Sex efficiency through exercises : special physical culture for women / by Th. H. van de Velde ; [photos, by E. Steinemann].

The greater majority of women have no technique in this matter, and many have no idea that such is necessary. Even those who share the liberation and culmination of the orgasm are apt to remain needlessly passive and receptive beforehand, instead of participating in the rhythmic motions; or they make such vehement and ill-judged attempts at motion that they spoil both the man's sensations and their own. The psychological causes of these failures cannot be considered in detail here. They are partly to be sought in the men's attitude of mind to sex, and partly in the women themselves, and are also largely due to the manner in which most married couples approach sex. In short, women do not, as a rule, know either what can be done or what shoidd be done in order to make coitus completely successful. They do not know the mechanism —or even in many cases the existence—of their own perineal and perivaginal muscles. And among the comparatively few who possess this knowledge, even fewer have any conscious control. My experience, both as a gynaecologist and—especially—of late years, as a specialist in marital problems, has convinced me that this feminine ignorance and inadequacy are often fatal to married happiness. I have had cases in which either the husband or the wife herself has deplored the latter's defective attitude in coitus. The circumstances in those cases when the women acknowledged their own inadequacy were sometimes poignantly pathetic. Thus, within one year, I came across three instances of the following situation (with certain individual variations, of course, but essentially the same). A devoted wife, a modest and respectable woman in every sense of the word, finds her husband's ardour greatly decreased and his manner cooler and more aloof. She has no exact knowledge of the reason, but she has intuition, sharpened by love and grief and unclouded by vanity. She has consulted leading gynecologists in three different countries without obtaining any light on the matter, or any appreciation of her need ! So she went, in secrecy, to a house of ill-fame to beg for instruction and advice as to how to recapture