The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
actuality, whereas men, she considered, actually wanted to inflict
pain:
As regards physical pain, though the idea of it is sometimes
exciting, I think the reality is the reverse. A very slight
amount of pain destroys my pleasure completely…. No
woman has ever told me that she would like to have pain
inflicted on her. On the other hand, the desire to inflict pain
seems almost universal among men. I have only met one
man in whom I have never at any time been able to detect
it…. Perhaps a woman’s readiness to submit to pain to please
a man may sometimes be taken for pleasure in it. Even when
women like the idea of pain, I fancy it is only because it
implies subjection to the man, from the association with the
fact that physical pleasure must necessarily be preceded by
submission to this will. 16
Ellis does not demur. His conclusion is still ‘That the idea or
even the reality of pain in sexual emotion is welcomed by
women,’ so long as the pain was small in amount and
subordinate to the pleasure which was to follow. 17 To illustrate
the point he mentioned an anecdote of the nymphomaniac who
had an orgasm when the knife passed through her clitoris,
presumably during a clitoridectomy operation designed to cure
her ‘nymphomania’.
Ellis, who professed himself to be pro-feminist, proclaimed
that the differences between men and women, particularly that
of woman’s masochism, did not interfere in the least with her
capacity for emancipation. He seems to have been hurt by the
fact that feminists insisted on quarrelling with his conclusions
and defends himself thus:
I am well aware that in thus asserting a certain tendency in
women to delight in suffering pain—however careful and
qualified the position I have taken—many estimable people
will cry out that I am degrading a whole sex and generally
supporting the ‘subjection of women’. But the day for
academic discussion concerning the ‘subjection of women’
has gone by. The tendency I have sought to make clear is too
well established by the experience of normal and typical
women—however numerous the exceptions may be—to be
called in question. I would point out to those who would
deprecate the influence of such facts in relation to social
progress that nothing is gained by regarding women as simply
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