matter there is some element of truth in the “man of the world’s” opinion.  One may refer to the story (told by Etienne de Bourbon, by Francisco de Osuna in a religious work, and by Cervantes in Don Quixote, part ii, ch. xlv) concerning a magistrate who, when a girl came before him to complain of rape, ordered the accused young man either to marry her or pay her a sum of money.  The fine was paid, and the magistrate then told the man to follow the girl and take the money from her by force; the man obeyed, but the girl defended herself so energetically that he could not secure the money.  Then the judge, calling the parties before him again, ordered the fine to be returned:  “Had you defended your chastity as well as you have defended your money it could not have been taken away from you.”  In most cases of “rape,” in the case of adults, there has probably been some degree of consent, though that partial assent may have been basely secured by an appeal to the lower nervous centers alone, with no participation of the intelligence and will.  Freud (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, p. 87) considers that on this ground the judge’s decision in Don Quixote is “psychologically unjust,” because in such a case the woman’s strength is paralyzed by the fact that an unconscious instinct in herself takes her assailant’s part against her own conscious resistance.  But it must be remembered that the factor of instinct plays a large part even when no violence is attempted.

Such facts and considerations as these tend to show that the sexual impulse is by no means so weak in women as many would lead us to think.  It would appear that, whereas in earlier ages there was generally a tendency to credit women with an unduly large share of the sexual impulse, there is now a tendency to unduly minimize the sexual impulse in women.

FOOTNOTES: 

[156] I have had occasion to refer to the historic evolution of male opinion regarding women in previous volumes, as, e.g., Man and Woman, chapter i, and the appendix on “The Influence of Menstruation on the Position of Women” in the first volume of these Studies.

[157] The terminology proposed by Ziehen ("Zur Lehre von den psychopathischen Konstitutionen,” Charite Annalen, vol. xxxxiii, 1909) is as follows:  For absence of sexual feeling, anhedonia; for diminution of the same, hyphedonia; for excess of sexual feeling, hyperhedonia; for qualitative sexual perversions, parhedonia.  “Erotic blindness” was suggested by Nardelli.

[158] O. Adler, Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, 1904, p. 146.

[159] A correspondent tells me that he knows a woman who has been a prostitute since the age of 15, but never experienced sexual pleasure and a real, non-simulated orgasm till she was 23; since then she has become very sensual.  In other similar cases the hitherto indifferent prostitute, having found the man who suits her, abandons her profession, even though she is thereby compelled to live in extreme poverty.  “An insensible woman,” as La Bruyere long ago remarked in his chapter “Des Femmes,” “is merely one who has not yet seen the man she must love.”