[AM] It is really amusing to notice how the radical writers put up a target and fire at it to their heart’s content. They take the church or state marriage and direct their poisoned arrows against it. As if the biologist, when speaking of animal and human marriage, could ever mean the conventional marriage. Neither does he understand by monogamy the condition generally known by this term. The biological monogamic marriage of a certain couple is their exclusive cohabitation for a certain length of time. If during this time they refrain from cohabitating with others they are for the time being living biologically in monogamic marriage. The cock in the barn-yard is polygamous, the steer in the herd is promiscuous, but the cow is monogamous. Once she has been impregnated she will not admit any other male until the end of the period of gestation and lactation, and the new period of rut has set in. From the beginning of one impregnation to the beginning of the other, almost a year, she is monogamic. This is the case with almost all females among the higher animals, and woman does not make any exception to this rule. Even the girl who professes free love, except she be a nymphomaniac, would not continue to live with her lover, if she found that while living with her he had had love affairs with others. She would divorce him forthwith, and sometimes such a divorce would be accompanied by quite a little scandal. Most of the erotic murders committed by men upon women and most of the cases of women throwing acid into the faces of men, we so often read in the Parisian papers, are perpetrated by those whose marriage relations have never been sanctioned by church or state. This fact reveals another error of the radicals who picture the peaceful parting of their free-loving couples in such glowing colors. They simply leave each other when they do not love any longer. But in practice love does not depart from both parties simultaneously, and the party which is still attached to the other will resent the desertion no less than if they would have been legally married. The reason is that normal men and women, except in early youth, perhaps, are never varietists. The varietist who lacks the instinct of exclusiveness is a psychopathic sensualist. No alienist could have given a better description of the symptoms of the psychopathic sensualist than that found in E. C. Walker’s (The moloch of the monogamic ideal) picture of the sufferings of the varietist, not of the suffering of total abstinence—in this case there may be some physiological basis—but of the suffering for lack of variety. And those pathological specimens are presented to us as normal men and women.
[AN] The pride of the female, says Otto Weininger (Sex and Character, p. 201), is something quite peculiar to herself, something foreign even to the most handsome man, an obsession of her own body, a pleasure which displays itself even in the least handsome girl, by admiring herself in the mirror, by stroking herself and playing with her own hair, but which comes to its full measure only in the effect that her body has on man.
[AO] Grudge, ill will, fear, hatred, or envy are often miscalled jealousy, but are emotions entirely different from the emotion of sexual jealousy.
Jealousy is especially confused with the emotion of envy. Professional jealousy, artistic jealousy, etc., for instance, are nothing but envy. Jealousy has a real or pretended claim, envy has none. Envy needs only two persons, jealousy three.
When a man, for instance, loves a woman in silence, without her knowledge or encouragement, i. e., without even a pretended claim upon her, and another man enters upon the stage, the emotion of the first man is not that of jealousy but of fear, lest the second man may succeed where he has not yet. When a man has a successful love affair, and another man appears as a disturber, the emotion of the second is that of envy. If the woman transfers her affections on the disturber, the emotion of the lover is that of jealousy, because he had a claim upon her.
[AP] This accounts for the observation not seldom made in the cases of widows that the children of the second husband bear a certain resemblance with the first dead one.
[AQ] The experiments of Waldstein and Elder show that every congressio, ending in the male ejaculation within the vagina, causes a certain saturation of the female blood with a substance, owing its origin within the male body, and exercises a certain change in the female blood. These authors have shown by experiments on rabbits (Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik, Vol. 56, p. 364) that the male sperma within the female organism represents a foreign body in the sense of Abderhalden. When the sperma has entered the blood of the female organism it produces there a specific ferment. The blood of a rabbit, twenty-four hours after copulation, possesses the quality of dialyzation upon testicular tissue. This reaction is positive after every copulation, no matter whether fertilization has taken place or not. Thus a part of the male circulates within the blood of the female, even after copulation without fertilization.
[AR] Even very small children with scanty knowledge of right or wrong, and without any rebuke or reprimand by parents or guardians, seem to have a conscious idea that masturbation is reprehensible and try to hide their activities.
[AS] One of the author’s patients, Mr. X., in his struggle against the habit, while a student in college, vowed never to fall back into the habit. As a reminder of this vow, he wrote upon a piece of cardboard the celebrated words of Darius, “μέμνησο τοῦ ὅρκου,” and hung it up over the desk. One day a college-friend, Mr. Y., came to see him and noticed the Greek sentence. Mr. Y. asked his host what kind of a vow he has taken. When he received no satisfactory answer Mr. Y. said: “I know the nature of your vow. It was that you will never masturbate again. But you did it in spite of your solemn oath.” This correct guess shows that Mr. Y. had the same struggle on his hands as his friend Mr. X.
[AT] The word onanism in this treatise is always used in the true Biblical sense, i. e., it always designates the practice of coitus interruptus; for this is what Onan did (Genesis xxxviii, 9). All other kinds of self-abuse, especially the practice where the hands are used, are called masturbation or manusturpation, but never onanism.