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Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939

"Sexual Inversion"


"It was at this time that I began to make a good many friends of
my own and to become aware of psychical and sexual attractions. I
had never come across any theories on the subject, but I decided
that I must belong to a third sex of some kind. I used to wonder
if I was like the neuter bees! I knew physical and psychical sex
feeling and yet I seemed to know it quite otherwise from other
men and women. I asked myself if I could endure living a woman's
life, bearing children and doing my duty by them. I asked myself
what hiatus there could be between my bodily structure and my
feelings, and also what was the meaning of the strong physical
feelings which had me in their grip without choice of my own.
[Experience of physical sex sensations first began about 16 in
sleep; masturbation was accidentally discovered at the age of 19,
abandoned at 28, and then at 34 deliberately resumed as a method
of purely physical relief.] These three things simply would not
be reconciled and I said to myself that I must find a way of
living in which there was as little sex of any kind as possible.


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