Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Ii Part 15

"My last s.e.xual experiences have been in Australia; once in Sydney at the baths a fellow-bather playfully began tickling me, when I had an erection; he grasped my p.e.n.i.s, I jumped up, and he asked me to do anything that I liked with him. I refused. Once on board a coasting steamer a fellow-pa.s.senger used to expose himself, posing as a statue; we became very familiar and he wanted me to spend a night with him. I also refused his offers.

"I am very healthy and strong, fond of riding, fishing, and shooting. I lead a very active life. I am neither musician nor artist, but fond of hearing music and I admire works of art.

"In person I am 6 feet high, inclined to fat; my body is very strong; my p.e.n.i.s is six inches long in repose and eight in erection; I can without fatigue discharge twice in the night and have connection at least twice a week. My s.c.r.o.t.u.m is tense and both t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es large. I am rather slow at discharging. I have never had any desire to have connection with any other woman since marriage, but several times I have met men who attracted me. I have a friend (another doctor) who is very familiar with me and if we spend a night together we will play with each other. I have a great desire for him to circ.u.mcize me. We have never indulged in anything beyond feeling or pressing our bodies together like schoolboys.

"My favorite color is green.

"My erotic dreams, when I have any, are of my wife or of a male lover.

"s.e.xual inversion is more widespread than is popularly supposed and I have never had any twinge of conscience after any of my affairs. I regard the h.o.m.os.e.xual instinct as quite natural, and, except in regard to my wife, it is stronger in my case than the heteros.e.xual instinct. I have never initiated a youth into the s.e.xual life or had any desire to seduce a girl. Boys under 17, or persons of lower social cla.s.s, have no attraction for me."

HISTORY x.x.xIII.-M. O., 30 years of age, born in the United States, of English father and of mother whose father was Scotch,-the rest of his ancestry being English of long standing in America, with a very little admixture of Dutch blood. He is 5 feet 8 inches in height, and has brown hair and eyes. No hereditary troubles so far as known. In childhood, for some time "threatened with ch.o.r.ea." Is subject to tonsillitis and a stubborn though not severe form of indigestion, induced by sedentary habits. He is of quick, nervous temperament. Has an aversion from most outdoor sports, but a great esthetic attraction to nature. Highly educated.

As far back as he can remember, he lived in a house from which his parents removed when he was 4 years old. Before this removal, he remembers two distinctly s.e.xual experiences. A cousin five years older was in the bathroom, seated, and M. O. was feeling his s.e.xual organs; his mother called him out. On another occasion he was in a wagonhouse with a girl of his own age. They were lying on a carriage-seat attempting intercourse. The girl's older sister came in and found them. She said: "I am going to tell mamma; you know she said for you not to do that any more." With each of these clear memories comes the strong impression that it was but one among many. Five years ago M. O. met a man of his own age who had lived in that neighborhood at the same time. Comparing notes, they found that nearly all the small children in it had been given to such practices. The neighborhood was a thoroughly "respectable" middle-cla.s.s one.

From it, M. O. removed to another of just about the same character, and lived there until he was 11 years old. Of this period his memories are very fresh and abundant. With a single exception, all the children between 5 and 14 years of age appear to have indulged freely in promiscuous s.e.xual play. In little companies of from four to twelve they went where trees or long gra.s.s hid them from observation, and exhibited their persons to one another; sometimes, also, they handled one another, but not in the way of masturbation. Of this last, M. O. was wholly ignorant. Sometimes when but two or three were together, intercourse was attempted. In M. O.'s case there was eager s.e.xual curiosity, and a more or less keen desire, but actual contact brought no great satisfaction. On two or three occasions girls practised f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o, and he then reciprocated with cunnilinctus, but without pleasure. In all these plays he is sure that girls took the initiative as often as boys did.

During all this period, M. O. had now one girl sweetheart and now another. This was conventional among the children, and was fostered by the banter of older persons. M. O.'s s.e.xual curiosity was certainly greater in regard to the opposite s.e.x. At this time, however, his h.o.m.os.e.xual interests appeared. With a boy two or more years older he frequently went to some hiding-place where they looked at each other's organs and handled them. He and another boy were once in an abandoned garden, and they took off all their clothes, the better to examine each other. The other boy then offered to kiss M. O.'s fundament, and did so. It caused a surprisingly keen and distinctly s.e.xual sensation, the first s.e.xual shock that he can remember experiencing. He refused to reciprocate, however, when asked.

Toward the end of this period there was a new and increasing development of another sort, not recognized then as at all s.e.xual in character. He began to feel toward certain boys in a way very different and much keener than he had done thus far toward girls, although at the time he made no comparisons. For instance there was a boy whom he considered very pretty. They visited each other often and spent long times playing together. In school they looked and looked at each other until delicious, uncontrollable giggling spells came on. s.e.xual matters were never discussed or thought of. These experiences were, in their way, very sentimental and ideal. M. O. is sure that with himself the main consideration was always the other boy's beauty. He began to recall with great fondness a certain much older and very handsome youth who had lived near him in the first neighborhood, and had at the time shown him, various little friendly attentions. He seldom saw him now, and hardly sought to do so, yet was immensely pleased by a casual word or look from him in the schoolyard, and much interested when other people spoke of him.

A cousin about two years younger than M. O. often visited him and slept with him. They were very fond of each other, and handled each other's organs.

When M. O. was about 11 years of age the family removed to a distant neighborhood, where there were almost no children of his own age, and where any a.s.sociation with those in the one just left was practically impossible. From this time until the changes of p.u.b.erty were well under way his s.e.xual life contrasted strongly, in its solitude, with the former promiscuity. He remembers liking to wrestle with two or three schoolboys and to get their heads between his legs. He thinks they were not aware of his s.e.xual impulses. He flirted, consciously flirted, with certain school-girls, but never even suggested anything s.e.xual to them. He read a few family medical books.

One day, lying on an old uneven couch, innocently enough at first, he induced a new and delicious sensation, altogether different from any he had ever dreamed of-something far beyond the satisfaction of mere curiosity. He repeated the thing and before long produced emissions. Masturbation soon followed. Certain days he would perform the act two or three times, but again he would avoid it for days. He began at once to fight the tendency, and felt very guilty and very ashamed for indulging it. He prayed for help and at times wept over his failures to break the habit so quickly formed. For a certain period, after two or three years, he seemed to have succeeded, but he observed that he had intense erotic dreams with copious emissions regularly every eight days. Just then certain newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts fell under his eye, and these persuaded him that he had produced in himself a diseased condition. He never resorted to the remedies advertised, but he was discouraged in his efforts to overcome the bad habit; and since the evil effects appeared to consist only in the seminal losses, he concluded that he might as well have the greater enjoyment of masturbation.

For a short time, he remembers that he had an intense but revolting interest in the s.e.xual organs of animals, especially horses. The males were much more interesting.

Gradually he began to develop, entirely from within, the ideal of a male comrade,-a beautiful, emotional boy between whom and himself there might exist a powerful romantic pa.s.sion. He lay for hours dreaming of this, and inventing thrilling situations. Suddenly, at church, he became acquainted with the very youth, Edmund, who seemed to satisfy all his longings. M. O. was then 16 and Edmund 15. A real wooing ensued, Edmund finally yielding to the physical appeals of M. O. after several fits of misgiving. The yielding was in the end complete, however. The two spent night after night together, enjoying intercrural intercourse and sometimes mutual masturbation. Their parents may have been slightly uneasy at times, but the connection continued uninterruptedly for a year and a half or more. In the meantime M. O. occasionally had relations with other boys, but never wavered in his real preference for Edmund. For girls he had no s.e.xual desire whatever, though he was much a.s.sociated with them.

Then M. O. and Edmund went to college at different places, but they met in vacations and wrote frequent and ardent love-letters. Both had genuine attacks of love-sickness and of jealousy. As M. O. looks back on this first love pa.s.sion he can by no means regret it. It doubtless had great formative influence.

After the first year at college, Edmund transferred to another school farther away from M. O. and the opportunities for meeting became rarer, but their affection was maintained and the intercourse resumed whenever it was possible. Gradually, however, Edmund became interested in women and finally married. M. O. also formed relations repeatedly with college friends and occasionally with others.

On the whole M. O. preferred boys a year or two younger than himself, but as he grew older the age difference increased. At 30 he regarded himself as virtually "engaged" to a youth of 17, one unusually mature, however, and much larger than himself.

M. O. is always unhappy unless his affections have fairly free course. Life has been very disappointing to him in other respects. His greatest joys have come to him in this way. If he is able to consummate his present plan of union with the youth just referred to, he will feel that his life has been crowned by what is for him the best possible end; otherwise, he declares, he would not care to live at all.

He admires male beauty pa.s.sionately. Feminine beauty he perceives objectively, as he would any design of flowing curves and delicate coloring, but it has no s.e.xual charm for him whatever. Women have put themselves in his way repeatedly, but he finds himself more and more irritated by their specifically feminine foibles. With men generally he is much more patient and sympathetic.

The first literature that appealed to him was Plato's dialogues, first read at 20 years of age. Until then he had not known but what he stood alone in his peculiarity. He read what he could of cla.s.sic literature. He enjoys Pater, appreciating his att.i.tude toward his own s.e.x. Four or five years, later he came across Raffalovich's book, and ever since has felt a real debt of grat.i.tude to its author.

M. O. has no wish to injure society at large. As an individual he holds that he has the same right to be himself that anyone else has. He thinks that while boys of from 13 to 15 might possibly be rendered inverts, those who reach 16 without it cannot be bent that way. They may be devoted to an invert enough in other ways to yield him what he wishes s.e.xually, but they will remain essentially normal themselves. His observations are based on about 30 h.o.m.os.e.xual relationships that have lasted various lengths of time.

M. O. feels strongly the poetic and elevated character of his princ.i.p.al h.o.m.os.e.xual relationships, but he shrinks from appearing too sentimental.

With regard to the traces of feminism in inverts he writes:-

"Up to the age of 11 I a.s.sociated much with a cousin five years older (the one referred to above) and took great delight in a game we often played, in which I was a girl,-a never-ending romance, a non-s.e.xual love story.

"Somewhat later and until p.u.b.erty, I took great delight in acting, but generally took female roles, wearing skirts, shawls, beads, wigs, head-dresses. When I was about 13 my family began to make fun of me for it. I played secretly for a while, and then the desire for it left, never to return.

"There still lingers, however, a minor interest, which began before p.u.b.erty, in valentines. My feeling for them is much like my feeling for flowers.

"Before I reached p.u.b.erty I was sometimes called a 'sissy' by my father. Such taunts humiliated me more than anything else has ever done. After p.u.b.erty my father no longer applied the term, and gradually other persons ceased to tease me that way. The sting of it lasted, though, and led me more than once to ask intimate friends, both men and women, if they considered me at all feminine. Every one of them has been very emphatically of the opinion that my rational life is distinctively masculine, being logical, impartial, skeptical. One or two have suggested that I have a finer discrimination than most men, and that I take care of my rooms somewhat as a woman might, though this does not extend to the style of decorations. One man said that I lacked sympathy with certain 'grosser manifestations of masculine character, such as smoking.' Some women think me unusually observing of women's dress. My own is by no means effeminate. In a muscular way I have average strength, but am supple far beyond what is usual. If trained for it early, I believe I would have made a good contortionist.

"I have never had the least inclination to use tobacco, generally take neither tea nor coffee, and seldom any liquor, never malt liquors. The dessert is always the best part of the meal. These tastes I attribute largely to my sedentary life. When out camping I observed a marked change in the direction of heartier food and mild stimulants.

"My physical courage has never been put to the test, but I observe that others appear to count on it. I am very aggressive in matters of religious, political, social opinion. In moral courage I am either reckless or courageous, I do not know which.

"I am, perhaps, a better whistler than most men.

"When I was quite little my grandmother taught me to do certain kinds of fancy-work, and I continued to do a little from time to time until I was 24. Then I became irritated over a piece that troubled me, put it in the fire, and have not wanted to touch any since. As a pet economy I continue to do nearly all of my own mending.

"I have a decided aversion for much jewelry. My estheticism is very p.r.o.nounced as compared with most of the men with whom I a.s.sociate, although I have never been able to give it much scope. It makes for cleanliness, order, and general good taste. My dress is economical and by no means fastidious; yet it seems to be generally approved. I have been complimented often on my ability to select appropriate presents, clothing, and to arrange a room."

M. O. states that he practises the love-bite at times, though very gently. He often wants to pinch one who interests him s.e.xually.

He considers very silly the statement somewhere made, that inverts are always liars. Very few people, he says, are perfectly honest, and the more dangerous society makes it for a man to be so, the less likely he is to be. While he himself has been unable in two or three instances to keep promises made to withhold from s.e.xual intercourse with certain attractive individuals, he has never otherwise been guilty of untruth about his h.o.m.os.e.xual relations.

The foregoing narrative was received eight years ago. During this interval M. O.'s health has very greatly improved. There has been a marked increase in outdoor activities and interests.

Two years since M. O. consulted a prominent specialist who performed a thorough psychoa.n.a.lysis. He informed M. O. that he was less strongly h.o.m.os.e.xual than he himself supposed, and recommended marriage with some young and pretty woman. He attributed the h.o.m.os.e.xual bent to M. O.'s having had his "nose broken" at the age of 6, by the birth of a younger brother, who from that time on received all the attention and petting. M. O. had continued up to that age very affectionate toward his mother and dependent on her. He can remember friends and neighbors commenting on it. At first M. O. was inclined to reject this suggestion of the specialist, but on long reflection he inclines to believe that it was indeed a very important factor, though not the sole one. From his later observations of children and comparisons of these with memories of his own childhood, M. O. says he is sure he was affectionate and demonstrative much beyond the average. His greatest craving was for affection, and his greatest grief the fancied belief that no one cared for him. At 10 or 11 he attempted suicide for this reason.

Also as a result of the psychoa.n.a.lysis, but trying to eliminate the influence of suggestion, he recollects and emphasizes more the attraction he felt toward girls before the age of 12. Had his s.e.xual experiences subsequently proved normal, he doubts if those before 12 could be held to give evidence of h.o.m.os.e.xuality, but only of precocious nervous and s.e.xual irritability, greatly heightened and directed by the secret practices of the children with whom he a.s.sociated. He does not see why these experiences should have given him a h.o.m.os.e.xual bent any more than a heteros.e.xual one.

The psychoa.n.a.lysis recalled to M. O. that during the period of early flirtation he had often kissed and embraced various girls, but likewise he recalled having observed at the same time, with some surprise, that no definitely s.e.xual desire arose, though the way was probably open to gratify it. Such interest as did exist ceased wholly or almost so as the relation with Edmund developed. There was no aversion from the company of girls and women, however; the intellectual friendships were mainly with them, while the emotional ones were with boys.

Very recently M. O. spent several days with Edmund, who has been married for several years. With absolutely no s.e.xual interest in each other, they nevertheless found a great bond of love still subsisting. Neither regrets anything of the past, but feels that the final outcome of their earlier relation has been good. Edmund's beauty is still p.r.o.nounced, and is remarked by others.

In spite of his precocious s.e.xuality, M. O. had from the very first an extreme disgust for obscene stories, and for any a.s.sociation of s.e.xual things with filthy words and anecdotes. Owing in part to this and in part to his temperamental skepticism, he disbelieved what a.s.sociates told him regarding s.e.xual emissions, only becoming convinced when he actually experienced them; and the facts of reproduction he denied indignantly until he read them in a medical work. Until he was well over 25 the physical aversion from any thought of reproduction was intense. He knows other, normal, young men who have felt the same way, but he believes it would be prevented or overcome by s.e.x-education such as is now being introduced in American schools.

Again, as to traces of feminism: Perhaps two years ago, all impulse to give the love-bite disappeared suddenly. There has been lately a marked increase of dramatic interest, arising in perfectly natural ways, and without any of the peculiarities noted before. The childish pleasure in valentines has all gone; M. O. believes that circ.u.mstances have lately been more favorable for the development of a more robust estheticism.

For some years he has heard no definite reproach for feminism, though some persons tell his friends that he is "very peculiar." He forms many intimate, enduring, non-s.e.xual friendships with both men and women, and he doubts if the peculiarity noted by others is due so much to his h.o.m.os.e.xuality as it is to his estheticism, skepticism, and the unconventional opinions which he expresses quite indiscreetly at times. With the improvement in general health, has come the changes that would be expected in food and other matters of daily life.

Resuming his narrative at the point where the earlier communication left it, M. O. says that about a year after that time, the youth of 17 to whom he had considered himself virtually engaged withdrew from the agreement so far as it bore on his own future, but not from the sentimental relation as it existed. Although separated most of the time by distance, the physical relation was resumed whenever they met. Subsequently, however, the young man fell in love with a young woman and became engaged to her. His physical relation with M. O. then ceased, but the friendship otherwise continues strong.

Shortly after the first break in this relation, M. O. became, through the force of quite unusual circ.u.mstances, very friendly and intimate with a young woman of considerable charm. He confided to her his abnormality, and was not repulsed. To others their relation probably appeared that of lovers, and a painful situation was created by the slander of a jealous woman. M. O. felt that in honor he must propose marriage to her. The young woman was non-committal, but invited M. O. to spend several months at her home. Shortly after his arrival a sad occurrence in his own family compelled him to go away, and they did not meet again for four years. They corresponded, but less and less often. His relations with boys continued.

Before his final meeting with her he became acquainted with a woman whom he has since married. The acquaintance began in a wholly non-sentimental community of interests in certain practical affairs, and very gradually widened into an intellectual and sympathetic friendship. M. O. had no secrets from this woman. After a full and prolonged consideration of all sides of the matter they married. Since that event he has had no s.e.xual relations except with his wife. With her they are not pa.s.sionate, but they are animated by the strong desire for children. Of the parental instinct he had become aware several years before this.

M. O. believes that no moral stigma should be attached to h.o.m.os.e.xuality until it can be proved to result from the vicious life of a free moral agent,-and of this he has no expectation. He believes that much of its danger and unhappiness would be prevented by a thorough yet discreet s.e.x-education, such as should be given to all children, whether normal or abnormal.

[124]

Thus G.o.dard described the little boys in Cairo as amusing themselves indifferently either with boys or girls in s.e.xual play. (Egypte et Palestine, 1867, p. 105.) The same thing may be observed in England and elsewhere.