Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/69

 Rh average woman, and are hence more apt to actively seek intercourse, or more apt to yield to the illicit soliciations of the male. The occurrence among prostitutes of a certain proportion of nymphomaniacs is not surprising.

The age-long drafting into the ranks of harlots of the more ardent women should theoretically give a slight advantage in reproduction to the “colder” types, and could thus have produced amodificiation in the average constitution of woman; which seems indeed to have occurred. While among savages, according to many accounts, women are more lustful, if anything, than men; among modern civilized peoples the rule is that aside from coquetry, woman yields rather than seeks. Her sexual desires are a flame which must be lighted from an external source, whereas the male’s are self-igniting. Man’s desire is always explicit, but woman’s are usually implicit, becoming explicit only under the favorable stimulating influence—mental and physical—of the male. The manifestation of the implicit desire in extreme cases is coquetry, which is only an exaggeration of the normal tendency to encourage the male, that is, to submit herself to the stimulation, mental at first, which will eventually arouse her explicit desire. The beautiful reciprocity of the sexes herein exhibited must command our