sire is
present, sexual abstinence is less easily tolerated by women than by
men.[94]

Cabanis, in his famous and pioneering work, _Rapports du Physique
et du Moral_, said in 1802, that women not only bear sexual
excess more easily than men, but sexual privations with more
difficulty, and a cautious and experienced observer of to-day,
Loewenfeld (_Sexualleben und Nervenleiden_, 1899, p. 53), while
not considering that normal women bear sexual abstinence less
easily than men, adds that this is not the case with women of
neuropathic disposition, who suffer much more from this cause,
and either masturbate when sexual intercourse is impossible or
fall into hystero-neurasthenic states. Busch stated (_Das
Geschlechtsleben des Weibes_, 1839, vol. i, pp. 69, 71) that not
only is the working of the sexual functions in the organism
stronger in women than in men, but that the bad results of sexual
abstinence are more marked in women. Sir Benjamin Brodie said
long ago that the evils of continence to women are perhaps
greater than those of incontinence, and to-day Hammer (_Die
Gesundheitlichen Gefahren der Geschlechtlichen Enthaltsamkeit_,
1904) states that, so far as reasons of health are concerned,
sexual abstinence is no more to be recommended to women than to
men. Nystroem is of the same opinion, though he thinks that women
bear sexual abstinence better than men, and has discussed this
special question at length in a section of his _Geschlechtsleben
und seine Gesetze_. He agrees with the experienced Erb that a
large number of completely chaste women of high character, and
possessing distinguished qualities of mind and heart, are more or
less disordered through their sexual abstinence; this is
specially often the case with women married to impotent men,
though it is frequently not until they approach the age of
thirty, Nystroem remarks, that women definitely realize their
sexual needs.

A great many women who are healthy, chaste, and modest, feel at
times such powerful sexual desire that they can scarcely resist
the temptation to go into the street and solicit the first man
they meet. Not a few such women, often of good breeding, do
actually offer themselves to men with whom they may have perhaps
only the slightest acquaintance. Routh records such cases
(_British Gynaecological Jo