ive at least some satisfaction to each of these
two opposite longings.

The psychological satisfaction which women tend to feel in a certain
degree of pain in love is strictly co-ordinated with a physical fact.
Women possess a minor degree of sensibility in the sexual region. This
fact must not be misunderstood. On the one hand, it by no means begs the
question as to whether women's sensibility generally is greater or less
than that of men; this is a disputed question and the evidence is still
somewhat conflicting.[80] On the other hand, it also by no means involves
a less degree of specific sexual pleasure in women, for the tactile
sensibility of the sexual organs is no index to the specific sexual
sensibility of those organs when in a state of tumescence. The real
significance of the less tactile sensibility of the genital region in
women is to be found in parturition and the special liability of the
sexual region in women to injury.[81] The women who are less sensitive in
this respect would be better able and more willing to endure the risks of
childbirth, and would therefore tend to supplant those who were more
sensitive. But, as a by-product of this less degree of sensibility, we
have a condition in which physical irritation amounting even to pain may
become to normal women in the state of extreme tumescence a source of
pleasurable excitement, such as it would rarely be to normal men.

To Calmann appear to be due the first carefully made observations
showing the minor sensibility of the genital tract in women.
(Adolf Calmann, "Sensibilituetsprufungen am weiblicken Genitale
nach forensichen Gesichtspunkten," _Archiv fuer Gynaekologie_,
1898, p. 454.) He investigated the vagina, urethra, and anus in
eighteen women and found a great lack of sensibility, least
marked in anus, and most marked in vagina. [This distribution of
the insensitiveness alone indicates that it is due, as I have
suggested, to natural selection.] Sometimes a finger in the
vagina could not be felt at all. One woman, when a catheter was
introduced into the anus, said it might be the vagina or urethra,
but was certainly not the anus. (Calmann remarks that he was
careful to put his questions in an intelligible form.) The women
were only conscious of the urine being drawn off when they heard
the familiar sound of the stream or when the bladder was very
full; if the sound of the stream was