who once pinched my nates in
coitus, no doubt as a matter of business; it heightened my
pleasure, perhaps by stimulating muscular movement. It does not
occur to me to ask to be pinched when I am very much excited
already, but only at an earlier stage, no doubt with the object
of promoting excitement. Apart altogether from sexual excitement,
being pinched is unpleasant to me. It has not seemed to me that
women usually like to be bitten. One or two women have bitten and
sucked my flesh. (The latter does not affect me.) I like being
bitten, partly for the same reason as I like being pinched,
because if spontaneous it is a sign of my partner's amorousness
and the biting never seems too hard. Women do not usually seem to
like being bitten, though there are exceptions; 'I should like to
bite you and I should like you to bite me,' said one woman; I did
so hard, in coitus, and she did not flinch." "She is particularly
anxious to eat me alive," another correspondent writes, "and
nothing gives her greater satisfaction than to tear open my
clothes and fasten her teeth into my flesh until I yell for
mercy. My experience has generally been, however," the same
correspondent continues, "that the cruelty is _unconscious_. A
woman just grows mad with the desire to squeeze or bite
something, with a complete unconsciousness of what result it will
produce in the victim. She is astonished when she sees the result
and will hardly believe she has done it." It is unnecessary to
accumulate evidence of a tendency which is sufficiently common to
be fairly well known, but one or two quotations may be presented
to show its wide distribution. In the _Kama Sutra_ we read: "If
she is very exalted, and if in the exaltation of her passionate
transports she begins a sort of combat, then she takes her lover
by the hair, draws his head to hers, kisses his lower lip, and
then in her delirium bites him all over his body, shutting her
eyes"; it is added that with the marks of such bites lovers can
remind each other of their affections, and that such love will
last for ages. In Japan the maiden of Ainu race feels the same
impulse. A.H. Savage Landor (_Alone with the Hairy Ainu_, 1893,
p. 140) says of an Ainu girl: "Loving and biting went together
with her. She could not do the one without the other. As we sat
on a