Free Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X by Donald Rayfield, Mr. Victor X Page B

great sexual excitement, when I could get hold of them. One item of reading especially gave me the strongest erotic experience. It was an article published in a medical journal, which fell into my hands at the house of a friend of my father's who was a doctor. While the grown-ups were chatting in the drawing room, I was reading the medical review feverishly in the doctor's study. It was a transcript of a trial that caused a big sensation in Russia then. An eccentric young woman, daughter of a very rich merchant, killed a man from good society - as was she - with the complicity of her debauched companions in a Moscow brothel. The girl was less than twenty and a homosexual, and the motive for her crime was jealousy: she wanted vengeance for the loss of her female lover. What transpired from the trial was that this rich heiress who was wallowing in luxury used to dress up as a man and tour the most wretched and the most opulent Moscow brothels in the company of rich young men. That was the background to the trial, if I can trust my memory , for I have never come across anything in print about it since. But I recall very precisely that the transcript published in the medical review gave a complete rendering of the expert medical evidence. Among other things, the girl's sexual organs were described, in fuller detail than anything I have seen since: the most minute item was shown either in graphic terms or with exact measurements in centimetres and millimetres &c. When I read this I was aroused by thinking how these measurements must have been taken, how they had arrived at the length of the clitoris, the dimensions of the labia minora in different places, the depth of the vagina; I imagined the experts evaluating the nuances of the vulva's colour at different stages. The following phrase sent me off into a dreamworld: "the patient's sensuality is revealed by the great excitability of the labia minora and the clitoris which both became violently erect at the slightest touch". As the girl was no virgin, there were details of what she felt, on her own testimony, in normal coitus and during homosexual intercourse. Essentially, reading this was for me like taking a powerful aphrodisiac.
    For someone of my type, really, the strongest sexual arousal comes from the imagination. Mental images have as much or even more effect on me than physical sights. But this is not altogether auto-eroticism: shut me up behind closed doors and my sexual obsessions will soon vanish. To operate erotically my imagination always needs an outside stimulus: the sight of a woman's sexual organs, looking at an obscene drawing, pornographic reading, lewd talk. It is not enough for me to be sitting next to a pretty and attractive woman: the sight of the prettiest and most charming woman, if she is dressed decently and looking respectable, never sparks off a desire to have intercourse with her and never gives me an erection. If my venereal appetite is to be awoken, then I have to see the woman behaving provocatively, to hear her talking lasciviously, to see naked flesh or - even if I am still under the spell of erotic reading matter - to have an obscene conversation just beforehand . Old erotic memories stop arousing me, lewd reading generally leaves me cold unless it is new to me, that is if it is dated . At first the same piece of lewdness will excite me even if I re-read it several times without a break; after a few days the impact is blunted. Thus I can remain for a long time in a state of complete sexual neutrality; then a sensual image which happens to come from outside (it is absolutely vital for it to come from outside and not to be produced from my own mind) will suddenly come and disrupt the balance and inflame my carnal ardour. I do not know how far these psychological predilections are abnormal or morbid: it needs a specialist to judge.
    Just as sadistic or masochistic tendencies, even in their mildest form, are subjectively incomprehensible to me, so I