en they touch the penis, are sufficient to excite their
sexual desire. Other masked masochists are excited by the secretions
or even excrements of women.

I have been consulted by a typical masochist, who, being very
religious, was convinced that his perverted sexual appetite was a sin.
He therefore married, thinking that God and repentance would change
him. But when married he naturally found himself absolutely impotent
and incapable of coitus.

If masochism is common in men, it is produced in women rather as an
exaggeration in the domain of her normal sexual sensations, for it is
to a great extent in harmony with her passive sexual role. Woman does
not like the weak man who submits to her. She prefers a master on whom
she can lean. In fact, normal women do not like their husbands to ask
advice from them too often, nor to be wanting in decision and
self-confidence. On the contrary they like them to be firm and even
somewhat imperious, provided they are not unkind. It is notorious that
many women like to be beaten by their husbands, and are not content
unless this is done. This appears to be especially common in Russia.
Accentuated forms of pathological masochism are, however, rare in
women.

Masochism presents a certain analogy with the religious ecstasy of
fakirs and flagellants who flog themselves. These individuals appear
to become exalted in a kind of ecstatic convulsion with the idea of
pleasing God or gaining Heaven by their martyrdom. We may add that,
like sadism, masochism occurs in sexual inverts, but always having the
same sex for its object. I know an old gentleman whose only pleasure
consisted in receiving a shower of blows: as a boy, like Rousseau he
tried by all kinds of ruses to obtain corporal punishment: when he
grew up this became impossible and he devised tricks to urge
schoolboys to fight each other, pretending to be angry and exciting
their spirit of contradiction: the boys then pretended to fight him,
and this sufficed for the rest of his life to excite erections and
seminal ejaculations. This gentleman was a lawyer and told me his
history, hoping that suggestion might cure him.

The eroticism produced by submission to pain and humiliation is often
blended with that produced by performing acts of cruelty. These
mixtures of sadism and masochism have been investigated by Schrenk
Notzing, who concludes that they are intimately related.

_Fetichism_ (production of voluptuous sensations by contac