Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 · Chapter 25Chapter IV.—Sexual Inversion in Women. (4)
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
"During this period I began to fall in love,—a practice which clung to me until I was nearly 30 years old. I recall various older women with whom I became much enamored, and one man. Of these there was only one with whom I became acquainted well enough to show any affection; another was a teacher, and another was a young married woman at whom I used to gaze ardently during an entire church service. Toward all my women teachers I had a somewhat sentimental attitude. They stimulated me, while the men gave me a wholly impersonal feeling. This abnormal sentimentality may have been caused, or at least was increased, by the reading of novels, some of a highly voluptuous nature. I began to read novels at 7, and from 11 to 14 I absorbed a great many undesirable ones. This lead to my picturing my future with a lover, fancying myself in romantic scenes and being caressed and embraced. I had always supposed I should marry. When about 5 I decided that when I grew up I would marry a certain young man who used to come to our house. Several years later he married, to my real disappointment. I had no affection for him, but merely thought he would make a desirable husband.
"During my unhappy adolescence I heard that a former playmate was going to visit at my home. I began to look forward to the visit with much eagerness and at her arrival was much excited. I wished to stay alone with her and to caress her, and when we slept together I pressed my body against her in a sensual manner, which act she permitted, but without passion. I was greatly excited and could scarcely sleep. This was the first time I had acted in such a way, and after she left I felt shame and dislike for her. At future meetings there was never the least sensuality; we never referred to the first visit and are still friends, though not intimate.
"A diary which I kept during my fourteenth and fifteenth years is filled with romantic sentiments and endearing terms applied successively to three girls of my own age. I had but a speaking acquaintance with them, but I was strongly infatuated with all. One boy was also the object of adoration.
"During my thirteenth year I became for a time very religious and devoted to religious exercises. This passed and by my fourteenth year I had become heretical, but was still keenly sensitive to religious influences.
"When barely 16 I slept one night with a woman of low morals. She acted toward me in a sensual manner and aroused my sexual feelings. I felt at the time that this was a sin, but I was carried away by passion. Afterward I hated this woman and despised myself.
"I then went away to a co-educational boarding school. Here for the first time I became happy. A girl of my own age, of fine character and noticeable refinement, fell in love with me and caused me to reciprocate. On retrospection I believe this to have been a genuine and beautiful love on both sides. After a few months, however, our relation, at my initiative and against my friend's will, became a physical one. We expressed our affection by mutual caresses, close embraces and lying on each other's bodies. I sometimes touched her sexual organs sensually. All this contact gave me exquisite thrills. After three years we had a misunderstanding and separated. I was greatly grieved and troubled for many years, and came to regret greatly the physical relationship that had existed between us. My friend at length fell in love and married. I had several other slighter infatuations for women, was courted by several men to whom I remained cold and bored except in one instance, where I was somewhat touched, and finally found a lasting friendship with a woman who had fallen deeply in love with me in her school days and had never been able to care for any one else. She is a woman of considerable literary talent and of good general ability and high ideals. She is usually much liked by men. Her love for me is the most real thing in the world for me, and seems the most permanent. At first my feeling for her was almost purely physical, although there were no sexual relations. I hated this feeling and have succeeded in overcoming it pretty largely. At times after long separations we have embraced with great passion, at least on my part. This has always had a bad physical effect on me. At present, however, it very rarely occurs. We both consider sexual feelings degrading and deleterious to real love. Whether at any time we have had complete physical satisfaction or gratification, I hardly know. I have experienced very keen physical pleasure, mingled with what I took to be great mental exaltation and quickening of the emotions. This condition was brought about by close contact with the body of my friend, usually by lying upon it. But if by 'gratification' it is meant that desire, having been completely satisfied, ceases temporarily, I think I have never had that experience. If I did, it was when I was about 18 when I lived with a girl friend in intimate relations. Of late years, at any rate, it has never happened to me, and an embrace, however close, always leaves me with a desire for a closer union, both physical and spiritual. So a few years since, I came to the conclusion that it was impossible to obtain physical satisfaction through the woman I loved. I came to this conclusion because of the bad physical effects of contact. My sexual organs became highly sensitive and inflamed and I suffered pain from the inflammation and resulting leucorrhea. Should I allow myself to indulge in caresses this condition would return. My friend, fortunately, though very affectionate and demonstrative toward me, has very little sexual passion. The idea that our relationship is based upon it is very repugnant to her. I was at one time, a few years since, much discouraged and almost hopeless of being able to overcome my appetite, and I decided that we could not associate unless I succeeded. At present, with help, I have very largely succeeded in living with my friend on a basis of normal, though affectionate and tender, companionship. I have been helped more, and have learned more, through this companionship, than through anything else. The keen pleasure that I have felt when in responsive contact I never experienced in masturbation. So far as I remember it never took place till I was well along in my 'teens and was never an habitual practice, except the first summer I was separated from a school friend whom I loved. Thoughts of her aroused feelings which I attempted to satisfy in this way, but the entire sensuality of the act soon led me to refrain and to see that that was not what I wanted.
"A peculiar incident that might have some significance occurred to me about five years ago. I was sitting in a small room where a seminar was being conducted. The leader of the discussion was a man about 50, whom I looked up to on account of his attainments and respected as a man, though I knew him socially very slightly. I had lost a night's sleep from toothache and was feeling nervous. I was giving my entire attention to the subject in hand, when suddenly I felt a very strong physical compulsion toward that man. I did not know what I was going to do, but I felt on the point of losing all control of myself. I was afraid to leave, for fear the slightest movement would throw me into a panic. The attraction was entirely physical and like nothing I had felt before. And I had a strange feeling that its cause was in the man himself; that he was willing it; I was like a spectator. It was some moments before the assemblage broke up, when my 'possession' completely disappeared and never recurred.
"Regarding dreams, I will say that not until the past year or two have I been conscious of having clear-cut dreams with definite happenings. They seemed usually to leave only vague impressions, such as a feeling that I had been riding horseback, or trying to perform some hard task. Sexual dreams I do not recall having had for several years, except that occasionally I am awakened by a feeling of uncomfortable sexual desire, which seems usually caused by a need to urinate. Between the ages of 17 and 22, approximately, I frequently, perhaps several times a month, would have vague sexual dreams. These always, I think, occurred when I happened to be sleeping with someone whom, in my dream, I would mistake for my intimate friend, and would awaken myself by embracing my bedfellow with sometimes a slight, sometimes considerable degree of passion. I have finally arrived at some understanding of my own temperament, and am no longer miserable and melancholy. I regret that I am not a man, because I could then have a home and children."
HISTORY XXXIX.—Miss D., actively engaged in the practice of her profession, aged 40. Heredity good, nervous system sound, general health on the whole satisfactory. Development feminine but manner and movements somewhat boyish. Menstruation scanty and painless. Hips normal, nates small, sexual organs showing some approximation toward infantile type with large labia minora and probably small vagina. Tendency to development of hair on body and especially lower limbs. The narrative is given in her own words:—
"Ever since I can remember anything at all I could never think of myself as a girl and I was in perpetual trouble, with this as the real reason. When I was 5 or 6 years old I began to say to myself that, whatever anyone said, if I was not a boy at any rate I was not a girl. This has been my unchanged conviction all through my life.
"When I was little, nothing ever made me doubt it, in spite of external appearance. I regarded the conformation of my body as a mysterious accident. I could not see why it should have anything to do with the matter. The things that really affected the question were my own likes and dislikes, and the fact that I was not allowed to follow them. I was to like the things which belonged to me as a girl,—frocks and toys and games which I did not like at all. I fancy I was more strongly 'boyish' than the ordinary little boy. When I could only crawl my absorbing interest was hammers and carpet-nails. Before I could walk I begged to be put on horses' backs, so that I seem to have been born with the love of tools and animals which has never left me.
"I did not play with dolls, though my little sister did. I was often reproached for not playing her games. I always chose boys' toys,—tops and guns and horses; I hated being kept indoors and was always longing to go out. By the time I was 7 it seemed to me that everything I liked was called wrong for a girl. I left off telling my elders what I did like. They confused and wearied me by their talk of boys and girls. I did not believe them and could hardly imagine that they believed themselves. By the time I was 8 or 9 I used to wonder whether they were dupes, or liars, or hypocrites, or all three. I never believed or trusted a grown person in consequence. I led my younger brothers in everything. I was not at all a happy little child and often cried and was made irritable; I was so confused by the talk, about boys and girls. I was held up as an evil example to other little girls who virtuously despised me.
"When I was about 9 years old I went to a day school and began to have a better time. From 9 to 13 I practically shaped my own life. I learned very little at school, and openly hated it, but I read a great deal at home and got plenty of ideas. I lived, however, mainly out of doors whenever I could get out. I spent all my pocket money on tools, rabbits, pigeons and many other animals. I became an ardent pigeon-catcher, not to say thief, though I did not knowingly steal.
"My brothers were as devoted to the animals as I was. The men were supposed to look after them, but we alone did so. We observed, mated, separated, and bred them with considerable skill. We had no language to express ourselves, but one of our own. We were absolutely innocent, and sweetly sympathetic with every beast. I don't think we ever connected their affairs with those of human beings, but as I do not remember the time when I did not know all about the actual facts of sex and reproduction, I presume I learned it all in that way, and life never had any surprises for me in that direction. Though I saw many sights that a child should not have seen, while running about wild, I never gave them a thought; all animals great and small from rabbits to men had the same customs, all natural and right. My initiation here was, in my eyes, as nearly perfect as a child's should be. I never asked grown people questions. I thought all those in charge of me coarse and untruthful and I disliked all ugly things and suggestions.
"Every half-holiday I went out with the boys from my brothers' school. They always liked me to play with them, and, though not pleasant-tongued boys, were always civil and polite to me. I organized games and fortifications that they would never have imagined for themselves, led storming parties, and instituted some rather dangerous games of a fighting kind. I taught my brothers; to throw stones. Sometimes I led adventures such as breaking into empty houses. I liked being out after dark.
"In the winter I made and rigged boats and went sailing them, and I went rafting and pole-leaping. I became a very good jumper and climber, could go up a rope, bowl overhand, throw like a boy, and whistle three different ways. I collected beetles and butterflies and went shrimping and learned to fish. I had very little money to spend, but I picked things up and I made all traps, nets, cages, etc., myself. I learned from every working-man, I could get hold of the use of all ordinary carpenters' tools, and how to weld hot iron, pave, lay bricks and turf, and so on.
"When I was about 11 my parents got more mortified at my behavior and perpetually threatened me with a boarding-school. I was told for months how it would take the nonsense out of me—'shape me,' 'turn me into a young lady.' My going was finally announced to me as a punishment to me for being what I was.
"Certainly, the horror of going to this school and the cruel and unsympathetic way that I was sent there gave me a shock that I never got over. The only thing that reconciled me to going was my intense indignation with those who sent me. I appealed to be allowed to learn Latin and boys' subjects, but was laughed at.
"I was so helpless that I knew I could not run away without being caught, or I would have run away anywhere from home and school. I never cried or fretted, but burnt with anger and went like a trapped rabbit.
"In no words can I describe the severity of the nervous shock, or the suffering of my first year at school. The school was noted for its severity and I heard that at one period the elder girls ran away so often that they wore a uniform dress. I knew two who had run away. The teachers in my time were ignorant, self-indulgent women who cared nothing for the girls or their education and made much money out of them. There was a suspicious reformatory atmosphere, and my money was taken from me and my letters read.
"I was intensely shy. I hated the other girls. There were no refinements anywhere; I had no privacy in my room, which was always overcrowded; we had no hot water, no baths, improper food, and no education. We were not allowed to wear enough clean linen, and for five years I never felt clean.
"I never had one moment to myself, was not allowed to read anything, had even not enough lesson books, was taught nothing to speak of except a little inferior music and drawing. I never got enough exercise, and was always tired and dull, and could not keep my digestion in order. My pride and self-respect were degraded in innumerable ways, I suffered agonies of disgust, and the whole thing was a dreary penal servitude.
"I did not complain. I made friends with a few of the girls. Some of the older girls were attracted to me. Some talked of men and love affairs to me, but I was not greatly interested. No one ever spoke of any other matters of sex to me or in my hearing, but most of the girls were shy with me and I with them.
"In about two years' time the teachers got to like me and thought me one of their nicest girls. I certainly influenced them and got them to allow the girls more privileges.
"I lay great stress upon the physical privations and disgust that I felt during these years. The mental starvation was not quite so great because it was impossible for them to crush my mind as they did my body. That it all materially aided to arrest the development of my body I am certain.
"It is difficult to estimate sexual influences of which as a child I was practically unaware. I certainly admired the liveliest and cleverest girls and made friends with them and disliked the common, lumpy, uneducated type that made two-thirds of my companions. The lively girls liked me, and I made several nice friends whom I have kept ever since. One girl of about 15 took a violent liking for me and figuratively speaking licked the dust from my shoes. I would never take any notice of her. When I was nearly 16 one of my teachers began to notice me and be very kind to me. She was twenty years older than I was. She seemed to pity my loneliness and took me out for walks and sketching, and encouraged me to talk and think. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever sympathized with me or tried to understand me and it was a most beautiful thing to me. I felt like an orphan child who had suddenly acquired a mother, and through her I began to feel less antagonistic to grown people and to feel the first respect I had ever felt for what they said. She petted me into a state of comparative docility and made the other teachers like and trust me. My love for her was perfectly pure, and I thought of her's as simply maternal. She never roused the least feeling in me that I can think of as sexual. I liked her to touch me and she sometimes held me in her arms or let me sit on her lap. At bedtime she used to come and say good-night and kiss me upon the mouth. I think now that what she did was injudicious to a degree, and I wish I could believe it was as purely unselfish and kind as it seemed to me then. After I had left school I wrote to her and visited her during a few years. Once she wrote to me that if I could give her employment she would come and live with me. Once when she was ill with neurasthenia her friends asked me to go to the seaside with her, which I did. Here she behaved in an extraordinary way, becoming violently jealous over me with another elderly friend of mine who was there. I could hardly believe my senses and was so astonished and disgusted that I never went near her again. She also accused me of not being 'loyal' to her; to this day I have no idea what she meant. She then wrote and asked me what was wrong between us, and I replied that after the words she had had with me my confidence in her was at an end. It gave me no particular pang as I had by this time outgrown the simple gratitude of my childish days and not replaced it by any stronger feeling. All my life I have had the profoundest repugnance to having any 'words' with other women.
"I was much less interested in sex matters than other children of my age. I was altogether less precocious, though I knew more, I imagine, than other girls. Nevertheless, by the time I was 15 social matters had begun to interest me greatly. It is difficult to say how this happened, as I was forbidden all books and newspapers (except in my holidays when I had generally a reading orgy, though not the books I needed or wanted). I had abundant opportunities for speculation, but no materials for any profitable thinking.
"Dreaming was forced upon me. I dreamed fairy-tales by night and social dreams by day. In the nightdreams, sometimes in the day-dreams, I was always the prince or the pirate, rescuing beauty in distress, or killing the unworthy. I had one dream which I dreamed over and over again and enjoyed and still sometimes dream. In this I was always hunting and fighting, often in the dark; there was usually a woman or a princess, whom I admired, somewhere in the background, but I have never really seen her. Sometimes I was a stowaway on board ship or an Indian hunter or a backwoodsman making a log-cabin for my wife or rather some companion. My daythoughts were not about the women round about me, or even about the one who was so kind to me; they were almost impersonal. I went on, at any rate, from myself to what I thought the really ideal and built up a very beautiful vision of solid human friendship in which there was everything that was strong and wholesome on either side, but very little of sex. To imagine this in its fullness I had to imagine all social, family, and educational conditions vastly different from anything I had come across. From this my thoughts ran largely on social matters. In whatever direction my thoughts ran I always surveyed them from the point of view of a boy. I was trying to wait patiently till I could escape from slavery and starvation, and trying to keep the open mind I have spoken of, though I never opened a book of poetry, or a novel, or a history, but I slipped naturally back into my non-girl's attitude and read it through my own eyes. All my surface-life was a sham, and only through books, which were few, did I ever see the world naturally. A consideration of social matters led me to feel very sorry for women, whom I regarded as made by a deliberate process of manufacture into the fools I thought they were, and by the same process that I myself was being made one. I felt more and more that men were to be envied and women pitied. I lay stress on this for it started in me a deliberate interest in women as women. I began to feel protective and kindly toward women and children and to excuse women from their responsibility for calamities such as my school-career. I never imagined that men required, or would have thanked me for, any sort of sympathy. But it came about in these ways, and without the least help that I can trace, that by the time I was 19 years of age I was keenly interested in all kinds of questions: pity for downtrodden women, suffrage questions, marriage laws, questions of liberty, freedom of thought, care of the poor, views of Nature and Man and God. All these things filled my mind to the exclusion of individual men and women. As soon as I left school I made a headlong plunge into books where these things were treated; I had the answers to everything to find after a long period of enforced starvation. I had to work for my knowledge. No books or ideas came near me but what I went in search of. Another thing that helped me to take an expansive view of life at this time was my intense love of Nature. All birds and animals affected me by their beauty and grace, and I have always kept a profound sympathy with them as well as some subtle understanding which enables me to tame them, at times remarkably. I not only loved all other creatures, but I believed that men and women were the most beautiful things in the universe and I would rather look at them (unclothed) than on any other thing, as my greatest pleasure. I was prepared to like them because they were beautiful. When the time came for me to leave school I rather dreaded it, chiefly because I dreaded my life at home. I had a great longing at this time to run away and try my fortune anywhere; possibly if I had been stronger I might have done so. But I was in very poor health through the physical crushing I had had, and in very poor spirits through this and my mental repression. I still knew myself a prisoner and I was bitterly disappointed and ashamed at having no education. I afterward had myself taught arithmetic and other things.
"The next period of my life which covered about six years was not less important to my development, and was a time of extreme misery to me. It found me, on leaving school, almost a child. This time between 18 and 24 should, I think, count as my proper period of puberty, which probably in most children occupies the end years of their school-life.
"It was at this time that I began to make a good many friends of my own and to become aware of psychical and sexual attractions. I had never come across any theories on the subject, but I decided that I must belong to a third sex of some kind. I used to wonder if I was like the neuter bees! I knew physical and psychical sex feeling and yet I seemed to know it quite otherwise from other men and women. I asked myself if I could endure living a woman's life, bearing children and doing my duty by them. I asked myself what hiatus there could be between my bodily structure and my feelings, and also what was the meaning of the strong physical feelings which had me in their grip without choice of my own. [Experience of physical sex sensations first began about 16 in sleep; masturbation was accidentally discovered at the age of 19, abandoned at 28, and then at 34 deliberately resumed as a method of purely physical relief.] These three things simply would not be reconciled and I said to myself that I must find a way of living in which there was as little sex of any kind as possible. There was something that I simply lacked; that I never doubted. Curiously enough, I thought that the ultimate explanation might be that there were men's minds in women's bodies, but I was more concerned in finding a way of life than in asking riddles without answers.
"I thought that one day when I had money and opportunity I would dress in men's clothes and go to another country, in order that I might be unhampered by sex considerations and conventions. I determined to live an honorable, upright, but simple life.
"I had no idea at first that homosexual attractions in women existed; afterward observations on the lower animals put the idea into my head. I made no preparation in my mind for any sexual life, though I thought it would be a dreary business repressing my body all my days.
"My relations with other women were entirely pure. My attitude toward my sexual physical feelings was one of reserve and repression, and I think the growing conviction of my radical deficiency somewhere, would have made intimate affection for anyone, with any demonstration in it, a kind of impropriety for which I had no taste.
"However, between 21 and 24 other things happened to me.
"During these few years I saw plenty of men and plenty of women. As regards the men I liked them very well, but I never thought the man would turn up with whom I should care to live. Several men were very friendly with me and three in particular used to write me letters and give me much of their confidence. I invited two of them to visit at my house. All these men talked to me with freedom and even told me about their sexual ideas and doings. One asked me to believe that he was leading a good life; the other two owned that they were not. One discussed the question of homosexuality with me; he has never married. I liked one of them a good deal, being attracted by his softness and gentleness and almost feminine voice. It was hoped that I would take to him and he very cautiously made love to me. I allowed him to kiss me a few times and wrote him a few responsive letters, wondering what I liked in him. Someone then commented on the acquaintance and said 'marriage,' and I woke up to the fact that I did not really want him at all. I think he found the friendship too insipid and was glad to be out of it. All these men were a trifle feminine in characteristics, and two played no games. I thought it odd that they should all express admiration for the very boyish qualities in me that other people disliked. A fourth man, something of the same type, told another friend that he always felt surprised at how freely he was able to talk to me, but that he never could feel that I was a woman. Two of these were brilliantly clever men; two were artists.