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

SEXUAL DEVIATIONbeen made not by young men, whose attitude towards thewomen who attract them tends to be more respectful andeven reverential, but by elderly married men, often bythose whose character and position rendered such attemptsextremely unlikely.Apart from senility there seems (as Leppmann longsince concluded) to be no congenital perversion directedtowards children. There may exceptionally be a repressedsubconscious impulse towards unripe girls,but the chiefcontingent before old age is furnished by the weakminded.It has to be recognized that with the advance of agethere is not only the liability to this eruption of sexualactivity but also the development of a certain egotism andcallousness which facilitates its manifestations. This is inother respects beneficial because it protects enfeebled oldage from the risks of strong emotion, but it is liable toabuses of which the most dangerous occur if there arisesan efflorescence of activity in the sexual sphere.This late exacerbation of sexuality becomes still moredangerous if it takes the form of an attraction to girls whoare no more than children, and to acts of indecent familiaritywith children. There is normally an attraction, of amore or less sexual character, on the part of the elderlytowards the young; it is a counterpart of the sexual attractionoften felt by young girls towards elderly men and bytowards adult women. But in old men the attractive-boysness of the young may take on an abnormal and mischievousform owing to the senile decline of potency whichrenders mere sexual contacts au adequate gratification.The older the man the more easily he is satisfied and theless compunction he appears to find in seekingsuch satisfaction,so that in sexual assaults, as Brouardel long agoshowed, the average age of the victim regularly decreases[*"]