ith whom they are
enamored and to whom they devote all their love and sincere orgasms,
all the time allowing themselves to be plundered and exploited by him.

What the normal woman requires from man is love, tenderness, a firm
support for life, a certain chivalrous nature, and children. She can
renounce the voluptuous sensations of coitus infinitely more easily
than the exigencies I have just indicated, which are for her the
principal things. Nothing makes a woman more indignant than the
indifference of her husband, when, for instance, he treats her simply
as a housekeeper. Some have maintained that the average woman is more
sensual than man, others that she is less so. Both these statements
are false: she is sensual _in another manner_.

All the peculiarities of the sexual appetite in woman are thus the
combined product of: (1) the profound influence of the sexual
functions on her whole existence; (2) her passive sexual role; (3) her
special mental faculties. By these, and more especially by her passive
sexual role, are explained her instinctive coquettishness, her love of
fiery and personal adornment, in a word her desire to please men by
her external appearance, by her looks, movements and grace. These
phenomena betray the instinctive sexual desires of the young girl,
which as we have just seen, do not normally correspond to a direct
desire for coitus.

While a virgin experiences in her youth the sensations we have just
described, things change after marriage, and as a general rule after
repeated sexual connections. If these do not provoke voluptuous
sensations in some women, they do in the majority, and this is no
doubt the normal state of affairs. Habit, then, produces an increasing
desire for coitus and its sensations, and it is not rare, in the
course of a long life in common, for the roles to be reversed and the
woman become more libidinous than the man. This partly explains why so
many widows are anxious to remarry. They easily attain their object,
as men quickly succumb to the sexual desire of woman when it is
expressed in an unequivocal manner.

In widows, two strong sentiments struggle against each other, with
variable results in different individuals; on the one hand, feminine
constancy in love, and the memory of the deceased; on the other hand,
the acquired habit of sexual connection and its voluptuous sensations,
which leaves a void and appeals for compensation. The sexual appetite
being equal, the f