Ignorance and delicacy combine with a
less versatile and perverted concentration on the sexual impulse to
prevent any general recourse to such highly specialized methods of
solitary gratification.
On the other hand, the use, or rather abuse, of the ordinary objects and
implements of daily life in obtaining auto-erotic gratification, among the
ordinary population in civilized modern lands, has reached an
extraordinary degree of extent and variety we can only feebly estimate by
the occasional resulting mischances which come under the surgeon's hands,
because only a certain proportion of such instruments are dangerous. Thus
the banana seems to be widely used for masturbation by women, and appears
to be marked out for the purpose by its size and shape[195]; it is,
however, innocuous, and never comes under the surgeon's notice; the same
may probably be said of the cucumbers and other vegetables more especially
used by country and factory girls in masturbation; a lady living near
Vichy told Pouillet that she had often heard (and had herself been able to
verify the fact) that the young peasant women commonly used turnips,
carrots, and beet-roots. In the eighteenth century Mirabeau, in his
_Erotikca Biblion_ gave a list of the various objects used in convents
(which he describes as "vast theatres" of such practices) to obtain
solitary sexual excitement. In more recent years the following are a few
of the objects found in the vagina or bladder whence they could only be
removed by surgical interference[196]: Pencils, sticks of sealing-wax,
cotton-reels, hair-pins (and in Italy very commonly the bone-pins used in
the hair), bodkins, knitting-needles, crochet-needles, needle-cases,
compasses, glass stoppers, candles, corks, tumblers, forks, tooth-picks,
toothbrushes, pomade-pots (in a case recorded by Schroeder with a
cockchafer inside, a makeshift substitute for the Japanese _rin-no-tama_),
while in one recent English case a full-sized hen's egg was removed from
the vagina of a middle-aged married woman.
Pages:
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318