In Russia, Guttceit states in his
_Dreissig Jahre Praxis_, that from the ages of 10 to 16 boys masturbate
more than girls, who know less about the practice which has not for them
the charm of the forbidden, but after 16 he finds the practice more
frequent in girls and women than in youths and men. Naecke, in Germany,
believes that there is much evidence pointing in the same direction, and
Adler considers masturbation very common in women. Moraglia is decidedly
of the opinion, on the ground of his own observations already alluded to,
that masturbation is more frequent among women; he refers to the fact--a
very significant fact, as I shall elsewhere have to point out--that, while
in man there is only one sexual centre, the penis, in woman there are
several centres,--the clitoris, the vagina, the uterus, the
breasts,[309]--and he mentions that he knew a prostitute, a well-developed
brunette of somewhat nervous temperament, who boasted that she knew
fourteen ways of masturbating herself.
My own opinion is that the question of the sexual distribution of
masturbation has been somewhat obscured by that harmful tendency, to which
I have already alluded, to concentrate attention on a particular set of
auto-erotic phenomena. We must group and divide our facts rationally if we
wish to command them. If we confine our attention to very young children,
the available evidence shows that the practice is much more common in
females,[310] and such a result is in harmony with the fact that
precocious puberty is most often found in female children.
Pages:
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443