Notice on the contrary the indignation of the average man when the fire "does not amount to anything", when the "victim" of an accident escapes unharmed.
Is the Male More Cruel? It has been said that sadism was a masculine trait, masochism a feminine characteristic. Like the majority of generalisations on the subject of sex differences, it is inaccurate.
Man, the hunter, is more aggressive in love, but his aggressiveness need not include cruelty. His strength, in modern life, is put to quite a different use, to protect the weaker female, not to overwhelm her.
Woman is supposed to be more submissive but mythology, legend and history present to us thousands of cases in which the female of the human species betrayed many sadistic instincts, not infrequently associated with her love activities. Even in the animal world, while we behold males apparently submitting the female to much suffering, we find not a few cases, for instance in the insect world, of females killing or even devouring their mate immediately after the love communion.
CHAPTER XX
Love That Craves Suffering. Masochism
The man whom Krafft-Ebing selected as the typical masochist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, was born in Lemberg, January 27, 1836.
He was extremely frail in infancy and childhood. He compensated for his physical inferiority thru unusual mental activity, for at the age of nineteen he won his degree of doctor of law. At twenty he was appointed instructor in German history at an university. At the age of twenty-five he was the author of several books of history. He then turned to fiction, first of the historical and then of the purely psychological type.
A morbid tendency was observable in his very first books, a tendency which became more and more marked and which led him to write almost exclusively descriptions of perverse love entanglements.