conveyance, theatre, or elsewhere, the man sees a desirable woman and by concentrating his attention on her person and imagining all the stages of intimacy he quickly succeeds in producing orgasm.[222] Niceforo refers to an Italian work-girl of 14 who could obtain ejaculation of mucus four times a day, in the workroom in the presence of the other girls, without touching herself or moving her body, by simply thinking of sexual things.[223]

If the orgasm occurs spontaneously, without the aid of mental impressions, or any manipulations ad hoc, though under such conditions it ceases to be sinful from the theological standpoint, it certainly ceases also to be normal.  Serieux records the case of a somewhat neurotic woman of 50, who had been separated from her husband for ten years, and since lived a chaste life; at this age, however, she became subject to violent crises of sexual orgasm, which would come on without any accompaniment of voluptuous thoughts.  MacGillicuddy records three cases of spontaneous orgasm in women coming under his notice.[224] Such crises are frequently found in both men and women, who, from moral reasons, ignorance, or on other grounds are restrained from attaining the complete sexual orgasm, but whose sexual emotions are, literally, continually dribbling from them.  Schrenck-Notzing knows a lady who is spontaneously sexually excited on hearing music or seeing pictures without anything lascivious in them; she knows nothing of sexual relationships.  Another lady is sexually excited on seeing beautiful and natural scenes, like the sea; sexual ideas are mixed up in her mind with these things, and the contemplation of a specially strong and sympathetic man brings the orgasm on in about a minute.  Both these ladies “masturbate” in the streets, restaurants, railways, theatres, without anyone perceiving it.[225] A Brahmin woman informed a medical correspondent in India that she had distinct though feeble orgasm, with copious outflow of mucus, if she stayed long near a man whose face she liked, and this is not uncommon among European women.  Evidently under such conditions there is a state of hyperaesthetic weakness.  Here, however, we are passing the frontiers of strictly auto-erotic phenomena.

Delectatio morosa, as understood by the theologians, is distinct from desire, and also distinct from the definite intention of effecting the sexual act, although it may lead to those things.  It is the voluntary and complacent dallying in imagination with voluptuous thoughts, when no effort is made to repel them.  It is, as Aquinas and others point out, constituted by this act of complacent dallying, and has no reference to the duration of the imaginative process.  Debreyne, in his Moechialogie (pp. 149-163), deals fully with this question, and quotes the opinions of theologians.  I may add that in the early Penitentials, before the elaboration of Catholic theology, the voluntary emission of semen