The same deleterious effects are caused by all other kinds of masturbatic practices. Even though we agree with Paget that moderate masturbation is no more harmful than normal intercourse, it can not be denied that masturbation, since opportunity for it is ever present, is of far more frequent occurrence than natural sexual indulgence. The habit, once established, masturbation presents an unconquerable impulse and a resultant incapacity to control it. It is then the cause of grave material injuries to the nervous system. It dwarfs the entire female organism. It makes the girl shy, offish, squeamish, repellent, and weakens and sickens the emotions of sex-attraction.
One of the author’s patients, a dress-maker, thirty-five years of age and single, has been suffering from general nervousness, headaches, palpitation of the heart, frequent urination, anorexia and constipation. One day she took courage and asked for a remedy for her excessive autoeroticism. Scarcely does she reach her bed at night time and gets warm, when the overwhelming desire for autoeroticism takes a hold of her and, fighting as she may against the impulse, ei feminandum est manu. These practices were going on nightly for the last twenty years.
Howard says: The permanent effects left from early masturbation seem to be much graver in women than in men. As the girl grows, her psychic life becomes more complicated, her natural romantic nature is fed by kiss literature and poetry of the decadents, in which perverted passion is thinly disinfected by erotic mysticism. Under such a stimulating psychic pabulum a dormant sexual volcano may become active. If it is only smoldering, suggestive dressing, the dance and wine will soon bring about the complete explosion. At home in bed, with strange and abnormal psychic pictures, she will seek relief in stupro manu. If this state of affairs is kept up for many years, when she marries her husband is certain to find that he has for a wife a female who has no use for normal sex activity and who has acquired a perverted taste for some form of autoeroticism.
It is a curious fact that autoeroticism is frequently practised by married women living with sexually normal husbands. The gynaecologist must consider this fact as the possible cause of many female complaints.
A few years ago, the author removed an ovarian tumor and performed a perinæorrhaphy on a woman of thirty-five, mother of a child of ten years of age. While in the hospital the nurse complained that the patient is soiling the wound contrectando muliebria. Three months after the patient left the hospital she called at the author’s office for treatment of ulcerations of the labia and nymphae. The clitoris was found to be one inch long, bluish-red and inflamed, the prepuce swollen and edematous, the nymphae inflamed and swollen. The author told the patient that she could not be cured unless she desisted from autoeroticism which she promised to do. This promise had the value of a confession that she did indulge in autoerotic practices. Yet she had a normal husband who very industriously performed his marital obligations. For before the operation she once asked the author to tell her husband not to have any connections, or at least, not so frequently, with her until after the operation.
The female masturbator often becomes excessively prudish, despises and hates the opposite sex, and forms passionate attachments for other women. Masturbation is not seldom the cause of a great number of female complaints. It is often the cause of obstruction and of pains of menstruation, of ovarian neuralgia, of weakness of the legs and of sexual irritation. It causes pruritus vulvae, hypertrophy of the clitoris and labia minora, hyperaemia of the vaginal orifice, fluor albus, and cervical catarrh. Masturbating women often complain of general weakness and of palpitation of the heart.
One of the author’s patients, a young masturbator of seventeen, suffered from painful menstruation, attacks of palpitation of the heart, from melancholia and fear of death, and at the same time from suicidal inclinations, which thus revealed the illogical state of her mind.
Masturbation also causes that form of increased erethism, connected with female impotency, in which the orgasm no longer occurs during the conjugal embrace. For this reason the victim prefers solitary indulgence even after marriage.
In Moll’s case the woman, thirty years of age, mother of several children, is happily married, loves her husband and is loved in return. Yet coition does not gratify her in the least. She finds satisfaction only in solitary stupro manu by which orgasm is induced in the highest degree. In this way there are times, when the patient who is a modest, moral woman, practises autoeroticism several times a day.
To this class of patients belong the cases recorded by Loiman, Laker, and others. The sexual functions were originally normal and satisfaction was possible in the normal way. Through excessive masturbation, however, the nerves became so weakened that normal coition did not give the desired satisfaction.