Mein Busen drängt
Sich nach ihm hin,
Ach, dürft ich ihn fassen
Und halten ihn
Und küssen ihn,
So wie ich wollt,
An seinen Küssen
Vergehen sollt.”
A resemblance to heat or rut in animals, who exhibit the sexual impulse only at definite periods, those at which the ovules ripen, is manifested in females of the human species only in so far as there is during menstruation a more intense sexual sensibility; but the limitation of the sexual impulse to definite periods, and its close association with reproduction, are not found in women. Education and morality impose artificial limitations on the sexual impulse in women, whilst nature endows this impulse with a coercive power, a fact recognized by thinkers of all times and all peoples. Thus, Buddha wrote: “The sexual impulse is stronger than the ankus with which the wild elephant is controlled, it is hotter than flame, it is like unto an arrow driven into the spirit of man.” In a similar sense Luther writes: “He who wishes to restrain the impulse of nature and not to allow it free play, as nature will and must, what does he do but this, to insist that nature shall not be nature, that fire shall not burn, that water shall not wet, that man shall neither eat, drink, nor sleep.” Schopenhaur describes the sexual impulse as “the completest outward manifestation of the will to live, the concentration, that is to say, of all wills. * * * The affirmation of the will to live concentrates itself in the act of generation, and this act is its most determined expression.” Mainländer in his Philosophy of Deliverance makes the following statement: “In the sexual impulse lies the centre of gravity of human life. To nothing does man devote a more earnest attention than to the business of generation, and in the pursuit of no other aim does he concentrate the intensity of his will in so striking a manner as in the performance of the act of generation.” Debay similarly insists on the strength of the sexual impulse, saying: “The union of the sexes is one of the great laws of nature; to that law men and women are subordinated as completely as all other creatures, they cannot escape its operation.”
According to the general opinion, the sexual impulse is not so strongly developed in women as it is in men. Hegar, Litzmann, Lombroso, P. Müller, and many others, assume that the sexual sensibility of women is less than that of men; Fürbringer is inclined to attribute the characteristic of sexual frigidity to the great majority of German wives. I do not believe that this view, of the slight intensity of the sexual impulse in women in general, is well grounded, and can admit only this much, that in adolescent girls who are inexperienced in sexual matters, the sexual impulse is less powerful than in youths of the same age who have undergone sexual enlightenment. From the moment when the woman also has been fully enlightened as to sexual affairs, and has actually experienced sexual excitement, her impulse toward intimate physical contact and toward copulation is just as powerful as that of men. According, however, to the dominant artificial conditions, man assumes it as his right to give free rein to his sexual desires and to gratify them without regard to consequences, whereas woman, narrowly confined within the boundaries imposed by law and convention, cannot so readily yield to her inclination in the direction of physical love, and must forcibly control that inclination. Moreover, a powerful check on the free indulgence of the sexual impulse is imposed on woman by the consequences of such indulgence, consequences which exist for woman only.