Concerning the influence on the pairing impulse of stimuli acting through the ear

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. HEARING II

HEARING II

Summary—Why the Influence of Music in Human Sexual Selection is Comparatively Small.

We have seen that it is possible to set forth in a brief space the facts at present available concerning the influence on the pairing impulse of stimuli acting through the ear. They are fairly simple and uncomplicated; they suggest few obscure problems which call for analysis; they do not bring before us any remarkable perversions of feeling.

At the same time, the stimuli to sexual excitement received through the sense of hearing, although very seldom of exclusive or preponderant influence, are yet somewhat more important than is usually believed. Primarily the voice, and secondarily instrumental music, exert a distinct effect in this direction, an effect representing a specialization of a generally stimulating physiological influence which all musical sounds exercise upon the organism. There is, however, in this respect, a definite difference between the sexes. It is comparatively rare to find that the voice or instrumental music, however powerful its generally emotional influence, has any specifically sexual effect on men. On the other hand, it seems probable that the majority of women, at all events among the educated classes, are liable to show some degree of sexual sensibility to the male voice or to instrumental music.

It is not surprising to find that music should have some share in arousing sexual emotion when we bear in mind that in the majority of persons the development of sexual life is accompanied by a period of special interest in music. It is not unexpected that the specifically sexual effects of the voice and music should be chiefly experienced by women when we remember that not only in the human species is it the male in whom the larynx and voice are chiefly modified at puberty, but that among mammals generally it is the male who is chiefly or exclusively vocal at the period of sexual activity; so that any sexual sensibility to vocal manifestations must be chiefly or exclusively manifested in female mammals.

At the best, however, although æsthetic sensibility to sound is highly developed and emotional sensibility to it profound and widespread, although women may be thrilled by the masculine voice and men charmed by the feminine voice, it cannot be claimed that in the human species hearing is a powerful factor in mating. This sense has here suffered between the lower senses of touch and smell, on the one hand, with their vague and massive appeal, and the higher sense, vision, on the other hand, with its exceedingly specialized appeal. The position of touch as the primary and fundamental sense is assured. Smell, though in normal persons it has no decisive influence on sexual attraction, acts by virtue of its emotional sympathies and antipathies, while, by virtue of the fact that among man's ancestors it was the fundamental channel of sexual sensibility, it furnishes a latent reservoir of impressions to which nervously abnormal persons, and even normal persons under the influence of excitement or of fatigue, are always liable to become sensitive. Hearing, as a sense for receiving distant perceptions has a wider field than is in man possessed by either touch or smell. But here it comes into competition with vision, and vision is, in man, the supreme and dominant sense.[129] We are always more affected by what we see than by what we hear. Men and women seldom hear each other without speedily seeing each other, and then the chief focus of interest is at once transferred to the visual centre.[130] In human sexual selection, therefore, hearing plays a part which is nearly always subordinated to that of vision.

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