It seems, however, quite unnecessary to lay down any general rules regarding the frequency of coitus. Individual desire and individual aptitude, even within the limits of health, vary enormously. Moreover, if we recognize that the restraint of desire is sometimes desirable, and often necessary for prolonged periods, it is as well to refrain from any appearance of asserting the necessity of sexual intercourse at frequent and regular intervals. The question is chiefly of importance in order to guard against excess, or even against the attempt to live habitually close to the threshold of excess. Many authorities are, therefore, careful to point out that it is inadvisable to be too definite. Thus Erb, while remarking that, for some, Luther's dictum represents the extreme maximum, adds that others can go far beyond that amount with impunity, and he considers that such variations are congenital.[397] Ribbing, again, while expressing general agreement with Luther's rule, protests against any attempt to lay down laws for everyone, and is inclined to say that as often as one likes is a safe rule, so long as there are no bad after-effects.[398] It seems to be generally agreed that bad effects from excess in coitus, when they do occur, are rare in women (see, e.g., Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 127). Occasionally, however, evil effects occur in women. (The case, possibly to be mentioned in this connection, has been recorded of a man whose three wives all became insane after marriage, _Journal of Mental Science_, Jan., 1879, p. 611.) In cases of sexual excess great physical exhaustion, with suspicion and delusions, is often observed. Hutchinson has recorded three cases of temporary blindness, all in men, the result of sexual excess after marriage (_Archives of Surgery_, Jan., 1893). The old medical authors attributed many evil results to excess in coitus. Thus Schurig (_Spermatologia_, 1720, pp. 260 et seq.) brings together cases of insanity, apoplexy, syncope, epilepsy, loss of memory, blindness, baldness, unilateral perspiration, gout, and death attributed to this cause; of death many cases are given, some in women, but one may easily perceive that _post_ was often mistaken for _propter_.
There is, however, another consideration which can scarcely escape the reader of the present work. Nearly all the estimates of the desirable frequence of coitus are framed to suit the supposed physiological needs of the husband,[399] and they appear usually to be framed in the same spirit of exclusive attention to those needs as though the physiological needs of the evacuation of the bowels or the bladder were in question. But sexual needs are the needs of two persons, of the husband and of the wife. It is not enough to ascertain the needs of the husband; it is also necessary to ascertain the needs of the wife. The resultant must be a harmonious adjustment of these two groups of needs. That consideration alone, in conjunction with the wide variations of individual needs, suffices to render any definite rules of very trifling value.
It is important to remember the wide limits of variation in sexual capacity, as well as the fact that such variations in either direction may be healthy and normal, though undoubtedly when they become extreme variations may have a pathological significance. In one case, for instance, a man has intercourse once a month and finds this sufficient; he has no nocturnal emissions nor any strong desires in the interval; yet he leads an idle and luxurious life and is not restrained by any moral or religious scruples; if he much exceeds the frequency which suits him he suffers from ill-health, though otherwise quite healthy except for a weak digestion. At the other extreme, a happily married couple, between forty-five and fifty, much attached to each other, had engaged in sexual intercourse every night for twenty years, except during the menstrual period and advanced pregnancy, which had only occurred once; they are hearty, full-blooded, intellectual people, fond of good living, and they attribute their affection and constancy to this frequent indulgence in coitus; the only child, a girl, is not strong, though fairly healthy.
The cases are numerous in which, on special occasions, it is possible for people who are passionately attached to each other to repeat the act of coitus, or at all events the orgasm, an inordinate number of times within a few hours. This usually occurs at the beginning of an intimacy or after a long separation. Thus in one case a newly-married woman experienced the orgasm fourteen times in one night, her husband in the same period experiencing it seven times. In another case a woman who had lived a chaste life, when sexual relationships finally began, once experienced orgasm fourteen or fifteen times to her partner's three times. In a case which, I have been assured may be accepted as authentic, a young wife of highly erotic, very erethic, slightly abnormal temperament, after a month's absence from her husband, was excited twenty-six times within an hour and a quarter; her husband, a much older man, having two orgasms during this period; the wife admitted that she felt a "complete wreck" after this, but it is evident that if this case may be regarded as authentic the orgasms were of extremely slight intensity. A young woman, newly married to a physically robust man, once had intercourse with him eight times in two hours, orgasm occurring each time in both parties. Guttceit (_Dreissig Jahre Praxis_, vol. ii. p. 311), in Russia, knew many cases in which young men of twenty-two to twenty-eight had intercourse more than ten times in one night, though after the fourth time there is seldom any semen. He had known some men who had masturbated in early boyhood, and began to consort with women at fifteen, yet remained sexually vigorous in old age, while he knew others who began intercourse late and were losing force at forty. Mantegazza, who knew a man who had intercourse fourteen times in one day, remarks that the stories of the old Italian novelists show that twelve times was regarded as a rare exception. Burchard, Alexander VI's secretary, states that the Florentine Ambassador's son, in Rome in 1489, "knew a girl seven times in one hour" (J. Burchard, _Diarium_, ed. Thuasne, vol. i, p. 329). Olivier, Charlemagne's knight, boasted, according to legend, that he could show his virile power one hundred times in one night, if allowed to sleep with the Emperor of Constantinople's daughter; he was allowed to try, it is said, and succeeded thirty times (Schultz, _Das Höfische Leben_, vol. i, p. 581).
It will be seen that whenever the sexual act is repeated frequently within a short time it is very rarely indeed that the husband can keep pace with the wife. It is true that the woman's sexual energy is aroused more slowly and with more difficulty than the man's, but as it becomes aroused its momentum increases. The man, whose energy is easily aroused, is easily exhausted; the woman has often scarcely attained her energy until after the first orgasm is over. It is sometimes a surprise to a young husband, happily married, to find that the act of sexual intercourse which completely satisfies him has only served to arouse his wife's ardor. Very many women feel that the repetition of the act several times in succession is needed to, as they may express it, "clear the system," and, far from producing sleepiness and fatigue, it renders them bright and lively.
The young and vigorous woman, who has lived a chaste life, sometimes feels when she commences sexual relationships as though she really required several husbands, and needed intercourse at least once a day, though later when she becomes adjusted to married life she reaches the conclusion that her desires are not abnormally excessive. The husband has to adjust himself to his wife's needs, through his sexual force when he possesses it, and, if not, through his skill and consideration. The rare men who possess a genital potency which they can exert to the gratification of women without injury to themselves have been, by Professor Benedikt, termed "sexual athletes," and he remarks that such men easily dominate women. He rightly regards Casanova as the type of the sexual athlete (_Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan., 1896). Näcke reports the case of a man whom he regards as a sexual athlete, who throughout his life had intercourse once or twice daily with his wife, or if she was unwilling, with another woman, until he became insane at the age of seventy-five (_Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Aug., 1908, p. 507). This should probably, however, be regarded rather as a case of morbid hyperæsthesia than of sexual athleticism.
At this stage we reach the fundamental elements of the art of love. We have seen that many moral practices and moral theories which have been widely current in Christendom have developed traditions, still by no means extinct among us, which were profoundly antagonistic to the art of love. The idea grew up of "marital duties," of "conjugal rights."[400] The husband had the right and the duty to perform sexual intercourse with his wife, whatever her wishes in the matter might be, while the wife had the duty and the right (the duty in her case being usually put first) to submit to such intercourse, which she was frequently taught to regard as something low and merely physical, an unpleasant and almost degrading necessity which she would do well to put out of her thoughts as speedily as possible. It is not surprising that such an attitude towards marriage has been highly favorable to conjugal unhappiness, more especially that of the wife,[401] and it has tended to promote adultery and divorce. We might have been more surprised had it been otherwise.
The art of love is based on the fundamental natural fact of courtship; and courtship is the effort of the male to make himself acceptable to the female.[402] "The art of love," said Vatsyayana, one of the greatest of authorities, "is the art of pleasing women." "A man must never permit himself a pleasure with his wife," said Balzac in his _Physiologie du Mariage_, "which he has not the skill first to make her desire." The whole art of love is there. Women, naturally and instinctively, seek to make themselves desirable to men, even to men whom they are supremely indifferent to, and the woman who is in love with a man, by an equally natural instinct, seeks to shape herself to the measure which individually pleases him. This tendency is not really modified by the fundamental fact that in these matters it is only the arts that Nature makes which are truly effective. It is finally by what he is that a man arouses a woman's deepest emotions of sympathy or of antipathy, and he is often pleasing her more by displaying his fitness to play a great part in the world outside than by any acquired accomplishments in the arts of courtship. When, however, the serious and intimate play of physical love begins, the woman's part is, even biologically, on the surface the more passive part.[403] She is, on the physical side, inevitably the instrument in love; it must be his hand and his bow which evoke the music.
In speaking of the art of love, however, it is impossible to disentangle completely the spiritual from the physical. The very attempt to do so is, indeed, a fatal mistake. The man who can only perceive the physical side of the sexual relationship is, as Hinton was accustomed to say, on a level with the man who, in listening to a sonata of Beethoven on the violin, is only conscious of the physical fact that a horse's tail is being scraped against a sheep's entrails.
The image of the musical instrument constantly recurs to those who write of the art of love. Balzac's comparison of the unskilful husband to the orang-utan attempting to play the violin has already been quoted. Dr. Jules Guyot, in his serious and admirable little book, _Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental_, falls on to the same comparison: "There are an immense number of ignorant, selfish, and brutal men who give themselves no trouble to study the instrument which God has confided to them, and do not so much as suspect that it is necessary to study it in order to draw out its slightest chords...Every direct contact, even with the clitoris, every attempt at coitus [when the feminine organism is not aroused], exercises a painful sensation, an instinctive repulsion, a feeling of disgust and aversion. Any man, any husband, who is ignorant of this fact, is ridiculous and contemptible. Any man, any husband, who, knowing it, dares to disregard it, has committed an outrage...In the final combination of man and woman, the positive element, the husband, has the initiative and the responsibility for the conjugal life. He is the minstrel who will produce harmony or cacophony by his hand and his bow. The wife, from this point of view, is really the many-stringed instrument who will give out harmonious or discordant sounds, according as she is well or ill handled" That such love corresponds to the woman's need there cannot be any doubt. All developed women desire to be loved, says Ellen Key, not "en mâle" but "en artiste" (_Liebe und Ehe_, p. 92). "Only a man of whom she feels that he has also the artist's joy in her, and who shows this joy through his timid and delicate touch on her soul as on her body, can keep the woman of to-day. She will only belong to a man who continues to long for her even when he holds her locked in his arms. And when such a woman breaks out: 'You want me, but you cannot caress me, you cannot tell what I want,' then that man is judged." Love is indeed, as Remy de Gourmont remarks, a delicate art, for which, as for painting or music, only some are apt.
It must not be supposed that the demand on the lover and husband to approach a woman in the same spirit, with the same consideration and skilful touch, as a musician takes up his instrument is merely a demand made by modern women who are probably neurotic or hysterical. No reader of these _Studies_ who has followed the discussions of courtship and of sexual selection in previous volumes can fail to realize that--although we have sought to befool ourselves by giving an illegitimate connotation to the word "brutal"--consideration and respect for the female is all but universal in the sexual relationships of the animals below man; it is only at the furthest remove from the "brutes," among civilized men, that sexual "brutality" is at all common, and even there it is chiefly the result of ignorance. If we go as low as the insects, who have been disciplined by no family life, and are generally counted as careless and wanton, we may sometimes find this attitude towards the female fully developed, and the extreme consideration of the male for the female whom yet he holds firmly beneath him, the tender preliminaries, the extremely gradual approach to the supreme sexual act, may well furnish an admirable lesson.
This greater difficulty and delay on the part of women in responding to the erotic excitation of courtship is really very fundamental and--as has so often been necessary to point out in previous volumes of these _Studies_--it covers the whole of woman's erotic life, from the earliest age when coyness and modesty develop. A woman's love develops much more slowly than a man's for a much longer period. There is real psychological significance in the fact that a man's desire for a woman tends to arise spontaneously, while a woman's desire for a man tends only to be aroused gradually, in the measure of her complexly developing relationship to him. Hence her sexual emotion is often less abstract, more intimately associated with the individual lover in whom it is centred. "The way to my senses is through my heart," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to her lover Imlay, "but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours." She spoke for the best, if not for the largest part, of her sex. A man often reaches the full limit of his physical capacity for love at a single step, and it would appear that his psychic limits are often not more difficult to reach. This is the solid fact underlying the more hazardous statement, so often made, that woman is monogamic and man polygamic.
On the more physical side, Guttceit states that a month after marriage not more than two women out of ten have experienced the full pleasure of sexual intercourse, and it may not be for six months, a year, or even till after the birth of several children, that a woman experiences the full enjoyment of the physical relationship, and even then only with a man she completely loves, so that the conditions of sexual gratification are much more complex in women than in men. Similarly, on the psychic side, Ellen Key remarks (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 111): "It is certainly true that a woman desires sexual gratification from a man. But while in her this desire not seldom only appears after she has begun to love a man enough to give her life for him, a man often desires to possess a woman physically before he loves her enough to give even his little finger for her. The fact that love in a woman mostly goes from the soul to the senses and often fails to reach them, and that in a man it mostly goes from the senses to the soul and frequently never reaches that goal--this is of all the existing differences between men and women that which causes most torture to both." It will, of course, be apparent to the reader of the fourth volume of these _Studies_ on "Sexual Selection in Man" that the method of stating the difference which has commended itself to Mary Wollstonecraft, Ellen Key, and others, is not strictly correct, and the chastest woman, after, for example, taking too hot a bath, may find that her heart is not the only path through which her senses may be affected. The senses are the only channels to the external world which we possess, and love must come through these channels or not at all. The difference, however, seems to be a real one, if we translate it to mean that, as we have seen reason to believe in previous volumes of these _Studies_, there are in women (1) preferential sensory paths of sexual stimuli, such as, apparently, a predominence of tactile and auditory paths as compared with men; (2) a more massive, complex, and delicately poised sexual mechanism; and, as a result of this, (3) eventually a greater amount of nervous and cerebral sexual irradiation.
It must be remembered, at the same time, that while this distinction represents a real tendency in sexual differentiation, with an organic and not merely traditional basis, it has about it nothing whatever that is absolute. There are a vast number of women whose sexual facility, again by natural tendency and not merely by acquired habits, is as marked as that of any man, if not more so. In the sexual field, as we have seen in a previous volume (_Analysis of the Sexual Impulse_), the range of variability is greater in women than in men.
The fact that love is an art, a method of drawing music from an instrument, and not the mere commission of an act by mutual consent, makes any verbal agreement to love of little moment. If love were a matter of contract, of simple intellectual consent, of question and answer, it would never have come into the world at all. Love appeared as art from the first, and the subsequent developments of the summary methods of reason and speech cannot abolish that fundamental fact. This is scarcely realized by those ill-advised lovers who consider that the first step in courtship--and perhaps even the whole of courtship--is for a man to ask a woman to be his wife. That is so far from being the case that it constantly happens that the premature exhibition of so large a demand at once and for ever damns all the wooer's chances. It is lamentable, no doubt, that so grave and fateful a matter as that of marriage should so often be decided without calm deliberation and reasonable forethought. But sexual relationships can never, and should never, be merely a matter of cold calculation. When a woman is suddenly confronted by the demand that she should yield herself up as a wife to a man who has not yet succeeded in gaining her affections she will not fail to find--provided she is lifted above the cold-hearted motives of self-interest--that there are many sound reasons why she should not do so. And having thus squarely faced the question in cool blood and decided it, she will henceforth, probably, meet that wooer with a tunic of steel enclosing her breast.
"Love must be _revealed_ by acts and not _betrayed_ by words. I regard as abnormal the extraordinary method of a hasty avowal beforehand; for that represents not the direct but the reflex path of transmission. However sweet and normal the avowal may be when once reciprocity has been realized, as a method of conquest I consider it dangerous and likely to produce the reverse of the result desired." I take these wise words from a thoughtful "Essai sur l'Amour" (_Archives de Psychologie_, 1904) by a non-psychological Swiss writer who is recording his own experiences, and who insists much on the predominance of the spiritual and mental element in love.
It is worthy of note that this recognition that direct speech is out of place in courtship must not be regarded as a refinement of civilization. Among primitive peoples everywhere it is perfectly well recognized that the offer of love, and its acceptance or its refusal, must be made by actions symbolically, and not by the crude method of question and answer. Among the Indians of Paraguay, who allow much sexual freedom to their women, but never buy or sell love, Mantegazza states (_Rio de la Plata e Tenerife_, 1867, p. 225) that a girl of the people will come to your door or window and timidly, with a confused air, ask you, in the Guarani tongue, for a drink of water. But she will smile if you innocently offer her water. Among the Tarahumari Indians of Mexico, with whom the initiative in courting belongs to the women, the girl takes the first step through her parents, then she throws small pebbles at the young man; if he throws them back the matter is concluded (Carl Lumholtz, _Scribner's Magazine_, Sept., 1894, p. 299). In many parts of the world it is the woman who chooses her husband (see, e.g., M.A. Potter, _Sohrab and Rustem_, pp. 169 et seq.), and she very frequently adopts a symbolical method of proposal. Except when the commercial element predominates in marriage, a similar method is frequently adopted by men also in making proposals of marriage.
It is not only at the beginning of courtship that the act of love has little room for formal declarations, for the demands and the avowals that can be clearly defined in speech. The same rule holds even in the most intimate relationships of old lovers, throughout the married life. The permanent element in modesty, which survives every sexual initiation to become intertwined with all the exquisite impudicities of love, combines with a true erotic instinct to rebel against formal demands, against verbal affirmations or denials. Love's requests cannot be made in words, nor truthfully answered in words: a fine divination is still needed as long as love lasts.
The fact that the needs of love cannot be expressed but must be divined has long been recognized by those who have written of the art of love, alike by writers within and without the European Christian traditions. Thus Zacchia, in his great medico-legal treatise, points out that a husband must be attentive to the signs of sexual desire in his wife. "Women," he says, "when sexual desire arises within them are accustomed to ask their husbands questions on matters of love; they flatter and caress them; they allow some part of their body to be uncovered as if by accident; their breasts appear to swell; they show unusual alacrity; they blush; their eyes are bright; and if they experience unusual ardor they stammer, talk beside the mark, and are scarcely mistress of themselves. At the same time their private parts become hot and swell. All these signs should convince a husband, however inattentive he may be, that his wife craves for satisfaction" (_Zacchiæ Quæstionum Medico-legalium Opus_, lib. vii, tit. iii, quæst. I; vol. ii, p. 624 in ed. of 1688).
The old Hindu erotic writers attributed great importance alike to the man's attentiveness to the woman's erotic needs, and to his skill and consideration in all the preliminaries of the sexual act. He must do all that he can to procure her pleasure, says Vatsyayana. When she is on her bed and perhaps absorbed in conversation, he gently unfastens the knot of her lower garment. If she protests he closes her mouth with kisses. Some authors, Vatsyayana remarks, hold that the lover should begin by sucking the nipples of her breasts. When erection occurs he touches her with his hands, softly caressing the various parts of her body. He should always press those parts of her body towards which she turns her eyes. If she is shy, and it is the first time, he will place his hands between her thighs which she will instinctively press together. If she is young he will put his hands on her breasts, and she will no doubt cover them with her own. If she is mature he will do all that may seem fitting and agreeable to both parties. Then he will take her hair and her chin between his fingers and kiss them. If she is very young she will blush and close her eyes. By the way in which she receives his caresses he will divine what pleases her most in union. The signs of her enjoyment are that her body becomes limp, her eyes close, she loses all timidity, and takes part in the movements which bring her most closely to him. If, on the other hand, she feels no pleasure, she strikes the bed with her hands, will not allow the man to continue, is sullen, even bites or kicks, and continues the movements of coitus when the man has finished. In such cases, Vatsyayana adds, it is his duty to rub the vulva with his hand before union until it is moist, and he should perform the same movements afterwards if his own orgasm has occurred first.
With regard to Indian erotic art generally, and more especially Vatsyayana, who appears to have lived some sixteen hundred years ago, information will be found in Valentino, "L'Hygiène conjugale chez les Hindous," _Archives Générales de Médecine_, Ap. 25, 1905; Iwan Bloch, "Indische Medizin," Puschmann's _Handbuch der Geschichte der Medizin_, vol. i; Heimann and Stephan, "Beiträge zur Ehehygiene nach der Lehren des Kamasutram," _Zeitschaft für Sexualwissenschaft_, Sept., 1908; also a review of Richard Schmidt's German translation of the _Kamashastra_ of Vatsyayana in _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1902, Heft 2. There has long existed an English translation of this work. In the lengthy preface to the French translation Lamairesse points out the superiority of Indian erotic art to that of the Latin poets by its loftier spirit, and greater purity and idealism. It is throughout marked by respect for women, and its spirit is expressed in the well-known proverb: "Thou shalt not strike a woman even with a flower." See also Margaret Noble's _Web of Indian Life_, especially Ch. III, "On the Hindu Woman as Wife," and Ch. IV, "Love Strong as Death."
The advice given to husbands by Guyot (_Bréviaire de l'Amour Expérimental_, p. 422) closely conforms to that given, under very different social conditions, by Zacchia and Vatsyayana. "In a state of sexual need and desire the woman's lips are firm and vibrant, the breasts are swollen, and the nipples erect. The intelligent husband cannot be deceived by these signs. If they do not exist, it is his part to provoke them by his kisses and caresses, and if, in spite of his tender and delicate excitations, the lips show no heat and the breasts no swelling, and especially if the nipples are disagreeably irritated by slight suction, he must arrest his transports and abstain from all contact with the organs of generation, for he would certainly find them in a state of exhaustion and disposed to repulsion. If, on the contrary, the accessory organs are animated, or become animated beneath his caresses, he must extend them to the generative organs, and especially to the clitoris, which beneath his touch will become full of appetite and ardor."
The importance of the preliminary titillation of the sexual organs has been emphasized by a long succession alike of erotic writers and physicians, from Ovid (_Ars Amatoria_ end of Bk. II) onwards. Eulenburg (_Die Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 79) considers that titillation is sometimes necessary, and Adler, likewise insisting on the preliminaries of psychic and physical courtship (_Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes_, p. 188), observes that the man who is gifted with insight and skill in these matters possesses a charm which will draw sparks of sensibility from the coldest feminine heart. The advice of the physician is at one in this matter with the maxims of the erotic artist and with the needs of the loving woman. In making love there must be no haste, wrote Ovid:-- "Crede mihi, non est Veneris properanda voluptas, Sed sensim tarda prolicienda mora."
"Husbands, like spoiled children," a woman has written, "too often miss the pleasure which might otherwise be theirs, by clamoring for it at the wrong time. The man who thinks this prolonged courtship previous to the act of sex union wearisome, has never given it a trial. It is the approach to the marital embrace, as well as the embrace itself, which constitutes the charm of the relation between the sexes."