is not a real, but only an apparent, passivity, and this holds true of our own species as much as of the lower animals.  “Women are like delicately adjusted alembics,” said a seventeenth-century author.  “No fire can be seen outside, but if you look underneath the alembic, if you place your hand on the hearts of women, in both places you will find a great furnace."[170] Or, as Marro has finely put it, the passivity of women in love is the passivity of the magnet, which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron toward it.  An intense energy lies behind such passivity, an absorbed preoccupation in the end to be attained.

Tarde, when exercising magistrate’s functions, once had to inquire into a case in which a young man was accused of murder.  In questioning a girl of 18, a shepherdess, who appeared before him as a witness, she told him that on the morning following the crime she had seen the footmarks of the accused up to a certain point.  He asked how she recognized them, and she replied, ingenuously but with assurance, that she could recognize the footprints of every young man in the neighborhood, even in a plowed field.[171] No better illustration could be given of the real significance of the sexual passivity of women, even at its most negative point.

“The women I have known,” a correspondent writes, “do not express their sensations and feelings as much as I do.  Nor have I found women usually anxious to practise ‘luxuries.’  They seldom care to practice fellatio; I have only known one woman who offered to do fellatio because she liked it.  Nor do they generally care to masturbate a man; that is, they do not care greatly to enjoy the contemplation of the other person’s excitement. (To me, to see the woman excited means almost more than my own pleasure.) They usually resist cunnilinctus, although they enjoy it.  They do not seem to care to touch or look at a man’s parts so much as he does at theirs.  And they seem to dislike the tongue-kiss unless they feel very sexual or really love a man.”  My correspondent admits that his relationships have been numerous and facile, while his erotic demands tend also to deviate from the normal path.  Under such circumstances, which not uncommonly occur, the woman’s passions fail to be deeply stirred, and she retains her normal attitude of relative passivity.

It is owing to the fact that the sexual passivity of women is only an apparent, and not a real, passivity that women are apt to suffer, as men are, from prolonged sexual abstinence.  This, indeed, has been denied, but can scarcely be said to admit of doubt.  The only question is as to the relative amount of such suffering, necessarily a very difficult question.  As far back as the fourteenth century Johannes de Sancto Amando stated that women are more injured than men by sexual abstinence.  In modern times Maudsley considers that women “suffer more than men do from the entire deprivation of sexual intercourse”