At certain times and with certain peoples the virgin maid has been forced about with all manner of safeguards up to the very hour of her marriage; but have these and other peoples ever troubled to preserve the virginity of their daughters as they were at pains to guard the chastitiy of their wives? What nation ever inflicted that ghastly contrivance, the Girdle of Chastitiy, upon its virgin daughters? This bar to erotic pleasure was reserved exclusively for the potentially froward wife.
experience with women, which has been demonstrated to lead to novelty of wishes from fastidious impotence.……Yet, in truth, I esteem the fruition of a virgin to be, with respect both to the mind and body of the enjoyer, the highest aggravation of sensual delight. In the first place, his fancy is heated with the prospect of enjoying a woman, after whom he has perhaps long sighed and has been in pursuit, who he thinks has never before been in bed with a man, (in whose arms never before has man laid), and in triumphing in the first sight of her virgin charms. This precious operation, then, of fancy, has been shown in the highest degree to prepare the body for enjoyment Secondly, his body perceives, in that of a virgin, the cause of the greatest aggravation of delight. I mean not only in the coyness and resistance which she makes to his efforts, but when he is on the point of accomplishing them: when arrived, as the poet sings, 'on the brink of giddy rapture,' when in pity to a tender virgin's sufferings, he is intreated not to break fiercely in, but to spare 'fierce dilaceration and dire pangs.' The resistance which the small and as yet unopened, mouth of bliss makes to his eager endeavours, serves only, and that on a physical principle, to strengthen the instrument of his attack, and concurs, with the instigation of his ardent fancy, to reinforce his efforts, to unite all the co-operative powers of enjoyment, and to produce an emission copious, rapid, and transporting……'In this case, part of the delight arises from considering that ……you feel the convulsive wrigglings of the chaste nymph you so long adored……'" Our acknowledgements are again due to Pisanus Fraxi, from whose Index Librorum Prohibitorum our extract is taken. The author of The Battles of Venus, it need hardly be said, is in no sense an authority; his work, indeed, is pornographic rather than artistic; at the same time, it is impossible to ignore his flashes of insight into a question which has exercised the minds of the greatest psychologists.
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