Own Study

Sex object choice and sexual urge

I classified the patients for three variables of sex object choice: the sex with which they had sexual activity, the sex which excited them mentally, and the sex they imagined themselves with while masturbating. also classed them according to sexual urge: if they said of their own accord that they had such a strong sexual urge that it was hard for them to control or satisfy themselves, I called the libido strong; if they said that they never, or hardly ever, felt any sexual desire, and had hardly ever masturbated, I classed the libido as weak; in the rest of the cases I classed the urge as moderate.

For all these classifications I took the whole time from puberty until the time the patients consulted me into consideration, the final classification being a kind of average.
The following is the breakdown on sexual activity:

Three of the 6 male patients (cases 2, 10, 15, 16, 17, 25) who claimed to have had chiefly or only heterosexual experience were married men, all with children (cases 2, 10, 15). None of these 3 were satisfied by their sexual relations with their wives. One (case 15) had had normal heterosexual relationships before marriage, however. At the time I interviewed them, all 6 men said that acting as the male in sexual activity felt wrong, peculiar or unnatural. They were all, at the time I examined them, erotically stimulated mentally only by their own sex. Several of them were greatly troubled by this discrepancy.

The same was true of the only female patient (case 37) who had mainly heterosexual relations. Two of the female patients had married many years ago, but had soon divorced, mainly because of sexual maladjustment (cases 41, 43). Three of the women had tried to curb their homosexual tendencies, mostly because of the criticism of others (cases 31, 37 and 43). Two women had children as the result of temporary heterosexual relations (cases 37, 43) but the feeling of belonging to the other sex grew more intense, rather than weaker, during pregnancy, and at least one of the women (case 43) felt as if her pregnancy were against the laws of nature.

Twenty-five of the men and 6 of the women said that they masturbated. Twenty men said that they always thought of other men when they masturbated, generally of playing the female role in sexual intercourse. All 6 women who said they masturbated had homosexual fantasies while they did so. Five men and 7 women said that they did not masturbate. These corresponding to 17 and 54 per cent, the sex difference was probably statistically significant (p<0.05). Five of the men (cases 4, 7, 11, 21, 23) had a strong sexual urge, 19 a moderate urge, and 6 a weak urge (cases 1, 3, 9, 10, 25, 29). Ten of the women had a moderate sexual urge and 3 a weak one (cases 33, 34, 37).

Five patients both had a weak libido and said that they had not had any form of genital activity with another person, 5 had a weak libido and said that they had never masturbated, and 5 had not had any form of sexual activity or masturbated. Thus there was a combination of two of these factors in 10 cases, 5 male and 5 female (cases 1, 3, 9, 10, 29, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38) or in about 23 per cent. But no patient in the series seems to have been quite indifferent sexually. Thus all 10 were mentally stimulated to some degree by persons of their own sex. The same was true of all but 2 of the others (cases 2, 15). In view of the fact that the sex one chooses for physical relations often depends on circumstances (Kinsey et al., 1948), the sex which excites a person mentally should be more reliable for indicating whether a person is heterosexual or homosexual. Using this criterion, all but 2 of the patients were basically homosexual. This is substantiated by the fact that, except in cases 2 and 15, the patients were mentally attracted by only one sex-their own from the time they became aware of their sexual urge.