Matting

“ Why should he feel angry and resentful when he knew that only one woman in fifty could be stirred by the sight of a man, or respond to a man's love-making? Had not all other women been made virtually sexless in their mental processes by selective mating and other gene-altering techniques?
Surely a woman without physical desire had no need to appear seductive or to flaunt her charms. And surely a man without physical desire would not care at all if a woman lacked a mating look, and was just a human being more fragile than himself with contours that were softer and more rounded. ”

“ Pregnancy a period of continence.—When impregnation occurs and the womb becomes the closed home of embryonic life, sexual desire largely or entirely{533} ceases in the normal woman. She now enters a nine-month period of gestation. Again it is natural for her to repel sexual approaches of her husband. All the pregnant females among the lower animals and savage man faithfully repel the approach of their mates during gestation. This law is violated alone by semi-civilized and civilized man. ”

“ I would call his attention to the fact that among the animals where the young is born alive, that the mother furnishes the young with food before it is born. If the child has witnessed the mating of the birds and domestic animals and this is explained to him in detail, the necessity for a detailed discussion of human mating will be avoided. The child could be informed that human mating is practically the same. ”

“ That one month the ovum is of that character which would result in the production of a male child, and the succeeding month of such a nature as would result in the production of a female child. Some hold that the respective ages of the parents have something to do with determining the question of the sex of their offspring; that where the father is older than the mother, female children are likely to predominate. Some hold that the superior vitality of the father, or of the mother, will result in the production of sex of their own kind. ”

“ And until they are satisfied, by meeting the male and procuring from him the vitalizing fluid which will fertilize their infertile ovum; or, failing in this, until the ovum passes away from them, out of the womb, they know no rest. At such times they will run all risks, incur all sorts of danger, do every possible thing to secure pregnancy. The thousand-and-one ways which female animals use to make known to their male mates their sexual desire and needs, when in heat, is a most interesting and wonderful story, a record made up of facts which would be well worth any student's knowing. ”

“ Human beings are human animals however much we may pretend to the contrary. In the rest of the animal world the fact of the mating season is frankly acknowledged. It has never been recognized among humankind within the period of written history. Is it possible that when women are released from economic and social coercion, this periodic mating instinct in the woman of the species may assert, or reassert, itself? ”

“ Here it may be met by the male life element, and if so, it becomes fertilized and remains in the uterus to grow into a baby. This is called fertilization, fecundation, impregnation or conception. But if the egg is not fertilized, [Pg 12] it passes from the uterus through the vagina and out of the body. The ovaries take turns in developing the ovum.
Every twenty-eight days or so a woman, from the time she is about thirteen or fourteen till she is about fifty, has a slight flow of blood from the uterus, which is called menstruation. ”

“ There is a woman with me, and we are both in great danger. We are not fugitives for a night, as you are, for we have never known the freedom of the mating centers, a freedom which you found incomplete and love-destroying. ”

“ Young women of mature years should be made familiar with the physiological conditions which attend conception and maternity, and they need to know that from the [Pg 172] moment of conception life exists in the embryo, and that from the moment the spermatozoön enters and assimilates with the ovum a separate individual life is really begun, and that she is, at that very moment, the mother of this life within her as truly as when, in the later months, she feels the quickening within her, or after its birth experiences the joy of a mother who clasps her newborn infant in her arms. ”

“ I'd managed to stay in a golden daze from the time in the Garden till that moment, refusing to think through the implications of what Larry said.
Sex. Sex is mating and reproduction. Dating and dancing and kissing are parts of the courtship procedure. And the television shows all stop with kissing, because the mating itself is taboo. ”

“ Later, when a girl who has been treated in this way wishes to marry and become a mother, by a reversal of the manipulations the uterus is restored to its natural position. It is said that these skilled women have been called in by European women in the Dutch Indies, who did not wish to have many children; but it appears that in a woman who has once given birth to a child, the result of the manipulations is less to be depended upon, than in the case of a virgin. ”

“ From the moment that I understood the frequency of the attempts made to prevent impregnation and induce abortion, I felt that I had a key to the loss of beauty, of expression, and the sweet maternal charm, which every one who thinks must miss in this generation of women. ”

“ After one has traced the development of the human body in the uterus, and even faintly understood its growth and method of nourishment, it is impossible to believe that the mother’s thoughts or experiences could in any way deform or mark her child, or alter its sex. That the mother’s “reaching up,” for example, could slip the cord around the unborn baby’s neck is manifestly absurd, as well as the previously mentioned superstitions about the eight-month baby’s slender chances for survival. ”

“ No one not sex-privileged; and even the sex-privileged have become too numerous. Do you hear? Even they have become too numerous and just thinking about it—the bridal bed, everything that takes place in the mating centers night and day—has become hateful to me."
"That does not surprise me!" Alicia cried. "Envy can become a corrosive blight."
"It is not envy!"
"Listen to me, old woman, I will tell you what takes place in the mating centers. A young man, strong-limbed and comely, removes all of his garments and walks with proud and eager steps into the chamber of his beloved. ”

“ The physiology and pathology of the menacme coincides with the normal processes and pathological changes respectively of the female genital organs consequent on their functional activity as organs of sexual sensation and of reproduction. Woman as wife and mother stands at the climax of her existence.
In a quite astonishing manner, however, many of the advocates of the modern movement for the emancipation of women contest the significance of maternity to women. ”

“ The phenomena of pregnancy, birth and suckling are known to all, so that I shall be brief. The almost sudden activity of the breasts after childbirth is a very interesting correlative phenomenon. It suffices to glance at one who has just become a mother and to observe the complications which profoundly influence all her organism with regard to the life of the infant, to comprehend to what extent the role of sexual life is more important, more profound, even more vital, in woman than in man. ”

“ With regard to the physiological effects of arrested development of the reproductive apparatus in women, Dr. Maudsley uses the following plain and emphatic language: "The forms and habits of mutilated men approach those of women; and women, whose ovaries and uterus remain for some cause in a state of complete inaction, approach the forms and habits of men. It is said, too, that, in hermaphrodites, the mental character, like the physical, participates equally in that of both sexes. ”

“ Their development is notably in close sympathy with that of the organs of reproduction, an arrest thereof being often associated with some defect of the latter; so that it might perhaps fairly be questioned whether it was right and proper, for the race's sake, that a woman who has not the wish or power to nurse should indulge in the functions of maternity. We may take note, by-the-way, that those in whom the organs are wasted invoke the dress-maker's aid in order to gain the appearance of them; they are not satisfied unless they wear the show of perfect womanhood. ”

“ Instruments which rarely fail of destroying the child, or at least cruelly wounding it, and never but injure the mother, not only in those exquisitely tender-textured parts, where they are so blindly and ungovernably introduced; but in the often irrecoverable dilatations of the external orifice, the vagina, and especially the fourchette or frænum labiorum, all which, in general, they considerably damage: and always originally without necessity. For if through carelessness, if through an impatience, so much more natural to men than to women, in a case and position of this nature ”

“ The woman’s system is no longer that of a mother alone; it has been recalled to its rôle as a wife. There may be conception or there may not—at any rate, the frequent occurrence of children only a year or thirteen months older than a brother or sister, shows how often conception does take place in such circumstances—and the consequence is that the suckling has to be removed from the breast, in order to become the experimental victim of every kind of abomination in the form of substitutes for mother’s milk. ”

“ We now come to the consideration of the subject of Contraception, pure and simple, the methods of which contemplate the manifestation of the usual physical sexual relations between husband and wife, accompanied by an avoidance of the union of the male and female elements of reproduction which result in conception. ”

“ CONCEPTION IN THE FIRST HALF of the time between the menstrual periods produces females, and males in the latter.—London Lancet.
8. INTERCOURSE in from two to six days after cessation of the menses produces girls, in from nine to twelve, boys.—Medical Reporter.
THE MOST MALE POWER and passion creates boys; female girls. This law probably causes those agricultural facts just cited thus: Conception right after menstruation give girls, because the female is then the most impassioned; later, boys, because her wanting sexual warmth leaves him the most vigorous. ”

“ The maid, half-yielding, half-refusing, by doubt and trust in turn possessed, bent over the fair-eyed beast recumbent at her side, and stroked its smoking flanks, and played with the garlands now displaced and torn, and sought with pliant fingers to renew a labor which might conceal the passion new-born, struggling in her breast. ”

“ Just as in boys the capacity for reproduction, and in girls the function of menstruation, does not appear at a fixed and definite age, so also in the case of the other processes that come into being under the influence of the activity of the reproductive glands, we have to reckon with such individual differences. For this reason, in persons who have been castrated at the same age, the subsequent course of development may vary to some degree, notwithstanding the apparent identity of the determining factor in each case. ”

“ Permanent mating is, therefore, a natural impulse among human beings. It is necessary for the protection and preservation of the lives of a lesser number of offspring of a higher grade. Permanent mating is, hence, of fundamental racial value. In man this impulse is of a more complex form and broader range, which leads the individual to wish not for momentary excitement, but for a permanent union, for a home, for a family. ”

“ My Ma is what you would call a fashionable woman, and although she loves her baby, yet she says it is not fashionable for mammas in the southern states to nurse their own babies; I am, consequently, turned over to the care of nigger Molly, and Lord preserve me, such nursing as I get would kill a young Indian. I am fed with every thing, from a green apple to a chunk of fat pickled pork, and the sufferings which I undergo therefrom, would crack a sucking bottle, or rend a diaper in tatters. ”

“ But successful mating depends, in each year, on the sexual fitness of the male himself, and the mate, or mates, which for that year he has taken “for better or worse.” It is possible, of course, that a male, ambitious but impotent, will be forsaken by his mate; it is possible that a female of low sexual vitality may fail to respond to the most impassioned displays; in either case no offspring result, and thus the failures are eliminated. It is possible that here, as with the higher vertebrates, coition may by no means always be immediately preceded by display. ”

“ A power of activity which, towards conquering the otherwise natural coldness of the female constitution, nature would hardly give to the uterus merely to excite in women a desire, sanctified under due restrictions, by her favorite end, that of propagation, if she had not, at the same time, endowed that uterus with an instinct, beneficial by its influence in the preservation of the issue of that desire. ”

“ Again—not merely does nature prepare the appendages of the child and the womb of its mother for the separation that in due time is to ensue between them, it also provides an additional means of insuring its successful accomplishment through the action that takes place in the woman's breasts, namely, the secretion of the milk. ”

“ Impotence and sterility may arise from organic or from functional causes, and may be curable or incurable. Impotence (q.v.) is taken cognisance of by the law courts as a ground of divorce, and might, of course, be urged as a defence in a case of rape. Sterility is not a ground of divorce, but might be a question of importance in cases of legitimacy.
6. Pregnancy.—This subject presents one of the widest fields for medico-legal evidence. The limits of age between which it is possible, the limits of utero-gestation, and the signs of pregnancy may all in turn be the subjects of investigation. ”