Sexual arousal

No want of conscience hold it that I call / Her “love”, for whose dear love I rise and fall. —Shakespeare

Sexual arousal, also known by many other names, involves physiological and psychological responses to or in anticipation of sexual stimuli.

Sex

• Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein,
  Under her other was the tender boy,
  Who blush’d and pouted in a dull disdain,
  With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;
  She red and hot as coals of glowing fire,
  He red for shame, but frosty in desire.
  • Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593)

• Love is too young to know what conscience is;
  Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
  Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
  Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove.
  For, thou betraying me, I do betray
  My nobler part to my gross body’s treason.
  My soul doth tell my body that he may
  Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason,
  But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee
  As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
  He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
  To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
    No want of conscience hold it that I call
    Her “love”, for whose dear love I rise and fall.
  • Shakespeare, "Sonnet 151" (1609)

• Whenever, Lesbia, from your chair you rise,
  Your dress is tightly drawn between your thighs,
  And plays, I’ve noticed, in your hindmost site
  The active part of some vile sodomite:
  You strive, while plaintive sighs your lips escape,
  Left hand and right, to stop the woollen rape,
  Dragging your dress from ’twixt the tight’ning grips
  Of those twin Minyan rocks that grace your hips;
  But the moist lips of your poor longing quim
  Cling to your robe and glue you limb to limb.
  Would you be cured of such a hideous vice?
  Lesbia, nor rise nor sit is my advice,
  Lie on your bottom, free from clothes, and seek
  The aid of some stout youth to plug the leak.
  • Martial, xi. 99. "To Lesbia"
    The Index Expurgatorius of Martial (1868), p. 71.