Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXtwice displayed his nates to girls at a distance. When travelingthrough Moravia many years ago I noted a youngwoman who had been bathing in a stream near the railwayline and as the train passed turned her back to it andraised her chemise. (Here we have to bear in mind theancient method of exorcism by displaying the nates, laterdegenerating into a way of showing contempt especiallypracticed by women.) True exhibitionism is rare in thefemale except in childhood. As Douglas Bryan puts it,women in exhibitionism treat the whole body as a penisto be exposed.Exhibitionism is an act which, on the face of it, mayseem nonsensical or meaningless, but it iswildly extravagantto regard it as necessarily an inexplicable act of madness,such as it was once, if not still, frequently treatedboth by writers on insanity and on sexual perversion, eventhough in its extreme form it may be associated witheither.We must regard exhibitionism as fundamentally a symbolicact based on a perversion of courtship. The exhibitionist,if a male, displays the organ of sex to a femininewitness, and in the shock of modest sexual shame by whichshe reacts to that spectacle he finds a gratifying similitudeof the normal emotions of coitus. He feels that he haseffected a psychic defloration.Exhibitionism is thus analogous, and indeed related, tothe impulse felt by many persons to perform indecorousacts or tell indecent stories before young and innocentpersons of the opposite sex. This also is a kind of exhibitionism,the gratification it causes lying exactly, as inphysical exhibitionism, in the emotional confusion whichit is felt to arouse, though we cannot accept the view ofNacke that exhibitionism issimply a form of sadism andthe satisfaction felt only due to the horror aroused. The[190]