Page:The Perfumed Garden - Burton - 1886.djvu/204

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188
The Perfumed Garden

pleasure by coition, only if compelled by blows and ill-treatment. Some people ascribe this conduct to the aversion they feel either against coition or against the husband; but this is not so; it is simply a question of temperament.

"There are also women who do not care for coition because all their ideas turn upon the grandeurs, personal honours, ambitious hopes, or business-cares of the world. With others this indifference springs, as it may be, from purity of the heart, or from jealousy, or from a pronounced tendency of their souls towards another world, or lastly from past violent sorrows. Furthermore, the pleasures which they feel in coition depend not alone upon the size of the member, but also upon the particular conformation of their own natural pars. Amongst those the vulva called from its form el morteba, the square one, and el mortafa, the projecting, is remarkable. This vulva has the peculiarity of projecting all round when the woman is standing up and closes her thighs. It burns for the coitus, its slit is narrow, and it is also called el keulihimi, the pressed one. The woman who has such a one likes only large members, and they must not let her wait long for the crisis. But this is a general characteristic of women.

"As to the desire of men for coition, I must say that they are also addicted to it more or less according to their different temperaments, five in number,[1] like the women's, with the difference that the hankering of the woman after the member is stronger than that of a man after a vulva."

  1. Note in the autograph edition.—The text says four, the author, no doubt, not taking the mixed temperament into account. It has been considered right to make this slight modification in the translation.