that is partly natural--"an
art that nature makes"--and therefore it is a natural subject for learning
and exercising in play. Children left to themselves tend, both playfully
and seriously, to practice love, alike on the physical and the psychic
sides.[381] But this play is on its physical side sternly repressed by
their elders, when discovered, and on its psychic side laughed at. Among
the well-bred classes it is usually starved out at an early age.

After puberty, if not before, there is another form in which the art of
love is largely experimented and practised, especially in England and
America, the form of flirtation. In its elementary manifestations flirting
is entirely natural and normal; we may trace it even in animals; it is
simply the beginning of courtship, at the early stage when courtship may
yet, if desired, be broken off. Under modern civilized conditions,
however, flirtation is often more than this. These conditions make
marriage difficult; they make love and its engagements too serious a
matter to be entered on lightly; they make actual sexual intercourse
dangerous as well as disreputable. Flirtation adapts itself to these
conditions. Instead of being merely the preliminary stage of normal
courtship, it is developed into a form of sexual gratification as complete
as due observation of the conditions already mentioned will allow. In
Germany, and especially in France where it is held in great abhorrence,
this is the only form of flirtation known; it is regarded as an
exportation from the United States and is denominated "flirtage." Its
practical outcome is held to be the "demi-vierge," who knows and has
experienced the joys of sex while yet retaining her hymen intact.

This degenerate form of flirtation, cultivated not as a part of
courtship, but for its own sake, has been well described by Forel
(_Die Sexuelle Frage_, pp. 97-101). He defines it as including
"all those expressions of the sexual instinct of one individual
towards another individual which excite the other's sexual
instinct, coitus being always excepted." In the beginning it may
be merely a provocative look or a simple apparently unintentional
touch or contact; and by slight gradations it may pass on to
caresses, kisses, embraces, and even extend to pressure or
friction of the sexual parts, sometimes leading to orgasm. Thus,
Forel mentions, a sensuous woman by the pressure of her garments
in