The last action in his fancy is symbolical of the highest degree of humility, which does not shrink back even from the loathsome and disgusting, but on the contrary, considers it a high honor and favor to be allowed to approach even this unaesthetic part of the human anatomy. The anal kiss, for that reason, played a prominent rôle in the ceremonies of the witches’ vigil. The anal kiss is well known in fornicibus, frequented by masochists. In men every masochistic desire is at once recognized as pathological; in women the dividing line between the normal and pathological masochistic tendencies is not so easily determined.
It is entirely within the physiological limit that playful taps and light blows should be taken by the woman for caresses. “Like the lover’s pinch, which hurts and is desired,” says Shakespeare. In one of the letters of Abélard to Héloïse, the teacher writes to his pupil and mistress: “Verbera quandoque dabat amor, non ira magistralis, quaeque omnium gaudiorum dulcitudinem superarent.” Subordination to a certain extent is quite a normal manifestation in the loving woman; with her it is a physiological phenomenon. It is the subordination of weakness to strength. A certain amount of subordination depends upon the woman’s passive rôle in procreation. The aggressor always controls the subjected in love as in war. The element of pleasure found in passivism and ideal submission is, therefore, peculiar to the feminine sex. The custom of unnumbered generations also has given her an instinctive inclination to voluntary subordination.
Ideas of submission are, therefore, in the woman normally connected with the idea of sexual relations. They form the harmonies of the tone quality of feminine feeling, says Krafft-Ebing. We women, says Schiller, can only choose between ruling and serving, but the highest pleasure power affords is but a miserable substitute if the greater joy of being the slave of a man we love be denied us. Goethe’s Dorothea says: In time shall the woman learn to serve in accord with her destiny, for only by serving she finally gains the reins and the power that is rightly hers in the household. In fact, intelligent women have scant respect for slavish men, and exaggerated gallantry is distasteful to them.
A moderate degree of submission to the wishes and the will of the man she loves is, therefore, characteristic of the feminine nature and is not abnormal. Many a young woman worships her husband and wishes nothing better than to kneel before him. This is done because her husband means for her the whole sex and his importance to her becomes very great. But in masochism there exists the desire to be subjected and abused by any man without any inclination to a particular object of love. A further pathognomonic symptom of masochism is that, as a rule, the girl begins to dream of subjugation at a time when she is yet too young to have any perception of love.
The best examples of female masochism are given in Krafft-Ebing’s two cases.
The first case is of a girl, twenty-one years of age. From her earliest youth she fancied herself being whipped. She simply revelled in these ideas and had the most intense desire to be severely flogged. This desire originated at the age of five when a friend of her father laid her playfully across his knees, pretending to whip her. Since then she had longed for the opportunity of being whipped. To her great regret her wish had never been realized. She imagined herself absolutely helpless and fettered. The mere mention of the word cane or whip caused her intense excitement.
For the last two years she associated these masochistic ideas with the male sex. Previously she only thought of a severe school-mistress or simply a hand. Now she wishes to be the slave of a man she loved. She would kiss his feet, if he would only whip her. She imagines herself lying before the man of her fancy; he puts one foot on her neck, while she kisses the other. In the meantime she revels in the idea of being whipped by him. She takes the blows as so many tokens of love. She fancies him first as being extremely kind and tender and then, in excess of his love, he beats her. She also fancies that beating her for love’s sake gives him the highest pleasure. She often dreams that she is the beloved man’s slave. The patient never understood that these manifestations were of a sexual nature.
The second case is that of a woman, thirty-five years of age, of a greatly tainted family. For some years past she had been in the initial stage of paranoia persecutoria. This sprang from cerebral neurasthenia, the origin of which was found to be sexual hyperexcitation. Since her twenty-fourth year she had been given to manu stupro, the result of a disappointment from a broken engagement. To appease her intense sexual excitement, she began the practice of manu stuprum and of mental erethism by fancying herself to be in concarnatione.
The story of her youth reads as follows: At the age of six to eight years she conceived the desire to be whipped. She had never been whipped nor present when others were thus punished. Hence she cannot understand how she came to have this strange desire. With the idea of being whipped she had a feeling of actual delight. She pictured in her fancy how fine it would be to be whipped by one of her female friends. She never had any thought of being whipped by a man. She revelled in the idea only and never attempted any actual realization of her fancies, which disappeared after her tenth year of age.
Here we have a young masochist whose ideas of humiliation are associated with her own sex. The reason for the patient’s fancy for female friends lay in the fact that the masochistic desire was present in the mind of the child before the psychic vita sexualis had developed and the instinct for the male awakened. Had the desire lasted until puberty the association of these ideas with the male would have been established.
The ideas of humiliation of the masochistic sufferers are in the beginning often associated with their own sex. Not that they are in any way homosexual at the same time, but because genuine, complete masochism, being a hereditary taint, the feverish longing for submission begins in early youth at a time when the child is as yet unconscious of the difference of sex.
Sometimes the masochistic tendency is not fully developed. The desire to suffer pain at the hands of the lover has only the end in view to increase the natural libido in congressu.
One of the author’s patients, a sexually hyperaesthetic woman of thirty years of age, who always had a supply of lovers besides her husband, found great delight in jacendo nuda in genibus amati et ab eo verberata in nudis natibus. When first told about this peculiar desire, the author attributed this desire to her natural hyperexcitation. In this state every impression, produced by the consort, independently of the manner of its production, is per se attended with lustful pleasure. But later on, when he learned that she found more satisfaction in concubitu if preceded by such a spanking, and that the husband often had to gratify her in this manner even in the middle of the night, there was no doubt that hers was a case of a psychical anomaly in which the sexual instinct was partly made insensible to the normal charms of the consort. Her perverse desire was, therefore, of a masochistic nature.