hildren.
Somewhat commoner, however, is the mutual and perfectly voluntary
exhibition of their genital organs by children, generally boys and girls
together; in these cases, as previously explained (p. 71), the acts are
determined rather by curiosity than by the sexual impulse. It is
necessary to insist upon this fact, as distinguishing exhibitionism in
children from exhibitionism in adults. A like question arises regarding
the skatological inclinations and interests of children, which are
assumed by Havelock Ellis[63] to be intimately connected with the sexual
life. It is an undoubted fact that many children before puberty are
greatly interested in the excretions from the bladder and the intestine.
Stanley Hall,[64] to whom Havelock Ellis refers, is of opinion that
"micturitional obscenities, which our returns show to be so common
before adolescence, culminate at ten or twelve, and seem to retreat into
the background as sex-phenomena appear." He distinguishes between two
classes of cases: "fouling persons or things, secretly from adults, but
openly with each other," and, less often, "ceremonial acts, connected
with the act or the product, that almost suggest the skatological rites
of savages." I can myself, as a result of numerous inquiries, confirm
the existence of skatophilia in children. But I have not yet been able
to satisfy myself that these processes always, or even usually, have any
connexion with the sexual life. Such a connexion unquestionably exists
in some cases, but no less certainly it is not an invariable one.
Skatological acts--those, that is to say, in which the more disgusting
excreta play a part--arise in some instances out of a masochistic mode
of sensibility. In cases in which adult masochists have such
inclinations, it is often impossible to trace their existence back into
childhood. It rather appears, in most of the instances of skatological
inclinations which have come under my own observation, that these
inclinations have been superimposed upon other masochistic tendencies,
and these latter may sometimes be traced back to the days of childhood.
But in a few cases I have found skatological perversions to have
originated very early in life. A man with a university education, with
an inclination to the practice of cunnilinctus, assured me that this
inclination began in childhood. Another man, whose interest in the
female nates and anus was unquestionably not the result of any excesses,
stated posit