediate
environment, in the finished product, in the decorative, the individual,
and the concrete; man, on the other hand, exhibits a preference for the
more remote, for that which is in process of construction or growth, for
the useful, the general, and the abstract.
In agreement with these views is a report in the _Berliner Städtischen
Jahrbuch_ (1870, pp. 59-77), concerning the knowledge possessed by
several thousands of boys and girls at the time of their entry into
school. The report states:
“The more usual, the more approximate, and the easier an idea is, the
greater is the probability that the girls will excel the boys, and
_vice versa_. In boys more frequently than in girls do we find that
they know nothing of quite common things in their immediate
environment.”
Professor Minot arranged that persons of both sexes should cover ten
cards with sketches of any subject they chose. It appeared from this
experiment that the sketches of the men embraced a greater variety of
subjects than those of the women.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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