Perhaps a still more important factor is the element of combat in tumescence, since the primitive conditions associated with tumescence provide a reservoir of emotions which are constantly drawn on even in the sexual excitement of individuals belonging to civilization.  The tendency to show affection by biting is, indeed, commoner among women than among men and not only in civilization.  It has been noted among idiot girls as well as among the women of various savage races.  It may thus be that the conservative instincts of women have preserved a primitive tendency that at its origin marked the male more than the female.  But in any case the tendency to bite at the climax of sexual excitement is so common and widespread that it must be regarded, when occurring in women, as coming within the normal range of variation in such manifestations.  The gradations are of wide extent; while in its slight forms it is more or less normal and is one of the origins of the kiss,[78] in its extreme forms it tends to become one of the most violent and antisocial of sexual aberrations.

A correspondent writes regarding his experience of biting and being bitten:  “I have often felt inclination to bite a woman I love, even when not in coitus or even excited. (I like doing so also with my little boy, playfully, as a cat and kittens.) There seem to be several reasons for this:  (1) the muscular effect relieves me; (2) I imagine I am giving the woman pleasure; (3) I seem to attain to a more intimate possession of the loved one.  I cannot remember when I first felt desire to be bitten in coitus, or whether the idea was first suggested to me.  I was initiated into pinching by a French prostitute who once pinched my nates in coitus, no doubt as a matter of business; it heightened my pleasure, perhaps by stimulating muscular movement.  It does not occur to me to ask to be pinched when I am very much excited already, but only at an earlier stage, no doubt with the object of promoting excitement.  Apart altogether from sexual excitement, being pinched is unpleasant to me.  It has not seemed to me that women usually like to be bitten.  One or two women have bitten and sucked my flesh. (The latter does not affect me.) I like being bitten, partly for the same reason as I like being pinched, because if spontaneous it is a sign of my partner’s amorousness and the biting never seems too hard.  Women do not usually seem to like being bitten, though there are exceptions; ’I should like to bite you and I should like you to bite me,’ said one woman; I did so hard, in coitus, and she did not flinch.”  “She is particularly anxious to eat me alive,” another correspondent writes, “and nothing gives her greater satisfaction than to tear open my clothes and fasten her teeth into my flesh until I yell for mercy.  My experience has generally been, however,” the same correspondent continues, “that the cruelty is unconscious.  A woman just grows mad with the desire to squeeze or bite something,