The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
Ellis carried his idea of innate differences straight into the
realm of sexual behaviour, saying that man was sexually active
and woman passive. His explanation of the form taken by male/
female sexual relations is an evolutionary one rather than a
strictly biological one. He writes that the courtship behaviour
of early humans, like that of animals and birds, arose from the
needs of reproduction. Ellis explained that contemporary sexual
relations were simply a continuation of this process:
the primary part of the female in courtship is the playful, yet
serious, assumption of the role of a hunted animal who lures
on the pursuer, not with the object of escaping, but with the
object of being finally caught… [the male] will display his
energy and skill to capture the female or to arouse in her an
emotional condition which leads her to surrender herself to
him, this process at the same time heightening his own
excitement. 9
Ellis has been seen as a sexual enlightener because he asserted
not merely woman’s capacity, but also her right to sexual
pleasure. 10 But the form of pleasure which woman was to recieve
was strictly circumscribed. In courtship she must be hunted,
must be captured and surrender. In sexual activity itself she
must be entirely passive. The male was to practise foreplay
upon her until she was aroused and then sexual intercourse was
to take place: ‘the woman’s part is, even biologically, on the
surface the more passive part. She is, on the physical side,
inevitably the instrument in love; it must be his hand and his
bow which evoke the music.’ 11
The notion of foreplay, called by Ellis the ‘art of love’, was
to provide the rationale for twentieth-century sex advice
literature. Behind it lies the idea that women are rather slow
and difficult in terms of sexual arousal, and that complex
techniques had to be mastered by the man. These techniques,
for preparing the woman for the man’s preferred sex practice of
sexual intercourse, are still the stuff of contemporary sex
manuals. In Ellis’s case it is particularly surprising that he should
have laid such great stress on sexual intercourse being the main
event in sexual interaction since he seems to have found that
particular practice very difficult, if not impossible, himself. His
preference was urolagnia, i.e. gaining pleasure from watching
a woman urinate as an end in itself. His sexual preference is
clear from his autobiography. 12 He wrote a eulogy to urolagnia
in poetic form which contains the immortal lines:
130