This section is from the book "Human Sexuality", by J. Richardson Parke. Also available from Amazon: Human Sexuality.
That sadism is not infrequent in women is also shown by Case 42, of Krafft-Ebing. "A married man presented himself with numerous cuts and scars on the arras. He told their origin as follows: When he wished to have intercourse with his wife, who was young and nervous, he first had to make a cut in his arm. Then she would suck the wound, and during the act become violently excited sexually." 1
History is full of further instances of sadistic instinct in the sex, of which possibly Valeria Messalina and Catherine di Medici are the most noted; the latter, along with being the secret instigator of the awful St. Bartholomew Massacre, finding great pleasure, we are told, in having the ladies of her court whipped before her.
The desire which is so frequently observed in men to play the slave to a woman, or a woman to a man, submitting to the most humiliating outrages of their manhood or womanhood in the degrading role, can scarcely be explained on other than masochistic grounds.*
* Loc. ext., p. 87. This recalls the mythological legend of the vampires, originating, possibly, among the Greeks, in the myth of the lamina- and marmolykes, blood-sucking women and men, a full account of which may be found in Tyler's "Prim. Cult.," 1893, Ch. xv. Goethe also makes use of it in his "Bride of Corinth," and there is little doubt, in my mind at least, that the origin of such outre fictional characters as Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the Slavonic and Albanian beliefs so gravely set forth in Ranft's " De Mas-ticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis," and Calmet's "Dissertation on the Vampires of Hungary," is to be found in the nocturnal depredations of genial sadists, whose abnormality escaped detection through the fact that it was not then recognized or known.
*Schub reports the саде (Wrinrr Hfrd. Wochrnschfi/t, 49, 1869) of a man who was incapable of intercourse with his wife until he had worked himself into a state of artificial anger. Leo Taxil states ("La Corruption," p. 224) that in Parisian brothels knouts are kept for the castigation of patrons who can only be excited by such means; and it is recorded of the religious enthusiast, Antoinette Bouvignon de la Porte, as showing the connection between the mystical and sexual passions, and the masochistic tendency of both, that she habitually mixed human fteces with her food. (Krafft-Ehing, toe. at., p 136.) The beatified Marie Alacoque, to "mortify herself," is also said to have licked up with her tongue the fecal dejections of the patients, and sucked their toes, covered with putrifying sores. 1 Kraff t-Ebing, loe. at., p. 113.
The following represents only an exaggerated instance of this tendency, so common as to furnish material for a dozen books.
 
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