(having a germ that was placed in modern men by Christianity, and perhaps by still older religions) says that woman ought to be an absolutely pure being, with ethereal sensations, and that in her sexual enjoyment is out of place, improper, scandalous.  To arouse sexual emotions in a woman, if not to profane a sacred host, is, at all events, the staining of an immaculate peplos; if not sacrilege, it is, at least, irreverence or impertinence.  For all men, the chaster a woman is, the more agreeable it is to bring her to the orgasm.  That is felt as a triumph of the body over the soul, of sin over virtue, of earth over heaven.  There is something diabolic in such pleasure, especially when it is felt by a man intoxicated with love, and full of religious respect for the virgin of his election.  This feeling is, from a rational point of view, absurd, and in its tendencies, immoral; but it is delicious in its sacredly voluptuous subtlety.  Defloration thus has its powerful fascination in the respect consciously or unconsciously felt for woman’s chastity.  In marriage, the feeling is yet more complicated:  in deflowering his bride, the Christian (that is, any man brought up in a Christian civilization) has the feeling of committing a sort of sin (for the ‘flesh’ is, for him, always connected with sin) which, by a special privilege, has for him become legitimate.  He has received a special permit to corrupt innocence.  Hence, the peculiar prestige for civilized Christians, of the wedding night, sung by Shelley, in ecstatic verses:—­

        “’Oh, joy!  Oh, fear!  What will be done
        In the absence of the sun!’”

This feeling has, however, its normal range, and is not, per se, a perversity, though it may doubtless become so when unduly heightened by Christian sentiment, and especially if it leads, as to some extent it has led in my Russian correspondent, to an abnormal feeling of the sexual attraction of girls who have only or scarcely reached the age of puberty.  The sexual charm of this period of girlhood is well illustrated in many of the poems of Thomas Ashe, and it is worthy of note, as perhaps supporting the contention that this attraction is based on Christian feeling, that Ashe had been a clergyman.  An attentiveness to the woman’s pleasure remains, in itself, very far from a perversion, but increases, as Colin Scott has pointed out, with civilization, while its absence—­the indifference to the partner’s pleasure—­is a perversion of the most degraded kind.

There is no such instinctive demand on the woman’s part for innocence in the man.[19] In the nature of things that could not be.  Such emotion is required for properly playing the part of the pursued; it is by no means an added attraction on the part of the pursuer.  There is, however, an allied and corresponding desire which is very often clearly or latently present in the woman:  a longing for pleasure that is stolen