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From the questions he asked, the tales told him and the records in anthropologies, Havelock Ellis was able to finish publishing by 1910 thoroughly documented treatises on 1) the evolution of modesty, the phenomena of sexual periodicity, autoeroticism; 2) sexual inversion; 3) analysis of the sexual impulse, love and pain, sexual impulse in women; 4) sexual selection in man; 5) erotic symbolism, the mechanism of detumescence, the psychic state in pregnancy; 6) sex in relation to society. A seventh volume, on eonism, was added in 1928.
Until Dr. Ellis investigated the subject, no one could give an adequate answer to the commonplace query of why most women like strong husky men. Dr. Ellis found the answer in the craving which women have to be touched. They love gentle, caressing, firm handling, occasionally painful manhandling.
Monogamy, "the more or less prolonged cohabitation of two individuals of opposite sex," he found, "has been the prevailing type of sexual relationship among the higher vertebrates and through the greater part of human history." On the other hand, a man's proclivities and his economic condition have often led to the practice of the sexual union of one man with more than one woman. Such polygynic conditions, observed honest Dr. Ellis, "have proved advantageous, as they have permitted the most vigorous and successful members of a community to have the largest number of mates and so to transmit their own superior qualities."
A man who likes to dress in women's clothes, a transvestite, gave Dr. Ellis an illuminating explanation of his perverse craving: "Just as a clergyman is influenced by his surplice, a soldier by his uniform, so am I by my clothes. The transformation that takes place is really wonderful, for I often reflect sadly that I have no earthly chance of looking altogether like a woman. Yet my eyes and smile are regarded as truly feminine, and happiness shows itself and soon improves my appearance."
Dr. Ellis' curiosity concerning the jungle land of sex seems to have ended in 1910 when he completed the main body of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Although in 1928 he published an addendum that was made up from notes collected in his middle age, and although in 1933 he published The Psychology of Sex, that was simply an introduction to the vast Studies. For the greater part of 20 years he has been living, a childless widower, in a compact London flat, in which are hung ten small pictures, five of men, five of women. There he talks sex, writes belles-lettres. He is aware that beyond tangled fields which he long ago cleared, lie great rivers of hormones which irrigate the human body and profoundly affect the flowering of personality. But into those rivers Dr. Ellis, who last month serenely celebrated his 77th birthday, has scarcely dipped his mind.