of intercourse and can never be recovered. That is a notion which has survived into civilisation, but it belongs to barbarism and not to civilisation. So far as it has any validity it lies within a sphere of erotic perversity which cannot be taken into consideration in an estimation of moral values. For most men, however, in any case, whether they realise it or not, the woman who has been initiated into the mysteries of love has a higher erotic value than the virgin,[1] and there need be no anxiety on this ground concerning the wife who has lost her virginity.')
"It was impossible," continues Dr. Jacobus X——, "ever to find the signs of virginity among the Machacura women in Brazil, and Feldner explains the reason thus:—
"'Among them a virgin is never to be found, for this reason: that the mother from her daughter's tenderest years endeavours with the utmost care to remove all tightness of the vagina and obstacle therein. With this end in view, the leaf of a tree folded in the shape of a funnel is held in the
- ↑ "I am not surprised if the Phœnicians, according to St. Athanasius, obliged their daughters, by severe laws, to suffer themselves before marriage to be deflowered by valets, or also that the Armenians, as Strabo relates, sacrificed their daughters in the temple of the Goddess Anaitis, with the object of being eased of their maidenheads, so as to be able afterwards to find advantageous marriages suited to their condition; for one cannot describe what exhaustion and what sufferings a man has to undergo in his first action, at all events if the girl be narrow.……It is far sweeter to have connection with a woman accustomed to the pleasures of love locksmith to ease the wards of a new lock he brings us, to save us the trouble we might have the first day, so had the nations of whom we spoke good reason for establishing such laws." (Nicolas Venette: La Generation de L'Amour Conjugal: Paris, 1751.)
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