Page:Fielding - Sex and the Love Life.pdf/88

 responsible for her more sensitive emotional nature, also governs the general character of her erotic life.

In other words, her physiological structure and biological functions are responsible for the typical psychological reactions peculiar to woman. It is inevitable that this should be so. Sexual conservatism and quiescence—i. e., relative passiveness—are demanded by the responsibilities of motherhood, whether actual or potential. Of course, as our social environment is far from a natural state, there are many modifications in sexual conduct in all its phases. Fundamentally, however, woman is sexually conservative, comparatively passive, but nevertheless possesses an erotic and emotional organization more highly ramified than that of man, and with different reactions and different ways of manifesting itself.

Man's sexual nature is more centered upon the love-object from the standpoint of sexual experience, more ego-centric, more dynamic.

This quality of differentiation of sexual temperament in the two sexes is not peculiar to the human race, but extends throughout the animal kingdom. It is summed up in the axiom that among all organized beings, the male as a rule pursues the female of its choice.

Certain cases, as in some pathological and hysterical types of women, and to an extent in incorrigible flirts, may seem to contradict this contention. But these are exceptions, represented by abnormal types. In this connection, Clouston states that hysteria tends to prove absence of control of the superior centers which rule the sexual instinct. Hysterical eroticism, therefore, indicates a lack of sexual control, and where the intense sensuality gets out of bounds, criminal tendencies often make their appearance, as has been evidenced in the case of many famous voluptuaries of modern times and as reported in history.