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Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939

"Sexual Selection In Man"

He told me he had worn it for two years. No wonder it was
redolent of him. I asked him to let me keep it as a souvenir. He
smiled and said: 'You like it because it has lain so long upon my
_panoia_.' 'Yes, just so,' I replied; 'whenever I kiss it, thus
and thus, it will bring you back to me.' Sometimes I tie it round
my naked waist before I go to bed. The smell of it is enough to
cause a powerful erection, and the contact of its fringes with my
testicles and phallus has once or twice produced an involuntary
emission."
I may here reproduce a communication which has reached me
concerning the attractiveness of the odor of peasants: "One
predominant attraction of these men is that they are pure and
clean; their bodies in a state of healthy normal function. Then
they possess, if they are temperate, what the Greek poet Straton
called the phydike chrotos (a quality which, according to this
authority, is never found in women). This 'natural fair perfume
of the flesh' is a peculiar attribute of young men who live in
the open air and deal with natural objects. Even their
perspiration has an odor very different from that of girls in
ball-rooms: more refined, ethereal, pervasive, delicate, and
difficult to seize.


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