511. THE LUST TO RAPE

By the lust to rape we do not mean the lust to deflower. The lust to deflower is a violation of virgins' virginity, but not of the virgins themselves when it is done with their consent. In contrast, the lust to rape which we take up here recedes in the face of consent and is intensified by refusal. Moreover it is an impulsion to violate any women whatever who absolutely refuse and vehemently resist, whether they are virgins, widows or wives. Such men are like highwaymen and pirates who take delight in goods seized and plundered and not in ones given and justly acquired. They are also like malefactors who pant after things unlawful and forbidden and spurn those which are lawful and allowed.

These violators of women utterly dislike consent and are inflamed by resistance; and if they observe that the resistance is not an internal one, the heat of their lust is, like a fire doused with water, immediately extinguished.

People know that some wives do not automatically submit themselves to their husbands' determinations in regard to the outmost expressions of love, but that they are led by their prudence to put up a show of resistance, as though to acts of violation, in order to expel from their husbands any coldness arising from its ordinariness in consequence of its being continually allowed, and also any coldness arising from a lascivious idea of them as women.

These shows of resistance, however, even though they arouse, still do not cause this lust but are only introductory to it. The cause of the lust comes after conjugial love and likewise licentious love have become, through exercises of them, stale, when in order to be reinvigorated the men wish to be set on fire by absolute efforts at resistance.

This lust thus begun, afterwards grows, and as it grows, it disdains and bursts through all the limits of a love for the opposite sex and exiles itself from them, so that from being a lascivious, carnal and fleshly love it becomes a cartilaginous and bony one; and then, from the periostea, which possess an acute sensibility, it becomes acute.

Still, however, this lust is rare, because it occurs only in those who have entered into marriage and afterward engaged in licentious affairs until these have become stale.

In addition to this natural cause, this lust has also a spiritual cause, which we will say something about later on.