really resented by the woman on whom it is exercised. His feeling is by
no means always according to knowledge, but it has to be taken into
account as an essential part of his emotional state. The physical force,
the teasing and bullying, which he may be moved to exert under the stress
of sexual excitement, are, he usually more or less unconsciously persuades
himself, not really unwelcome to the object of his love.[74] Moreover, we
have to bear in mind the fact--a very significant fact from more than one
point of view--that the normal manifestations of a woman's sexual pleasure
are exceedingly like those of pain. "The outward expressions of pain," as
a lady very truly writes,--"tears, cries, etc.,--which are laid stress on
to prove the cruelty of the person who inflicts it, are not so different
from those of a woman in the ecstasy of passion, when she implores the man
to desist, though that is really the last thing she desires."[75] If a man
is convinced that he is causing real and unmitigated pain, he becomes
repentant at once. If this is not the case he must either be regarded as a
radically abnormal person or as carried away by passion to a point of
temporary insanity.

The intimate connection of love with pain, its tendency to approach
cruelty, is seen in one of the most widespread of the occasional and
non-essential manifestations of strong sexual emotion, especially in
women, the tendency to bite. We may find references to love-bites in the
literature of ancient as well as of modern times, in the East as well as
in the West. Plautus, Catullus, Propertius, Horace, Ovid, Petronius, and
other Latin writers refer to bites as associated with kisses and usually
on the lips. Plutarch says that Flora, the mistress of Cnaeus Pompey, in
commending her lover remarked that he was so lovable that she could never
leave him without giving him a bite. In the Arabic _Perfumed Garden_ there
are many references to love-bites, while in the Indian _Kama Sutra_ of
Vatsyayana a chapter is devoted to this subject. Biting in love is also
common among the South Slavs.[76] The phenomenon is indeed sufficiently
familiar to enable Heine, in one of his _Romancero_, to describe those
marks by which the ancient chronicler states that Edith Swanneck
recognized Harold, after the Battle of Hastings, as the scars of the bites
she had once given him.

It would be fanciful to trace this tendency back to that process of
devouring to which sexual congre