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

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXtumescence has already been attained, and even then mayprove repulsive,and so be liable to constitute what maybe an even serious trouble in sexual relations. That is tosay, our olfactory experiences of the human body approximaterather to our tactile experiences of it than to ourvisual experiences.Smell with us has ceased to be a leadingchannel of intellectual curiosity. Personal odors makean appealthat is mainly of an intimate, emotional imaginativecharacter. They are thus liable to arouse whatJames called the anti-sexual instinct.Among animals, it seems probable, both sexes are alikeinfluenced by odors, for, while it is usually the male whosesexual regions are furnished with special scent glands,when such occur, the peculiar odor of the female duringthe sexual season is certainly not less efficacious as an allurementtothe male. If we compare the general susceptibilityof men and women to agreeable odors, apart fromthe question of sexual allurement, there can be littledoubt that it is most marked among women. Groospointed out that even among children little girls are moreinterested in scents than boys, and the investigations ofvarious workers, especially Garbini, have shown that thereis actually a greater power of discriminating odors amonggirls than among boys. In America Alice Thayer showedthat girls are considerably more influenced by odor intheir likes and dislikes than are boys. Marro went further,and in an extended series of observations on girls beforeand after the establishment of puberty, he found reasontobelieve that girls acquire an increased susceptibility toodors when sexual life begins, although they show nosuch increased powers as regards the other senses. It maybe added that some women acquire a special olfactoryhyper-aesthesia during pregnancy. Even in old age, as Vaschide'sexperiments showed, women preserve their olfac-[56]