Pseudo - Anaesthesia

«The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that the minotity of women who unquestionably are is of formidable dimensions. To be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in the Northen countries, makes them place a high value upon the virginal type of woman, and so this type tends to grow more common by sexual selection, but despite that fact, it has by no means superseded the normal type, so realistically described by the theologians and publicists of the middle ages. (...) That preference obviously owes its origin to the concept of private property and is most evident in those countries in which the property-owning caste reaches down into the lowest conceivable strata of bounders and ignoramuses. The low-caste man is never quite sure of his wife unless he is convinced that she is entirely devoid of amorouse susceptability. Thus he grows uneasy whenever she shows any sign of responding in kind to his own elephantine emotions, and is apt to be suspitions of even so trivial a thing as a hearty response to a connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of such suspicions, there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good deal less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the domestic hearth.»


H. L. Mencken - in In Defense of Women, The feminine mind