fear of the orgasm not developing; that there would be no involuntary resistance on her part.”  The fact that such suggestions can be permanently effective tends to show how superficial the sexual “anesthesia” of women usually is.

Not only, therefore, is the apparatus of sexual excitement in women more complex than in men, but—­in part, possibly as a result of this greater complexity—­it much more frequently requires to be actively aroused.  In men tumescence tends to occur almost spontaneously, or under the simple influence of accumulated semen.  In women, also, especially in those who live a natural and healthy life, sexual excitement also tends to occur spontaneously, but by no means so frequently as in men.  The comparative rarity of sexual dreams in women who have not had sexual relationships alone serves to indicate this sexual difference.  In a very large number of women the sexual impulse remains latent until aroused by a lover’s caresses.  The youth spontaneously becomes a man; but the maiden—­as it has been said—­“must be kissed into a woman.”

One result of this characteristic is that, more especially when love is unduly delayed beyond the first youth, this complex apparatus has difficulty in responding to the unfamiliar demands of sexual excitement.  Moreover, delayed normal sexual relations, when the sexual impulse is not absolutely latent, tend to induce all degrees of perverted or abnormal sexual gratification, and the physical mechanism when trained to respond in other ways often fails to respond normally when, at last, the normal conditions of response are presented.  In all these ways passivity and even aversion may be produced in the conjugal relationship.  The fact that it is almost normally the function of the male to arouse the female, and that the greater complexity of the sexual mechanism in women leads to more frequent disturbance of that mechanism, produces a simulation of organic sexual coldness which has deceived many.

An instructive study of cases in which the sexual impulse has been thus perverted has been presented by Smith Baker ("The Neuropsychical Element in Conjugal Aversion,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. xvii, September, 1892).  Raymond and Janet, who believes that sexual coldness is extremely frequent in marriage, and that it plays an important part in the causation of physical and moral troubles, find that it is most often due to masturbation. (Les Obsessions, vol. ii, p. 307.) Adler, after discussing the complexity of the feminine sexual mechanism, and the difficulty which women find in obtaining sexual gratification in normal coitus, concludes that “masturbation is a frequent, perhaps the most frequent, cause of defective sexual sensibility in women.” (Op. cit., p. 119.) He remarks that in women masturbation usually has less resemblance to normal coitus than in men and involves very frequently the special excitation of parts which are not