Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/153

 disorders; one brother insane at S—, is semi-violent at times. Miss E—, from extreme youth, has always felt herself sexually interested in beautiful women, and has wished to embrace them, concumbere eis, etcetera; but on the contrary has never had any desire for masculine caresses, or the least interest in masculine beauty, male personal charms, etc., except of a calm, platonic sort. Her antipathy to corporeal intimacy with a man amounts to horror corpor. hominis, in fact. The patient says she feels it the more intelligently, compared with her pleasure in embracing, kissing, masturb. mut. and occasional sapphism with women, because she was the victim of a kind of rape some years ago. She insists that she then experienced ample proofs of her being congenitally unsympathetic to male relationships. During a walk with a young man whom she admired as a friend, and who was of distinguished personal beauty, he ravished her, or rather he succeeded partly by force and partly by what she vaguely calls "very vehement persuasions", in having sexual intercourse with her. She was not in any way conscious of the least sexual sympathy, but is sure that fear or moral aversion had nothing to do with her antipathy. E— now has two sexual intimacies with women; a middle-aged married woman being the more intimate friend, the other one, a young lady employed in a banking-establishment. (Sapph. mut. et masturb.) R. E— shows emphatically signs of secondary mental and, to some extent, moral individuality. She "has no religious convictions" and calls herself an agnostic. She had good educational advantages in youth, but disliked study and was never proficient in even ordinary matters, such as reading, simple mathematics, geography and history. She writes a clear but unformed hand, and spells uncertainly. She has never cared to read anything except the newspapers, and novels by Xavier de Montépin, Gyp, Eugène Sue and Paul de Kock. She likes the kind of theatrical pieces that are given at such theaters as the Palais-Royal, and, so far as I infer,