Yet I am a man dressed in women's clothes and my wife says I would be a failure if I attempted to pass myself off as a woman. She says I am too broad in the shoulders and too tall.

When I am dressed as a woman I do not adopt particularly fem- inine ways, though I find some amusement in doing certain women's work--I insist on repairing my own lingerie.

There is undoubtedly a large sexual component in the pleasure experienced in wearing corsets, petticoats and frocks. When I am unwell, overtired or worried the desire is greatly reduced. It may go so far in the other direction as to appear a mere foolish- ness. During a severe illness of my wife's, when a nurse was in the house for over two months, it did not occur to me that I was missing a wonted pleasure--and comfort. By habit I continued to wear corsets, stockings, etc., and to sleep in a nightdress when male pajamas were no longer essential, but I took little interest in them.

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The desire is, however, directly connected with the sex urge. When life and energy are at a high level and normal sexual inter- course is very desirable and pleasing (I repeat that I find in my- self no trace of anything but the heterosexual and I think I am highly sexed) it is then that dressing in dainty silk and lace and smart frocks provide the greatest thrills. I delight in the firm comfortable pressure of well-fitting corsets, the soft contact of silk underclothes, the sensuous kiss of petticoat and skirt on silk-stockinged legs.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to perform any degree of self analysis without finding something of what one expects or un- consciously hopes to find. This is a serious attempt to keep a detached, unbiased attitude in describing my own history as an Eonist. In all that experience I find no trace of fetchism or homosexuality. Although the sexual instinct is (i.e. was) aroused by the sight of feminine underclothes--and by wearing them in spec- ial circumstances--it is in no way dependent upon them. There is a strong element of voyeurism. When I was a boy all signs of fem- inine underclothing were prudishly kept from the male; it was not "nice" that he should even be given a glimpse of laundry. So, of course, I was all the more anxious to get secret glimpses. And when I was able to wear them myself, I found, as Havelock Ellis notes in the "Eonism" volume of his masterly "Studies in the Psy- chology of Sex", if one cannot see pretty underclothes on women

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