The whole sexual structure of the world is built up on the general fact that the intimate contact of the male and female who have chosen each other is mutually pleasurable.  Below this general fact is the more specific fact that in the normal accomplishment of the act of sexual consummation the two partners experience the acute gratification of simultaneous orgasm.  Herein, it has been said, lies the secret of love.  It is the very basis of love, the condition of the healthy exercise of the sexual functions, and, in many cases, it seems probable, the condition also of fertilization.

Even savages in a very low degree of culture are sometimes patient and considerate in evoking and waiting for the signs of sexual desire in their females. (I may refer to the significant case of the Caroline Islanders, as described by Kubary in his ethnographic study of that people and quoted in volume iv of these Studies, “Sexual Selection in Man,” Sect.  III.) In Catholic days theological influence worked wholesomely in the same direction, although the theologians were so keen to detect the mortal sin of lust.  It is true that the Catholic insistence on the desirability of simultaneous orgasm was largely due to the mistaken notion that to secure conception it was necessary that there should be “insemination” on the part of the wife as well as of the husband, but that was not the sole source of the theological view.  Thus Zacchia discusses whether a man ought to continue with his wife until she has the orgasm and feels satisfied, and he decides that that is the husband’s duty; otherwise the wife falls into danger either of experiencing the orgasm during sleep, or, more probably, by self-excitation, “for many women, when their desires have not been satisfied by coitus, place one thigh on the other, pressing and rubbing them together until the orgasm occurs, in the belief that if they abstain from using the hands they have committed no sin.”  Some theologians, he adds, favor that belief, notably Hurtado de Mendoza and Sanchez, and he further quotes the opinion of the latter that women who have not been satisfied in coitus are liable to become hysterical or melancholic (Zacchiae Quaestionum Medico-legalium Opus, lib. vii, tit. iii, quaest.  VI).  In the same spirit some theologians seem to have permitted irrumatio (without ejaculation), so long as it is only the preliminary to the normal sexual act.

Nowadays physicians have fully confirmed the belief of Sanchez.  It is well recognized that women in whom, from whatever cause, acute sexual excitement occurs with frequency without being followed by the due natural relief of orgasm are liable to various nervous and congestive symptoms which diminish their vital effectiveness, and very possibly lead to a breakdown in health.  Kisch has described, as a cardiac neurosis of sexual origin, a pathological tachycardia which is an exaggeration of the physiological quick heart