"No. 6. Absolutely innocent before marriage. Was practically raped by her husband on her marriage night. This disgusted her with the whole performance, and she could not bear her husband's caresses. During pregnancy she was frightened because she did not know what was going to happen, i.e., how the child was going to be born; and no one enlightened her,--doctor, nurse, or mother. Did not know the meaning of the words sexual feeling, and never thought about sexual matters at all until marriage. I roused her passion, put things in their true light, made her have an orgasm, and told her what it meant. The orgasms at first made her cry and nearly faint, and she thereafter became intensely passionate. Very excited at cunnilingus, which I practised on her more than once. She confessed that the orgasm was stronger and more complete during coitus than during masturbation, which relieved my mind. She volunteered to strip naked and has but little shyness with me. Cannot bear her husband yet. She admits that she was only half a woman before she knew me, but now regrets her marriage. Short, thin, and slight, with narrow hips and no breasts. Quick woman's wit, but not intellectual.
"Of the prostitutes I have known, perhaps 60 in number, the Japanese easily take the palm. They are scrupulously clean, have charming manners and beautiful bodies, and take an intelligent interest in the proceedings. Also they are not always thinking about the money. Perhaps the Kashmiris come next, though the Chinese run them very close. Some of the more expensive London women are bearable, but they are such harlots! The white women in the East are insupportable, and small wonder, for they consist of the dregs of the European and American markets. My list comprises English, French, German, Italian, Spanish-American, American, Bengali, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Kaffir, Singhalese, Tamil, Burmese, Malay, Japanese, Chinese, Greek, and Pole.
"I naturally prefer to satisfy myself with a woman, a friend and a lady of my own class; but in the absence of the best I gladly take the next best available, down the scale from a lady for whom I do not care to prostitutes of all classes and colors, men, boys, animals, melons, and masturbation. I would as cheerfully have connection with my sister, or any other female relative. I have frequent erotic dreams about the most extraordinary subjects--male and female relations, casual acquaintances of both sexes, and animals. When I have got an intrigue in hand with a woman, I have no wish to masturbate, and often restrain myself when I know that I am going to have access before long to prostitutes. After coitus it takes a long time before I am ready for the next, sometimes two hours; and the first is always very quick, nearly always too quick for the woman. With a strange woman I have difficulty in maintaining erection at the instant of penetration, and this has often given me trouble.
"I know that most women like, and few dislike, being touched by me. My favorite colors are green and red, and I can whistle quite well.
"I would be very glad to know whether I may be considered sexually normal or not, but I do not desire any opinion on the morality of my acts, for the simple reason that without knowing all the circumstances it would be impossible to judge. But I cannot help saying that I do not consider anything I have done is wrong in itself, and I am quite certain that I have never harmed in any way any of the ladies with whom I have had relations. I am certain, if I had made promises which I knew I could not keep, I might have married one of them. But the result would have been great unhappiness to both, quarrels, and ultimate separation or divorce--and she realized that as well as I did. I may seem egotistical in my attitude and assurance toward ladies, but I only speak the honest truth; and I know that No. 6, for instance, has only gratitude and worship to give me for having opened her eyes. I have made her promise to have intercourse with her husband as soon as she can bear it, and I have satisfied myself that I have not started her on the road to sexual perversion. So much in self-explanation. I may add that I do not deliberately seek 'affaires de coeur,' and that, when they come my way, I do my utmost to use all consideration for the lady, thinking, as I do, that I owe them a far bigger debt than I shall ever be able to pay."
HISTORY XIV.--J.E., professional man, aged 32. Public school and university education, in which he did well. From age of 6 or 7 had strong sexual emotions, and from 9 sexually pleasurable dreams, though no emission till 12 or 13. He remembers the association of sexual excitement with whipping, either at sight or imagination of it, and this feeling was certainly shared by boys aged 9 to 12 at his private boarding-school and others at the public school later on. His nurse-maid used to invent excuses for beating his nates with a long lead-pencil when he was aged about 7, and he saw occasional whippings with clothes removed in the family nursery.
When nearly 16 he was initiated into masturbation, which at once coincided with rapid mental development and success at school. He has practised it ever since under same conditions and restrictions as marital intercourse. Religion has never acted as any restraint, and the best restraint to all young people, in his opinion, is to warn them on hygienic grounds. (He became a freethinker at 17, partly on observing the inconsistency of religious persons in this connection. He was twice set upon by Catholics when 16, who attempted mutual masturbation.) He can vaguely remember some such warning when very young from his mother.
No intercourse with women till age of 19, though strong homosexual feelings from 10 upward, associated with feminine youths. These feelings were quite distinct from feelings of affection and friendship for more virile youths. An attack of gonorrhea at 21 was followed by an operation for circumcision, which had beneficial effects, but did not prevent an attack of syphilis at age of 23, caught at a guaranteed state establishment in France. Intercourse almost always with prostitutes, on prudential and worldly grounds, though what he approves would be greater laxity between boys and girls, with proper safeguards against undesired offspring. He is now happily married. He only indulges in masturbation at times when intercourse is impossible (e.g., childbirth). It is then practised once or twice a week in the early morning; overnight it causes troubled sleep, brain activity, and constipation. This seems ethically more desirable unless the wife were to condone physical infidelity, which she would not, and even then there might be risks of venereal disease. His general health and working power are in all respects excellent, as the venereal diseases were speedily and thoroughly cured. Homosexual feeling has entirely disappeared since marriage.
HISTORY XV.--G.D., English; aged 60. "My earliest essays in juvenile vice were due not so much to unguarded as to unguided ignorance. I slipped where my natural protectors suspected no danger, and I fell because I had never been warned of the treacherous nature of the ground. Before or soon after I was 7 years old, the example of an elder brother, who had lately begun to go to school as a day-boy, initiated me into the mysteries of masturbation, which seemed to me then as harmless as it was fascinating; and the novel pleasure was almost daily indulged in, after I had acquired sufficient dexterity to accomplish the act within a reasonable time, without a twinge of conscience, either in that brother's company or when alone. Decency demanded secrecy in the gratification of what soon became an imperious desire, and the preliminary operations included, almost from the first, mutual _fellatio_ and approximation of the excited organs; but similar privacy was very properly sought during the performance of other bodily acts associated with those 'less honorable members,' and it appeared to me quite as natural and right for us to amuse ourselves together in that way as for a married couple to hide their most intimate embraces from the observation of others. Indeed, I went farther than that, and even came to regard the absence of all shame between us as akin to the primeval innocence which Adam and Eve exhibited before the Fall. I believed for long that we two were specially privileged and possessed a peculiar sense denied to other boys, for I had never heard of masturbation till I learnt, not the word indeed, but the thing itself.
"My curiosity about the real nature of sexual union in the case of human beings set my intelligence to work at the interesting problem, and by carefully studying certain parts of the Bible, Lemprière's classical and other dictionaries, as well as by persistently watching when I could the amorous proceedings of domestic animals, I learnt enough to make its most prominent features pretty clear before I was 11 years of age. I was then all eagerness to have the opportunity of inspecting at close quarters the genitals of women or young girls, and a stay at the seaside when I was 12 made the latter at least feasible. When the shore was nearly deserted, between 1 and 2 P.M., the daughters of the fisherfolk used to besiege the bathing machines and disport themselves in the water, bathing and paddling in various stages of nudity. I would pretend that my whole attention was being given to the making of miniature tunnels in the sand, while all the time I slyly peeped at what I most desired to see, whether in front or from behind, as the dancing damsels stood upright or stooped till their haunches were higher than their heads. I had already read something somewhere about the _clitoris_, and wanted especially to see it, but indistinct glimpses were all that I could obtain; nor was it until I visited an anatomical museum, which then existed at the top of the Haymarket in London, that I learned, a good many years later, from several life-sized models there displayed, the characteristic features of that part, as well as the abnormal modifications to which it is subject, either congenitally or in consequence of profligate habits. I was 15, I think, when I first came to know that girls can masturbate as well as boys.
"Long after I had realized why the terms male and female are so distinguished, my imagination was occupied with the possible postures in which the act of copulation may be accomplished by a man and woman; from Horace, Lucretius, Martial, Aristophanes, and, above all, from Ovid's _Ars Amatoria_ I obtained much, but not always very clear, information while still a schoolboy. This was supplemented later by photographic pictures from Pompeiian brothels and photographs from life, purchased at Florence and gloated over one night, with twice-repeated masturbation, and afterward destroyed in a revulsion of shame.
"But while continuing to practise self-abuse (with a certain degree of restraint indeed, but seldom less often than once or even twice a week), after I had been made fully aware of its perils by Dr. Adam Clarke's alarming comments on Genesis xxxviii, 9, when I was about 12 or 13, I never had connection with a woman until I married somewhat late in life. This abstinence was not due to any frigidity of disposition, but from prudential and religious motives, and, to some extent perhaps, from the imperfect but genuine satisfaction afforded by solitary indulgence. My imagination, like that of young J.J. Rousseau, as set forth in his _Confessions_, was allowed free scope for its exercise, but in practice I confined myself to what seemed to me comparatively innocent as compared with fornication. I was never an unreserved 'exhibitionist' like Rousseau, but I have on more than one occasion turned toward a hedge and pretended to make water, when a girl had just passed me on the road, showing a _turgens cauda_ if she should chance out of curiosity to look back, as once, at any rate, happened.
"I watched with interest the first indications of puberty in my own person. I had, of course, seen the pubic hair on many of my own sex, but I was 17 when I first saw a naked woman. She was standing at the door of her machine, wringing out her bathing-dress, as I swam past, and her face was hidden by the awning then used, so that she could not see me. A slight effusion of limpid mucus began to characterize the orgasm, at the age of 12 or 13 (before any ejaculation of semen was experienced), such as exuded later from the _urethra_ when salacious excitement reached a certain pitch, even though the final climax might be postponed or prevented altogether. I found it a refinement of luxury to prolong the period of tumescence as far as possible, by frequently checking a too rapid progress toward the goal. By this practice of repeated arrest when the orgasm was imminent, and the mental debauchery which was its habitual accompaniment, I believe I did my nervous system more damage than by anything else--even the early age at which the dangerous indulgence became established. Nocturnal emissions (the sequel of lascivious dreams) commenced when I was about 15, at which age I had my first experience of an involuntary discharge when awake, under the influence of purely mental emotion; but this latter mode of escape did not often happen, and later on ceased altogether. My muscular strength was not impaired by too frequent indulgence, and I acquired some athletic prowess on the football field and on the running path, both as a boy and as a young man. Walking tours were for long my favorite recreation, even after the bicycle became an increasing attraction. My health, however, suffered in other ways from too constant absorption in lustful thoughts, which found vent in erotic verses and tales, generally destroyed soon after they were written. I have been subject since I was a boy to more or less prolonged fits of mental depression. How far I have inherited this tendency (my father and his father both married first cousins, and a neurotic diathesis has been characteristic of our family), or how far it has been aggravated by pernicious habits, I cannot say; cause and effect have no doubt acted and reacted on each other.
"As I grew toward adolescence I endeavored to make self-abuse as close an imitation as possible of sexual intercourse by such methods as may be easily imagined. My biological studies (I won a scholarship and took honors at my university) were directed with most intent predilection toward the reproductive system, particularly the modifications of the copulatory organs in different animals and the diverse manner of their employment. The sexual instinct, whether in its normal or abnormal manifestations, is a subject which has always had a strong attraction for me, nor has it lost its fascination with the growth of years (I am now 60) nor the competition of other interests.
"My very limited experience of the sexual system in women would lead me to believe that the _clitoris_ is the only peculiarly sensitive part of the female _genitalia_, coition giving no pleasure unless 'the trigger of love' is simultaneously manipulated, as can be done when intromission is effected _a tergo_; that the mind of a normally healthy maiden is altogether free from sexual excitement of a physical kind, and that little curiosity is felt about the precise _modus operandi_ of conjugal intercourse; but, nevertheless, I have good reason to believe that this, if not an unusual type, is by no means the only one that exists.
"As to sexual inversion my personal experience has been confined to two or three _grandes passions_ for boys, the first of which possessed me when between the ages of 16 and 18, and involved, when I was 17, the most intense mental emotion, of a romantic kind, tinged with poignant jealousy and vexation at comparative coldness toward myself. These love passages never led me into indelicate behavior (I was once threatened with such treatment myself by a stranger whose acquaintance I made one day at the British Museum, when a lad of 15. He took me to his bedroom at an inn, locked the door, and showed me a collection of coins, giving me some, and, while doing so, attempted to take indecent liberties; but I pretended that I must catch a certain train, unlocked the door, and made a hasty escape), nor was any gratification sought beyond occasional kisses and other innocent endearments, though such caresses would sometimes excite an erection, which I carefully concealed. These amours were, however, no outcome of perverted instinct, nor were they any bar to fancies for the opposite sex which affected my imagination rather than my heart."
HISTORY XVI.--This history is given in the subject's own words: A.N., 34 years of age, a university graduate, devoted to learning and interested in philosophy and theology. He is happily married and the father of an only daughter. Since puberty he has enjoyed excellent health.
"Looking back he finds the beginnings of sexual feeling obscure. This feeling is by no means identical in its progress with the knowledge of the phenomena of sex generally. The latter he acquired thus: His mother told him at a very early age the outlines of the phenomena of birth and explained to him (perhaps at that time unnecessarily) that the genital organs of little girls were different from his own. This piece of knowledge led to his asking, when 9 years old, a little girl cousin who came to live with the family (he was an only child) and who shared his bed to let him see her genitalia. This she readily did and also invited him to coitus, which she described as a 'nice game.' He complied, but without, of course, any feeling of pleasure or any understanding of the nature of what he was doing. Shortly after this he went to a day school, where, amid the extraordinarily coarse conversation of the boys, he was initiated into all the more obvious phenomena of sex. But still it was only a matter of intellectual curiosity. As such it had a strange fascination for him, and to this day he remembers many of the obscene words and phrases, as, for example, a set of indecent verses beginning 'William, the milkman, sat under a tree,' describing coitus, though some of the details were yet misunderstood by him. That up to his tenth or eleventh year no real sexual desire was awakened is plain from the fact that there was no desire for any repetition of attempts at coitus with his cousin, though he did indeed, again out of curiosity, finger her genitals sometimes, a thing which she, grown evidently more fastidious, reported to his mother, who gravely reprimanded him, telling him that it was the 'beginning of all evil.'
"Desire was awakened gradually and, as I have said, obscurely. Not only at school, but among his own cousins, especially two girls (other than the one above mentioned) and a boy, the conversation was lascivious in the extreme, though words never proceeded to deeds as between the boys and the girls. He was soon, however, about his fifteenth year, so far as he can remember, initiated into the practice of masturbation, first, sleeping with his boy cousin, the two used to play at 'husband and wife,' and then, more directly, a neighbor, a heavy, sensual type of boy, took him aside one day and drawing out his own penis asked him 'if he knew how to make some buttermilk.' Out of curiosity at first, and to obtain the new and voluptuous sensation afterward, he began assiduously to practise this vice, which, as he afterward found out, was very common, if not universal about him. That it was morally reprehensible he had not at that time the ghost of a notion; he considered that it belonged to the category of the 'dirty' only. His father quite neglected this development, believing, I suppose, in the superstition of the 'innocence of childhood.'
"This practice of masturbation went on assiduously to his sixteenth year, when its true nature and danger were revealed to him by a good clergyman who prepared him for confirmation. He had at this time gone far, in both solitary vice and vice 'à deux,' with his male cousin, with whom he practised even 'fellatio' and 'intromissio in anum.' But now he began to struggle against it and made some headway, but never entirely shook it off before his marriage at 26, so deeply rooted was the hold it had on him. Especially at the time between sleeping and waking, or while lying sleepless at night--when the monks prayed 'ne polluantur corpora'--did its attacks come insidiously upon him. He would struggle for weeks and then would come a relapse. On one occasion he slept with a young uncle who amused himself, thinking he was asleep, by playing with his penis until he had an emission. A.N. hailed the occasion with keen joy--he caustically argued that he experienced the pleasure without being culpable in its production! Then on 'coming to himself' he would agonize over his vice, remembering, for example, that, while _he_ had rejoiced in what had been done, the very cousin who some time before used to share his sin was genuinely annoyed at the same uncle's attentions when it was he who suffered them.
"Looking back over the whole period of his youth and adolescence, he can trace the psychological effect of what was going on secretly, in his relations to girls and women. In a word, these relations were sentimental only. He often imagined himself in love; but it was imagination only. He was in love with a wraith, not a girl of flesh and blood. He hesitated to regard in any sexual way any girl of whom he had a high opinion; sexual desire and 'love' seemed for him to inhabit different worlds and that it would be a pollution to bring them together. In hours of relaxation from the very hard intellectual work which he was at this time engaged on at school and at the university, he was quite content with the society of quite young girls or even children when most of his friends would have sought out females of their own age. Nothing could have been farther from his desires or intention than any lascivious or, indeed, unseemly act toward any female in whose company he might be: no mother need have hesitated to trust her daughter in his company. I firmly believe that the discipline of the same bed which Gibbon (_Decline and Fall_, ed. Bury, vol. ii, p. 37) makes so merry over could have been endured by him without difficulty. His outward conduct was in all these respects most seemly and decorous, yet night after night he could masturbate, his imagination glowing with visions of female nakedness.
"Curiously the one and only actual female for whom he felt any desire at the earlier period (aged 14 to 16) began to be the cousin who lived in the house. On one occasion he touched her breasts, on another her naked thighs--and that was all! As she grew to puberty, she would have allowed far more liberties, but he contented himself with a sly glance now and again, when he could procure it, at her swelling bosom. The fear of putting her with child was ample to keep him away from her bed. Later on even so much as the foregoing occurred no more, and, as I have said, his outward life became absolutely decorous.
"Consequently he was in no danger of having dealings with prostitutes. The preliminaries, the conversation of such women, especially their drinking habits, would have been disgusting and repugnant to him in the extreme. He would have shunned the possibility of acquiring venereal disease like the plague. But he was never free from solitary vice; he secretly envied those who had occasions for coitus in what I may call a seemly and cleanly manner, friends in the country with farm girls, etc., of whom he had heard. He indulged also in lascivious reading, the obscene when he could procure it, rather than the merely suggestive, which has never been to his taste. He was familiar with quite a large number of Latin and Greek indecent passages, knew the broader farces of the _Canterbury Tales_ and of the _Decameron_, and, later, the 'contes' of La Fontaine and the _Facetiæ_ of Poggio. As Ste.-Beuve says of Gibbon, I think, he acquired an 'erudite and cold' sort of obscenity in this way.
"All this, of course, is only one half, and by no means always the dominant half, of his nature. He was often repentant for these delinquencies, and he was sincerely religious. He was also fond of serious learning and contrived to take a first-class university degree. Yet, ever and anon, the deeply sensual side of his nature made itself felt. Scotched for a time it could be, but killed never.
"Yet, I do not think it could be said that he had the sexual instinct in any really high degree. It was more like a small fly that makes a large buzz than any considerable factor in his constitution. He had a companion about this time of whom such a remark is even more true. This man's mind was replete with all manner of risky stories, all sorts of sexual details. He would take long walks with girls of loose character, talk with prostitutes at home and abroad, and yet, I believe, he never proceeded to coitus.
"Such then, was the subject of this notice up to the time of his marriage. Two men, one might say, in one skin. One learned, one merely obscene; one a pattern of decorousness, the other a self-polluter.
"On the sexual side he was as one knowing everything there is to know--yet knowing nothing. Like the boy-hero in Wedekind's _Frühling's Erwachen_, he had been long in Egypt, yet he had never seen the pyramids. He began to distress himself with questions as to whether he was yet capable; whether his recurring vice had not permanently injured him; whether he had made himself unfit for marriage. So shy and reserved was he about his secret that he could never have brought himself to mention it to a medical man. 'What! he! the good, the religious! the wholly moral and decorous!' (such was, indeed, the reputation he had among his friends); 'he, the victim of a vice so black!' No, no! '_Secretum meum mihi_,' he cried.
"Fortune, however, was kind to him. He was at an early age free from financial worries, which had almost crushed him earlier in his career, and he met in course of time the family from which he selected his excellent wife.
"The society in which he lived was of all English classes, I should suppose, the most reticent in matters of sex--the respectable, lower middle class; shopkeepers and the like, with a tradition of homely religion and virtue. The classes a little higher in the scale (to which, by the way, his mother had belonged) could far better sympathize with one in his position. Well, the family of his future wife was of a higher class and, what is far more, of foreign origin, for whom a large number of our English 'convenances' do not exist. To them sex was frankly recognized as a factor in life, and the mother of this household, as he grew more intimate, broached subjects which he had never, in such a manner, discussed before. It is unnecessary to give here any general history of his relationships with this household, as they have nothing to do with the matter in hand. After some time he became engaged to the youngest daughter, two years his senior, a woman of remarkable beauty and splendid development, one who attracted him as none other had done, both on account of her intellectual and social qualities and her physical beauty (he had hitherto despaired of finding the two combined in one person), for she is certainly the most beautiful woman with whom he has ever been acquainted.
"He now began to make the practical acquaintance of a woman--and one who, in impulses, temper, manner, and habit of thought, differed _toto cælo_ from the girls he had known in his old home. Her sexual nature was ripe and developed, and it is lucky that the engagement was of short duration, or the strain and anticipation of that time might have been injurious to the health of both. As usual, in his outward relations toward women, so toward his _fiancée_, he was prepared for chaste caresses only. This, however, did not suffice for her hot and passionate nature. They went as far as possible short of actual coitus.
"After a few months, however, the marriage took place, and, at first, this brought him bitter disappointment and seemed to confirm his worst fears. He found himself quite unable to have pleasure or satisfactory coitus; quite incapable, with any erection that he could command, of introducing his well-developed penis into his wife's extremely narrow and contracted vagina. About a fortnight after the marriage, however, on his return from their short wedding tour, he felt much stronger and copulated with her, especially in the early mornings, so satisfactorily that she soon found herself with child. Coitus now began to be much more pleasurable for him, but to his wife still attended with pain.
"After nine months of married life, the child, the only offspring of the marriage, a healthy girl, was born. The stress of this time, the upsetting of his wife's health, her nervous breakdown and consequently uncertain temper, seemed for a period of nearly two years effectually to repress any sexual desire in the husband, and this period is perhaps the chastest of his life. Desire seemed to be the one thing absent. The revulsion of feeling in his wife was remarkable. The erstwhile amorous _fiancée_, who could hardly wait until marriage to test her lover, became now the wife and mother who hardly wished to be touched by her husband.