e from the "brutes," among civilized men, that sexual
"brutality" is at all common, and even there it is chiefly the result of
ignorance. If we go as low as the insects, who have been disciplined by
no family life, and are generally counted as careless and wanton, we may
sometimes find this attitude towards the female fully developed, and the
extreme consideration of the male for the female whom yet he holds firmly
beneath him, the tender preliminaries, the extremely gradual approach to
the supreme sexual act, may well furnish an admirable lesson.

This greater difficulty and delay on the part of women in responding to
the erotic excitation of courtship is really very fundamental and--as has
so often been necessary to point out in previous volumes of these
_Studies_--it covers the whole of woman's erotic life, from the earliest
age when coyness and modesty develop. A woman's love develops much more
slowly than a man's for a much longer period. There is real psychological
significance in the fact that a man's desire for a woman tends to arise
spontaneously, while a woman's desire for a man tends only to be aroused
gradually, in the measure of her complexly developing relationship to him.
Hence her sexual emotion is often less abstract, more intimately
associated with the individual lover in whom it is centred. "The way to my
senses is through my heart," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to her lover Imlay,
"but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours." She
spoke for the best, if not for the largest part, of her sex. A man often
reaches the full limit of his physical capacity for love at a single step,
and it would appear that his psychic limits are often not more difficult
to reach. This is the solid fact underlying the more hazardous statement,
so often made, that woman is monogamic and man polygamic.

On the more physical side, Guttceit states that a month after
marriage not more than two women out of ten have experienced the
full pleasure of sexual intercourse, and it may not be for six
months, a year, or even till after the birth of several children,
that a woman experiences the full enjoyment of the physical
relationship, and even then only with a man she completely loves,
so that the conditions of sexual gratification are much more
complex in women than in men. Similarly, on the psychic side,
Ellen Key remarks (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 111): "It is
certainly t