I find good reason to believe that in many cases the psychic influence of masturbation on women is different from its effect on men.  As Spitzka observed, although it may sometimes render women self-reproachful and hesitant, it often seems to make them bold.  Boys, as we have seen, early assimilate the tradition that self-abuse is “unmanly” and injurious, but girls have seldom any corresponding tradition that it is “unwomanly,” and thus, whether or not they are reticent on the matter, before the forum of their own conscience they are often less ashamed of it than men are and less troubled by remorse.

Eulenburg considers that the comparative absence of bad effects from masturbation in girls is largely due to the fact that, unlike boys, they are not terrorized by exaggerated warnings and quack literature concerning the awful results of the practice.  Forel, who has also remarked that women are often comparatively little troubled by qualms of conscience after masturbation, denies that this is due to a lower moral tone than men possess (Forel, Die Sexuelle Frage, p. 247).  In this connection, I may refer to History IV, recorded in the Appendix to the fifth volume of these Studies, in which it is stated that of 55 prostitutes of various nationalities, with whom the subject had had relations, 18 spontaneously told him that they were habitual masturbators, while of 26 normal women, 13 made the same confession, unasked.  Guttceit, in Russia, after stating that women of good constitution had told him that they masturbated as much as six or ten times a day or night (until they fell asleep, tired), without bad results, adds that, according to his observations, “masturbation, when not excessive, is, on the whole, a quite innocent matter, which exerts little or no permanent effect,” and adds that it never, in any case, leads to hypochondria onanica in women, because they have not been taught to expect bad results (Dreissig Jahre Praxis, p. 306).  There is, I think, some truth—­though the exceptions are doubtless many—­in the distinction drawn by W.C.  Krauss ("Masturbational Neuroses,” Medical News, July 13, 1901):  “From my experience it [masturbation] seems to have an opposite effect upon the two sexes, dulling the mental and making clumsy the physical exertions of the male, while in the female it quickens and excites the physical and psychical movements.  The man is rendered hypoesthetic, the woman hyperesthetic.”

In either sex auto-erotic excesses during adolescence in young men and women of intelligence—­whatever absence of gross injury there may be—­still often produce a certain degree of psychic perversion, and tend to foster false and high-strung ideals of life.  Kraepelin refers to the frequency of exalted enthusiasms in masturbators, and I have already quoted Anstie’s remarks on the connection between masturbation and premature false work in literature and art.  It may be added that excess in masturbation has often