Page:The Way of a Virgin.djvu/139

Rh sexual emotions. In the seventeenth century a book of this kind was written by Venette. In matters of love, Venette declared, 'men are but children compared to women. In these matters women have a more livly imagination, and they usually have more leisure to think of love. Women are much more lascivious and amorous than men.' In a subsequent chapter, dealing with the question whether men or women receive more pleasure from the sexual embrace, Venette concludes, after admitting the great difficulty of the question, that man's pleasure is greater, but that woman's last longer. (N. Venette, De la Génération de l'Homme ou Tableau de l'Amour Conjugal, 1688)."

These and similar quotations, all acknowleding or laying stress on the erotic appetite of women, might be continued indefinitely. Among the other supporters of the opinion quoted by Havelock Ellis are Montaigne (Essais), Schurig (Parthenologia), Plazzonus (De Partibus Generations Inservientibus), Ferrand (De la Maladie d'Amour), Uacchia (Quæstiones Medico-Legales), Sinibaldus (Geneanthropeia), Senancour (De l'Amour), Busch, Gutteceot, Mantegazza (Fisiologia del Piacere), Forel (The Sexual Question), who believed that women are more erotic than men, and Bloch (The Sexual Life of Our Time), who says, "The sexual sensibility of women is certainly different from that of men, but in strength it is at least as great."