| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Sexual Life of our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization - Translated from the Sixth German Edition
Author: Bloch, Iwan
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Sexual Life of our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization - Translated from the Sixth German Edition" ***
book was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)
Transcriber’s Note
Text printed in italics has been transcribed between _underscores_,
bold face text between =equal signs=. Small capitals have been
replaced with ALL CAPITALS. ^{text} represents superscript text.
More Transcriber’s Notes may be found at the end of this text.
THE SEXUAL LIFE OF OUR TIME
THE SEXUAL LIFE OF
OUR TIME
IN ITS RELATIONS TO MODERN
CIVILIZATION
BY
IWAN BLOCH, M.D.
PHYSICIAN FOR DISEASES OF THE SKIN, AND FOR DISEASES OF THE SEXUAL
SYSTEM
IN CHARLOTTENBURG, BERLIN
AUTHOR OF “THE ORIGIN OF SYPHILIS,” ETC.
TRANSLATED FROM THE SIXTH GERMAN EDITION
BY
M. EDEN PAUL, M.D.
[Illustration]
LONDON
REBMAN LIMITED, 129, SHAFTESBURY AVENUE, W.C.
1909
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall, 1908_
_All rights reserved_
PUBLISHERS’ NOTE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
The author’s aim in writing this book was to write a complete
Encyclopædia on the sexual sciences, and it will probably be
acknowledged by all who study its pages that the author has accomplished
his intention in a very scholarly manner, and in such form as to be of
great value to the professions for whom this translation is intended.
The subject is no doubt one which appeals to and affects the interests
of all adult persons, but the publishers have, after very serious and
careful consideration, come to the conclusion that the sale of the
English translation of the book shall be =limited to members of the
legal and medical professions=. To both these professions it is
essential that a knowledge of the science of Sex and the various causes
for the existence of “abnormals” should be ascertained, so that they may
be guided in the future in their investigations into, and the practice
of attempts to mitigate, the evil which undoubtedly exists, and to bring
about a more healthy class of beings. It is the first time that the
subject has been so carefully and fully gone into in the English
language, and it is believed that the very exhaustive examination which
the author has made into the matter, and the various cases to which he
has called attention, will be of considerable use to the medical
practitioner, and also to the lawyer in criminal and quasi-criminal
matters, and probably in matrimonial disputes and cases of insanity.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I
THE ELEMENTARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE 7
CHAPTER II
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE (BRAIN AND SENSES) 19
CHAPTER III
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE (REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS, SEXUAL
IMPULSE, SEXUAL ACT) 37
CHAPTER IV
PHYSICAL DIFFERENTIAL SEXUAL CHARACTERS 53
CHAPTER V
PSYCHICAL DIFFERENTIAL SEXUAL CHARACTERS--THE WOMAN’S QUESTION.
APPENDIX: SEXUAL SENSIBILITY IN WOMEN 67
CHAPTER VI
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--RELIGION AND SEXUALITY 87
CHAPTER VII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--THE EROTIC SENSE OF SHAME
(NAKEDNESS AND CLOTHING) 125
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF LOVE 159
CHAPTER IX
THE ARTISTIC ELEMENT IN MODERN LOVE 177
CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP--MARRIAGE 185
CHAPTER XI
FREE LOVE 233
CHAPTER XII
SEDUCTION, THE SENSUAL LIFE, AND WILD LOVE 279
CHAPTER XIII
PROSTITUTION--APPENDIX: THE HALF-WORLD 303
CHAPTER XIV
VENEREAL DISEASES--APPENDIX: VENEREAL DISEASES IN THE HOMOSEXUAL 349
CHAPTER XV
PROPHYLAXIS, TREATMENT, AND SUPPRESSION OF VENEREAL DISEASES 371
CHAPTER XVI
STATES OF SEXUAL IRRITABILITY AND SEXUAL WEAKNESS (AUTO-EROTISM,
MASTURBATION, SEXUAL HYPERÆSTHESIA AND SEXUAL ANÆSTHESIA, SEMINAL
EMISSIONS, IMPOTENCE, AND SEXUAL NEURASTHENIA) 407
CHAPTER XVII
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECT OF PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS--APPENDIX:
SEXUAL PERVERSIONS DUE TO DISEASE 453
CHAPTER XVIII
MISOGYNY 479
CHAPTER XIX
THE RIDDLE OF HOMOSEXUALITY--APPENDIX: THEORY OF HOMOSEXUALITY 487
CHAPTER XX
PSEUDO-HOMOSEXUALITY (GREEK AND ORIENTAL PÆDERASTY,
HERMAPHRODITISM, BISEXUAL VARIETIES) 537
CHAPTER XXI
ALGOLAGNIA (SADISM AND MASOCHISM)--APPENDIX: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT
OF AN ALGOLAGNISTIC REVOLUTIONIST) 555
CHAPTER XXII
SEXUAL FETICHISM 609
CHAPTER XXIII
ACTS OF FORNICATION WITH CHILDREN, INCEST, ACTS OF FORNICATION
WITH CORPSES (NECROPHILIA) AND ANIMALS (BESTIALITY),
EXHIBITIONISM, AND OTHER SEXUAL PERVERSITIES--APPENDIX: THE
TREATMENT OF SEXUAL PERVERSITIES 631
CHAPTER XXIV
OFFENCES AGAINST MORALITY FROM THE FORENSIC STANDPOINT 659
CHAPTER XXV
THE QUESTION OF SEXUAL ABSTINENCE 671
CHAPTER XXVI
SEXUAL EDUCATION 681
CHAPTER XXVII
NEO-MALTHUSIANISM, THE PREVENTION OF CONCEPTION, ARTIFICIAL
STERILITY AND ARTIFICIAL ABORTION 693
CHAPTER XXVIII
SEXUAL HYGIENE 709
CHAPTER XXIX
THE SEXUAL LIFE IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONSHIPS (SEXUAL QUACKERY,
ADVERTISEMENTS, AND SCANDALS) 719
CHAPTER XXX
PORNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE AND ART 729
CHAPTER XXXI
LOVE IN POLITE (BELLETRISTIC) LITERATURE 741
CHAPTER XXXII
THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF THE SEXUAL LIFE 753
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE OUTLOOK 763
INDEX OF NAMES 767
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 778
ERRATA
Page 189, note, line 2, _for_ “Classes in Antiquity,” _read_ “Age
Classes.”
Page 361, line 1, _for_ “=inflammation of the retina=,” _read_
“=syphilitic iritis=.”
Page 361, line 2, _for_ “retina,” _read_ “iris.”
Page 446, lines 6 and 7 from foot, _for_ “=reflection=,” _read_
“=reflective=.”
Page 481, note 493, line 5, _for_ “Classes of Antiquity,” _read_ “Age
Classes.”
Page 485, line 17, _for_ “Classes of Antiquity,” _read_ “Age Classes.”
Page 548, note 577, line 1, _for_ “Classes in Antiquity,” _read_ “Age
Classes.”
Page 747, lines 21 and 24, _for_ “divorce,” _read_ “adultery.”
INTRODUCTION
“_It seems at first sight as if Nature had endowed man with the
procreative impulse solely with a view to the preservation of the
species, and regardless of the individual; and yet it is undeniable that
in the high estimation of this impulse the individual was not
forgotten._” (“On the Art of Attaining an Advanced Age,” vol. i., p. 2;
Berlin, 1813).
CONTENTS OF INTRODUCTION
The two constituents of modern love -- The purposes of the species and
the purposes of the individual -- Insufficiency of the former for the
understanding of love -- The individualization of love through the
process of civilization -- The organic interconnexion between the
bodily and the mental manifestations of love -- Possibilities of
future development -- Victory of the love of civilized man over the
elemental force of the sexual impulse -- Our own time a turning-point
in the history of love.
INTRODUCTION
The sexuality of the modern civilized man--the sum, that is to say, of
the phenomena of sexual love dependent upon and associated with the
sexual impulse--is the result of a process of development lasting many
thousands of years. Therein, as in a mirror, we may see an accurate
reflection of all the phases of the bodily and mental history of the
human race. Anyone who wishes to understand modern love in all its
complexity must, in the first place, succeed in informing himself, not
merely regarding the first foundations of the feeling of love in the
grey primeval age, but, in addition, as to the manner in which that
feeling has been transformed and enriched in the course of the history
of civilization. For modern love is a complex of two constituents.
The word “love” is applicable to the sexual impulse of human beings
only. Its use implies that in the case of man the purely animal feelings
have acquired an =importance= far greater than that of subserving the
purposes of mere reproduction, and aim at a =goal= transcending that of
the preservation of the species. The nature of human love can be
understood and explained only with reference to this intimate and
inseparable union of its purposes in respect of the preservation of the
species and its independent significance in the life of the loving
individual himself. Herein is to be found the starting-point of the
whole so-called “sexual problem,” and it is necessary that the matter
should be clearly understood at the outset of this book. In earlier days
human love was mainly concerned with the purposes of the species. Modern
civilized man, conceiving history as progress in the consciousness of
freedom, has also come to recognize the profound =individual=
significance of love for his own inward growth, for the proper
development of his free manhood. To quote a phrase from Georg Hirth, a
cultured modern writer, the genuine experienced love of a civilized man
of the present day is one of the “ways to freedom.” By love is made
manifest, and through love is developed, his inmost individual nature.
For this reason Schopenhauer’s “Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe”
(“Metaphysic of Sexual Love”), which wholly ignores this individual
factor, must be regarded, brilliant as it unquestionably is, as a quite
inadequate explanation of the nature of love. Again, a recent writer,
Arnold Lindwurm, greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s teaching, in the
introduction to his work entitled “Ueber die Geschlechtsliebe in
sozial-ethische Beziehung” (“Sexual Love in its Socio-Ethical
Relations”), writes: “The =fruit of love=, =children=, and =marriage= as
a domestic institution indispensable for the upbringing of
children--these constitute the author’s ethical criterion in the field
of sexual research; these also form the socio-ethical goal of all sexual
love, inasmuch as the =sole= standard by which sexual love can be judged
is the procreation and upbringing of children.” We, however, at the very
outset, contest the validity of such a standpoint, for we consider that
it fails entirely to do justice to the nature of modern love. For the
history of the human sexual impulse teaches us beyond dispute that, in
the course of the development of the human species, that impulse,
through its progressive association with intellectual and emotional
elements to form the complex whole designated by the term “love,” has
undergone a progressive individualization, and has attained a more
defined significance for the unitary human being. At the present day
sexual love constitutes a part of the very being of the civilized man;
his sexual life clearly reflects his individual nature, and love
influences his development in an enduring manner.
Love conjoins in a quite unique way the =two= principal classes of vital
manifestations--the lower vegetative and the higher animal life; and it
thus constitutes the highest and the most intense expression of the
=unity= of life (Schopenhauer’s “focus of the will;” Weismann’s
“continuity of the germ-plasma”).
Whoever wishes to understand the developmental tendencies of love as
they manifest themselves at the present day in the course of human
history, whoever desires to grasp how remarkably love has been
developed, enriched, and ennobled in the course of civilization, must at
the outset gain a clear understanding of this apparently dualistic, but
in reality thoroughly monistic, nature of the passion.
The matter may be expressed also in this way--that he who has
scientifically investigated love, who has based his conception of it
philosophically, and has personally experienced it, will become a
convinced monist in relation to life, at least, and to the organic
world, and will be compelled to regard every dualistic division into a
physical and a spiritual sphere as something quite artificial. In love
above all is manifested this mystery of the life force, as for centuries
the poets, the artists, and the metaphysicians have declared, and more
especially as the great natural philosophers of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries have proved--above all Charles Darwin and Ernst
Haeckel. There is, indeed, no more happily chosen metaphor, none that
better describes the fundamentally monistic nature of love, than the
saying of the old æsthetic J. G. Sulzer--that love is a =tree=, that it
has its =roots= in the physical sphere, but that its =branches= extend
high above the physical world, expanding more and more, branching more
and more abundantly into the sphere of the spiritual.[1] It is certainly
impossible to find a more appropriate comparison. Thereby we show
clearly the intimate =organic= connexion between the physical and
spiritual phenomena of love; it is rooted for ever in Mother Earth, but
it grows always upwards into the subtle ether. Just as the arborescence
of the tree has a richer, more manifold, more extensive development than
the root, so also it is in the =spiritual= form that love is first
capable of extending upwards and in all directions, compared with which
its physical capacity for development is minimal and strictly limited.
=But just as the arborescence of the tree grows from, and is supplied
with nutriment by, the root, so also the higher love is inevitably
founded upon a sensory basis. Even while= love becomes spiritually
richer, it remains as irrevocably as ever dependent upon the
physical.[2]
To put the matter briefly, the future =developmental possibilities= of
human love rest purely in the spiritual sphere, but they are inseparably
connected with the far less variable physical phenomena of sexuality.
Upon the development, the configuration, and the differentiation, of the
spiritual elements of sexual love are alone based the intimate relations
of love with the process of civilization. This fact is again reflected
in the manifold phases of the evolution of the sentiment of love.
For the human spirit in the course of its development has become not
merely lord of the earth and of the elementary forces of Nature: it has
become also lord and master, interpreter and guide, of the sexual
impulse; for this impulse owes to the human spirit its new and peculiar
life, its life =capable of further development= as manifested in the
history of human love. The history of love is the history of mankind, of
civilization. For love manifests a continual =progress=, which can be
denied by those only who have failed to understand the deep significance
of human love in the entire civilized life of all times, and who,
observing the persistence of the primeval and ever-active sexual
impulse, elemental in its nature, are led only to a hopeless doubt as to
the possibility of all love, and thus justify the pessimism with which
Schopenhauer has condemned the significance of human sexual love.
Undoubtedly this elemental impulse persists for ever, and to follow it
=alone= leads to death, to utter desolation, to nothingness, as Tolstoi,
Strindberg, and Weininger, the bitter opponents of modern “love,” have
so vehemently declared. But did these men know true love? Had they
become conscious of the inevitable =necessity= with which civilization
in the course of ages and generations had transformed the human sexual
impulse into love as it now exists, transformed it in so manifold and so
wonderful a way? Had they any idea of the =development= of love, and of
its place and its significance in history?
Let them believe this, these doubting and despairing souls--=nothing=
has been destroyed of all the spiritual relations, of all the wonderful
possibilities of development, which have manifested themselves in the
course of the long and varied history of the evolution of love. To
describe this evolution, it is necessary to draw attention to all those
elements of civilization which =remain at present= influential in love,
but it is further indispensable to forecast their future development.
Once again we stand at an important turning-point in the history of
love. The old separates itself from the new, the better will once more
be the enemy of the good. But love regarded, as it must now be regarded,
in its inner =nature=, as a sexual impulse most perfectly and completely
infused with a spiritual content, will remain the inalienable gain of
civilization; it will stand forth ever purer and more promotive of
happiness, like a mirror of marvellous clearness, wherein is reflected a
peculiar and accurate picture of the successive epochs of civilization.
[1] The natural philosopher Kielmeyer, the teacher of Cuvier, also
compared the genital organs with the root, the brain with the
arborescence, of a tree. _Cf._ Arthur Schopenhauer, “New Paralipomena”
(Grisebach’s edition, p. 217).
[2] Eduard von Hartmann points out very effectively that “an assumed
love without sensuality is merely a fleshless and bloodless phantom of
the creative imagination” (“Philosophy of the Unconscious,” sixth
edition, p. 196; Berlin, 1874).
CHAPTER I
THE ELEMENTARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE
“_The critical natural philosopher conceives this process, this ‘crown
of love,’ in a very matter-of-fact manner, as the process of conjugation
of two cells and the coalescence of their nuclei._”--ERNST HAECKEL.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER I
The well-spring of love -- The conjugation of the germinal cells as
the simplest expression of the nature of the sexes -- The active
masculine and the passive feminine principles of sexuality -- Their
representation in ancient mythology -- The significance of sexual
procreation -- The most important principle of progressive development
-- The significance of sexual differentiation -- The development of
heterosexuality -- Vestiges of an original hermaphroditic state in men
and women -- New acquisitions -- The hymen -- Metchnikoff’s hypothesis
of the original significance of the hymen -- The “third sex” --
The attainment of perfection by means of progressive sexual
differentiation -- The increase in the intensity of the sexual
attractive force in the course of human evolution -- Its cause --
Explanation of Paul Rée -- Theory of Havelock Ellis -- Elementary
psychical phenomena of love -- A sensation analogous to one of smell
-- Theories of Steffens, Haeckel, and Kröner -- The specific sexual
odours of the capryl group -- Odoriferous glands in animals and human
beings -- An example from Southern Slavonic folk-lore -- The position
of the nose in relation to the genital system -- The sexual rôle of
artificial perfumes -- Origin of the latter -- Reduction in size of
the organ of smell in the human species -- Primary and secondary
elements in human sexuality -- Bölsche’s “fusion-love” and
“distance-love” -- Their different significance.
CHAPTER I
The mystery of sexual love, of this “wonder of life,” from which both
religious belief and artistic inspiration have drawn and continue to
draw the major part of their force, may ultimately be referred to a
single phenomenon in the sexuality of the great group of metazoa to
which the major part of the animal world and the human species belong.
This process is a conjugation of the female germ cell with the male
sperm cell--the “well-spring of love,” to use Haeckel’s expression; in
comparison with this conjugation, all other spiritual and physical
phenomena, however complicated, are of a subordinate and secondary
nature. From this primitive organic process of reciprocal attraction and
conjugation of the two reproductive cells has arisen the entire complex
of the remaining physical and spiritual phenomena of love. We have, in
this process of cell conjugation, a picture in little of love, a greatly
simplified representation of the nature of the relations between man and
woman; moreover, the highest and the finest psychical experiences and
impressions occurring under the influence of love are ultimately no more
than the results of this “erotic chemotropism” of the sperm and germ
cells.
Sexual =differentiation= existed already as a =natural= product in the
early stages of organic evolution, and =civilization= has done no more
than develop, increase, and refine that differentiation, which is
typified in a manner at once simple and convincing--because =directly
visible=--in the male sperm cell and the female germ cell. Herein the
=specific sexual differences= are made visibly manifest.
Procreation results from the approach of the male sperm cell towards the
female germ cell, and from the entrance of the former into the latter.
Thus, the sperm cell represents the =active=, the germ cell the
=passive=, principle in sexuality. Already in this =most important= act
in the process of procreation the natural relations between man and
woman are very clearly manifested. This fact is clearly grasped already
in the mythology and the sepulchral symbolism of antiquity. In these the
man is always represented as the active principle; woman, on the
contrary, as the passive principle.
“Peace reigns in the ovum, but when driven by the desire of creation
the masculine god breaks through the shell and begins his work of
fertilization, everything at once becomes movement, restless haste,
impulsive force, unending circulation. Thus the male generative
principle appears as the representative and embodiment of movement in
the visible act of creation.... The active principle in Nature appears
to be identical with the principle of motion.... Winged is the
phallus, quiescent the female; the man is the principle of movement,
and the woman the principle of repose; force is the cause of eternal
change, woman the picture of eternal repose; for which reason the
‘earth-mother’ is almost always depicted in a sitting posture”
(Bachofen).
The appearance of =sexual= reproduction in the history of the evolution
of the organic world is an especially instructive example of the great
importance of differentiation and variation as the most effective
principle of evolution in general. The lowliest forms of life reproduce
their kind in an extremely simple manner by a process of asexual cell
division, which has not improperly been regarded as nothing more than a
peculiar form of =growth=; and this simple process of cell division is
retained as a mode of growth also in the higher organisms which
reproduce their kind by sexual union. In some cases of simple cell
division the secondary cell, the “daughter cell,” separates itself from
the old cell, the “mother cell,” and forms a new complete individual; in
other cases the cell division occurs as gemmiparous reproduction
(budding or pululation), the daughter cell remaining united with the
mother cell, so that a new organ is built up. Reproduction by cell
division is found in many plants and lower animals side by side with
sexual reproduction. This latter becomes the exclusive method of
production in higher animals and in the human species, whose capacity
for the procreation of new individuals by cell division, and for the
replacement of lost organs by growth, has been lost. Thus, the progress
and the gain which on the one hand are derived from the process of
sexual reproduction, whose character we are about to investigate more
closely, are balanced on the other hand by a loss. We shall often
encounter this fact again in the history of the evolution of the sexual
impulse, more especially in mankind and in relation to human love.
With the evolution of sexual reproduction is introduced the opportunity
for a great step forward, since an incomparably greater sphere of action
is opened to the differentiation and variability of specific forms than
was possible in the case of species reproduced asexually (Kerner von
Marilaun, R. Martin). By means of the sexual union of two =differing=
independent individuals, each of which, again, has been brought into the
world by the sexual union of two differing individuals, the way is
freely opened for a progressive differentiation of the individuals of
this species. No one of them is exactly similar to any other. Each one
exhibits new peculiarities, new capabilities, and all of these play
their part in the struggle for existence. This gradually results in a
progress towards higher, better, more perfect forms. The persistence of
specific type, due to inheritance, is largely counteracted by sexual
reproduction, inasmuch as the conjugation of reproductive cells derived
from two different individuals induces a tendency to progressive
variation and improvement. Moreover, by this sexual mode of reproduction
the preservation of the species is rendered much more secure than by
asexual reproduction, whilst at the same time the possibility of
differentiation or variation is indubitably increased. We have already
insisted on the fact that in the striking difference between the sperm
cell of the male and the germ cell of the female we must seek for the
ultimate cause of the profound difference between the sexes. Those who
maintain the theory of the absolute identity of man and woman must
continually be reminded of this fact. Unquestionably the greater
motility of the male reproductive cell as compared with the more passive
quality of the female cell implies the existence of deeply founded
psychical differences; and the existence of these may be assumed with
more confidence since we know from experience to what a high degree the
finest psychical peculiarities of father and mother can be transmitted
by inheritance to the child.
=For this reason, all attempts, whether initiated by some natural
process or by some intentional guidance of the process of civilization,
towards the obliteration of the distinction between the specific
masculine and the specific feminine, must be regarded as futile, and as
antagonistic to the process of development.= The production of the
so-called “third sex” is unquestionably a step backwards. For bisexual
differentiation is an =advance= upon the more primitive form of sexual
differentiation in which both the male and the female sexual elements
were produced by a single individual (=hermaphroditism=). In the
phylogeny of the human species unilateral sexual reproduction gave place
to the bilateral type, the reproductive elements being formed within the
bodies of two =distinct= individuals--the sperm cells within the body of
the male, the germ cells within the body of the female. In this manner
originated the contrast between the individuals of the two sexes, or
bisexual differentiation, which, in the course of phylogenetic
development, has become continually more definite, more extensive, and
more characteristic, through the operation of the principle of =sexual
selection=; and thus by inheritance and adaptation the mental and
physical characteristics of sexuality, primitive and superadded, have
gradually become defined and fixed. In the higher ranks of the animal
kingdom and in the human species, this =heterosexuality= has, through
inheritance, become continually more sharply defined; but the traces of
the primitive hermaphroditic state have never been wholly obliterated.
Love in the human species is manifested by pairing. Such is the normal
condition, and the =only= condition in harmony with the progressive
tendency towards perfection. But remnants of hermaphroditism, of
bisexuality in a single individual, of the “third sex,” are to be found
in every human being, and are disclosed by embryology and comparative
anatomy in the form of vestiges of female reproductive organs in the
male and of male reproductive organs in the female. Herein exists an
indisputable proof of the originally hermaphrodite nature of the human
ancestry. But these female organs in the male body, and their converse,
the male organs in the female body, are =stunted=, are rudiments merely;
whereas in the course of evolution the masculine reproductive organs of
the male and the feminine reproductive organs of the female have been
more and more powerfully developed, and more and more sharply
differentiated in type, until they have come to constitute the
expression of the specific differences between man and woman. They alone
represent the more advanced stage. Moreover, these vestiges of an early
hermaphroditic condition are in the human species far less extensive
than in other mammals; and the sexual discrepancy in the human species,
as compared with the lower animals, becomes still more noticeable when
we take into account the fact that certain parts of the reproductive
system are peculiar to mankind, are =new acquisitions=, and, above all,
the hymen, which is non-existent even in the anthropoid apes.
The original purpose of the hymen, which unquestionably must at the time
of its appearance have represented an evolutionary advance, is still
undetermined. Metchnikoff has propounded an interesting hypothesis on
this subject. According to him, it is very probable that human beings,
during the earliest period of human history, began sexual relations at
an extremely youthful age, at a time when the external genital organs of
the boy were not yet fully developed. In such a case the hymen would not
only have been no hindrance to the act of copulation, but rather, by
narrowing the vaginal outlet, and thus accommodating its size to the
relatively too small penis of the male, would have rendered pleasure in
sexual intercourse possible. In such cases, moreover, the hymen would
not have been brutally lacerated, but gradually dilated. Laceration of
the hymen represents a later and secondary phenomenon.
It is a fact that, even at the present day, among many primitive races,
marriages commonly take place in childhood, and it is further true that
even in civilized races in a considerable number of cases (15 per cent.,
according to Budin) the hymen is not always lacerated during sexual
intercourse, but is retained; thus some support is given to
Metchnikoff’s hypothesis.
It is unquestionable that evolution and the progress of civilization
have resulted in an extremely marked differentiation between the two
sexes, and for this reason the formation of a so-called “third sex,” in
which these sexual differences are obscured, can only be regarded as a
markedly retrogressive step. Ernst von Wolzogen, in a well-known
romance, to which he gave the name of “The Third Sex,” described a kind
of barren, stunted woman, capable, however, of holding her own at work
in competition with men; but in our opinion such women represent merely
a =stage of transition= in the great battle of women for the
independent, free development of their =peculiar= personality. Such
types as these are certainly not the final goal of the woman’s movement;
they are caricatures, products of a false and extreme conception of
woman’s development. This “third sex,” which Schurtz very justly
compares to the stunted, barren workers among ants and bees, is
incapable of prolonged existence, and will give place to a new
generation of women, who, while fully retaining their specific feminine
peculiarities, will share with men the rights and duties of the great
work of civilization; and thus this work will unquestionably be enriched
by a number of new and fruitful elements.
It is indeed possible that this “third sex,” that hermaphrodites,
homosexual individuals, sexual “intermediate stages,” also play a
certain part in the great process of civilization. But their
significance is slight and limited, if for this reason alone because
from these individuals the possibility of transmission by inheritance of
valuable peculiarities is cut off, and hence the possibility of a future
perfectibility, of true “progress,” is excluded. There are =two= sexes
only on which every true advance in civilization depends--the genuine
man and the genuine woman. All other varieties are ultimately no more
than phantoms, monstrosities, vestiges of primitive sexual conditions.
Very ably has Mantegazza described the intimate relationship between
these dreams of the “third sex” and the fantastic aberration of the
sexual impulse. He writes:
“While the pathology of love recognizes in many sexual aberrations the
obscure traces of a general hermaphroditism, imagination, which works
faster than science, shows us the possibility that in more
complicated creations sexual differentiation might be more than
twofold, so that in such worlds sexual reproduction might be effected
by a more elaborate division of labour. Thus, in the cynical or
sceptical distinction between platonic, sexual, and licentious love,
we see the first traces of new and monstrous possibilities of sexual
union, on the one hand reflecting the sublimity of the supersensual,
and on the other more brutal than the most horrible sexual
aberration.”
In reality, it is only for normal heterosexual love between a normal man
and a normal woman that it is possible to find an unimpeachable
sanction. Only this love, continually more differentiated and more
individualized, will play a part in the future course of civilization.
Heterosexuality arises from the reciprocal attraction and the
coalescence of the reproductive cells of two individuals of distinct
sexes; it forms the foundation and constitutes the most important
element of the sexual relations of the higher animal world and of the
human species; and it obtains through inheritance continually a more
sharply defined expression. Since this fundamental phenomenon of the
sexual impulse has been transmitted from the most ancient and simplest
forms of the organic world and has been modified only in the direction
of heterosexuality, it has come to pass, as Ewald Hering says at the end
of his celebrated lecture on “Memory as a General Function of Organic
Matter,” that organic matter has the strongest memory of the impulse of
conjugation in its most ancient and most primitive form; thus this
impulse at the present day continues to dominate mankind as an intensely
powerful physical imperative, endowed with the strength of an elemental
force, which, notwithstanding the gradually higher development of the
brain, has remained during thousands of years undiminished in its
potency, and indeed by the accumulative influence extending through
thousands of generations has acquired a notable increase in intensity.
We must assume that for untold generations always those animals and men
have had the most numerous descendants in whom the sexual impulse was
the most powerful; this powerful impulse being inherited, was
transmitted once more to the next generation, and tended by natural
selection continually to increase.
This explanation of the indisputable gradual increase in the intensity
of the sexual impulse, first given by the moral philosopher Paul Rée, is
more illuminating than the theory propounded by Havelock Ellis of the
increase of the sexual impulse by civilization, which was long ago
maintained by Lucretius (“De Rerum Naturâ,” V. 1016). In support of this
latter theory, it is asserted that among savage people the genital
organs are less powerfully developed than among civilized races, but
this can by no means be regarded as an established fact. Civilization
has done no more than cause a fuller development of all sides of sexual
love by a multiplication of physical and psychical =stimuli=; but it
appears extremely doubtful if civilization itself is to be regarded as
the immediate causal influence in the increase of the intensity of the
sexual impulse.
* * * * *
Having studied the elementary phenomena of human love dependent upon the
phylogenetic history of the human race, namely the union of the male and
female reproductive cells, the question now arises as to the nature of
the =psychical= processes, the character of the =sensations= that
accompany this union of the sperm cells and the germ cells. What is the
most primitive =psychical elementary phenomenon= of love?
It is apparently that sensation in which the actual contact of the
psyche with the material occurs--an immediate sensation of the nature of
matter--namely, the =sense of smell=. The metaphysical significance of
the sense of smell has been aptly indicated by describing that sense as
the “sublimated thing-in-itself,” as a sense which, like no other sense,
allows us to enter immediately into the nature of matter; it is, in
fact, the sense of personality.
“Smell,” says Heinrich Steffens, “is the principal sense of the higher
animals; it represents for them their own inner world; it envelops
their existence. Upon smell, wherein sympathy and antipathy are
represented, is based the whole security of the higher animal
instinct; =for carnal desire is comprehended in this sense=....
Indeed, in sexual union the subjective sensation which is developed by
means of smell blends completely with the objective, and from the
monistic union of the two arises the intenser libido, wherein the
unfathomableness of the procreative force and the whole power of sex
are absorbed.”
Ernst Haeckel ascribes to the two sexual cells a kind of inferior
psychical activity; he believes that they experience a sensation of one
another’s proximity; and indeed it is probably a form of sensory
activity analogous to the sense of smell that draws them together. The
sensation of the two sexual cells, which Haeckel believes to be situated
especially in the cell nuclei, he denotes by the term “erotic
chemotropism.” He attributes it to an attraction of the nature of smell,
and considers that it represents the psychical quintessence, the
original being of love.
A later investigator, Eugen Kröner, holds the same view. In the
conjugation of two vorticellæ he recognizes the influence of the
chemically operative sensation of smell; to him smell is the most
important element in the sexual impulse of animals.
This theory is strongly supported, and indeed elevated to the rank of a
natural law, by the circumstance that in the higher animals the sense of
smell, in the course of phylogenetic development, has attained a
continually greater significance in relation to sexuality; and by the
fact that, according to the discovery of Zwaardemaker, there exists
widely diffused throughout Nature a =distinct group= of sexual odours,
the so-called =capryl odours=, which have a natural biological connexion
with the _vita sexualis._ These capryl odours, which already in plants
play a sexual part, are in animals and in the human species localized in
or near the genital organs (odoriferous glands of the beaver, the
musk-ox, etc., the secretions of the male foreskin and the female
vagina), or in other cases are found in the general secretions, such as
the sweat. Recently Gustav Klein has succeeded in proving that a
definite group of glands in the female genital organs (glandulæ
vestibulares majores, or glands of Bartholin) must be regarded as a
vestige from the time of periodic sexual excitement (rutting). At that
time in the human species, as now in the lower animals, the sexual
impulse was periodic in its activity, and the secretion of these
odoriferous glands of the human female then served as a means of
alluring members of the male sex. At the present time these glands have
for the most part lost their significance as specific stimuli. Now it is
rather the exhalation from the entire surface of the female body which
exercises the erotic influence. Cases in which such stimuli proceed
exclusively from the female genital organs are regarded by Klein as a
phylogenetic vestige of the primitive relations between the rutting
odours of the female and sexual excitement in the male. Friedrich S.
Krauss, in his “Anthropophyteia” (1904, vol. i., p. 224), reproduces a
Southern Slavonic story in which a man is described who obtained sexual
gratification only by enjoying the =natural= smell of the female genital
organs. The remarkable classification of Indian women according to the
various odours proceeding from their genital organs must not be
forgotten in this connexion.
That this primitive phenomenon of love has even to-day a certain
significance, although, in consequence of the enormous development of
the brain and the predominance of purely psychical elements in man, its
influence has been very notably diminished, is shown by the existing
physiological connexion proved by Fliess to exist between the nose and
the genital organs. On the inferior turbinate bones there exist certain
“genital areas,” which, under the influence of sexual stimulus and
excitement, as in coitus, during menstruation, etc., swell up. From
these areas it is also possible to influence directly certain conditions
of the genital organs.
It is noteworthy that civilization has to a large extent replaced the
natural sexual odours by artificial scents, so-called =perfumes=, whose
origin is partly due to the =imitation= or =accentuation= of the natural
odours, in part, however, and especially in recent times, to an
endeavour to =conceal= these natural odours, especially when the latter
are of a disagreeable character. For this reason, in addition to
penetrating perfumes, such as civet, ambergris, musk, etc., we have also
mild perfumes, for the most part vegetable in origin. The markedly
exciting influence of these artificial scents is employed especially by
women, above all by professional prostitutes, in order to excite men.[3]
Frequently also the simple perfume of flowers suffices for this purpose.
Krauss tells us that in the kolo-dance of the Southern Slavs the girls
fasten strong-scented flowers and sprigs in the front of their dress,
and thereby excite intense sexual desire in the young men. In the East
sexual stimulation by means of the sense of smell plays a far more
extensive rôle than in Europe.
In the human species, however, as a specific elementary phenomenon of
sexual reproduction, smell has long been thrust into the background by
the strong development of other senses, especially that of sight. This
fact is very clearly exhibited by the notable reduction which has
occurred in the size of the organ of smell. In man the frontal lobes of
the brain, the seat of the highest intellectual processes and of speech,
have taken the place of the olfactory lobes in the lower animals.
Besides, by means of clothing, the natural odours of men and women,
which previously had such marked sexual significance, have been rendered
almost imperceptible, and nowadays sexual stimulation may result merely
from the senses of touch and of sight, so that the hands and the lips
and the female breasts have been transformed into erotic organs.
Notwithstanding, however, the notable weakening of the sexual
significance of smell, this most primitive sense (actually associated,
as we have shown, with the activity of the germinal cells) will never
completely cease to influence the sexual life.
“Still, there always surrounds us a now gently moving and now stormy
sea of odours, whose waves without cessation arouse in us feelings of
sympathy or antipathy, and to the minutest movements of which we are
not wholly indifferent” (Havelock Ellis).
Inasmuch as we have pointed out as the single primæval basis, as the
most important elementary phenomenon, of human love, the conjugation of
the male sperm cell with the female ovum (dependent probably upon a
sensation analogous to that of smell), we denote this particular
phenomenon of sexuality as =primary=, and we separate all the other
phenomena as =secondary=, as more remote. Wilhelm Bölsche has also
expressed this difference by denoting the union of the two reproductive
cells as “=fusion-love=,” whilst all that has occurred later, in the
course of many thousands of years of evolution, and that has transformed
this primary process, by innumerable new influences, stimuli, and
perceptions, into the love of modern civilized man, he denotes by the
apt name of “=distance-love=.”
According to him,
“the ultimate act of love in a member of the most highly civilized
community assumes the form of a sudden withdrawal from the entire
world of surrounding artifacts, of alphabets, posts, telephones,
submarine cables, etc.... At this instant the principle of union is
once again victorious, as it were, in an ultimate posthumous vision in
a vital experience of a portion of primæval Nature, of the primæval
world, of an instant’s profoundest self-absorption into the great
mystery of the obscure original basis of Nature, to which neither time
nor old and new is known, but which is ever renewed in us in its
elemental force--the procreative principle. At this instant the loving
individual must return home to the heart of the all-mother--it is
useless to resist. It must draw from the fountain of youth--must
descend like Odin to the Norns, like Faust to the Mothers--=and there
all civilization is swallowed up; there cell body must join cell
body=, in order in the ardent embrace to reduce to a minimum the
distance which usually sunders such large bodies. Indeed, in reality
the sexual act goes further and deeper than this reduction of
separation to a minimum. Within the body of one of the partners of the
sexual act the ovum and the spermatozoon undergo an ultimate =perfect
fusion= of soul and body, in comparison with which even the closest
approximation of the great halves of the love partnership is no more
than a mere mechanical apposition. The ultimate aim of the loving
union is attained only in the coalescence of ovum and spermatozoon.”
To express the matter briefly, fusion-love fulfils the purpose of the
species, while distance-love subserves rather the purpose of the
individual. Thus the natural course of the development of love, which in
the next chapter we propose to follow further, affords already the proof
of the thesis propounded in the introduction regarding the duplicate
nature of human love.
[3] According to Laurent (“Morbid Love,” pp. 133, 134, Leipzig, 1895),
common prostitutes generally use musk; young working women, violet or
rose-water; ladies of the bourgeoisie, penetrating perfumes, such as
white heliotrope, jasmine, and ylang-ylang; women of the half-world,
finer perfumes, or such “as are complex, like their own mode of
life”--for example, lily-of-the-valley, or mignonette.
CHAPTER II
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF LOVE (BRAIN AND SENSES)
“_From these considerations it follows that man, in the course of his
phylogenetic development extending through lengthy geological periods,
has lost numerous advantages; and the question arises whether, in
exchange for these, he may not also have gained certain other
advantages. Such must, indeed, have been the case if the human species
was to remain capable of survival. There has been a_ process of
exchange, _by means of which man has gained an equivalent for all the
qualities he has lost. And the gain consists in the_ unlimited
plasticity of his brain. _By this he is fully compensated for the loss
of the large and long series of advantages which his remote predecessors
possessed._”--R. WIEDERSHEIM.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER II
The secondary phenomena of sexuality -- Their connexion with the
nervous system and the sense organs -- The brain as criterion of human
sexuality -- Its development proportional to the retrogression of
other parts -- Example of the organ of smell and of the mammary glands
-- Relative retrogression of the female clitoris -- Variation of the
female genital organs -- Reduction of the hairy covering of the skin
-- Theory regarding the origin of the comparative baldness of the
human species -- Assumed connexion with climate -- With dentition --
Influence of artificial clothing -- The hygienic and æsthetic
significance of the loss of hair -- The reason why the axillary and
pubic hair have been retained -- Sexual influence of the hair of these
regions and of the hair of woman’s head -- Gradual retrogression of
the male beard -- The change of bodily type under the influence of the
brain -- The way of the spirit in love -- The pure instinctive in the
sexuality of primitive man -- His lack of the idea, “love” -- Analogy
of this state among the lower classes of the present day --
Periodicity of the sexual impulse in the time of primitive man --
Periodicity amongst savage races of to-day -- The researches of Fliess
and Swoboda -- The twenty-three day “masculine” and the twenty-eight
day “feminine” periods -- Menstruation -- A peculiarity of the human
female -- The origin of enduring love in mankind -- Love rendered more
enduring by the spirit -- Kant’s views on the subject -- Hypothesis of
W. Rheinhard and Virey -- The complication of the sexual impulse
through sensory stimuli -- Buddha’s speech to the monks -- The
prepotency of the higher senses -- The sense of touch -- The skin as
an organ of voluptuous sensation -- Erogenic areas of skin -- The kiss
-- Its erotic significance -- An Arabian poet (Sheik Nefzawi) on this
subject -- Burdach’s definition of the kiss -- The kiss on the
boundary-line between erotism and actual sexual enjoyment -- The
origin of the kiss -- The primitive elements of contact, licking and
biting -- Its connexion with the nutritive impulse -- European origin
of the kiss of contact -- The smelling kiss of the Mongols -- The kiss
and sexuality -- Voltaire’s genito-labial nerve -- The sense of taste
and sexuality -- The preponderant importance of the higher senses in
the love of civilized man -- The beautiful explanation of Herder --
Liberation from the material in the higher senses -- The sense of
sight as the true æsthetic sense -- Beauty as the product of love --
Its perception by the sense of sight -- Rôle of the sense of hearing
in love -- The investigations of Darwin -- The voice as a sexual lure
-- The rhythmical repetition of alluring sounds -- Origin of song and
music -- Greater susceptibility of women to impressions received
through the sense of hearing -- The charm of woman’s voice -- An
experience of the natural philosopher Moreau.
CHAPTER II
As we have learnt in the first chapter, the primitive phenomenon of
sexual attraction and reproduction, the conjugation of the male and the
female germinal cells, persists unaltered in man as the most important
part of the act of procreation; but this process of “fusion-love”
derived by inheritance from unicellular organisms, is associated in man
with a number of new secondary physical and psychical phenomena of
sexuality. This inevitably results from the nature of the human organism
as a cell society, from the development of man as one of the order of
mammalia, and finally from man’s elevation above the other mammalia as a
being of enormously enhanced brain powers. The complex of these
secondary physical and psychical phenomena of love, dependent upon the
process of evolution, has, as we have already said, been denoted by W.
Bölsche by the apt name of “distance-love,” which he thus distinguishes
from the primary elemental phenomenon of “fusion-love.” These superadded
elements play an extremely important part in human civilization, and,
indeed, actually characterize that civilization which is in no way
dependent on the primitive qualities shared by man with plants and lower
animals.
This secondary sexuality of mankind is, in correspondence with the
differentiation of the various organs of his body, extremely
complicated, and it is by no means solely dependent upon the structure
of the special =reproductive= or =copulatory= organs; it is also
intimately connected with other parts of the body, and more especially
with the sense organs and the nervous system. Thus it has accommodated
itself to all the external influences to which the species has been
subjected in the long course of its development history. We may say that
the =criterion, the characteristic mark of distinction between the human
body and that of the lower animals, is also the distinctive differential
characteristic between human sexuality and that of the lower animals=.
And this criterion is the =brain=.
The present physical and mental constitution of man is the result of an
evolutionary process, of which the most marked characteristic has been a
continually more rapid increase in the size and complexity of the brain.
Phylogeny and ontogeny clearly demonstrate the evolution of the human
body from lower states to higher, the slow but sure improvement in the
direction of a continual enlargement and increasing convolution of the
brain, which has by no means yet attained finality, but which may be
expected to continue into the far-distant future; and associated with
this physical development will undoubtedly proceed an equally extensive
improvement in the quality of human consciousness.
This progressive development of the brain has resulted in a
retrogression and arrest of development of other parts and organs, and
among these some more or less closely associated with the sexual
functions, and originally of considerable importance. Gegenbaur, in his
“Anatomy,” and Wiedersheim, in his interesting work on “The Structure of
Man as Bearing Witness to his Past,” recognize in the unlimited
plasticity of the human brain the sole cause of the arrest of
development and retrogressive metamorphosis of many organs and functions
which persist in other members of the animal kingdom.
In the sexual life, also, in correspondence with this preponderating
development of the brain, purely psychical elements continually play a
larger part, whilst parts and functions at one time intimately related
to sexuality have undergone atrophy. Thus, as we have already pointed
out, the human organ of smell had unquestionably in earlier times much
greater significance in relation to the _vita sexualis_ than it has at
the present day. Wiedersheim shows that in the ancestors of the human
race this organ was much more extensively developed, and that it must
now be regarded as in a state of atrophy. The mammary glands, the
original function of which was perhaps the production of odoriferous
substances, but which later became devoted solely to the secretion of
milk, existed in our ancestors in a larger number than in the present
human race. This is clearly shown by the fact that the human embryo
normally exhibits a “hyperthelia,” an excess of breasts, of which,
however, two only normally undergo development; moreover, the breasts of
the male, which are now in a state of arrested development, were
formerly better developed, and served, like those of the female, the
purpose of nourishing the offspring. These facts are clearly explicable
on the assumption that at one time the number of offspring at a single
birth was considerable, and that in this way the preservation of the
species was favoured (Wiedersheim).
It is a very interesting fact that the principal “organ of
voluptuousness” in women, the clitoris, is notably diminished in size
absolutely and relatively as compared with the clitoris of apes. It
certainly no longer represents an organ so susceptible to voluptuous
stimulation and excitement as it was assumed to be by the older
physicians and physiologists; so that, for example, Van Swieten, the
celebrated body physician of the Empress Maria Theresa, recommended
_titillatio clitoridis_ as the most certain means of curing the sexual
insensibility of his royal patient.
Moreover, the common variations in the external configuration of the
female genital organs, which Rudolf Bergh has very fully and minutely
described in his “Symbolæ ad Cognitionem Genitalium Externorum
Femineorum,” are largely dependent on such arrests of development,
which, indeed, occur also in the male.
A very remarkable phenomenon in the course of human evolution has been
the =diminution in the hairy covering of the body=. As compared with the
other mammalia, especially those most nearly allied to man--the
anthropoid apes--man is relatively bald. This baldness has been
=gradually acquired=, and seems likely to progress further in the
future. Numerous hypotheses have been propounded regarding the purpose
and true cause of this progressive atrophy of the hairy covering which
originally extended over the entire surface of the body. The effect of
tropical climate will not suffice to account for the change, for in the
tropics the hairy covering is useful for a covering against the rays of
the sun--witness the thick hairy coat of the tropical apes. More apt is
the idea of sexual selection, advanced by Darwin in explanation of the
loss of hair. According to this theory, the comparatively balder women
were preferred by the men to those with a thicker covering of hair.
Helbig raises the objection that primitive man in sexual intercourse
would observe only the genital organs and the parts in their immediate
neighbourhood. Yet in this region the sexually mature woman has retained
a portion of the hairy covering of the body. We must therefore, in order
to rescue the idea of sexual selection as an explanation of the
increasing baldness of the human race, assume that primitive man had
cultivated æsthetic tastes, and was not an extremely sensual person, and
that in his choice of a partner he would be guided by the appearance of
the woman’s entire body. This, however, is a very questionable
assumption. Very doubtful also is the suggested connexion between
largely developed dentition and the baldness of the skin (Helbig). More
apposite is W. Bölsche’s view that the atrophy of the human hairy
covering is related to the adoption of an =artificial covering=. Since
that time the thick hairy covering of the skin was felt to be
burdensome, since it hindered perspiration beneath the clothing, and
also favoured the harbouring of parasites, fleas, lice, etc., which play
so large a part in the annoyance of all hair-covered mammals. In these
circumstances bareness of skin became an ideal to primitive man. By
rubbing away the hair beneath the clothes, by cutting it short, and by
pulling it out by the roots, an artificial baldness was produced; this
then became an ideal of beauty. Thus it happened in the choice of a
partner that those individuals less hairy than others were preferred,
and thus gradually by this process of sexual selection the race became
continually less hairy, until ultimately the relative baldness of the
present day was attained.
In certain parts of the body, especially in the armpits and in the
neighbourhood of the external genital organs, the thick hairy covering
has been retained. This may, perhaps, be dependent upon the fact that
from the axillary and pubic hair certain erotic stimuli proceed, more
especially certain odours. In fact, it is possible that the hair of
those regions in which strong-smelling secretions were produced have
played the part of scent-sprinklers, analogous to the “perfume brushes”
of butterflies.
In a similar way, the preservation of an exceptionally rich development
of the hair of a woman’s head may be explained by the fact that
therefrom erotically stimulating odours unquestionably proceed. This
circumstance has influenced sexual selection in the direction of the
preservation and continual increase in the length of the hair of a
woman’s head; while, in the opposite direction, and equally by the
process of sexual selection, the female body has been much more fully
deprived of hair than that of the male.
It seems, however, that this process of loss of hair is not yet
completed. The male beard has already ceased to play the part of a
sexual lure, which it formerly undoubtedly possessed. Schopenhauer’s
opinion, that with the advance of civilization the beard will disappear,
probably represents the truth; he regarded shaving as a sign of the
higher civilization. It is certainly a logical postulate of the natural
course of development.[4]
Havelock Ellis, in “Man and Woman,” comes to the conclusion that the
bodily development of our race is a progress in the direction of a
youthful type. This is merely another way of expressing the fact that
in the case of many organs and systems, and more especially in the case
of the hairy covering of the skin, an arrest of development has
occurred, and it is a recognition of the fact that the retrogressive
metamorphosis of these organs is a compensation for the dominating and
enormous development of the brain.
Parallel with this development of the brain there has occurred a
progressive development of sexuality from the lowest animal instinct to
the highest human “love.” The way of the spirit in love becomes
predominant _pari passu_ with the development of mankind in
civilization. There is a profound meaning in the saying of Schopenhauer
that the transformation of the sexual impulse into passionate love
represents the victory of the intelligence over the will. And when
another writer of genius has described the history of civilization as
the history of the progress of mankind from nearer to =more remote=,
more spiritual stimuli of pleasure, this is above all true of human
love.
In lower states of human love these spiritual elements are undoubtedly
wanting. Amongst primitive men the manifestations of sexuality can have
differed in no wise from those of the animals most nearly related to
them. Their love was still a pure animal instinct. The Asiatic myth
which divided the earliest periods of human history in this way,
asserting that the inhabitants of paradise loved for thousands of years
merely by means of glances, later by a kiss, by simple physical contact,
until ultimately they underwent a “fall” through adopting the debased
methods of common animal sexual indulgence--this infantile mythology
would be accurate enough if one inverted the series of stages in the
evolution of love.
This view is confirmed by the fact that, according to the most recent
investigation into the history of primitive man, it is extremely
probable that to palæolithic man of the earlier diluvial period the idea
of the spiritual was still completely unknown--that palæolithic man was,
in fact, purely a creature of impulse--an opinion already maintained by
Darwin in his work on the “Descent of Man.” In the sexual instinct,
above all, every dualistic division into physical and spiritual was
entirely foreign to primitive man. The more primitive the state of
civilization, the less is the idea “love” known, a fact first
established by Lubbock. Even at the present day, in regard to this
matter, there is a notable difference between the upper and the lower
classes in a European civilized community. For example, Elard Hugo
Meyer, in his excellent “Deutsche Volkskunde” (“German Folk-lore,” p.
152; Strasburg, 1898), states that from Eastern Friesland to the Alps
amongst the common people the word “love,” to us so indispensable and so
exalted, is entirely unknown; in its place words expressing rather the
sensual side of the impulse are employed.
Rousseau suggested that primitive man embraced primitive woman only in
the fugitive moments of domination by his instinctive impulse. It is no
doubt very probable that primæval man shared with other animals the
periodicity of the sexual impulse; this periodicity disappeared only in
the subsequent course of human development, and traces of it yet remain.
It is probable that this periodicity of the sexual impulse was
associated with variations in the supply of nutriment, and was thus, as
Darwin assumes, a kind of natural obstacle to too rapid an increase in
the population. Later, in consequence of an increase in individual
security, and of a more enduring supply of abundant nutriment, such
periodic rutting ceased to occur, or was preserved only in the form of
menstruation (ovulation) in women, in whom at this period there is a
perceptible increase in sexual excitability. =Among savage races this
periodicity of the sexual impulse, its increase at definite seasons of
the year, is still clearly manifested even in the male.= Heape and
Havelock Ellis have carefully studied this primitive phenomenon, and
have adduced numerous proofs of its truth.[5]
Only the human female experiences true “menstruation”; that is to say,
only in women is the maturation of the ovum accompanied by a monthly
discharge of blood from the genital passage. The so-called menstruation
of female apes is limited to a periodic swelling of the external
genital organs, with a mucous discharge therefrom. According to
Metchnikoff, the menstruation of apes constitutes the intermediate stage
between the rutting of the lower animals and the menstruation of the
human female. This latter is a new acquisition, the purpose of which is
perhaps the limitation of fertility and the prevention of the
excessively early marriage of girls.
With the advanced development of the brain, the old periodic rutting, of
which rudiments still persist, became more and more subordinate to the
conscious will, was transformed more and more into enduring love.
Charles Letourneau writes:
“If we go to the root of the matter, we find that human love is in its
essence merely the rutting season in a reasoning being; it increases
all the vital forces of the human being, just as rutting increases
those of the lower animals. If love apparently differs enormously from
rutting, this is merely due to the fact that the reproductive impulse,
the most primitive of all impulses, becomes in developed nerve centres
more diffuse in its sphere of operations, and thus in man awakens and
excites a whole province of psychical life which is entirely unknown
to the lower animals.”
Philosophers and scientific observers have defined the distinction
between human and animal love as consisting in the fact that man can
love at all times, the animal periodically only; but this distinction
certainly does not apply to the beginnings of human development; it
originates beyond question with the =first appearance of the spiritual
element in love=. This alone makes man capable of enduring love, this
alone frees him from dependence upon periodic rutting seasons. The
=prolongation= of love by the introduction of the spiritual element was
already pointed out by Kant, whose writings (especially the lesser ones)
are rich in valuable observations of a similar kind. In his treatise
published in 1786, “The Probable Beginning of Human History,” he says
regarding the sexual instinct:
“Reason, as soon as it had become active, did not delay to exert its
influence also in the sexual sphere. Man soon discovered that the
stimulus of sex, which in animals depended merely on a transient and
for the most part periodic impulse, was in his own case =capable of
prolongation, and indeed of increase, by the force of imagination=.
This influence works more moderately, it is true, but with more
persistence and more evenness the more the affair is withdrawn from
the dominion of the senses, so that the satiety produced by the
gratification of a purely animal passion is avoided.”
This important question regarding the origin of the love of human beings
as contrasted with the periodic instinct of the lower animals and
primitive man has hitherto, strangely enough, hardly received any
attention, notwithstanding the fact that it is one of the most important
evolutionary problems in the history of human civilization, and
represents to a certain extent the only problem in the primitive history
of love.
The =principal= cause of the perennial nature of human love, as
contrasted with the periodic character of the sexual impulse of the
lower animals, must, as Kant says, be sought in the appearance of these
psychical relations between the sexes. Hypotheses such as that put
forward by Dr. W. Rheinhard in his book, “Man considered as an Animal
Species, and his Impulses,” according to which the prolonged
=separation= of the sexes, consequent on the increased difficulty in the
provision of sufficient nutriment (more especially in the Ice Age), led
to an incomplete satisfaction of the sexual impulse during the rutting
season, and thus gave rise to an =enduring= sexual excitement, cannot be
treated seriously. The same author suggests that the excessive
=consumption of meat= of the Ice Age, owing to the absence of vegetable
food, was responsible for the stronger stimulation of the sexual
impulse, and for its prolongation beyond the rutting season.
Unquestionably Kant’s explanation is the only true one; it is the one
which Schiller had in his mind when in his essay on the connexion
between the animal and the spiritual nature of man, he spoke of the
happiness of the animals as of such a kind that
“it is dependent merely upon the periods of the organism, and these
are subject to chance, to blind hazard, because this happiness rests
solely on sensation.”
The sexual love of primitive man was, like this, purely instinctive and
impulsive.
For him, beginning, course, and end, of every love-process was “directly
=linear=, with no to-and-fro oscillations into the indefinite province
of the transcendental.” The need for love and the satisfaction of that
need were in primitive man entirely limited to the physical process of
sexual activity (L. Jacobowski, “The Beginnings of Poetry,” p. 84).
It was the interpenetration of the whole of sexuality with spiritual
elements which first interrupted this single line of sensation, making
in a sense two lines: hence arose the frequently unhappy dualism between
body and mind in our experience of love; and yet at the same time it was
the cause of the elevation of human love to purely =individual=
feelings, which, extending far beyond the purposes of reproduction,
subserved the spiritual demands of the loving individual himself.[6]
Natural science, and especially the doctrine of descent, have shown that
in the higher animal world, to which we have proved primitive man
belongs, a =complication= of the sexual impulse exists as compared to
this condition in lower forms; this complication consists mainly in the
intimate association of =sensory stimuli= with the sexual impulse. In a
speech to monks, reported in the Pali Canon, Buddha has well described
the sexual part played by the various senses:
“I do not know, young men, any other =form= which fetters the heart of
man like a woman’s form.
“A woman’s form, young men, fetters the heart of man.
“I do not know, young men, any other =voice= which fetters the heart
of man like the voice of woman.
“The voice of woman, young men, fetters the heart of man.
“I do not know, young men, any other =odour= which fetters the heart
of man like the odour of woman.
“The odour of woman, young men, fetters the heart of man.
“I do not know, young men, any other =taste= which fetters the heart
of man like the taste of woman.
“The taste of woman, young men, fetters the heart of man.
“I do not know, young men, any =touch= which fetters the heart of man
like the touch of woman.
“The touch of woman, young men, fetters the heart of man.”
Then there follows, in the same rhythmical form, an enumeration of the
sexual stimuli emanating from woman through eye, ear, smell, taste, and
touch.
Associated with the progress towards “love” of this sexual impulse
enriched by sensory stimuli was a =preponderance=, a prevalence, of
certain particular sensory stimuli. Herein are certainly to be found the
beginnings of a spiritualization of purely animal instincts and
impulses.
The most important part in the amatory life of man is played, even at
the present day, by the sense of touch, and by the two higher senses,
sight and hearing, these two latter containing so many spiritual
elements.
The =sense of touch= is more widely extended in space than the other
senses, and for this reason touch is quantitatively the most excitable
of the senses. The stimulation of the sensory nerves of the skin, the
enormous number of which suffices to explain the richness of sensation
through the skin, experienced as touch, tickling, or slight pain,
transmits very similar sensations to the voluptuous sensorium. The
relationship between these various modes of sensation is confirmed by
the fact that the terminals of the sensory nerves of the skin, the
so-called corpuscles of Vater or Pacini, closely resemble in structure
the corpuscles of Krause found on the glans penis and glans clitoridis,
on the prepuce of the clitoris, the labia majora, and on the papillæ of
the red margin of the lip. From this point of view, the entire skin may
be regarded as a huge organ of voluptuous sensation, of which the skin
of the external organs of conjugation is most strongly susceptible to
stimulation.
Mantegazza therefore describes sexual love as a higher form of tactile
sensation. In human beings of a baser disposition love is no more than a
touch. Between the chaste stroking of the hair and the violent storm of
the sexual orgasm there is a quantitative, but not a qualitative
difference. The sense of touch is a profoundly sexual sense, which at
the present day plays much the same part as was in primitive times
played by the sense of smell.
“The skin,” says Wilhelm Bölsche, “became the great procurer, the
dominant intermediary of love, for the multicellular animals, in which
complete conjugation of the cell bodies had become impossible, so that
their sexual gratification had to be obtained by distance-love, by
contact-love. Thus the skin was the primitive area of voluptuous
sensation, the arena of the supreme bodily triumph of this
distance-love.”
It has been well said that the first intentional touching of a part of
the skin of the loved one is already a half-sexual union; and this view
is confirmed by the fact that such intimate bodily contacts, even when
they occur between parts far distant from sexual organs, very speedily
lead to states of marked excitement of these organs. Quite rightly,
therefore, the pleasurable sensations aroused by means of cutaneous
sensibility are regarded by Magnus Hirschfeld as the stages of
transition along which the power of self-command and the capacity for
resisting the impulses arising out of the transformation of sensory
perceptions into movements and actions most commonly break down. He who
avoids these first contacts, best protects himself against the danger
of being overpowered by his sexual impulse, and of blindly following
where that impulse leads--if, for example, he wishes to avoid
intercourse with a person whom he suspects to be suffering from some
venereal disease.
Areas of skin more especially susceptible to sexual stimulation, the
so-called erogenic areas, are those parts of the body where skin and
mucous membrane meet--above all therefore the lips, but also the region
of the anus, the female genital organs, and the nipples of the female
breast. That in certain circumstances even the eye may be an erogenic
zone is shown by the remarkable observation of Dr. Emil Bock, that in
many female patients a gentle inunction of Pagenstecher’s ointment into
the eye gives rise to changes of countenance showing that a sexual
orgasm is occurring.
The contact of the lips in the =kiss= is one of the most powerful
stimuli of love.[7] An Arabian author of the sixteenth century (Sheikh
Nefzawi) in his work, “The Perfumed Garden,” an Arabian _ars amandi_,
alludes to this fact. He quotes the verses of an Arabian poet:
“When the heart burns with love,
It finds, alas, nowhere a cure;
No witch’s magic art
Will give the heart that for which it thirsts;
The working of no charm
Will perform the desired miracle;
And the most intimate embrace
Leaves the heart cold and unsatisfied--
If the rapture of the kiss is wanting.”
The physiologist Burdach, influenced by the then dominant natural
philosophy of Schelling, defined the kiss as “the symbol of the union of
souls,” analogous to “the galvanic contact between a positively and a
negatively electrified body; it increases sexual polarity, permeates the
entire body, and if impure transfers sin from one individual to the
other.” Goethe has very perspicuously described sexual union in a kiss:
“Eagerly she sucks the flames of his mouth:
Each is conscious only of the other.”
And Byron writes:
“A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth and love,
And beauty, all concentrating like rays
Into one focus kindled from above;
Such kisses as belong to early days,
Where heart and soul and sense in concert move,
And the blood’s lava, and the pulse a blaze,
Each kiss a heart-quake--for a kiss’s strength,
I think it must be reckoned by its length.”
It is therefore a true saying, that a woman who permits a man to kiss
her will ultimately grant him complete possession.[8] Moreover, by the
majority of finely sensitive women the kiss is valued just as highly as
the last favour.[9]
The problem of the =origin= of the kiss, which Scheffel, in his book
(“Trompeter von Säckingen”), has treated in humorous verse, has recently
been investigated by the methods of natural science. The lip kiss is
peculiar to man and in him the impulse to kiss is not innate, but has
been gradually developed, and the kiss has only acquired by degrees a
relation to the sexual sphere.
Havelock Ellis has recently made an interesting investigation regarding
the origin of the kiss, and has proved that the love kiss has developed
from the primitive maternal kiss and from the sucking of the infant at
the maternal breast,[10] which are customary in regions where the sexual
kiss is unknown. Both the sense of touch and the sense of smell play a
part in this primitive kiss, and to simple contact primitive man
superadded both licking and biting. This primitive physiological sadism
of the biting kiss was probably inherited from the lower animals, which
when copulating often bite one another (Kleist in “Penthesilea” writes
“Küsse”--kissing--rhymes with “Bisse”--biting). Earlier authors--as, for
example, Mohnike, in his admirable essay on the sexual instinct--have
inferred from the existence of these passionate accompaniments of the
kiss that the latter has an intimate connexion with the nutritive
impulse. We have indeed the familiar expression, “I could eat you for
love.” Indeed, according to Mohnike, the frenzy of the wild kisses of
passionate love may actually lead to anthropophagy, as in a case
reported by Metzger, in which a young man on his wedding night actually
bit and began to devour his wife. Although in this case we doubtless
have to do with an insane individual, such sadistic feelings in a lesser
degree are so often observed in association with kissing that they may
be regarded as physiological.[11]
In the novel “Hunger,” by Knut Hamsun, the author describes a peculiar
relationship between hunger and the _libido sexualis_. Georg Lomer also,
in the beginning of his thoughtful work, “Love and Psychosis”
(Wiesbaden, 1907), expresses the opinion that hunger and love are not
opposites, but that one is rather the completion, the larval state, or
the sublimation, of the other. In certain species of spiders the male
runs the danger, when performing his share in sexual congress, of being
actually devoured by the stronger female.
The kiss by contact between the lips or neighbouring parts of the skin
is of European origin, and even here is a comparatively recent practice,
for the ancients very rarely allude to it. Its erotic significance was
early pointed out by Indian, Oriental, and Roman poets. Amongst the
Mongol races the so-called olfactory kiss (“smell-kiss”) is in much more
common use. In this the nose is apposed to the cheek of the beloved
person, and the expired air and the odour arising from the cheek are
inhaled.
With the diffusion of European civilization, the European kiss of
contact has also been diffused. It is no longer possible to determine
whether the peculiar connexion between the lips and the genital organs,
as manifested for example by the growth of hair on the upper lip at
puberty in the male sex, and also by the well-known thick “sensual” lips
often seen in individuals with exceptionally powerful sexual impulses,
is originally primary, or merely a secondary result of the employment of
the lips in a sexual caress.[12]
To our consideration of the kiss we may naturally append a few remarks
on the rôle of the =sense of taste= in human love. Inasmuch as taste is
almost invariably closely connected with smell, we are rarely able to
prove in an individual case whether an impression of taste or an
impression of smell more powerfully affects the _vita sexualis_. In
kissing, an unconscious tasting of the beloved person seems often to
play a part; and as regards the kissing of other parts of the body,
especially the genital organs, at the acme of sexual excitement this
undoubtedly often occurs. In Norwegian folk-tales, and in a South
Hungarian song published by Friedrich S. Krauss, this tasting of the
woman is very realistically described. The taste for sweets has also
been largely associated with sexuality. Children who are fond of sweets,
who have, as it is called, a sweet tooth, are also sensually disposed,
sexually more excitable, and more inclined to the practice of onanism,
than other children. The sensory impulses have therefore been classified
as the hunger impulse and the sexual impulse respectively. A certain
amount of truth appears to lie in these observations.
Much greater influence than these lower senses possess is exerted in the
sexual sphere on modern civilized man by the higher, truly
=intellectual= senses, =sight= and =hearing=. With the adoption of the
upright posture they gained an advantage over the sense of smell and
taste.
In his work “Ideas Concerning the Philosophy of Human History” Herder
writes:
“In the beginning all the senses of man had but a small area of
action, and =the lower senses were more active than the higher=. We
see this among savages of the present day: smell and taste are their
guides, as they are in the case of the lower animals. But when man is
raised above the earth and the undergrowth, smell is no longer in
command, but the eye: it has a wider kingdom, and accustoms itself
from early childhood to the finest geometry of lines and colours. The
ear, deeply placed beneath the projecting skull, has closer access to
the inner chamber for the collection of ideas, whilst in the lower
animals the ear stands upright, and in many is so formed as to point
in the direction of the sound.”
Smell, taste, and even touch, have but little æsthetic value as compared
with the two higher senses, because in the former the material
preponderates too greatly, and because they are more closely related
with the pure animal impulses than are sight and hearing. Johannes
Volkelt, in his valuable work “Æsthetics,” has carried on an interesting
investigation of this question, and comes to the conclusion that in
sight and hearing perception proceeds without any trace of the material;
in touch and taste, on the other hand, the material enormously
predominates, whilst smell stands between. Schiller wrote:
“In the case of the eye and the ear the surrounding matter is rejected
by the senses; for this reason, these two senses give the freest
æsthetic enjoyment unalloyed with animal lust.”
The sense of sight is a true æsthetic sense in relation to the _vita
sexualis_; it is the first messenger of love. By means of this sense,
colour and form become sexual stimuli: by the sense of sight the entire
impression of the beloved personality is first conveyed; sympathy and
sexual attraction are almost always at first dependent upon sight. In
regard to love’s choice, sight is unquestionably the sense of the
greatest importance.
According to researches guided by the light of the modern doctrine of
evolution, we can no longer doubt that the beauty of the living world is
intimately connected with the sexual life, and is indeed by this first
called into being. All beauty is, to use the words of Darwin and P. J.
Möbius, “love become capable of perception,” and, let us ourselves add,
love become capable of perception by means of the sense of sight. The
figure, the carriage, the gait, the clothing, the adornment, the
observation of the beauties of the various parts of the body of the
beloved person--all these impressions, received by means of the sense of
sight, have the most powerful erotic influence.
Havelock Ellis also comes to the conclusion that for mankind the ideal
of a suitable love-partner is based far more upon the =data of the sense
of sight= than upon those of touch, smell, and hearing.
However, in addition to the sense of sight, the sense of hearing plays a
part of considerable importance in the amatory life of mankind. A
sufficient indication of this fact is given by the change occurring in a
man’s voice at the time of puberty. Darwin’s classical investigations
prove beyond a possibility of doubt the intimate relationship between
the voice and sexual life. The masculine voice, especially, has a
sexually stimulating effect upon woman; but the converse influence of a
woman’s voice upon man may also be observed. In the other mammalia, it
is especially in the rutting season that the voice is used as a means of
sexual allurement. The repetition of this vocal lure at measured
intervals gives rise to rhythm and song. The rhythmical repetition of
the same tone possesses something highly suggestive, fascinating, and so
gives rise to sexual attraction and charm in the most powerful manner.
Here lies the origin of the profound erotic influence of singing and
music. Darwin assumes that the early progenitors of mankind, before they
had acquired the faculty of expressing their mutual love in articulate
speech, used to charm one another by musical tones and rhythms. Woman
is far more susceptible than man to the sexual influence of singing or
music, but man himself is by no means indifferent to the charms of the
beautiful feminine voice. The soft tones of a woman’s voice are, for
many men, the first enthralling disclosure of woman’s nature. The French
physician and natural philosopher Moreau relates that he was once
compelled to renounce the pleasure of seeing the performance of a
beautiful actress, for only thus could he overcome a violent outburst of
sexual passion which was evoked in him by the mere stimulus of her
voice.
[4] If at the present day an inquiry were instituted among the
cultured women of European and Anglo-American descent, whether bearded
or beardless men more nearly corresponded to their ideal of beauty,
there can be little doubt that the majority--perhaps a very large
majority--would declare against a full beard.
[5] Recently, apart from sexual periodicity, a general periodicity of
vital manifestations, more especially of the psychical phenomena
associated with sexuality, has been proved to exist in both sexes. In
a work that attracted much attention--“The Course of Life: Elements of
Exact Biology” (Vienna, 1905)--Wilhelm Fliess proved the occurrence in
the human species of a twenty-three day “masculine,” and a
twenty-eight day “feminine” period. Not merely do physical phenomena
recur quite spontaneously at intervals of twenty-three and
twenty-eight days respectively, but the same is true of perceptions,
feelings, and voluntary impulses. Hermann Swoboda, a thoughtful
supporter of Fliess’s theory, has treated this question in two
works--“The Periods of the Human Organism in their Psychological and
Biological Significance” (Leipzig and Vienna, 1904), and “Studies in
the Elements of Psychology” (Leipzig and Vienna, 1905). In these he
has described also twenty-three-hour and eighteen-hour vital
undulations in human beings, and has discussed the significance of
this periodicity to psychology. These researches of Fliess and Swoboda
need to be confirmed by other investigators before they can be
regarded as definite additions to our scientific knowledge. In this
connexion also the older work of Carl Reinl--“Undulatory Movements of
the Vital Processes in Woman” (Leipzig, 1884)--may be consulted. See
also Van de Velde’s “Ovarian Functions, Undulatory Movement, and
Menstrual Hæmorrhage” (Jena, 1905).
[6] Virey likewise explains the enduring nature of human love as
dependent upon an excess of potent nutritive material, whereas the
poor savages of Northern Europe and America, who must often go hungry,
really experience no more than an instant of sexual pleasure, just
like the wild animals, who rut only at certain distinct seasons. For
the same reason, our domestic animals, which have a superfluous supply
of nutriment, copulate far more frequently. And in our own case, the
incessant intimate association of the sexes in our domestic life is a
continued source of ever-renewed sexual needs, even contrary to our
own will. The assumption of the =upright posture= by man, which is so
intimately connected with the preponderance of the human brain, is
also regarded by Virey as “an enduring cause of sexual excitement.”
_Cf._ J. J. Virey, “Das Weib” (“Woman”), p. 301; Leipzig, 1827.
[7] Recently Gualino [“Il Riflesso Sessuale nell’ Eccitamento alle
Labbra” (“The Sexual Reflex resulting from the Stimulation of the
Lips”), published in the Italian “Archives of Psychiatry,” 1904, p.
341 _et seq._] by mechanical stimulation of the red parts of the lips,
has produced erotic ideas and congestion of the genital organs, and
this proves that the lips are an erogenic zone. Compare also the
interesting remarks of Professor Petermann and Dr. Näcke on the origin
of the kiss, in the German “Archives of Criminal Anthropology,” 1904,
vol. xvi., pp. 356, 357.
[8] A kiss is on the boundary-line between erotism and sexual
enjoyment. Bölsche calls it the true transitional form between
fusion-love and distance-love. At the instant of the kiss the distance
between the two lovers is certainly reduced to a minimum; the
distance-love, therefore, is on the point of becoming fusion-love. On
the other hand, however, the kiss is still simply tactile contact, and
contact of the heads only, the actual seat in mankind of the sentiment
of distance-love. The kiss represents a yearning for complete
fusion-love, and yet is at the same time a symbol of purely spiritual
distance-love.
[9] Especially in France is this the case. Madame Adam describes very
tastefully this feeling of loss of virtue after granting a kiss.
[10] _Cf._ also J. Librowicz, “The Kiss and Kissing,” p. 22 (Hamburg,
1877).
[11] It is interesting to observe that the Chinese regard the European
kiss as a sign of cannibalism [d’Enjoy, “Le Baiser en Europe et en
Chine” (“The Kiss in Europe and in China”), _Bulletin de la Société
d’Anthropologie_, Paris, 1897, No. 2.]
[12] We can allude only in passing to the celebrated genito-labial
nerve of Voltaire.
CHAPTER III
THE SECONDARY PHENOMENA OF HUMAN LOVE (REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS, SEXUAL
IMPULSE, SEXUAL ACT)
“_Sexual passion is a matter of universal experience; and speaking
broadly and generally, we may say it is a matter on which it is quite
desirable that every adult at some time or other should have actual
experience._”--EDWARD CARPENTER.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER III
Origin and purpose of the reproductive organs -- Progressive
differentiation of these organs -- Original identity of their
rudiments in the two sexes -- Weininger’s theory of the intermixture
of the sexual elements -- This theory anticipated by Heinse --
Bisexuality -- The actual significance of bisexuality trifling --
Phylogenetic explanation of the organs of sexual congress -- Bölsche’s
three problems -- The “aperture-problem” -- Connexion between the
genital aperture and the urinary passage -- Between the genital
aperture and the anus -- Significance in relation to certain sexual
aberrations -- The “member-problem” -- Earlier modes of fixation
during coitus -- Sucking and biting -- The action of the limbs (the
embrace) -- The penis -- Its various forms -- The penis-bone -- The
free character of the human penis -- The descent of the testicles --
The feminine rudiment of the penis -- Its original function rendered
superfluous by the further evolution of the sexual orifice --
Transformation into the clitoris and the labia minora -- The
“libido-problem” -- Voluptuousness a phenomenon of distance-love --
Questionable specificity of voluptuousness -- Theory of the “sexual
sense” and of the “sexual cells” -- Relations of voluptuousness to
tickling and to painful sensations -- A special variety of contact
stimuli -- Localization to the genital organs -- The sexual impulse --
Relative independence of the impulse from the reproductive glands --
Genesis of sexual excitement -- Stage of prelibido (sexual tension) --
Terminal libido (sexual gratification) -- Symptoms and early
appearance of prelibido -- Causes of sexual tension -- Freud’s
chemical theory of sexual tension -- The act of sexual intercourse --
Roubaud’s description of coitus -- Demeanour of woman in coitus --
Magendie on this subject -- Dr. Theopold’s observations --
Physiological phenomena associated with coitus -- Sadistic and
masochistic elements -- The normal position during sexual intercourse
-- Figuræ Veneris -- Significance of the normal position in relation
to civilization.
CHAPTER III
As the progressive evolution of the multicellular organism continued,
and there occurred an increasing differentiation of the individual
portions of the body, it became necessary that the very simple process
of reproduction of the unicellular organism (by simple cell-division or
by conjugation) should, in the multicellular organisms of the metazoa,
be ensured and facilitated by the development of new apparatus. This was
all the more necessary because, owing to the differentiation of the
other organs, the originally independent reproductive elements became
more and more dependent upon the parent organism, and lost their former
capacity for obtaining nourishment by means of their own activity. Hence
it became necessary that the period of time elapsing between the moment
when the reproductive cells were freed from the parent organism and the
moment in which they coalesced to form a new individual should be
shortened to a minimum. This purpose is subserved by apparatus which
renders possible the =secure= and =rapid= coalescence of the two
reproductive elements, having the form of special =excretory canals=
with contractile walls, through which the two sexual elements pass.
These are the “=copulatory organs=,” by means of which the distance
between the two loving individuals is abridged. According to the
exhaustive investigations of Ferdinand Simon, the perfection and
differentiation of these conducting canals proceeds _pari passu_ with
the higher development of the organism.
Simultaneously therewith proceeds the differentiation of the proper
internal reproductive organs, the rudiments of which are =identical= in
the two sexes. A portion of these primitively identical structures
undergoes further development in the male, another portion undergoes
further development in the female, whilst in both sexes rudiments of the
earlier condition are retained, and these bear witness to the primitive
state in which =both= reproductive glands were present in a single
individual (hermaphroditism). In this sense Weininger’s theory
applies--viz., that there is no absolutely male and no absolutely female
individual, that in every man there is something of woman, and in every
woman something of man, and that between the two various transitional
forms, sexual “intermediate stages,” exist. Therefore, according to this
view, every individual has in his composition so many fractions “man”
and so many fractions “woman,” and according to the preponderance of
one set of elements or the other, he must be assigned to one or the
other sex. This theory, which Weininger regards as his own discovery,
=is by no means new=, and already finds a place in Heinse’s
“Ardinghello,” where we read:
“I find it therefore necessary to assume the existence in Nature of
masculine and feminine elements. =That man is nearest perfection who
is composed entirely of masculine elements, and that woman perhaps is
nearest perfection who contains only so many feminine elements as to
be able to remain woman; whilst that man is the worst who contains
only so many masculine elements as to qualify for the title of man.=”
Magnus Hirschfeld, to whom this noteworthy passage in Heinse’s book
appears to be unknown, has recently, in his valuable monographs, “Sexual
Stages of Transition” (Leipzig, 1905) and “The Nature of Love” (Leipzig,
1906), thoroughly investigated these relations, and quotes, among
others, sayings of Darwin and Weismann, according to which the latent
presence of opposite sexual characters in every sexually differentiated
bion must be regarded as a normal arrangement. Unquestionably the widely
diffused phenomenon of “psychical hermaphroditism,” or “spiritual
bisexuality,” is connected with the physical facts just enumerated, and
provides us with the key for the understanding of the nature of
homosexuality. Both these states--the physical and the mental--may be
referred to primitive conditions of sexuality. They cannot play any
serious part in the future course of human evolution, of which the
progressive differentiation of the sexes is so marked a characteristic.
In contrast with this differentiation, these rudimentary sexual
conditions are practically devoid of significance. Suggestion, indeed,
the influence of momentary tendencies of the time and of transient
mental states, may temporarily deceive us. And when, for example,
Hirschfeld maintains that in the central nervous system of women the
more masculine, rational qualities, and in the central nervous system of
men the more feminine, emotional qualities, are respectively on the
increase, we must answer, in the first place, that this is not generally
true, and, in the second place, that, in so far as it is true, it is a
passing phenomenon, which has already provoked a powerful reaction in
the =opposite= direction.[13] The exuviæ of a dead condition cannot
again be vitalized.
The original purpose of the organs of sexual congress is, then, to
safeguard and to facilitate, in the more complicated conditions peculiar
to multicellular organisms, the conjugation of the two reproductive
cells. They do not exist, as Eduard von Hartmann assumes, as a mere lure
to voluptuousness, to induce man to continue the practice of sexual
congress, purely instinctive in his animal ancestors, but now endangered
by the development of the higher type of consciousness. For animals
without organs of sexual congress also experience a voluptuous sensation
at the instant of the sexual orgasm and of procreation.
The history of evolution alone solves the riddle of the origin of the
organs of sexual congress, and renders their purpose clear to us. In a
most ingenious manner, W. Bölsche distinguishes three problems in this
history of the genital organs: the “=aperture-problem=,” the
“=member-problem=,” and the “=libido-problem=.”
The first problem relates to the character and the position of the two
apertures from which the sexual products, the reproductive cells, issue;
the second relates to the exact mutual adaptation of the male and the
female reproductive apertures; the third relates to the impulse to the
intimate apposition of the genital apertures in consequence of a
powerful nervous stimulus.
The most remarkable fact that we encounter in our consideration of the
first problem--the “aperture-problem”--is the intimate association
between the sexual aperture and the excretory canal of the urinary
apparatus both in woman and in man--in the latter, indeed, the
association is more pronounced. There seems to be a sort of parsimony on
the part of Nature to combine so closely these two excretory tubes of
the urine and of the products of sexual activity. Phylogenetically,
indeed, the reproductive products originally passed with the urine
freely into the open, and it was there that their conjugation took
place. Among certain worms still existing at the present day we find
this “urine-love.” Later, the genital canal became separated from the
urinary canal, but the two tubes remained partly united at their
outlets, opening side by side at the same part of the body. In man,
indeed, the urethra still subserves the double purpose of the excretion
of urine and the emission of semen. In woman the two excretory apertures
are distinct, but they open in close proximity into the genital fissure
between the thighs.
The intimate connexion which thus obtains between the urinary and the
reproductive organs is not without significance for the understanding of
certain aberrations of the _libido sexualis_. The same is true of the
relations between the orifice of the genital passage and the similarly
adjacent aperture of the large intestine, the anus. “Anus,” or, better,
“cloaca love,” plays a part, indeed, in many fishes, amphibia, and
reptiles; in these the act of procreation and the excretion of urine and
fæces all take place by way of the cloaca. Among the mammals, at an
early stage of phylogenetic development the intestine became completely
separated from the sexual rudiment and the sexual excretory passages;
and it is only in the proximity of the respective orifices that we find
an indication of the primitive association. The act of pæderasty reminds
us of the same fact.
The “aperture-problem” itself leads us, in the course of progressive
development, to the “member-problem”--that is to say, to the problem of
the more accurate apposition of the two reproductive apertures. The
penis, by its introduction into the body of a member of the opposite
sex, acts as a means for the shortening of distance-love; it serves for
the fixation, for the clamping together, of the copulating pair, which
in earlier stages of animal life was effected by sucking and biting; for
example, in birds, who for the most part lack an actual penis, the cock
holds the hen firmly with his beak during intercourse, and the sucking
and biting which often occur in human beings in the sexual act persist
as a reminiscence of these relations. In various vertebrates other means
of fixation are employed: by the shape of fins, of arms, or of legs, a
close “embrace” is rendered possible; finally, the evolution of a
special member for sexual purposes closed the long series of means of
ensuring union. Originally no more than a peg or a spine, in man the
penis is first developed into the form of an absolutely free limb. Dogs,
beasts of prey, rodents, bats, and apes, have a strong bone in the
organ, the so-called “penis-bone.” In man this bone is lacking; the
penis has become entirely free. W. Bölsche writes:
“In relation to the large, heavy, massive trunk and thighs, the
sharply individualized, independent, mobile penis appears as a kind of
spiritualized central point; as it were, a finger or a small third
hand to the trunk, appearing to the eye to stand in rhythmical
relation with the hands, right and left.”
In phylogenetic parallelism with the development of the penis, proceeds
(from the marsupials upwards) the _descensus testiculorum_, the descent
of the male reproductive glands, the testicles, until they attain their
final position in the scrotum, beneath the penis. Here also we can
recognize the principle of “limb-mobility,” mentally refined mobility.
In the clitoris woman also possesses a rudiment of a primitive penis.
By the apposition of the two limbs, a more complete and rapid
conjunction of the reciprocal sexual products must have been effected.
But the further development of the large sexual aperture of the female
checked the progressive development of this primitive penis, made it to
some extent superfluous, since now, by the adaptation of the male penis
to the female sexual aperture, a sufficient internal fixation in the act
of copulation was rendered possible. Thus the female penis came to
subserve other purposes: a portion of it formed the labia minora;
another portion, the upper, the clitoris, the name of which sufficiently
indicates the fact that, like the penis of the male, its function is
connected with the voluptuous sense.
This leads us to the third and last problem, the “libido-problem.” In
the human species voluptuous pleasure is almost completely divorced from
the process of “fusion-love,” the coalescence of spermatozoon and ovum,
and has for the most part become a phenomenon of “distance-love.” It
appears extremely doubtful if there is anything specific about the
voluptuous sensation--whether there is, in fact, a special “sexual
sense.” Magnus Hirschfeld assumes the existence of peculiar “sexual
cells,” of receptive areas for sexual stimuli, furnished with a sensory
substance endowed with a peculiar specific sensibility. He regards love
and the sexual impulse as “a molecular movement or force of a quite
specific quality, streaming through the nervous system,” and accompanied
by a quite peculiar sensation, or pleasure-tone, arising from a
condition of excitement of the sexual cells. But, as we have already
pointed out, the voluptuous sensation is merely a special case of
general cutaneous sensibility; it is very closely allied with the
cutaneous sensation of tickling; properly speaking, it is no more than
an =excessively powerful tickling=.[14] It has also intimate relations
with the sensation of pain.[15] The structure and position of the
nerve-terminal apparatus of the genital organs, by means of which
voluptuous pleasure is rendered possible, exhibit great similarity with
the touch corpuscles and sensory end-organs of other parts of the skin.
In the sexual orgasm the general cutaneous sensation increases to so
high a degree of intensity, becomes so powerful, that for an instant
=consciousness= is actually lost. The association of a momentary loss of
consciousness with the acme of sensation indicates the summit of sexual
pleasure--it is an abandonment, a dissolution, of individual
personality.
Voluptuous pleasure plays its part in the human species entirely in the
sphere of distance-love. Bölsche has very beautifully described its
significance in this relation:
“All-embracing in its path towards the attainment of its final aim is
the love-life also of the great cell societies, such as you yourself
are, such as I myself am, such as your beloved is. These higher, more
advanced individuals saw one another, approached one another, heard
one another, perceived one another through a hundred external media;
they became spiritually fused, and attained a condition of wonderful
harmony--their principal body walls came at length into immediate
contact--they pressed one another’s hands, they embraced one another,
kissed one another--they drew ever closer and closer together; to a
certain extent the body of one penetrated the body of the other. In
all this, =their= love undertook the =whole= affair, undertook it a
thousand times more effectually than the individual cells seeking
conjunction could ever have done; undertook it for the sake of the
reproductive cells hidden deep within their bodies. All the
pleasurable and painful feelings of love undulated and surged for so
long a time throughout the entire organism with intense force; these
feelings agitated the entire superior, comprehensive, individual
personality, searched its every depth with stormy emotions of desire,
complaint, and exultation.
“But at a precise instant this all came to a halt. The seminal cells
were ejaculated; one of them conjugated with the ovum; the hidden
inward life of a tiny separate organism began within the body of one
of the over-individuals. The last separation was bridged, and the true
cell-fusion took place. But when this happened, the immediate
relationship with the love-life of the great individual man and woman
was already completely severed. The bodily act of love was already
long at an end; its increase to a climax and its fulfilment had long
passed by.
“The instant of supreme voluptuous pleasure, which in the case of
unicellular beings naturally occurs at the moment of complete
coalescence, must in the case of the multicellular organisms just as
naturally be =transferred= to another stage, as it were, in the great
path of love.
“To an earlier stage.
“To that stage of distance-love which is =nearest= to the true act of
fusion of the reproductive elements. To the farthest point, that is to
say, attained by the great containers of the genuine unicellular
sexual elements (themselves capable of the act of ultimate
coalescence)--the farthest point =attained= by the multicellular
over-individuals.”
This farthest point is an =act of contact=.[16] We have already learnt
to regard the skin as a projection of the nervous system, and we have
come to understand the significance of the skin in the sphere of
sexuality. The other senses which have arisen from the skin must also be
taken into account in this matter. In the genital organs, this touch
stimulus assumes a quite peculiar character; it gives rise here to the
proper voluptuous sensation which is associated with the discharge of
the reproductive products. In man this association is most distinctly
manifest. The instant of most intense sexual pleasure coincides with
ejaculation, with the expulsion of the semen. The character of this
voluptuous sensation can hardly be defined; in part, it is like an
intense tickling sensation, but, on the other hand, it has an
unmistakable relationship to pain. Later, in another connexion, we shall
consider this interesting point at greater length. Not inaptly the
sexual act has also been compared with sneezing; the preliminary
tickling sensation, with the subsequent discharge of nervous tension, in
the form of a sneeze, have, in fact, a notable similarity with the
processes occurring in the sexual act.
The sexual act depends upon the occurrence of certain stimuli which are
connected with the complete development of the internal and external
genital organs and of the reproductive glands. The time when this
development occurs in man and woman is known as =puberty=. The sum of
these stimuli is known as the “=sexual impulse=.” Whereas in the lower
animals the sexual impulse is for the most part connected with the
activity of the reproductive glands, in the human species, in
association with the preponderating significance of the brain, it has
attained a relative independence of the reproductive glands; whilst the
mind has come to influence the sexual impulse very powerfully. Generally
speaking, sexual excitement is produced in three ways: first, by the
activity of the reproductive glands; secondly, by peripheral excitement
derived from the so-called “erogenic” areas; and thirdly, by central
psychical influences. S. Freud has recently studied the relations
between these three causes of sexual excitement, of the sexual impulse,
and has very properly distinguished two stages--the stage of
“=prelibido=” (sexual desire), and the stage of the proper sexual
“=libido=” (sexual gratification).
The stage of prelibido has distinctly the character of tension; the
stage of libido, the character of relief. The feeling of tension during
the prelibido finds expression mentally as well as physically by a
series of changes in the genital organs. The tension is further
increased by the stimulation of the various erogenic zones. If this
prelibido increases beyond a certain degree, the characteristic
potential energy of sexual tension is transformed into the relief-giving
kinetic energy of the terminal libido, during which the evacuation of
the reproductive products occurs.
Prelibido, which is especially characterized by engorgement, swelling,
and erection of the corpora cavernosa of the male and female
reproductive organs, occurring as a reflex from the spinal cord, may be
experienced long before puberty; it is much more independent of
processes occurring in the reproductive glands than is the terminal
libido, or sexual gratification, which in the male accompanies
ejaculation of the semen, and is associated with conditions attained
only at puberty.
The actual origin of the sexual tension which ultimately leads to
ejaculation is still obscure; it seems, at first sight, probable that in
the male this sensation is connected with the accumulation of semen in
the seminal vesicles. Pressure on the walls of these structures may be
supposed to stimulate the sexual centres in the spinal cord, and also
those in the brain; but this theory fails to take into account the
condition in the child, in woman, and in castrated males, in all of
whom, notwithstanding the absence of the accumulation of any
reproductive products, nevertheless a distinct state of sexual tension
may be observed. It is, indeed, an old experience that eunuchs may have
a very powerful sexual impulse. It is obvious, then, that the sexual
impulse must be, to a very great extent, independent of the reproductive
glands.
The nature of sexual tension is still entirely unknown. Freud assumes,
in view of the recently recognized significance of the thyroid glands in
relation to sexuality, that possibly some substance generally diffused
throughout the organism is produced by stimulation of the erogenic
zones, that the products of decomposition of this substance exercise a
specific stimulus on the reproductive organs, or on the associated
sexual centre in the spinal cord. For example, such a transformation of
a toxic, chemical stimulus into a special organ-stimulus is known to
occur in the case of certain foreign poisonous materials introduced into
the body. Freud considers that the probability of this chemical theory
of sexual excitement is increased by the fact that the neuroses
referable to disturbances of the sexual life possess a great clinical
similarity to the phenomena of intoxication induced by the habitual
employment of aphrodisiac poisons (certain alkaloids).
The relief of sexual tension occurs in the natural way in the =sexual
act=, in the completion of normal intercourse between man and woman.
Notwithstanding the numerous observations of leading natural
philosophers and physicians concerning the act of sexual congress, among
which I need only refer to those of Magendie, Johannes Müller, Marshall
Hall, Kobelt, Busch, Deslandes, Roubaud, Landois, Theopold, Burdach, and
many others, we possess, for reasons it is easy to understand, no really
exact investigations regarding the different phenomena occurring during
the sexual act. More particularly, the demeanour of the woman during
this act is a matter which remains extremely obscure.
The French physician Roubaud has given us the most vivid description of
sexual intercourse:
“As soon as the penis enters the vaginal vestibule, it first of all
pushes against the glans clitoridis, which is situated at the entrance
of the genital canal, and owing to its length and to the way in which
it is bent, can give way and bend further before the penis. After this
preliminary stimulation of the two chief centres of sexual
sensibility, the glans penis glides over the inner surfaces of the two
vaginal bulbs; the collum and the body of the penis are then grasped
between the projecting surfaces of the vaginal bulbs, but the glans
penis itself, which has passed further onward, is in contact with the
fine and delicate surface of the vaginal mucous membrane, which
membrane itself, owing to the presence of erectile tissue between the
layers, is now in an elastic, resilient condition. This elasticity,
which enables the vagina to adapt itself to the size of the penis,
increases at once the turgescence and the sensibility of the clitoris,
inasmuch as the blood that is driven out of the vessels of the vaginal
wall passes thence to those of the vaginal bulbs and the clitoris. On
the other hand, the turgescence and the sensitiveness of the glans
penis itself are heightened by compression of that organ, in
consequence of the ever-increasing fulness of the vessels of the
vaginal mucous membrane and the two vaginal bulbs.
“At the same time, the clitoris is pressed downwards by the anterior
portion of the compressor muscle, so that it is brought into contact
with the dorsal surface of the glans and of the body of the penis. In
this way a reciprocal friction between these two organs takes place,
repeated at each copulatory movement made by the two parties to the
act, until at length the voluptuous sensation rises to its highest
intensity, and culminates in the sexual orgasm, marked in the male by
the ejaculation of the seminal fluid, and in the female by the
aspiration of that fluid into the gaping external orifice of the
cervical canal.
“When we take into consideration the influence which temperament,
constitution, and a number of other special and general circumstances
are capable of exercising on the intensity of sexual sensation, it may
well be doubted if the problem regarding the differences in voluptuous
sensation between the male and the female is anywhere near solution;
indeed, we may go further, and feel convinced that this problem, in
view of all the difficulties that surround it, is really insoluble. So
true is this, that it is a difficult matter to give a picture at once
accurate and complete of the phenomena attending the normal act of
copulation. Whilst in one individual the sense of sexual pleasure
amounts to no more than a barely perceptible titillation, in another
that sense reaches the acme of both mental and physical exaltation.
“Between these two extremes we meet with innumerable states of
transition. In cases of intense exaltation various pathological
symptoms make themselves manifest, such as quickening of the general
circulation and violent pulsation of the arteries; the venous blood,
being retained in the larger vessels by general muscular contractions,
leads to an increased warmth of the body; and, further, this venous
stagnation, which is still more marked in the brain in consequence of
the contraction of the cervical muscles and the backward flexion of
the neck, may cause cerebral congestion, during which consciousness
and all mental manifestations are momentarily in abeyance. The eyes,
reddened by injection of the conjunctiva, become fixed, and the
expression becomes vacant; the lids close convulsively, to exclude the
light. In some the breathing becomes panting and labouring; but in
others it is temporarily suspended, in consequence of laryngeal spasm,
and the air, after being pent up for a time in the lungs, is finally
forcibly expelled, accompanied by the utterance of incoherent and
incomprehensible words.
“The impulses proceeding from the congested nerve centres are
confused. There is an indescribable disorder both of motion and of
sensation; the extremities are affected with convulsive twitchings,
and may be either moved in various directions or extended straight and
stiff; the jaws are pressed together so that the teeth grind against
each other; and certain individuals are affected by erotic delirium to
such an extent that they will seize the unguarded shoulder, for
instance, of their partner in the sexual act, and bite it till the
blood flows.
“This delirious frenzy is usually of short duration, but sufficiently
long to exhaust the forces of the organism, especially in the male, in
whom the condition of hyperexcitability is terminated by a more or
less abundant loss of semen.
“A period of exhaustion follows, which is the more intense in
proportion to the intensity of the preceding excitement. The sudden
fatigue, the general sense of weakness, and the inclination to sleep,
which habitually affect the male after the act of intercourse, are in
part to be ascribed to the loss of semen; for in the female, however
energetic the part she may have played in the sexual act, a mere
transient fatigue is observed, much less in degree than that which
affects the male, and permitting far sooner of a repetition of the
act. ‘_Triste est omne animal post coitum, præter mulierem
gallumque_,’ wrote Galen, and the axiom is essentially true--at any
rate, so far as the human species is concerned.”
Kobelt, in his celebrated work on the human organs of sexual pleasure
(Freiburg, 1884, p. 55 _et seq._), gave a similar description of
copulation. In the majority of descriptions of coitus but little
attention is usually paid to the demeanour of the woman. Magendie long
ago drew attention to the fact that there was much obscurity about this
matter, and insisted that, in comparison with the male, the female
exhibited extremely marked differences, in respect to her active
participation in copulation and to the intensity of her voluptuous
sensations.
“Very many women,” says this distinguished physiologist, “experience a
sexual orgasm accompanied by very intense voluptuous sensations;
others, on the contrary, appear entirely devoid of sensation; and
some, again, have only a disagreeable and painful sensation. Many
women excrete, at this moment of most intense sexual pleasure, a large
quantity of mucus, but the majority do not exhibit this phenomenon. In
reference to all these phenomena, =there are perhaps no two women who
are precisely similar=.”
The demeanour of the woman _in coitu_ has been especially studied by
gynæcologists, such as Busch, Theopold, and recently Otto Adler. Little
known are the observations of Dr. Theopold, based upon his own
experience, and published in 1873. He energetically denies the view that
the woman is always passive in coitus, and also that the female
reproductive organs are inactive during intercourse. During erotic
excitement in woman the heart beats more frequently, the arteries of the
labia pulsate powerfully, the genital organs are turgid and are hotter
to the touch. As the most intense libido approaches, the uterus
undergoes erection; its base touches the anterior abdominal wall; the
Fallopian tubes can be distinctly felt through the abdominal wall, when
these are thin, as hard, curved strings. The vagina, especially the
upper part of the passage, undergoes rhythmical contraction and
dilation, and complete gratification terminates the act.
As long as the muscle guarding the vaginal outlet (constrictor
cunni--bulbo-cavernosus muscle) is intact, the woman is able, by tightly
grasping the root of the penis, to expedite the ejaculation of semen, or
to increase the stimulation of the male until ejaculation occurs.
These powerful contractions of the vagina, alternating rhythmically with
the dilatations occurring during the orgasm, grip the glans penis
tightly, and induce a coaptation of the male urethral orifice with the
os uteri externum, and the enlargement of the latter orifice facilitates
the entrance of the semen. According to O. Adler, sexual excitement of
the woman during sexual intercourse begins with very powerful congestion
of the entire reproductive apparatus, including even the fimbriæ
surrounding the abdominal orifice of the Fallopian tubes; this
congestion gives rise to an erection of these parts, and especially of
the clitoris, the labia minora, and the vaginal wall. At the same time,
the glands of the vaginal mucous membrane and of the vaginal inlet begin
to secrete, as is manifest by the moistness of the external genital
organs. There now begin gentle rhythmical contractions of the vagina and
of the pelvic muscles, and during the orgasm these increase, to become
spasmodic contractions, whereby an increased secretion is extruded, and
more especially is there an evacuation of uterine mucus.
It is very important to note the various physiological accompaniments of
coitus, since they assist us to understand the mode of origin and the
biological root of many sexual perversions. Already in normal sexual
intercourse sadistic and masochistic phenomena may be observed. The
biting and crying out mentioned by Roubaud as occurring in the
voluptuous ecstasy are, indeed, of very frequent occurrence. Rudolf
Bergh, the celebrated Danish dermatologist and physician, of the
Copenhagen Hospital for Women suffering from Venereal Diseases, alludes
regularly in his annual reports to the consequences of “erotic bites.”
Amongst the Southern Slavs, the custom of “biting one another” is very
general (Krauss). The intense dark red coloration of the face and of the
reproductive organs and their environment is also a physiological
accompaniment of sexual excitement, and this coloration is more marked
in consequence of the associated turgescence of the male and female
genital organs; it leads, moreover, to associations of feeling in which
the =blood= plays a dominant part. Hence we deduce the biological and
ethnological significance of the colour red in the sphere of sexuality.
The nature of the sadist “to see red” during sexual intercourse is,
therefore, firmly founded upon a physiological basis, and merely
exhibits an increase of a normal phenomenon.[17] The crying and cursing
in which many individuals find sexual gratification has also a
physiological representative in the inarticulate noises and cries
frequently expressed in normal intercourse. It is remarkable that an
Indian writer on erotics--Vātsyāyana--deduces this verbal sadism from
the various noises which are commonly made in normal intercourse.
Similarly, in both parties to the sexual act the presence of masochistic
elements can be detected: witness the patience with which pain is borne
when it has a voluptuous tinge.[18]
Passing to the consideration of the =posture= adopted during
intercourse, we find in civilized man, who in this respect is far
removed from animals, the normal position during coitus is front to
front, the woman lying on her back with her lower extremities widely
separated, and the knee and hip joints semiflexed; the man lies on her,
with his thighs between hers, supporting himself on hands or elbows--or
often the two unite their lips in a kiss.
Of all other numerous positions during coitus, or _figuræ Veneris_, some
of which, according to Sheikh Nefzawi, are possible only “in words and
thoughts,” the postures that demand consideration on hygienic grounds
are, lateral decubitus of the woman, dorsal decubitus of the man, and
coitus _a posteriori_ (for example, when man and woman are extremely
obese); but this subject belongs rather to the chapter on sexual
hygiene.
Ploss-Bartels has proved that the position described above as normal was
usual already in ancient times and amongst the most diverse peoples. The
adoption of this position in coitus undoubtedly ensued in the human race
upon the evolution of the upright posture. It is the natural,
instinctive position of civilized man, who in this respect also
manifests an advance on the lower animals.
[13] Apart from Strindberg and Weininger, who advocate, for the
salvation of the future and as ideals of development, the most
pronounced and one-sided development of the masculine type, I need
refer only to “The Physiological Weakmindedness of Woman” by Möbius,
and to such writings as B. Friedländer’s “Renaissance des Eros
Uranios” (Berlin, 1904), and to Eduard von Mayer’s “The Vital Laws of
Civilization” (Halle, 1904), as characteristic symptoms of such a
reaction.
[14] ITCHING, TICKLING, AND SEXUAL SENSIBILITY.--On September 2, 1890,
Dr. Bronson, Professor of Dermatology in the New York Polyclinic, read
before the American Dermatological Association a paper on “The
Sensation of Itching” (printed in the _New York Medical Record_ of
October 18, 1890, and republished by the New Sydenham Society in 1893
in a volume entitled “Selected Monographs on Dermatology”). In this
paper the author deals at some length with the relations between
itching and the voluptuous, or, as he calls it, the “aphrodisiac,”
sense. He also denies the specific character of sexual sensations, and
states that the aphrodisiac sense “is but a higher development of the
primitive sense of contact. It has a special organ or instrument--the
penis in the male, the clitoris in the female. Moreover, it is
distributed over the entire cutaneous surface” (New Sydenham Society,
_op. cit._, p. 314). In this connexion, and more particularly apropos
of Dr. Bloch’s statement on the previous page that “the function of
the clitoris is expressed by its name” (German, _Kitzler_), it is
interesting to note that in German the word _Kitzel_ variously
denotes--(1) _tickling_, (2) _itching_, (3) _sexual desire_, (4)
_sexual gratification_. The more commonly employed German term for
itching, _Jucken_, does not possess any secondary sexual
signification; but, as Dr. Bronson points out (_op. cit._, p. 312),
“both the English words _itch_ and _itching_, and the Latin _prurio_
and _pruritus_, in their secondary significations, convey the idea of
a longing, teasing desire, while _pruritus_ was commonly used by the
Latins as a synonym for lasciviousness.” The same idea is, of course,
conveyed by the English derivations, _pruriency_ and _prurient_. Thus,
we see that the familiar terminology of these three tongues (and
doubtless of many others) refuses to countenance Hirschfeld’s view
regarding the specific character of sexual sensibility.--TRANSLATOR.
[15] In his profound essay, containing a number of new points of view,
“Concerning the Emotions” (_Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und
Neurologie_, 1906, vol. xix., Heft 3 and 4), Dr. Edmund Forster has
ably discussed these primitive relations between voluptuous sensation
and pain. According to him, the sexual tension, which commences at the
time of puberty, is an increased stimulus of the sensory nerves of the
genital organs. The positive sensation-tone of libido accompanying
ejaculation represents the relief of the painful, disturbing sensation
of sexual tension, and for this reason it has a pleasurable tone.
[16] Carpenter perceives in this “sense of contact” the essence of all
sexual love.
[17] For this reason many ingenious prostitutes wear a red
chemise.--_Cf._ P. Näcke, “Un Cas de Fetichisme de Souliers,” etc. (“A
Case of Shoe Fetichism”), in _Bulletin de la Société de Médecine
Mentale de Belgique_, 1894.
[18] Thus it appears that sadism and masochism are not manifestations
of “genital atavism” in the sense of Mantegazza and Lombroso, but are
rather due to the gradual and pathological increase of physiological
phenomena still manifest at the present day.
CHAPTER IV
PHYSICAL DIFFERENTIAL SEXUAL CHARACTERS
“_We have here a_ primitive _inequality, whose primitiveness goes back
to the opposition between content and form. From this primeval
difference arise all the other secondary differences._”--ALFONS
BILHARZ.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER IV
Sexual differentiation as the primeval fact of human sexual life --
Waldeyer on the significance of sexual differentiation -- The
biological law of Herbert Spencer -- Antagonism between reproductive
and developmental tendencies -- Example of menstruation in
illustration of this contrast -- The primitiveness of woman, and her
greater proximity to nature -- Untenability of the notion of the
“inferiority” of woman -- Views upon the nature of her physical
development -- Increased differentiation of the sexes in consequence
of civilization -- Comparison between medieval and modern pictures of
women -- Obscuration of the sexual contrast in primitive times --
Examples -- Change of the voice in consequence of civilization --
Return to primitive conditions in certain phenomena of the
emancipation of woman (the adoption of a masculine style of clothing,
tobacco-smoking) -- Sexual indifference in the primitive history of
mankind -- Connexion therewith of a primordial gynecocracy (according
to Ratzel) -- Secondary sexual characters -- Principal difference
between the masculine and the feminine body -- New researches on
sexual differences -- Skeletal differences -- The specific sexual
differences of the human pelvis -- Their dependence upon civilization
and upon development of the brain -- Differences in body-size and
body-weight -- In muscular and fatty development -- In the
constitution of the blood -- Sexual differences in the larynx and the
voice -- The skulls of men and women -- The weight of the brain -- No
ground for the assumption of the inferiority of women -- Differences
in brain-structure -- Researches of Rüdinger, Waldeyer, Broca, G.
Retzius, etc. -- Recognition of the fact that the feminine type is
somewhat infantile -- This type due to adaptation to the purposes of
reproduction -- Masculine and feminine beauty -- Men and women
different, but neither superior to the other.
CHAPTER IV
The difference between the sexes is the =original cause= of the human
sexual life, the primeval preliminary of all human civilization. The
existence of this difference can be proved, alike in physical and
psychical relations, already in the fundamental phenomenon of human
love, in which, because here the relations are simple and uncomplicated,
it is most easily visible.
Waldeyer, in his notable address on the somatic differences between the
sexes, delivered in 1895 at the Anthropological Congress in Kassel, drew
attention to the fact that the higher development of any particular
species is notably characterized by the increasing differentiation of
the sexes. The further we advance in the animal and vegetable world from
the lower to the higher forms, the more markedly are the male and the
female individuals distinguished one from another. In the human species
also, in the course of phylogenetic development, this sexual
differentiation increases in extent.
In the development of these sexual differences, the antagonism first
shown by Herbert Spencer to exist between reproduction and the higher
evolutionary tendency plays an important part. Among the higher species
of animals the males exhibit a stronger evolutionary tendency than the
females, owing to the fact that their share in the work of reproduction
has become less important. The more extensive organic expenditure
demanded by the reproductive functions limits the feminine development
to a notably greater extent than the masculine. In the human species
this retardation of growth in the female is especially increased in
consequence of menstruation, and this affords a striking example of the
truth of Spencer’s law. I quote also in this connexion the remarks of
the Würzburg anatomist Oskar Schultze, in his recently published
valuable monograph on “Woman from an Anthropological Point of View,” pp.
55, 56 (Würzburg, 1906);
“The undulatory periodicity of the principal functions of the feminine
organism, which depends on the processes of ovulation and
menstruation, and is invariable in the females of the human species,
does not occur in the other mammalia (with the exception of apes). In
these latter, as far as we have been able to observe, the secondary
sexual characters, in the matter of differences in muscular
development and in strength, are not so developed, or sometimes are
not so developed, as in the human species. We must in this connexion
exclude the differences which appear in domestic animals as a result
of domestication (for example, the difference between the cow and the
bull). In the human female, the periodicity, which begins to act even
on the youthful, still undeveloped body, has during thousands of years
increased the secondary sexual differences. Periodicity is, in my
opinion, an important cause of the fact that woman is inferior to man,
more especially in the development of the muscular system and in
strength, and that her organs, for the most part, are more closely
approximated to the infantile type.
“The sexually mature body of a woman has always during the
intermenstrual period to make good the loss undergone during
menstruation. Hardly has this been effected and the climax of vital
energy been once more attained, when a new follicle ruptures in the
ovary, and the menstrual hæmorrhage recurs; thus continually, month
after month, the vital undulation and the vital energy rises and
falls. =The energy periodically expended in woman’s principal function
has for thousands of years ceased to be available for her own internal
development.= The actual loss on each occasion is so trifling that
numerous women hardly find it disagreeable. The effect depends upon
summation. The earnings are almost immediately spent, =not for the
purpose of her own domestic economy, but for the sake of another, in
the service of reproduction=; this comes first, for the species must
be preserved. =To accumulate capital for her personal needs has been
rendered more difficult for woman than it is for man.=”
The previously quoted biological law of Spencer (regarding the
antagonism between reproduction and the higher evolutionary tendency),
of which menstruation affords so interesting an illustration, explains
also the fact pointed out by Milne Edwards, Darwin, Brooks, Lombroso,
Alfons Bilharz, and other investigators--to wit, the greater simplicity
and primitiveness of woman as compared with the more complicated and
more variable nature of man--more variable, because it oscillates within
wider boundaries. Paracelsus long ago enunciated the profound saying,
“=Woman is nearer to the world than man.=”
It would be =fundamentally erroneous= to deduce from these
considerations any inferiority or comparative inutility of woman.
Rather, indeed, the nature of her bodily structure in relation to the
purposes it has to fulfil is comparatively nearer perfection; and this
admirable adaptation has undergone an increase in the course of the
evolution of civilization. We have already noted the fact that under the
influence of the continually increasing predominance of the brain in the
male, certain retrogressive processes have also made themselves manifest
(as, for example, the increasing loss of hair); and these processes in
woman have gone farther than in man, because in her case the progressive
development is =in its very nature= less extensive. Hence recent
investigators, such as Havelock Ellis, have actually come to the
conclusion that the ideal type, towards which the bodily development of
mankind is striving, is represented by the feminine--that is, by a
youthful type.[19]
It is, however, very doubtful if this evolution will ever go so far that
the =primitive= difference between man and woman, founded as it is in
the very nature of the sexual, will ever pass away. On the contrary,
notwithstanding the retrogressive changes associated with the excessive
development of the brain, we find that there is =an increasing
differentiation of the sexes induced by civilization=. To this fact,
which possesses great importance in connexion with the discussion of the
woman’s question and the problem of homosexuality, W. H. Riehl, the
historian of civilization, in his work on the family, published in 1885,
was the first to draw attention. He devotes the second chapter of this
book to the differentiation of the sexes in the course of civilized
life. He was astonished by the fact that in almost all the portraits of
celebrated beauties of previous centuries the heads appeared to him too
=masculine= in type when compared with the ideal of feminine beauty
which now appeals to us.
“The medieval painters, when representing the general type of angels
and saints, van Eyck and Memmling in their Madonnas and female saints,
paint heads exhibiting the most clearly defined individual
characteristics, but into these feeling representations of delicate
virginity there intrude certain harsh lineaments, so that the heads
strike us as masculine, or as a little too old. Van Eyck’s Madonnas,
with the Christ-child at their breast, frequently look to us like
women of thirty years old. But the painter must have followed Nature;
=it is Nature which since his time has changed. The tender virgin of
three hundred years ago had more masculine lineaments than she has at
the present day=, and he who in the portrait of a Maria Stuart expects
to find a face like one he would meet in a modern journal of fashion
will find himself greatly disappointed by certain traits in the
pictures of this celebrated beauty, traits which to the nineteenth
century would seem almost masculine.”
The contrast between the sexes becomes with advancing civilization
continually sharper and more individualized, whereas in primitive
conditions, and even at the present day among agricultural labourers and
the proletariat, it is less sharp and to some extent even obliterated.
Let the reader familiarize himself with the likenesses of modern women
of the working classes; they seem to us almost to resemble disguised
men. In the stature, also, of the sexes among savage peoples, and among
the lower classes of the civilized nations, the sexual differences are
much less marked than in our cultivated large towns. Very characteristic
of the differentiating influence of civilization is, moreover, the
effect on the voice. Riehl remarks on this subject:
“The tone of the voice even, in simpler conditions of civilization, is
generally far more alike in the two sexes. The high tenor, the
feminine man’s voice, and the deep alto, the masculine woman’s voice,
are among civilized peoples far rarer than among savage races, in whom
masculine and feminine varieties sometimes seem hardly
distinguishable. Our bandmasters travel to Hungary and Galicia to find
clear high tenors, whilst deep alto voices are now increasingly
difficult to find, for the reason that among the civilized peoples the
masculine-feminine contraltos die out. =Dominant, on the other side,
is the distinct contrast between the two sexual tones of
voices--soprano and bass.= This fact has already had a determining
influence in our school of song; it affects our vocal
tone-teaching--to such a hidden, out-of-the-way path have we been led
by our recognition of the continually increasing contrast between man
and woman.”
Certain phenomena and aberrations of the movement for the emancipation
of women, such as the adoption of a masculine style of dress and the use
of tobacco, are no more than =relapses= into a primitive condition,
which among the common people has persisted unaltered to the present
day. We need merely allude to the man’s hat, the short coat, and the
high-laced boot of the Tyrolese women, and to the tobacco-smoking of the
women at the wedding festivals among the German peasantry. A false
“emancipation” of this kind is frequently encountered among peasants,
vagabonds, and gipsies, to which, moreover, the neuter designation of
the women of this class as _das Mensch_ and “woman-fellow,” etc., bears
witness; we have herein characteristic indications of the fact that
“peculiar to the woman of the people is a self-conscious, actively
progressive masculine nature.”
That the comparative obliteration of sexual contrasts among the lower
orders of modern society is a vestigial relic of primitive conditions,
is shown also by the primeval history of the nations. The idea appearing
already in the Biblical creation myth, and the thought later expressed
by Plato, and recently by Jacob Böhme, that the first human being was
originally both man and woman, and that the woman was subsequently
formed out of this primeval human being Adam--this pregnant thought
merely expresses the fact of the indifference of the sexes among savage
people and in the primitive history of mankind. The hermaphrodite of
ancient art is, like the man-woman of the modern woman’s movement, an
atavism, a retrogression to these long-past stages, of which we have
only the above-mentioned vestiges to remind us.[20]
Friedrich Ratzel, in the introduction to his great work on “The Races of
Man,” also alludes to this primitive obscuration of sexual contrasts in
earlier stages of civilization, and draws therefrom interesting
conclusions regarding the existence of a primordial gynecocracy, a
“regiment of women.” I have myself discussed this question in the second
volume of my book, “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis,” and shall return to the subject when dealing with masochism.
W. H. Riehl, and after him Heinrich Schurtz, have laid stress on the
dangers to civilization involved in the obliteration of sexual
differences. Sexual differentiation stands and falls with civilization.
The former is the indispensable preliminary of the latter. Destroy it,
and the whole course of development will be reversed.
Sexual differences comprise for the most part the diverse development of
the so-called “secondary sexual characters”--that is to say, all the
differential characteristics which distinguish man from woman, over and
above those strictly related to the work of sex--for instance, stature,
skeleton, muscles, skin, voice, etc.
The masculine body has evolved to a greater extent than the feminine
body as a force-producing machine, for in man the bones and the muscles
have a larger development, whereas in woman we observe a greater
development of fat, whereby the plasticity of the body is enhanced, but
its mechanical utility and energy are impaired.
According to the most recent scientific representation of sexual
differences, as we find them enumerated in the monograph of Oskar
Schultze, based upon his own observations, and also on the earlier works
of Vierordt, Quetelet, Topinard, Pfitzner, Waldeyer, C. H. Stratz, J.
Ranke, E. von Lange, Havelock Ellis, Merkel, Bischoff, Rebentisch,
Welcker, Schwalbe, Marchand, and others, the most important physical
differentiæ between man and woman are the following:
The supporting framework of the body, the osseous skeleton, exhibits
important differences in man and woman. The bones of women are on the
whole smaller and weaker. Especially extensive sexual differences are
noticeable in the pelvis. Wiedersheim regards these sexual differences
of the woman’s pelvis as a specific characteristic of the human species.
In all the anthropoid apes they are far less strongly marked than in
man. Moreover, these differences exhibit a progressive development,
which is to an important extent dependent upon advancing civilization.
For this reason, as G. Fritsch, Alsberg, and others, point out, among
the majority of savage races the differences between the male and the
female pelvis are far less extensive than among civilized nations. The
characteristic peculiarities of the pelvis of the European woman, which
can be distinguished from the male pelvis at a glance--namely, its
greater extent in transverse diameter, the greater depression and the
wider opening of the anterior osseous arch--are far less marked among
women of the South African races and among the South Sea Islanders.
The enlargement of the female pelvis in the course of human evolution is
dependent upon the most important of all the factors of civilization,
the =brain=. Even in the human fœtus the great size of the brain gives
rise to a far greater proportionate development of the skull than we
find in the fœtus of any other mammal. This influences the pelvic inlet
and the sacrum, but also the large pelvis, since, in consequence of the
adoption by man of the upright posture, the pregnant uterus expands more
laterally, and thus opens out the iliac fossæ. In the lower races of
man, it is precisely this plate-like expansion of the iliac fossæ which
is so much less developed than in the case of civilized races.
Another physical difference between the sexes concerns =stature= and
=body-weight=.
The mean stature of woman is somewhat less than that of man. Among
Europeans it is about 1·60 metres (5 feet 3 inches), as compared with
1·72 metres (5 feet 7-3/4 inches) for the average stature of the male.
According to Vierordt, the new-born boy is already on the average from
1/2 to 1 centimetre (1/5 to 2/5 inch) longer than the new-born girl.
Johannes Ranke characterizes the individual factors which give rise to
these differences in the following manner:
“The typical bodily development of the human male is characterized by
a trunk relatively shorter in relation to the whole stature; but in
relation to the length of the trunk, the upper and the lower
extremities are longer, the thighs and the legs longer, the hand and
the foot also longer; relatively to the long upper arm and to the long
thigh respectively, the forearm and the leg are still longer; and
relatively to the entire upper extremity, the entire lower extremity
is also longer.
“On the other hand, the feminine proportions, remaining more
approximate to those of the youthful state, as compared with those of
the fully developed male, are distinguished by the following
characteristics: comparatively greater length of the trunk; relatively
to the length of the trunk, comparatively shorter arms and lower
extremities, shorter upper arm and forearm, shorter thigh and leg,
shorter hands and feet; relatively to the shorter upper arm, still
shorter forearm, and relatively to the shorter thigh, still shorter
leg; finally, relatively to the entire upper extremity, shorter lower
extremities.”
This difference in the stature is found also in primitive peoples. Among
the savage races of Brazil, who are still living in the stone age, Karl
von den Steinen found that the average height of the men was 162
centimetres (5 feet 3·8 inches), whilst that of the women was 10·5
centimetres (4·14 inches) less. This difference corresponds exactly with
that given in Topinard’s figures as corresponding to the average male
height of 162 centimetres (5 feet 3·8 inches).
In relation to the greater length of the body, the other proportions of
the male body also exhibit greater figures. More particularly, the width
of the shoulders is greater in man as compared with woman.
The body-weight of man is likewise notably greater than that of woman.
According to Vierordt, the average weight of a new-born boy in middle
Europe is 3,333 grammes (7·348 pounds), as compared with that of a
new-born girl 3,200 grammes (7·055 pounds). The difference, therefore,
is 133 grammes (0·293 pounds = about 4-1/2 ounces). In the case of
adults, the mean difference amounts to 7 kilogrammes (15 pounds), since
the average weight of man is 65 kilogrammes (143 pounds), that of woman
58 kilogrammes (128 pounds).
Corresponding with the slighter development of the skeleton, the
=muscular system= in woman is also less strongly developed; the muscles
contain a larger percentage of water than those of man, and in this
point also we find a resemblance to the juvenile state.
On the other hand, =the development of fat= in woman is much greater
than in man. Bischoff investigated the relations between muscle and fat
in man and woman, and found that in the entire body in the male there
was 41·8 per cent. muscle and 18·2 per cent. fat; in the female 35·8 per
cent. muscle and 28·2 per cent. fat. In the female two regions of the
body are distinguished by a specially abundant deposit of fat, the
breast and the buttocks, whereby both parts receive the stamp of
extremely prominent secondary sexual characters. Upon this greater
deposit of fat depends the softer, more rounded form of the feminine
body; whilst the muscular system is less developed than in man. Man, on
the other hand, is especially powerful in the head, neck, breast, and
upper extremities. The contrast between the typical beauty of man and
woman, respectively, is mainly explicable by the differences just
enumerated.
Woman’s =skin= is clearer and more delicate than that of man.
More important is the fact that the blood of man contains a notably
larger quantity of =red blood-corpuscles= (erythrocytes) than that of
woman. Woman’s blood is richer in water. Welcker found in a cubic
millimetre of man’s blood 5,000,000, and in the same quantity of woman’s
blood 4,500,000 blood-discs. In correspondence with this, the hæmoglobin
content and the specific weight of woman’s blood are both less than
those of man’s. Since the red blood-corpuscles play a very important
part in the human economy as oxygen-carriers, this sexual difference in
the corpuscular richness of the blood is very important, and influences
to a high degree the bodily organization of both sexes.
=Larynx= and =voice= remain infantile in woman. Woman’s larynx is
notably smaller than man’s. After puberty woman’s voice is, on the
average, in the deep tones an octave, in the high tones two octaves,
higher than man’s.
According to the investigations of Pfitzner, the measurements of the
=head= (length, breadth, height, circumference) are smaller in woman
than in man. Woman’s skull remains, in respect of numerous
peculiarities of structure, strikingly like the skull of the child.[21]
This infantile quality of a woman’s skull, we must again point out,
justifies =no= conclusion regarding the inferiority of woman. Schultze,
when presenting these data for our consideration, rightly reminds us of
the well-known fact that the man of genius is also frequently
distinguished by infantile peculiarities.
Woman’s skull is absolutely smaller than man’s; hence, of course, her
brain is also absolutely smaller. Waldeyer gives as the mean weight of a
man’s brain 1,372 grammes (44·12 ounces), and of a woman’s brain, 1,231
grammes (39·58 ounces); Schwalbe’s figures are respectively 1,375
grammes (44·21 ounces) and 1,245 grammes (40·03 ounces).
In this connexion O. Schultze remarks:
“The question immediately arises, whether we are justified in speaking
of the mental ‘inferiority’ of woman, because her brain weighs less
than that of man.
“Now, in the first place, it is obvious that the greater body-weight
of man demands a greater weight of brain. And there is nothing
remarkable about the fact that the greater size exhibited by many
organs of the male should be exhibited also by the brain. It seems
very natural that the unquestionably greater functional activity which
has distinguished the masculine brain for many thousand years should
be manifested by the notably greater size of that organ, just as a
larger muscle generally performs more work than a small one.
“As a matter of fact, among the numerous investigators occupied with
this question, many have assumed that differences in the psychical
power of human brains are dependent upon differences in their size.
But this is an =assumption= merely, and with Bischoff, who as long as
forty years ago conducted an exhaustive investigation into the problem
of the relations between brain-weight and intellectual capacity, we
must say also to-day that ‘the proof of any such connexion has =not=
yet been offered us.’”
Whether the study of the finer structure of the brain in man and woman
will enable us to form more trustworthy conclusions regarding their
respective intellectual valuation, is a question whose answer must for
the present be postponed. According to Rüdinger and Passet, in new-born
boys and girls there exist very remarkable differences in the formation
and development of the brain. In the male fœtal brain the frontal lobes
are larger, wider, and higher; the convolutions, especially those of
the parietal lobe, are better formed than in the female fœtal brain.
Waldeyer was able to confirm this observation, and he considers it of
great importance, especially in view of the large share which the
frontal lobes have in the performance of purely intellectual functions.
Broca, however, was unable to detect a lesser development of the frontal
lobes in woman. Eberstaller and Cunningham even believed that they could
establish that this portion of the brain was more powerfully developed
in woman! Finally, the great Swedish cerebral anatomist, G. Retzius,
made an exact investigation of the sexual differences between the brains
of man and woman in the adult state. According to O. Schultze, his
results can be regarded as authoritative. Retzius stated that =hitherto
no specific invariably recurrent peculiarity had been found by which the
female brain could always with certainty be distinguished from the male;
still, he was inclined to attribute to woman’s brain a greater
simplicity of structure; it showed less divergence from the fundamental
type=.
This coincides with the fact to which we have already alluded, that
woman as compared with man possesses less variability, that she is the
simpler, more primitive being. Similarly, experience teaches
ethnologists that the men of a race differ from one another to a much
greater extent than the women.[22]
If we wish to sum up in a word the =nature= of the physical sexual
differences, we must say: =Woman remains more akin to the child than
man.=
This, however, in no way constitutes an inferiority, as Havelock Ellis
and Oskar Schultze have convincingly shown. It is only the expression of
=a primitive difference in nature=, brought about by the adaptation of
the female body to the purposes of reproduction. This is the cause of
the more infantile habitus of women (according to the above-quoted
biological law of Herbert Spencer).
The observation of the physical differences between man and woman also
teaches us the futility of the old dispute as to whether man’s body or
woman’s was the more beautiful.[23] The different tasks which lie
before the male and female bodies respectively give rise to different
development of individual parts. If this development is complete in its
kind, the body is beautiful. Stratz, in the introduction to his book on
“The Beauty of the Female Body,” has rightly =identified perfect beauty
with perfect health=. Man’s body and woman’s will alike be beautiful if
all secondary sexual characters are developed in a harmonious and not
excessive degree, if the idea of “manliness in man” and “womanliness in
woman” have attained full expression, and have not been unduly limited
by isolated peculiarities and variations.
Masculine and feminine beauty are different. There can be no question
regarding the superiority of one or the other.
[19] Another author--H. Quensel--goes even farther than this in his
book (in some respects most fantastic), “Do We Advance? An Ideal
Philosophical Hypothesis of the Evolution of the Human Psyche based
upon Natural Science,” pp. 152, 153 (Cologne, 1904). He writes: “When
we compare the position in civilization of man and woman, we find that
man unquestionably takes the higher position in respect of those
intellectual impulses which serve as the basis of the higher and the
highest stages of civilization, especially the impulse of building and
construction, of the collection and the elaboration of scientific
facts, in regard to the science of statesmanship and social
activities, in respect also of the study of the connexion between
cause and effect, and in respect of art. When, however, we apply to
the problem before us the data I have obtained concerning the details
of physical retrogression and of psychical advance, it appears that
woman in many relations stands unquestionably higher than man; for
woman, in her development, not alone in bodily relations, as regards
the retrogression of the skeletal and muscular systems and the
delicacy of constitution dependent thereon, as regards the cutaneous
covering of the body, and as regards speech and voice, has advanced
much farther than man on the path of bodily retrogression necessary
for the progress of civilization. Positively, also, in all that
concerns the development of the highest psychical impulses, the
development of general nervous sensibility, of a finer discrimination
of moral values and of idealism, of general charity and capacity for
self-sacrifice in association with diminishing egoism, of
transcendental piety and religious sentiment, and also of clearness of
vision, and, finally, in all that concerns the development of an
adaptability disclosing supreme psychical differentiation--associated,
indeed, with deficient fixity of purpose--woman has advanced far
beyond man on the forward path of civilization; that is to say, in
respect of civilization, woman unquestionably excels man.”
[20] W. Havelburg, in his essay, “Climate, Race, and Nationality in
Relation to Marriage,” published in “Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage and the Married State,” by Senator and Kaminer, p. 127
(London, Rebman, Limited, 1904), also alludes to the significance of
progressive sexual differentiation in the process of civilization, and
draws attention to the increase in feminine beauty.
[21] We may refer also to Paul Bartel’s valuable work, “Ueber
Geschlechtsunterschiede am Schädel”--“Sexual Differences in the Skull”
(Berlin, 1898). The author concludes: “We are unable to recognize any
important difference between man’s skull and woman’s--probably,
indeed, no such difference exists.”
[22] We must not ignore the fact, that other distinguished
anthropologists, such as Manouvrier, Pearson, Frassetto, and
especially Giuffrida-Ruggieri, have recently contested the slighter
variability and the infantile character of woman. _Cf._
Giuffrida-Ruggieri, “Anthropological Considerations regarding
Infantilism, and Conclusions regarding the Origin of the Varieties of
the Human Species” (_Italian Zoological Review_, 1903, vol. xiv., Nos.
4, 5). _Cf._ also the interesting remarks of Näcke in the “German
Archives for Criminal Anthropology,” 1903, vol. xiii., pp. 292, 293.
[23] Konrad Lange--“Das Wesen der Kunst” (“The Nature of Art”), pp.
361-364; Berlin, 1901--has ably exposed the subjective grounds of this
ancient dispute, and has shown their untenability.
CHAPTER V
PSYCHICAL DIFFERENTIAL SEXUAL CHARACTERS--THE WOMAN’S QUESTION
(Appendix: SEXUAL SENSIBILITY IN WOMAN)
“_Among all the higher activities and movements of our time, the
struggle of our sisters to attain an equality of position with the
strong, the dominant, the oppressive sex, appears to me, from the purely
human point of view, most beautiful and most interesting; indeed, I
regard it as possible that the coming century will obtain its historical
characterization, not from any of the social and economical
controversies of the world of men, but that this century will be known
to subsequent history distinctively as that in which the solution of the
‘woman’s question’ was obtained._”--GEORG HIRTH.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER V
The fact of psychical sexual differences -- Attempts to deny their
existence -- Rosa Mayreder’s “Critique of Femininity” -- The sexual
nuances of the psyche -- Ineradicability of these -- Condemnation of
psychical bisexuality -- Expression of psychical difference in the
demeanour of the sperm cell and the germ cell -- Original
representatives of the differing natures of man and woman -- Recent
researches regarding psychical sexual differences -- Sensory
sensations -- Intellectual differences -- Experiments of Jastrow,
Minot, and others -- Inquiries of Delaunay and Havelock Ellis --
Readier suggestibility of women -- Tendencies to independent activity
on the part of women -- Higher spiritual activities in man and woman
-- Woman’s talent for politics -- Emotivity of woman -- Greater
susceptibility to fatigue -- Decline of emotivity in the modern woman
-- Artistic talents of man and woman -- Greater variability of man --
Influence of menstruation on the feminine physique -- Psychological
experiments of H. B. Thompson -- Woman and man heterogeneous natures
-- Comparison by Alfons Bilharz -- The enigmatical in woman -- Poets
and thinkers on this question -- A saying of Theodor Mundt --
Antipathy of the sexes -- Love as the solution of the enigma --
Significance of psychical differences for the woman’s question -- Part
played by women in civilization -- Retrospect of primeval history --
Women as the discoverers of handicrafts and arts -- As the teachers of
man -- Thomas Henry Huxley on the woman’s question -- The value of
work for woman -- Improvement of domestic service according to
Schmoller -- The woman of the future.
_Appendix: Sexual Sensibility in Woman._ -- An old topic of dispute --
Sexual sensibility in man -- Feminine erotic types -- Theory of
Lombroso and Ferrero -- Adler’s monograph -- Refutation of the theory
of the lesser sensual sensibility of woman -- Diffuse character of the
feminine sexual sphere -- Researches of Havelock Ellis regarding the
sexual impulse in woman -- Experience of alienists regarding sexuality
in woman -- A case of temporary sexual anæsthesia -- Causes of sexual
frigidity.
CHAPTER V
The unquestionably existing physical differences between the sexes
respectively, correspond equally without question to existing
=psychical= differences. Psychically, also, man and woman are completely
=different= beings. We must not employ the word “psychical,” as it is so
often employed, in the sense of pure “intelligence”; we must understand
the term to relate to the entire conception and content of the psyche,
to the whole spiritual being--the spiritual habitus, emotional
character, feelings, and will: we shall then immediately be convinced
that masculine and feminine beings differ through and through, that they
are heterogeneous, incomparable natures.
Under the influence of Weininger’s book, the attempt has recently been
made to deny the existence of sexual differences in the psychical
sphere, and especially to contest the origin of these differences from
the fundamentally different nature of the masculine and feminine types.
(Weininger himself not only went so far as to declare the obliteration
and equalization of sexual differences, but he even asserted that all
feminine nature was a personification of nothingness, of evil; he wished
to annihilate femininity, in order to allow the existence of one sex
only, the male, this being to him the embodiment of the objective and
the good.) I recently read with great interest a most intelligent book,
one full of new ideas, by Rosa Mayreder--“Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit”
(A Critique of Femininity), Jena, 1905--in which the author maintains
what she calls the “primitively teleological character of sexuality”;
that is, she considers the different sexual functions of man and woman
to be comparatively unimportant for the determination of their spiritual
nature, and regards the individual psychical differentiation as
independent of sexuality and of the different sexual natures. In her
opinion, sexual polarity does not extend to the “higher nature” of
mankind, to the spiritual sphere. She offers as a proof of this, among
other points, the fact that by crossed inheritance spiritual
peculiarities of the father can be transmitted to the daughter. Very
true. Moreover, no objective student of Nature will deny that a woman
can attain the same degree of individual psychical differentiation as a
man, or that she can bring her “higher nature” to an equally great
development. But quite as incontestable is the fact which Rosa Mayreder
keeps too much in the background: =that everything psychical, the
entire emotional and voluntary life, receives from the particular sexual
nature a peculiar characterization, a distinctive colouring, and a
specific nuance=; and that these precisely constitute the heterogeneous
and the incomparable in the masculine and the feminine natures.
The attempts to annihilate sexual differences in theory are very
old,[24] but they have always proved untenable in practice. They have
invariably been shattered by contact with--sexual differences.
_Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret_ (You may drive out Nature
with a pitchfork, but she will inevitably return). And this return of
Nature is, in fact, a =step forward=, in advance of primitive
hermaphroditic states. Sexual differences are ineradicable; civilization
shows an unmistakable tendency to increase them. There is also an
individual differentiation of sexual characters. It is proportional to
the differentiation of the psychical characters of man and woman. And
the problem is this: How is it possible for woman to ensure the
development and perfectibility of her higher nature, without eliminating
and obscuring her peculiar character as a sexual being?
When Rosa Mayreder herself, at the end of her book (p. 278), comes to
the conclusion--
“In the province of the physical, about which no doubt is possible,
the development towards ‘homologous monosexuality,’ towards =the
unconditional sexual differentiation of individuals=, =constitutes the
most desirable aim=. Every =divergence= from the normal renders the
individual an imperfect being; =physical hermaphroditism is repulsive=
because it represents a state of insufficiency, an inadequate and
malformed structure. It appertains to the qualities of beautiful and
healthy human beings that the body should be that of an entire man or
an entire woman, just as it is desirable that the body should be
intact in all other respects”
--she has at the same time expressed a judgment regarding the value of
psychical bisexuality which =must ever be a rudiment merely= in the
“entire man” or the “entire woman,” and can never attain the
transcendent importance, can never represent the progress towards higher
altitudes, which the author, in her singular misunderstanding of the
true relations, wishes to ascribe to that condition. We may admit that
the bisexual character is more or less strongly developed in the
individual male or female, without thereby abandoning the fundamental
natural difference between man and woman, which involves not merely the
physical, but also the psychical sphere.
I disbelieve, therefore, in Rosa Mayreder’s “synthetic human being,” who
is “subordinate alike to the conditions of the masculine and the
feminine” but I do believe, as I have already stated in earlier
writings, in an individualization of love, in an ennobling and deepening
of the relationship between the sexes, such as is possible only to free
personalities. This is easily attainable in conjunction with the
retention of all bodily and mental peculiarities, as these have
developed during the process of sexual differentiation between man and
woman.
There can be no possible doubt that psychically woman is a different
creature from man. And quite rightly Mantegazza declares the opinion of
Mirabeau, that the soul has no sex, but only the body, to be a great
blunder.
Let us now return to the directly visible elementary phenomenon of love,
to the process of coalescence of the spermatozoon and the ovum. From our
study of other natural processes we feel we are justified by analogy in
drawing the conclusion that the observed kinetic difference between the
spermatozoon and the ovum is the expression also of different psychical
processes. Georg Hirth draws attention to these remarkable =differences
in respect of their modes of energy= between spermatozoa and ova.[25] He
also infers from the greater variability of the spermatozoa in the
different animal species, as compared with the usual spherical form of
the ova, that to the spermatozoon is allotted the most important kinetic
function in the process of reproduction, to which opinion its aggressive
mobility would also lead us, whereas the ovum rather represents
potential energy.
“We can indeed hardly believe that anywhere in the entire organic
world is there anything, of the same minute size, endowed with like
energy and enterprise as these so-called spermatozoa (‘little sperm
animals’), which are indeed not animals, and which yet prepare for us
more joy and more sorrow than any animal does. There everything is
busy. With what turbulence they hurry along until they attain their
ardently desired goal, and having attained it, thrust themselves head
first into the interior of the ovum! In this we have a drama for the
gods. To doubt the energy of these structures would be preposterous.”
Spermatozoa and ova are the original representatives of the respective
spiritual natures of man and woman. Disregarding all further
differentiation and individualization, the =fundamental lineaments= of
the masculine and feminine natures harmonize with the demeanour of the
reproductive cells; and we are able to recognize that for each is
provided a =different= task, and yet that =the task of each is no less
important than that of the other=. Quite rightly Rosa Mayreder points
out, that the male sex stands biologically no higher than the female
from the reproductive and procreative point of view; that in the
continued reproduction of life male and female have equal share.
No less true, on the other hand, is the remark of Havelock Ellis, whose
position in relation to the woman question is throughout objective:
“As long as women are distinguished from men by primary sexual
characters--as long, that is to say, as they conceive and bear--so
long will they remain unequal to man in the highest psychical
processes” (“Man and Woman,” p. 21).
The nature of man is aggressive, progressive, variable; that of woman is
receptive, more susceptible to stimuli, simpler.
Numerous exact, scientific, ethnological, and psychological
investigations concerning the sexes, among the most important of which
we may mention those of Darwin, Allan, Münsterberg, C. Vogt,
Ploss-Bartels, Jastrow, Lombroso and Ferrero, Shaw, Havelock Ellis, and
Helen Bradford Thompson, have confirmed the existence of these
differences in the nature of the two sexes. Many individual points still
remain obscure, but the above-mentioned sexual difference is everywhere
recognizable, and can never be entirely eradicated, even by a higher
psychical differentiation. Even the author of the “Critique of
Femininity,” who would open an unlimited perspective to the freedom of
individuality, is still compelled to admit that the majority of women
differ from men, no less in character than in intellect.
Havelock Ellis, in his classical work “Man and Woman” (London, 1892),
has given a summary of the psychical differences between the sexes,
based upon the most recent anthropological and psychological
investigations. This work forms the foundation for all later researches.
Of the individual psychical phenomena in man and woman, the sensory
sensations first demand consideration. In these no absolute and general
superiority of one sex over the other can be shown to exist. The
assumption that women have a more delicate power of sensory receptivity
cannot be sustained; indeed, the contrary appears the truer view. It is
true that women can be more readily excited by sensory stimuli, but they
do not possess a more delicate sensory receptivity.
As regards the general =intellectual endowment= of the sexes, the
interesting experimental researches of Jastrow into the psychology of
woman show that she possesses a greater interest in her immediate
environment, in the finished product, in the decorative, the individual,
and the concrete; man, on the other hand, exhibits a preference for the
more remote, for that which is in process of construction or growth, for
the useful, the general, and the abstract.
In agreement with these views is a report in the _Berliner Städtischen
Jahrbuch_ (1870, pp. 59-77), concerning the knowledge possessed by
several thousands of boys and girls at the time of their entry into
school. The report states:
“The more usual, the more approximate, and the easier an idea is, the
greater is the probability that the girls will excel the boys, and
_vice versa_. In boys more frequently than in girls do we find that
they know nothing of quite common things in their immediate
environment.”
Professor Minot arranged that persons of both sexes should cover ten
cards with sketches of any subject they chose. It appeared from this
experiment that the sketches of the men embraced a greater variety of
subjects than those of the women.
In respect of quickness of comprehension and intellectual mobility woman
is distinctly superior to man. Women, for example, read faster than men,
and can give a better account of what they have read. From this fact,
however, no conclusion can be drawn regarding their higher intellectual
capacity, for many men of exceptional intelligence read very slowly.
Delaunay inquired of a number of merchants regarding the industrial
capacity of the two sexes, and was informed that women are more diligent
than men, but less intelligent, so that they can be trusted only in
routine work.
In general, the experience of the postal service coincided with what has
already been stated. Havelock Ellis regarded the result of an inquiry
made at several of the large English post-offices as “typical and
trustworthy.” One of the chief postmasters was of the opinion that as
counter and instrumental clerks, doing concurrently money-order and
savings-bank business, taking in telegrams and signalling and receiving,
and in attending to rough and illiterate persons, women clerks were
preferable to men. Women telegraphists work as intelligently and as
exactly as their male colleagues. They do not, however, like the men,
exhibit an interest in the technical working of telegraphy; and, owing
to a lack of staying power, they are unable to compete with the men in
times of pressure. The comparatively slighter strength of the wrist made
it difficult for women telegraphists to write at the desired speed, and
to produce the requisite number of copies.
All the reports agree in this--that
“Women are more docile and amenable to discipline, they do light work
as well as men, and are steadier in some respects; on the other hand,
they more often remain away from work on the ground of trifling
indisposition, are more likely to fail to meet severe demands, and
show less intelligence in respect of tasks lying outside the course of
their current work, and in general show less desire and less capacity
for self-culture.”
Unquestionable is the =greater suggestibility= of women, doubtless
dependent on organic peculiarities, in consequence of which they so
quickly become subject to the influence of persons and opinions, when
the latter exercise a sufficiently powerful effect upon their emotional
life. The independent, the poietic,[26] are more distant from women, are
more foreign to their nature, than in the case of men. But that these
are quite impossible to them I am compelled to doubt. And when, for
example, Havelock Ellis considers it unthinkable that a woman should
have discovered the Copernican system, I need merely call to mind the
widely known physical discoveries of Madame Curie, whose thoroughly
independent work qualified her to succeed her husband as professor at
the Sorbonne. We cannot therefore exclude the possibility that in the
sphere of the natural sciences notable discoveries and inventions may be
made in the future in consequence of the independent work of women.
Very interesting are the observations of Paul Lafitte on the differences
between the higher intellectual qualities of man and woman. After
drawing attention to the greater receptivity of woman, he says:
“When children of both sexes are educated together, during the first
year the girls lead; at this time they have to do chiefly with the
reception and retention of impressions, and we see every day that
women put men in the shade by the vividness of their impressions and
the excellence of their memory. In addition to this we must take into
account the inborn sense of women for symmetry, from which it is
readily explicable that they generally receive geometrical instruction
with very beneficial results. In correspondence with this, we find
that woman students of medicine excel in the examinations in
physiology and general pathology, and show a clearness of apprehension
of series of facts which is really remarkable; on the other hand, they
are distinctly inferior in clinical investigations, in which other
intellectual qualities are involved. In general, women are more
receptive for facts than for laws, more for the concrete than for
general ideas. If we chance to hear an opinion expressed regarding
someone with whom we are acquainted, a man’s opinion will probably be
more accurate in the general outlines, but a woman’s will show a
clearer perception of the nuances of character.”
Thus it is that among women concrete philosophers are greater favourites
than abstract metaphysicians. According to the experience of a London
bookseller, ladies of the West End of London prefer Schopenhauer, Plato,
Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Renan; that is to say, the most
concrete, the most personal, the most poetical, and the most religious
of thinkers. This last quality especially fascinates the mind of woman.
At the same time, want of relationship between the strong suggestibility
of woman and her slight power of independent production also strikingly
manifests itself in woman’s position with regard to the =religious=
phenomena of the spiritual life. Havelock Ellis shows that ninety-nine
in every hundred of the great religious movements of the world have
received their initial impulse from men. And yet it has always been
women who have been the first to attach themselves to the founders of
religions.
In contrast with this, women appear to possess more independent
significance in the sphere of =politics=, as is shown by the fact that
there has been such a large number of celebrated women rulers.
Diplomatic adroitness, finesse, and self-command, to the extent to which
these qualities favour political activity, are indeed specific feminine
peculiarities.
The above-mentioned greater suggestibility of woman is connected with
her greater =emotivity=; that is, woman reacts to physical and psychical
stimuli more quickly than man. The “vasomotor theory” of the emotions,
originated by Mosso and C. Lange, is true to a greater extent of woman
than of man. Woman’s neuro-muscular system is more irritable, as is
especially shown in the case of the pupil of the eye, and in that of the
urinary bladder. By Mosso and Pellacani the bladder is termed the most
sensitive psychometer in the body. Contraction of the bladder is well
known to occur in many emotional states, such as fear, expectation,
tension, and bashfulness. This is much commoner in women and children
than in men. The fact that in women under the influence of strong
excitement there arises a powerful impulse to urinate, is a fact
extremely well known to medical men and others with special
opportunities for observation.
The greater neuro-muscular irritability of woman may also be explained
as the result of the relatively greater size of her abdominal organs.
To this greater =irritability= of woman there corresponds a =greater
susceptibility to fatigue=. It appears as a result of any long-lasting
task; it is, in fact, a safeguard against over-exertion, which in man so
commonly leads to complete exhaustion, because he works =too= long. The
ease with which a woman becomes exhausted is no doubt partly dependent
upon the physiological anæmia to which we alluded in the last
chapter--to the larger quantity of water and the smaller quantity of red
blood-corpuscles (erythrocytes) in her blood.
Havelock Ellis has detected a decline in the emotivity of modern woman,
under the influence of custom and education, especially as a result of
the great diffusion of bodily sports among girls. But he does not
believe that anything of the kind can lead to a complete abolition of
the emotional differences between the sexes, since these depend upon
firmly established bodily differences, such as the greater extension of
the sexual sphere and of the visceral functions in woman, upon woman’s
physiological anæmia, and upon the more marked periodicity of her vital
processes.
“So many factors work in combination, in order to give a basis for the
play of the emotions, whose greater extension can be overcome by no
alteration of the _milieu_, or of custom. The emotivity of woman may
be reduced to finer and more delicate shades, but it can never be
brought down to the level of the emotivity of the male sex.”
In respect of =artistic endowment= the male sex is unquestionably
superior to the female. The long series of male poets, musicians,
painters, sculptors, of the highest genius cannot be matched by any
notable number of striking female personalities in the same sphere of
artistic activity. Even the art of cooking has been further developed by
men. Without doubt the differences in sexuality are the principal causes
of this deficiency. The impetuous, aggressive character of the male
sexual impulse also favours poietic endeavours, the transformation of
sexual energy into higher plastic activity, as it fulfils itself in the
moments of most exalted artistic conception. The greater variability of
the male also serves to explain the greater frequency of male artists
of the first rank.
John Hunter, Burdach, Darwin, Havelock Ellis, and others, have shown
that there exists a greater tendency on the part of man to divergence
from type. In the course of evolution, man represents the more variable
and progressive, woman the more monotonous and conservative, moiety
of mankind. These differences find no less clear expression in
the psychical sphere. Notwithstanding increasing individual
differentiation--in truth, affecting only the minority, the _élite_
among women, as Rosa Mayreder very rightly insists--this great
difference in the variability of the sexes will ever continue. This
biological fact is certainly of great importance in respect of
civilization and of the relation between the sexes.
In a comparison between man and woman, the important fact of
=menstruation= must never be forgotten. Menstruation is only the
expression, only a phase, of a continuous undulatory movement in the
entire feminine organism. The intellectual and emotional state of woman
is, beyond question, a different one in different phases of the monthly
cycle. Icard, and recently Francillon (“Essai sur la Puberté chez la
Femme”--“Essay on Puberty in Woman,” pp. 189-198; Paris, 1906), have
given us exact information on this subject.
“In all tests of strength and cleverness,” says Havelock Ellis, “the
woman’s degree of strength and exactitude is related to the level of
her monthly curve. Moreover, in every criminal procedure, the relation
between the time of occurrence of the alleged crime and the accused’s
monthly cycle should invariably be taken into consideration.”
The results obtained by Helen Bradford Thompson by experimental research
in her “Comparative Psychology of the Sexes” (Würzburg, 1905) agree in
general with the details we have already given as the result of earlier
researches. In her experiment also
“man proved better developed in respect of motor capacity and accuracy
of judgment. Woman had, indeed, sharper senses and a better memory.
The opinion, however, that emotional excitement plays a greater part
in the life of woman has not been confirmed. On the contrary, woman’s
greater tendency towards religion and towards superstition is a proof
of her conservative nature, of her function to guard established
beliefs and modes of action.”
Thus we cannot expel from the world the fact that man and woman are
eminently =different= alike physically and mentally. Whether, as Alfons
Bilharz declares, they are really throughout equivalent opposites, or,
as he expresses the comparison, like +1 and -1, their sum is equivalent
to nil, must remain at present undetermined. But that ineradicable
differences exist is certain. There is no question here of an
inferiority to man. What woman lacks on one side she has more of on
another. She is through and through a creature =constructed on other
lines=, standing nearer to Nature than man, and for this reason, like
Nature, =problematical=, the great guardian of the secrets of Nature
(Bärenbach).
“Who shall explain the wonderful
Magic power of woman?”
says Platen, thus touching an aspect of ancient German sentiment, which
has also found expression in the _sanctum aut providum_ of Tacitus.
Ovid, Byron, Börne, and Rousseau, have also described the wonderful and
mysterious influence of woman’s nature, fundamentally different from
that of man. Most beautifully has it been described by Theodor Mundt in
the following magnificent passage of his book on Charlotte Stieglitz:
“The most secret elements of woman’s nature, in association with the
magic mystery of her organization, indicate the existence in her of
peculiar and deep-lying creative ideas, and in this wonderful riddle
of love we find the sympathetic of the entire universe expressed. The
sympathetic, which attracts and binds forces, the silent music in the
innermost being of the world’s soul, by means of which the stars, the
suns, bodies, spirits, are compelled to move in this eternal,
changeable rhythm, and in this continuous opposition--is the feminine
of the universe. This is the eternal feminine, of which Goethe says
that it draws us heavenward. Therefore there is nothing deeper, more
gentle, more unsearchable, than a woman’s heart. All-movable, it
extends into that wonderful distance of existence, and hears with fine
nerves the most hidden elements of existence. Touched and shaken by
every sound, like a spiritual harp, the most hidden aspects of nature
and of life often evoke in its strings prophetic oscillations. The
feminine is something common to all life, the most gentle psyche of
existence, and hence the fine connexion of the feminine nature with
the general organizations, operations, and world forces; hence the
mysterious force of attraction which exercises itself in such a magic
manner as the true pole of sex, as though each one only in, and with,
the true feminine could first find peace.... The ancients made a
remarkable use of this idea of a common feminine element in human
nature, inasmuch as by the name they gave to the pupil of the eye they
expressed the idea that =a young girl was to be found in every man’s
eye=. Young girls (pupillæ, κοραι)--these formed the centre of the
human eye, as Winkelmann points out; and is it possible to describe
the eye more aptly and distinctively, this radiant chiaroscuro of the
hidden basis of the soul, than by ascribing femininity to
it--femininity, which rises from that hidden basis of the soul as an
Anadyomene rises from the deep?”
Nietzsche speaks also of the “veil” of beautiful possibilities with
which woman is covered, and which makes the charm of her life. This
undefinable spiritual emanation, this dark, irrational element in woman,
led von Hippel to coin the clever phrase that woman is a comma, man a
full-stop. “With man, you know where you are--you have come to an end;
but with woman, there is something more to be expected.” From this
inward nature of woman there proceed immense results: the feminine
essence is a civilizing factor of the first rank; were woman wanting,
civilization would be non-existent. Very beautifully has the great
Buckle drawn attention to the indispensability of woman for the
spiritual progress of mankind. He remarks that men, the slaves of
experience and of fact, have only the women to thank for the fact that
their slavery has not become much more complete and more narrowing.
Women’s way of thinking, their spiritual care, their intercourse, their
influence, diffuse themselves unnoticed through the whole of society,
and take their place throughout its entire structure. By means of this
influence, more than by any other cause, we men have been conducted,
says Buckle, to a completely thought-out world.
This obscure, wonderful nature of woman has, however, its shadowy side.
Upon it depends that primitive, deeply-rooted =antipathy of the sexes=,
which is due to their profound heterogeneity, to the impossibility that
they can ever really understand one another. Herein lie the roots of the
brutal enslavement of woman by man in the course of history; of the
belief in witchcraft; of contempt for women, and the continued renewal
of theoretical misogyny. The victory of sexual love over this contrast
is often apparent only. Leopardi, and Theophile Gautier (in
“Mademoiselle de Maupin”), have shown how little woman understands the
inner nature of man; how little man understands woman has been
poetically described by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.
For this reason, true love is an understanding of the contrasted
natures, a solution of the riddle. “Être aimé, c’est être compris,” says
Delphine de Girardin.
What significance for the so-called “woman’s question” has the
determination of the existence of psychical sexual differences? We
answer: =The nature of woman, completely developed in all her
peculiarities, and enriched throughout her being by all the spiritual
elements of our times adequate to her being, ensures her an equal share
in civilization and in the progress of humanity.=
Complete equality between man and woman is impossible. But are all
sides of woman’s nature as yet adequately worked upon, fully developed?
Is not the civilized woman of the future still to be created? The true
nucleus of the woman’s movement is, I conceive, to be found in the
emancipation of woman from the dominion of pure sensuality, and from the
not less disastrous dominion of masculine spiritual arrogance. Have we
men really any right to pride ourselves to such a degree upon our
knowledge and intelligence? Should we =without= woman have advanced
anything like so far?
A glance at the beginnings of human civilization should teach us a
little modesty, for there we see that woman was equal, if not superior,
to man in productive, poietic activity. Gradually only, in the progress
of civilization, man supplanted woman, and monopolized all spheres of
productive activity, whilst woman was limited more and more to domestic
occupations. According to Karl Bücher, to women were originally allotted
all the labours connected with the obtaining and subsequent utilization
of vegetable materials, also the provision of the apparatus and vessels
necessary for this purpose; to man, on the other hand, were allotted the
chase, fishing, herding, and the provision of weapons and tools. Thus
woman was engaged in threshing and grinding the grain, in baking bread,
in the preparation of food and drink, in the making of pots, and in
spinning. Since these occupations are largely conducted in a rhythmical
manner, and the women worked together in the fields or in their huts,
while the men hunted singly in the forests, it resulted that women were
the first creators of poetry and music.
“Not,” writes Bücher, “upon the steep summits of society did poetry
originate; it sprung rather from the depths of the pure strong soul of
the people. =Women have striven to produce it; and as civilized man
owes to woman’s work much the best of his possessions, so also are her
thought and her poetry interwoven in the spiritual treasure handed
down from generation to generation.= To follow the traces of woman’s
poetry farther, in the intellectual life of the people, would be a
valuable exercise. Although these traces have to a large extent
disappeared, during the subsequent period of man’s poetic activity,
which appears to have gained predominance in proportion as men
monopolized the labours of material production, still, in a number of
races the influence of woman’s poetry can be followed for a long way
into the literary period.”
=To a large extent men first learned from women the elements of the
various handicrafts.= For instance, as Mason says, primeval woman gave
her “ulu”[27] to the saddler, and taught him the mode of preparing
leather. Women were the first discoverers of numerous industries and
handicrafts. The further development of these in later times was the
work of men; men alone understood how to differentiate their work, while
from the first it was inevitable that motherhood should greatly limit
the working powers of woman.
In the middle ages there still existed in Europe, especially in Germany
and France, certain industries which were exclusively in the hands of
women--for instance, the silk-spinners, silk-weavers, tailoresses, and
girdle-makers. In all these occupations there were mistresses, maids,
and female apprentices. It was not until the sixteenth century that
manufactures became a monopoly of the male sex. In the eighteenth
century women were actually forbidden by law to take part in
manufactures, until in recent times a reaction in their favour took
place.
Therefore we must not from the present conditions judge the capacity of
women for practical activity outside the home. I quite agree with
Gerland, who assumes that during this oppression of the female sex for
thousands of years, a certain deteriorating influence must have been
exercised, and I agree also with Havelock Ellis, who hopes much from the
development in the civilization of the future of an equal freedom for
man and woman, and who demands that we should acquire experience by
unlimited experiment regarding the qualifications of the female sex for
all departments of activity. Golden words as to the necessity for a
comprehensive emancipation of woman were uttered in 1865 by the
celebrated anthropologist Thomas Huxley, in his essay on
“Emancipation--Black and White,” in which he strongly condemns the
present system for the education of girls:
“Let us have ‘sweet girl graduates’ by all means. They will be none
the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the ‘golden hair’ will not
curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains
within. Nay, if obvious practical difficulties can be overcome, let
those women who feel inclined to do so descend into the gladiatorial
arena of life, not merely in the guise of _retiariæ_, as heretofore,
but as bold _sicariæ_, breasting the open fray. Let them, if they so
please, become merchants, barristers, politicians. Let them have a
fair field, but let them understand, as the necessary correlative,
that they are to have no favour. Let Nature alone sit high above the
lists, ‘rain influence and judge the prize.’”
And that men would maintain their old position cannot be doubted. The
only change would be that women, too, would take part in the work of
civilization.[28] They would introduce a new and fresh element into
this work; and inasmuch as every woman would be brought up
systematically with a view to her life’s work, the physically and
psychically disastrous idleness of unmarried young girls, of “old
maids,” and of “misunderstood women,” would come to an end, and these
unattractive types would pass away for ever. The work of mother and
housewife must, in correspondence with these changes, be more highly
esteemed than has hitherto been the case. The technique and the theory
of domestic economy can even now, with sufficient intelligence devoted
to the question, be remodelled and transformed to a satisfying
activity.[29]
Woman is an integral constituent of the processes of civilization,
which, without her, becomes unthinkable. The present moment is a
turning-point in the history of the feminine world. The woman of the
past is disappearing, to give place to the woman of the future; instead
of the bound, there appears the =free personality=.
APPENDIX: SEXUAL SENSIBILITY IN WOMAN
An old and still unsettled subject of dispute is the strength and nature
of sexual sensibility in woman. Whilst the manifestation of sexual
appetite and sexual enjoyment in the male are fairly simple--and in man,
as A. Eulenburg has proved, the copulatory impulse is much more powerful
than the reproductive impulse--the sexual sensibility of woman is still
involved in obscurity. Magendie remarked that no two women are exactly
alike in respect of their sexual sensations and perceptions. There is no
question that among women the varieties of erotic type are far more
numerous than among men. Rosa Mayreder, for instance, distinguishes an
erotic-eccentric, an altruistic-sentimental, and an egoistic-frigid
type. The attempt has been made to prove that the last-named type is the
most widely diffused--that it is, in fact, the characteristic type of
woman. Lombroso and Ferrero were the first to maintain the slight sexual
sensibility of woman; Harry Campbell took the same view; and recently a
Berlin physician--Dr. O. Adler--has published a book on the “Deficient
Sexual Sensibility of Woman,” the conclusions of which are that
“the sexual impulse (desire, libido) of woman is, alike in its first
spontaneous origin and in its later manifestation, notably less
intense than that of man; and further, that libido must first be
aroused in a suitable manner, and that often it never appears at all.”
Albert Eulenburg, in an article in _Zukunft_ (December 2, 1893), and
later in his “Sexual Neuropathy,” pp. 88, 89 (Leipzig, 1895), first
opposed this doctrine of the physiological sexual anæsthesia of woman,
and quoted in support of his view the following passage from the
writings of the celebrated gynæcologist Kisch:
“The sexual impulse is so powerful, in certain life periods it is an
elementary force which so overwhelmingly dominates the entire organism
of woman, that it leaves no room in her mind for thoughts of
reproduction; on the contrary, she greatly desires sexual intercourse
even when she is very much afraid of becoming pregnant or when there
can be no question of any pregnancy occurring” (see Kisch, “The Sexual
Life of Woman,” English translation, Rebman, 1908).
I have myself asked a great many cultured women about this matter.
=Without exception=, they declared the theory of the lesser sexual
sensibility of women to be erroneous; many were even of opinion that
sexual sensibility was greater and more enduring in woman than in
man.[30]
When we actually consider the physical bases of feminine sexuality, we
must admit that women’s sexual sphere is a much =more widely extended=
one than that of men. The author of “Splitter” has very well
characterized this fact when he says:
“Women are in fact pure sex from knees to neck. We men have
concentrated our apparatus in a single place, we have extracted it,
separated it from the rest of the body, because _prèt à partir_. They
(women) are a great sexual =surface= or target; we =have= only a
sexual =arrow=. Procreation is their proper element, and when they are
engaged in it they remain at home in their own sphere; we for this
purpose must go elsewhere out of ourselves. In the matter of time also
our part in procreation is concentrated. We may devote to the matter
barely ten minutes; women give as many months. Properly speaking, they
procreate unceasingly, they stand continually at the witches’
cauldron, boiling and brewing; while we lend a hand merely in passing,
and do no more than throw one or two fragments into the vessel.”
It is possible, however, that the greater extension of the sexual sphere
in woman gives rise, if one may use the expression, to a greater
dispersal of sexual sensations, which are not, as they are in man,
closely concentrated to a particular point, and for this reason the
spontaneous resolution of the libido (in the form of the sexual orgasm)
is rendered more difficult.
Recently Havelock Ellis has made a searching investigation into the
nature of the sexual impulse in woman. He found the following
differences by which it was distinguished from the sexual impulse of the
male:
1. The sexual impulse of woman shows greater external passivity.
2. It is more complicated, less readily arises spontaneously, more
frequently needs external stimulus, while the orgasm develops more
slowly than in man.
3. It develops in its full strength only after the commencement of
regular sexual intercourse.
4. The boundary beyond which sexual excess begins is less easily reached
than in man.
5. The sexual sphere has a greater extension, and is more diffusely
distributed than in man.
6. The spontaneous appearances of sexual desire have a marked tendency
to periodicity.[31]
7. The sexual impulse exhibits in woman greater variability, a greater
extent of variation, than in man--alike when we examine separate
feminine individuals, and when we compare the different phases in the
life of the same woman.
This great extension of the feminine sexual sphere is illustrated, for
example, by the case reported by Moraglia, of a woman who was able to
induce sexual excitement by the masturbation of fourteen different areas
of her body.
How much more woman is sexuality than man is can be observed in asylums,
where the conventional inhibitions are withdrawn. Here, according to
Shaw’s observations, the women greatly exceed the men in fluency,
malignity, and =obscenity=; and in this relation there is no difference
between the shameless virago from the most depraved classes of London
and the elegant lady of the upper circles. Noise, uncleanliness, and
sexual depravity in speech and demeanour, are much commoner in the
women’s wards of asylums than on the male side. In all forms of acute
mental disorder, according to Shaw, the sexual element plays a much more
prominent part in woman than in man.
Another experienced alienist, Dr. E. Bleuler, confirms this permeation
of woman with sexuality. In a recently published work he remarks:
“The whole ‘career’ in the average woman depends on sexuality;
marriage, or some equivalent of marriage, signifies to her what to man
a position in business signifies--viz., her ambition in all relations,
the happily conducted struggle for simple existence, as well as for
pleasure and for all else that life can bring, and only after these,
sexuality also, and the joy of having children. Not to marry, and also
extra-conjugal sexual indulgence, induce in woman inevitable
consequences, with strongly marked emotional colouring; to the average
man all this is a trifling affair, or it may even be a matter of
absolute indifference. And we have further to consider the limits
imposed by our civilization, which make it impossible for the
well-brought-up woman to live, and even to think, as she pleases in
sexual matters, and which demand the actual suppression of sexual
emotions, not merely of the outward manifestation of these emotions.
Is it to be wondered at that in these circumstances, in mentally
disordered women, we encounter once more the suppressed sexual
feelings, those sexual feelings which really comprise at least half of
our natural existence?--I say =at least= half, for the analogous
impulse, the nutritive impulse, seems really to be inferior in
strength to the sexual impulse, in civilized as well as in savage
human beings.”
In the majority of cases the sexual frigidity of woman is, in fact,
apparent merely--either because behind the veil prescribed by
conventional morality, behind the apparent coldness, there is concealed
an ardent sexuality, or else because the particular man with whom she
has had intercourse has not succeeded rightly in awakening her erotic
sensibility, so complicated and so difficult to arouse.[32] When he has
succeeded in doing so, the sexual insensibility will in the majority of
cases disappear. A striking example of this is seen in the following
case:
=Case of Temporary Sexual Anæsthesia.=--Girl twenty years of age.
Early awakening of the sexual impulses. Already practised onanism at
the age of five years; often for the sake of sexual stimulation
introduced hairpins into the vagina, until one day one of these
remained, and had to be removed by operation. Notwithstanding this,
she soon resumed masturbation, using for this purpose a finger, a
candle, etc. Ultimately this became a daily practice, which she
continued until she was eighteen years of age. She then first had
sexual intercourse with a man, in which, however, she remained quite
cold; this was the case also in subsequent attempts with this man and
with others. Finally she met a man with whom she was in sympathy, who
succeeded in inducing in her sexual gratification, by exchange of
rôles, and corresponding alteration in the position in intercourse.
Later, intercourse in the normal position also induced complete sexual
gratification; since then onanism has been entirely discontinued, and
in coitus the orgasm occurs speedily in one or two minutes.
Where sexual frigidity in woman is enduring in character, we have to do
either with inherited influences, with sexual developmental inhibition,
the psycho-sexual infantilism of Eulenburg, or with some disease
(especially hysteria and other nervous disorders), and with the
consequences of habitual masturbation.
Speaking generally, the sexual sensibility of woman is, as we have seen,
of quite a different nature from that of man; but in intensity it is at
least as great as that of man.
[24] The hermaphroditic idea of antiquity has repeatedly fascinated
the human spirit. It certainly cannot be denied that something great
and noble underlay this idea of overcoming sex. As long as eighty
years before, Weininger and the modern apostles of bisexuality, Johann
Michael Leupoldt, Professor of Medicine at the University of Erlangen,
made the following prophecy: “_The reconciliation of the sexual
contrast in every human individual will some day proceed so far_ that,
dynamically understood, _with the general attainment of a kind of
hermaphroditism_, humanity, having reached its earthly goal, will
become totally extinct” (“Eubiotik oder Grundzüge der Kunst, als
Mensch richtig, tüchtig, wohl und lang zu leben”--“Eubiotics, or
Principles of the Art of Living as Man Rightly, Virtuously, Well, and
Long,” pp. 232, 233; Berlin and Leipzig, 1828). This would amount to a
kind of natural realization of E. von Hartmann’s ideal of conscious
self-annihilation at the end of time!
[25] G. Hirth, “Entropy of the Germinal System and Hereditary
Enfranchisement,” pp. 89, 90 (Munich, 1900).
[26] See note (^{36}), p. 94.
[27] The “ulu” is a kind of knife used by Eskimo women.
[28] _Cf._ in this connexion, Alice Salomon, “The Choice of a
Profession for Girls”; Josephine Levy-Rathenau, “A Consideration of
the Various Professions for Women, Qualifications and Prospects”;
Elizabeth Altmann-Gottheiner, “A Study of Woman.” These are all
published in “Das Buch vom Kinde” (“The Book of the Child”), edited by
Adele Schreiber, Leipzig and Berlin, 1907, vol. ii., Div. 2, pp.
182-188, 189-209, 210-216 (contains an abstract of the most important
literature of the subject).
[29] On this subject one of our most celebrated economists writes as
follows: “Let us observe what to-day a good housewife of the middle
class is able to get through in the way of domestic and hygienic
activity, and of the education of children, and by means of the
knowledge and employment of domestic machines; let us not overlook in
what a one-sided way the great advances in natural science and in the
mechanical arts have hitherto been devoted to the service of the great
industries, what enormous economies are still possible if the same
knowledge and intelligence are devoted to the amelioration of domestic
service. Only the rough, barbarous housewife of the lower classes can
say, ‘I have no more to-day to do in the house.’ When the mode of life
is a healthy one, when to every dwelling-house is attached a garden,
the housewife even to-day is fully occupied, and in the future will be
still more so, notwithstanding all the schools that come to her
assistance, all the shops, all the trades; notwithstanding all the
products, including food-products, which nowadays she buys ready-made.
And besides her domestic activity, she has to find time for lectures,
for culture, for music, and for various socially useful
activities--even women of quite the lower classes. Without this no
social cure is possible.”--G. SCHMOLLER, “Elements of General Domestic
Economy,” vol. i., p. 253 (Leipzig, 1901).
THE SIMPLIFICATION OF HOUSEHOLD DUTIES.--English readers will find the
questions briefly touched upon in this note--the enslavement of woman
by an unceasing round of petty domestic toil, the necessity for
devoting the same amount of finished intelligence to these domestic
problems that has been devoted to “labour-saving” in most departments
of masculine activity, and the lines on which future progress may be
expected to move, bringing about in this way alone a much-needed
“emancipation” of women--fully discussed by Mr. H. G. Wells in his
sociological studies. See “Anticipations,” “Mankind in the Making,” “A
New Utopia,” “In the Days of the Comet.”--TRANSLATOR.
[30] Noteworthy is the following utterance of a clergyman regarding
the sensuality of country girls: “Young women are in no way behind
young men in the strength of their fleshly lusts; they are only too
willing to be seduced--so =willing= that even older girls frequently
give themselves to half-grown boys, and =girls give themselves to
several men in brief succession=. Moreover, it is by no means always
the young men by whom the seduction is effected. Often enough =it is
the girls who lure the lads to sexual intercourse=, in which case they
do not wait till the lads come to their rooms, but they go themselves
to the young men’s bedrooms, or wait for them in their beds.”--C.
WAGNER, “The State of Affairs as Regards Sexual Morality among the
Evangelical Agricultural Population of the German Empire,” vol. i.,
sec. 2, p. 213 (Leipzig, 1897).
[31] E. Heinrich Kisch (“The Sexual Life of Woman,” English
translation, Rebman, 1908) names the =ovaries= “regulators of the
sexual impulse.” In the ovary, and in the periodical changes that
occur in that organ, are to be found the fundamental cause, and the
means of regulation, of the =sexual impulse=; in the clitoris is the
seat of =voluptuous sensibility=.
[32] Georg Hirth remarks very aptly (“Ways to Love,” Munich, 1906, p.
570): “For it is the task of the man to summon his whole power of
self-command, to employ all his skill, to take all the care in his
power, that the woman may be, as one says, ‘ready.’ The man who thinks
only of his own gratification, and who leaves his partner ungratified,
is a brutal being, or, if not brutal, he is simply ignorant of the
harm he is doing.... In general, the man has the _tempo_ of
gratification much better and more securely under control than the
woman; in many women, indeed, the sexual orgasm is very difficult to
induce, and in such cases the man must help with skill and
tenderness.”
CHAPTER VI
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--RELIGION AND SEXUALITY
“_The more dearly we understand how the indeterminate sexual attractive
force of the most lowly organisms has, by a continuous addition of
psychical elements, slowly developed into the love of the higher species
of animals and of mankind, the sooner shall we be inclined to attribute
to this sentiment the importance which it deserves. Then we shall no
longer be able to regard it as an individual imagination, which has no
relation to reality and no roots in the depths of life. It will become
to us a measuring rule for the stage of evolution to which we have
attained._”--CHARLES ALBERT.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VI
Influence of the development of the brain upon the sexual impulse --
Relations between speech and love -- The psychic-emotional roots of
love -- Love as a product of civilization -- Relation between the
physical and the spiritual poietic impulse -- The “function-impulse”
of Dr. Santlus -- Psychical sexual equivalents -- Schopenhauer, Hirth,
and Mantagazza, on this subject -- Rôle of sexuality in the feelings
of life -- The organic necessity of love -- Sexual philosophy -- The
Marquis de Sade -- Otto Weininger -- Max Zeiss -- Relations of love to
the individual feelings of personality -- The reproductive impulse and
the conjugative impulse -- Love and love’s embrace as a personal aim.
The psychogenetic fundamental law of love -- The way of the spirit in
love -- Its tendency from the general to the individual -- From the
remote to the proximate -- Love as a transcendental and as a personal
relationship.
The association of religio-metaphysical ideas with the sexual life --
A general anthropological phenomenon -- Anthropomorphistic-animistic
explanation of the relation between religion and the sexual life --
Billroth’s scientific analysis of religious perception -- L.
Feuerback, M’Lennan, and Tylor on this subject -- My own description
of the psychological processes in the association between the
religious and the sexual life -- The deification of love according to
E. von Mayer -- Strongest in women -- Vicarious religions and sexual
perceptions -- History of religio-sexual phenomena -- Religious
prostitution -- Single and repeated acts of religious prostitution --
Sexual self-surrender to the deity or his representative --
Defloration by divine symbols -- Defloration deities among the
Indians, the Jews, and the Romans -- Religious defloration by
representatives of the deity -- The Babylonian Mylitta-cult --
Diffusion and explanation thereof -- Religious prostitution in India
-- Among primitive peoples -- Bachofen’s brilliant explanation of
religious prostitution as a counteraction to the individualization of
love -- Contempt for virginity among primitive peoples -- Permanent
religious prostitution -- Sexual intercourse as a consecrated act --
The temple-girls of the Greeks, Phœnicians, and Indians -- The Indian
“nautch-girls” -- The sense of eternity in the religious and the
sexual impulse -- Sexual mysticism -- Religio-erotic festivals --
Their wide diffusion -- Examples from antiquity, from India, and from
Central and South America -- Sexual mysticism in Christianity --
Religio-sexual sects -- The “unio mystica” -- The primiz, or mystical
marriage -- Mariolatry -- A religious poem.
Asceticism -- Its origin -- Metchnikoffs explanation of the origin of
asceticism -- Disharmonies of the sexual life -- Psychology of
ascetics -- Their hypersexuality -- Great antiquity and ubiquity of
asceticism -- The asceticism of the Indians, Mohammedans, and
Christians -- Preoccupation of Christian ascetics with sexual matters
-- Sexual visions -- Dissolute sects -- Monastic and cloistral life --
Modern asceticism -- Its difference from ancient asceticism -- Its
connexion with actual experiences -- Example of Schopenhauer --
Hitherto unpublished evidence of the relationship between his ascetic
views and his own life -- Tolstoi on the sorrows of voluptuousness --
His relative asceticism -- Weininger’s renewal of early Christian
asceticism -- Its cause -- Characteristics of Weininger’s book.
The belief in witchcraft -- The principal source of all misogyny and
contempt of women -- Not a Christian discovery -- Primeval association
between sexuality and magic -- The sexual origin of the belief in
witchcraft -- Devil’s mistresses -- The predisponents of the medieval
belief in witchcraft -- Continuance of this belief into our own times
-- Rôle of sexuality in pastoral medicine -- External and internal
causation of the theological treatment of sexual problems -- Sexual
casuistic literature -- The religious factor in the sexual life of the
present day -- Sexual excesses of modern sects -- The revival of
romanticism -- Experiences of an elderly physician regarding religion
and sexuality -- Deprivation of love and satiety of love as sources of
religious needs -- Significance of the religious factor in the history
of love -- Subordinate rôle of this in the individualization of the
sentiment of love.
CHAPTER VI
If, with Friedrich Ratzel, we understand by civilization the sum total
of all the mental acquirements of a period, then also human love, this
specific product of civilization, is merely a mirrored picture of the
mental activities of the existing epoch of civilization. We can follow
this =way of the spirit in love= from the primitive age down to the
present day, and we can detect, in each successive epoch of
civilization, the association with sexuality of peculiar spiritual
states; and after thus passing in review the thousands of years of human
history, we can discern once more in our own epoch the individual
psychical elements which characterize the love of modern civilized man.
The increasing spiritualization and idealization of sensuality in the
course of civilization, =notwithstanding= the persistence of the
elementary intensity of the sexual impulse, is associated with the fact
to which we have already alluded--namely, the preponderance of the brain
characteristic of the genus homo--a preponderance which was
unquestionably gradually acquired, and arose in consequence of an
accumulation of original variations which gave their possessors a
certain advantage in the struggle for existence.
Thus very gradually the primary, instinctive, still powerful animal ego
underwent expansion into the secondary ego (in Meynert’s sense), into
the =spiritual personality=, to which a fixed foundation was given by
the possession of =speech=. With some justice the origin of speech has
been singled out as extremely significant for the development of the
feeling of love; and the conquest of the primitive animal instinct has
been, above all, attributed to this faculty. A. Cabral, in his
interesting work, “La Vénus Génitrix” (Paris, 1882, p. 155), expresses
the opinion that speech and song developed solely on account of sexual
relations; and he alludes in support of this view to the well-known
manifold noises made by various animals in conditions of sexual
excitement. It is very significant in this connexion that
anthropological science has proved, as an important fact in racial
psychology, that the development of poetry =preceded= that of prose.[33]
The original form of speech was rhythmical noise, a poem, a song. And
we saw above that this was subservient to more suggestive purposes, and,
above all, to sexual allurement. Thus the primitive natural connexion
between speech and sexuality appears somewhat probable. With these
earlier erotic noises and alluring tones were subsequently associated
the first elements of intellectual comprehension, the first =thoughts=.
This “withdrawal of mankind from pure instinct,” which Schiller, in his
essay on the earliest human society, describes as the “most fortunate
and most important occurrence in human history,” from which time the
struggle towards freedom may be said to begin, gradually enabled the
higher =feeling-tones= of sensation to become more predominant. The
elementary impulses became associated with sensations of pleasure and
pain as psychical reactions. The “organic sensations” entered the sphere
of consciousness, and so gave rise, in association and reciprocal
working with the higher sensory stimuli, to the psychico-emotional roots
of the impulses. Thus, in the sexual sphere, out of pure voluptuousness,
the simple instinctive impulse towards copulation, arose =love=, whose
essence is an intimate association of physical sensations with feelings
and thoughts, with the entire spiritual and emotional being of
mankind.[34]
“Love,” says Charles Albert, “is the result of all the forward steps
of human activity in all departments, and in every direction, as
manifested in their effects upon the sexual life. It is an advance
which goes hand in hand with all other advances. Man is an inseparable
whole, and in theory only can he be subdivided into separate
faculties. In reality, indeed, all departments of human development
are so intimately associated that progress in any one of them must
place something to the credit of all.”
Increasing psychical refinement and differentiation of the human type,
domination of the intelligence and of emotion over brute force,
transformation of the social relations between man and woman in
consequence of economic conditions or of religious and moral ideas,
respect for personality, a secured provision for the most pressing vital
needs, and a consequent elevation and complication of the sexual life,
the influence of a longing for ideal beauty in a psychical and moral
sense--all these and much more have contributed to constitute sexual
love in the sense in which we understand and experience it at the
present day. The speech of the lover of our own time is the
comprehensive expression of all human progress. The difference between
animal rutting and the lofty sensation of love corresponds exactly to
the gulf which separates primitive man, capable only of chipping for
himself a few almost useless flint tools, from civilized man who, with
the aid of innumerable machines, has tamed to his service the elementary
forces of Nature.
We must recur to the earliest beginnings of the evolution of the human
psyche in its association with sexuality, in order to understand the
=profound= and =primitive= connexion between the bodily and the
spiritual formative impulse; this connexion has been expressed by the
saying that the sexual impulse is the father of all those intellectual
impulses peculiar to man which have made him a thinker and a discoverer.
In the time of Schelling’s natural philosophy, they went so far as to
speak of the “testicular hemispheres” as analogous to the hemispheres of
the brain. And is not this connexion also expressed etymologically (in
German) in the verbal association of _Zeugung_ (procreation) and
_Ueberzeugung_ (certainty, _i.e._, higher, or intellectual,
procreation), and, further, by the fact that in the Hebrew tongue the
ideas of “procreation” and “cognition” are jointly represented by a
=single= term? And, returning to the physical sphere, it may be
mentioned that, according to Moebius (“Ueber die Wirkungen der
Kastration”--“Concerning the Effects of Castration,” Halle, 1906),
sexuality is the common product of testicular and cerebral activity.
Plato was already aware of this relationship when he called thought a
sublimated sexual impulse, and Buffon likewise when he described love as
“le premier essor de la sensibilité, qui se porte ensuite à d’autres
objets.” In more recent times, Dr. Santlus, in his valuable essay, “On
the Psychology of the Human Impulses” (_Archiv für Psychiatrie_, 1864,
vol. vi., pp. 244 and 262), alluded to this combination of the sexual
sphere with the highest spiritual interests of mankind under the name of
the “function-impulse.”
From these intimate relations between sexual and spiritual productivity
is to be explained the remarkable fact that certain spiritual creations
may take the place of the purely physical sexual impulse; that there are
psychical =sexual equivalents= into which the potential energy of the
sexual impulse may be transformed. Here belong numerous emotions, such
as ferocity, anger, pain, and the productive spiritual activities which
find their vent in poetry, art, and religion--in short, the whole
=imaginative life= of mankind in the widest sense is able, when the
natural activity of the sexual impulse is inhibited, to find such sexual
equivalents, the importance of which in the evolutionary history of
human love we shall have later to study in further detail.
Interesting observations regarding this intimate connexion between the
spiritual and the physical procreative impulse are to be found in the
work of a thinker who made no secret of his intense sensuality, and in
whose life and thought sexuality played a peculiar part--in the work of
Schopenhauer. In his “New Paralipomena” he lays stress on the similarity
between the work of productive genius and the modification of the sexual
impulse peculiar to the human race. In another place in which, as
Frauenstädt also insists, he is speaking from personal experience, he
writes: “In the days and hours when the =voluptuous= impulse is most
powerful, not a dull desire, arising from emptiness and dullness of the
consciousness, but a burning longing, a violent ardour, =precisely then
also are the highest powers of the spirit available, the finest
consciousness is prepared for its intensest activity=, although at the
moment when the consciousness has given itself up to desire they are
=latent=; but it needs merely a powerful effort to turn their direction,
and instead of that tormenting, despairing lust (the kingdom of
darkness), the activity of the highest spiritual powers fills the
consciousness (the kingdom of light).”
Georg Hirth, who, in the section of his “Ways to Love” entitled
“Stark-naked Thoughts,” gives in aphorisms an interesting account of the
psychology of love, affirms the “delightful phenomenon of a peculiarly
active enhancement of our impulse to thought and production,” =after=
erotic satisfaction, =after= a fortunate love-night. Very ably, also,
has Mantegazza described the spiritual activity produced by a happy and
victorious love.[35]
Many great thinkers have complained of the alleged impairment of pure
spirituality by the sexual life, and have recommended asceticism in
order to arrive at a truer internal enlightenment. This, however, would
imply pulling up the roots of spiritual poietic[36] activity, the
suppression of a rich inner life of thought and feeling, the
destruction of all true poetry and art. There would be left behind only
the wilderness of a cold abstraction. Look at the letters of Abelard
before and after his emasculation. Sexuality first breathes into our
spiritual being the warm and blooming life.
“The world,” says Philipp Frey, “would be conceived by us in sharply
bounded intellectual pictures, unless we saw it in the changing lights
of our sexuality. From the green of gently dreaming desire, through
the yellow of surging emotion, and from the blood-red of eager desire
to the cool blue of satisfaction--all things appear to us in the light
of our sexuality. Life would be better ordered if we were purely
intelligible machines for the purposes of nutrition, work, and
production. But without the dualism of desire and satisfaction, the
world would become torpid in a great yawn.”
This intimate connexion between the psychic-emotional being and the
sexual impulse gave rise to a deepening, a concentration, and an
increasing intensity, of the feeling of love, whereby the latter becomes
the most powerful influence affecting mankind in bodily and spiritual
relations. Voltaire, in his “Pensées Philosophiques,” says aptly:
“L’amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu’elle attaque
à la fois la tête, le cœur, et le corps.” That it is in love that the
immediate admixture of organic processes most clearly manifests itself
is a fact pointed out already by Aristotle, and among modems emphasized
by Griesinger.[37]
Thus love discloses itself as a =nucleus=, the =axis= of the individual,
and therewith also of the social life, a fact indicated already in
Schopenhauer’s phrase, describing love as the “focus of the will,” and
in Weismann’s expression “the continuity of the germ-plasma.” And we can
easily understand that there are literary advocates of a consequent
“=sexual philosophy=,” who base their view of the universe solely and
entirely upon the sexual. To them the sexual problem becomes a world
problem, eroticism expands into metaphysics. These sexual philosophers
start from love to unveil the mysteries of life. The most celebrated
advocate of such a sexual philosophy was the Marquis de Sade, of whom I
have myself given an account in a pseudonymous work entitled “New
Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (Berlin, 1904). According to
de Sade, it is only through the sexual that the world can be grasped and
understood.
In a certain sense the antipodes of the Marquis de Sade is a remarkable
sexual philosopher of our own time, the author of “Sex and Character,”
Dr. Otto Weininger. His whole circle of thought also revolves
exclusively round the sexual. It forms the basis, the starting-point of
his exposition; though, indeed, it does so in a purely negative sense.
For Weininger is the apostle of =asexuality=; to him the highest type of
human being is the non-sexual, the one who renounces all sexuality. And
woman, as the incorporation of sexuality, is to him “nothingness,” the
“radically evil” which must be annihilated.
A positive sexual philosopher of a nobler kind than these two anomalous
spirits is Max Zeiss, whose book, “Ragnarök, a Philosophico-Social
Study,” was published at Strasburg in 1904. He regards work, effort,
creation, the strife for material position, for honour and renown, only
as subordinate aims for the attainment of one aim--=love=.
The ever more intimate association of love with the spiritual life, its
increasing depth, the inclusion within its sphere of influence of all
feelings and thoughts, necessarily give rise to a stronger development
of the =feeling of individual personality=, which, in contrast with the
earlier instinctive impulse, came more and more to dominate the amatory
life. Now love gained at least an =equal= importance for the individual
that in former conditions it had for the purposes of reproduction, and
therewith subjectively the reproductive idea was unquestionably thrust
into the background, in comparison with the idea of personal living, of
personal enrichment and development, by means of love. Hegel says aptly
(“Æsthetics,” Berlin, 1837, vol. ii., p. 186): “The sorrows of love,
these frustrate hopes, the very state of being in love, the never-ending
pains which the lover actually experiences, this never-ending happiness
and joy to which he looks forward in imagination--these are matters
devoid of all general interest; =they concern only the lover himself=.”
Schleiermacher also insists, in his letters concerning “Lucinde,” on the
great importance of love for the spiritual development of the
individual.
The individualization of love has certainly resulted in a great decline
in the predominance of the reproductive idea, of the subjective sense of
race, without it ever being possible for it to lose its eminent
=objective= significance. Nietzsche, therefore, declares a
“reproductive impulse” to be pure “mythology;”[38] and Carpenter, also,
in his book, “Love’s Coming of Age,” says that human love is mainly a
desire for complete union, and only in much less degree a wish for the
reproduction of the race. The profound significance of individual love
in the =promotion of civilization= is exceedingly well described by him
when he says:
“Taking union as the main point, we may look upon the idealized
sex-love as a sense of contact pervading the whole mind and
body--while the sex-organs are a specialization of this faculty of
union in the outermost sphere: union in the bodily sphere giving rise
to bodily generation, the same as union in the mental and emotional
spheres occasions generation of another kind.”
Proof of the fact that love, in its purely individual relations, is also
of great importance for human civilization, that it is profoundly
significant for the higher evolution of humanity, =in addition to= its
importance for the perpetuation of the species--the proof of this thesis
is very important in view of certain problems connected with the theory
of population and in view of the practical conclusions deduced from that
theory, as, for example, the doctrine of neo-malthusianism. =Love and
love’s embrace do not exist only for the purposes of the species: they
are also of importance to the ego; they are necessary for the life, the
evolution, and the internal growth of the individual himself.=
And we must not fail to recognize to what extent the fact that the
individual has gained much from love ultimately reacts also to the
advantage of the species. For the species, as well as for the
individual, the true path of progress lies in the direction of the
individualization of the sexual impulses.
* * * * *
When we study in detail the gradual permeation of sexuality with
spiritual elements, the gradual development of love, and its advance
towards perfection by means of civilization, we ascertain that for the
love of the modern civilized man there exists a kind of biogenetic, or
rather psychogenetic, fundamental law. In modern love we encounter all
the spiritual elements which were actively operative in the love of past
times; the love of the civilized man of the present day is an extracted,
shortened, compressed repetition of the entire developmental course of
love from the earliest times to the present day. And the general course
of this development reappears also in the love of the individual.
This course is, to put the matter shortly, from the general to
the individual, from the remote to the proximate. We can further
divide the history of human love into two great epochs. In the first
epoch, love was, above all, a =transcendental relationship= of a
religio-metaphysical nature. The transcendental relationships played a
more important part than the purely human and personal. Everywhere an
ulterior element played its part. In the second epoch, love underwent an
evolution into a more =personal= relationship, in which the human being
himself took foremost place, as compared with any transcendental
considerations. The history of love is, in fact, an illustration of
Compte’s replacement of the theologico-metaphysical epoch of mental
development by the anthropological. In individual love, however, there
still remain active and demonstrable many transcendental elements. The
oldest spiritual elements of love continue to form a portion of the
content of modern love, and to play a more or less dominant part in its
genesis.
To this primeval and psychical phenomenon belongs, above all, an
intimate association between =religious= ideas and feelings and the
sexual life. In a certain sense, the history of religion can be regarded
as the history of a peculiar mode of manifestation of the human sexual
impulse, especially in its influence on the imagination and its
products.
Certain modern writers, members of the laity far from learned in the
history of civilization, have considered the Roman Catholic Church
pre-eminently responsible for the appearance of this sexual element in
ritual and dogma. This, however, is grossly unjust. A =scientific= study
of these relations teaches us that =all= religions exhibit to a greater
or less degree this sexual admixture, and if this appears more prominent
in the Roman Catholic Church, it is due, in the first place, to the fact
that this religion is nearer to us in time than many of the religions of
antiquity, and, in the second place, it is explicable on the ground that
the Roman Catholic Church has always displayed greater openness and less
hypocrisy than, for example, the Protestant pietists, who, as the
Königsberg scandal, the Eva van Buttler affair, etc., show, are no less
blameworthy in respect of sexual vagaries.
A really =objective= basis for an opinion regarding the relations
between religion and sexuality can only be obtained when we cease to
consider these relations as an affair of dogma and of the confessional,
and study them upon the basis to which they properly belong--to wit, the
=anthropological=. For these relationships are peculiar to the genus
homo as such. The sexual element is quite as prominent in the religions
of primitive peoples as in those of modern civilized nations.
Anthropological science has hitherto been occupied more with the fact
than with the explanation of the remarkable relations between religion
and sexuality. There can, however, be no doubt that these relations
arise out of the very nature of mankind. The various anthropologists and
physicians who have occupied themselves with these problems are in
agreement upon this point: that the connexion between religion and the
sexual life can be explained only on =anthropomorphic-animistic=
grounds--that is, by the same kind of ideas which Tylor has proved to be
the foundation of the primitive mental life.
Thus, the great physician and anthropologist Theodor Billroth doubts the
existence of any pure religious perception entirely free from all
sensual elements. In a letter to Hanslick, dated February 21, 1891, he
writes:
“In my opinion, it is nonsensical to speak of a special religious
perception. What we call by this name is either a purely fanciful and
imaginative opinion, which may rise to the intensity of hallucination,
and has for substratum any kind of imaginative product which excites a
yearning in the believing or loving individual--or else, in fanatics,
it is an actual erotic excitement, like the rhythmical
prayer-movements of the Mohammedans, the dancing of the Dervishes, or
the jumping of the Flagellants. The Church as bridegroom for the nun,
as bride for the monk, has a similar signification. It is, in a
certain sense, the continuation of the service of Isis, and of the
festivals of Aphrodite and Bacchus. Man has always created his gods or
his god in his own image, and prays and sings to him--that is,
properly speaking, to himself--in the artistic forms of the period.
Since the so-called divine is always a mere abstraction or
personification of one or several human attributes in the highest
conceivable potency, it follows that human and divine, worldly and
religious, cannot really be of differing natures. Man cannot, in fact,
think anything supernatural, nor can he do anything unnatural, because
he never can think or act except with human attributes.”
This explanation coincides with the view of Ludwig Feuerbach, who has
especially insisted on the anthropomorphistic element in religio-sexual
phenomena in his essay “Concerning Mariolatry.”
M’Lennan and Tylor were among the chief discoverers of the animistic
aspect of religio-sexual ideas. In a way analogous to his attitude
towards other phenomena, primitive man assumed the activity of spirits
in explanation of the sexual impulse and everything associated
therewith; and he paid divine worship to the sexual impulse, as the
visible and palpable manifestation of those spirits.
I myself have more fully described this physiological process in a
somewhat different manner (“Contributions to the Etiology of
Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 76, 77), and I quote here my
account of the primitive deification of the sexual.
As something elemental, incredible, supernatural, the sexual impulse
made its appearance in man’s life at the time of puberty; by its
overwhelming force, by the intensity, spontaneity, and multiplicity, of
the perceptions to which it gave rise, it awakened feelings which
enriched, vivified, and inflamed the imagination in an unexpected
manner. This phenomenon, overwhelming him with elemental force, filled
primitive man with a holy fear. He ascribed it to a supernatural
influence, =and this supernatural influence became associated in his
circle of perceptions with those others which he had previously
experienced=, and which had aroused in him the feeling of =dependence
upon one or several higher powers=, before which he knelt in worship. To
what an extent the =metaphysical= invaded the whole sexual life of man,
Schopenhauer has clearly shown in his “Metaphysic of Sexual Love.”
Religion and sexuality come into the most intimate association in this
perception of the metaphysical and in this feeling of dependence; hence
arise the remarkable relations between the two, and that easy transition
of religious feelings into sexual feelings which is manifest in all the
relations of life. In both cases the surrender, the renunciation, of the
individual personality is experienced as a pleasurable sensation.
Schopenhauer has described in a classical manner the metaphysical
impulsive force of love striving onward towards the infinite and the
divine, whose analogy with the religious impulse we cannot fail to
recognize.
In his thoughtful book, “The Vital Laws of Civilization” (Halle, 1904,
p. 52), Eduard von Mayer has also discussed the religio-sexual problem.
He starts from the idea that man regarded as higher than himself that
which he was unable to master, and, above all, hunger and love.
“The pains of ungratified hunger or love plough deep furrows, into
which falls the seed of voluptuousness, of satisfied hunger, or of the
joys of love. And to primitive man, to whom the entire universe is
full of living beings, hunger and love also appear as =divine powers=,
which pain and plague him until their will is satisfied.”
The association of sexuality with religion affects both sexes equally,
although the phenomenon appears more intense in woman, and is more
enduring in her, owing to the greater depth of her emotional life. The
brothers de Goncourt, in their diary, describe religion as simply a
portion of woman’s sexual life. Feminine sexual activity thus appears
something religious, pious, holy. And those priests who pretended to
“sanctify” by their love the women whom they seduced, were certainly
more accurate, from the =physiological= point of view, than the Church
was in its condemnation of carnal lust as sin and the work of the devil.
In the middle ages it was a view commonly held in France that women who
had intercourse with priests were in some sort sanctified thereby. The
mistresses of priests were called the “consecrated.”
The identity of religious and sexual perceptions explains the frequent
transformation of one into the other, and the continuous association
between the two. A sexual emotion will often function vicariously for a
religious emotion, in part or wholly.
The unusually interesting history of the complicated and remarkable
religio-sexual phenomena renders clear to us individual processes of
this kind and certain peculiarities of racial psychology; and thereby we
are led to understand the powerful after-effects of these phenomena in
the customs, the morals, and the conventions of our time, and we are
enlightened as to the rôle still played by the religio-sexual factor in
the life of many men even of our own day.
One of the oldest, if not the oldest, of religio-sexual phenomena is
=religious prostitution=--the “lust-sacrifice,” as Eduard von Mayer
happily expresses it--since therein the sexual act is regarded as a
sacrifice made to the deity. We have here the unrestricted offering by a
woman of her body to every chance comer without love, =as an act of
simple sensuality, and for payment=, and thus we find all the
characteristics of what at the present day we term “prostitution.”
According to the researches I have myself previously published regarding
religious prostitution, this may be divided into two great groups:
1. =A single act of prostitution in honour of the deity.=
2. =Permanent religious prostitution.=
A single act of religious prostitution mostly consists in the offering
of virginity; sometimes also in the single, not repeated, offering of an
already deflowered woman. In the single act of religious prostitution,
the woman either offers herself =directly to the deity=, the bodily act
of defloration being effected by a divine physical symbol--as, for
instance, by a penis made of stone, ivory, or wood--or by direct
intercourse with the statue of the god; or else the woman gives herself
to a =human representative= of the deity--for instance, to the king, to
a priest, to a blood-relative (not seldom to her own father, this being
a variety of religious incest), and sometimes to a passing stranger.[39]
With regard to the first mode of defloration, by means of a divine
symbol, we have especially full reports from the East Indies. Here, in
the sixteenth century, in the Southern Deccan, the Portuguese Duarte
Barbosa first saw the religious defloration of girls effected by means
of the “lingam,” the divine phallus. Girls aged ten years only were
sacrificed to the deity in this brutal manner. From a later time come
the accounts of Jan Huygen van Linschoten and Gasparo Balbi, regarding
the customs of the inhabitants of Goa. The bride was taken into the
temple, where a penis of iron or ivory was thrust into the vagina, so
that the hymen was destroyed. In other cases, the girl’s genitals were
brought into contact with the stone penis of an image of the god, at a
shrine eighteen miles distant from Goa. W. Schultze, in his “East Indian
Journey” (Amsterdam, 1676, p. 161_a_), relates:
“By means of this priapus, with the assistance of friends and
relatives, the maiden was deprived of her virginity with force and in
a painful manner; at the same time the bridegroom rejoiced that the
foul and accursed idol had done him this honour, in the hope that as a
result of this sacrifice he would enjoy greater happiness in his
marriage.”
This process of defloration of Indian virgins by the lingam idol is
confirmed by the reports of John Fryer, Roe, Jeon Moquet, Abbé Guyon,
Démeunier, and others.
The god Baal Peor, worshipped by the Moabites and Jews, seems also to
have possessed such a divine power of defloration. His name, “Peor,” “to
open,” is supposed to relate to the destruction of the hymen.[40]
This relationship is more distinctly expressed in the names of certain
gods of the ancient Romans, such as Dea Perfica, Dea Pertunda, Mutunus
Tutunus, regarding whose functions in connexion with defloration, shown
unquestionably by the etymology of their names, I have referred to at
greater length in my essay on “Ancient Roman Medicine” (published in
Puschmann’s “Handbook of the History of Medicine,” p. 407; Jena, 1902).
For the honour of the sexual divinities, the bride was compelled, as
Augustine, Lactantius, and Arnobius report, to seat herself upon the
“fascinum”--that is, the _membrum virile_ of the priapus statue--and in
this way, either physically, or at least symbolically, sacrifice her
virginity to the deity. According to the legend, the conception of
Ocrisia was actually effected in this way![41]
According to the second method by which single acts of religious
prostitution are effected, a representative of the deity exercises the
latter’s right of defloration. It is a form of religious _jus primæ
noctis_, which is given to the king, the priest, the father, and, above
all, to a casual stranger, before the girl becomes the property of her
husband or master. In cases in which the husband has effected
defloration, the deity may be satisfied by the woman later giving
herself once to his representative.
The best-known form of religious prostitution is the Mylittacult of the
Babylonians, the worship of that goddess who, according to Bachofen,
represents the uncontrolled life of Nature in its fullest creative
activity, unchecked by any man-made laws--the goddess whose free nature
is opposed to the constraining bonds of marriage. For this reason the
goddess, as representative of the unrestrained nature principle, demands
from every girl a free gift of herself to any man wishing to have
intercourse with her. This demand is made in the name of Mylitta and in
the temple devoted to her. The money paid by the man in return for his
sexual indulgence belongs to the goddess, and is added to the treasures
of the temple.[42]
Herodotus and Strabo give us additional accounts of this remarkable
service of Mylitta. Women of rank, as well as those of the lower
classes, must allow themselves to be possessed once by a stranger, and
were not permitted to return home until they had given their tribute to
the goddess. Moreover, the woman might not refuse herself to any
stranger, whilst the man, on the other hand, had a free choice. Thus in
this account we find all the characteristics of “prostitution” according
to our present ideas.
This custom was abolished by the Emperor Constantine, as Eusebius
informs us, in his biography of this Emperor. The accounts of Strabo and
of Quintus Curtius show us that it had persisted from the time of
Herodotus to the time of Constantine; in Cyprus, Phœnicia, Carthage,
Judea, Armenia, and Lokris, the Mylittacult was diffused.[43]
The true origin of this cult was a consecration to the deity, a tribute
to the goddess of voluptuousness. Secondarily only, other elements may
have entered into the practice, as, for instance, the later widely
diffused assumption of the uncleanness and poisonous properties of the
blood which was shed in the act of defloration. At the same time the
religious idea of a “sacrifice” may have become associated with the idea
of “self-surrender” to an utterly strange and unloved man, so that it is
possible that at the root of this peculiar custom there lay a kind of
masochism on the part of the woman, whilst we cannot fail to recognize
the existence of a sadistic basis in the demeanour of the betrothed man
or husband, surrendering the woman to a strange man; both of these
elements--sadism and masochism--having here a religious signification.
In Eastern Asia, and among many savage races, priests played the part of
representatives of the deity to whom the defloration of the girls and
the newly-married was assigned; for instance, in the Indian sect of the
“Mahārājas,” founded by Vallabha, in which “=immorality was elevated to
the level of a divine law=.”[44]
These “great kings” assumed the part of deities who had an unlimited
right of possession over the wives of the faithful--above all, the right
of defloration. They proclaimed as the most perfect mode of honouring
the god a complete surrender of the woman to the spiritual chief of the
sect, for purposes of carnal lust--in exact imitation of the
shepherdesses (“gopis”), the mistresses of the god Krishna. This took
place during the pastoral games “rasmandali” in the autumn.[45] In
addition, on account of his activity as deflorator, the priest received
a present in the name of the deity. Abel Rémusat reports in his
“Nouveaux Mélanges Asiatiques” (Paris, 1824, vol. i., p. 16 _et seq._),
following the account of a Chinese author of the thirteenth century, the
peculiar methods employed in Cambodia for the purpose of religious
defloration. Here the priests of Buddha or the priests of the Tao
religion were carried in sedan-chairs to the girls awaiting them. Each
girl had a candle with a mark on it. The “tshin-than” (= adjustment of
posture--that is, sexual intercourse) must be finished before the candle
had burnt down to this mark!
The medicine-men and wizards among the Caribs of Central and South
America, the “piaches” or “pajes,” had to effect the defloration of the
young girls;[46] whilst among other primitive peoples this right was
assigned to the chiefs.[47]
The talented and far-seeing Bachofen, one of the greatest of our
investigators into the history and psychology of civilization, in his
classical works upon “Matriarchy” and upon “The Legend of Tanaquil,” has
very cleverly pointed out that religious prostitution in general arises
from the primitive =opposition= to the individualization of love,
instinctively felt by primitive peoples. In fact, in the religious view
of sexual matters more value is placed upon the act than the person, the
individual. Hence arises the slight esteem--so strongly opposed to our
modern view--felt for physical and moral virginity in woman, which to us
(whether rightly or not we will not now discuss) appears the symbol of
feminine individuality. Waitz, Bachofen, Kulischer, Post, Ploss-Bartels,
Rottmann, and other ethnologists, give additional accounts of the
contempt, to us so remarkable, felt in primitive states for the virgin
woman. The tragi-comic position of our own “old maids” is closely
connected with this primeval sentiment.[48]
The facts we have just given regarding single acts of religious
prostitution will pave the way for the understanding of =permanent
temple prostitution= as a historical phenomenon.
Sexual self-surrender as a purely sensual act is associated with
religious feeling. Thus in some cases a woman would experience a
combination of ardent sensuality with intense religious feeling, would
devote herself wholly to the service of the god, and in his name would
permanently surrender her body; whilst in other cases the idea of a
divine harem--in Indian belief every god has a harem--would find its
earthly exemplar in temple prostitution, by means of which the deity
would enjoy a number of women through the intermediation of men; or,
finally, this custom would arise out of the primitive practice,
according to which sexual intercourse, regarded as a religious act,
=customarily= took place in a temple, or in some consecrated room of a
house. In support of this view, we may quote a significant utterance
from Herodotus (chapter lxiv. of the second book of his “History”), who
in ethnological matters had such accurate discrimination. He reports
that among the Egyptians intercourse was strictly forbidden in the
temples, and then says:
“For people of all nations, except the Egyptians and the Hellenes, are
accustomed to copulate in holy places, and proceed after intercourse
unwashed into the holy places; and they are of opinion that men
resemble animals, and every one sees beasts and birds copulating in
the temples of the gods, and in the consecrated groves. Now, =if this
were displeasing to the gods, the animals would not do it=. Men,
therefore, do this, and give this reason for it.”
This custom arose, without doubt, from the need for a religious
sentiment, and from the wish to enter into direct communion with the
deity, by remaining in the temple during the sexual act. When later the
divine beings obtained their own consecrated women in the form of the
=temple-girls=, it was no longer necessary for a man to take his own
wife or some other woman into the temple, for now communion with the
deity could be obtained by means of intercourse with the temple-girls.
In the case of =feminine= deities a fourth cause or influence comes into
operation in the production of temple prostitution, inasmuch as the
courtesans, on account of their extreme beauty and their remarkable
intellectual powers, were often regarded as representatives of the
goddess. This explains how it happened that among the Greeks beautiful
hetairae served as models for Praxiteles and Apelles, when these
sculptors were making statues for the temple.
The sacred priests of Venus, the “kade-girls” of the Phœnicians, and the
“hierodules” of the Greeks, were the servants of Aphrodite, and dwelt
within the precincts of the temple. Their number was often very great.
Thus in Corinth more than 1,000 female hierodules prostituted themselves
in the precincts of the temple of Aphrodite Porne, and even within the
temple.[49]
India, where the primitive phenomena of the amatory life can best be
studied, is also the favourite seat of temple prostitution, since the
religious view of the sexual life is nowhere so prominent as in the
Indian beliefs.[50] The temple girls of India are known as
“nautch-girls,” or “nautch-women.” Warneck writes regarding them:
“Every Hindu temple of any importance possesses an arsenal of
=nautch-girls=--that is, dancing-girls--who, next to the sacrificial
priests, are the most highly respected among the personnel of the
temple. It is not long since these temple-girls (just like the
hetairae of Ancient Greece) were among the only educated women in
India. These =priestesses, betrothed to the gods= from early
childhood, were under the professional obligation to prostitute
themselves to every one without distinction of caste. This
self-surrender is so far from being regarded as a disgrace that even
the most =highly placed= families regarded it as an honour to devote
their daughters to the service of the temple. In the Madras Presidency
alone there are about 12,000 of these temple prostitutes.”[51]
Shortt gives further interesting details of these temple prostitutes,
who are also known as “thassee.”
Religious prostitution is to a certain extent still practised in
Southern Borneo; and in a newspaper published at Amsterdam--_The German
Weekly News of the Netherlands_--the following account of the practice
appears in the issue of July 30, 1907:
“In the Dyak country there are to be found in nearly every _kampong_
(village) individuals known as ‘balians’ and ‘basirs.’ The balians are
prostitutes who also perform medical services. The basirs are men who
dress in women’s clothing, and in other respects perform the same
functions as the balians, but not all the basirs act in this way.
Balians and basirs are also commonly employed to perform certain
religious ceremonies, on festal occasions, at marriages, funerals,
births, etc. According to the nature of the festivity, five to fifteen
of them officiate. The president of the balians and basirs goes by the
name of the ‘upu’; usually the oldest and most experienced is chosen
for this office. The upu sits in the middle, with the others to right
and left. At an important festival the upu receives from twenty to
thirty gulden; the others one to fifteen gulden. The further away that
a balian sits from the upu, the smaller is her honorarium; the
honorarium is called ‘laluh.’ The principal balians and basirs are
known as ‘bawimait maninjan sangjang’--that is, ‘holy women.’ At the
present time the basirs no longer exercise the immoral portions of
their duties, because the Government inflicts severe penalties if they
do so; moreover, they are not allowed now to appear in public in
women’s clothing.”
Religion shares with the sexual impulse the unceasing yearning, the
sentiment of everlastingness, the mystic absorption into the depths of
life, the longing for the coalescence of individualities in an eternally
blessed union, free from earthly fetters. Hence the longing for death
felt by lovers and by mystically enraptured pietists, which has been so
wonderfully described by Leopardi. “The yearning for death felt by
lovers is identical with the yearning for sexual union,” aptly remarks
H. Swoboda, and he very rightly points out that many a suicide ascribed
to “unfortunate love” is rather the result of a happy love.
Among primitive peoples, and in ancient times, =religio-erotic
festivals= first gave an opportunity for the manifestation of this
religio-sexual mysticism. In this the transition of religious ecstasy
into sexual perceptions is very clearly visible, and in the sexual
orgies in which these religious frenzies often found an appropriate
finale we see the crudest expression of the relationship between
religion and sexuality. In such cases sexual ardour appears to be
equivalent to a =prolongation= and an =increase= of the religious
ardour--fundamentally, radically coincident, as the natural earthly
discharge of an ecstatic tension directed to the sphere of the remote
and the metaphysical.
The fact that such sexual excesses are =throughout the world= found in
association with religion, that since the very earliest times they have
been connected with the =most various forms= of religion, proves once
more that the origin of this relationship is dependent on the very
nature of religion as such, and that it is =not in any way= due to the
individual historic character of any one belief. It is, moreover, quite
uncritical and altogether without justification for any modern writer to
endeavour to make Roman Catholicism responsible for such an association;
Roman Catholicism as such has as little to do with the matter as all
other beliefs. Religio-sexual phenomena belong to the everywhere
recurring =elementary ideas= of the human race (elementary ideas in the
sense of Bastian); and the only way of regarding such phenomena that can
be considered scientifically sound, is from the anthropological and
ethnological standpoint.
This sexual religious mysticism meets us everywhere--in the religious
festivals of antiquity, the festivals of Isis in Egypt, and the
festivals of imperial Rome, both alike accompanied by the wildest sexual
orgies; in the festivals of Baal Peor, among the Jews, in the Venus and
Adonis festivals of the Phœnicians, in Cyprus and Byblos, in the
Aphrodisian, the Dionysian, and the Eleusinian festivals of the
Hellenes; in the festival of Flora in Rome, in which prostitutes ran
about naked; in the Roman Bacchanalia; and in the festival of the _bona
dea_, the wild sexual licence of which is only too clearly presented to
our eyes in the celebrated account of Juvenal.
In India, the sect of Caitanya, founded in the sixteenth century,
celebrated the maddest religio-sexual orgies. Their ritual consisted
principally of long litanies and hymns, stuffed full with unbridled
eroticism, and followed by wild dances, all leading up to the sexual
culmination, in which “the love of God” (_bhakti_) was to be made as
clearly perceptible as possible.[52] Even worse were the Sakta sects
(the name is derived from _sakti_, force--that is, the sensuous
manifestation of the god Siva). They gave themselves up with ardent
sensuality to the service of the female emanations of Siva, all
distinctions of caste being ignored, and wild sensual promiscuity
prevailing. Divine service always preceded the act of sexual
intercourse.
Among the Kauchiluas, one of these Sakta sects, each of the women who
took part in these divine services threw a small ornament into a box
kept by the priests. After the termination of the religious festival,
each male member of the congregation took one of these articles out of
the box, whereupon the possessor of the article must give herself to him
in the subsequent unbridled sexual excesses, even if the two should
happen to be brother and sister.[53]
Ancient Central and South America were also familiar with wild outbreaks
of a sexual-religious character. In Guatemala, on the days of the great
sacrifices, there occurred sexual orgies of the worst kind, men having
intercourse promiscuously with mothers, sisters, daughters, children,
and concubines; and at the “Akhataymita festivals” of the ancient
Peruvians, the religious observances terminated in a race between
completely nude men and women, in which each man overtaking a woman
immediately had sexual intercourse with her.[54]
Sexual mysticism found its way also into Christianity. When the renowned
theologian Usener, in his work “Mythology,” writes in relation to these
matters, “the whole of paganism found its way into Christianity,” we
must point out that in our view what “corrupted” Christianity was not
“paganism,” but the =fundamental phenomena of primitive human nature=,
the primordial connexion between religion and sexuality, which by a
natural necessity manifested itself in Christianity not less than in
other religions.
=Thus down to the present day= we encounter the most peculiar
manifestations of sexual mysticism in the most diverse Christian sects,
and not merely in Roman Catholicism.
In the fourth century of our era, the Jewish-Christian sect of the
Sarabaïtes concluded their religious festivals with wild sexual orgies,
which are graphically described by Cassianus. This sect persisted into
the ninth century. The later history of the Christian sects is full of
this religio-sexual element. Religious and sexual ardour take one
another’s place, pass one into the other, mutually =increase= one
another. I need merely allude to certain points familiar in the history
of civilization, and investigated and described by many recent students:
the religio-erotic orgiastic festivals of the Nicolaitans, the Adamites,
the Valesians, the Carpocratians, the Epiphanians, the Cainites, and the
Manichæans. Dixon, in his “Spiritual Wives” (2 vols., London, 1868), has
described the sexual excesses of recent Protestant sects, such as the
“Mucker” of Königsberg, the “Erweckten” (“the awakened”), the Foxian
spiritualists of Hydesville, etc. Widely known also is the peculiar
association between sexuality and religion in Mormonism, polygamy being
among the Mormons a religious ordinance.
Not only do Roman Catholicism and Protestantism exhibit such phenomena,
but in the Greek Church also sexual mysticism gives rise to the most
remarkable offshoots. Leroy-Beaulieu gives an account of the Russian
sect of the “Skakuny,” or “Jumpers,” who at their nocturnal assemblies
throw themselves into a state of erotic religious ecstasy by hopping and
jumping, like the dancing Dervishes of Islam. When the frenzy reaches a
climax, a shameless, utterly promiscuous union of the sexes occurs, of
which incest is a common feature.[55]
Quite apart from these sectarian peculiarities, religio-sexual
perceptions play a definite part in the ideas of present-day, truly
pious Christians. The idea of a “unio mystica” between man and the Deity
manifests itself everywhere.[56]
Albrecht Dieterich, in his learned work, “A Mithraist Liturgy,”
contributes valuable material to the history of civilization concerning
these mystical unions. The oldest heathen cults were familiar with the
idea of love unions as a representation of the union of man with God;
and in the New Testament the ideas of the bridegroom and the marriage
feast play a leading part. Christ is the “bridegroom” of the Church, the
Church is His “bride.” Pious maidens and nuns are happy to call
themselves the brides of Christ. This ecstatic union has always as its
substratum a sexual imagination. Augustine says: “Like a bridegroom
Christ leaves His bridal chamber; in the mood of a bridegroom He
bestrides the field of the world.”
The literature, the theology, the visions, and the plastic art of the
middle ages abound in embellishments of the mystical marriage. St.
Catherine of Siena and St. Theresa were favourite objects of this form
of art. The baroque artist Bernini, in his representation of St.
Theresa, in the Church Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, has painted a
truly modern “alcove scene,” so that a mocking Frenchman, President de
Brosses, said, speaking of this picture, “Ah, if that is divine love, I
know all about it.”
On October 8, 1900, when Crescentia Höss, of Kaufbeuren, was canonized
in the Peterskirche, a picture was exhibited in which was depicted the
mystical union between the new saint and the Redeemer. To the picture
was attached a Latin inscription signifying, “Our Lord Jesus Christ
presents to the virgin Crescentia, in the presence of the most holy
Mother of God and of Crescentia’s guardian angel as groomsman, the
marriage ring, and weds her.” The novice about to become a nun appears
before the altar dressed as a bride, in order to wed herself eternally
to Christ; and in the life of the common people we find an even more
realistic view is taken of this mystical marriage. A celibate priesthood
appears to the peasant, notwithstanding all the respect that he has for
the clerical vocation, as something strange and incomprehensible; he
regards the “primiz,” the first mass of the newly ordained priest, as a
marriage which the most reverend priest celebrates with the Church, and
for this purpose the Church is represented by a young girl. This is at
the present day still a popular custom in Baden, Bavaria, and the Tyrol.
In this ceremony, which does not lack a poetic aspect--it is admirably
described by F. P. Piger in the _Zeitschrift des Vereins für
Volkskunde_, 1899--the peasants who are present make the coarsest and
most pointed jokes, and as soon as the celebration is finished, they
withdraw, in the company of the “holy” bride, to a public-house, where
“they need not be embarrassed by the presence of the reverend priest.”
The intimate association between sexuality and religion in these
mystical unions and marriages has been shown by Ludwig Feuerbach in his
treatise, “Ueber den Marienkultus” (“On Mariolatry”), Complete Works,
Leipzig, 1846, vol. i., pp. 181-199. A very interesting instance of this
is also afforded by the following religious poem, which appears in a
poetical devotional work, at one time very widely diffused among the
feminine population of France (“Les Perles de Saint François de Sales,
ou les plus belles Pensées du Bienheureux sur l’Amour de Dieu,” Paris,
1871):
“Vive Jésus, vive sa force,
Vive son agréable amorce!
Vive Jésus, quand sa bonté
Me reduit dans la nudité;
Vive Jésus, quand il m’appelle:
Ma sœur, ma colombe, ma belle!
Vive Jésus en tous mes pas,
Vivent ses amoureux appas!
Vive Jésus, lorsque sa bouche
D’un baiser amoureux me touche!
Vive Jésus quand ses blandices
Me comblent de chastes délices!
Vive Jésus lorsque à mon aise
Il me permet que je la baise!”
[“Praise to Jesus, praise His power,
Praise His sweet allurements!
Praise to Jesus, when His goodness
Reduces me to nakedness;
Praise to Jesus when He says to me:
‘My sister, My dove, My beautiful one!’
“Praise to Jesus in all my steps,
Praise to His amorous charms!
Praise to Jesus, when His mouth
Touches mine in a loving kiss!
“Praise to Jesus when His gentle caresses
Overwhelm me with chaste joys!
Praise to Jesus when at my leisure
He allows me to kiss Him!”]
In addition to religious prostitution and to sexual mysticism, two other
religious manifestations show an intimate relationship with the sexual
life, are, indeed, in part of sexual origin--namely, =asceticism= and
the =belief in witchcraft=.
Neither of these is, as has often been maintained by superficial
writers, peculiar to the Christian faith. As Nietzsche says, Eros did
not poison Christianity alone; asceticism and the belief in witchcraft
are =common anthropological conceptions, met with throughout the history
of civilization=, and arising from the primitive ardour of religious
perceptions.
To what degree is the high estimation of asceticism--that is, the view
that earthly and eternal salvation are to be found in =complete sexual
abstinence=--associated with the religious sentiment? Religion is the
yearning after an ideal, a belief in a process of perfectibility. To
such a belief the sexual impulse and everything connected with it must
appear as the greatest possible hindrance to the realization of the
ideal, because nowhere else is the =disharmony= of existence so plainly
manifest as in the sexual life.
In the fifth chapter of his work on “The Nature of Man,” Metchnikoff has
collected all the numerous disharmonies of the reproductive organs and
the reproductive functions, in consequence of which the modern man,
become self-conscious, suffers so severely. Among these disharmonious
phenomena in social life, Metchnikoff enumerates, _inter alia_, the
troublesome, painful, and unæsthetic menstrual hæmorrhage in women,
which all primitive peoples regarded as something unclean and evil; the
pains of childbirth; the asynchronism between puberty and the general
maturity of the organism, the latter occurring much later than the
former, and thus giving rise to temporal inequalities of development in
different parts of the sexual functions, causing, for example,
masturbation actually before the development of spermatozoa; the long
interval that commonly elapses between the onset of sexual maturity and
the conclusion of marriage; the numerous disharmonious phenomena
occurring in connexion with the decline of reproductive activity at a
later stage of life, when marked specific excitability and sexual
sensibility often persist after the capacity for sexual intercourse has
been lost; and finally the disharmonies in sexual intercourse between
man and woman.
According to Metchnikoff, this disharmony of the sexual life, from the
earliest to the most advanced age, is the source of so many evils, that
almost all religions have harshly judged and severely condemned the
sexual functions, and have recommended abstinence from coitus as the
best means for the harmonious and ideal regulation of life.
In addition to this, we have to take into consideration the opposition
between spirit and matter, deeply realized already by primitive man. The
sexual, as the most intense and most sensuous expression of material
existence, was opposed to the spiritual, and was regarded as an unclean
element, which must be fought, overcome, and, when possible, utterly
uprooted, in favour of the spiritual life. In one of the most ancient of
mythologies the first recorded instance of the gratification of sexual
desire resulted in excluding man for ever from “Paradise”--in excluding
him, that is to say, from the highest kind of spiritual existence. The
principal psychological characteristic of asceticism is therefore to be
found, not only in the vow of poverty, but, in addition, and even more,
is it found in =sexual abstinence=, in the battle against the “flesh”
(“caro,” to the fathers of the early Church, always denoted the genital
organs).
What is, however, the inevitable consequence of this continual battle
with the sexual impulse? Weininger expressed the opinion (“Sex and
Character,” p. 469, second edition; Vienna, 1904): “The renunciation of
sexuality =kills= only the =physical= man, and kills him only in order,
for the first time, to ensure the complete existence of the spiritual
man”; but this is =entirely false=, and proceeds from an extremely
deficient knowledge of human nature. For the “renunciation of sexuality”
is, in truth, the most unsuitable way of securing a complete existence
for the spiritual man. Just as little will it annihilate the physical
man. For he who wishes to overcome and cast out the sexual impulse
(powerful in every normal man, and at times overwhelming in its
strength) =must keep the subject constantly before his eyes, for ever in
his thoughts=. Thus it came to pass that the ascetic was actually more
occupied with the subject of the sexual impulse than is the case with
the normal man. This was favoured all the more by the ascetic’s
voluntary =flight from the world=, by his continuous life in solitude--a
life favourable to the production of hallucinations and visions, and one
which becomes tolerable only by a sort of natural reaction in the form
of a luxuriance of imaginative sensuality. For
“Nous naissons, nous vivons pour la société:
A nous-mêmes livrés dans une solitude,
Notre bonheur bientôt fait notre inquiétude.”
(Boileau, Satire X.)
[“We are born, we live for society:
Given up to ourselves in solitude,
Our happiness is speedily replaced by restlessness.”]
This “inquiétude,” this intensification of the nervous life in all
relations, was especially noticeable in the sexual sphere. Visions of a
sexual character, erotic temptations, mortifications of the flesh in the
form of self-flagellation, self-emasculation and mutilations of the
genital organs, are characteristic =ascetic= phenomena. On the other
hand, the excessive valuation and glorification of the pure spiritual
led not only to the view that matter was something in its nature sinful
and base, =but also led directly to sexual excesses=, for many ascetic
sects declared that what happened to the already sinful body was a
matter of indifference, that every contamination of the body was
permissible. Hence is to be explained the remarkable fact of the
occurrence of =natural and unnatural unchastity in numerous ascetic
sects=.
Sexual mortification and sexual excesses--these are the two poles
between which the life of the ascetic oscillates, so that we see in each
case a marked sexual intermixture. Asceticism is, therefore, often
merely the means by which sexual enjoyment is obtained in another form
and in a more intense degree.
=Asceticism is as old as human religion, and as widely diffused
throughout the entire world.= We find individual ascetics among many
savage peoples; ascetic sects, especially among the ancient and modern
civilized races, in Babylon, Syria, Phrygia, Judæa, even in
pre-Columbian Mexico, and most developed in India, in Islam, and in
Christianity.
The Indian samkhya-doctrine, demanding increased self-discipline,
“yoga,” which was based upon the opposition between spirit and matter,
led to the adoption of asceticism in Buddhism and in the religion of the
Jains, also to the foundation of ascetic sects, such as the “Acelakas,”
the “Ajivakas,” the “Suthrēs” or “Pure,” who, according to Hardy, “are
in their life a disgrace to their name.” Yogahood attained its highest
development among Sivaitic sects of the ninth to the sixteenth
centuries; these alternated between uncontrolled satisfaction of the
rudest sexual impulses and asceticism pushed to the point of
self-torture.
In Islam it was the sect of the Sufi in which the relation between
sexuality and asceticism was especially manifest; but before this
Christianity had developed asceticism into a formal system, and had
deduced its most extreme consequences. To the early Christians, only the
nutritive impulse appeared natural; the sexual impulse was debased
nature; physical and psychical emasculation were actually recommended in
the New Testament writings (_cf._ Matt. xix. 12). Already in the second
century of the Christian era numerous Christians voluntarily castrated
themselves, and in the fourth century the Council of Nicæa found it
necessary to deal with the prevalence of this ascetic abuse, and with
the predecessors of the modern “skopzen.”[57]
Numerous ascetics and saints withdrew into solitude in order to attain
salvation by castigation of the body. But it is very noteworthy that
they almost all =lived and moved exclusively in the sexual=, and that,
in the way already explained, they came to occupy themselves incessantly
with all the problems of the sexual life.
The writings of the saints are full of such references to the _vita
sexualis_, and are, therefore, a valuable source for the history of
ancient morals. Nothing was so interesting to these ascetics as the life
of prostitutes and the sexual excesses of the impious. Numerous legends
relate the attempts of the saints to induce prostitutes to abandon their
profession, and to turn to a holy life, and the work of Charles de
Bussy, “Les Courtisanes Saintes,” shows the result of these labours. St.
Vitalius visited the brothels every night, to give the women money in
order that they might not sin, and prayed for their conversion.
Thus, in the case of the ascetics, whose thoughts were continually
occupied with sexual matters, the sole result of their castigation,
self-torture, and emasculation, was to lead their sexual life ever wider
astray into morbid and perverse paths. The monstrous =sexual visions= of
the saints reflect in a typical manner the incredible violence of the
sexual perceptions of the ascetics. To use the words of Augustine, how
far were these unhappy beings from the “serene clearness of love,” how
near were they to the “obscurity of sensual lust!” These visions, these
“false pictures,” allured the “sleepers” to something to which, indeed,
in the awakening state they could not have been misled (Augustine,
“Confessions,” x. 30). The forms of beautiful naked women (with whom,
moreover, the ascetics often really lay in bed in order to test their
powers) appeared to them in dreams. Fetichistic and symbolic vision of
an erotic nature pestered them, and led to the most violent sensual
temptations, until in the sects of the Valesians, the Marcionites, and
the Gnostics they resulted in sexual excesses. Marcion, the founder of
the well-known sect named after him, preached continence, but maintained
that sexual excesses could not hinder salvation, since it was only the
soul that rose again after death! The Gnostics oscillated between
unconditional celibacy and indiscriminate sexual indulgence. As late as
the nineteenth century an ascetic mystic led the Protestant sect of
Königsberg pietists into the grossest sensual excesses.
From asceticism arose =monasticism= and the =cloistral life=, to which
the considerations above given fully apply. The undeniable unchastity
of the medieval cloisters, which found its most characteristic
expression in denoting brothels by the name of “abbeys,” and, above all,
in popular songs and in folk-tales, also shows us very clearly the
relations between religious asceticism and the _vita sexualis_.
The idea of asceticism has not lost its primitive force even at the
present day, and retains it for certain men not under the influence of
the Church. But the character and origin of this =modern asceticism= are
different. We understand it when we remind ourselves of the saying of
Otto Weininger, this typical adherent of “modern” asceticism, that the
man who has the worst opinion of woman is not the one who has least to
do with them, but rather the one who has had the greatest number of
_bonnes fortunes_ (“Sex and Character,” p. 315).
The ascetics of early Christianity first denied sexuality--for
example, by self-castration, or by flight into solitude--in order
subsequently to affirm it the more strongly. Our modern _fin-de-siècle_
ascetics, above all, the three most successful literary apostles of
asceticism--Schopenhauer, Tolstoi, and Weininger--at first affirmed
their sexuality most intensely, in order subsequently to deny it in the
most fundamental manner. They studied voluptuousness, not merely in the
ideal, but also in reality. For this reason, also, they have furnished
us with more valuable conclusions regarding its nature and its
significance in the life of individual men than we can obtain from the
visions of the early Christian ascetics. This is true above all of
Schopenhauer and Tolstoi.
Schopenhauer had first to endure in his own person the whole tragedy of
voluptuousness, to experience the elemental force of the sexual impulse,
the “enmity” of love (see his own account given to Challemel-Lacour),
before he proceeded to grasp the full significance of the ascetic idea.
His asceticism is intimately associated with his sensuality, and with
the consequences of its activity. I believe that I have myself recently
furnished a striking proof of this fact by the publication of a hitherto
unknown holograph manuscript of the philosopher,[58] by which it is
clearly established that he had suffered from syphilitic infection. In
this connexion we find the explanation of the close relationship which
Schopenhauer himself postulated between the “wonderful venereal disease”
and asceticism. From his own utterances regarding syphilis, and, above
all, from the fact that he himself had suffered from the disease, we are
able to grasp the significance that syphilis had in the conception of
his ascetic views, which were developed under the immediate influence of
his experiences, sorrows, and passions; whereas in old age, when the
elemental force of the sexual impulse, and the unhappy consequence of
yielding to it, no longer troubled him, there appeared in his thought a
distinctly happier colouring.
Tolstoi also recognizes without reserve how much he had been affected by
voluptuousness. “I know,” he says, “how lust hides everything, how it
annihilates everything, by which the heart and the reason are
nourished.” Lack of continence on the part of men is, in his view, the
cause of the stupidity of life. Tolstoi’s conception of asceticism is,
however, by no means identical with the early Christian, the Buddhistic,
and the Schopenhauerian asceticism. In the beautiful saying, “Only with
woman can one lose purity, only with her can one preserve it,” lies the
admission that =absolute= chastity is an unattainable ideal, and that
man can reach only a =relative asceticism=. We should hold fast to this
utterance in Tolstoi’s teaching, which is in no way systematically
developed, and should ignore his insane doctrine of the unchastity of
married life. Later, during our discussion of the so-called “problem of
continence,” we shall return to this idea of a relative continence, and
of the good that lies therein.
Weininger, whose views are unquestionably strongly pathological, recurs
wholly to the ideas of early Christian asceticism. According to him,
“coitus in every case contradicts the idea of humanity”! Sexuality
debases man, reproduction and fertility are “=nauseating=.”[59] Man is
not free, only because he has originated in an immoral manner! In woman
he denies again and again the idea of humanity. The renunciation, the
conquest of femininity, it is this that he demands. =Since all
femininity is immorality, woman must cease to be woman, and must become
man!=[60]
Georg Hirth has described Weininger’s book as “an unparalleled crime
against humanity.”[61] Since, however, Probst, in his psychiatric study
of Weininger, has brought forward evidence to show that in Weininger’s
book we have to do with the work of a lunatic, the author of this crime
cannot at any rate be held responsible. It is only to be regretted that
so many readers have been led astray by the presence of isolated
thoughtful passages in the book to take Weininger in earnest as a
“thinker,” and even in company with the bizarre August Strindberg to
believe that Weininger has solved “the most difficult of all problems”!
* * * * *
Very significant and influential even down to the present day are the
relations between religion and sexual sentiments exhibited in the
=belief in witchcraft=.[62] This belief, extending backwards to the most
remote age, is the principal source of all misogyny and contempt for
women--of which fact we cannot too often remind our modern misogynists,
in order to make clear to them the utter stupidity, the primitiveness,
and the atavistic character of their views.
Here, again, we must first show the falsity of the view that the belief
in witches is a specifically Christian experience. To the diffusion of
this error the celebrated work of J. Michelet, “La Sorcière,” has
especially contributed, for in this book the witch is represented as a
Christian medieval discovery. But the Christian religion, as such, is as
little blameworthy for this belief as are all the other confessions of
faith. =The belief in witches, with its religio-sexual basis, is a
primitive general anthropological phenomenon=, a fixture, a part of
primitive human history arising from the primeval relations between
religious magic and the sexual life.
“When we look deeply into the province of psychology,” says G. H. von
Schubert, “we not only suspect, but recognize with great certainty,
that there exists a secret combination between the activities of the
animal carnal sexual impulse and the receptivity of human nature for
magical manifestations.
“We stand here in the depths of the abyss in which the lust of the
flesh becomes inflamed to the lust of hell, and in which the flesh,
with all its indwelling forces of sin and death, celebrated its
greatest triumph over the spirit appointed by God to command the
flesh.”[63]
The animism of primitive man, and of savage man at the present day, sees
in all frightful natural phenomena shaking his innermost being to its
foundation the manifestation and action of demons and sorcerers. The
rutting impulse also, which attracts primitive man to woman, appears to
him to be due to the influence of a demon, =and soon woman herself came
to seem to man something uncanny, something magical=. Thus, in its
origin the belief in witchcraft arises from the =sexual impulse=, and
=throughout its history sorcery in all its forms remained associated
with the sexual impulse=.
This sexual origin of the belief in witches and in magic has been
carefully described by the celebrated ethnologist K. Fr. Ph. von
Martius, on the basis of his observations amongst the indigens of
Central Brazil. “=All sorcery arises from rutting=,” said an old Indian
to him.
Magic propagates itself by means of sexual desire, and, according to
Martius, will predominate among primitive peoples as long as these
=remain unchaste=.[64] Secret arts, voluptuousness, and unnatural vice
are inseparable one from another. This is proved by the entire history
of human civilization and morals. Among the indigens of Brazil, the
“pajé” or “piache,” the sorcerer or medicine-man, plays the same part as
the medieval or Christian witch.
Sorcerers and witches are, above all, experienced in the sexual
province; popular belief always turns first to this subject. The witches
of ancient Rome resemble those of the middle ages in respect of their
evil practices in sexual relations. According to J. Frank, the word
“hexe” (witch) is derived from “hagat”--that is, “vagabond woman.” The
ascetic view of the middle ages, formulated principally by men, saw in
woman one who seduced man to sensual, sinful lust, the personification
of the Evil One, the “janua diaboli,” and, ultimately, a female demon
and a witch, whose very being is an impersonation of the obscene and the
sexual. The doctrines of Original Sin and of the Immaculate Conception
had unquestionably an important share in this conception of woman.
The idea of woman as a witch turned almost exclusively on the sexual,
and the witch was for the most part represented as a “=mistress of the
devil=” (_cf._ W. G. Soldan, “History of Witch-Trials,” pp. 147-159;
Stuttgart, 1843), in which sexual perversion plays the principal part,
since, instead of simple sexual intercourse, the most horrible unnatural
vice was assumed to occur.
Holzinger, in his valuable lecture on the “Natural History of Witches,”
characterized the spiritual and moral condition of the time, which
brought forth such an idea, in a few apt words:
“Whilst in the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries,
as those well acquainted with the state of morals during this period
can all confirm, a most unbounded freedom was dominant in sexual
relations, the State and the Church were desirous of compelling the
people to keep better order by the use of actual force, and by
religious compulsion. So forced a transformation in so vital a matter
necessarily resulted in a reaction of the worst kind, and forced into
secret channels the impulse which it had attempted to suppress. This
reaction occurred, moreover, with an elemental force. There resulted
widespread sexual violence and seduction, hesitating at nothing, often
insanely daring, in which everywhere the devil was supposed to help;
every one’s head was turned in this way, the uncontrolled lust of
debauchees found vent in secret bacchanalian associations and orgies,
wherein many, with or without masquerade, played the part of Satan;
shameful deeds were perpetrated by excited women and by procuresses
and prostitutes ready for any kind of immoral abomination; add to
these sexual orgies the most widely diffused web of a completely
developed theory of witchcraft, and the systematic strengthening by
the clergy of the widely prevalent belief in the devil--all these
things woven in a labyrinthine connexion, made it possible for
thousands upon thousands to be murdered by a disordered justice and to
be sacrificed to delusion.”
The study of the witch-trials of the middle ages and of recent
times--for it is well known that in the seventies of the nineteenth
century (!) such trials still occurred[65]--would without doubt afford
valuable contributions to the doctrine of psychopathia sexualis, and at
the same time would throw a remarkable light upon the origin of sexual
aberrations.
What a large amount of sexual abnormality arises even to-day from this
common, human, obscure, superstitious impulse dependent upon the
intermixture of religious mysticism and sexual desire, and which in the
medieval belief in witches attained such astonishing development!
As Michelet proved in his great work on “Sorcery,” it was =the religious
imagination straying into sexual by-paths=, which for the most part
animated the belief in witchcraft, and thus led to the most horrible
aberrations, principally of a sadistic nature.
Like superstition, so also the sexual-religious obsession of the middle
ages, still persists in many persons, =even at the present day=, and
gives rise to sexual anomalies.
Apart from asceticism and the belief in witchcraft, theological
literature offers numerous instances of the relationship between
religion and sexuality.
In an essay published six years ago,[66] I showed the important part
which sexual questions have played in the so-called =pastoral
medicine=--that is to say, in those theological writings in which the
individual facts and problems of medicine are studied from the
theological standpoint, and their relation to dogma is determined. We
find here theological casuistry carried to its extreme limits, in
relation to all possible problems of the _vita sexualis_. The
experiences of the confessional are employed in a remarkable manner, the
religious imagination wandering, in a peculiar combination of
scholasticism and sensuality, in the obscure fields of human aberration.
The =ostensible= inducement to the theological consideration of sexual
problems is in part offered by the statements of perverse individuals in
the confessional, and in part by public scandals. In both cases
casuistry endeavours, from the religious standpoint, to formulate
certain normal rules for the judgment of the various matters relating to
the sexual life. This would, however, have been impossible, had there
not existed an intimate connexion between sexuality and religion.
Only in this way is it possible to explain the origin of the gigantic
=literature of sexual casuistry= in theology, and especially in pastoral
medicine. A comprehension of these facts has led certain writers to
launch bitter invectives against the system of which the confessional
formed so essential a part. This is a narrow and prejudiced view, which
we mention only to condemn. There is, however, ample justification for
the representations of =physicians= and =anthropologists=, who are able
to observe matters in the great connexion sketched above, and who have
recognized the relations between religion and the sexual life to be
something common to all humanity, not the artificial products of any
particular spiritual tendency. It is precisely the frequent endeavours
of the Catholic Church to overcome the worst outgrowths in this
direction, which teach us, notwithstanding their failure to eradicate
sexual aberrations, that these relationships depend upon the very nature
of religion.
There is not a single sexual problem which has not been discussed in
the most subtle manner by the theological casuists,[67] so that their
writings offer us a most instructive picture of =imaginative activity=
in the sexual sphere.
The most detailed discussion, verging on the salacious, of the degree to
which sexual contact is permissible, gave rise to the name “theologiens
mammillaires,” because some of them--Benzi, for example, and
Rousselot--sanctioned “tatti mammillari” (mammillary palpation). This
doctrine was condemned by Pope Benedict XIV., which proves that the
Catholic Church as such has not invariably sanctioned these things.
In the “Golden Key” (“Llave de Oro”) of Antonio Maria Claret, the
Archbishop of Cuba, in Debreyne’s “Moechialogie,” in the writings on
moral theology of Liguori, Dens, and J. C. Saettler, in the
“Diaconales,” widely diffused in France, and in many similar works, all
possible sexual problems which have come before the confessional, or
possibly =might= come there, have been thoroughly discussed--even the
most improbable and impossible. Coitus interruptus, irrigatio vaginæ
post coitum, pollutions (nocturnal seminal emissions), bestiality,
necrophilia, figuræ Veneris (positions in which coitus is effected),
procuration, various kinds of caresses, conjugal onanism, abortion,
varieties of masturbation, pæderasty, intercourse with a statue (!),
psychical onanism, pædication, etc.--all have been subjected to a subtle
critical theological analysis. In a sense, these writings are really
valuable mines for the study of psychopathia sexualis. Later we shall
have frequently to touch on the religious etiology of the individual
sexual aberrations.
From the preceding discussion it appears quite clearly that the
relations between religion and the _vita sexualis_ are to be regarded as
general anthropological phenomena, and not as peculiarities arising by
chance, the accidental results of beliefs, time, or race. The modern
physician, jurist, and criminal anthropologist must therefore pay the
most careful attention to the religious factor in the normal and
abnormal sexual life of mankind, if he wishes to arrive at an
unprejudiced and undisturbed knowledge of sexual anomalies. Havelock
Ellis has also laid stress on the leading significance of religious
sexual perceptions. He proved that small oscillations of erotic feelings
accompany all religious perceptions, and that in some circumstances the
erotic feelings overwhelm the religious perceptions.[68] We still meet
with sexual excesses under the cloak of religion, as occurred recently
(1905) in Holland, and (1901) in England. In the English instance young
girls were initiated into the most horrible forms of unchastity in the
religious association founded by the American Horos and his wife, and
known by the name of “Theocratic Unity.”[69]
Friedrich Schlegel, as Rudolf von Gottschall remarks, proclaimed in his
“Lucinde” the new evangel of the future, in which voluptuousness--as
during the time of Astarte--is to form a part of religious ritual. The
reawakened tendency of our own day towards romantic modes of perception
would certainly seem to involve the danger of a renewal and
strengthening of religio-sexual ideas.
For as long as the feelings of love carry with them an inexpressible,
overwhelming force, like that of religious perceptions, the intimate
association between religion and sexuality will persist both in a good
and a bad sense. An elderly physician, who in his interesting book
detailed the experiences derived from forty years of practice,[70] made
very apposite remarks regarding this religious sexualism. According to
him, unbounded piety is “often no more than a sexual symptom,”
proceeding from =deprivation of love or satiety of love=, the latter
reminding us of the saying “Young whore, old devotee.” Moreover, this is
true alike of man and woman. Piety dependent upon deprivation of love
can often be cured by “castor, cold douches, or a well-arranged marriage
with a robust, energetic man,” who drives away for ever the “heavenly
bridegroom.”[71]
The religious perception is a completely =general= yearning, and the
same is the case with the associated sexual feelings. The boundless
everlasting impulsion which both contain does not admit of any
individualization. For this reason, the religio-sexual perceptions can
play only a subordinate part in the individual love of the future; they
constitute only the first step in the history of the idealization of the
sexual impulse, and of its spiritualization to form love.
In the romance “Scipio Cicala,” by Rehfues, the Neapolitan abbess calls
out “=I love love=,” after she has gone through the enumeration of all
the phases of passionate love towards God. The modern man, however, says
to the woman, and the woman says to the man, “=I love you=”; the general
religious love has capitulated to the individual love.
This is clearly the direction taken by “the way of the spirit” in love,
which we shall now pursue further.
[33] _Cf_. F. von Andrian, “Some Results of Modern Ethnology,” in
“Correspondenzblatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie,
Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte” (1894, No. 8, p. 71).
[34] “Love,” in the sense above defined, is peculiar to mankind, and
for this reason we must, as Ploss-Bartels also insists, admit its
existence in human beings at the very lowest levels of civilization.
There it is, indeed, no more than “a faintly glimmering, easily
extinguished spark,” while among civilized peoples it has become “a
bright, widely diffused flame.”
[35] Regarding the connexion between sexuality and spiritual activity,
see also Virey, “Recherches médico-philosophiques sur la Nature et les
Facultés de l’Homme” (Paris, 1817, p. 39).
[36] For the apt and convenient word _poietic_, in preference to
_creative_ or _productive_, I have to thank Mr. H. G. Wells. See his
most admirable “A Modern Utopia,” and on p. 265 _et seq._ his
brilliant classification of “four main classes of mind--the Poietic,
the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base.”... “The Poietic or creative
class of mental individuality embraces a wide range of types,” but, he
goes on to say, the two principal varieties of the _poietic_ type are
those classified as _artistic_ and _scientific_ natures respectively.
It is the quality by which these two natures are distinguished from
the kinetic and the dull to which Mr. Wells gives the name of
“poietic,” and it is precisely this quality whose interconnexion with
the sexual life is insisted on in the text by Dr. Bloch and by the
authors from whom he quotes.--TRANSLATOR.
[37] _Cf._ W. Griesinger, “Mental Disorders,” third edition
(Brunswick, 1871, p. 7).
[38] Rudolf Topp speaks of a “degeneration” of the “healthy natural
reproductive impulse” into the “sexual impulse.” In the primeval
period of human history, he maintains, man knew and gratified the
reproductive impulse only; the sexual impulse developed gradually, and
in a later stage of the evolutionary history of mankind, out of the
reproductive impulse, and, in fact, is a degeneration (!) of the
latter. In this period we may look for the first beginnings of
functional impotence, on account of the too frequent exercise of the
sexual function. _Cf._ R. Topp, “On the Therapeutic Use of Yohimbin
‘Riedel’ as an Aphrodisiac, with Especial Reference to Functional
Impotence in the Male,” published in the _Allgemeine Medizinische
Central-Zeitung_, 1906, No. 10.
[39] From this fact we may draw the conclusion that the so-called
_hospitable prostitution_ is only a variety of religious prostitution.
[40] J. A. Dulaure, “Des Divinités génératrices,” etc. (Paris, 1885).
[41] W. Schwartz, “Prehistoric Anthropological Studies,” p. 278
(Berlin, 1884).
[42] _Cf._ J. J. Bachofen, “The Legend of Tanaquil, an Investigation
concerning Orientalism in Rome and Italy,” p. 43 (Heidelberg, 1870).
[43] _Cf._ the details and more exact reports in my work,
“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp.
84, 85.
[44] Karsandas Mulji, “History of the Sect of Mahārājas or
Vallabhāchārjas in Western India,” p. 161 (London, 1865).
[45] _Cf._ E. Hardy, “History of Indian Religions,” pp. 124-126
(Leipzig, 1898).
[46] K. Fr. Ph. von Martius, “Contributions to the Ethnography and
Philology of America,” vol. i., p. 113 (Leipzig, 1867).
[47] Starke, “The Primitive Family,” p. 135 (Leipzig, 1888).
[48] _Cf._ L. Tobler, “Old Maids in Belief and Custom among the German
People” (_Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_), by Lazarus and
Steinthal, vol. xiv., pp. 64-90 (Berlin, 1882).
[49] W. H. Roscher, “Nectar and Ambrosia,” pp. 80-89 (Leipzig, 1883).
[50] _Cf._ Edward Sellon, “Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the
Hindus,” p. 3 (London, 1865).
[51] Ploss-Bartels, “Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde,” vol. i.,
p. 580 (eighth edition, Leipzig, 1905).
[52] E. Hardy, _op. cit._, p. 125.
[53] Sellon, “Annotations,” etc., p. 30.
[54] Ploss-Bartels, _op. cit._, p. 608.
[55] _Cf._ H. Beck, “Count Tolstoi’s ‘Kreuzer Sonata,’” etc., p. 5
(Leipzig, 1898).
[56] _Cf._ “Mystical Marriages,” in the _Vossische Zeitung_, No. 370,
August 9, 1904.
[57] _Cf._ Adolf Harnack, “Medical Data from Ancient Ecclesiastical
History” (Leipzig, 1892, pp. 27, 28, and 52).
[58] Iwan Bloch, “Schopenhauer’s Illness in the Year 1823” (A
Contribution to Pathography based upon an Unpublished Document). Paper
read at the Berlin Society for the History of the Natural Sciences and
Medicine on June 15, 1906. Printed in _Medizinische Klinik_, 1906,
Nos. 25 and 26.
[59] It is a remarkable fact that the hypersexual Marquis de Sade
expressed this identical idea, in precise agreement with the asexual
Weininger.
[60] _Cf._ the chapter “Woman and Humanity,” in “Sex and Character,”
pp. 453-472.
[61] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 219. _Cf._ also the pertinent remark
of Grete Meisel-Hess, “Misogyny and Contempt for Women” (Vienna,
1904).
[62] _Cf._ also the exhaustive research, with regard to witch-mania
and witchcraft, by Count von Hoensbroech, “The Papacy in its
Socio-Civil Reality” (third edition, vol. i., pp. 380-599; Leipzig).
[63] Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, “The Sins of Sorcery in their Old
and New Form” (Erlangen, 1854, p. 25).
[64] _Cf._ K. Fr. von Martius, “The Nature, the Diseases, the Doctors,
and the Therapeutic Methods of the Primitive Inhabitants of Brazil”
(Munich, 1843, pp. 111-113).
[65] According to Holzinger, on August 20, 1877, at St. Jacobo in
Mexico, five witches were burnt alive! Then “hundreds of angry pens
were set in motion to declaim the horrible anachronism.” As late as
1875, Friedrich Nippold, in a work published by Holtzendorff and
Oncken--“Problems of the Day in Germany”--gives an account of the
continued belief in witches at the present day.
[66] Iwan Bloch, “Regarding the Idea of a History of Civilization in
Relation to Medicine,” published in _Die Medizinische Woche_, 1900,
No. 36.
[67] The best-known of these are Augustine, Benzi, Bouvier,
Cangiamila, Capellmann, Claret, Debreyne, Dens, Filliucius, Gury,
Liguori, Moja, Molinos, Moullet, Pereira, Rodriguez, Rousselot, Sa,
Thomas Sanchez, Samuel Schroeer, Skiers, Soto, Suarez, Tamburini,
Thomas Aquinas, Vivaldi, Wigandt, Zenardi. Copious extracts from their
writings are given by Count von Hoensbroech in the second volume of
his work--“The Papacy in its Socio-Civil Reality” (Leipzig, 1907).
[68] Havelock Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sentiment of Shame.”
[69] We shall return later to the religio-sexual “Masses,” celebrated
even at the present day in Paris and other large towns.
[70] “Personal Experiences, or Forty Years from the life of a
Well-known Physician” (Leipzig, 1854, three vols.). In addition,
“Gleanings In and Out of Myself,” from the papers of the author of the
“Personal Experiences,” etc. (Leipzig, 1856, four vols.).
[71] “Gleanings In and Out of Myself,” vol. ii., pp. 37-45. Regarding
the relations between religion and sexuality, many interesting details
are found in the work of George Keben, “The Half-Christians and the
Whole Devil: the Road to Hell of Superstition” (Gross-Lichterfelde,
1905), especially in the chapter “The Brothel,” pp. 93-110.
CHAPTER VII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--THE EROTIC SENSE OF SHAME (NAKEDNESS AND
CLOTHING)
“_Shame has made no change in man as regards his bodily outlines, but
shame has played a very important part in the entire province of
clothing, and it has acquired such spiritual power that the entire
amatory life of the higher human beings is dominated by it. It is, in
the first place, in consequence of this sense of shame that man’s
amatory life has ultimately and individually separated from that of
other animals._”--WILHELM BÖLSCHE.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VII
The individualizing influence of the sentiment of shame -- Recent
anthropological researches regarding the origin and nature of the
erotic sense of shame -- The animal and the social factor of shame --
Shame as a biological sense of warding off -- Coquetry -- The
fundamental social element of the sense of shame -- Lombroso’s theory
of shame -- The dread of arousing repulsion -- Connexion of the sense
of shame with clothing -- Conditions among the indigens of Central
Brazil -- Nudity as a natural condition -- The coverings of the
genital organs among the primitive races have a protective function,
and are not portions of clothing -- Origin of clothing -- The original
purpose of decoration and adornment -- Relation of clothing to the
feeling of love -- Tattooing a preliminary stage to clothing --
Prehistoric painting of the body -- Tattooing as a sexual lure --
Tattooing of the genital organs -- Sexual effect of colours --
Occurrence of tattooing amongst modern civilized nations -- Recent
anthropological researches regarding this subject -- Erotic tattooing
-- Tattooing in women of the upper classes -- The colour element in
clothing -- Its connexion with sexual charm -- With jealousy -- With
sexual allurement -- Sexual influence of concealment -- The stimulus
of the unknown -- The two fundamental elements of fashion --
Accentuation and display of portions of the body -- Influence of
partial concealment, of _retroussé_ -- The two principal forms of
clothing -- Accentuating and enlarging influences of clothing -- H.
Lotzes’s theory of the nature of clothing -- Reciprocal influence
between clothing and personality -- “Physiognomy” of clothing --
Clothing as an expression of the psyche -- Denuding of portions of the
body as a sexual stimulus -- Fashion -- Its absence in antiquity --
Difference between ancient and modern clothing -- Diaphanous raiment
of the ancient half-world -- Analysis of clothing -- Upper and under
clothing -- The waist -- Further differentiation into clothing proper
and more intimate articles of dress -- Dressing and undressing --
Separation of the body-spheres by the waist -- Beginnings of fashion
in the middle ages -- The corset as a witness of Christian teaching --
Contest between medieval fashion and asceticism -- Victory of fashion
-- Accentuation of the bosom -- _Décolleté_ -- Views of the æsthetics
on this subject -- Harmfulness of the corset -- A sin against
æsthetics and hygiene -- Its deleterious influence upon the thoracic
and abdominal organs -- The corset and anæmia -- Atrophy of the
mammary glands -- Other serious consequences -- Its influence on the
female reproductive organs -- The corset and “fluor albus” -- The
corset and sterility -- Pre-Raphaelite flat-breastedness --
Accentuation of the regions of the hips -- Tournure (_cul de Paris_),
the “crinolette” -- Indication of the abdominal region and of
pregnancy -- The farthingale and the crinoline -- Waldeyer’s views
regarding the cause of the difference between men’s clothing and
women’s -- Greater simplicity of men’s clothing -- Connexion of this
with the greater mental differentiation of man -- Former anomalies of
men’s clothing -- The breeches-flap -- Feminine men’s clothing --
Present predominance of the English style in men’s clothing --
Influence of clothing on the skin -- _Venus im Pelz_ (Venus in fur) --
Sacher-Masoch’s explanation of the sexual influence of furs -- The
face and clothing -- Sexual differentiation of the features -- The
relation of clothing to the environment -- Enlargement of the
conception of “fashion” -- Theory of fashion -- The two functions of
fashion -- Social equalization and individual differentiation -- The
_demi-monde_ and fashion -- Fashion as a safeguard of personality --
Economic theories of fashion -- Their connexion with capitalism -- The
reform of women’s clothing -- “Rational dress.”
The relation between the feeling of shame and nudity as a problem
of modern civilization -- Prudery -- Natural and lascivious
nakedness -- Prudery is concealed lust -- Schleiermacher’s talented
characterization of the sexual element in prudery -- Psychiatric
observations -- Unnatural increase in the sense of shame -- Importance
to civilization of the genuine, natural feeling of shame -- False
fig-leaf morality -- Natural views regarding nudity and sexual matters
the watchword for the future.
CHAPTER VII
The first step on the road to the individualization of love was effected
at the very outset of the grey primeval age by the origination of the
sexual =sense of shame=. Recent researches have for the first time
established the fact that the sense of shame is not innate in man, but
that it is =a specific product of civilization=--that is to say, a
mental phenomenon arising in the course of progressive evolution, and as
such is peculiar to man--present already, indeed, in the naked man, but,
above all, characteristic of the =clothed= man. Clothing and the sense
of shame have developed proportionally side by side, and in dependence
each on the other; and originally both subserved the same purpose, to
develop more strongly, and to bring to expression the individual,
personal, peculiar nature of the individual man. They mirror the first
individual activities in the amatory life of primitive man.
Georg Simmel has recognized very clearly this individualizing influence
of the sense of shame by saying: “The entire sense of shame depends upon
the self-uplifting of the individual.”[72]
By means of the recent critical investigations of leading
anthropologists and ethnologists, we have obtained most important
conclusions regarding the erotic sense of shame. Above all worthy of
mention are the clear-sighted investigations of Havelock Ellis, and
these have been supplemented by the researches of C. H. Stratz, Karl von
den Steinen, etc.
Havelock Ellis distinguishes an =animal= and a =social= factor of shame.
The former is specifically of a sexual nature, and is the simplest and
most primitive element in the sense of shame. It is unquestionably more
strongly developed in woman than in man; originally, indeed, it was
peculiar to the female sex, and was the expression of the endeavour to
protect the genital organs against the undesired approach of the male.
In this form we may observe the sense of shame in other animals.
The sexual sense of shame of the female animal, declares Havelock Ellis,
is rooted in the sexual periodicity of the female sex in general, and is
an involuntary expression of the organic fact that the present time is
not the time for love. Since this fact persists throughout the greater
part of the life of the females of all animals kept under man’s
control, the expression of this sense of warding off becomes so much a
matter of custom that it manifests itself also at times when it has
ceased to be appropriate. We see this, for example, in the bitch, which,
when on heat, herself runs up to the dog, but then turns round again and
tries to run away, and finally permits copulation only after the most
delicate approaches on the part of the dog. =In this manner the sense of
shame becomes more and more a simple manifestation of the proximity of
the male; it comes to be expected by the male, and takes its place among
his ideas of what is sexually desirable in the female.= Thus the sense
of shame would appear to be also explicable as =a psychical secondary
sexual character=. The sexual sense of shame of the female, continues
Havelock Ellis, is, therefore, the unavoidable by-product of the
naturally aggressive demeanour of the male being in sexual relations,
and of the naturally repellent demeanour of the female; and this, again,
is founded upon the fact that--in man and in nearly all the species
allied to him--the sexual function of the female is periodic, and must
always be treated with circumspection by the other sex; whereas in the
male any care of this kind in regard to the exercise of his own sexual
functions is seldom or never needed.
Groos very rightly points out that the great biological and
psychological importance of =coquetry= is dependent upon this protective
nature of the sense of shame, coquetry arising from the conflict between
the sexual instinct and the innate sense of shame. It is to some extent
the turning to account of the sense of shame for sensual purposes, a
seldom failing speculation on the sexual impulse of the male, and in
this sense it is the outcome of a genuine gynecocratic instinct, which
we shall again encounter in our study of masochism.
Since, then, it is no longer possible to question the data of the most
recent researches, by which we are assured of the existence of a
primitively organic animal basis for the sexual feeling of shame, it is
quite as little open to doubt that the true psychic individual
importance of the feeling of shame arises out of a second fundamental
element of that feeling, out of the =social= factor; and this factor
also affords an explanation of the origin of the sense of shame in man.
This phenomenal form of the sense of shame is, moreover, specifically
human.
This second social fundamental element of the sense of shame is =the
fear of arousing disgust=.
In this connexion we must refer to the interesting and thoroughly
naturalistic theory of Lombroso regarding the origin of the sense of
shame. Lombroso starts from the observation that in many prostitutes
there exists a kind of remarkable equivalent of the sense of
shame--namely, the dislike to permit of an inspection of their genital
organs when they are menstruating, or when for any other reason the
organs are not clean. Now, the Romance term for shame is derived from
“putere,” which indicates the origin of the sense of shame from the
repugnance to the smell of decomposing secretions. If we connect with
this the fact that the kiss was originally a smell, Lombroso declares
that this pseudo-shame of prostitutes represents the original, primitive
sense of shame of primeval woman--that is, the fear of being disgusting
to man.[73] Sergi also accepts this hypothesis of Lombroso’s.
According to Richet’s studies regarding the origin of disgust, the
genito-anal region, with its secretions and excrements, is an object of
disgust among most primitive races, for which reason they carefully
conceal it even from their own sex, but more particularly from the other
sex. Later, quite commonly the fear of arousing dislike or disgust plays
a prominent part in the production of the sense of shame. This fear
relates not only to the actual sexual organs, but also to the buttocks.
Among many primitive races the latter alone are covered.
The idea also of =ceremonial= uncleanness, aroused especially by the
process of menstruation, and associated with ritual practices, plays a
part in the genesis of the sense of shame.
Incontestably, however, the sense of shame has most intimate relations
with =clothing=; but clothing is in part only to be referred to the
above-described primary factors of the sense of shame. In the later
course of the development of civilization, however, clothing has come to
play a peculiar independent rôle in the further development of a refined
sexual sense of shame.
Karl von den Steinen is led, as the result of his own observations among
the Bakäiri of Central Brazil, to the most remarkable conclusions.
“I find it,” he writes, “impossible to believe that the sense of
shame, which is entirely wanting among these naked Indians, can in
other men be a primary sense. I am compelled to believe that this
sense first made its appearance after certain parts of the body had
been covered by clothing, and that the nakedness of women was first
concealed from the gaze of others when, perhaps, in very slightly
complicated economic and social conditions, the value of marriageable
girls had increased, in consequence of more active intercourse, as is
now the case among the principal families in Schingu. I am also of
opinion that we make the explanation more difficult than it really is
when we theoretically believe ourselves to possess a greater sense of
shame than we practically have.”[74]
Thus we find that among the Bakäiri, who go =completely naked=, our
(sexual) sense of shame is almost completely undeveloped; more
especially, a sense of shame due to disclosure of parts does not exist,
whilst the purely animal, physiological sense of shame is clearly
manifested by these people.[75]
Where nudity is customary, the erotic sense of shame is very slightly
developed. Civilized man also accustoms himself with incredible
quickness to nudity, as if it were an entirely natural condition.
“The feeling of being in the presence of nudity is no longer noticed
after a quarter of an hour, and when those who witness it are
intentionally reminded of it, and are asked whether naked men and
women, fathers, mothers, and children, who are standing about or
walking unconcernedly, should be condemned or regarded with compassion
on account of their shamelessness, the observer only feels inclined to
laugh, as at something quite absurd, or to protest at a preposterous
suggestion.... With what rapidity in unfamiliar regions it is possible
to become accustomed to a purely nude environment is most clearly
shown by the fact that I myself, in the night from the 15th to the
16th September, and again on the following night, dreamed of my German
home, and there in my dream I saw all my acquaintances as completely
nude as the Bakäiri with whom I was sojourning. I myself felt
astonished at this, but my neighbour at table at a dinner-party at
which in my dream I was a guest, a lady of quality, at once bade me
compose myself, and said, ‘Now we all go like this.’”[76]
The Bakäiri, who go completely naked, have no “private parts.” They jest
about these parts verbally and pictorially with complete indifference.
It would be ridiculous for this reason to regard them as “indecent.” The
onset of puberty is celebrated in the case of both sexes by noisy
popular festivals, in which the “private parts” receive a demonstrative
and joyful attention. A man who wishes to inform a stranger that he is
the father of one of those present, a woman who wishes to declare
herself to be the mother of a child, grasps the genital organs with an
earnest and unconcerned demeanour, intending by this gesture to indicate
that they themselves are the procreators. The cloth covering the penis
of the male, and the three cornered apron of the female, are not for
purposes of concealment, but are simply intended to protect the mucous
membranes--as a bandage or an apron in the women, and in the men as an
apparatus for the mechanical treatment of phimosis.
It is only in jest that such things can be regarded as “articles of
clothing,” the principal object of which is to subserve the sense of
shame. Sexual excitement is not concealed by this simple covering. The
red threads of the Trumai, the vari-coloured cloths of the Bororo, are
adornments, by which attention is attracted to this region rather than
repelled.[77] The completely naked Suyá women wash their genital organs
in the river in the presence of Europeans.[78]
Thus among these Caribs of Central Brazil, who are still living in the
stone age, we observe in all their simplicity the results of complete
nudity, and we are able to determine that this nudity entirely prevents
the origination of an erotic sense of shame in our meaning of the term.
The physiological factors of the sense of shame are not, taken alone,
sufficiently strong to lead to the appearance of this sense in its full
strength as a special psychical phenomenon. It is first in association
with clothing that these physiological factors have any great
significance in the production of the sense of shame.
C. H. Stratz, in a historical and anthropological study regarding
women’s clothing (Stuttgart, 1900), has compared the data of the more
recent ethnological investigations with the facts already known in the
history of civilization and art, and has noticed a remarkable agreement
between the two. According to him, “the first original purpose of
clothing was, not the covering, but simply and solely the =adornment= of
the naked body.”[79] The naked man feels little or no shame; the clothed
man is the first to feel shame--=he feels it when the customary ornament
is lacking=. This is true alike for primitive and for civilized man. For
Stratz very rightly points out that any manifestation of nudity which is
prescribed by fashion--that is to say, by the then dominant code of
beautification--is never felt as nudity. On the contrary, a lady in a
high-necked dress amongst the _décolletée_ ladies of a ballroom, “would
feel deeply ashamed because her breast was not bare.”
The history of =clothing= and of =fashion=, which is so closely
associated therewith, affords us the most important elements for the
understanding of the sense of shame of modern man, and for the judgment
of its importance and of its natural limitations. Moreover, clothing has
most intimate relations to love as a psychical phenomenon. “How great an
influence,” says Emanuel Herrmann, “love exercises, in all its stages,
upon clothing, and how clearly, on the other hand, love is expressed by
clothing!”[80] Clothing more especially satisfies the general human
need, proved by Hoche and myself to exist, for variety in sexual
relationships, which continually demands new allurements and new
stimuli.
The preliminary stage of clothing, a kind of symbolic clothing for
primitive man, is the =staining=, =painting=, and =tattooing=, of the
skin, regarding which recent ethnological researches, especially those
of Westermarck,[81] Joest,[82] and Marquardt,[83] have afforded us
noteworthy conclusions.
It is a fact of great interest that the tendency to painting and
adorning the body existed already in prehistoric times, thus affording
a notable illustration of the truth of Herbert Spencer’s opinion that
the vanity of uncivilized man was much greater than that of civilized
man. In palæolithic dwellings coloured earths have actually been
discovered, and coloured pastes made by mixing iron rust with reindeer
fat, which unquestionably were employed for the colouring of the human
body. Moreover, as Ludwig Stein remarks, the history of cosmetics, which
Lord Bacon, in his “Cosmetica,” dated from the days of Biblical
antiquity, can be traced back with certainty to the man of the ice age,
upon whose individual and moral qualities this fact throws a significant
light. According to Klaatsch, palæolithic man was not contented simply
with painting his skin; he also tattooed himself by means of fine flint
knives.[84]
Painting and tattooing of the body must, then, be regarded as a
primitive stage of clothing. Ploss-Bartels remarks: “I find it
impossible to doubt that the original meaning of tattooing is to be
found in the endeavour =to cover nakedness=”; and Joest, the most
learned student of tattooing, is of the same opinion. He writes: “The
less a man clothes himself, the more he tattoos his skin; and the more
he clothes himself, the less he tattoos.”[85]
We must also regard the coloration of the skin produced by tattooing as
a means of allurement; tattooing was, in fact, =principally= carried out
for the purpose of sexual allurement and stimulation. The tattooed man
is the more beautiful, the more worthy object of desire. Even in cases
in which painting and tattooing were originally undertaken for other
purposes--for instance, with some therapeutic aim, or perhaps to serve
as means of social or political differentiation--still, these signs and
visible changes in the skin of the body speedily exerted a powerful
influence upon the other sex, and by sexual selection were converted
into sexual lures.[86]
This sexual character of tattooing is indicated also by the fact that
amongst numerous savage people of the South Seas, in the Caroline
Islands, in New Guinea, and in the Pelew Islands, the girls, in order to
attract the men, were accustomed to tattoo =exclusively the genital
region=, and especially the mons Veneris; thus, by tattooing, they made
this region markedly apparent. It is characteristic that Miklucho-Maclay
at the first glance received the impression that the girl tattooed in
this manner wore on the mons Veneris a three-cornered piece of blue
cloth, so closely can tattooing simulate clothing.
The sexual nature of tattooing is also shown by its association with
=phallic= festivals. In Tahiti there is a very characteristic legend
regarding the sexual origin of tattooing.[87] Among many primitive
peoples the first appearance of menstruation gives the signal for
tattooing, and for priapistic festivals.
An important sexual relationship is also manifested by the =colour=
element of tattooing. It appears that the sense of love in primitive man
is closely connected with the sight of particular colours. According to
Konrad Lange, the sensual voluptuous value of these colours obtained its
peculiar character from the feeling of love associated with viewing
them; and, speaking generally, we can prove the existence of a certain
=association between the love of colour and the sexual impulse=. Lange
records an experience of his own youth, that when, about fourteen years
of age, he was glancing at a vari-coloured necktie he had feelings which
were not very different in their nature from sexual desire. He rightly
draws attention to the fact that in primitive man this association of
ideas is especially vivid, for the reason that, as already stated, the
painting of the body is usually first undertaken at the time of the
commencement of puberty.[88]
It is a significant fact that among modern civilized peoples the
practice of tattooing is generally confined to certain lower classes of
the population, such as sailors, criminals, and prostitutes, among whom
the primitive impulses remain active in a quite exceptional strength, as
Lombroso has more especially shown in his “Palimsesti di Carcere,” and
in his works on the criminal and the prostitute. Very frequently obscene
tattooings were found in such persons.[89] Marro, Lacassagne, Batut, and
Rudolf Bergh, have also studied the tattooings of prostitutes and
criminals, and have observed the same objects and ornaments in both
classes. Salillas in Spain, Drago in the Argentine, Ellis and Greaves in
England, and Tronow in Russia, obtained similar results. In 12·5 per
cent. of the inmates of reformatories in Brieg, Kurella found that the
skin was tattooed. According to him, cynicism, revenge, cruelty,
remorselessness, gloomy or indifferent fatalism, bestial lewdness, with
a dominant tendency to unnatural vices of every kind, “constituted the
principal psychical manifestations exhibited by these tattoo-pictures.”
“Pæderastic symbols among the men, and tribadistic among the female
prostitutes, are of especially frequent occurrence, and among these we
often find a mackerel sketched on the vulva, denoting the _souteneur_;
still more perverse sexual representations even French authors such as
Batut have not ventured to reproduce; we see things which would send
the _police des mœurs_ out of their minds. Already in quite young
vagabonds, frequently sons of prostitutes, we see representations of
this kind.”[90]
Not only, however, in criminals and prostitutes, but also in the
non-criminal members of the lowest classes of the population, we often
observe erotic tattooings of the most obscene character, which, without
doubt, serve as sexual lures and stimuli. J. Robinsohn and Friedrich S.
Krauss recently published an interesting account of these matters.[91]
=Cases of Tattooing in Women of the Upper Classes.=--It appears that
the primitive tendency to tattooing as a sexual stimulus and means of
allurement has recently revived in certain circles of the refined
sensual world. René Schwaeblé, in his celebrated book based on his own
observations and moral studies, and entitled, “Les Détraquées de
Paris” (Paris, 1904), gives an account of the increasing diffusion of
tattooing among both men and women of the upper classes of Parisian
society, for which purpose a specialist has opened an _atelier_ in the
Rue Blanche, in Montmartre. Schwaeblé devotes a special chapter to the
“_tatouées_” (pp. 47-57), and describes an assembly of some of these
distinguished libertines in a house in the Rue de la Pompe in Passy.
In one of these ladies, tattooing imitated in a most deceptive manner
a pair of stockings, thus affording a characteristic instance of the
above-mentioned association between tattooing and clothing. Another
woman had inscriptions tattooed on the thighs and hips; in two the
legs were adorned with garlands of vine-leaves, birds were billing on
the abdomen, and on the back were depicted many coloured bouquets of
flowers, with the inscription, “X. pinxit, after Watteau.” A
marchioness had her family coat-of-arms depicted between the shoulder
blades; another great lady had had tattooed on her body the maddest
and most obscene drawings of a satanistic character! Two unmistakably
homosexual women had a common tattooing--that is to say, one was
complementary to the other; only when they were side by side had the
picture a meaning. The most remarkable of all the tattooings, however,
was that of the hostess. On her body was the picture of a complete
hunt, the individual scenes of which wound round her body; it was in
the most vivid colours; carriages, packs of hounds and hunters were
all shown. The final goal of the hunt was a fox tattooed in the
genital region.
Tattooing leads on to the consideration of =many-coloured clothing=,
which is especially common in primitive conditions of mankind. Such
clothing, in such conditions, serves chiefly to accentuate particular
portions of the body, in order to stimulate the sexual appetite of
members of the opposite sex. According to Moseley, the savage begins by
painting and tattooing himself for the sake of adornment. Then he takes
a movable appendage, which he throws round his body, and on which he
places the ornamentation =which he had previously marked on his skin in
a more or less ineradicable manner=. Now a greater =variation= is
rendered possible than was the case with tattooing and painting. Thus,
by means of vari-coloured and bright bands, fringes, girdles, and
aprons, which for the most part are attached in the genital region,
attention is drawn to this part--and here a =contrast of colours= is
found extremely effective. The Indians of the Admiralty Islands have as
their only article of clothing a brilliant white mussel-shell, which
exhibits a striking contrast to the dark colour of their skin. The
Areois of Tahiti, a class of privileged libertines and voluptuous
individuals, manifested this character in public places by wearing a
girdle made of “ti-leaves.”[92]
The first and most primitive form of clothing was this =pubic ornament=,
the original purpose of which was adornment, not concealment. The latter
significance it acquired only in proportion as the genital organs became
the object of a superstitious feeling of fear and respect, and were
regarded as the seat of a dangerous magic.[93] The above-mentioned
connexion between sexuality and magic here made itself apparent. It was
necessary that this wonderful, daimonic region should be concealed, in
order to protect an onlooker from its evil and influence, or,
contrariwise, to protect the genital region from the evil glance of the
observer. Both ideas are ethnologically demonstrable. According to
Dürkheim, the genital organs, and especially those of women, were
covered in primitive times, in order to prevent the perception of any
disagreeable emanations from these regions. Finally, Waitz, Schurz, and
Letourneau propounded the theory that the jealousy of primitive man was
the primary ground of clothing, and was indirectly also the cause of the
sense of shame. This view is supported by the interesting ethnological
fact that in many races only the married women are clothed, whilst the
fully-grown unmarried girls go completely naked. The married woman is
part of the property of the husband; to the latter, clothing appears to
be a protection against glances at his property--to unclothe the wife is
a dishonour and a shame. When the idea of possession was extended to the
relationship between the father and his unmarried daughters, these
latter also were clothed; thus the idea of chastity and the feeling of
shame were developed.[94]
We can, however, adduce numerous considerations in support of the view
that the first covering of the genital organs, in association with the
pubic ornament, did not arise out of the feeling of shame, but, on the
contrary, that it served as a means of sexual allurement. By all kinds
of striking ornaments, such as cat’s tails, mussel-shells, or strips of
hide, fastened either in front or behind, every possible attention was
attracted to the genital region or the buttocks.[95] Concealment made
itself felt as a =more powerful= sensual stimulus than nudity. This is
an old anthropological experience which still possesses great
significance in our modern civilized life.
Virey believed that human beings had more intense and manifold sexual
enjoyments than the lower animals, because these latter see their wives
at all times without any kind of adornment, whereas the half-opened veil
with which the human female conceals or partially discloses her charms
increases a hundredfold the already boundless lust of mankind. “The less
one sees, the more does imagination picture.”[96] That which causes a
refined and sensual stimulus is not the entirely naked, but the
half-naked or partial nudity. Westermarck remarks:
“We have numerous examples of races who generally go about completely
naked, but sometimes employ a covering. In such cases they always wear
the latter in circumstances which make it perfectly clear that the
covering is used simply as a means of allurement. Thus, Lohmann
relates that among the Saliras only prostitutes wear clothing, and
they do this =in order to stimulate by means of the unknown=. Barth
informs us that among many heathen races in Central Africa, the
married women go entirely naked, whilst the girls ripe for marriage
clothe themselves (in order that they may appear worthy of desire).
The married women of Tipperah wear no more than a short apron, while
the unmarried girls cover the breasts with vari-coloured cloths with
fringed edges. Among the Toungta, the breasts of the women remain
uncovered after the birth of the first child, but the unmarried women
wear a narrow breast-cloth.”[97]
The significance of clothing and partial clothing as a sexual stimulus,
proved by K. von den Steinen and Stratz to exist among primitive
peoples, can be shown to form an element in the “fashion” of civilized
races, which provides the imagination with entirely new sexual stimuli,
by means of the two fundamental elements of the =accentuation= and
=disclosure= of certain parts, and speaks to man of “hidden joys.” Moses
made use of this psychical sexual influence of clothing. He wished to
increase the numbers of his small people, and therefore he ordered the
=concealment= of the feminine charms, “=in order to stimulate the senses
of the male members of his community=, and thus increase the fertility
of his people.”[98] Nudity, rejected by him as =unsuitable=, came in the
Christian teaching to be regarded as “=immoral=”; for such a change in
the point of view, we can find numerous examples in the public life of
the present day.
The greatest sensual stimulus is exerted by the =half-clothing= or
=partial disclosure= of the body, the so-called _retroussé_--that is,
the art of bringing about a refined mutual influence between the charms
of clothing and the charms of the body.[99] This plays a very important
part in the origination of the so-called “clothes fetichism,” which we
shall describe at greater length when we come to the consideration of
these sexual anomalies.
There are two fundamental forms of clothing, the =tropical= (coat and
sash) and the =arctic= (doublet and hose), and these, in addition to
their simple function of protecting in the tropics from the powerful
rays of the sun, and in the northern climates of protecting from cold,
serve also in both sexes as a means of sexual allurement. The changeful
phenomena and phases of “fashion in clothing” afford the most certain
proofs of this fact; they may, in fact, be regarded as the most valuable
sexual psychological documents of the successive epochs of
civilization. The celebrated writer on æsthetics Friedrich Theodor
Vischer has regarded them especially from this point of view in his
original work, distinguished by its pithy style, “Fashion and Cynicism:
Contributions to the Knowledge of the Forms of Civilization and of our
Moral Ideas” (Stuttgart, 1888). He regards “the rage to excel in
man-catching” as “the most powerful of impulses, capable of inflaming to
fever-heat the madness of fashion, with its brainless changes, its
furious inclinations, its raging distortions.” In a certain sense we may
also speak of some of the fashions of men’s clothing as an art of
“woman-catching.” Still, on the whole, this feature is much less
manifest here than in relation to woman’s clothing.
Clothing has a sexually stimulating influence in a twofold manner:
either certain parts are especially =accentuated= and =enlarged= by the
shape or cut of the clothing and by peculiar kinds of ornamentation, or
else particular portions of the body are directly =denuded=. Both of
these have a sexual influence.
The accentuation and enlargement of certain parts of the body by means
of clothing takes its origin in man’s belief that by this means he
really produces certain enlargements of his personality, =as though
these portions of clothing were actually a part of himself=. This
remarkable theory of clothing, according to which the latter represents
a =strengthening of the body=, a kind of outwardly projected emanation
of the human personality, a direct continuation of the body, was first
enunciated by the celebrated philosopher Hermann Lotze. He writes:
“Everywhere when we place a foreign body in connexion with the surface
of our body (for not the hand alone develops this peculiarity), =the
consciousness of our personal identity is in a certain sense
transmitted into the ends and outer surface of this foreign body=, and
there arise feelings, partly of an enlargement of our personal ego,
partly of a change in form and in extent of movement, now become
possible to us, but naturally foreign to our organs, and partly of an
unaccustomed tension, firmness, or security of our carriage.”[100]
Naturally the reciprocal influence of one person upon another is not
wanting, and the observer believes that in the clothing he actually
finds the body. Parts that otherwise would not have attracted attention
now appear as important objects. For example, the tall hat, as a
prolongation of the head, seems to give the latter a certain height and
worth. Gustave Flaubert, in “Madame Bovary,” very beautifully describes
this remarkable transition, this identification of clothing with the
body:
“Beneath her hair, which was drawn upwards towards the top of the
head, the skin of the nape of her neck appeared to have a brownish
tint, which gradually became paler, and lost itself in the shadows of
her clothing. Her dress spread out on either side over the chair on
which she was sitting; it fell in many folds, and spread out on the
floor. When he chanced to touch it with his foot, he immediately drew
the foot back again, =as if he had trodden on something living=.”
The same association of ideas has led to the idea that clothing “is, as
it were, a complete skin to man,” as if it must represent a kind of
“ideal nudity.”[101] Clothing represents the person, shelters the
nature, the soul. It can, therefore, become the means of expression of
human peculiarities, of individual traits of character. There exists a
“physiognomy” of clothing; it is a mirror of the physical and spiritual
being.[102] Very rightly is it asserted, in a pseudonymous essay on the
“Erotics of Clothing,” that clothing, in the course of the many thousand
years of the development of civilization, has taken up into itself so
much of the =spirit= of mankind that we should find a solution for all
the problems of human civilization if we were able completely and
immediately to understand the spirit of clothing. The form of clothing
is at the same time also the most subtle and accurate measuring
apparatus for the peculiar and personal in a man--for the individual in
him.[103]
If the accentuation of certain parts is the first sexual stimulus of
clothing the denuding of certain parts is the second. When once the
custom of concealing the body has been introduced, the denuding of
portions of the body has acquired a sexually stimulating effect which it
did not previously possess, and which it does not now possess among
primitive communities. In the saying of a thoughtful writer, that there
is a great difference from an erotic point of view between a glance at
the naked leg of a sturdy peasant girl and a glance at the naked leg of
a fashionable young lady, this different conception of nudity finds very
clear expression. There is, in fact, a natural, sexually indifferent
nudity, and an artificial, erotically stimulating nudity. It is the
latter only which plays a part in the history of clothing and of
fashion; and it is this, in association with the erotic accentuation of
certain portions of the body, which has from early times been cultivated
for the allurement of men, and above all by the world of prostitution
and by the half-world.
This first occurred in classical antiquity, to which, however, true
“fashion” was unknown, because clothing was not then, as it is in modern
times, fused with the body, and therefore did not appear to be a
continuation and representation of the bodily personality. In general,
the refined quality of the modern “mode” was lacking, in regard to the
accentuation of particular parts of the body by means of clothing. Very
aptly has Schopenhauer, in the second volume of his “Parerga and
Paralipomena,” pointed out the thorough-going difference between antique
and modern clothing in this relationship. In the days of antiquity
clothing was still a whole, which remained distinct from the body, and
which allowed the human form to be recognized as distinctly as possible
in all its parts. Sexual stimulation could be effected only by the
employment of =diaphanous= fabrics, which were preferred in the circles
of the half-world and by effeminate men. Varro, Juvenal, and Seneca
chastise with biting words this immorality of “coacæ vestes,” and of the
network clothing imported from Egypt. Then there appeared for the first
time as a peculiar type the woman in man’s clothing, a proof of the wide
diffusion of the love of boys, on which those prostitutes who went about
clothed as men must have speculated when they assumed this dress.
The analysis of clothing into =upper-clothing= and =under-clothing=
signifies a differentiation of clothing very effective as regards erotic
influence. For the first time could the individual portions of the body
appear in definite significance in relation to the body as a whole. And
the indication of the waist became characteristic of fashion in
clothing.[104]
The analysis of clothing was carried a stage further in the separation
of clothing, properly speaking, from that which lies beneath it, the
more intimate covering of the body, the washable underclothing--shirt,
chemise, petticoat, etc. More especially had this differentiation a
great erotic significance. It was the increase in the number of
individual articles of clothing which first gave rise to the erotically
tinged idea of the gradual “dressing” and “undressing,” to the idea of
the intimate “toilet.” The possibilities of disclosure, half
concealment, and semi-nudity were notably increased, and a much larger
playground was opened to the erotic imagination.
In association with this, the waist, especially in the case of woman,
indicated a separation of the bodily spheres into an upper sphere,
associated chiefly with the intellectual, and a lower sphere, belonging
rather to the purely sexual.
“The waist, which is already, roughly speaking, indicated by the sash
or girdle, but which, in consequence of the progressive
differentiation of feminine clothing, comes to play a principal part
in women’s dress, divides the woman’s body into thorax and abdomen.
The fully clothed woman becomes an insect, a wasp, with two sharply
defined emotional and sexual spheres, with a heavenly and an earthly
division.”[105]
With this classification and differentiation of clothing there now
developed a fertile field for the activity of “fashion,” which
therefore, as such, first really takes its rise in the middle ages.
According to Sombart,[106] it was in the Italian States of the fifteenth
century that it first became a living reality. Fashion is a product of
the Christian middle ages; the specific element that this period
introduced into feminine clothing--the corset--is a witness to Christian
doctrine.
Stratz remarks on this subject:
“Strange as it may seem, it is very remarkably true that =the corset
derives its origin from the Christian worship of God=. Owing to the
strict ecclesiastical control in the middle ages--strict, at least, as
regards public life--the dominant ascetic point of view demanded the
fullest possible covering of the feminine body, and the =mortification
of the flesh=; it insisted, at any rate, that those portions of the
body should be withdrawn from the view of sinful man which are
regarded as especially characteristic of the female sex. Through woman
sin had entered the world, and therefore woman must, above all, take
care to conceal as much as possible the sinful characteristics of her
baser sex. Whilst man, by the greatest possible increase in breadth of
shoulders and chest, endeavoured to suggest a more powerful and
warlike aspect, we find that among women from the twelfth to the
sixteenth century, the endeavour was dominant to make the breasts as
flat and childlike and as narrow as possible, and for this purpose,
=for the compression and obliteration of the breasts, an early form of
the corset was employed=.”[107]
It is characteristic that fashion later employed the corset in precisely
the =opposite= sense--namely, in order to make the breasts “stand out
more prominently above the upper margin of the corset, which continually
became shorter.” Thus there arose a conflict between medieval fashion
and the ascetic tendencies of the times. Fashion was victorious along
the whole line, as we can learn in detail in Ritter’s interesting essay
regarding the nudities of the middle ages.[108]
Since the middle ages, two portions of the body have in the female sex
been especially accentuated by clothing--the breasts, and the region of
the hips and the buttocks.
As we have already pointed out, the corset was especially employed to
accentuate the breasts, the corset having already produced the
stimulating contrast between the prominence of the breast and the
slenderness of the waist, increased by lacing. At the same time, at an
early date the denuding of the upper part of the breasts was associated
with this accentuation, the top of the dress being cut away in front _à
la grand’ gorge_, whilst the corset, strengthened by rods of whalebone
or steel, produced a _bonne conché_. This accentuation of the breasts
dominated feminine fashion down to the present day. Besides the use of
the corset in this matter, the region of the breasts was also rendered
more prominent by the use of artificial breasts made of wax, by
ornaments in the form of breast-rings, etc.
The partial denuding of the breasts represents the true _décolleté_ of
our balls and parties, a custom which a man so tolerant in other
respects as H. Bahr condemns on æsthetic grounds.[109]
“The art of undressing and enjoying =in imagination= beautiful girls
and women,” says Georg Hirth, “is learnt chiefly at Court and other
balls, at which the feminine guests are compelled by fashion to bare
the upper part of the body. It is astonishing how quickly, how
invariably, the girls of the upper classes accustom themselves to this
exhibition, which exercises so stimulating an effect upon us of the
opposite sex. And yet they would turn up their noses if, at the
parties of non-commissioned officers and servants, the women allowed
such extensive glimpses of their charms. I once heard a girl three
years of age express a naive surprise when she saw the _décolletage_
of her mother, who was about to go to a ball. What a scolding would
the poor servant-girl get if _she_ were to exhibit her nudity to the
children in such a manner!”[110]
Fr. Th. Vischer also severely criticizes this exposure of feminine
nudities _coram publico_. Moreover, the free enjoyment of alcohol
customary among men at these evening entertainments is likely to induce
a frame of mind in which the charms thus freely displayed before their
eyes will receive an attention _not_ purely æsthetic.
As regards the corset more particularly, it is not only =unæsthetic=,
but also =unhygienic=.
The corset draws in the beautiful outline of the feminine body in the
most disagreeable manner; the wasp waist which it produces is an ugly
exaggeration of the natural condition. The lady editor of the _Documents
of Women_ instituted an inquiry amongst a number of artists in regard to
the corset. One of these, the architect Leopold Bauer, replied as
follows:
“Nature has endowed the feminine body with a most beautiful outline.
It is almost incomprehensible that the ideal of beauty should during
so lengthy a period aim at the destruction of this wonderful and
unique perfection. The corset makes an ugly bend in the vertebral
column, it makes the hip shapeless, it suggests an unnatural and even
repulsive development of the breasts, which transforms our sentiment
of the sacred beauty of the human body into the lowest sexual and
perverse impulses. That the corset does _not_ really make the body
appear slender is no longer open to doubt. All the suggested
advantages of the corset are prejudices.... It is only when women’s
dress is freed from the tyranny of this detestable corset that it will
be able to develop in a free and artistic manner.”[111]
Physicians are unanimous regarding the unhygienic nature of the corset.
The deleterious influence of tight-lacing upon the form and the activity
of the thoracic and abdominal organs has been thoroughly elucidated by
many authors. I need refer only, among many, to the writings of Hugo
Klein,[112] Menge,[113] and O. Rosenbach,[114] regarding the dangers of
the corset. The corset hinders the sufficient inspiration, which is so
necessary for the adequate activity of the respiratory and circulatory
organs, and herein we find a principal cause of anæmia (O. Rosenbach);
it exercises the most harmful pressure on the abdominal organs,
especially on the stomach and the liver, and presses them out of their
natural situation, so that it gives rise to a descent of the kidneys,
the liver, and the genital organs. The extremely ugly “pendulous belly”
is also dependent on the influence of the corset. The pressure of the
corset also often gives rise to an atrophy of the mammary glands, and to
abnormal changes in the nipples. Thence ensues, further, a serious
hindrance to the function of lactation, which may indeed be rendered
completely impossible. For this reason, Georg Hirth, in his admirable
essay upon the indispensable character of the maternal breast, exclaims:
“Away with the corset!”[115]
The dorsal and abdominal muscles also undergo partial atrophy in
consequence of the habitual wearing of the corset, because this garment
to some extent relieves these muscles of their natural function. Anæmia,
gastric and hepatic disorders, and intercostal neuralgia are also
dependent upon this “most disastrous error of woman’s dress,” as von
Krafft-Ebing calls the corset. Menge has very thoroughly studied the
hurtful influence of the corset on the feminine reproductive organs. He
enumerates, as a result of wearing it, among many evil results,
inflammatory states and enlargement of the ovaries, relaxation of the
uterine muscles, atrophy and excessive proliferation of the uterine
mucous membrane, the onset of the extremely disagreeable _fluor albus_,
premature termination of pregnancy, displacements of the uterus
(retroflexion, anteversion, prolapse), abnormal stretching of the entire
pelvic floor, retention of urine, constipation, and nervous troubles of
the most varied character. Very often, also, sterility in woman is
causally dependent upon the constriction and pressure exercised by the
corset.
Rightly, therefore, the abandonment of the corset plays a principal part
in the “reformed dress” of woman--a subject to which we shall later
return.
In addition to the accentuation of the breast by the corset and by other
apparatus,[116] another aim of feminine fashion has been most persistent
in very various forms, namely, the exaggeration of =the hips, or the
buttocks, or both=--in fact, of all the visible parts of the clothed
body which are directly related to the sexual functions of woman; that
is to say, there has been a persistent endeavour to indicate in the most
prominent manner, in a way to stimulate the male, the secondary sexual
characters of the female in this region of the body.
“The thoroughly modern women,” says Heinrich Pudor, “coquet at the
present day less with their breasts than with their hind-quarters--for
this reason, because for the most part they have a masculine type
(?). It began with the _cul de Paris_. Nowadays, clothes are cut in
such a way that in the view from the back the gluteal region is
especially prominent. This is how the fashionable wife of a German
officer strikes us at present.
“‘Tailor-made’ is the phrase that has for some time been in use in
England. The tailor has made it--not the milliner. No, the tailor, who
perhaps is at the same time bath-master and masseur.... Certain
species of baboons are distinguished by their brightly coloured and
prominent hind-quarters--there seems to be no doubt that our modern
ladies in high life have taken these for their example. Or can it be
that they wish to avail themselves of the homosexual inclinations of
their male acquaintances? Beyond question this is so. Here we find the
fundamental ground of the type of clothing of our own day by which so
much attention is drawn to the region of the buttocks. What is
repulsive here is not the homosexuality, but the misuse that is made
of clothing. In fact, that which is most repulsive to a refined
sentiment is this--that women have their clothes cut as tightly as
possible round the hips, in order that the broad pelvis, which is
especially characteristic of women as a sexual being, shall be as far
as possible visibly isolated.”[117]
Similarly Fr. Th. Vischer has castigated the immorality of the gross
accentuation of kallipygian charms,[118] which in the eighteenth century
was inaugurated by the invention of the so-called _tournure_ (_cul de
Paris_), against which Mary Wollstonecraft inveighed so severely. By the
tension of the clothing, not only the buttocks, but also the hips and
the thighs, were rendered grossly apparent. In certain epochs, also, the
feminine abdomen was very markedly indicated by the mode of dress; for
instance, in the middle ages, down to the sixteenth century, fashion
provided women and girls with the insignia of pregnancy, as is apparent
in the pictures of Jan van Eyck (“The Lamb,” “Eva”), Hans Memling
(“Eva”), and Titian (“The Beauty of Urbino”). The fashion of the “thick
abdomen” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was only another
variation of the same theme.
In close relation to the variations of fashion we have just described is
the =farthingale= (_montgolfière_) or =crinoline=. It was first adopted
in the sixteenth century by courtesans and prostitutes, who thus
exhibited rounded and provocative forms, wishing to allure men by these
_vertugales_, which, according to the _bon mot_ of a Franciscan,
expelled _vertu_, leaving behind only the _gale_ (syphilis). The aptest
remarks regarding the repulsive and dirty fashion of the crinoline were
made by Schopenhauer.[119] It seems as if the crinoline, which is well
known to have celebrated its greatest triumph during the period of the
Second Empire in France--who is not familiar with the characteristic
daguerrotypes of that period?--has recently endeavoured to come to life
once more, for it appears that attempts have actually been made towards
the rehabilitation of this monstrosity of clothing.
The physical difference between man and woman is also beyond question
the principal cause of the difference between masculine and feminine
clothing. According to Waldeyer (Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth
Congress of Anthropologists at Kassel, 1895, published in the _Journal
of the German Society of Anthropologists_, No. 9, p. 76), it is
especially the difference in the length and position of the thigh-bones
that is responsible for the differentiation between masculine and
feminine clothing. In woman, the upper ends of the femora are, in
consequence of the greater width of the pelvis, more widely separated
than in the male; and since in both sexes these bones are closely
approximated at the knees, in women their position appears more oblique.
This, in combination with the comparative shortness of women’s thighs,
has a manifest influence upon the gait, especially in running, in which
man distinctly excels woman. In this purely anatomical difference is to
be found the reason why the masculine mode of dress, which makes the
lower extremities very manifest, is not adapted for woman, especially
when in the upright posture. This is an important cause for the
differentiation between masculine and feminine clothing.
A further fundamental difference between the clothing of man and that of
woman is the much greater simplicity and monotony, on the whole, of
masculine clothing. This has, with good reason, been associated with the
greater intellectual differentiation of man, who, therefore, stands less
in need of any peculiar accentuation of the individual personality by
means of clothing. Woman, who earlier was =only= a sexual being,
utilized clothing in manifold ways as a means of sexual allurement, as
the chief means of compensation for the life of activity denied her by
Nature and custom, whereas to man, on the whole, the employment of
sexual stimulation by means of clothing was superfluous.
Georg Simmel writes from another point of view. He is of opinion that
woman, in comparison with man, is, on the whole, the more constant
being, but that precisely this constancy, which expresses the equability
and unity of her nature on the emotional side, demands, on the
principle of compensation of vital tendencies, a more active variability
in other less central provinces; whereas, on the contrary, man, in his
very nature less constant, who is not accustomed to cleave with the same
unconditional concentration of all vital interests to any once
experienced emotional relationship, precisely in consequence of this,
stands less in need of such external variability. Man, as regards
objective phenomena, is, on the whole, more indifferent than woman,
because fundamentally he is the more variable being, and therefore can
more easily dispense with such objective variability.[120]
Notwithstanding this, down to the beginning of the nineteenth century
there were not wanting, in the fashion of men’s clothing, attempts to
employ certain parts of dress for the purpose of sexual stimulation. I
refer in this connexion to my earlier contributions.[121] Here I shall
allude only in passing to the peculiar and characteristic variations of
men’s clothing in the form of marked attention drawn to the male
genitals by the breeches-flap (_braguettes_); to the shoe, _à la
poulaine_, which imitated the form of a male penis; to certain
effeminate tendencies in the dress of man which have recurred very often
since the days of the Roman Empire,[122] which are connected with the
wide diffusion of homosexual tendencies, and which sometimes have given
men’s dress so variegated a character, have involved such frequent
changes and such occasional nudities, that at these times it could enter
into competition with women’s clothing. In this respect, clothing
enables us to draw conclusions not merely regarding the nature of the
men who wore it, but also regarding the character of the time. There
exists also the modern dandyhood, which recalls many peculiarities of
earlier times; but, on the whole, fashion in men’s clothing tends to
simplicity and sexual indifference. This movement originated in England,
and the English fashion in men’s clothing has become dominant throughout
the whole world, whereas women’s clothing now, as formerly, receives its
fashionable stimulus from Paris.
In addition to the indirect relations of clothing with the _vita
sexualis_, which we have already described, there is a direct
relationship, and this is =the effect of certain fabrics upon the skin=,
from which certain associations of ideas and certain abnormal
tendencies may arise. Thus, for example, the contact of woollen stuffs
and of furs has a sexually stimulating influence. Ryan compared their
influence with that of flagellation.[123] In this sense, also, furs and
the whip go together--these two symbols of “masochism”; velvet has a
similar effect. The celebrated author of “Venus im Pelz,” Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, in his well-known romance bearing this name, deals fully
with the sexual significance of furs. According to him, they exert a
peculiar, prickling, physical stimulus, perhaps dependent upon their
being charged with electricity, and upon the warmth of their atmosphere.
A woman in a fur coat is like a “great cat,[124] a powerful electric
battery.” Influences of smell also appear to be associated herewith.
For, in a letter to his wife, Sacher-Masoch once wrote to tell her what
voluptuous pleasure it would give to him to bathe his face in the warm
odour of her furs.[125] With the description of the stimulating effect
of fur dependent upon sensations of contact and smell, he associated
also the fact that fur gave woman a dominant, masterful, magical
influence. His “Venus im Pelz” is also to him “one who commands.” Titian
found for the rosy beauty of his beloved one no more costly frame than
dark fur. It is doubtless the strong contrast-effect between the
delicate charm and the shaggy surroundings that evokes that remarkable
symbolical relationship to longings for power and cruel despotism. In a
thoughtful essay, “Venus im Pelz” (_Berliner Tageblatt_, No. 487,
September 25, 1903), the idea is developed and explained, that the love
of woman for furs results from her inward nature. It is the secret
longing for an increase of her power and influence by means of
contrast.[126]
Men’s and women’s clothing comprises the covering of the entire body
with the exception of the face--the idea does not, as a rule, include
the head-covering and the way the hair is dressed. In a recent work, H.
Pudor brings the face into a peculiar =sexual relationship with the
clothing=. His remarks on this subject, which contain many valuable
observations, notwithstanding the fact that much of what he says is
overdrawn, run as follows:
“There is no doubt that the face is a bearer of the sexual sense in
the second and third degree. Not only the mouth or the larynx. The
nose, especially in virtue of the mucous membranes by which odours are
perceived. The eye, in virtue of the magnetic currents, the perception
of light, and the chemical activity of the retina. But even the cheeks
and the ears. Let some one you are fond of whisper something into your
ear--notice the emotional wave you will feel, and observe how from the
ear there are paths of conduction to the sexual cells [!]. Above all,
however, naturally the mouth. We speak of the labia of the female
genital organs, and therewith already we indicate the relationship to
the lips of the mouth. We can, in fact, prove the existence, not only
of a parallelism in the structure of the mouth and that of the sexual
organs, in man just as in woman. We can go even further: we can regard
the sacral region as the forehead, the anal region as the nose, the
pudendal region as the mouth, and the gluteal region as the cheeks
[!].
“If we regard the sexual differentiation of the features of the face
as established, from this standpoint we gain an interesting light upon
the deeper lying causes of the wearing of clothes. Civilized mankind
conceals the sexual organs of the first degree; the sexual organs of
the third degree--that is, the features of the face--are left naked;
in fact, on account of the thorough way in which the parts of the body
adjacent to the face are covered, stress is actually laid upon the
nakedness of the face as bearing sexual organs of the third
degree--now we recognize the rôle played by the hat--and by means of
that which we call coquetry, we see mirrored in the features the
proper sexual organs, or we have our attention drawn to the sexual
organs by means of the features, and by the latter we are made aware
of certain peculiarities of the former. In this connexion, let us
remember certain facial adornments which serve to limit still more the
naked area of the face, and to clothe a larger portion of that region,
such as the locks of hair covering the ears which the dancer Cléo de
Mérode introduced, ringlets such as were worn in youth by our
grandmothers, or the chin-band drawn across the middle of the chin.
Perhaps even other ornaments of the face (neck-band, ear-rings, and
even eyeglasses and lorgnette [!]) also play a certain part in this
connexion. Think, above all, of the stand-up collar and all other
varieties of high collar by which the clothing is carried up as high
as the chin. But those parts of the face which remain naked must now
be as naked as possible; for this reason hairs, unless they belong to
the beard as sexual organs of the second degree, must be removed, and
society determinedly insists that faces shall be clean-shaven.”[127]
The relation of the face to the clothing already makes clear to us the
idea of “costume” as an extension of clothing beyond the mere covering
of the body. All which surrounds man, which has a relation to his
appearance, is costume in the widest sense of the word; thus,
sitting-room, workshop, study, dressing-room, park, library, etc.
“We take pains regarding all that we have nearest to us and round
about us, our toilet, because therein we are at home, therein we
suffer and we rejoice. Where we feel ourselves at home, we shall
endeavour so to arrange matters that everything is comfortable to us,
down to the furthest manifestations of our existence, so that our
sitting-room, our bedroom, our house and our garden, constitute =a
prolongation, an extension of our clothing=” (A. von Eye).[128]
Thus it happens that fashion is concerned, not merely with clothing, but
also with an abundance of customary details of environment. The
arrangement and furnishing of rooms, artistic objects, bodily exercises,
social intercourse, sports, etc., are subject to the caprices of
fashion. On this extended idea of fashion is based Fr. Th. Vischer’s
definition: “Fashion is a general term to denote a complex of temporary
current forms of civilization.”
The =theory= of fashion has been elaborated especially by Sombart[129]
and Simmel.[130] In the work of W. Fred,[131] also, we find some
thoughtful observations.
According to Simmel, fashion fulfils a double task. On the one hand, it
is the imitation of a given example, and thus satisfies the need for
social dependence; it leads the individual along the path on which all
are going. But, on the other hand, it satisfies also the need for
difference, the tendency to differentiation, to variation, to
self-assertion. This fashion effects by means of frequent changes, and
by the fact that first of all it is always a class fashion. The fashions
of the upper classes are distinguished from those of the lower classes,
and are instantly abandoned when the lower classes adopt them. Thus,
=according to Simmel’s definition, fashion is nothing else than a
peculiar form among many forms of life, by means of which the tendency
towards social equalization is connected with the tendency towards
individual differentiation and variation to constitute a unitary
activity=.
In Paris, the centre of fashion, the associated work of these two
tendencies may be studied most accurately and purely. We can there
observe how at first always a portion only of society adopts the
fashion, whilst the commonalty are still only on the way towards its
adoption. If the fashion has become entirely general, if it is followed
without exception, it is already over, it is no longer “fashionable,”
because this class difference has ceased to exist.
“By means of this interplay--between its tendency to general diffusion
on the one hand, and, on the other, the annihilation of its
significance which this very diffusion brings about--fashion exercises
the peculiar charm of the border-line, the charm of simultaneous
beginning and ending, the charm of that which is at the same time new
and obsolete” (Simmel).
In connexion with this fact we find that from the earliest times the
“=demi-monde=” has always given the impulse to new fashions. Owing to
the peculiarly uncertain position occupied by this class, everything
conventional, everything long in use, is detested by its members; only
newness and change are agreeable.
“In the continuous endeavour to find new, hitherto unheard-of
fashions, in the heedlessness with which precisely that which is
opposed to what has gone before is passionately grasped, there lies an
æsthetic form of the destructive impulse, which all pariah existences
appear to possess, so long, at any rate, as they are not completely
enslaved” (Simmel).
On the other hand, the equalizing tendency of fashion serves delicate,
sensitive natures as a kind of =protection= of their personality, as
Simmel has shown in a masterly manner. To such persons fashion plays the
part, as it were, of a mask.
“Thus it is a delicate shame and shyness, lest by a peculiarity in
outward aspect, some peculiarity of the subjective character might
perhaps be betrayed, that leads many natures to seek with eagerness
the concealing equalization of fashion.... It gives a veil and a
protection to all that lies within, and that thereby becomes more
perfectly free.”
That modern fashion is, for the most part, a child of the nineteenth
century, and is most intimately dependent upon the nature of capitalism,
has been directly proved by W. Sombart. He indicates as a decisive fact
in the process of the formation of fashion the perception that the
participation of the consumer is thereby reduced to a minimum, that, on
the contrary, the driving force in the creation of modern fashion is the
capitalistic entrepreneur. If, for example, a Parisian cocotte discovers
a new style of dress, or if, as the newspapers recently reported, the
King of England introduces the fashion of a white hat or white shoes for
men, these actions have, according to Sombart, the character only of
intermediate assistance. The true driving agent for the rapid =general=
diffusion of fashion, and for the frequent =changes of fashion=, remains
the capitalistic entrepreneur, the producer, or merchant. Sombart proves
this convincingly by striking examples. This economic aspect of fashion
must receive no less consideration than the psychological.
If men’s clothing, as we have already said, is, in the gross, far less
subject to the dominion of fashion than women’s clothing, still recently
efforts have been apparent to simplify women’s clothing also, to make it
independent of the caprices of fashion, and, above all, to subordinate
it to hygienic principles. It is noteworthy that these efforts proceed
more particularly from the leaders of the modern woman’s movement, an
interesting proof of the connexion already alluded to between
personality and clothing. The more differentiated and the more inwardly
rich the personality, the simpler and more monotonous is the clothing.
To this extent, therefore, the desire for simplification of feminine
clothing is an entirely logical postulate of the emancipation of women.
But this demand finds a justification also from the point of view of
hygiene. This fact has been discussed especially by Paul
Schultze-Naumburg in his book on “The Culture of the Feminine Body as
the Basis of Women’s Clothing” (Leipzig, 1901). He insists above all on
the =complete abandonment of the corset=, and of the “small waist,” and
on a return of women’s clothing to the free, simple outlines of the
antique. He makes, also, very noteworthy observations on the unhygienic
footgear of both sexes.
The idea that woman’s clothing should unconstrainedly represent the form
of her body has been admirably realized in the different varieties of
the so-called “=reformed dress=.” Not without influence on these
deserving attempts has been the recognition of the distinguished
simplicity and hygienic purposefulness of the Japanese women’s clothing.
For the present, however, fashion, as of old, remains dominant, and
celebrates annually its triumph in respect of new discoveries and
refinements of the dress of women of the world, employing for this
purpose the familiar means of accentuation and disclosure, and of
coloured and ornamental stimuli. The “woman’s movement” has as yet had
little ostensible and practical influence in liberating women’s dress
from the all-powerful control of fashion.
Now that we have considered clothing and fashion in their relations to
the sexual life, and have learned to understand how they combine in
action as means of sexual stimulation of a peculiar nature, we are in a
position to grasp the =relations between the sense of shame and nudity=,
as it presents itself to us as a =problem of modern civilization=.
While, as Simmel also maintains, and as we have thoroughly explained
above, clothing, through the intermediation of fashion, gives rise to
shamelessness as a group manifestation, or, as we are accustomed to say
at the present day, seriously impairs the sense of shame in such a
manner as would be repelled with disgust if it were adopted by the
personal choice of an isolated individual,[132] clothing has, on the
other hand, led astray the natural biological sense of shame, since it
is the sole cause of the “exaggerated sense of shame” known as
=prudery=. Prudery recognizes the existence of =clothed= human beings
only; it will not recognize the existence of naked man; it refuses to
admit the purely moral-æsthetic influence of natural nudity--to prudery
this is something immoral and repulsive.
To prudery alone we must ascribe the fact that we modern civilized human
beings have completely lost the taste for natural nudity, and also for
the natural sense of shame, and thus we show little understanding of the
ennobling, civilizing influence of both.
Natural nudity, the state in which every human being is born into this
world, not artificial nudity, with its lascivious influence dependent
upon clothing, posture, and gesture, is purely an object of simple
contemplation for the human being of normal perceptions, who sees in the
unclothed human body precisely the same individual natural object as he
sees in the bodies of other living beings. People, in other respects
extremely prudish, admit this when they have the opportunity--at the
present day certainly very rare--of seeing completely naked human beings
in natural surroundings, as, for instance, when bathing.
It is only when we introduce =intentionally= a sensual or, speaking
generally, an artificial influence, that nudity has an effect of
lascivious stimulation. =Prudery is, however, nothing more than such a
way of looking at nudity, with concealed lustful feelings.= The talented
Schleiermacher already recognized this fact. He unmasked prudery as a
lack of the sense of shame, and very clearly pointed out the sexual and
lascivious element which it conceals. In his “Vertrauten Briefen über
die Lucinde” (edition of K. Gutzkow, Hamburg, 1835, pp. 63-65) we find
the following beautiful passage:
“What, then, shall we think of those who pretend to be in a condition
of quiet thought and activity, and yet are so intolerably sensitive
that as a result of the most trivial and most remote impulse, passion
arises in them, and who believe themselves to be the more fully
equipped with the sense of shame the more readily they find in
everything something worthy of suspicion? They do not really find what
they pretend to find in every occurrence; =it is their own crude lust
which lies always on the watch=, and springs forward as soon as
anything shows itself in the distance akin to themselves, and which
therefore they find it possible to condemn; and they will quickly
seize an opportunity for blaming anything of which the motives were
=absolutely blameless=. Ordinarily, indeed, blamelessness appears to
them a pretence. Youths and maidens are represented as knowing nothing
as yet of love, but none the less as full of yearnings which every
moment threaten to break out, and which clutch the slightest
opportunity in order to grasp the forbidden fruit. But this is absurd.
True youths and maidens are, indeed, the ideals of this kind of
modesty, =but in them it takes another form=. Only that which has no
other purpose than to arouse desire and passion can do them any harm;
=but why should they not be allowed to learn love and to understand
Nature, both of which they see everywhere round them=? Why should they
not, without restraint, understand and enjoy what is thought and said
about these matters, since in this way so much the less would passion
be aroused in them? =Such anxious and limited modesty as is at the
present day characteristic of society is based only upon the
consciousness of a great and widespread perversity, and upon a deep
corruption.= What will be the end of all this? If matters were left to
themselves, they would become worse and worse; when we so persistently
hunt out that which in reality is =not shameful=, we shall at last
succeed in finding something immodest in every circle of ideas; and
finally all conversation and all society must come to an end; we must
separate the sexes so that they may not look at one another; we must
introduce monasticism, or even something more severe. But this is not
to be borne, and it will happen to our society as it happened to our
wives when morality confined them ever more and more strictly, until
at last it became improper for them to show the tips of their
fingers--and then in despair they suddenly turned round, and they
exposed their necks, their shoulders, and their breasts to the rude
winds and to lascivious eyes; or, like the caterpillars, they cast off
their old skin by a predetermined movement. Thus will it be; when
corruption has reached its climax, and the crude impulses become so
dominant =that it is no longer possible to keep them within bounds=,
all these false appearances will break down of themselves, and behind
them we shall see youthful shamelessness which has long intimately
entwined itself round the body of society, so that this has become the
true skin in which society naturally and easily moves. Complete
corruption and =completed culture, by way of which we return to
blamelessness=--both of these make an end of prudery.”
Fine words from a theologian! This thoroughly just description of the
nature of prudery and of its dangers should be laid seriously to heart
by our modern theological bigots and moral fanatics. How truly
Schleiermacher has depicted the nature of prudery is shown by the
observations of the alienist J. L. A. Koch, that it is precisely the
women who were formerly prudish and “moral” when they become insane--for
example, in mania--who are much more shameless than women who in
everyday life had taken a more natural view of sexual relationships.
The =eternal concealment= of the most natural things is what first makes
them appear unnatural, first awakens desire, where otherwise they would
have been passed by quietly and harmlessly without attention. At the
present day the natural justifiable sense of shame has been
=intensified= to an unnatural degree, and has been falsified to such an
extent that this exaggeration of the sense of shame, this unceasing
objective suppression of natural harmless activities and feelings, has
really increased the hidden desires to an immeasurable degree; it is
this, in fact, which heaps fuel on the fire of fleshly lust.[133]
The genuine, natural, biological sense of shame sets bounds to lust. To
this shame we owe the ennobling and spiritualizing of the crude sexual
impulse; it is the preliminary stage to the individualization of that
impulse. It is intimately related to that voluntary, temporary, and
relative continence which has so great an importance for the individual
life. The sense of shame has civilized the sexual impulse without
denying its essential basis.
Complete culture returns to complete innocence. It knows no fig-leaves;
it does not go about, as did recently in the Dresden Museum a clergyman
affected with the psychosis of hyper-prudery, knocking off the genital
organs from naked statues; nor does it castrate the human spirit, as we
find most biographers do even now in the case of the great men whose
lives they describe. It recognizes the sexual as something noble and
natural.
The sense of shame is an inalienable acquirement of civilization; it is
self-respect. But, as Havelock Ellis rightly remarks, in =completely
developed= human beings self-respect keeps a tight rein on any excess of
the sense of shame. Knowledge and culture give the death-blow to all
false prudery. The cultured man looks the natural in the face; he
recognizes its value and its necessity. To him the sexual is the
indispensable preliminary of life; hence in its essential nature it is
something =harmless, wholly comprehensible=; something that must not be
underrated, but =above all must not be overrated=, as our virtuous
hypocrites and fanatics of prudery invariably overrate it.
The true league against immorality is the league against prudery. The
apostles of the nude do more service to true morality than the men of
the “Lex-Heinze,” than those who hold conferences on morality, than the
German Christian League of Virtue. A natural conception of the
nude--that is the watchword of the future. This is shown by all the
hygienic, æsthetic, and ethical endeavours of our time.
[72] G. Simmel, “Philosophy of Fashion” (Berlin, 1906, p. 27).
[73] _Cf._ C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero, “Woman as Criminal and
Prostitute.”
[74] Karl von den Steinen, “Experiences among the Savage Races of
Central Brazil” (Berlin, 1894, p. 199).
[75] _Op. cit._, p. 66.
[76] _Op. cit._, p. 64.
[77] A discussion of the early manifestations of the sexual sense of
shame as exhibited by savages and by primitive man would hardly be
complete without an allusion to the theory mentioned by Robert
Browning (“Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” Collected Works, 1889, vol.
iv., p. 271):
“Suppose a pricking to incontinence--
Philosophers deduce you chastity
Or shame, from just the fact that at the first
Whoso embraced a woman in the field,
Threw club down and forewent his brains beside,
So stood a ready victim in the reach
Of any brother savage, club in hand;
Hence saw the use of going out of sight
In wood or cave to prosecute his loves:
I read this in a French book t’other day.”
[78] _Op. cit._, pp. 190, 191, 195. _Cf._ also the interesting remarks
regarding the nudity of the indigens of South America by Alex. von
Humboldt, “Journey in the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent”
(Stuttgart, vol. ii., pp. 15, 16).
[79] Somewhat diverging from these views, Karl von den Steinen (_op.
cit._, pp. 174, 178, and 186) is of opinion that man learned first by
their use for practical ends the employment of the articles later
utilized for adornment. Above all, in this connexion, he alludes to
tattooing, which originated, he believes, in the practice of smearing
the body with various coloured earths and with different kinds of
clay, these at the same time serving to promote coolness and to afford
a protection against the bites of insects. _Cf._ also Yrjö Hirn, “The
Origin of Art” (Leipzig, 1904, p. 222).
[80] E. Herrmann, “Natural History of Clothing” (Vienna, 1878, p.
239).
[81] Edward Westermarck, “History of Human Marriage.”
[82] Wilhelm Joest, “Tattooing, Scarifying, and Painting the Body”
(Berlin, 1887).
[83] Carl Marquardt, “Tattooing of Both Sexes in Samoa” (Berlin.
1899).
[84] Ludwig Stein, “The Beginnings of Human Civilization” (Leipzig,
1906, pp. 74, 75); Edward Tylor, “Anthropology: an Introduction to the
Study of Man and Civilization” (Macmillan, 1881, p. 237).
[85] According to Karl von den Steinen (_op. cit._, p. 186), the oil
colours used in painting the body are “=actually the clothing of the
Indians, employed for this purpose as occasion demands=.” Their oldest
aim was protection against heat, cutaneous irritation, and external
noxious influences.
[86] _Cf._ Y. Hirn, “The Origin of Art” (Leipzig, 1904, pp. 223, 224).
[87] _Cf._ my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis,” vol. ii., p. 338.
[88] _Cf._ K. Lange, “The Nature of Art” (Berlin, 1901, vol. ii., pp.
185, 186).
[89] The significance of tattooing of this nature in the diagnosis of
sexual perversities we shall later discuss at greater length.
[90] _Cf._ Kurella, “The Natural History of the Criminal” (Stuttgart,
1893, pp. 105-112).
[91] “Erotic Tattooing” in “Anthropophyteia, Annual for Folk-lore and
for Researches regarding the History of the Evolution of Sexual
Morals,” edited by Friedrich S. Krauss (Leipzig, 1904, vol. i., pp.
507-513). According to an account in the _Temps_, in a deserter from
the French army the most remarkable tattooings were observed. On the
breast there were two seductive women throwing kisses to a sturdy
musketeer, in addition to portraits of music-hall singers, both male
and female--for example, Yvette Guilbert. The entire back was covered
with love sketches. _Cf._ _B. Z. am Mittag_, August 21, 1906.
[92] William Ellis, “Polynesian Researches” (London, 1859, vol. i., p.
235).
[93] _Cf._ Hirn, “The Origin of Art,” pp. 214, 215.
[94] _Cf._ Havelock Ellis, _op. cit._ pp. 56-62.
[95] It is well known that the buttocks formed an object of erotic
allurement in many savage races, and especially so in certain African
tribes.
[96] J. J. Virey, “Woman” (Leipzig, 1825, p. 300).
[97] Westermarck, “History of Human Marriage,” pp. 193, 197.
[98] C. H. Stratz, “Women’s Clothing” (Stuttgart, 1900, p. 42).
[99] In his “Confessions,” Rousseau writes regarding the collar of the
beautiful courtesan Giulietta: “Her cuffs and collar had silken
threads running through them, and were adorned with pictures of roses.
=These made a beautiful contrast with her fine skin.=”
[100] H. Lotze, “Mikrokosmus: Ideas regarding the Natural History of
Mankind” (third edition, Leipzig, 1878, vol. ii., p. 210).
[101] H. Bahr, “Clothing Reform,” in _Dokumente der Frauen_, 1902,
vol. vi., No. 23, p. 665.
[102] _Cf._ the detailed account of this aspect of clothing in my
“Contributions to the Etiology of the Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol.
ii., pp. 334-336.
[103] _Cf._ Lucianus, “Erotics of Clothing,” published in _Die
Fackel_, edited by Karl Kraus (Vienna, No. 198, March 12, 1906, pp.
12, 13).
[104] _Cf._, in this connexion, Ernest Kapp, “Fundamental Outlines of
a Philosophy of Technique,” p. 267 (Brunswick, 1877).
[105] Lucianus, “Erotica of Clothing,” p. 16.
[106] W. Sombart, “Domestic Economy and Fashion” (Wiesbaden, 1902, p.
12).
[107] Stratz, “Woman’s Clothing,” pp. 123, 124.
[108] B. Ritter, “Nudities in the Middle Ages: Outlines of the History
of Morals,” in the _Annual of Science and Art_, published by O. Wigand
(Leipzig, 1855, vol. iii., p. 229).
[109] H. Bahr, “Clothing Reform,” _op. cit._, p. 666.
[110] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 619.
[111] Leopold Bauer, in _Documents of Women_, March, 1902, pp. 675,
676.
[112] _Op. cit._, pp. 671, 672.
[113] Menge, “The Influence of Constricting Clothing upon the
Abdominal Organs, and more Especially upon the Reproductive Organs of
Woman” (Leipzig, 1904).
[114] O. Rosenbach, “The Corset and Anæmia” (Stuttgart, 1895).
[115] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 49.
[116] The modern fancy for slender, ethereal, Pre-Raphaelite feminine
figures is also to some extent allied with a negative accentuation of
the breasts. Heinrich Pudor with good reason declares that at the
present time perhaps the strongest sexual influence of woman is
dependent upon the fact that “the existence of the breasts is
concealed, and the appearance of the male sex is simulated.” _Cf._ his
article, “Clothing and Sex,” in _Die Gemeinschaft der Eigenen_, August
number, 1906, p. 22. Still, the sexual stimulating influence of this
concealment of the breasts appears to be of a transient character, and
confined to certain circles of the hyperæsthetic and the homosexual.
[117] Heinrich Pudor, “Nackt-Kultur,” vol. ii.; “Clothing and Sex;
Limbs and Pelvis,” pp. 7, 8 (Berlin-Steglitz, 1906).
[118] _Cf._ the passages relating to this in my work, “Contributions,”
etc., vol. i., pp. 152, 153.
[119] Schopenhauer, “Parerga and Paralipomena,” vol. v., p. 176.
[120] G. Simmel, “Philosophy of Fashion, p. 24” (Berlin, 1906).
[121] “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol.
i., pp. 158-162.
[122] Ovid, in his “Ars Amandi,” long ago advised men who wished to
please women to avoid feminine adornments, and to leave those to the
homosexual.
[123] J. Ryan, “Prostitution in London,” p. 382 (London, 1839).
[124] In Alfred de Musset’s erotic story, “Gamiani,” he describes how
a woman danced on a mat of catskin, which gave rise in her to very
voluptuous sensations.
[125] “Confessions of My Life,” Memoirs of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, p.
38 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1906).
[126] Here we may allude to a remark in the diary of the de Goncourts
that there is nothing to compare to the delicate voluptuous charm of
old cashmere as a dress-fabric for women (E. and J. de Goncourt,
“Diary,” 1851-1895).
[127] H. Pudor, “Nackt-Kultur,” vol. ii., pp. 4-6.
[128] Ernst Kapp, “Elements of a Philosophy of Technique,” pp. 269,
270 (Brunswick, 1877).
[129] W. Sombart, “Domestic Economy and Fashion” (Wiesbaden, 1902).
[130] G. Simmel, “The Psychology of Fashion,” published in _Die Zeit_,
October 12, 1895; “The Philosophy of Fashion” (Berlin, 1906).
[131] W. Fred, “The Psychology of Fashion” (Berlin, 1905).
[132] Simmel rightly points out that many women would feel very
uncomfortable if they had to appear in their private sitting-room, or
before a single strange man, in a dress so _décolleté_ as that in
which they readily appear, in society and following the fashion,
before thirty or a hundred.
[133] What serious dangers to health prudery may entail has recently
been shown by Karl Ries in a valuable essay, “Prudery as the Cause of
Bodily Disorders” (published in the Reports of the German Society for
the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, 1906, vol. iv., pp. 113-121).
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT IN LOVE--THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF LOVE
“_Above all, we must avoid the widely diffused error of regarding love
as a simple and single feeling. The exact opposite is the truth--love
consists of an entire group, and, indeed, of an extremely complex,
incessantly varying, group of feelings._”--H. T. FINCK.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VIII
The individualization of love a product of recent times -- Finck’s
“romantic” love too narrow a conception -- Rôle of the idealization of
the senses -- First beginnings of individual love -- The Platonism of
the Greeks and of the Renascence -- Distinction between the plastic
and the romantic -- The love of the minnesinger -- The connexion
between the nature-sense and love -- The secret elements in love --
Love and gallantry -- The slavery of love -- The imaginative element
in love -- Predominance of tender feelings in the days of chivalry --
The development of the conventional in the relationships of love --
True and false gallantry -- Love as presented by Shakespeare --
Conventional life of pleasure in the days of Louis XIV. and XV. -- The
belief in woman (“Manon Lescaut”) -- Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s
“Werther” -- The nature-sense and sentimentality in love -- Difference
between “The New Héloïse” and “Werther” -- The first beginnings of
Weltschmerz -- Its physiological connexion with the vital feelings of
puberty -- The vital energy in the Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine --
The modern Weltschmerz -- Nietzsche’s connexion with this matter --
The love of the romantic period -- A mirroring of the past -- Dreams
and emotions -- Moonshine reverie -- Conflict with conventional
Philistine morality -- Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” -- Apotheosis of
individual love -- Individual love in relation to genius -- Rôle of
the emotional in romantic love -- Love mysticism -- The modern
renascence of romanticism -- The Dionysiac element in modern romantic
love -- Difference between romantic and classical love -- Theodor
Mundt on this subject -- Goethe’s “Tasso” -- Gretchen and Helena in
“Faust” -- Heine’s “Ardinghello,” a combination of romantic and
classical love -- The prototype of “young Germany” -- Discussion of
all modern love problems in young German literature -- Gutzkow’s
overwhelming importance -- Among writers of the nineteenth century,
Gutzkow’s knowledge of women is the most profound -- His
characteristic girls and women -- Brings for the first time the
problem of love upon the stage -- The problem of personality in
Gutzkow’s writings -- The young German poetry of the flesh --
Self-analysis and reflection in love -- French precursors --
Replacement of the medieval “sin” by self-reflection -- Gutzkow’s
“Wally” and “Seraphine” -- The love of the emancipated woman --
Kierkegaard’s and Grillparzer’s diaries -- “Free love” and “free
marriage” in modern literature -- Influence of the Second Empire --
The satanic and artistic elements in love -- Pessimism. -- Grisebach’s
“New Tanhäuser” -- The affirmation of life in this work -- A glance at
the present day.
CHAPTER VIII
The individualization of love is principally a product of recent times.
A talented author, H. T. Finck, has dealt with this fact in a
comprehensive work in two volumes.[134] This individual love, containing
the spiritual elements of all the successive epochs of civilization, he
denotes by the term “romantic” love, whereas we ourselves generally
understand by that term a special variety of the more comprehensive
individual love.
Every one who is interested in the numerous “overtones” of individual
love will find in Finck’s book a rich, though not very well arranged,
supply of material.
Independently of Finck, I shall endeavour in this chapter to describe
very briefly the most =important= elements and the developmental phases
of modern love.
First, however, let us consider the “=idealization of the senses=,” this
expression being used by Georg Hirth to denote the capacity of the
senses for self-government; for independent feelings of pleasure and
pain; for the development of peculiar imaginations, ideas, and talents;
and for the utilization at will of other sensory areas and foci of
impulse--indeed, of the entire individual--for the purposes of purely
sensual self-command. The lower senses, among which Hirth also reckons
the sexual impulse, can only be idealized in consequence of the
centripetal spontaneous activity of the higher senses.[135]
This artistic idealization of the senses and impulses also plays an
important part in the process of the individualization and
spiritualization of love. The sexual impulse becomes “the source of rich
joys and imaginative tragedy” by means of the “veil of imagination,” the
“heaping up of emotions,” and the “helmet of reason” (Hirth). The libido
sexualis also takes part in the idealization of all the human senses and
impulses. This is the indispensable preliminary and foundation of the
transformation of the sexual impulse into love.
The first important enrichment of the sexual inclinations by means of a
higher spiritual, individual element, which continues to-day to form a
constituent of modern love, is, I consider, the =Platonism= of Greek
antiquity and of the Italian renascence. It is a metaphysic of love
resting upon the individual, æsthetic contemplation of the beloved
personality.[136] For that is the true sense of “Platonic love.” It
ennobles physical love to the heavenly Eros, which is nothing else than
the idea of =beauty= in the highest sense of the word. Kuno Fischer, in
his first published writing, “Diotima” (Pforzheim, 1849), has erected a
beautiful monument in honour of this Platonic love. And did not the
immortal Darwin restate the thought of Plato, when he described beauty
as the testimony of love? In Platonism, at any rate, is to be found the
first intimation of a =higher= individual significance of love. In
Dante’s Beatrice, in Petrarch’s Platonic lyrics, this idea is
reillumined after the long night of the middle ages, to shine forth
still more clearly at the time of the renascence in the new Platonism
and in the cult of the beautiful, thus attaining a much more powerful
individual colouring than it had among the Greeks.
In the sphere of love, as elsewhere, the plastic genius of the Greeks
manifested itself in the form of peaceful æsthetic contemplation;
romantic individualism, on the other hand, was foreign to the Greek
mind. The latter is a modern sentiment. Jean Paul, in his “Vorschule der
Aesthetik” (Hamburg, 1804, vol. i., p. 139), has aptly characterized the
difference between antique and modern sensibility in the words: “The
plastic sun (of the ancients) illuminates universally, like waking; the
romantic moon (of the moderns) gleams fitfully, like dreams.”
These first traces of =romantic-individual= love may be detected already
in Christian medievalism, among the troubadours and the minnesinger. The
heartfelt song, “Thou art mine, I am thine,” gives the clearest
expression to the individual, purely personal nature of the
love-relations between man and woman, and discloses also the “romantic”
sentiment, as in “Thou art locked within my heart; lost is the key: now
must thou stay there for ever,” and discloses the intimate association
peculiar to romanticism between the nature-sense and the feeling of
love. It is the beloved who first fills for us the joy of summer; her
love is like the rose. An enormous range is thus opened to the
subjectivity of this sentiment. The romanticism of the =secret= element
in love is first perceived at this time, and finds perception in the
words:
“No fire, no coal, can burn so hot
As secret love, of which no one knows anything.”[137]
The age of chivalry now arrives, the epoch of =minne=[138] (=love=) and
=gallantry=. What a new and remarkable change in the spiritual
physiognomy of love! This also has left deep traces in the love of
modern civilized man; this period represents an important stage in the
developmental history of individual eroticism.
In the middle ages the honour of the knight and the love of woman, “the
most beautiful radiance coming down to us from the life of this
wonderful period,” as Wienberg says, belong together. Since that time
man’s honour has been associated in a peculiar manner with woman’s love.
Boldly but aptly the far-sighted Herder has described the knightly minne
(love) as a reflex of the Gothic. The same immeasurability of the
imagination, the same indescribable sentiment, constructed the huge
cathedral, and disclosed the unrivalled worth and beauty of the
beloved--created minne and its outward expression, gallantry.
In deifying supplication, the knightly spirit elevated the beautiful sex
to the heavens, =raised woman far above man=, and placed man far beneath
woman. The knight sacrificed himself for the mistress of his heart,
subjected himself to her judgment before the _cours d’amour_ (courts of
love), and in the lists. He became the =slave= of love and of the
beloved woman; he wore her fetters, he obeyed her slightest nod, he
endured chastisement and pain for her sake. But was this all reality?
Was it not rather pure imagination? There was, indeed, as Johannes
Scherr says, a worm at the heart of all this romanticism. The ideal
deification of woman did not affect a corresponding elevation in her
true social position; minne was but too often a mere “pose,” and was
often associated with unbridled sexual licence in relation to women of
lower degrees.
The domination of the imaginative element characterized the aberrations
of minne, debasing itself for the honour of the beloved. The masochistic
element concealed in all love was here for the first time elevated into
a system. We shall return to this subject in the chapter on “Masochism.”
And yet there is another side to the matter, and by the spirit of
chivalry there was aroused a nobler view of woman’s nature.
“The cause and the secret of this dominance (of women) is this, that
woman, with her complete, noble womanliness, entered wholly and fully
into life; that she controlled a kingdom which was hers by right, the
world of feeling and emotion, but controlled this kingdom and no more.
As mistress of feeling, as guardian of feeling, she brought poetry
into life; and into art she brought that lofty impetus, the
above-described fanciful ideal or feminine tendency, which, when
observed and perceived, reacts on the emotional mood of the
observer.”[139]
To this time also belongs the development of the =conventional= in the
amatory relations of the sexes, which came to be governed by definite
rules; since that time, for example, it has been regarded as improper
and scandalous for an unmarried woman to remain for any considerable
time alone with a man, a view which has persisted to the present day.
The social intercourse of the sexes was based upon “=gallantry=” or
“courtesy,” upon a refined behaviour towards “ladies,” regulated by the
laws of beauty, propriety, and social tact. In the sequel there
developed out of this that exaggerated modern gallantry, characterized
by little real delicacy of feeling, because it exhibits an undertone of
contempt which makes woman feel only too clearly that she is the
representative of a “weaker,” inferior sex, and is in no way the
possessor of any proper individual, personal value. Intelligent, eminent
women have always protested against this modern gallantry. Mantegazza,
in his “Physiology of Woman,” p. 442 (Jena, 1893), ably describes the
hypocrisy underlying this evil form of gallantry.
The first intimation of modern individual love is to be found in
Shakespeare, to whom love was in general, indeed, only a “superhuman”
passion, something lying beyond good and evil, which seized hold of man
against his will; but none the less he embodies in his work the romantic
ideal life of his time in feminine characters possessing the fullest
individuality--as, for example, Ophelia, Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona,
Virginia, Imogen, and Cordelia, whilst in Cleopatra he has described the
daimonic-bacchantic traits of the love of woman. In Juliet, who sees in
“true love acted simple modesty,” we observe the passionate emotion of
the primordial natural impulse, and the first awakening of woman as a
personality.
False gallantry, in association with conventional propriety, both of
which were developed to the fullest degree at the Courts of Louis XIV.
and Louis XV., subordinated love to rules, and was very well compatible
with the most frivolous and epicurean sensual life. And this occurred at
the expense of deeply-felt natural sentiment, the place of which was
taken by mere flirtation and coquetry. Here, also, the contempt of woman
clearly shows itself. Especially in regard to this period, the opinion
has been maintained that the modern Frenchman has never suspected,
understood, recognized the divine in woman’s nature. Still, the general
truth of this assertion is belied by the amatory life of the celebrated
heroines of the salons, such as Du Deffand, Lespinasse, Du Chatelet,
Quinault, and above all of the celebrated Ninon de l’Enclos[140]; and
the Abbé Prévost, in his immortal “Manon Lescaut,” proved that even in
that period the indestructible belief in woman persisted, at least as an
ideal.
It was, in fact, in France that the higher individual love underwent a
new spiritual enrichment; Rousseau’s “Julie” appeared on the horizon of
Love’s heaven. And in the background was disclosed the German “Werther,”
a book strangely influenced by that of Rousseau. The =nature-sense= on
the one hand, =sentimentality= on the other, are the new elements in the
love of the period of Héloïse and Werther.
In Rousseau’s “New Héloïse,” passionate love and a complete
self-surrender were described without the artificiality, and also
without the coquetry and wantonness, of which the literature of the time
was full. =It was love in a grander style= than people were then
accustomed to see. For this reason, the book constituted a turning-point
in literature. That love is an earnest thing, that it can become “la
grande affaire de notre vie,” has perhaps never been more deeply and
thoroughly depicted than in the character of “Julie.” In maintaining the
essential purity of the love relationship, when the voice of Nature is
really expressed therein, Rousseau speaks of the principal theme of his
own life.
“Is not true love,” asks Julie, “the chastest of all bonds?... Is not
love in itself the purest as well as the most magnificent impulse of
our nature? Does it not despise low and crawling souls, in order to
inspire only grand and strong souls? And does it not ennoble all
feeling, does it not double our being and elevate us above ourselves?
In contrast to social inequalities, the love relationship points to a
higher law, before which all are equal.”[141]
The love of Rousseau is, in fact, not social; it is not a product of
civilization, but it is a creation of nature; it is one with nature. The
nature-sense and the love-sense are here most intimately associated. And
he observes both, nature and love, =with feeling=. The _sensibilité de
l’âme_ finds in nature and in love objects of the most glorious delight,
of the sweetest pain, of the most burning tears.
“Out of the perceptions of mingled pain and ecstasy which the vision
of nature, of beauty, or of a fine action, induced in him, he wove the
web of sensibility with which he enveloped the creatures of his
imagination. Incessantly thrust back into himself, his heart bleeding
from wounded friendship or from unrequited love, self-tormentingly
dissecting his own wishes and illusions, his own faculties and
impossibilities, he became one of the first heralds of the
Weltschmerz, of the woes of Werther and René, to which Byron and Heine
had only to add self-mockery.”[142]
The sentimentality of the eighteenth century took its rise in England,
as I have explained at some length in my pseudonymous work, “The Sexual
Life in England,” vol. ii., pp. 95-107 (Berlin, 1903). In that country
it found its most characteristic expression in the romances of
Richardson and Sterne, and in landscape-gardening; but it was by
Rousseau and Goethe that for the first time it was really brought into
contact with the realities of life.
For the history of Julie, the history of Werther--this was the history
of all happily or unhappily loving youths and maidens of that day; each
maiden had her Saint Preux, each youth his Lotte.
The profound influence exercised by Rousseau, especially on women, has
been described by H. Buffenoir in a very careful study.[143] The
significance which “Werther” had for the emotional life of the time has
been explained with the most cultivated understanding by Erich Schmidt
in a well-known monograph.[144]
He shows that the nature-sense and sentimentality are much more deeply
felt in Goethe’s “Werther” than in Rousseau’s “Nouvelle Héloïse.”
Goethe himself says in “Wahrheit und Dichtung,” speaking of this
poetical, rational, intimate, and loving absorption into nature:
“I endeavoured to separate myself inwardly from everything foreign to
me, to regard the outward world lovingly, and to allow all beings,
from the human onwards, to influence me, each in its kind, as deeply
as was possible. Thus arose a wonderful alliance with the individual
objects of nature, and an inward harmony, a harmony with the whole; so
that every change, whether of places and of regions, or of days and
seasons, or of any possible kind, moved me to my inmost soul. The
painter’s view became associated with that of the poet; the beautiful
country landscape through which the friendly river was wandering,
increased my inclination to solitude, and favoured my quiet attitude
of contemplation extending itself in every direction.”
Werther’s feeling for nature is intimately related to his love passion.
The two harmonize, and each exercises a reciprocal influence upon the
other. Nature is to Werther a second beloved. The youth of nature, the
spring of nature, are also the youth and the spring of his love.
In the peculiar association of love with the nature-sense and
sentimentality, which is so characteristic of the time of Julie and
Werther, are to be found the first beginnings of the “=Weltschmerz=,”
with its erotically significant “ecstasy of sorrow.” The following words
in Goethe’s “Stella” appear to me to bind Weltschmerz and eroticism in
an extremely distinct relationship. Stella says of men:
“They make us at once happy and miserable! They fill our heart with
feelings of bliss! What new, unknown feelings and hopes fill our
souls, when their stormful passion invades our nerves! How often has
everything in me trembled and throbbed, =when, in uncontrollable
tears, he has washed away the sorrows of a world on my breast=! I
begged him, for God’s sake, to spare himself!--to spare me!--in
vain!--=into my inmost marrow he fanned the flames which were
devouring himself=. And thus the girl, from head to foot, became all
heart, all sentiment.”
Here we find clearly described the erotic element in mental pain; and we
observe the remarkable =increase= of passion by means of sorrow, tears,
and a profound perception of the evil of the world. This Weltschmerz
fans the flames of eroticism, increases love, and ultimately gives rise
to a peculiar sense of power; it is, indeed, most frequently in the
first bloom of love, in the years of puberty, that its relations with
sexuality are most distinctly manifested. The celebrated alienist Mendel
has described this almost physiological Weltschmerz of the age of
puberty as “hypo-melancholia.” An indefinite, passionate longing, which
seeks relief in tears, a by no means negligible inclination to
suicide--of which Werther is the classical exemplar--characterizes this
condition, which is connected with the complete revolutionizing of the
spiritual and emotional life by means of the sexual. The Weltschmerz of
youth is a latent sexual sense of power.
How the nature-sense and love combine to constitute a perception of
Weltschmerz has been most beautifully expressed by Byron and Heine in
their poetry. With quite exceptional clearness, Heine also describes it
in a letter to Friedrich Merckel (written at Nordeney on August 7,
1826), in which he described a nightly recurring scene with a beautiful
woman on the seashore:
“The sea no longer appeared so romantic as before--and yet on its
strand I had lived through the =sweetest= and most mystically dear
experience of my life which could ever inspire a poet. The moon seemed
to wish to show me that in this world happiness yet remained for me.
We did not speak--it was only a long, profound glance, the moonlight
supplied the music--as we walked to and fro, I took her hand in mine,
I felt the secret pressure--my soul trembled and glowed--=afterwards I
wept=.”
How different were these tears from the floods of tears in Miller’s
“Siegwart,” and in other similar productions of the Werther epoch,
which, with their weakly sentimentality, their emotionally happy
“sensibility,” had nothing whatever in common with the much more natural
Weltschmerz of Goethe and Heine--more natural because based on a
physiological foundation.
In modern love also, the Weltschmerz continues to live. The only
difference is that by means of the pessimistic philosophy it has to some
extent obtained a logical foundation. And Nietzsche has shown us the
=force= which lies hidden in this ecstasy of sorrow. Precisely on
account of the pains of the world, he affirms joyfully life and love.
Anyone who wishes to write the history of Weltschmerz, from a
psychological point of view so profoundly interesting, must not overlook
Nietzsche as a most important turning-point in that history.
The passion inspired by genius, the excess of vital energy in the “Sturm
und Drang” epoch of German literature, was admirably consistent with
that genuine, primitive Weltschmerz. Rousseau’s more indeterminate
sensibility had, on the other hand, a more powerful influence upon the
mode of feeling of =romanticism=, and this movement appears more closely
related to him than to Goethe.
=Romantic love= combines the elements of feeling of the previous epochs
in an increased subjectivism. Not nature alone, but history also,
folk-tales, legends, poetry, and the wonderful secrets of the primeval
age--all these are reflected in romantic love, and awaken singular
dreams and emotions. The “mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht” (“moon-illumined
magic night”) is much more than a mere feeling of nature; it is the
recognition of a connexion with the past and with its secret, sweet,
half-forgotten stories. Fonqué’s “Undine” is the classical type of all
this. Romantic love delights in this wonder-mood of the heart; reality
becomes, as it were, a dream. The obscure, the problematical--these
attract the romanticist. It is for this reason that he loves the night
and the night-mood of nature, rather than the clear daylight. =Moonshine
reverie= is a characteristic trait of romantic love. Everything flows
away into the indeterminate, the cloudy, the boundless. This love knows
no limitation or narrowing, no fetters. It is the sworn enemy of the
conventional, narrow-hearted, philistine morality, and of all
limitations of personality. In Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” this most
celebrated monument of romantic love, the campaign against philistinism,
as the greatest enemy of a free, noble amatory life, is most
energetically carried on. It is utterly untrue to describe “Lucinde” as
a romance in which there is a cult of suggestive nudity--as the poetry
of the flesh. It certainly preaches the free natural conception and
perception of the nude and the sexual, and is a glorious protest against
the artificial and hypocritical separation of body and soul in love;
but, on the other side, it unlocks in love the entire kingdom of the
emotional and spiritual life, and discloses its significance for the
individual man as a free personality.
More than Rousseau’s “Julie” and Goethe’s “Werther” is Friedrich
Schlegel’s “Lucinde” the apotheosis of individual love. Romantic love is
the mirror of personality; it is changeable, filled with the highest
spiritual content, and, above all, like personality, is capable of
development. In a masterly manner Schlegel has represented the intimate
connexion between true love and all vital energy. The relations of love
to genius have never before been so admirably described.
“Here,” says Karl Gutzkow, “there is no question of artificiality; we
have to do rather with the yearning of a youth who loves, who sees the
one and only beloved in many different forms, in the metamorphoses of
his own ego, which yearns to reconcile egoism and love.”
Schleiermacher, in his “Confidential Letters regarding Lucinde,” Gutzkow
in his preface to the new edition of this work, and recently H.
Meyer-Benfey,[145] have supplied us with conclusions regarding the true
significance of “Lucinde,” conclusions in harmony with our own view.
We must allude here to a new element in romantic love, which since that
time has played an important part in modern eroticism. It is _l’art pour
l’art_ of love, the revelling in pure moods and emotions as the means of
enjoyment. The emotional frequently grows luxuriantly and chokes the
natural feeling of love. Jean Paul, for example,
“regards eroticism purely as a method of cultivation. Human beings are
not to be actually loved, but are to be used to strike sparks from, by
which one’s own inward life may be illuminated.... He is the exemplar
of that artist-love which, vampire-like, drinks the souls of those who
become its prey. This love sees in the hearts offered to it only the
stuff for pictures; and in their warm blood it finds only an
intoxicating, stimulating drink.”[146]
This unqualified search for personal emotional experiences in love,
without regard to the love-partner, is especially represented in Jean
Paul’s “Titan.”
Wackenroder, in his “Phantasien über die Kunst” (“Imaginative Studies
concerning Art”), has already warned us of the dangers of this purely
erotic-emotional love. Karl Joel has recently described very vividly how
the romanticists ultimately reduced all vital relationships to the
emotions of love.[147] This attempt must lead finally to mysticism, the
poetical representative of which is Novalis.
It is very interesting to find that all the diverse elements of romantic
love may also be detected in the latter-day renascence of romanticism.
In his admirable book on “Nietzsche and Romanticism,” Karl Joel has
clearly shown the existence of this romantic element in modern love,
and, above all, has insisted upon the intimate connexion which the
philosophy of Nietzsche has with the joy in battle and the vital energy
of the romanticists. Both are apostles of the Dionysiac, not of the
Apollinian.[148]
This also is the difference by which “romantic” love is distinguished
from “=classical=” love--a difference and a distinction which I find
indicated for the first time in Theodor Mundt’s romance “Madelon oder
die Romantiker in Paris” (Leipzig, 1832).
The relevant passage (pp. 9-12) runs as follows:
“I am therefore of opinion that there can be a romantic and a
classical poetry; there are also romantic and classical love; and it
is only by means of this twofold nature that it is possible to
discover and understand this contrast in poetry....
“This wild and yet so sweet disturbance of the heart, in which love
subsists, this rejoicing and revelry of the aroused imagination which,
originated by the charm of the beloved, lead to an intoxication with
all the sensual dreams of a delightful, ethereal happiness; and as in
the flower-bud in which a burning ray of sunshine has suddenly
awakened the impulse to bloom, give rise to the desire and longing of
sensual impulsion--all these tears and sighs of the lovers, pains and
joys, this love-happiness and love-misery at the same time, this
star-flaming night-side of passion, to which after a vagrant drunken
frenzy, an ice-cold, unwelcome morning follows--all this, my friend,
is romantic love....
“And shall I now describe also =classical= love?... Believe me, there
are faces which at the very first glance seem to us so trustworthy and
so near akin, they draw us to them, as if we had spent years with them
in sympathy, asking for love and receiving love. By the sight of this
girl’s face there was induced in me so suddenly a sense of peace, such
as never before in my life had I experienced; and this gentle feeling
which drew me towards her, I may call true love and true happiness. In
her loving eyes there glowed no seductive fire, no repellent pride
like that of our romantic Madelon; in the simple beautiful German
girl, all is clear and true; out of her gentle features speaks her
gentle soul; and all for which I have longed in passionate, aberrant
hours of my life--a definite, unalloyed happiness in existence--seemed
to me, as I saw her for the very first time, to shine on me out of her
blue true eyes. My friend, is not that classical love?”
It is the Apollinian-Platonic element of modern love which Theodor Mundt
here describes as “classical” love, and certainly he wrongly places it
before romantic love, which is the expression of modern subjectivism and
individualism. Such classical love found in Goethe’s “Tasso” its most
complete representation. Here love was conceived as “possession, which
should give =peace=”; the beloved being influences after the manner of
an already understood picture. As Kuno Fischer remarks, in the world of
Goethe’s “Tasso” the Platonic Eros is the fashion. Love is here the
pure, quiet contemplation of beauty in and with the beloved.
Gretchen and Helena in “Faust” embody very clearly the contrast
between romantic and classical love. We find these contrasts united
in Wilhelm Heinse’s celebrated “Ardinghello,” a romance which even
to us at the present day seems so modern. In this work we find the
Dionysiac-Faustian impulse of the loving individual, and the
Apollinian-artistic contemplation of the loved one, described with equal
mastery.
In regard to love, Heinse was the prototype of “=Young Germany=.” And we
are young Germany.
For all the problems of amatory life which to-day occupy our minds have
already been made topics of public discussion by the authors of young
Germany. In young German love-philosophy, the “Knights of the Spirit” as
well as the “Knights of the Flesh,” come to their full rights. Only the
ignorant can regard the so-called “emancipation of the flesh,” the
apotheosis of lascivious sensuality, as the sole characteristic of the
efforts and battles of our own time. No, he who wishes to understand
modern love, in all its =spiritual= manifestations and relationship, let
him read the writings of young Germany, especially the works of Laube,
Gutzkow, Mundt; and also those of Heine, who has a more intimate
relationship to young Germany than he has to romanticism.
More especially Gutzkow,[149] who appears to me the greatest and most
comprehensive spirit of the young German literature--indeed, of the more
recent German literature in general--overlooks no single riddle and
problem of modern eroticism. Of all the writers of the nineteenth
century, he has the profoundest knowledge of women. How stimulating are
his girl characters; how true, notwithstanding their manifoldness!
Wally, riding proudly upon a white palfrey, outwardly an image of
beauty, but, like so many modern emancipated women, inwardly tormented
by the demon of doubt; Seraphine the dreamer, uncertain about herself
and her love, of whom the poet himself later admitted that her character
was based on reality; Idaline,[150] full of majesty, the ideal “bride of
the waves,” a typical figure of conventional high life, who yet in
sudden revolution against this conventionalism gives her whole being to
a chance love, a love of the moment,[151] which alienates her from her
betrothed and later husband, and drives her to death; then, again, all
the brilliant feminine characters in the great romances, “Die Ritter vom
Geiste,” Melanie, Helene, Selma, Pauline, Olga--all are characters
bearing the stamp of reality in their spiritual and emotional life, so
various and yet so true, and, above all, in their manifold,
differentiated relationships to men, genuinely =modern= women.
Gutzkow was also the first to bring upon the stage the modern woman and
the problems of modern love, long before the French dramatists and
before Ibsen.
As Karl Frenzel pointed out as early as 1864, Gutzkow made the stage the
battlefield of modern ideas. The inward contrasts of love, the
psychological problem of the heart--he first ventured to deal with these
in the dramatic form.
“We all of us felt the wounds which ‘the world’ inflicted on Werner;
we all wandered from the quiet violet, Agathe, to the brilliant rose,
Sidonie; as in Ottfried, so in ourselves, the love of the heart
battled with the love of the spirit. Who would admit himself to be so
miserably poor as never to have revelled, lived, and suffered, in the
play of these feelings? What wife has not, at least in imagination,
hesitated for a moment, like Ella Rose, between the lover and the
husband? Such figures as these bear in themselves the essence of
truth, and do not lose their lofty value because, perhaps, their
garments are not draped with sufficient harmony. They touch us,
because we recognize in them our own flesh and blood; and they fulfil,
in so far as the form of the society drama allows, Shakespeare’s canon
of dramatic art--they hold the mirror up to nature.”
In his tragedies, “Werner,” “Ottfried,” “Ella Rose,” Gutzkow presents in
a masterly manner the inner life of the time; we see in them the pulsing
wing-beats of the souls, which in pain, as it must be in these days,
soar upwards in the effort to attain beauty and freedom.[152]
Of all the young German authors, Gutzkow has best grasped the problem of
problems in love--the problem of =personality=. In the painful question
asked of Helene d’Azimont, in “Die Ritter vom Geiste”--
“Is it, then, thy innermost need,
To be everything to others, =nothing to thyself=?
Nothing to woman’s highest glory, love,
Nothing, Helene, to the pang of renunciation?”
--this inalienable right to the safeguarding and development of the
individual personality, notwithstanding all the self-sacrifice of
passionate love, is most forcibly maintained. This is, indeed, the true
nucleus of all higher individual love between man and woman.
Gutzkow has been accused, by those who had in mind only the purely
symbolic nudity scene in “Wally,” of preaching the “emancipation of the
flesh”; the same accusation has been levelled against other young German
authors, such as Lambe (in “Jungen Europa”), Theodor Mundt (in the
“Madonna”), Wienbarg (in the “Aesthetische Feldzüge”), Heine (in the
“Neue Gedichte”). The charge is unjust. It is only the =poetry= of the
flesh which they wish to bring to its rights. Notwithstanding his
enthusiastic hymn of praise to Casanova, Theodor Mundt declares in his
“Madonna” that the separation of flesh and spirit is the “inexpiable
suicide of the human consciousness.”
Much more important, the true characteristic of all the authors of young
Germany, appear to me the parts which =self-analysis= and =reflection=
here for the first time play in love, visible beneath the influence of
the offshoots of French romanticism, in which, however, we also
encounter the same phenomenon, as in George Sand’s “Lelia,” in Alfred de
Musset’s “Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle,” in Balzac’s “Femme de
Trente Ans”--in which last romance we find the following passage:
“Love assumes the colouring of every century. Now, in the year 1822,
it is doctrinaire. Instead of, as formerly, proving it by deeds, it is
argued, it is discussed, it is brought upon the tribune in a speech.”
=Just as in the middle ages the idea of “sin” was the disturbing
principle of love, so for the modern civilized man, since the days of
young Germany, this cold self-reflection, this critical analysis of
one’s peculiar passionate perceptions and feelings, is the modern
disturbing principle.= This is the worm which gnaws unceasingly at the
root of our love, and destroys its most beautiful blossoms. Gutzkow’s
“Wally the Doubter” and “Seraphine” are the classical literary documents
for this destructive ascendancy of pure thought in love. Very noteworthy
is it that in both these romances it is =woman= who destroys life and
love by reflection, whilst from earliest days this danger has always
lain in the path of man. It is the fate of the modern woman, of
individual personalities, which is here depicted; this fate makes its
appearance from the moment when woman comes to take a share in the
spiritual life of man. The cold dialectic of Seraphine, who, as Gutzkow
makes one of her lovers say, reverses the natural order of man and
woman, is a necessary product of the love of woman ripening in the
direction of a free personality--happily, however, it is only a
=transient= phenomenon. The fully developed personality will return to
the primitiveness of feeling, and will no longer endure within herself
any kind of division or laceration. The corresponding phenomena in man
have been described by Kierkegaard and Grillparzer in their diaries,
which are classical documents of “reflection-love.”
The love of the present day contains within itself, and nourishes itself
upon, all the above-described spiritual elements of the past. More
especially at the present day is the question of the so-called =free
love= or =free marriage=, disregardant of the legally binding forms of
civil and ecclesiastical marriage, representative of all the heartfelt
needs of highly civilized mankind, hitherto held back, oppressed, and
fettered by the materialism of the time, and still more by its
conventionalism still active beneath its covering of outlived forms. The
problem of free love was first formulated in “Lucinde,” but found in the
young German literature, especially in the writings of Laube, Mundt, and
Dingelstedt, its theoretical foundation; and in the Bohemian life of the
Second Empire free love obtained its practical realization, although the
purely =idyllic= character of this Bohemian life, and its limitation to
the circle of the _dolce far niente_ students and artists, in truth
makes it differ widely from the most intensely personal free love,
=taking its part fully in the struggle for life=, as it presents itself
in the ideal form to modern humanity.
The Second French Empire, whose significance for the spiritual
tendencies of our time was a very great one, allowed two elements of
love, to which we have earlier alluded, to appear with marked
predominance--elements still influential at the present day: the
=satanic-diabolic= element of eroticism, which found its most incisive
expression in the works of Barbey d’Aurevilly (strongly influenced by
the writings of de Sade), of Baudelaire, and more particularly of the
great Félicien Rops; and the purely artistic element, as it appears in
the works of the authors just mentioned, but more especially in the
writings of Théophile Gautier. This “Young France” (to use the name of a
novel of Gautier’s) has influenced the amatory life and the amatory
theory of the present day almost as strongly as young Germany.
At the same time, in the sixties of the nineteenth century
Schopenhauer’s philosophy was dominant in Germany, and his metaphysic
of love, which considered the individual not at all, but the species as
all in all--this =pessimistic= conception of all love found its poetic
expression in Edward Grisebach’s “New Tanhäuser,” published in 1869.
Here, also, it would be a grave error to condemn these erotic poems of
the day, on account of their glowing sensuality, as mere glorifications
of carnal lust. The poet himself was the new Tanhäuser. He wished, as he
often told me, to find expression in these poems for the life-denying as
well as for the life-affirming forces. He sang the pleasure and the
pain, the hopes and the disappointments of modern love. For him love is
indeed the rose =with= the thorns. For this reason the motto of the poem
is a saying of Meister Eckart: “The voluptuousness of the creature is
intermingled with bitterness;” and this is the theme of the poets,
though expressed in numerous variations: “There is no pleasure without
regret.”
But for this reason Grisebach--and in this respect he resembles
Nietzsche--wished none the less joyfully to affirm this life, filled as
it is with pain, and in all its activity bringing with it regrets. In
this sense he is no exclusive pessimist, but an apostle of =activity=,
like the men of young Germany, in whose footsteps, and especially in
those of Heine, he follows. The beautiful saying of Laube, in his
“Liebesbriefen” (Leipzig, 1835, p. 29), “He who has never been shaken to
the depths by any profound sorrow is also ignorant of all deep
rejoicing, he knows no single verse of that enthusiasm which woos the
denied heaven, he experiences no sort of religion, he is capable of no
sacrifice, of no greatness,” is suited also to the “new Tanhäuser,”
which so powerfully influenced German youth during the seventies and
eighties of the nineteenth century.
He who wishes to understand how the various love-problems are
represented in the literature of the present, strongly influenced as it
is by the problem-poems of Ibsen, by Zola’s naturalism, and by the
French symbolism[153] dependent on him, will find it described later in
a special chapter devoted to love in the literature of to-day.
In the following chapter we have to consider one additional influence
which is especially apparent in the love and eroticism of the present
day, and possesses great importance for the individualization of love.
This is the artistic element in modern love.
[134] H. T. Finck, “Romantic Love and Personal Beauty.”
[135] _Cf._ G. Hirth, “Ways to Freedom,” pp. 468-472 (Munich, 1903).
[136] G. Saint-Yves (“La Littérature Amoureuse,” Paris, 1887, p. 25)
also sees in the æsthetic contemplation of the beloved person the
fundamental root of individual love. It has gradually developed out of
the ordinary æsthetic contemplation of nature. An interesting proof of
this connexion is the Song of Solomon, in which the æsthetic stimuli
of the beloved one are compared with every possible animate and
inanimate natural object.
[137] _Cf._ regarding the numerous variations of this ancient couplet,
the interesting account given by Arthur Kopp, “Old Proverbs and
Popular Rhymes for Loving Hearts,” published in the _Zeitschrift des
Vereins für Volkskunde_, Heft i., pp. 8, 9 (Berlin, 1902).
[138] _Minne_ is an old German word (now obsolete) for _love_, “the
love of fair women.” The _minnesinger_ were love-singers who sang
their own compositions to the accompaniment of the music of harp or
viol--in fact, they were lyric poets. The most flourishing years of
this art were from about 1170 to 1250; thus the minnesinger were
contemporary with and closely akin to the Provençal troubadours. But
the German development was essentially native, and the minnesinger’s
treatment of love was characterized by a more ideal note than was
usually attained by the troubadours. A good, though brief, account
(with a list of authorities) is given of the minnesinger in
“Chambers’s Encyclopædia.”--TRANSLATOR.
[139] Jacob Falke, “The Society of Knighthood in the Epoch of the Cult
of Women,” p. 49.
[140] In her letters (“Letters of Ninon de l’Enclos,” with ten
etchings by Karl Walser, Berlin, 1906), the deep spiritual
relationships of love found a classical representation.
[141] _Cf._ Harald Höffding, “Rousseau and his Philosophy,” pp. 86, 89
(Stuttgart, 1897).
[142] Emil Du Bois-Reymond, “Frederick II. and Jean Jacques Rousseau.”
[143] H. Buffenoir, “Jean Jacques Rousseau and Women” (Paris, 1891).
[144] Erich Schmidt, “Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe” (Jena, 1875).
[145] H. Meyer-Benfey, “Lucinde,” published in
_Mutterschutz--Zeitschrift zur Reform der sexuellen Ethik_, 1906, No.
5, pp. 173-192. Edited by Dr. Helene Stöcker.
[146] Felix Poppenberg, “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Liebe und
Ehestand,” in “Bibelots,” p. 214 (Leipzig, 1904).
[147] Carl Joel, “Nietzsche und die Romantik,” pp. 13-16 (Jena and
Leipzig, 1905).
[148] _Cf._ also Helene Stöcker, “Nietzsche und die Romantik,” in
_Kölnische Zeitung_, No. 1127, October 29, 1905.
[149] At the present time but few of my living contemporaries share
this opinion of Gutzkow, which I myself base upon the careful reading
of all his works. I may quote, however, with satisfaction the prophecy
of the deceased dramatist Theodor Wehl. He writes of Gutzkow: “As a
literary phenomenon he will grow with time. After long, long years,
out of the literature of our time two characteristic heads will
emerge--one laughing, and one glancing round him earnestly and
sorrowfully: the head of Heinrich Heine, and the head of Karl Gutzkow”
(F. Wehl, “Zeit und Menschen,” “Tagebuch Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren
von 1863 bis 1884,” vol. i., p. 297 (Altona, 1889)).
[150] Karl Gutzkow, “Reminiscences of my Life,” p. 18 (Berlin, 1875).
[151] “The time of love is not age, it is not youth: the time of love
is the moment,” says Beate, one of Gutzkow’s characters, at the end of
the tragedy “Ein Weisser Blatt.”
[152] K. Frenzel, “Karl Gutzkow,” published in “Büsten und Bilder,”
pp. 177 and 178 (Hanover, 1864).
[153] Heinrich Stümcke refers to this connexion between naturalism and
symbolism in a very thoughtful essay (“Zwischen den Garben,” p. 156;
Leipzig, 1899).
CHAPTER IX
THE ARTISTIC ELEMENT IN MODERN LOVE
“_I am of opinion that love bears within itself, more than any other
moral relationship, the_ sense of the beautiful, _and when anywhere a
heavy heart begins to move its wings and to strive towards the ideal, it
is in the time when it loves. Without doubt an æsthetic perception
always accompanies the eye of the lover, and in a greater degree than it
ever accompanies the dispassionate eye._”--KUNO FISCHER.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER IX
Ennoblement and reform of the amatory life as a demand of our time --
The battle with the elemental forces of the sexual impulse and of
asceticism -- The artistic element in modern love -- Erotic
rhythmotropism -- Sexuality and æsthetics -- The awakening of æsthetic
sensibility at the time of puberty -- Importance of sensuality to
life and to the poietic impulse -- The example of Annette von
Droste-Hülshoff -- Sensuality of great poets and artists -- Views of
recent æsthetics regarding the relations between sexual love and
artistic perception -- Rôle of the erotic need for illusion in social
life -- Emerson, Konrad Lange, and William Scherer, on the æsthetic
eroticism of social life -- The liberating and vitalizing elements
therein -- Significance of modern individual beauty -- Misnamed
“nervous” beauty -- The English “Pre-Raphaelites” and the ideal of
beauty -- Masculine beauty -- Why women love ugly men -- Caroline
Schlegel, Goethe, Eduard von Hartmann, and Swedenborg, on this subject
-- The attractive force of the poietic and the spiritual in man.
CHAPTER IX
At the present day, notwithstanding all the adverse opinions and
jeremiads of infatuated apostles of morality, the epoch of our amatory
life through which we are passing is by no means one of decadence. On
the contrary, we are now actually engaged in its re-constitution,
reform, and ennoblement. All the tendencies of the time proceed towards
such a radical perfectionment of love, towards its free, individual
configuration, not by the unchaining of sensuality, but by its
idealization; and when we have once attained a natural view of
sensuality, it loses all its terrors. We fight at first against the
elemental force of the wild impulse, and against the elemental force of
life-denying asceticism. In this struggle the artistic element in modern
love plays a notable part. By this we do not signify “sugary”
æstheticism, nor yet the completely non-sensual Platonic Eros, but that
æsthetic tendency in human love, bringing about an intimate association
of the bodily and spiritual, which W. Bölsche denotes by the term
“rhythmotropism.” It is “an impulsive, forced reaction of the higher
animal brain to rhythmical beauty,” to which art also owes its origin.
This æsthetic natural impulse is of great importance to love, as Darwin
recognized many years ago. It was he who expressed the great thought
that beauty is love become perceptible.
The sexual is in no way hostile to æsthetic contemplation, as the
unhappy Weininger quite erroneously maintained in the confused chapter
“Erotism and Æsthetics” of his book. He curtly denies that sexuality has
any æsthetic value whatever, yet Plato himself deduced from the physical
Eros the highest æsthetic contemplation of a spiritual nature. In the
world of the senses he discovered the reflection of the Divine.
The well-known fact that with the awakening of the sexual life,
spiritual creative activity also awakens, and an artistic tendency
becomes kinetic, that at the time of puberty every youth is a poet,
confirms the suggested existence of this intimate relationship between
sexual and æsthetic perception.
“There appears to me to be no doubt,” says J. Volkelt in his
“Æsthetics” (vol. i., p. 523; Munich, 1905), “that in the youth or the
maiden the awakening of sexuality induces an individualization and
invigoration of artistic perception. Hand in hand with the first love
of youth, somewhere about the sixteenth or seventeenth year, the
sense of grace and beauty in the landscape, the appreciation of the
charm of poetry, painting, and music, are strengthened and refined to
such a degree, that in comparison with what is now felt, all earlier
experiences and enjoyments seem to be as nothing.”
Sensuality first gives life colour, brings out the nuances and the finer
tones of feeling, without which life would be tinted a uniform grey,
would be a monotonous waste, and lacking which the joy of existence and
creative activity would be annihilated, or, at least, would be reduced
to a minimum. Even the most ideal love must be nourished upon
sensuality, if it is to remain poietic and full of vitality. Of this
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff is an interesting example--a woman and poet
in whom in other respects sexual influences can have played only a very
modest part. But she lost on the instant all poetic capacity, all
artistic creative power, when her lover, Lewin Schücking, became engaged
to Louise von Gall. The mere idea of the =possibility= of physical
possession was to her a spur to poetic activity without its being
necessary for this possibility to be translated into reality. But when
the possibility was for ever removed, her muse at once became dumb.
An absolutely convincing proof of the intimate connexion between
sexuality and æsthetics is the fact that great artists and poets have,
in the majority of cases, possessed thoroughly sensual natures. The
previously described relationship between the sexual impulse and the
poietic impulse, comprised in the “function impulse” of Santlus, is
especially manifest in the case of artists. In these artistic natures
the perceptive æsthetic power is associated with an ardent sensuality,
which derives its most powerful impulse directly from the beautiful. We
agree with von Krafft-Ebing when he denies the possibility of genius,
art, and poetry except upon a sexual foundation. We do not believe in a
so-called purely æsthetic contemplation and perception without any
sexual admixture. Even Volkelt, who is inclined to sever art and the
sexual impulse each from the other, is unable to deny the genetic
connexion between the two. Oskar Bie makes the interesting observation
that “in æsthetic relationships the cord of the will does not become
thinner to the breaking point, but stronger, until it becomes blind
passion” (_Neue Deutsche Rundschau_, 1894, p. 479). Nietzsche and Guyau
have also declared themselves opposed to Schopenhauer’s theory regarding
the absence of a will-element in æsthetic perception. Nietzsche speaks
even of an “æsthetic of the sexual impulse.” Guyau bases his æsthetic
upon the love of life and upon sexual love (“Les Problèmes de
l’Esthétique Contemporaine,” Paris, 1897). Magnus Hirschfeld alludes in
his “Wesen der Liebe” (“The Nature of Love”), p. 48, to a work by G.
Santayana entitled “The Sense of Beauty,” in which the theory is
propounded that “for human beings the whole of nature is an object of
sexual perception, and it is chiefly in this way that the beauty of
nature is to be explained.” Finally, Gustav Naumann (“Sex and Art:
Prolegomena to Physiological Æsthetics,” Leipzig, 1899) says most
convincingly that the sexual is the =root= of all art, of all æsthetics.
But whatever view may be held regarding the relationship between
sexuality and art, it is a quite incontestable fact that our latter-day
life is characterized by a need “for erotic illusion” (to use the
expression of Konrad Lange), that the slighter degree of eroticism, as
it exhibits itself in social intercourse between the two sexes, is
principally of an artistic nature. I do not speak here merely of the
dance as the artistic transfiguration of the erotic phenomena of
courtship, or of dress and fashion and the whole _milieu_ as æsthetic
means of expression of the personality (as they were described in
earlier pages of this work), but I refer above all to =social
intercourse= as a whole, which to-day represents a free and facile
æsthetic element, in which modern love receives its most manifold
suggestions.
Emerson, in his essay on Love, has very beautifully described the
importance to our civilized life of these slight, imponderable
influences of an erotic-æsthetic nature; and Konrad Lange, in his “Wesen
der Kunst” (vol. ii., p. 23; Berlin, 1901), refers the pleasure of
social intercourse ultimately to the sexual impulse, even though therein
sensuality is mitigated by illusion and is elevated to a purer sphere.
Erotic enjoyment is modified into a “love-play,” sensuality is refined,
spiritualized, dematerialized. It is precisely this æsthetic eroticism
which at the present day becomes of increasing importance in the
emotional life of civilized humanity, in the life of those engaged in
the hard struggle for existence, to whom time and leisure are lacking
for the “great” love-passion. For such as these, these gentler
suggestions constitute the true charm of life, into the dreary monotony
of which they bring light and colour.
In his excellent “Remarks on Goethe’s Stella,” Wilhelm Scherer has
assigned its true value to this erotic æstheticism and æsthetic
eroticism of society and social intercourse. He speaks of a charm of
personal presence, which brings out all that is best in two human
beings. He speaks of an enthusiastic and complete surrender of the
spirit and the emotions, in which the souls seem to enter into
inseparable union--and yet only seem. For in reality this surrender
occurs for weeks, for days, for minutes, for moments, and to various
persons. These frequent, individual, purely spiritual contacts between
the two sexes have completely the character of æsthetic joy; they give
rise to a perception of =freedom=, of liberation from the power of the
senses. Who does not know the happy freedom of spirit which is aroused
by the glance of a beautiful girl, by the smile of a sympathetic face?
This æsthetic incitation by means of eroticism has, moreover, in it
something =vitalizing=, something which spurs on the will, because its
cause--eroticism itself--contains within it such an element of action
and vital energy. The modern love ideals of the sexes have a peculiar
impulsive force. Classical beauty taken by itself, and without the
individual, personal characteristic element, is valueless. And woman
herself also is no longer the patient Gretchen of yore. She must have
temperament, character, passion--she must be a personality.
More than by the beautiful are we allured by the characteristic, by the
developed personality, by the passionate, the subjective in woman--by
that which, in pursuance of a false connotation, is often now termed
“nervous” beauty. The pale Josepha of the days of Heine’s boyhood is an
example of this type.
In her “Buch der Frauen” (“Book of Women”) (Paris and Leipzig, 1895),
Laura Marholm has described in the figures of Marie Bashkirtzeff, Anna
Charlotte Loeffler, Eleonore Duse, George Egerton, Amalie Skram, and
Sonja Kowalewska, well-marked and characteristic types of modern woman
as a personality.
This attraction to the characteristic, to the personal, in the aspect of
woman conflicts to some extent with the preference arising under the
influence of the English “Pre-Raphaelites,” of Burne-Jones and Rossetti,
for straight lines, for slender, ethereal, unduly spiritual,
supersensual forms, which no longer express the free personality of the
mature, complete woman, but approximate rather to the infantile, asexual
habitus. In this case, however, we have to do with a mere transient
fashion, which cannot countervail the above characterized general
tendency towards the personal.
This personal, individual has in man even greater importance than actual
beauty. It is a distinctive fact that, throughout the history of
civilization, men have always had a clearer understanding of “masculine
beauty” than women. Women have preferred power, intelligence, energy of
will, and marked individuality. Caroline Schlegel, in a letter to Luise
Gotter, writes of Mirabeau: “Hideous he may have been--he says so
himself frequently in his letters--but Sophie loved him, =for what women
love in men is certainly not beauty=” (“Letters of Caroline Schlegel,”
vol. i., p. 93; edited by G. Waitz, Leipzig, 1871). This conception also
elucidates the words in the second part of Goethe’s “Faust”:
“Women, accustomed to man’s love,
Fastidious are they not,
But cognoscenti;
And equally with golden-haired swains
Shall we see black-bristly fauns,
As opportunity may serve,
Over their rounded limbs
Attain rights of possession.”
It explains, too, the opinion of Eduard von Hartmann (“Philosophie des
Unbewussten”--“Philosophy of the Unconscious,” p. 205; Berlin, 1874),
that the most powerful passions are not aroused by the most beautiful,
but, on the contrary, by the ugliest, individuals. The influence of
powerfully developed individuality is, in fact, notably greater than
that of physical beauty. The mystic Swedenborg long ago declared that in
man woman desired truth, spiritual significance, not beauty alone.[154]
Herein we see a suggestion of the fact that true beauty is ultimately
spiritual beauty, the expression of the force of will, of poietic
activity, and of free personality.
[154] “It is by no means rare,” says Lermontoff in “Ein Held unserer
Zeit” (“A Hero of our own Time”), “for women to love such men to
distraction, and to be unwilling to exchange their hideousness for the
beauty of an Endymion.”
CHAPTER X
THE SOCIAL FORMS OF THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP--MARRIAGE
“_The individualistic tendency, in the most decisive and characteristic
form peculiar to our system of civilization, is most happily represented
in the monogamic form of marriage; for here, on the woman’s side also,
the development of individuality is gently and imperceptibly
accomplished._”--LUDWIG STEIN.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER X
The disputed question of sexual promiscuity -- The fact of its
existence -- Westermarck’s defective criticism of the doctrine of
promiscuity -- Persistence of promiscuity until the present day --
Ethnological proofs of this fact -- The researches of Friedrich S.
Krauss -- Marriage an artificial product -- Group-marriage -- A form
of limited promiscuity -- Diffusion of group-marriage -- Connexion of
polygamy and group-marriage -- The loan and the exchange of wives --
Matriarchy and patriarchy -- Progress from lower to higher social
forms of sexual relationship -- Transition from matriarchy to
patriarchy -- Formation of the patriarchal family -- Marriage by
capture and marriage by purchase -- The bright side of patriarchy --
Patriarchal forms of marriage -- Polygamy and the patriarchal family
-- Levitical marriage -- Monogamic marriage -- Coexistence with
monogamic marriage of a facultative polygamy -- The conventional lie
of marriage -- Hegel’s definition of marriage -- Criticism of this
definition -- Combination of the matriarchal and the patriarchal forms
of the sexual relationship -- Revival of the idea of matriarchy --
Transformation of the ancient patriarchal form of marriage to freer
forms -- Introduction of civil marriage and divorce -- Chief grounds
for marriage reform -- Duplex sexual morality -- Its origin --
Criticism thereof -- Relationship between prostitution and the
conventional coercive marriage -- Necessity of, and justification for,
freer forms of marriage -- Lecky’s views on this subject -- Roman
concubinage, and the morganatic marriage -- Significance of the
sacramental character of marriage -- Sanction by the State of a freer
form of marriage (civil marriage, mixed marriage, divorce) --
Psychology of love in the marriage problem -- Inconstancy of human
love -- The eternity lie -- Transient character of youthful love --
Gutzkow, Kierkegaard, and Rétif de la Bretonne on this subject -- The
poetical character of the first stages of every love -- The sexual
need for variety as an anthropologico-biological phenomenon -- This
simply an explanatory principle, not an ideal -- Rarity of the “only”
love -- The psychologist Stiedenroth on this subject -- The
possibility of love felt simultaneously for several persons --
Explanation of this fact -- Examples -- Difficulty of complete harmony
between man and wife -- The ideal of the “one” love -- Schleiermacher
on the necessity for experiments in love -- The examples of Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient and Caroline Schelling -- The need for love
unaffected by disillusion -- Dangers of habituation -- The double rôle
of habituation in marriage -- Danger of intimate life in common -- The
common bedroom -- Unfavourable conditions with regard to the relative
ages of husband and wife -- Increase in premature marriages --
Connexion of this phenomenon with the premature awakening of sexuality
-- Too great a difference in age between husband and wife --
Consequent physiological disharmony -- Postponement of marriage in
consequence of civilization -- Diminution of marriages in various
European countries -- Economical factors -- Mercenary marriage a
vestige of earlier times -- Disappearance of the economic background
to marriage with the further advance of civilization -- Marriage and
the price of corn -- Part played by mercenary marriage in various
classes -- Importance of economic factors in marriage -- Summary of
the causes of the diminution of the “marriage impulse” -- “Conjugal
rights” -- Justification and misuse of these -- Boredom in married
life -- Marriage and disease -- Opinion of an alienist on the
calamities of marriage -- Statements of a wife -- Schiller and
Byron upon love and marriage -- A dictum of Socrates -- Growing
disinclination to the coercive character of the marriage bond -- Great
increase in the number of divorces in recent years -- § 1568 of the
Civil Code -- Legal possibility of several successive divorces on the
part of the same individual -- A kind of civil sanction of free love
-- Dependence of the consciousness of duty upon freedom -- Grounds for
divorce -- Marriage reform in France -- Composition and programme of
the French committee for marriage reform -- The idea of sexual
responsibility.
Appendix: Report of one hundred typical marriages, and twelve
characteristic more detailed pictures of married life, after
Gross-Hoffinger.
CHAPTER X
Since the subject first engaged my close attention, it has always seemed
to me incomprehensible that a dispute should ever have arisen among
anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians of civilization as to
whether, among the primitive forms of the sexual relationship, marriage
was the first, or whether it was preceded by a state of sexual
promiscuity.
Whoever knows the nature of the sexual impulse, whoever has arrived at a
clear understanding regarding the course of human evolution, and,
finally, whoever has studied the conditions that even now prevail, alike
among primitive peoples and among modern civilized races, in the matter
of sexual relations, can have no doubt whatever that =in the beginnings
of human development a state of sexual promiscuity did actually
prevail=.[155]
“The ideal goal,” says Heinrich Schurtz, “towards which, more or less
consciously, civilized humanity is undoubtedly advancing,
involuntarily also becomes the standard by which the past is judged,
and sentiment and mood take the place of a single-minded endeavour to
arrive at truth.”
Thus it has happened that the ideal of permanent marriage between a
single man and a single woman, which, in fact, as we shall proceed to
explain, must persist as =an ideal of civilization never to be lost=,
has been employed as a standard for the judgment of bygone conditions.
This error is one into which Westermarck more especially has fallen in
his “History of Human Marriage” (Jena, 1893)--a work of considerable
value from its richness in ethnological detail. Hence Westermarck’s
criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity, based as it is upon false
premises, “has ultimately remained barren,” as Heinrich Schurtz has
proved.[156] Westermarck, for example, simply ignores the fact that
within the group-marriage of sexual associates, within the totem,
promiscuity undoubtedly existed.
Since, as we shall see, among the tribes and races living in social
unions, sexual promiscuity can be proved to have existed side by side
with, and commonly in advance of, the development of marriage, it is
indubitable that primitive man, in whom the sexual impulse was still
purely instinctive, had simply no knowledge of “marriage” in the modern
sense of the term. Otherwise, indeed, the “mother-right” would not have
been necessary, for matriarchy was the typical expression of the
uncertainty of paternity which resulted from sexual promiscuity.
The great freedom of sexual intercourse in primitive times is denoted by
various investigators by many different terms; sometimes it is called
“promiscuity,” sometimes “free-love,” sometimes “group-marriage,”
“polyandry,” “polygamy,” “religious and sexual prostitution,” etc. The
classical works of Bachofen, Bastian, Giraud-Teulon, von Hellwald,
Kohler, Friedrich S. Krauss, Lubbock, MacLennan, Morgan, Friedrich
Müller, Post, H. Schurtz, Wilcken, and others, have proved beyond
question the existence of this primordial hetairism.
When modern critics at length find it convenient to admit the
overwhelming force of the enormous mass of evidence that has been
collected concerning this subject, they still exhibit a great dislike to
the conception and the term sexual “promiscuity,” whereby is understood
the boundless and indiscriminate intermingling of the sexes. They admit
the possibility of group-marriage, although this is merely a socially
limited form of promiscuity; they admit even the existence of polyandry
and polygamy, and of indiscriminate religious prostitution; but they
refuse to believe in the existence of genuine promiscuity.
And yet, if they only chose to make use of their eyes, they could
observe sexual promiscuity at the present day among the modern civilized
nations. In certain strata and classes of the population, such an
indiscriminate and unregulated sexual intercourse, in no way leading to
the formation of enduring relationships, can be observed to-day. Ask a
young man, even of the better classes, with how many women he has had
connexion during a single year--not one of these need have been a
prostitute--and, if he speaks the truth, you will be astounded at the
number of the “objects of lust”! This last expression is suitable
enough, because in most cases there is no individual relationship
between such casual partners. Ask certain girls also--maidservants, for
example, or girls engaged in the manufacture of ready-made clothing--and
you will obtain analogous information regarding the number of their
annual lovers. Phillip Frey (“Der Kampf der Geschlechter”--“The Battle
of the Sexes,” p. 51; Vienna, 1904) bases on similar grounds the
assumption of a primitive sexual promiscuity; he refers especially to
the condition of the seaports:
“Ports in which ocean-going vessels come to harbour are familiar with
the sexual impulse in its most completely animal form, and devoid of
every refinement and concealment. We find ourselves transported into
the depths of an urgent primitiveness and savagery, which gives the
lie to the advance in civilization, and this will enable us to form a
clearer idea of the bestial indifference in sexual matters that must
have obtained amongst the herds of primitive man. Intercourse between
man and woman promoted by the lust of the moment, dependent solely
upon reciprocal animal desire, the various male and female individuals
of the human herd differing too little each from the other to make it
worth while to strive for permanent rights of possession, the absence
of any ownership of land amongst those wandering to and fro through
the primeval forest, the common ownership of children by the herd or
tribe--that such was the primitive, ape-like condition of the human
race, one actually inferior to that of many other mammals, is a belief
amply justified by the polygamous and polyandrous instincts of _homo
sapiens_, recurring again and again in all the stages of
civilization.”
Fortunately, ethnology furnishes us with incontrovertible proofs of
genuine promiscuity.
Of the Nasomoni in Africa, Herodotus (iv. 172) reports:
“When a Nasomonian man takes his first wife, it is the custom that on
the =first= night the bride should be visited by each of the guests in
turn, and each one, as he leaves, gives her a present which he had
brought with him to the house.”
Diodorus Siculus makes a similar report regarding the inhabitants of the
Balearic Islands (v. 18). Have we not here an echo of primeval custom,
of sexual promiscuity prior to marriage?
Very interesting are the accounts recently given by Melnikow regarding
the free sexual relationships customary among the Siberian Buryats.
There before marriage unregulated sexual intercourse between men and
girls prevails. This is especially to be observed at festival seasons.
Such festivals occur usually late in the evening, and can rightly be
called “nights of love.” Near the villages bonfires are lighted, round
which the men and women dance monotonous dances termed “nadan.” From
time to time pairs separate from the thousands of dancers, and disappear
into the darkness; soon they return and resume their place in the dance,
to disappear again by and by into the obscurity; but they are not the
same couples that disappear each time, =for they continually change
partners=.[157]
Is this not promiscuity? In a mitigated form we can see the same among
ourselves. A case recently came under my notice in which two friends
made an exchange of their “intimates”; moreover, the “intimacy” in each
case had been of very brief duration. This, indeed, happened in the full
light of day; while among the Buryats the darkness concealed a
completely indiscriminate promiscuity.
Marco Polo reports as a remarkable custom of the inhabitants of Thibet,
that there a man would in no circumstances marry a girl who was a
virgin, for they say a wife is worth nothing if she has not had
intercourse with men. Girls were offered to the traveller, and he was
expected to reward the courtesy with a ring or some other trifle, which
the girl, when she wished to marry, would show as one of her
“love-tokens.” =The more such tokens she possessed, the more she was in
request as a wife.=[158]
From New Holland we receive similar reports.
Of especial importance, as proving the existence of sexual promiscuity,
are the investigations of the student of folk-lore, Friedrich S. Krauss,
regarding the sexual life of the Southern Slavs. Krauss has, indeed,
rendered most valuable aids to the scientific study and anthropological
foundation of the human sexual life; a place of honour among the
founders of “anthropologia sexualis” must be given to Krauss, and also
to Bastian, Post, Kohler, Mantegazza, and Ploss-Bartels.
Dr. Krauss first published his pioneer investigations in “Kryptadia,”
vols. vi. and vii. (Paris, 1899 and 1901); but later he founded an
annual for the record of researches into the folk-lore and ethnology of
the sexual life, entitled “Anthropophyteia: Jahrbuch für folkloristische
Erhebungen und Forschungen zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der
geschlechtlichen Moral”--“Anthropophyteia: Annual for Folk-lorist
Investigations and Researches in the History of the Evolution of Sexual
Morality.” This has been published now for four years, 1904-1907, Krauss
having the co-operation of anthropologists, ethnologists, folk-lorists,
and medical men, such as Thomas Achelis, Iwan Bloch, Franz Boas, Albert
Eulenburg, Anton Herrmann, Bernhard Obst, Giuseppe Pitré, Isak
Robinsohn, and Karl von dem Steinen. It constitutes a most important
addition to the hitherto very scanty works for the scientific study of
sexual problems. Later, I shall have occasion to refer again to this
important undertaking. Krauss, who, as he himself says, is insensitive
to the romantic appeal of folk-lore, but has an open mind for the
realities and possibilities of human history, has proved in this
publication the unquestionable existence of sexual promiscuity among the
Southern Slavs. As he himself declares, such an abundance of trustworthy
proofs, obtained by a professional folk-lorist, regarding the existence
of a form of sexual promiscuity within the narrow sphere of a single
geographical province of research, has not hitherto been available.
It is, moreover, perfectly clear that the human need for sexual variety,
which is an established anthropological phenomenon,[159] must in
primitive times have been much stronger and more unbridled, in
proportion as the whole of life had not hitherto risen above the needs
of purely physical requirements. Since even in our own time, in a state
of the most advanced civilization, after the development of a sexual
morality penetrating and influencing our entire social life, this
natural need for variety continues to manifest itself in almost
undiminished strength, we can hardly regard it as necessary to prove
that in primitive conditions sexual promiscuity was a more original,
and, indeed, a more =natural=, state than marriage.
For from the purely =anthropological= standpoint--only from this
standpoint, since with questions of morality, society, and civilization
we are not now concerned--permanent marriage appears a thoroughly
=artificial= institution, which even to-day fails to do justice to the
human need for sexual variety, since, indeed, vast numbers of men live
_de jure_ monogamously, but _de facto_ polygamously--a fact pointed out
by Schopenhauer. This criticism is, of course, based upon purely
physical sensual considerations; it does not touch marriage as an ideal
of civilization possessing a =spiritual and moral= content.
The other social forms of sexual intercourse, forms whose existence is
admitted even by the critics of promiscuity, are characterized by
frequent =changes= in sexual relationships. This is especially true of
the oldest form of marriage, the so-called “=group-marriage=.”[160]
Group-marriage is not a union in marriage of isolated individuals, but
such a union between two =tribal groups=, composed respectively of male
and female individuals, a union between the so-called =totems=.
The social instinct, the impulse towards companionship, upon which even
to-day the State and the family depend, united mankind at one time into
tribes of a peculiar kind, which felt themselves to constitute single
individuals, and believed themselves to be inspired by an animal spirit,
their protective spirit. Their union was known as the totem.
Group-marriage is =the marriage of one totem with another=--that is, the
men of one totem-group marry the women of another, and _vice versa_. But
=no individual man has any particular wife=. On the contrary, if, for
example, twenty men of the first totem espoused twenty women of the
second totem, then each one of the twenty men had an equivalent share of
each one of the twenty women, and _vice versa_. This was indeed an
advance over unrestricted sexual promiscuity, limited by no social
forms; but it afforded no possibility of any individual relationships of
love, it remained promiscuity within narrow bounds. Group-marriages
exist at the present day in Australia in a well-developed form among
certain tribes; whilst, as an occasional custom, in the form of an
exchange of wives among friends, guests, and relatives, it appears to be
almost universally diffused throughout Australia. Schurtz regards
Australian group-marriage as a kind of partial taming of the wild sexual
impulse.
Well known is the description of group-marriage in ancient Britain given
by Julius Cæsar: “The husbands possess their wives to the number of ten
or twelve in common, and more especially brothers with brothers, or
parents with children.” Here we have a special variety of
group-marriage.
According to Bernhöft, =polyandry= is also to be regarded as the
vestige of a primitive form of group-marriage, arising from a deficiency
of women in a totem, so that one woman was left as the representative of
the totem married to several husbands. Marshall has, in fact, amongst
the polyandrous Toda in Southern India, actually observed group-marriage
side by side with polyandry.
Among certain Indian tribes we find even at the present day indications
of group-marriage. For example, the husband will have a claim on the
sisters of his wife, or even on her cousins or her aunts, and gradually
he may marry them. In this case we see that =polygyny= has developed out
of the group-marriage.
The widely diffused practice of =wife-lending= and =wife-exchange= is
also connected with the conditions of group marriage. In Hawaii, in
Australia, among the Massai and the Herero in South Africa, we encounter
this custom, but more especially in Angola and at the mouth of the
Congo, also in North-Eastern Asia, and among many tribes of North
American Indians.
Schurtz points out that similar conditions may arise among European
proletariat in consequence of inadequate housing accommodation.
In this state of a somewhat limited promiscuity the only natural tie was
that between mother and child. The child belonged exclusively to the
mother, and therefore, in the wider sense, belonged to his mother’s
totem. As Bachofen proved in his celebrated work,[161] in primeval
times, and among many primitive tribes even at the present day, the
“=mother-right=” (matriarchy), founded upon purely sensual,
non-individual relations, was predominant; and only with the appearance
of freer, more spiritual, more individual relations between the sexes
(though this did not necessarily involve the development of monogamy)
was “mother-right” first superseded by “father-right” (patriarchy).
These recent ethnological researches have proved the untenability of
Westermarck’s criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity; it is no longer
possible to doubt the fact of a primitive sex-companionship, taking the
form of a more or less limited promiscuity of sexual intercourse. Ludwig
Stein also lays stress on this view.[162] The sexual relationships of
the primeval hordes were either quite unregulated, or regulated only to
a very small extent.
In this view of the matter there is nothing in any sense degrading to
the human race; on the contrary, in the development of individual,
enduring relationships between man and woman out of a condition of
primitive promiscuity, we see manifested a continuous progression from
lower to higher social forms of the sexual relationships, a gradual
improvement and ennoblement of these relationships, until the
development of monogamic marriage (which even to-day is merely an ideal
state, since the reality does not correspond to it, or the original pure
idea has been falsified and obscured).
The transition from matriarchy, resting on a purely natural basis, in
which women assumed a leading social position, and often also a leading
political position, to patriarchy, in which the spiritual and the
individual relationships were brought into the foreground, signified a
great step forward in the developmental history of marriage. Bachofen
was the first to recognize the profound importance in the history of
civilization and for the spiritual and social life of humanity of this
transition of the mother-right to the father-right, from matriarchy to
patriarchy. Schurtz found the following formula to express the change:
“Woman is the central point of the natural groups arising from sexual
intercourse and reproduction; man, on the other hand, is the creator
of free forms of society based upon the sympathy of like kinds.”
The development of the individual personal marriage is most intimately
dependent upon patriarchy. In this sense, but only in this sense, Eduard
von Mayer is right when he points to man as the true creator of the
family. For under the matriarchal system the “family” was incomplete: it
consisted only of mother and child. Only with the development of
patriarchy could the family become a complete whole. This patriarchal
family, which is also our modern family, is thus “the masculine form of
the human tendency to social aggregation.”[163]
The father-right consisted in the right of the father over the wife and
her children; it was a right of domination acquired by a severe
struggle. The =rape of women= and =marriage by capture= belong to the
beginnings of patriarchy; later, when woman, completely enslaved, had
fallen to the position of a mere chattel, =marriage by purchase= was
introduced. The debased position of women under the domination of the
primitive father-right can be best studied among the Greeks, where free
sexual relationships were possible only in connexion with hetairæ and
the love of boys. To the Greeks of classical antiquity the love of boys
was precisely that which to the modern civilized man hetero-sexual love
is, resting upon the most personal, most individual, most spiritual
contact and understanding.
Kohler has beautifully described the bright side of the complete and
unrestricted father-right:
“Now for the first time the man founds his home; he is the master of
the domestic herd, he is the priest of sacrifice at the domestic
altar; his ancestors are present in the spirit; he honours them; the
house is permeated by them. In his house nothing unclean shall exist;
he teaches the children propriety and dependence on the family; and
the wife, at the moment when, as a bride, she crosses the threshold of
her husband’s house, or is carried across it, gives up her household
gods; his home is now her home. Now, at the domestic hearth, the
virtues flourish--those virtues which become the preliminaries of
national greatness. In the bosom of his family the man gains power,
which fits him for the most important functions, whether in the life
of the State or in the life of science; and a township or an
agricultural community based upon such conditions constitutes the
necessary foundation upon which to erect the structure of ethical,
scientific, and political life. The wife passes into the background,
but in the house she develops new virtues; self-sacrifice to the
family, a domestic sense, joy in the home, amiability in narrower
circles, are the bright sides of her influence, for the wife knows how
to develop everywhere beautiful traits of character, so long as her
lot is not cast amidst rude or degenerating conditions.”
The most ancient form of marriage under the father-right was polygamy,
as, for example, we find it described in the Old Testament. Here we have
a typical picture of the patriarchal order of family. The head of the
house and of the family has a principal wife for the procreation of
legitimate issue, but, in addition, numerous concubines. Among the Jews,
the great stress laid upon father-right gave rise to the so-called
“=Leviratsehe=”--that is to say, a widowed wife was compelled to marry
the brother of her deceased husband, in order that the race of the dead
man should be continued. Out of this patriarchal polygamy there
gradually arose =monogamic= marriage, which down to the present
time--let us insist on the matter once for all--has remained an ideal,
never in reality attained, either by the Greeks or Romans or in the
modern civilized world. For the modern civilized marriage is mainly a
production of the father-right, and stands under the dominion of
“man-made” morality, which, beside monogamy, legally established and
assumed to be binding, tolerates “facultative polygamy”; hence =there is
here concealed an element of lying and hypocrisy which has rightly
brought into discredit the modern patriarchal marriage as a conventional
form among those who regard as the true ideal of marriage in the future
the enduring life in common of two free personalities endowed with equal
rights=.
Hegel, in his celebrated definition of marriage,[164] which he regards
as the embodiment of the reality of the species and as the spiritual
unity of the natural sexes brought about by self-conscious love, as
legal-moral love, has not done justice to the recognition and
development of the individuality of =both= parties. The “unity,” the
“one body and one soul,” corresponds indeed to the patriarchal
conception, according to which the woman is completely absorbed into the
man; it does not correspond, however, to the modern idea of individual
marriage, in which both man and woman are united as free personalities.
This, as we shall see later, is the meaning of the struggle for
“free-love,” which must not be confused, as, for example, it is confused
by Ludwig Stein (“Beginnings of Civilization,” p. 110), with the
free-love, the hetairism, of ancient times, or with the simple
extra-conjugal intercourse of the present day.
=Neither the mother-right alone, nor the father-right alone, is
competent to satisfy the ideals of modern civilized human beings, in
respect of the configuration of the social forms of the amatory life.=
This is only possible when both forms of right are united in a new form,
by equal rights given to both sexes.[165]
Hence, in association with the endeavour for the free individual
development of the feminine nature, we find also the tendency to
reintroduce into public life, into true valuation and honour, the
ancient conception of the mother-right.
“Slowly and gradually,” says Kohler, “has the reawakened idea of the
mother-right been gnawing with a sharp tooth, now in one way, now in
another, at the rigid fetters of this system, and has loosened
them.... =That in this manner woman will attain a worthier position is
certain.= But the unitary family-sense has long ceased among us to be
the powerful incentive to action that it is among the purely agnate
(patriarchal) peoples.... Our own conditions render it possible that
the institutions of civilization will continue to thrive, even though
the family tie is no longer tense and exclusive.”
The modern civilized man can quietly accustom himself to the idea that
the old patriarchal family under the dominion of the father-right will
gradually disappear; and that at the same time the patriarchal
conventional marriage of ancient times, still to all appearance so
firmly established, will be replaced by other, freer forms. The idea of
marriage, and its value as a form of social life, remains meanwhile
unaffected. It is possible to be a critic of the old, outlived form of
marriage, without therefore being exposed to the suspicion of wishing to
dispense with the idea of “marriage” altogether. The one-sided,
juristic, political, sacramental, and ecclesiastical conception of the
past does justice neither to the social nor to the individual
significance of marriage. He who, like Westermarck, regards monogamic
marriage as something primitively ordained, as if it were a biological
fact, and denies completely the =development= of that institution out of
lower forms, denies also the possibility of any extensive transformation
of the existing forms of marriage. The common mistake is, to place on
the one hand monogamy in its most ideal form, that of life-long
marriage, and on the other hand, the so-called “free love,”
understanding by free love completely unregulated extra-conjugal sexual
intercourse. It is not a matter for surprise that, in respect of both of
these extreme forms of sexual relationship, a pessimistic view should
easily gain ground. According to the point of view, one party will
insist on the intolerable character, in relation to the need for
individual freedom and as regards the development of personality, of a
lifelong marriage of duty; whilst the other party will lay stress upon
the equally great, if not greater, dangers of the unrestrained practice
of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse.
With regard to recent views on the marriage problem, the reader will do
well to consult the thoughtful pamphlet of Gabriele Reuter, “The Problem
of Marriage” (Berlin, 1907). The author points out that there is a
“deep-lying dissatisfaction with the existing marriage conditions, a
yearning and restless need for improvement.” In marriage, she holds, the
bodily and spiritual process of human development is completed in the
most concentrated manner. As a cause of the numerous unhappy marriages
of our time, she points to the divergencies, so widely manifest at the
present day, between modes of thought and views of life among members of
the same strata of society and among those of the same degree of
education, more especially in religious matters, and she refers also to
experiments made in respect of new modes of life, such as the woman’s
movement. According to Gabriele Reuter, the child will become the
regulator of all the changes in the married state which we have to
expect in the future. As “marriage,” she defines that earnest union
between man and woman which is formed for the purpose of a life in
common, and with the intention of procreating and bringing up children,
and she regards it as altogether beside the question whether that union
has been affected with or without civil or ecclesiastical sanction. In
contrast with this idea of “marriage,” there would be other fugitive or
more enduring unions, serving only for excitement and sensual enjoyment.
It is interesting to note that the author recommends to the modern woman
“good-humoured and motherly forbearance” in respect of marital
infidelity. For a woman’s own good and for that of her children, it is
more important that her husband should show her love, respect, and
friendship, than that he should preserve unconditional physical
faithfulness. But the author here ignores the possibility of venereal
infection as a result of occasional unfaithfulness, which very seriously
threatens the well-being of the wife and the children! Very wisely she
advises a facilitation of divorce. This would not make husband and wife
careless in their relations one to the other; on the contrary, it would
make both more careful and thoughtful in the avoidance of anything
causing pain to one another. The children should always remain with the
mother up to the age of fourteen years. A detailed and valuable account
of the problems of modern marriage will be found also in the work
“Regarding Married Happiness: the Experiences, Reflections, and Advice
of a Physician” (Wiesbaden, 1906).
Fortunately, by the legal introduction of =civil marriage= and of
=divorce= the necessity has now been recognized by the State of leaving
open for many persons a middle course--one which lies =between= lifelong
marriage (whose sacramental character is thus abandoned) and free
extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, =and yet maintains the tendency
towards the ideal of monogamic marriage=.
The principle of divorce forms the most important foundation at once for
a future reformation of marriage, and for a rational view, one doing
equal justice to the interests of society and those of the individual,
of the relations between man and wife. By the introduction of divorce,
the State itself has recognized the purely personal character of
conjugal relations, and has admitted that circumstances arise in which
the marriage ceases to fulfil its aims and becomes injurious to both
parties. =Thus the State has proclaimed the rights of the individual
personality in the married state.=
In the marriage problem, the so-called “=duplex sexual morality=” also
plays an important part--that is to say, the idea that man is by nature
inclined to polygamy, but woman to monogamy. Herein, indeed, the
thoroughly correct idea was dominant that the cohabitation of one woman
with several men--be it understood we refer to simultaneous
cohabitation--is harmful to the offspring. From this, however, the only
permissible inference is that for the purposes of the procreation of
children and of racial hygiene “monogamy” can be demanded of woman on
rationalistic grounds--that is to say, the intercourse of woman should
be restricted to a single man during such a time and for such a purpose.
But it is not legitimate from these considerations to deduce the
necessity of permanent “monandry” for woman.
I will consider this question somewhat more exactly, and in doing so
will refer to the interesting essay of Rudolph Eberstadt on “The
Economic Importance of Sanitary Conditions” in relation to marriage,
being the concluding chapter of “Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage and the Married State,” by Senator and Kaminer (Rebman, 1906),
because here we find a very clear recognition of the confusion between
monogamy and monandry.
According to Eberstadt, there are above all two things characteristic of
modern civilized marriage--in the first place, the higher rank allotted
to the husband in the married state, and, in the second place, the
increased demand for prenuptial purity and for conjugal fidelity on the
part of the wife. The husband demands from his wife, in addition to his
own mastership in the married state, also sexual continence before
marriage and unconditional fidelity during marriage. But the husband
does not recognize that corresponding duties are imposed on himself.
This difference of judgment regarding extra-conjugal sexual intercourse
on the part of husband and wife respectively, depends entirely upon the
perfectly sound experience that =simultaneous= cohabitation on the part
of a woman with several men obscures paternity, and therewith the
foundations of the family, quite apart from a not uncommon physical
injury to the child. This =natural= difference between man and woman, in
respect of sexual intercourse and its consequences, will always endure.
A man can simultaneously cohabit with two women without thereby
interfering with the formation of a family; but a woman cannot with
similar impunity cohabit with two men. It is possible that the demand
for the virgin intactness of the wife at the time of marriage is based
upon the old experience that by sexual intercourse, and still more by
the first conception, certain far-reaching specific changes are induced
in the feminine organism, so that the first man impregnates the feminine
being for ever in his own sense, and even transmits his influence to
children of a second male progenitor. (_Cf._ in this connexion G.
Lomer, “Love and Psychosis,” p. 37.)
“It is not the brutality of man,” says Eberstadt, “which has imposed a
higher responsibility upon woman; Nature herself has done this. Nature
has endowed man and woman differently in respect of the consequences
of sexual intercourse. The fruit of intercourse is entrusted to the
woman alone. Now, one who has special responsibilities has also
special duties. Certain breaches of conjugal responsibility are more
sternly condemned when committed by the man; certain
others--especially such as concern care for the offspring--are more
severely judged in the wife. The relative positions in respect of
sexual intercourse are different in man and in woman, for reasons
which are physical and inalterable. Seduction, ill-treatment,
abandonment of a wife, and adultery, are punished in the husband by
law and custom. The wife, on the other hand, loses her honour =simply=
on account of promiscuous and unregulated intercourse, because Nature
herself forbids this intercourse if the material and spiritual tie
between mother, father, and child is to persist.”
In accordance with these considerations, Eberstadt holds fast to the
demand for “=monandry=” on the part of the wife; he rejects on principle
the idea of =sexual= equality between man and wife, and relegates the
progressive development of marriage exclusively to the =spiritual= and
=moral= provinces.
Although we recognize the general accuracy of this view, and admit that
it is based upon conditions imposed once for all by Nature herself,
still we are compelled to regard it as too narrow and one-sided, for it
completely overlooks the fact that this demand for monandric love on the
part of woman can be fulfilled in association with a freer moulding of
woman’s amatory life. We need merely think of the often happy marriages
of one woman to =several= men--_nota bene_ in temporal succession--in
which marriages perfectly healthy children have been born to different
fathers, in order to see that for the woman of the future a freer
moulding of the amatory life is also possible, though admittedly within
=narrower= limits than in the case of man. Just as the mastership of the
husband must give place to an equality of authority on the part of
husband and wife, considered as two free personalities, so also must the
“duplex morality” undergo a revision in the sense above indicated.
In passing, let us remark that all those who proscribe any kind of
extra-conjugal intercourse on the part of woman, and who love to brand
as an “outcast” any woman who indulges in it, should have their
attention directed for a moment to the tremendous fact of politically
tolerated, and even legalized, =prostitution=, which, like a haunting
shadow, accompanies the so-called conventional marriage--a shadow
growing ever =larger= the more strictly, exclusively, and narrowly the
idea of this “marriage” is conceived.[166]
The civilized ideal of marriage is the lifelong duration of the marriage
between two free, independent, mature personalities, who share fully
love and life, and by a common life-work further their own advantage and
the well-being of their children. =But this rarely attained ideal of
civilization in no way excludes other forms of marriage=, which have a
more transient and temporary character, without thereby doing any harm
either to the individual or to society.
More than forty years ago Lecky, the English historian of civilization,
an investigator whom no one can blame, in respect of the tendency of his
writings, for advancing lax ideas regarding sexual morality or for
advising libertinage, expressed himself admirably on this subject. In
his “History of European Morals” he wrote:
“In these considerations, we have ample grounds for maintaining that
the lifelong union of one man and of one woman should be the normal or
dominant type of intercourse between the sexes. We can prove that it
is on the whole most conducive to the happiness, and also to the moral
elevation, of all parties. But beyond this point it would, I conceive,
be impossible to advance, except by the assistance of a special
=revelation=! =It by no means follows that because this should be the
dominant type, it should be the only one, or that the interests of
society demand that all connexions should be forced into the same
die.= Connexions, which were confessedly only for a few years, have
always subsisted side by side with permanent marriages; and in periods
when public opinion, acquiescing in their propriety, inflicts no
excommunication on one or both of the parties, when these partners are
not living the demoralizing and degrading life which accompanies the
consciousness of guilt, and when proper provision is made for the
children who are born, it would be, I believe, impossible to prove, by
the light of simple and unassisted reason, that such connexions should
be invariably condemned. It is extremely important, both for the
happiness and for the moral well-being of men, that lifelong unions
should not be effected simply under the imperious prompting of a blind
appetite. There are always multitudes who, in the period of their
lives when their passions are most strong, are incapable of supporting
children in their own social rank, and who would therefore injure
society by marrying in it, but are nevertheless perfectly capable of
securing an honourable career for their illegitimate children in the
lower social sphere to which these would naturally belong (!). Under
the conditions I have mentioned these connexions are not injurious,
but beneficial, to the weaker partner; they soften the differences of
rank, they stimulate social habits, and they do not produce upon
character the degrading effect of promiscuous intercourse, or upon
society the injurious effects of imprudent marriages, one or other of
which will multiply in their absence. In the immense variety of
circumstances and characters, cases will always appear in which, on
utilitarian grounds, they might seem advisable.”
In ancient Rome these laxer unions were recognized by law as a form of
marriage, and this legal recognition protected them, notwithstanding the
unlimited freedom of divorce, from social contempt and stigmatization.
“Concubinage” was such a second kind of marriage, which was thoroughly
recognized and thoroughly honourable. The _amica convictrix_ or _uxor
gratuita_ was neither a legitimate wife nor simply a mistress; she had
rather the position of women in our own day who have contracted a
“morganatic” marriage, a “left-handed marriage.” The only difference was
that these ancient unions were more readily dissoluble.
It was the Christian dogma and the sacramental and lifelong character of
marriage which first caused the stamp of infamy to be impressed upon all
other varieties of sexual intercourse. The religious marriage was in its
very nature indissoluble; indeed, by forbidding mixed marriages
(marriages between Christian and pagan) individual freedom was entirely
prohibited.
In contrast with this ancient religious view, the State, by the
introduction of civil marriage, of mixed marriage (_vide supra_), and of
divorce, has been compelled to make continually greater concessions to
modern ideas, and =has already recognized in principle= that marriages
limited in duration harmonize exceedingly well with the demands of
civilization; that in general, as Lecky maintained, the recent changes
in economic conditions have a much greater influence upon marriage and
the forms of marriage than the ecclesiastical and mystical conception of
the institution.
Anyone who wishes to gain an insight into this very difficult problem of
modern marriage must first obtain clear views in respect of certain
peculiarities of individual human love, regarding the intimate connexion
of which with the whole process of mental evolution we have already
dealt in earlier chapters.
Max Nordau has written a celebrated chapter on “The Lie of
Marriage,”[167] and in the light of reality marriage is, in fact, often
such a lie as he describes, especially in view of the fact that not less
than 75 per cent. of modern marriages are so-called “marriages of
convenience,” and in no sense are properly love-marriages.[168]
But it is a well-known fact that these marriages of reason are often
more enduring than love-marriages. This depends upon the nature of human
love, which is by no means inalterable, =but changes in accordance with
the various developmental phases of the individual, needs new
incitements and new individual relationships=.
In No. 14,919 of the _Neue Freie Presse_ of Vienna, March 6, 1906, there
appeared among the advertisements a remarkable question, which was
probably directed by a betrayed or deceived lover to his beloved:
“Ewige Liebe--ewige Lüge?”
“Eternal Love--Eternal Lie?”
Love also, personal love, is transitory, like man himself, like the
isolated individual. It differs in the different ages of life; it
differs, too, according to its object for the time being. Eduard von
Hartmann calls love a thunderstorm, which does not discharge in a single
flash of lightning, but gradually discharges the electrical energy in
several successive flashes, and after the discharge “there comes the
cool wind, the heaven of consciousness clears once more, and we look
round astonished at the fertilizing rain falling on the ground, and at
the clouds fleeing towards the distant horizon.”
All those who are well acquainted with humanity, all poets and
psychologists, are in agreement respecting the fugitive character of
youthful love. For this reason, they advise against marriage concluded
during the passion of early youth. This poetry of love at first sight
is, according to Gutzkow, the eternal =game of chance= of our young
people, in which their health, their life, and their future go to wreck.
Another keen observer, Kierkegaard, in his “Diary of a Seducer,” says:
“Love has many mysteries, and this first love is also a mystery, if
not the greatest. Most men in their ardent passion are as if insane;
they become engaged or commit some other stupidity, and in a moment it
is all over, and they know once more what it has cost them, what they
have lost.”
And, finally, a third eminent writer on eroticism, Rétif de la Bretonne,
says:
“It is a folly of the same kind to trust the constancy of a young man
of twenty years of age. At this age it is less a woman that one loves
than women; one is intoxicated rather by sensual phenomena than by the
individual, however lovable that individual may be.”
But to youth love is almost always no more than a beautiful memory, a
vanishing paradise. There clings to it something imperishable, which
has, however, no binding force.
And just as to every man the love of youth appears ideal in character,
precisely because it is not subjected to the rude considerations of
reality, so also in every subsequent love it is almost always the =first
beginnings= only in which true beauty and deep perception are
experienced.
“A thousand years of tears and pains,” Goethe makes his Stella say,
“could not counterpoise the happiness of the first glance, the
trembling, the stammering, the approach and the withdrawal, the
self-forgetfulness, the first fugitive ardent kiss, and the first
gently breathing embrace.”
The eternal duration of such feelings is contradicted by an
anthropologico-biological phenomenon of human sexuality, which I have
described as “=the need for sexual variety=.”[169] Human love, as a
whole and in its individual manifestations, is dominated and influenced
by the need for change and variety. Schopenhauer drew attention to this
primordial and fundamental phenomenon of human love; he was wrong,
however, in limiting it to the male sex.[170] As I have already
insisted, this general human need for variety in sexual relationships is
to be regarded rather as a general =principle of explanation of admitted
facts=, than as a desirable ideal. On the contrary, in my opinion,
faithfulness, constancy, and durability in love, bring under control and
diminish this need for sexual variety, through the recognition of the
eminent =advances in civilization= by means of which the human amatory
life will be further developed and perfected in a higher sense. But the
facts of daily observation are not to be shuffled out of existence by
any kind of hypocrisy or prudery. They must be faced and dealt with.
First, it is an incontestable fact that the so-called “only” love is one
of the greatest rarities; that, on the contrary, in the life of the
majority of men and women a frequent repetition and renewal of
love-sentiments and love-relationships occurs. For the most part these
loves occur at successive intervals. Stiedenroth, in his admirable
“Psychology,” makes the following remarks regarding these successive
outbursts of passion and the transitory character of the feeling of
love:
“Since no two human beings are precisely alike, one will at one time
love passionately one only; in succession, however, several can be
loved, and the opinion that one person only can be loved in a lifetime
originates in rare dreams regarding the ideal, of which a quite false
representation is made. An object can indeed appear which transcends
the ideal hitherto conceived; but passion does not need a fully
developed ideal for its first foundation; it needs merely that which
in the theory of the feelings has been found to be a necessary
condition of love. That every love gladly thinks itself immortal, lies
in the nature of the case, for on account of the overwhelming
character of the sensations of love, it is impossible to understand
how they can ever come to an end. Experience, however, teaches us the
contrary, and insight enables us to recognize the reason.”[171]
Regarding the frequent occurrence of several love-passions on the part
of the same person, there can be two opinions; but is it possible that
anyone can =simultaneously= be in love with several individuals? I
answer this question with an unconditional “Yes,” and I agree fully with
Max Nordau when he explains that it is possible to love at the same time
several individuals with almost identical tenderness, and that it is not
necessarily lying when ardent passion for each of them is
expressed.[172]
It is precisely the extraordinarily manifold spiritual differentiation
of modern civilized humanity that gives rise to the possibility of such
a simultaneous love for two individuals. Our spiritual nature exhibits
the most varied colouring. It is difficult always to find the
corresponding complements in one single individual.
I ask those who are well acquainted with modern society if they have not
met men, and women also, who had advanced so far in the adaptation of
their love-needs to the anatomical analysis of their psychical life,
that for the romantic, realistical, æsthetic traits of their nature, for
the lyrical or dramatic moods of their heart, they demanded
correspondingly =different= lovers; and if these several lovers should
encounter each other, and be angry with one another, the one who loved
them both (or all) would be inclined to cry out in naive astonishment,
like the heroine in Gutzkow’s “Seraphine,” “Love one another! love one
another! You are all one, one--=in me=!”
In the romance “Leonide,” by Emerentius Scävola, the heroine is at the
same time the wife of two husbands. Reality also is familiar with double
love of this kind--for example, in the relationship of the Princess
Melanie Metternich to her husband, the celebrated statesman, and to her
previous bridegroom, Baron Hügel.[173] Especially frequent is the
gratification of higher ideal needs and of the simple natural impulse,
by means of two different persons. A man can love at the same time a
woman of genius and a simple child of Nature. In the novel “Double Love”
(1901), Elisar von Kupffer describes the simultaneous love of a learned
man for his extremely intelligent wife and for a buxom servant-girl. A
well-known example is also the double love of Wieland--the ideal love
for Sophie Laroche, the frankly sensual love for Christine Hagel. But
not only do differences of culture, of position, of character, play a
part in such multiple love; the simple difference also of bodily
appearance may lead to such simultaneous attractions; for example, a man
may love at the same time a brunette and a blonde, an elegant little
sylph and a distinguished presence. This is, however, on the whole, much
rarer than simultaneous attraction to two different spiritual varieties.
Such facts as these are not to be employed so much in advocacy of the
multiplication of love-relationships as for the illustration of the
enormous difficulty in obtaining complete harmony between human beings,
between one man and one woman. There remains always a balance of
yearning, which the other does not fulfil; always a balance of striving,
which the other is unable to understand. This cannot, however, affect in
the slightest degree the ideal of the =single love=; on the contrary, it
makes it stand out all the more brilliantly before our spiritual vision.
It is rare, like every ideal, and attainable only by few. This rarity of
=complete= love between a man and a woman is dwelt on also by Henry
Laube in his novel “Die Maske,” in which he describes love in all its
manifoldness and modern distraction.
Schleiermacher described very strikingly the necessity that exists for
the repetition and manifoldness of love-perceptions:
“Why,” says he, “should it be different with love from what it is in
every other matter? Is it possible that that which is the highest in
mankind should be brought at the first time, by the most elementary
activity, to a perfect conclusion in a single deed? Should we expect
it to be easier than the simple art of eating and drinking, which the
child first attempts, and attempts again and again, with unsuitable
objects and rude experimentation, and with results which, contrary to
his deserts, are not always unfortunate? In love, also, there is need
for =preliminary experiments=, leading to no permanent result, from
which, however, every one carries away something, =in order to make
the feeling more definite and the prospect of love greater and
grander=.”[174]
Georg Hirth also shows that true mastery of love only becomes possible
by means of repetition. There are ideal masculine and feminine Don Juan
natures, which are always searching for the genuine, eternal, only love;
as, for example, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, wandering perpetually
from man to man; or a similar figure, the titular heroine of the romance
“Faustine,” by the Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn. Many, most indeed, of such
never learn to know true love, because they never find the proper object
of love; and they die, as Rousseau, in his “Confessions,” says so
strikingly, without ever having loved, eternally torn by the need for
love, without ever having been able perfectly to satisfy that need.
Happy indeed are those like Karoline, who in Schelling found at length
the man whose powerful personality fully corresponded to her idea of
love.
The need for such a great and true love remains fixed, notwithstanding
all deceptions, bitternesses, and the sorrows of unsatisfied longing.
Love is, in fact, the human being himself; like the human being, love
has its development, its impulse towards higher things, towards that
which is better. No painful experience can completely annihilate love,
and the need for love. In a beautiful stanza a French poet of the
eighteenth century, the Chevalier de Bonnard, has described this
essential permanency of love:
“Hélas! pourquoi le souvenir
De ces erreurs de mon aurore
Me fait-il pousser un soupir!
Je dois peut-être aimer encore,
Ah! si j’aime encore, je sens bien
Que je serai toujours le même;
Le temps au cœur ne change rien:
Eh! n’est-ce pas ainsi qu’on aime?”
True love is the product of the ripest development; it is therefore
rare, and comes late. For this reason, as Nietzsche points out, the time
for marriage comes much earlier than the time for love. It is by means
of spiritual relationships that love first becomes enduring. Its
prolongation is almost always effected only by an enlargement and
variation of psychical relationships. Physical relationships alone soon
lose through habituation the stimulus of novelty; whence we explain the
fact that so many husbands, notwithstanding the physical beauty of their
wives, become unfaithful to them, often in favour of much uglier women,
of girls of the lower classes, or even of prostitutes. The de Goncourts
remark in their “Diary” that the beauty which in a _cocotte_ a man will
reward with 100,000 francs, will not in his own wife seem worth 10,000
francs--in the wife whom he has married, and who, with her dowry, has
brought him this magnificent beauty into the bargain. For this reason, a
priest, when a wife complained to him that her husband had begun to get
somewhat cold in his manner to her, gave the following by no means bad
advice: “My dear child, the most honourable wife must have in her just a
suspicion of the demi-mondaine.”
The greatest danger for love, a danger which therefore makes its
appearance above all in married life, is the danger of =habituation=.
This has a double effect. On the one hand, by the mere monotony of
eternal repetition, love may become blunted.
“It is worth remarking,” says Goethe, “that custom is capable of
completely replacing passionate love; it demands not so much a
charming, as a comfortable object; given that, it is invincible.”
In the second place, however, custom contradicts the already mentioned
need for variety, the eternal uniformity of daily companionship puts
love to sleep, damps its ardour, and even gives rise to a sense of
latent or open hatred between a married pair. This hatred is observed
most frequently in love-matches,[175] precisely because here the ideal
is all the more cruelly disturbed by the rude grasp of realities;
especially if the intimate life in common enfolds a human,
all-too-human, element, and tears away the last ideal veil. With justice
the common bedroom of a married couple has been called “the slaughter of
love.”
A further cause of unhappy marriages is to be found in unfavourable
age-relations of the married couple. The most serious is the premature
entrance upon marriage.
Before the introduction of the Civil Code, the age of nubility in the
German Empire was attained, in the male sex, with the completion of the
twentieth, in the female sex with the completion of the sixteenth year
of life. In Prussia a Minister of Justice could give permission to marry
at an even earlier age. According to the Civil Code, men could not marry
until they were of full age (twenty-one), and women, as before, not
until they were sixteen years of age. Women are able to obtain remission
from this restriction, but not men. In special cases, however, a man is
enabled to marry before the age of twenty-one years if the Court of
Wardship (_cf._ the English Court of Chancery) declares him to be of
full age, which the Court has power to do at any time after he is
eighteen years of age.
Whilst, before the year 1900, on the average, there were not as many as
300 men under twenty years who annually contracted marriage with the
permission of the Minister of Justice--already a matter for serious
consideration--since the introduction of the new Code, by which the
ordinary age of nubility for man is raised by one year, =the number of
persons prematurely contracting marriage has exhibited a notable
increase=. In the year 1900 there were 1,546, and in the year 1901
actually 1,848 young men married before the age of twenty-one years.
These very early marriages were distributed among all professions, and
almost all classes of the population.
This increase in premature marriages is, speaking generally, a symptom
indicative of the premature awakening of sexuality in our own time, a
phenomenon which we shall discuss more fully later. Such an occurrence
as the elopement of a girl aged fourteen with a boy aged fifteen, the
pair having already for some time been engaged in an intimate
love-relationship, and having finally come to the conclusion that they
could no longer live apart, is by no means a great rarity.[176] No
detailed argument is needed to show that persons completely wanting
mental and moral maturity are not suited for marriage, which can only be
regarded as offering some security for endurance and life happiness,
when it is the union of two fully-developed personalities. In this
respect it seems to me that the regulations of the Civil Code are not at
present sufficiently strict.
A second notable factor in the causation of unhappy marriages is an
excessive =difference between the ages= of husband and wife, and in this
respect it is quite an old experience, that a marked excess of age on
the part of the husband has a less unfavourable influence than a similar
excess on the part of the wife. This observation harmonizes with the
fact that men can preserve sexual potency up to the most advanced
age--even in a centenarian active spermatozoa have been found[177]--that
such old men can have complete sexual intercourse, and can procreate
children; whereas in women, at the age of forty-five to fifty years,
with the cessation of menstruation the procreative capacity is
extinguished, though not, indeed, the capacity for sexual intercourse
and for voluptuous sensation. Naturally, in this connexion we are not
alluding to quite abnormal cases, such as a premature impotence in the
husband, or other morbid conditions in either husband or wife. We are
considering merely the normal physical difference in age. Metchnikoff
lays great stress upon this physical disharmony between husband and
wife. He insists upon the fact that in the man sexual excitability
generally begins much earlier than in woman, and that at a time when the
woman stands at the acme of her needs the sexual activity in the man has
already begun to decline; but this is only the case when the husband was
notably older than the wife when the marriage was contracted. A
difference of five or ten years in this respect is a small matter; but a
difference of ten or twenty years may be of serious significance.
Generally speaking, in the case of marriages which are intended to be of
lifelong duration, the difference of age should never exceed ten years.
With increasing civilization, the average age at marriage has
continually advanced (in Western Europe the average age at marriage is
for men twenty-eight to thirty-one years, and for women twenty-three to
twenty-eight years), whilst the number of persons who do not marry until
late in life, and of those who do not marry at all, is continually
increasing. This is partly the result of spiritual differentiation and
of the ever-increasing difficulty in finding a suitable life-partner,
and partly it is the result of the increasing economic difficulty in
providing for the support of a household.
Schmoller has calculated that under normal conditions about 50 per
cent.--one-half, that is to say--of the population of the country must
be either married or widowed. In Europe, however, a much smaller
proportion is in this condition. Thus, taking only persons over fifty
years of age, in Hungary 3 per cent., in Germany 9 per cent., in
England 10 per cent., in Austria 13 per cent., in Switzerland 17 per
cent., were unmarried.
The number of married and widowed persons among those over fifty years
of age varies in the different countries between 56 per cent. (in
Belgium) and 76 per cent. (in Hungary). In England, in the years 1886 to
1890, the number was 60 per cent., in Germany 61 per cent., in the
United States 62 per cent., in France 64 per cent. If we enumerate the
married only, excluding the widowed, we find 8 or 10 per cent. fewer.
When we compare the number of married with the entire population, we
find, instead of the above-mentioned 50 per cent., no more than 37 to 39
per cent. And this percentage appears likely to undergo a continual
further decline. We must, at any rate, in the future reckon with this
fact, although, of course, isolated oscillations in the marriage
frequency may continue to occur. In these oscillations =economic= and
=domestic= factors play a great part.
It is, however, quite erroneous to regard our own time as one especially
characterized by “=mercenary marriages=,” one in which the union between
man and wife has become a simple affair of commerce. There are not
wanting reformers who attribute to mammonism all the blame for the
disordered love-life of the present day, and who describe very vividly
and dramatically Amor’s dance round the golden calf.
The facts of the history of civilization and folk-lore completely
contradict the view that this mammonistic character of marriage is a
product of our modern civilization. It is, on the contrary, a =vestige=
of early primitive civilization, in which economic factors always had a
far greater importance for marriage than spiritual sympathies. Thus,
Heinrich Schurtz proves that among the majority of savage races marriage
is rather an affair of business than of inclination. And where are money
marriages more frequent than they are among our sturdy German peasants,
with whom everything conventional has the freest possible play?[178]
It is first the higher, refined spiritual civilization which brings with
it a higher conception of marriage as the realization of the ideal,
individual only-love. As Ludwig Stein justly remarks:
“It was not in our own time that marriage first began to degenerate to
the level of an economic idea. The converse, indeed, is true; the
economic background of marriage, as it so clearly manifests itself
among savage races, =first began to disappear in the course of the
development of our own system of civilization, and therewith began
also the liberation of mankind from the burden of metallic
shackles=.”[179]
At the same time, it cannot be denied that even at the present day the
economic factor plays a very extensive part in the determination of
marriage, although certainly not to the degree maintained by Buckle, who
held that there was a fixed and definite relationship between the number
of marriages and the price of corn.[180] Beyond question, economic
considerations have a great influence upon the frequency of marriage.
Many marriages, even to-day, are purely mercenary marriages; but still
at the present time the qualities of intellect and emotion, quite apart
from physical characteristics, have at least an equal share in the
production of marriage. Only among the classes who feel it their duty to
keep up a particular kind of appearance, among the upper-middle classes,
the aristocracy, and among officers in the army, is the economic
question the main determining influence in marriage. Well known, also,
is the predominance of mercenary marriages among the Jews.
One may be an enemy of mammonism, and still see the necessity for an
economic regulation of conjugal relations in view of the expected
offspring, of the altered conditions of life, of the increase in the
household, and of the necessity for safeguarding personal independence
and free development. Such economic considerations can harmonize
perfectly with the demand for personal sympathy, and with the most
intimate physical and spiritual harmony between husband and wife.
Schmoller rightly places the most important advance of the modern family
in this, that it becomes more and more transformed from a productive and
business institute into an institute of moral life in common; that by
the =limitation= of its economic purposes the nobler ideal must become
more predominant, and the family become a richer soil for the
cultivation of sympathetic sentiments.[181]
More especially among the upper classes of modern European and American
society is there apparent an increasing disinclination to marriage, or,
to employ a phrase of the moral statistician Drobisch, there is a
decline in the intensity of the marriage impulse. Although the often
burning money question no doubt plays its part, that part is, on the
whole, much smaller than the part played by the ever-increasing
difficulties of individual spiritual harmony, difficulties dependent on
differences in age, character, education, views of life, and individual
development during marriage. This disinclination to marry is nourished
by certain tendencies of the time to be subsequently described, and by
certain changes in the relations between the sexes.
To many also the idea of “=conjugal rights=,” as established by law,
appears a horrible compulsion, an assignment to physical and spiritual
prostitution. The modern consciousness of free personality, in fact, no
longer harmonizes with that stoical conception of duty in marriage such
as, for example, is described by B. Chateaubriand in his memoirs,
although, of course, every one who enters on marriage ought to be aware
that by doing so he assigns to the other party certain rights, the
non-fulfilment of which actually destroys the character and the idea of
marriage. Thus, the conduct of a schoolmistress of Berlin, who
persistently refused physical surrender to her husband, on the ground
that she had wished merely to contract an “ideal” marriage (of the same
kind as the mystical “reformed marriage” of the American woman Alice
Stockham), demands emphatic condemnation. But an abominable =misuse= of
“conjugal rights” is unquestionably made by inconsiderate husbands, who
demand from their wives unlimited, excessively frequent, gratification
of their sexual desire, without any regard to the wife’s physical and
spiritual condition at the time. That in this respect the idea of
“conjugal rights” is greatly in need of revision has been convincingly
proved by Dorothee Goebeler in an essay entitled “Conjugal Rights,”
published in the _Welt am Montag_ of August 6, 1906.
Too frequently, also, it happens that the husband simply transfers into
his married life previous customs of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse,
and makes use in marriage of the experience he has gained in intercourse
with prostitutes or with priestesses of the love of the moment; he
treats his wife as an object of sensual lust, without paying any regard
to her individuality and to her more delicate erotic needs.
This physical dissonance is not even the worst. Too often it is simply
boredom which kills love in married life. Like Nora in “A Dolls’ House,”
one waits for the “wonderful,” and the wonderful does not happen.
Instead of this the years pass by; sexual passion, greatly influenced as
it is by the spiritual environment, gradually disappears, and with it
disappears also the last possibility of spiritual sympathy. Thus, the
character of most marriages is =solitude=. They represent the tragedy
of desolation, of the eternal self-seeking of husband and wife.
What disastrous consequences, finally, may result from the part played
in marriage by =disease=, what tragic conflicts may here rise, can be
studied in the great book “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage
and the Married State” (Rebman, 1906), an encyclopædic work edited by H.
Senator and S. Kaminer, discussing in detail the relation between
disorders of health and the married state.
The calamities of modern marriage are strikingly illuminated in the
following psychologically interesting account given by the alienist
Heinrich Laehr (“Concerning Insanity and Lunatic Asylums,” p. 44 _et
seq._; Halle, 1852):
“How, as a matter of fact, do marriages come about? In heaven
certainly a very small number indeed, if by that phrase we understand
marriages undertaken with the full understanding of the nature of the
sacrifice involved, under the impulsion of an inner necessity, and
based upon deep mutual inclination founded upon self-respect and
respect for each other; in social circles, and not in heaven, on the
other hand, the majority of marriages are made. The question upon
which ultimately so many marriages depend is, what each will gain by
it, whilst inner sensations and mutual liking are regarded as
subordinate matters.... A man is fully informed about such matters in
early years; a woman is full of dark perceptions, uncertain as to what
she is to receive and what she is to give. She is naturally impelled
by her sense of inward weakness to yield to anyone more powerful than
herself, and, in the intoxication of sensual excitement, under
conditions in which both, in order to please, tend to show the best
side only to each other, she is far less able than man to weigh
beforehand the significance of such a step. Later, indeed, when, in
the trodden path of marriage, the current of love runs more slowly,
her eyes are opened, naked reality takes the place of the pictures of
imagination, which formerly caused self-deception, and what appeared
to be love, but was not love, takes flight for ever. What has not been
hidden under the name of love! It conceals the pretence of egoistic
impulses, vanity it may be, the life of pleasure, avarice, indolence;
and what a number of marriages are entered into on the part of the
woman in order to escape from the oppression of repugnant domestic
conditions, because the imagined future appears to them more pleasant
in contrast with the actual present.
“There are in the course of marriage so many periods of misunderstood
depression, sadness, trouble; and mankind so readily forgets the
golden rule, that these periods have to be got through by means of
mutual aid, and that in married life husband and wife should do all
that is possible to help one another onwards, and not to thrust one
another back--so easily is this forgotten, that only too readily the
mirth and gladness with which married life was begun vanish away. The
intense pain which attacks us with violence, but only at long
intervals, has a far less depressing influence on our organism than
much less severe, but frequently repeated, emotional disturbances,
especially such as arise out of the wretchedness of life. They give
rise in us to irritability of the nervous system, by which
sensitiveness is increased; and repeated misunderstandings in married
life soon make both husband and wife feel that marriage is rather a
burden than a joy.”
That women as well as men recognize the danger to love entailed by
marriage is shown by Frieda von Bülow in “Einsame Frauen,” pp. 93, 94
(1897):
“During this period I have often considered the question of such
continued life in common. Is it not inevitable that this unceasing,
intimate association must always give rise to mutual hatred? Husband
and wife learn to know one another through and through. The veil of
white lies which plays so important a part in ordinary social
intercourse is here impossible. The characters are seen naked in all
their weakness, all their incapacity for love, all their vanity, all
their egoism. In such circumstances, phrases intended to conceal
appear simply untruths, and instead of producing illusion they repel.
Just as in the first awakening of love, all the powers of the soul are
directed towards the discovery of the excellences of the beloved one,
so here the soul is for ever upon a voyage of discovery seeking for
faults. In both cases alike, a sufficiency of that which one seeks is
found.”
The poets also give us an insight into the depths of the eternal
contradiction between love and marriage. Who does not know the saying of
the idealistic and optimistic Schiller: “Mit dem Gürtel, mit dem
Schleier reisst der schöne Wahn entzwei”--“With the girdle, with the
veil (of marriage), the beautiful illusion is torn to pieces”? Consider,
also, the horribly clear characterization of the pessimistic Byron (in
“Don Juan,” canto iii., stanzas 5-8):
V.
“’Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign
Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime.
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine--
A sad, sour, sober beverage--by time
Is sharpen’d from its high, celestial flavour,
Down to a very homely household savour.
VI.
“There’s something of antipathy, as ’twere,
Between their present and their future state;
A kind of flattery that’s hardly fair
Is used until the truth arrives too late--
Yet what can people do, except despair?
The same things change their names at such a rate;
For instance--passion in a lover’s glorious,
But in a husband is pronounced uxorious.
VII.
“Men grow ashamed of being so very fond;
They sometimes also get a little tired
(But that, of course, is rare), and then despond;
The same things cannot always be admired,
Yet ’tis “so nominated in the bond,”
That both are tied till one shall have expired.
Sad thought! to lose the spouse that was adorning
Our days, and put one’s servants into mourning.
VIII.
“There’s doubtless something in domestic doings,
Which forms, in fact, true love’s antithesis;
Romances paint at full length people’s wooings,
But only give a bust of marriages;
For no one cares for matrimonial cooings,
There’s nothing wrong in a connubial kiss.
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?”
It is significant that those who most praise marriage are young people
who do not know marriage from experience, but have failed to find true
happiness in celibacy. We think of the words of Socrates, that it is a
matter of indifference whether a man marries or does not marry, for in
either case he will regret it.
Our own time is certainly characterized by hostility to marriage. It is
the =form= of modern marriage which frightens most people; the
compulsion which has actually been rendered more stringent by the new
Civil Code of 1900. Modern individualism draws back from the undeniable
=loss of freedom= which legal marriage entails. The shadow which,
according to a saying of E. Dühring, indissoluble marriage has thrown
upon love and upon the nobler aspects of the sexual life, is darker
to-day than ever before.
Hence the growing disinclination to marry, which, significantly enough,
is increasingly manifest upon the part of women; hence, above all, the
=extraordinary increase in divorce=.
According to a statement in the _Vossische Zeitung_ (No. 137, March 22,
1906), the number of divorces in Germany underwent a =marked= increase
in the year 1904. In that year there were 10,882 divorces; in 1903,
9,932; in 1902, 9,074; thus in the year 1904 there was an increase of
590, or 9·6 per cent.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, a marked increase in the
number of divorces was already discernible. For instance, in the years
1894-1899 the number rose from 7,502 to 9,433. It was at that time
believed that the increase depended upon the fact that in most of the
countries of the German Confederation the new Civil Code made divorce
more difficult, and that for this reason as many people as possible were
seeking divorce before the new Code came into action. It is true that
the number of divorces diminished after the Civil Code passed into
operation. In the year 1900 the divorces numbered 7,922, and in the year
1901, 7,892. =Since then, however, there has once more been a marked
increase=, so that =the figure for the year 1904 is 2,990 in excess of
that for the year 1901, an increase of 38 per cent=. This increase is
principally to be referred to the fact that the so-called =relative
grounds for divorce=, enumerated in § 1568 of the Civil Code,[182]
appear to have justified a great number of demands for divorce. The
marked extensibility of the sections of this paragraph leaves the judge
very wide discretion in its application.
To what an extent the increase in the number of divorces influences the
existing marriages is seen as soon as we compare the number of divorces
with the number of marriages. It appears that in the years 1900 and
1901, for every 10,000 marriages, there were 8·1 divorces; in 1902, 9·3
divorces; in 1903, 10·1 divorces; and in 1904, 11·1 divorces. Thus in
the year 1904, there were 3 more divorces per 10,000 marriages than in
the year 1901.
I have already referred to the enormous importance of divorce in
relation to the recognition on the part of the State of the temporary
character of every marriage, whereby, in principle, free love, which is
no more than a temporary marriage, receives a civil justification, and
is legitimized. This fact stands out still more clearly when we
recognize the legal possibility of =repeated= divorces on the part of
one and the same person. Numerous actual examples of this can be given.
Thus a well-known author was divorced no less than =four= times, and of
his four wives one, on her side, had been divorced by other men. Two
divorces on both sides are by no means rare. If we consider the matter
openly and unemotionally, it must be admitted that this is nothing else
than the much-opposed “free love,” the bugbear of all honest
Philistines, =a free love which has already received the official
sanction of the State=.
When four or five divorces are possible to the same individual by
official decree, when, that is to say, this procedure has received civil
sanction, the number may for theoretical purposes be multiplied at
discretion.
He who knows human nature, he who knows that the consciousness of
freedom in mature human beings--and only such should enter upon
marriage--strengthens and confirms the =consciousness of duty=--such a
one need not fear the introduction of free marriage. On the contrary, it
may be assumed that divorces would be far less common than they are in
the case of coercive marriage.
According to the Civil Code, divorces are obtainable on the ground of
adultery, hazard to life, malicious abandonment, ill-treatment, mental
disorder, legally punishable offences, dishonourable and immoral
conduct, serious disregard of conjugal duties. As we saw, the last
clause empowered the judge in difficult cases, by a humane, reasonable
interpretation of the idea “disregard of conjugal duties,” to pronounce
a divorce. It is obvious that in every divorce the interests of the
=children= of the marriage (if any) must be especially safeguarded.
Marriage in France, to which hitherto the clauses of the Code Napoléon,
analogous to those of our Civil Code, have been applicable, is said to
have recently undergone reform, both in respect of moral and of legal
rights. In Paris there has been constituted a standing “Committee of
Marriage Reform,” composed of well-known authors, jurists, and women,
among the number being Pierre Louys, Marcel Prevost, Judge Magnaud,
Octave Mirbeau, Maeterlinck, Henri Bataille, Henri Coulon, and Poincaré.
In an address to the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate by the President
of this Committee, Henri Coulon, in which he gives the reasons for
desiring a change in the present marriage laws,[183] he says:
“It would be childish to disguise the fact that the institution of
marriage has entered upon a critical phase; philosophers and novelists
lay odds on the complete disappearance of the institution. In this,
perhaps, they go too far. But it is none the less true that it is a
matter of profound interest and importance to reform the institution
of marriage. Granted this, how shall we begin?
“The entrance into marriage must be made as easy as possible; in this
way the number of marriages which are based upon love will rapidly
increase. Then, the married pair must have =equal rights, equal
duties=, and =equal responsibilities=; in this way marriage will
become more practical and less immoral than it is at present.
Finally--and this is the most important of all--it is necessary =to
facilitate divorce=. Divorce will then become the worthy separation of
two thinking beings, and will no longer be the disgusting comedy that
it is at the present day.
“For those determined to live apart, for those whose morals are loose,
indissoluble marriage itself is no longer a bond. Absolute freedom is
no hindrance to conjugal fidelity and constancy; on the contrary,
=freedom is the cause of constancy=.
“Divorce is not happiness, but it is a help towards happiness. For two
human beings who hate one another to continue to live together is a
much greater evil than divorce. Certainly it would be preferable if
husband and wife could continue to love one another as they did during
the first days of their married life; that they should love their
children and be honoured by them. But since humanity is not free from
faults and vices, this does not always happen. Divorce, as we wish for
it, makes marriage worthier and more profound. Such marriages will be
better suited to the new social movements and to the modern spirit.
“=The civil equality of the two sexes must be a fundamental principle
of modern law.= The French Civil Code already recognizes for both
sexes equal rights in some respects; but the wife still loses a
certain portion of her rights in the moment that she marries. She is
in fact rendered incapable of business. The contrast between the
incapacity for business of the married woman and the capacity for
business of the unmarried is one of the characteristic traits of our
legislation.
“Divorce, as it now exists, contradicts the indissolubility of the
marriage bond demanded by the Church. Adultery should only be regarded
as a ground for divorce, and should not exonerate the murderer who
kills his adulterous wife or her accomplice.
“We demand the abolition of the punishment for adultery, because
prosecutions of this character arise either from revengeful feelings
or from litigiousness.”
Justice demands that with this facilitation of divorce, as advocated in
the French scheme of marriage reform, there should be associated
=increased= security for the care of the dependent wife and children
after divorce. In this connexion, =conjugal responsibility= is merely a
part of =sexual responsibility= in general. If two independent, free
individuals have sexual relations one with the other, in or out of
marriage, they thereby both undertake in respect of their =own persons=
and of all possible =offspring=, the duty and the responsibility which
are the outcome of a natural instinctive feeling, namely, “the sense of
sexual responsibility.” This must dominate the entire sexual life of
every human being, as a categorical imperative. In this is to be found
the necessary ethical counterpoise to the activity of boundless sexual
egoism.
For the love of the future and its social regulation, the three
following conditions appear to me to be determinative; they form a part
also of the French programme of marriage reform:
1. =Equal rights, equal duties, equal responsibilities on the part of
husband and wife.=
2. =Facilitation of divorce.=
3. =Individual freedom to be regarded as preferable to coercion. Freedom
best promotes constancy in love.=[184]
If these principles were strictly carried out in practical life, without
doubt, and as a matter of absolute certainty, the number of divorces
would not increase, but would diminish, and we should sooner witness the
realization of the ideal of true marriage, as the lifelong union of two
free personalities, fully conscious of their duties and their rights.
The high ethical and social significance of family life will ever
continue, even under the freest love, by which, as I must again and
again insist, I do not understand unrestricted and continually changing
extra-conjugal sexual intercourse. Against this the gravest
considerations must be urged. What “free love” is, is already apparent
from the preceding exposition, but in the next chapter the subject will
be more thoroughly discussed.
APPENDIX
ONE HUNDRED TYPICAL MARRIAGES AND SOME CHARACTERISTIC PICTURES OF THE
MARRIED STATE, AFTER GROSS-HOFFINGER
In a long-forgotten, but very interesting, book by Dr. Anton J.
Gross-Hoffinger, entitled “The Fate of Women, and Prostitution in
Relation to the Principle of the Indissolubility of Catholic Marriage,
and especially in Relation to the Laws of Austria and the Philosophy of
our Time,”[185] we find a collection, equally interesting to
psychologists and to students of human character, to the physician, the
jurist, and the sociologist, of a hundred typical marriages, and also a
more detailed description of the course of a few marriages. These
sketches deserve to be preserved from oblivion, because they will serve
equally well as an example of marriages of our time.
In the first place, the author discusses the principal difficulties of
marriage. He then asks whether, in view of the smallness of the number
of those comparatively happy persons who have found it possible to live
a legal and at the same time a natural family life, the existing
marriage laws, religious ideas, and social customs have attained their
aim, whether they give rise, as a general rule, to happy and fruitful,
honourable and blessed unions. The author hesitated long before
presenting for the first time “to the Catholic world the picture of the
actual state of marriages in that world, a picture based upon numerous
experiences and observations.” He investigated one hundred marriages of
persons belonging to the most diverse classes, without selection, as
they came under his observation by chance; then, again, another hundred,
and once again a third hundred. Always the results were equally sad;
always the ratio between happy and unhappy marriages was the same. The
result of his investigations was, he states:
“Although I have earnestly sought for happy marriages, my search has
to this extent been vain, that I have never been able to satisfy
myself that =happy= marriages are anything but =extremely isolated
exceptions to the general rule=.”
In his view this is not the unhappy result of erroneous observation, but
depends upon exact observation during a long series of years, and in
conditions which brought him into intimate relationship with numbers of
persons in all classes of society.
Thus, after a long, difficult, and careful investigation into a
=hundred= marriages among persons of different classes, he obtained the
following results, here briefly summarized:
Upper Classes.
1. The marriage not unhappy, wife suffering from disorder arousing
suspicion of syphilis; conjugal fidelity of the husband prior to the
occurrence of this illness doubtful. Children sickly.
2. Both parties to the marriage happy =in advanced age=, after the
husband had lived freely.
3. Both parties happy =in advanced age=--childless.
4. Husband impotent, wife unhappy.
5. Husband an old man, wife =unfaithful=.
6. Husband and wife apparently happy--children scrofulous.
7. The husband removed from home by circumstances, wife unfaithful.
8. Both parties unhappy, the husband a libertine.
9. Both parties apparently content in advanced age.
10. Husband a dissolute old libertine, wife unhappy, but resigned--no
children.
11. Condition precisely similar to No. 10.
12. A happy mésalliance.
13. The husband phlegmatically happy, wife dissolute, children ill,
mother sickly.
14. Husband dissipated, wife resigned. Husband and wife have come to
an understanding.
15. Husband a libertine, wife a Messalina. Both parties syphilitic.
Children sickly.
16. Both parties unhealthy and miserable. Husband dissipated, coarse.
Wife ill, in a decline.
17. Husband a coarse libertine, wife separated from him and unhappy.
Upper-Middle Classes.
18. Both parties unhappy. Husband impotent. Wife, who is elderly, a
Messalina. Marriage childless and unceasingly stormy.
19. Both parties tolerably happy, owing to gentleness and
good-heartedness. Husband a sensualist and unfaithful. Wife faithful,
ailing.
20. Both parties unhappy. Incessant domestic warfare in the house.
21. Phlegmatic rich husband, poor suffering wife--marriage
childless--happily, as it seems.
22. Both parties in very advanced age, apparently happy. Their past
doubtful. Scrofulous children.
23. Childless marriage between a former high-class mistress and a
dissolute man.
24. An apparently happy marriage between a still young husband and an
elderly wife. The former compensates himself secretly.
25. Unhappy marriage. Both parties unsatisfied. Husband dissolute.
Wife resigned.
26. Happy marriage.
27. Doubtfully happy marriage.
28. Extremely unhappy marriage. Husband a libertine, unprincipled;
wife half insane; children syphilitic.
29. Unhappy marriage, the husband formerly somewhat fickle, the wife
unforgiving.
30. =Happy marriage.= Both parties immoral, dissolute; the wife
carries on secret prostitution with the knowledge of the husband, who
on his side keeps several mistresses. They take matters
philosophically!
31. The husband a libertine and seducer by profession, the wife
separated from him.
32. Happy marriage. The husband inclined to gallantry, without being
absolutely dissolute. Wife gentle, patient, fond of her husband, and
faithful.
33. The husband ill as the result of dissipation, the wife frivolous.
Indifferent marriage.
34. The husband made happy by means of his wife’s money, but neglects
her; she is very ill, wasting away. Childless marriage.
35. Husband impotent. Wife, with knowledge of her husband, on intimate
terms with a friend of the family. In its way a happy marriage.
36. Dissolute husband, dissolute wife, both shameless and
=free-thinking=--in mutual indifference they =seem= fairly happy.
37. Husband old and sickly, a worn-out libertine. The wife on intimate
terms with a friend of the house. =Happy marriage!=
38. Unhappy marriage. Husband phlegmatic, wife extremely passionate
and voluptuous.
39. Unhappy marriage. A worthless speculator who led astray the wife
of a wealthy man and then deserted her. Childless.
40. Husband debilitated by excesses; wife immoral. =Happy marriage!=
41. Husband debilitated by excesses; wife patient. =Happy marriage!=
42. A similar state of affairs.
43. Happy marriage. Both parties still very young, untried.
44. Happy marriage. Husband phlegmatic--wife faithful.
45. Husband debilitated by excesses, wife rich. At the moment, a happy
marriage.
Professional and Trading Classes.
46. Happy marriage. The husband phlegmatic and =seldom= unfaithful;
wife forbearing, good, and faithful.
47. Happy marriage. Both parties rich and young. Husband, without his
wife’s knowledge, loves the joys of Venus.
48. Unhappy marriage. An enforced marriage of prudence. The husband
lives with a concubine, wife separated from him.
49. Unhappy marriage. Poverty, jealousy, and childlessness.
50. Happy marriage, owing to the forbearance and consideration of the
wife towards the sullen, irascible husband.
51. Unhappy marriage. Husband lives happily with a concubine, the wife
unhappily with a false friend.
52. Unhappy marriage. Phlegmatic husband, immoral wife, continuous
quarrelling.
53. Unhappy marriage. The husband henpecked, impotent. The wife
masterful, quarrelsome, and ill-tempered.
54. Husband and wife have separated.
55. Happy marriage. The husband is good-humoured and deceived; the
wife a sensual libertine; children sickly; wife incurably ill.
56. Happy marriage. The husband a worn-out debauchee, the wife a
worn-out prostitute. Both incurably ill, for the same reason.
57. Happy marriage, happy from necessity and phlegm.
58. Happy marriage. The husband, a swindler, does everything possible
for those dependent on him. The wife, formerly a prostitute, is happy
in consequence of his care.
59. A happy, artistic marriage. Happy on account of mutual laxity and
accommodation.
60. Similar circumstances.
61. Happy marriage. The husband conceals his diversions with success.
Wife faithful and always gentle.
62. Unhappy marriage. Light conduct on both sides, with usual results.
63. Happy marriage. The conjugal fidelity of the husband not above
suspicion.
64. }
} Similar circumstances.
65. }
66. Unhappy marriage. A marriage of prudence. The husband set himself
up with his wife’s money, but spends it on light women; the wife
revenges herself by boundless ill-temper.
67. Unhappy marriage. Marriage of prudence. The young husband settled
in business on the money of his elderly wife; she nags, and he is
drinking himself to death.
68. Marriage happy owing to =avarice= on both sides.
69. Marriage compulsorily happy owing to =poverty= on both sides.
70. Happy marriage! Husband a drunkard. Wife avaricious. Childless.
71. Husband and wife are separated; the husband abandoned his wife to
poverty and prostitution.
72. Unhappy marriage. Husband impotent, wife lustful. Continued
unhappiness.
73. Young married pair; wife mistress of a wealthy Jew, who supports
the family.
74. Unhappy marriage. Husband dissolute, no longer cares for his wife;
the latter incurably ill; children syphilitic.
75. Unhappy marriage. Both parties sickly and poor.
76. A marriage of speculation. Husband has sold his wife three times
to different wealthy men; in this way he makes his living.
77. Immoral marriage. The husband lives by a swindling industry. The
wife lives on a pension given by one whose mistress she formerly
was--children brought up to prostitution.
78. Easy-going marriage. Husband formerly a domestic servant, now in
business; wife formerly a prostitute who had saved money. Childless.
79. Happy marriage, between a fool and a clever woman.
80. Unhappy marriage. The husband dislikes his wife, is plagued to
death by her; she brought the property into the house.
81. Dissipated husband, dissipated wife, separated from one another.
The children scrofulous.
82. Impotent husband, licentious wife, sickly children; angry and
stormy scenes.
83. Worn-out libertine, young wife; the parties are not unhappy, owing
to affluence and freedom from cares.
84. Artistic marriage. Wife the mistress of a great man. The household
goes on comfortably.
Lower Classes.
85. Dissolute husband. Formerly well-to-do, owing to his wife’s dowry,
now reduced with her to beggary. Living by a trifling commission
business. Wife sickly. Children dead.
86. Marriage happy, in consequence of great poverty.
87. A procurer’s family.
88. =Happy marriage.= Husband a thief, wife a prostitute.
89. The marriage unhappy in consequence of poverty.
90. Unhappy marriage. The husband a drinker, the wife working amid
trouble and poverty.
91. Unhappy marriage. Poverty, misunderstanding, jealousy, and
illness.
92. A family of servants. Wife and daughter at the disposal of the
master.
93. Unhappy marriage. Frequent brawls. Mutual mistrust, hatred, and
contempt.
94. Unhappy marriage. Upright husband deceived by his wife, and, in
consequence of great poverty, is unable to control her.
95. Unhappy marriage. Husband has run away.
96. Immoral marriage. Husband, wife, and children live on the wages of
unchastity.
97. }
}
98. }Miserable marriages, which ended in the poor-house.
}
99. }
100. A happy pair, who had endured all the severe trials of life, had
forgiven each other everything, and never abandoned one another, a
=virtuous= marriage in the noblest sense.
Thus, among these hundred marriages there were:
Unhappy, about 48
Indifferent 36
Unquestionably happy 15
Virtuous 1
Virtuous and orthodox --
Further, among these hundred marriages there were:
Intentionally immoral 14
Dissolute and libertine 51
Altogether above suspicion ?
Further:
Wives who were ill owing to the husband’s fault 30
Wives who were ill not owing to the husband’s fault 30
Wives who were unhappy, and had themselves to
blame for it 12
Among these hundred marriages only one was happy owing to mutual
faithfulness; all the other slightly happy marriages, if one may call
them so, were so only because the wife did not disturb herself with
regard to the question of her husband’s faithfulness.
From these statistics Gross-Hoffinger draws the following conclusions:
1. About =one-half= of all marriages are =absolutely unhappy=.
2. Much more than one-half of all marriages are obviously
=demoralized=.
3. The morality of the remaining smaller moiety is preserved only by
avoiding questions regarding the husband’s faithfulness.
4. Fifteen per cent. of all marriages live on the earnings of
professional unchastity and procurement.
5. The number of orthodox marriages which are entirely above every
suspicion of marital infidelity (assuming the existence of complete
sexual potency) is in the eyes of every reasonable man, who understands
the demands which Nature makes, and the violence of those demands,
=equivalent to nil=. Hence the =ecclesiastical= purpose of marriage is
=generally=, =fundamentally=, and =completely evaded=.
“No =compulsion=,” thus concludes the author, “is more unnatural than
that of the Catholic (Protestant, Jewish, Greek Orthodox) religion, by
which is prescribed a compulsory continuance of marriage, with its
fantastic code and ridiculous conjugal duties and rights.
“First of all, this compulsion--this sacrament of marriage--marriage
which is nothing, can be nothing, =according to nature= should be
nothing, but =a free union and a civil arrangement=--results in the
=avoidance of marriage=.
“Secondly, it results that in marriage the purposes of marriage are
not and cannot be completely fulfilled.
“Thirdly, that marriage has ceased to be the natural marriage which it
should be, and has become merely a business, a speculation, or a
hospital for invalids.”
In illustration of this proposition, Gross-Hoffinger finally describes
from life twenty-four marriages, some of which, being especially
interesting, we will here record.
1.
Countess B., owing to unavoidable difficulties, was unable to contract
a suitable marriage, and attained the age of thirty whilst still
unmarried. The result of this was she gave herself to a servant,
consequently became infected, and died of syphilis some months after
she had, finally, married. Her husband was left with an unhappy
memorial of this brief marriage.
2.
Count C., a man of high rank, lost his beloved wife through death.
Circumstances made it impossible for him to marry again. He was afraid
of acquiring venereal disorders, and therefore abstained from natural
connexion. Through lack of natural sexual gratification his sexual
impulse became perverse, and he took to the practice of Greek love.
3.
Prince D., young, impotent, concluded a marriage of convenience with a
beautiful, very passionate lady, who, on account of her husband’s
impotence, compensated herself with domestic servants, members of her
retinue, and cavalry soldiers, and gave birth in these conditions to
several children, which inherited the title of the putative father. In
such circumstances the marriage has been very unhappy, but necessity
compels the husband to bear his fate with patience.
4.
Count E., in other respects a man of fine character, made a marriage
of convenience with a lady of good family, who, however, was not in a
position to make him happy. From natural nobility of character, he was
unwilling to distress his unhappy wife by entering openly into
relations with a concubine, and therefore sought sexual gratification
with prostitutes. He became infected, and transmitted the illness to
his wife, who became seriously ill, and gave birth to diseased
children. Although the poor sufferer is unaware of the origin of her
troubles, and bears them with patience; although her husband takes all
possible care of her, and does his best to bring about the restoration
of her health; the marriage, owing to the uneasy conscience of the
husband and the physical suffering of the wife, is obviously a very
unhappy one.
5.
Baron F., a man of wide influence, in youth a libertine--frivolous,
and of an emotional disposition, insusceptible to finer feelings,
contracted successively four marriages of convenience, which in all
cases terminated in the death of the wife. There is reason to believe
that the unceasing libertinism and unscrupulous conduct of the husband
had shortened the life of his wives--and this is all the more probable
because all the Baron’s children are sickly and scrofulous.
6.
Count G., dissipated libertine, wasted his property in wild
extravagance, and compelled his wife to live apart from him, whilst he
spent enormous sums on professional singers and dancers and common
prostitutes. Being ruined as completely financially as physically, he
was despised by persons of all classes, persecuted by his creditors,
and absolutely detested by his wife. Although his pleasures consist
chiefly in reminiscences, he still devotes enormous sums to them, the
money being obtained by a continued increase in his debts.
7.
Count H. has been married for many years, but lives on the most
unpleasant terms with his wife, and devotes his spare time to the
society of prostitutes. The scum of the street form his favourite
associates; but his voluptuous adventures carry him also into family
life, and no respectable middle-class wife or girl, however innocent,
is safe from his advances, which are all the more incredible because
he is quite an old man and completely impotent. He uses all possible
means to make the woman of his choice compliant--presents, promises,
threats.
8.
Dr. S., husband of an immoral wife, public official, libertine,
philosopher, enjoying a small secured income. Lives with his wife on a
footing which permits both parties unlimited freedom. The worthy
couple devote their whole energies to earning money by their industry,
in part by secret prostitution on the part of the wife, in part by
direct and indirect procurement by the holding of piquant evening
parties for youthful members of the aristocracy. The family has an
extraordinary vogue. Persons of high position are engaged in
confidential intercourse with them; young girls of the better classes
gladly attend their soirées, since there they meet the élite of the
young aristocracy, rich Jews, and officers. This interesting pair get
through an almost incredible amount of money; they keep a magnificent
carriage, they have a country house, a valuable collection of
pictures, etc. It is only from their servants that both of them
receive little respect, since the male portion of the household
subserve the lustful desires of the wife, the female domestics those
of the husband, and all must be initiated into the secrets of the
household industry.
9.
Dr. U. was till recently an old bachelor, who had never wished to
share his property with a wife and children, and found it much cheaper
and more agreeable to impregnate servant-girls and other neglected
characters than to keep a mistress, or to seek his pleasures in the
street. Finally, becoming infirm at sixty-two years of age, and
needing nursing, on account of an occasional gouty swelling of the
leg, he discovered that it was not good for man to be alone. Having
rank and wealth, it would have been easy for him to find a young and
pretty girl who, under the title of wife, would have undertaken to
play the part of sick nurse. But the old practitioner knew too well
the value of what he had to offer to throw himself away on a poor
girl. He considered that it would be reasonable to choose such a
partner that he would not be obliged to divide his income, and to find
some one to take care of him in his old age who would cost him nothing
at all, but would rather provide for her own needs. He thought less,
therefore, of youth than of property, less of beauty than of thrifty
habits; and finally found an old maid, a woman with some property,
who, on account of a somewhat unattractive exterior, had failed to
obtain a husband. Now one can see the prudent husband, who is as
faithful to his wife as the gout is faithful to him, walking from time
to time in the street on the arm of his life companion, whose aspect
is somewhat discontented. She still wears the same clothes which she
wore before her marriage, and which have a sufficiently shabby
appearance, but she endures her lot with patience, because she is now
greeted as “gnädige Frau,” and people kiss her hand, as they did not
do formerly.
10.
Count J., a man of unblemished character, lived for some time a happy
married life. The increasing age of the wife, however, associated with
the exceptional constitution of the Count, whose youth seemed
remarkably enduring, led to scenes of jealousy, which embittered the
life of both. We can hardly suppose that this jealousy is altogether
unfounded; but surely it is a matter for regret that two human beings
of distinctly noble character should by marriage be exposed to
lifelong unhappiness.
11.
Herr von K., a young merchant in the wholesale trade, is married to
the daughter of a man of position, and the wife by a rich dowry helped
to found her husband’s fortunes; hence she enjoys the distinction over
other wives that her husband pretends a great tenderness for her, and
conceals his indiscretions with the greatest possible care. For this
reason, she has always been devoted to him; she regards him as the
example for all other husbands, as a true phenomenon in the midst of
an utterly depraved world of immoral men. And as an actual fact, if
one sees this man, how he lives in appearance only for his business,
with what delicate modesty he avoids any conversation about loose
women, if one hears him zealously preach against husbands who deceive
their wives, how inconceivable it is to him that a man should find any
pleasure in immoral women--one would be willing to swear that he is
everything that his wife enthusiastically describes him to be. But
some wags amongst his acquaintances, by taking incredible pains,
discovered that this honourable merchant had no less than =seven
mistresses=, two of whom belonged to the class of prostitutes, two to
the class of grisettes; the remaining three had been decent
middle-class women. To these last he presented himself under various
names and in the most diverse forms--now as attaché to an embassy, now
as an officer, now as a journeyman mechanic. To all these latter
mistresses he had promised marriage, and by a succession of presents,
oaths, and lies, he had in each case attained his end, and thereafter
abandoned them without remorse to the consequences of the adventure,
whilst he himself set out to seek in a fresh quarter of the town new
sacrifices for the altar of his lusts. Since he never had anything to
do with known prostitutes and procuresses, but by personal pains
provided the materials for his pleasures, he succeeded both as a
merchant and as a husband in preserving the reputation of a man free
from illicit passion and deserving of all confidence.
12.
Major W., a distinguished officer, a man of honour in every respect,
had in youth married a chambermaid, naturally, as one can imagine,
from pure inclination. But the marriage remained barren, because the
wife suffered from organic troubles; and soon her sexual powers were
completely extinguished. Whilst the husband still remained virile, the
wife was already an old woman, suffering from spasmodic and other
affections, surrounded always by medicine-bottles and medical
appliances, always ill-humoured and nagging, a true torment for the
good-natured and amiable husband. The latter bears with Christian
patience and inexhaustible love the ill-humour of his wife; but Nature
is less pliable than his kind heart: his conjugal tenderness
diminishes, and his ardent temperament seeks other outlets for the
gratification of his natural sexual desires. The sick wife notices
this coolness, and revenges herself by a refined cruelty. She knows
that sulkiness on her part makes him ill and miserable; she therefore
afflicts him with coldness of manner, and by jealousy and ill-temper
she makes his life a hell. There occur horrible scenes of domestic
brawling, which more than once have led the husband to attempt to end
his troubles by suicide. He suffers in a threefold fashion: by the
continued irritation of his healthy natural impulse, by the illnesses
he contracts in gratifying that impulse, and by the sorrows of his
really loved wife. He imposes upon himself a voluntary celibacy in
order that he may not make her ill; but this sacrifice does not
suffice, it does not make his wife gentler towards him. She demands
from him, tacitly, all the ardency of the bridegroom; there is no
rescue possible from this inferno. The husband surrenders himself to a
quiet despair. He is faithful in his vocation; he lives only for the
wife, who torments him continually. The neighbours see a very
unedifying example of an extremely unhappy marriage, originally
contracted as a pure love match, and none the less entailing martyrdom
alike on husband and wife.
NOTE.--That in Vienna the conjugal conditions so graphically described
in the above extracts are still much the same as formerly, and that
marriage needs and marriage lies are there exceptionally painful is
shown by the foundation in Vienna of a “Society for Marriage Reform,”
which sent to the Assembly of German Jurists, meeting at Kiel in the
beginning of September, 1906, the telegraphic request that they would
undertake a revision of Austrian marriage law, since hitherto no cure
had been found for unhappy marriage in Austria, no divorce was possible,
and those who had obtained a judicial separation could, according to
Canon Law, sue one another on account of adultery (_cf._ _Neue Freie
Presse_, No. 15108, September 13, 1906). It is hardly credible, but,
according to a report in the _Berlin Aerzte-Correspondenz_, 1907, No. 8,
it is true, that the Medical Court of Honour for the town of Berlin and
the province of Brandenburg, in the year of our Lord 1906, punished
physicians on the ground of adultery!
[155] P. Näcke, one of the most trustworthy authorities on sexual
anthropology, writes as follows: “That in ancient times, before
monogamy, there was polygamy, or even a state resembling promiscuity,
=is very probable= (Westermarck notwithstanding), =and can, in fact,
be assumed a priori=” (“Einiges zur Frauenfrage und zur sexuellen
Abstinenz”--“A Contribution to the Woman’s Question and to the Problem
of Sexual Abstinence”), published in the _Archiv f.
Kriminalanthropologie_, vol. xiv., p. 52 (Hans Gross, 1903). _Cf._
also Lohsing’s “Zustimmung zur Annahme einer ursprünglichen
Promiscuität,” _ibid._, vol. xvi., p. 332.
The question of sexual promiscuity has recently been further
considered by P. Näcke (“Earliest Beginnings of Human Society,” in
_Die Umschau_ of August 17, 1907). He believes that the state of pure
promiscuity lasted a short time only, and gave place to certain nuclei
of family structure, a kind of semi-promiscuity, which, prior to the
complete development of the family union, lasted much longer than the
state of pure promiscuity. Still, these earliest families were merely
temporary, and only later became fixed and permanent. This assumption,
however, does not affect the fact of a primordial pure promiscuity.
Näcke himself also recognizes promiscuity as the natural state of
primitive man.
[156] H. Schurtz, “Altersklassen und Männerbünde: eine Darstellung der
Grundformen der Gesellschaft”--“Age Classes and Associations of Men: a
Demonstration of the Fundamental Forms of Society,” p. 176 (Berlin,
1902).
[157] N. Melnikow, “The Buryats of the District of Irkutsk,” published
in the Transactions of the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology,
and Primeval History, p. 440 (1899).
[158] Marco Polo, translated by Yule, 2nd edition, vol. ii., pp. 38,
39 (London, 1875).
[159] _Cf._ my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 165-169.
[160] _Cf._, regarding group-marriage, the writings of Joseph Kehler,
more particularly “Zur Urgeschichte der Ehe”--“The Primitive History
of Marriage” (Stuttgart, 1897); “Rechtsphilosophie und
Naturrecht”--“The Philosophy of Law and Natural Right,” published in
Holtzendorff-Kohler’s “Encyklopädie der Rechtswissenschaft,” pp. 27-36
(Leipzig, 1902); “Die Gruppenehe”--“Group-Marriage,” in “Aus Kultur
und Leben,” pp. 22-29 (Berlin, 1904); finally the chapter on
“Group-Marriage” by Schurtz (_op. cit._). [A quite modern instance of
group-marriage was the Oneida community, “a league of two hundred
persons to regard their children as ‘common.’” For an account of the
Oneida experiment see Noyes, “A History of American
Socialisms.”--TRANSLATOR.]
[161] J. J. Bachofen, “Das Mutterrecht”--“Matriarchy” (Stuttgart,
1861).
[162] Ludwig Stein, “Die Anfänge der Kultur”--“The Beginnings of
Civilization”--pp. 106, 107.
[163] Eduard von Mayer, “Die Lebensgesetze der Kultur”--“The Vital
Laws of Civilization”--p. 210.
[164] G. F. W. Hegel, “Fundamental Outlines of the Philosophy of Law,
or Natural Rights and Political Science in Outline,” edited by Eduard
Gans, second edition, p. 218 (Berlin, 1840).
[165] That is to say, it is not sufficient to replace the father-right
by the mother-right, as, for example, Ruth Bré demands (“The Children
of the State, or the Mother-Right?” Leipzig, 1904).
[166] There is a most apposite remark in one of George Meredith’s
novels. He imagines that an Oriental vizier (from a Mohammedan
country) is visiting our “Christian” capital, and late one evening,
after a dinner-party at a distinguished house, walks homeward by way
of Piccadilly. He asks, and is told, who are the numerous ladies
walking the streets at that late hour. “_I perceive_” said the vizier,
“_that monogamic society has a decent visage and a hideous
rear_.”--TRANSLATOR.
[167] M. Nordau, “The Conventional Lies of our Civilization,” pp.
263-317 (Leipzig, 1884).
[168] Georg Hirth estimates the percentage of marriages of convenience
as even higher--viz., 90 per cent. _Cf._ his “Ways to Love,” p. 607.
[169] _Cf._ my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 165-174; vol. ii., pp. 190, 191, 208, 209,
363, 364.
[170] Schopenhauer’s Collected Works, edited by E. Grisebach, vol.
ii., p. 1337 (Leipzig, 1905).
[171] Ernest Stiedenroth, “Psychologie zur Erklärung der
Seelenerscheinungen,” pp. 224, 225 (Berlin, 1825).
[172] Max Nordau, “Conventional Lies,” p. 305.
[173] _Cf._ in this connexion the feuilleton of the _Vossische
Zeitung_, No. 286, June 17, 1904. Jean Paul, also, was an enthusiast
in theory and practice for such double love. He called it
“simultaneous love.” The idea of simultaneous love has also been
employed in a recently published French novel, “A la Merci de
l’Heure,” by Jean Tarbel (Paris, 1907). The heroine has need of two
lovers--a celebrated literary professor for head and heart, and in
addition, a young physician for the gratification of her sensual
needs. Contrariwise, Knut Hamsun, in “Pan,” and Guy de Maupassant in
“Notre Cœur,” describe the double love of a man for a woman of the
world and for a child of Nature.
[174] Friederich Schleiermacher, “Philosophic and Other Writings,”
vol. i., p. 473 (Berlin, 1846).
[175] _Cf._ Eduard von Hartmann, “Philosophie des Unbewussten,” p.
205. In a French collection--“L’Amour par les Grands Écrivains,” by
Julien Lemer, p. 14 (Paris, 1861)--we find the saying, “Ordinairement,
lorsqu’on se marie par amour, il vient ensuite de la haine; c’est que
j’ai vu de mes yeux” (“Ordinarily, when one marries for love, hate
takes its place. I have seen it with my own eyes”).
[176] _B. Z. am Mittag_, No. 210, September 7, 1906.
[177] “Annales d’Hygiène Publique,” 1900, p. 340.
[178] Elard H. Meyer, “Deutsche Volkskunde,” p. 166 (Strasburg, 1898).
[179] Ludwig Stein, “Der Sinn des Daseins”--“The Sense of Existence,”
p. 235 (Tübingen and Leipzig, 1904).
[180] H. Th. Buckle, “History of Civilization in England.”
[181] G. Schmoller, “Elements of General Political Economy,” vol. i.,
p. 250 (Leipzig, 1901).
[182] § 1568 runs: “A husband or wife can sue for divorce when the
wife or husband =by serious disregard of the duties entailed by
marriage=, or by dishonourable or immoral conduct, has brought about
so profound a disorder of the conjugal relationship that to the
offended party the continuation of the marriage appears impossible.
Gross ill-treatment is also to be regarded as a serious infringement
of these duties.” It is clear that the emphasized passage is capable
of manifold interpretations, and it thus compensates for the abolition
of the earlier grounds for divorce based upon incompatibility of
temper.
[183] Taken from the newspaper _Le Jour_, No. 337, July 6, 1906.
[184] Compare Browning’s lines, in “James Lee’s Wife”:
“How the light, light love, he has wings to fly
At suspicion of a bond.”--TRANSLATOR.
[185] “Die Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution im Zusammenhange
mit dem Prinzip der Unauflösbarkeit der katholischen Ehe und besonders
der österreichischen Gesetzgebung und der Philosophie des Zeitalters”
(Leipzig, 1847).
CHAPTER XI
FREE LOVE
“_The transformation of coercive marriage into a free and equal
marriage, one more closely approaching perfection, both naturally and
morally, can only be effected in conjunction with social arrangements
providing for the complete economic independence of woman, and giving
security for her material means of subsistence. Unless this
indispensable preliminary is fulfilled, the highest ideal of free
morality will be debased to the level of a gross caricature._”--E.
DÜHRING.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XI
Free love as a burning question of our time -- Definition -- Free love
not equivalent to extra-conjugal sexual intercourse -- Defamation of
free love and sanction of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse by the
coercive-marriage-morality -- The immoral duplex morality for man and
woman -- Its momentous influence upon the sexual corruption of the
present day -- Free love as the only source of help -- Actual
realization of free love among the proletariat -- Strengthening of the
sense of responsibility in consequence of free love.
History of free love in the nineteenth century -- William Godwin’s
fight against coercive marriage -- His free union with Mary
Woolstonecraft -- Shelley’s polemic against conventional sexual
morality -- John Ruskin on free love -- Goethe’s marriage of
conscience -- His “Wahlverwandtschaften” (“Elective Affinities”) --
The remarkable proposal for a temporary marriage in this romance --
Perhaps based upon a Japanese custom -- Malayan temporary marriage --
Influence of Schlegel’s “Lucinde” -- Karoline’s marriage wanderings --
Free love in Jena and Berlin -- Communistic-socialistic ideas
regarding free love -- Rétif de la Bretonne, Saint-Simon, Enfantin,
and Fourier -- George Sand’s “Jacques” -- The “Es-geht-an-Idea” of the
Swedish author Almquist -- Schopenhauer’s fight against coercive
marriage -- His one-sided standpoint -- His description of the
disastrous effects of monogamic coercive marriage -- His apology for
concubinage -- Criticism of his view of the rôle of women in marriage
reform -- His theory of tetragamy -- =First communication of a
hitherto unpublished note of Schopenhauer’s on tetragamy= -- Criticism
of this theory.
Free love based upon =only-love=, the watchword of the future --
Bohemian love -- Does not correspond to the ideal of free love --
Importance of social and economic factors in the sexual relationships
of the present day -- Efforts for sexual reform -- The literature of
free love -- Charles Albert’s communistic foundation of free love --
Liberation of love from the dominion of the state and of capital --
Ladislaus Gumplowicz -- Bebel’s “Die Frau und der Sozialismus” (“Woman
and Socialism”) -- The psychologico-individual foundation of free love
-- Eugen Dühring -- Edward Carpenter’s “Love’s Coming of Age” -- His
ideas regarding self-control and spiritual procreation -- Ellen Key’s
work, “Ueber Liebe und Ehe” (“Love and Marriage”) -- Detailed analysis
of this work -- Her critique of nominal “monogamy” -- Her idea of
“spiritualized sensuality” -- “Erotic monism” -- The unity of marriage
and love -- Sexual dualism owing to coercive marriage and prostitution
-- General diffusion of erotic scepticism -- Recognition of love as
the spiritual force of life -- Importance of relative asceticism --
Love’s choice -- Medical certificates of fitness for marriage --
Immoral love -- The right to motherhood -- Preliminary conditions --
Necessity for free divorce -- Unfortunate marriages -- Importance of
divorce to children -- New programme of the rights of children --
Ellen Key’s new marriage law -- Endowment of motherhood --
Authorities for the protection of children -- Division of the property
of husband and wife -- Discontinuance of the coercion to live together
-- Secret marriages -- Conditions under which marriage is to be
contracted -- Divorce -- Council of Divorce -- Jury for the care of
children -- Sexual responsibility -- “Marriages of conscience” --
Examples from Sweden -- Public notification of “free” unions -- Legal
recognition of “free” unions in Sweden -- Increase in the number of
“marriage protestants” -- Importance of free love to the vital advance
of humanity -- General characterization of Ellen Key’s book -- Its
importance in connexion with sexual reform in Germany -- Formation of
“The Association for the Protection of Mothers” -- Directors and
committee of this society -- Preliminary appeal and programme of the
association -- The periodical _Mutterschutz_ -- The formation of local
groups -- The “Umwertungs-Gesellschaft” (Revaluation Society) of the
United States -- Its characterization of modern marriage -- The Berlin
“Union for Sexual Reform” -- Helene Stöcker’s “Love and Woman” --
Conception of the sexual problem in the sense of Nietzsche -- No
revolution, but evolution and reform -- Deepening of woman’s soul by
means of the older love -- The affirmation of life of the new love --
The economic and social grounds for the necessity of social reform --
Friedrich Naumann, Lily Braun, and others, on this subject -- Increase
in enforced abstinence from marriage -- The “maintenance question” a
crying scandal of our time -- A characteristic letter -- The radical
evil of conventional morality -- Insurance of motherhood -- Homes for
pregnant women and for infants -- The rights of the “illegitimate”
child -- Suggestions regarding a statistical inquiry relating to free
love and illegitimate offspring in the upper classes -- Examples of
celebrated personalities.
CHAPTER XI
The problem of “free love” is the burning question of our time. Upon its
proper solution depends the future of civilization, and our ultimate
liberation from the ignominious conditions of the amatory life of the
present day, dependent as these are upon coercive marriage. This is our
firm conviction, our profound belief, one which we share with many, and
those not the worst minds of our day.
Free love is neither, as malevolent opponents maintain, the abolition of
marriage, nor is it the organization of extra-conjugal sexual
intercourse. Free love and extra-conjugal sexual intercourse have
nothing whatever to do one with the other. Indeed, I go so far as to
maintain that true free love, as it must and will prevail, will limit
casual and unregulated extra-conjugal sexual intercourse =to a far
greater extent= than coercive marriage has ever succeeded in doing.
Above all, free love will ennoble sexual intercourse.
For the longer, in existing economic conditions, we cling to the
antiquated “coercive marriage,” which has so long been in need of
reform, the smaller is the number of those who desire to marry, the more
advanced becomes the age of marriage, the greater becomes the general
sexual wretchedness, the deeper shall we sink into the mephitic slough
of prostitution, towards which the increasing promiscuity of
extra-conjugal sexual intercourse inevitably leads us.
For this is the peculiar, hypocritical, and absurd mode of argument of
those who uphold conventional marriage; they despise and brand with
infamy every sexual relationship of two adult independent persons based
upon free love, and sanction quite openly casual transitory
extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, devoid of all personal relationships,
not only with prostitutes, but also with respectable women.
“Bachelorhood,” says Max Nordau, “is very far from being equivalent to
sexual continence. The bachelor receives from society the tacit
permission to indulge in the convenience of intercourse with woman,
when and where he can; it calls his self-seeking pleasures
‘successes,’ and surrounds them with a kind of poetic glory; and the
amiable vice of Don Juan arouses in society a feeling composed of
envy, sympathy, and secret admiration.”[186]
On the other hand, =this same= conventional coercive marriage morality
demands from the girl complete sexual continence and intactness until
the time of her marriage!
But every reasonable and just man must ask the question, Where, then,
are the unmarried men to gratify their sexual impulse if at the same
time the unmarried girls are condemned to absolute chastity?
It is merely necessary to place these two facts =side by side= in order
to expose the utter mendacity and shamelessness of the coercive marriage
morality, and to display the true cancer of our sexual life, the sole
cause of the increasing diffusion of =prostitution=, of =wild sexual
promiscuity=, and of =venereal diseases=.
When hereafter, before the judgment-seat of history, the dreadful
“_j’accuse_” is uttered against the sexual corruption of our time, then
there will be a good defence for those of us who, under the device,
“Away with prostitution! away with the brothels! away with all ‘wild’
love! away with venereal diseases!” were the first to indicate =free
love= as the one and only means of rescue from these miseries.
We are always told that men are not yet ready for the free, independent
management of their sexual life; mankind is not yet ripe for the
necessary responsibility. Our opponents point especially to the danger
of such an opinion and such reforms for the lower classes.
But human beings are better than the defenders of the obsolete
conventional morality would have us believe, and above all, it is the
members of the lower classes whom we may quietly allow to follow the
dictates of their own hearts. They, indeed, give us the example that
freedom is not equivalent to immorality and pleasure-seeking; that, on
the contrary, it is freedom that awakens and keeps active the
consciousness of duty and the sense of responsibility.
Alfred Blaschko rightly draws attention to the fact that among the
proletariat for a long time already the idea of free love has been
actually realized. In a large majority of cases men and women of these
classes have sexual intercourse with one another, especially between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-five, without marrying.[187]
“Among the proletariat free love has never been regarded as sinful.
Where there is no property which is capable of being left to a
legitimate heir, where the appeal of the heart draws man and woman
together, from the very earliest times people have troubled themselves
little about the blessing of the priest; and had it not been that at
the present day the civil form of marriage is so simple, whilst, on
the other hand, there are so many difficulties placed in the path of
unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, =who can tell if the
modern proletariat would not long ago, as far as they themselves are
concerned, have abolished marriage=?”[188]
Blaschko adduces proofs that in all places in which free love is not
possible =prostitution takes its place=.
This fact affords a striking proof of the necessity of free love. For
there can be no doubt as to the correct answer to the question which is
better, prostitution or free love.
Max Marcus and other physicians have recently discussed the question
whether the medical man is justified in recommending extra-conjugal
sexual intercourse. I myself, as a physician, and as an ardent supporter
of the efforts for the suppression of venereal diseases, in view of the
enormous increase of professional prostitution (both public and
private), and in view also of the extraordinarily wide diffusion of
venereal diseases, feel compelled to answer this question, generally
speaking, =in the negative=. Yet I look to the introduction of free
love, and in association with free love of a new sexual morality, in
accordance with which man and woman are regarded as two free
personalities, with equal rights and also equal responsibilities, as the
only possible rescue from the misery of prostitution and of venereal
disease.
Place the free woman beside the free man, inspire both with the profound
sense of =responsibility= which will result from the activity of the
love of two free personalities, and you will see that to them and to
their children such love will bring true happiness.
Before going further into this problem of free love, I will give a brief
account of the history of the question during the nineteenth century. We
shall see that quite a number of leading spirits, morally lofty natures,
were occupied with the question, because they were deeply impressed with
the intolerable character of existing conditions in the sexual sphere,
and were convinced that help was only to be found in a relaxation of
those conditions in the sense of a =freer= conception of sexual
relationships.
In addition to the romanticists (_vide supra_, pp. 169 and 175) in the
beginning of the nineteenth century in England, William Godwin, the
lover and husband of Mary Wollstonecraft (the celebrated advocate of
woman’s rights), in his “Political Justice,” declared the conventional
coercive marriage to be an obsolete institution, by which the freedom of
the individual was seriously curtailed. Marriage is a question of
property, and one person ought not to become the property of another.
Godwin maintained that the abolition of marriage would have no evil
consequences. The free love and subsequent marriage of Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft deserves a short description. Godwin was of opinion that
the members of a family should not see too much of one another. He also
believed that they would interfere with one another’s work if they lived
in the same house. For this reason he furnished some rooms for himself
at a little distance from Mary Wollstonecraft’s dwelling, and often
first appeared at her house at a late lunch; the intervening hours were
spent by both in literary work. They exchanged letters also during the
day.[189]
Doubtless under the influence of the views of Godwin, Shelley, in the
notes to “Queen Mab,” writes a violent polemic against coercive
marriage. He says:
“Love withers under constraint; its very essence is liberty; it is
compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there
most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in
confidence, equality, and unreserve. How long, then, ought the sexual
connexion to last? What law ought to specify the extent of the
grievances which should limit its duration? A husband and wife ought
to continue so long united as they love each other; any law which
should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of
their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny.”[190]
He then proceeds to attack the conventional morality so intimately
associated with coercive marriage, and concludes with the words:
“Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to
natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at
the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the
human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A
system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to
human happiness than marriage. I conceive that from the abolition of
marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connexion would
result. =I by no means assert that the intercourse would be
promiscuous=; on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent
to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked
above all others with generosity and self-devotion.”[191]
Here, also, we find the expression of the firm conviction that in the
freedom of love is to be found an assured guarantee for its durability!
Later, also, the English Pre-Raphaelites, especially John Ruskin,
advocated free love, and maintained that the sacredness of these natural
bonds lay in their very essence. It is love which first makes marriage
legal, not marriage which legalizes love (_cf._ Charlotte Broicher,
“John Ruskin and his Work,” vol. i., pp. 104-106; Leipzig, 1902).
In Germany, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, a lively
discussion of the problems of love and marriage ensued upon the
publication of Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” and Goethe’s
“Wahlverwandtschaften”--“Elective Affinities” (1809).
Goethe, in his very rich amatory life, especially in his relationship to
Charlotte von Stein and to Christiane Vulpius, with the latter of whom
he lived for eighteen years in a free “marriage of conscience,”[192] and
whose son, August, the offspring of this union, he adopted long before
the marriage was legitimized, realized the ideal of free love more than
once. Although in his book “Wahlverwandtschaften” (“Elective
Affinities”) he at length gave the victory to the moral conception of
monogamic marriage, and propounded it as an illuminating ideal for
civilization (which “ideal standpoint” we ourselves, as we have shown in
the previous chapters, fully share), yet in this novel he has
represented conjugal struggles, from which it appears how profoundly he
was impressed by the importance of a transformation of amatory life in
the direction of freedom. It is especially by the mouth of the Count in
this work that he gives utterance to such ideas. The latter records the
advice of one of his friends that every marriage should be contracted
for the term of five years only.
“This number,” he said, “is a beautiful, sacred, odd number, and such
a period of time would be sufficient for the married pair to learn to
know one another, for them to bring a few children into the world, to
separate, and, what would be most beautiful of all, to come together
again.”
Often he would exclaim:
“How happily would the first portion of the time pass! Two or three
years at least would pass very happily. Then very likely one member of
the pair would wish that the union should be prolonged; and this
desire would increase the more nearly the terminus of the marriage
approached. An indifferent, even an unsatisfied, member of such a
union would be pleased by such a demeanour on the part of the other.
One is apt to forget how in good society the passing of time is
unnoticed; one finds with agreeable surprise, when the allotted time
has passed away, =that it has been tacitly prolonged=. It is precisely
this voluntary, tacit prolongation of sexual relationship, freely
undertaken by both parties without any extraneous compulsion, to which
Goethe ascribes =a profound moral significance=.”
I should like to draw the attention of students of Goethe to the fact
that this recommendation of a temporary marriage for the term of five
years, with tacit prolongation of the term, is a very ancient Japanese
custom, or, at any rate, was so thirty years ago.
Wernich, who for several years was Professor of Medicine at the Imperial
University of Japan, remarks:
“Marriages were concluded for a term only: in the case of persons of
standing for =five= years; among the lower classes for a shorter term.
It was =very rare=, however, only in cases in which the marriage was
manifestly unhappy, for a separation to take place when the term
expired. If there were healthy living children such a separation
hardly ever occurred--most of these temporary marriages were, in fact,
extremely happy, and the same is true of Jewish marriages, in which
divorce is easily effected by a very simple ceremonial, closely
resembling that of the Japanese.”[193]
In view of the remarkable coincidence between the proposal in Goethe’s
“Elective Affinities” and the Japanese custom, we are probably justified
in assuming that Goethe was acquainted with the latter.
“Lucinde” gave expression to the feelings and moods of the time in
respect of love and marriage on behalf of a circle far wider than that
of the romanticists. At no time were the ideals of free love so deeply
felt, so enthusiastically presented, as then; above all, by the
beautiful Karoline, who, after long “marriage wanderings,” especially
with A. W. Schegel, finally found the happiness of her life in a free
marriage with Schelling, which subsequently became a legally recognized
union.
“In her letters,” says Kuno Fischer, “she praises again and again the
man of her choice and of her heart, in whose love she had really
attained the goal which she had longed and sought in labyrinthine
wanderings.... And that Schelling was the man who was able completely
to master the heart of this woman and to make her his own, gives to
his features also an expression which beautifies them.”[194]
Rahel, Dorothea Schlegel, and Henriette Herz, extolled, under the
influence of “Lucinde,” the happiness of free love. For this period of
genius in Jena and Berlin, as Rudolph von Gottschall calls it, the
free-love relationship of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia and Frau
Pauline Wiesel was typical. This relationship is more intimately known
to us from the letters exchanged between the two, published by Alexander
Büchner in 1865. In these letters, to quote a saying of Ludmilla Assing,
we find “the most passionate expression of all that it is possible to
express in writing.”
In France the discussion of the question of free love was to an
important extent associated with the communistic-socialistic ideas of
Saint Simon, Enfantin, and Fourier. Before this, Rétif de la Bretonne,
in his “Découverte Australe” (a work which exercised a great influence
upon Charles Fourier),[195] demanded that the duration of marriage
should be in the first instance two years, with which period the
contract should spontaneously terminate. Saint Simon and Barrault
proclaimed the “free wife,” Père Enfantin proclaimed the “free union,”
and Fourier proclaimed “free love” in the phalanstery.
A reflection of this idea is to be found in the novels of George Sand,
especially “Lelia” and “Jacques,” these tragedies of marriage; in
“Jacques,” for example, we find the following passage:
“I continue to believe that marriage is one of the most hateful of
institutions. I have no doubt whatever that when the human race has
advanced further towards rationality and the love of justice, marriage
will be abolished. =A human and not less sacred union= would then
replace it, and the existence of the children would be not less cared
for and secured, without therefore binding in eternal fetters the
freedom of the parents.”
We must mention Hortense Allart de Méritens (1801-1879) as a
contemporary of the much-loving George Sand, and, like her, a
theoretical and practical advocate of free love. She was cousin to the
well-known authoress Delphine Gay, and herself wrote a _roman à clef_,
published in 1872, “Les Enchantements de Prudence,” in which she records
the history of her own life, devoted to free love. First the beloved of
a nobleman, she ran away when she discovered she was pregnant, and then
lived successively with the Italian statesman Gino Capponi (1826-1829);
with the celebrated French author Chateaubriand (1829-1831); with the
English novelist and poet Bulwer (1831-1836); the Italian Mazzini
(1837-1840); the critic Sainte-Beuve (1840-1841); these being all free
unions. From 1843 to 1846 she was the perfectly legitimate and extremely
unhappy wife of an architect named Napoléon de Méritens, whereas with
her earlier lovers she had lived most happily. Léon Séché, in the _Revue
de Paris_ of July 1, 1907, has recently described the life of this
notable priestess of free love, to whose above-mentioned romance George
Sand wrote a preface (_cf._ _Literarisches Echo_ of August 1, 1907, pp.
1612, 1613).
In Sweden at about the same time the celebrated poet C. J. L. Almquist
was a powerful advocate for free love. In the numbers for July and
August, 1900, of the monthly review, _Die Insel_, Ellen Key has
published a thoughtful essay, containing an analysis of Almquist’s views
on this subject.
In the novel “Es Geht An” Almquist advocates the thesis that true love
needs no consecration by a marriage ceremony. On the contrary, a
ceremony of this kind belies the very nature of marriage, for it forms
and cements false unions; and any relationship concluded on the lowest
grounds, if it has only been preceded by a marriage ceremony, is
regarded as pure, whilst a union based upon true love without marriage
is regarded as unchaste. In the sense of free love Lara Widbeck, in “Es
Geht An,” arranges her own life and that of her husband Albert. Both are
to be masters of their respective persons and of their respective
property; they are to live for themselves, the work of each is to be
pursued independently of the other, and in this way it will be possible
to preserve a lifelong love, instead of seeing love transformed into
lifelong indifference or hate.
Even at the present day in Sweden the idea of free love is known, after
this romance of Almquist’s, as the “Es-geht-an idea” and also as
“briar-rose morality.” It was, above all, Ellen Key who revived
Almquist’s idea, and enlarged it to the extensive programme of marriage
reform in the direction of free love, which we shall consider more fully
below.
In his last writings Schopenhauer occupied himself at considerable
length with the problems of love, but entirely from the standpoint of
misogyny and of duplex sexual morality. Still, he recognized the great
dangers and disasters which the traditional coercive marriage entails
upon society, and rightly regarded this formal marriage as the principal
source of sexual corruption.
In his essay “Concerning Women” (“Parerga and Paralipomena,” vol. xi.,
pp. 657-659), ed. Grisebach, he writes:
“Whereas among the polygamist nations every woman is cared for, among
monogamic peoples the number of married women is limited, and there
remains an enormous number of unsupported superfluous women.[196]
Among the upper classes these vegetate as useless old maids; among the
lower classes they are forced to earn their living by immeasurably
severe toil, or else they become prostitutes. These latter lead a life
equally devoid of pleasure and of honour; but in the circumstances
they are indispensable for the gratification of the male sex, and
hence they constitute a publicly recognized profession, the especial
purpose of which is to safeguard against seduction those women more
highly favoured by fortune, who have found husbands, or may reasonably
hope to do so. In London alone there are 80,000 such women. =What else
are these women than human sacrifices on the altar of
monogamy=--=sacrifices rendered inevitable by the very nature of the
monogamic institution?= All the women to whom we now allude--women in
this miserable position--form the inevitable counterpoise to the
ladies of Europe, with their pretension and their pride. For the
female sex, regarded as a whole, polygamy is a real benefit. On the
other hand, from the rationalistic point of view, it is impossible to
see why a man whose wife is suffering from a chronic disease, or
remains unfruitful, or has gradually become too old for him, should
not take a second wife. That which produces so many converts to
Mormonism appears to be the rejection by the Mormons of the unnatural
institution of monogamy. In addition, moreover, the allotment to the
wife of unnatural rights has imposed upon her unnatural duties, whose
neglect, nevertheless, makes her unhappy. To many a man considerations
of position, of property, make marriage inadvisable, unless the
conditions are exceptionally favourable. He would then wish to obtain
a wife of his own choice, under conditions which would leave him free
from obligations to her and her children. However economical,
reasonable, and suitable these conditions may be, if she agrees to
them, and does not insist upon the immoderate rights which marriage
alone secures to her, she will, because marriage is the basis of every
society, find herself compelled to lead an unhappy life, one which, to
a certain degree, is dishonourable; because human nature involves
this, that we assign a quite immeasurable value to the opinion of
others. If, on the other hand, she does not comply, she runs the
danger either of being compelled to belong as a wife to a man
repulsive to her, or else of withering as an old maid, for the period
in which she can realize her value is very short. In relation to this
aspect of our monogamic arrangement, the profoundly learned treatise
of Thomasius, _De Concubinatu_, is of the greatest possible value, for
we learn from it =that among all cultured people, and in all times,
until the date of the Lutheran Reformation, concubinage was permitted,
and even to a certain extent legally recognized, and was an
institution not involving any dishonour=. From this position it was
degraded only by the Lutheran Reformation, for the degradation of
concubinage was regarded as a means by which the marriage of priests
could be justified; and, on the other hand, after the Lutheran
denunciation of concubinage, the semi-official recognition of that
institution by the Roman Catholic Church was no longer possible.
“Regarding polygamy there need be =no dispute=, for it is a
universally existing fact, and the only question is regarding its
=regulation=. Where are the true monogamists? We all live =at least=
for a time, but most of us continually, in a state of polygamy. Since,
consequently, every man makes use of many wives, nothing could be more
just than to leave him free, and even to compel him, to provide for
many wives.”
Just as are these views of Schopenhauer’s regarding the necessity of a
freer conception and a freer configuration of sexual relations, and
regarding the shamefulness of exposing to infamy the unmarried mother
and the illegitimate child, so much the more dangerous is his view of
the part to be played by women in this reform of marriage. Woman as an
inferior being, without freedom, is once more to lose all her rights,
instead of standing beside man as a free personality with equal rights
and equal duties. The result of a rearrangement of amatory life on this
basis would inevitably be a new and a worse sexual slavery.
As Julius Frauenstädt records, Schopenhauer, in a separate manuscript
found amongst his papers, has described the evil conditions of monogamy,
and has recommended, as a step to reform, the practice of “tetragamy.”
This peculiar and unquestionably very interesting essay has not found
its way into the Royal Library of Berlin. With regard to the whereabouts
of the manuscript we are uncertain; perhaps Frauenstädt destroyed it.
However, we find a brief, hitherto unpublished, extract from this essay
in Schopenhauer’s manuscript book, “Die Brieftasche,” written in 1823,
which is preserved in the Royal Library in Berlin.[197]
I publish here, for the first time, the summary account of tetragamy
contained on pp. 70-77 of the aforesaid manuscript book:
SKETCH OF SCHOPENHAUER’S “TETRAGAMY”
(HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED).
“Inasmuch as Nature makes the number of women nearly identical with
that of men, whilst women retain only about half as long as men their
capacity for procreation and their suitability for masculine
gratification, the human sexual relationship is disordered at the very
outset. By the equal numbers of the respective sexes, Nature appears
to point to monogamy; on the other hand, a man has =one= wife for the
satisfaction of his procreative capacity only for half the time for
which that capacity endures; he must, then, take a second wife when
the first begins to wither; but for each man only one woman is
available. The tendency exhibited by woman in respect of the duration
of her sexual capacity is compensated, on the other hand, by the
quantity of that capacity: she is capable of gratifying two or three
vigorous men simultaneously, without suffering in any way. In
monogamy, woman employs only half of her sexual capacity, and
satisfies only half of her desires.
“If, now, this relationship were arranged in accordance with purely
physical considerations (and we are concerned here with a physical,
extremely urgent need, the satisfaction of which is the aim of
marriage, alike among the Jews and among the Christians), if matters
were to be equalized as completely as possible, it would be necessary
for two men always to have one wife in common: let them take her when
they are both young. After she has become faded, let them take another
young woman, who will then suffice for their needs until both the men
are old. Both women are cared for, and each man is responsible for the
care of one only.
“In the monogamic state, the man has for a single occasion too much,
and for a permanency too little; with the woman it is the other way
about.
“If the proposed institution were adopted in youth, a man, at the
time when his income is usually smallest, would have to provide only
for half a wife, and for few children, and those young. Later, when he
is richer, he would have to provide for one or two wives and for
numerous children.
“Since this institution has not been adopted--for half their life men
are whoremongers, and for the other half cuckolds; and women must be
correspondingly classified as betrayed and betrayers--he who marries
young is tied later to an elderly wife; he who marries late in youth
acquires venereal disease, and in age has to wear the horns. Woman
must either sacrifice the bloom of her youth to a man already
withered; or else must discover that to a still vigorous man she is no
longer an object of desire. The institution we propose would cure all
these troubles; the human race would lead happier lives. The
objections are the following:
“1. That a man would not know his own children. Answer: This could, as
a rule, be determined by likeness and other considerations; in
existing conditions it is not always a matter of certainty.
“2. Such a _menage à trois_ would give rise to brawls and jealousy.
Answer: Such things are already universal; people must learn to behave
themselves.
“3. What is to be done as regards property? Answer: This will have to
be otherwise arranged; absolute _communio bonorum_ will not occur. As
we have already said, Nature has arranged the affair badly. It will,
therefore, be impossible to overcome all disadvantages.
“As matters are at present, Duty and Nature are continually in
conflict. For the man it is impossible from the beginning to the end
of his career to satisfy his sexual impulse in a legal manner. Imagine
his condition if he is widowed quite young. For the woman, to be
limited to a =single= man during the short period of her full bloom
and sexual capacity, is an unnatural condition. She has to preserve
for the use of one individual what he is unable to utilize, and what
many others eagerly desire from her; and she herself, in thus
refusing, must curb her own desires. Just think of it!
“More especially we have to remember that always the number of men
competent for sexual intercourse is double the number of functionally
capable women, for which reason every woman must continually repel
advances; she prepares for defence immediately a man comes near her.”
When we consider this suggestion of tetragamy of Schopenhauer’s from our
own standpoint, we find an accurate exposition of the evils arising from
monogamic coercive marriage, and a clear-sighted presentation of the
physiological disharmonies of the sexual life arising from the
difference between man and woman, upon which recently Metchnikoff also
has laid so much stress. In other respects Schopenhauer’s views are for
us not open to discussion, for, as already pointed out, he regards woman
from the first simply as a chattel, and denies to her any individuality
or soul; and, secondly, because he rejects the principle of the
=only-love=--a principle so intimately associated with the idea of woman
as individual. For the watchword of the future must be: Free love, based
upon the only-love! and, indeed, the only-love manifesting itself
reciprocally in the full struggle for existence.
For this reason, also, the characteristic free love of the Bohemians of
Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century, and more
especially during the period 1830 to 1860, can only be regarded as a
truly poetic love-idyll, when compared with that grand and earnest love
consecrated wholly to =work=, and to the =inward spiritual development=
which presents itself to modern humanity as an ideal love, as the united
conquest of existence. Grisette love, which Sebastian Mercier described
with great force, and which found its classic representation in Henry
Murger’s “Vie de Bohème,” was characterized by the enduring
life-in-common of the loving couples, who belonged for the most part to
the circle of artists and students. Thus it stood high as heaven above
our modern “intimacy,” which, for the most part, has a quite transitory
character; and yet the Bohemian free love corresponded in no way to the
conception and ideal of free love as a community of spirit and of life.
The development of modern civilization, in association with the
awakening of individualism, and with the economic revolution of our
time, has created entirely new foundations for sexual relationships, and
has made continually more apparent the injurious and destructive effects
of our long outworn sexual morality. These changes have taught us to
understand that in the so-called social question the sexual problem
possesses as much importance as the economic problem--perhaps more. They
have shown us the necessity for a new love of the future, for the reason
that to cling to the old, outlived forms would be equivalent to a
continuous increase in sexual corruption in the widest sense of the
word, combined with a general disease contamination of civilized
nations--as the threatening spread of prostitution, and more especially
of secret prostitution, and the increased diffusion of venereal
diseases, demonstrate before our eyes.
Almost at the same time, during recent years, among the various
civilized nations of Europe there have originated efforts for a radical
transformation of conventional sexual morality, and for a reform,
adapted to modern conditions, of marriage and of the entire amatory
life. In France, England, Sweden, and Germany, writers have appeared,
producing books, many of which have been important, full of matter, and
comprehensive, entirely devoted to this object. Societies for marriage
reform and sexual reform have been founded in North America, France,
Austria, and Germany; parliamentary commissions for the investigation of
these questions have been established. Several newspapers have been
founded for the reform of sexual ethics. In short, a general interest
has been aroused in this central question of life, and theoretical and
practical activity have been directed towards its solution.
All at once, as if by general agreement, civilized humanity asked itself
the earnest and solemn question, How was it possible that to hundreds
and thousands the simple right to love was refused, so that they were
condemned to a joyless existence, in which all the beautiful blossoms of
life withered away; that hundreds of thousands of others were condemned
to the hideous misery of prostitution; that, finally, the =community at
large= was delivered up in ever-increasing degree to devastation by
venereal diseases and their consequences?
How is it possible, asks Karl Federn, in the preface to his translation
of Carpenter’s “Wenn die Menschen reif zur Liebe werden” (“Love’s
Coming-of-Age”)--how is it possible that we sing love-songs, and yet
have an amatory life like that which we lead to-day, and have a moral
doctrine such as that which is dominant to-day?
All honour to the men and women who have dared to give an answer to
these questions, who have opposed conventional lies with the truth of
love, and who point out the new way along which mankind will go--will
go, because it =must=.
It is impossible here to mention by name all the writings dealing with
the reform of sexual relationships which have appeared within recent
years. Their name is legion. We must content ourselves with an allusion
to those books which most of all deserve the name of epoch-making, which
have aroused the interest of the community, and which may probably be
said to have first stimulated the discussion of the problem, and to have
been principally effective in starting the flowing current of reform.
In France, Charles Albert has treated the problem of free love from the
communistic standpoint.[198] In the first two chapters of his book, he
describes the development of the primitive sexual impulse, to become
the most supreme individual love, and then gives an interesting account
of the struggle of middle-class society against love, which to-day is
endangered to an equal extent both by the =state= and by =capital=.
“Capitalistic society represents one fact, love another. It suffices
to place them one beside the other in order to notice how sharp a
contrast there is between them, an eternal state of war.”
It is only money that dominates the thought and feeling of modern
humanity; for love and its idealism there is no longer any room; social
economy recognizes only a sexual relationship, but not the higher
feeling of love. Capital subjects the whole of the sexual life to its
laws. In prostitution this great social crime finds its conclusion. The
majority of marriages are nothing more than “sexual bargains.”
Free love is simply love liberated from the dominion of the state and of
capital. It can, therefore, be realized only by an economic revolution,
which will put an end to the economic struggle for existence. Free love
means the independence of the sexual from the material life. =Economic
reform= is the only way to the higher love. This is the author’s
conviction. But he is not subject to any deceptive delusion that with
this all will become beautiful and good; with this all problems will be
solved, all incompleteness at an end.
“We do not,” Albert continues, “regard the province of the sexual life
in the society of the future as an Eden, wherein those individuals
best suited one to the other will come together with mathematical
certainty, to lead a cloudless existence. Just as to-day, there will
be unrequited love, uncertain search and endeavour, errors and
deceptions, misunderstandings, satiety, aberrations, and sorrows.
However great the material prosperity may be which mankind in the
future will enjoy, the life of feeling will always remain the source
of incalculable disturbances, and love will not be the rarest cause of
such disturbances; but still a large proportion of the existing causes
of pain can and must disappear.”
The indispensable preliminary to free love is the complete equality of
man and woman. This, however, can only be attained by means of
communism--that is to say, by that ordering of society in which property
and wages cease to exist, in which not only the means of production, but
also all the articles of consumption, are appropriated to the common
use, and woman will no longer possess a commercial value, as she does at
the present day.
Like Albert, Ladislaus Gumplowicz[199] also believes that free love can
only be realized in a collectivist community.
However important it is to draw attention to the economic point of view,
as was done before Albert and Gumplowicz by Bebel, in his celebrated
“Woman and Socialism” (thirty-fourth edition, Stuttgart, 1903), still,
it appears to me that the communistic solution is not the only possible
solution, and that free love can very well be associated with the
preservation of private property.[200]
While the progressive changes in the economic structure of society
powerfully influence sexual relationships and lay down the rules for
their existing forms, still, physiological individual factors play a
great part also in the matter. The first to insist on this fact were the
Englishman Carpenter and the Swedish writer Ellen Key.[201]
Edward Carpenter,[202] at one time a priest in the Anglican Church, in
his study of the question of free love, without ignoring the economic
factor, lays stress above all on the psychical factor, the inward
spiritual relationship between man and wife.
He writes (_op. cit._, p. 120):
“It is in the very nature of Love that as it realizes its own aim it
should rivet always more and more towards a durable and distinct
relationship, nor rest till the permanent mate and equal is found. As
human beings progress, their relations to each other must become much
=more= definite and distinct, instead of less so--and there is no
likelihood of society in its onward march lapsing backwards, so to
speak, to formlessness again.”
Above all, Carpenter has introduced into the discussion of free love an
element which to me appears of great importance from the medical
standpoint: the question of relative asceticism, of =self-control=. He
rightly considers that the duty of the love of the future does not
subsist merely in the common physical union, but also in =spiritual
procreation=. From the intimate spiritual contact between two
differentiated personalities, the highest spiritual values proceed. Only
self-control leads us to this highest love.
“It is a matter of common experience that the unrestrained outlet of
merely physical desire leaves the nature drained of its higher
love-forces.... Any one who has once realized how glorious a thing
Love is in its essence, and how indestructible, will hardly need to
call anything that leads to it a sacrifice” (_op. cit._, pp. 7, 8).
The indispensable prerequisites to the reform of love and marriage are,
according to Carpenter, the following (_op. cit._, p. 100):
(1) The furtherance of the freedom and self-dependence of women. (2)
The provision of some rational teaching, of heart and of head, for
both sexes during the period of youth. (3) The recognition in marriage
itself of a freer, more companionable, and less pettily exclusive
relationship. (4) The abrogation or modification of the present odious
law which binds people together for =life=, without scruple, and in
the most artificial and ill-assorted unions.
Carpenter accepts Letourneau’s view, that, in a more or less distant
future, the institution of marriage will undergo transformation into
monogamic unions, freely entered on, and when necessary freely
dissolved, by simple mutual consent, as is already done in several
European countries--in Canton Geneva, in Belgium, in Roumania, as
regards divorce; and in Italy as regards separation. State and society
should take part in the matter only so far as the safety of the children
demands, concerning whom =more extensive duties= should be expected from
the parents. Carpenter also points out, as was shown seventy years ago
by Gutzkow, that, as regards the development of the children, it is
better, in unhappy marriages, that their parents should separate than
that the children should grow up amid the miseries of such marriages.
“Love”--thus Carpenter concludes his dissertation on marriage in the
future--“is doubtless the last and most difficult lesson that humanity
has to learn; in a sense, it underlies all the others. Perhaps the
time has come for the modern nations when, ceasing to be children,
they may even try to learn it” (_op. cit._, p. 113).
A greater vogue even than Carpenter’s book had was obtained by the
essays of the Swedish writer Ellen Key, “Love and Marriage,” which in
1894 appeared in a German translation,[203] and had an unusual success
in the book-market. It is without exception the most interesting and
pregnant work on the sexual question which has ever appeared. Written
from the heart, and inspired by the observations of a free and lofty
spirit, it avoids none of the numerous difficulties and by-paths in this
department of thought; and the reproach of libertinism which has been
cast at the author must be emphatically rejected. Ellen Key is the most
outspoken realist of all the writers on the subject of free love. She
takes her arguments from actual life; she associates her ideas of reform
always with the real; she writes as an earnest evolutionist. Thus, in
her book, her first aim is to establish “the course of the evolution of
sexual morality” and the “evolution of love.”
Ellen Key starts from the fact that no one has ever offered any proof
that monogamy is that form of the sexual life which is =indispensable=
to the vital force and civilization of the nations. Even among the
Christian nations =it has never yet really existed=, and its
legalization as the only permissible form of sexual morality has
hitherto been rather harmful than helpful to general morality.
The writer then develops the idea, no less beautiful than true, that the
genuine character of love can be proved only by the lovers actually
living together for a considerable time; only thus is it possible to
demonstrate that it is moral for them to live together, and that their
union will have an elevating influence on themselves and their
generation. Consequently, of no conjugal relationship can we
=beforehand= affirm or deny its success. Every new pair, whatever form
they may have chosen for their common life, =must first of all prove for
themselves that they are morally justified in living together=.
Ellen Key then proceeds to maintain a view, which I myself also regard
as an integral constituent of the programme of the love of the future,
and one which I have advanced in earlier writings: that love is not
merely, as Schopenhauer thought, an affair of the =species=, but is, at
least in equal degree, the concern of the loving =individuals=. This is
the result and the meaning of civilization, which, as I have proved in
earlier chapters, exhibits a =progressive= individualization and an
increasing spiritual enrichment of love (the “spiritualized sensuality”
of Ellen Key), and thus gives to love a thoroughly independent
importance for each individual.
“In view of the manner in which civilization has now developed
personal love, this latter has become so composite, so comprehensive
and far-reaching, that =not only in and by itself=--independently of
the species--=does it constitute a great life-value, but it also
increases or diminishes all other values=. In addition to its
primitive importance, it has gained a new significance: to carry the
flame of life from sex to sex. No one names that person immoral who,
deceived in his love, abstains in his married life from procreating
the species; that husband and wife also we shall not call immoral, who
continue their married life rendered happy by love, although their
marriage has proved childless. But in both cases =these human beings
follow their subjective feelings at the expense of the future
generations, and treat their love as an independent aim=. The right
already recognized in these individual cases, as belonging to the
individual at the expense of the species, will continue to undergo
enlargement in proportion as the importance of love continues to
increase. On the other hand, the new morality will demand from love an
ever-increasing =voluntary limitation of rights at those times when
the growth of a new life renders it necessary=. It will also demand a
=voluntary or enforced renunciation of the right to procreate new life
under conditions which would make this new life deficient in value=.”
Ellen Key terms this new, modern love “erotic monism,” because it
comprehends the =entire unitary personality=, including the spiritual
being, not merely the body. George Sand gave the first definition of
this love as being of such a kind that “neither had the soul betrayed
the senses, nor had the senses betrayed the soul.”
This erotic monism proclaims as its indestructible foundation the =unity
of marriage and love=.
The idea of unity gives to the human being the right to arrange his
sexual life according to his personal wishes, subject to the condition
that he does not consciously injure the unity, and therewith, mediately
or immediately, the right, of possible posterity.
Thus, according to Ellen Key, love “=will continually become to a
greater extent a private affair of human beings, whilst children, on the
contrary, will become more and more a vital problem of society=.” From
this it follows that the two “most debased and socially sanctioned
manifestations of sexual subdivision (of dualism), =coercive marriage=
and =prostitution=, will gradually become =impossible=, because, after
the victory of the idea of unity, they will cease to correspond to human
needs.”
Ellen Key rightly insists that among the young men of the present day
there is an increasing hostility to socially protected immorality (both
in the form of coercive marriage and in that of prostitution); whilst
they increasingly exhibit a monistic yearning for love. The general
diffusion, which we shall describe at length in a special chapter, of
ascetic moods and of misogyny among men and of misandry among women, is
partly connected with the feeling that the present social forms of the
sexual relationship limit to an equal extent the worth and the freedom
of mankind.
To-day the “purity fanatics and the frantic sensualists” meet in common
mistrust of the developmental possibilities of love, because they do not
believe in the possible ennoblement of the blind natural impulse. In
contrast to these, Ellen Key reminds us of the fact of the “mystical
=yearning for perfection=, which in the course of evolution has raised
impulse to become passion, and passion to become love, and which is now
striving =to raise love to an ever greater love=.”
We must recognize love as =the spiritual force of life=. Love, like the
artist, like the man of science, has a right to the peculiar, original
activity of its own poietic force, to the production of new spiritual
values. The more perfect race that is to come must, in the fullest
meaning of the words, =be brought forth by love=.
For this, however, the indispensable preliminary is the inward =freedom=
of love; the free-love union is the watchword of the future. Ellen Key
also shows that among the lower classes free love has long been
customary, and that there the dangerous utilization of prostitution is
far more limited than among the higher classes, with which view
Blaschko’s statistical data regarding the far greater diffusion of
venereal diseases among the higher classes of society are in substantial
agreement.
No less indispensable to free love, however, is the full, mature
development of the loving individual. For this reason, Ellen Key demands
self-control and sexual continence at least until the age of twenty
years. She regards the indiscriminate sexual intercourse which is to-day
an established custom among all young men as the murder of love. But too
early marriages are no less dangerous. She demands for the woman at
least an age of twenty; for the man, an age of twenty-five years; and
=until these respective ages are attained, sexual continence should be
observed as fully as possible by both sexes=.
This self-command is good for the physical development, “steels the
will, gives the joy of power to the personality; and these qualities are
later of importance in all other spheres of activity.”
With wonderful beauty, Ellen Key describes the happiness of the =power
of waiting= in love, and quotes in this connexion the lovely phrases of
the Swedish poet Karlfeldt:
“There is nothing on earth like the times of waiting,
The days of springtime, the days of blossoming;
Not even May can diffuse a light
Like the clear light of April.”
On the other hand, it is a demand of true morality that healthy men and
women between the ages of twenty and thirty years should enjoy the
possibility of marriage--of free marriage. This possibility can,
however, be secured only by economic reforms.
The author then considers the very important point of love’s choice, and
demands above all the compulsory provision of a =medical certificate of
health= before entering on marriage.
“It is absolutely beyond question that the healthy self-seeking which
wishes to safeguard the personal ego, in conjunction with the
increasing valuation of a healthy posterity, will hinder the
contraction of many unsuitable marriages. In other cases, love might
overcome these considerations, as far as husband and wife are
themselves concerned; but they must then renounce parentage. In those
cases, on the contrary, in which the law would distinctly forbid
marriage, one could naturally not prevent the sick persons from
procreating independently of marriage; but the same is true of all
laws: the best do not need them, the worst do not obey them, but the
majority are guided by them in the formation and development of their
ideas of what is right.”
As =immoral=, Ellen Key indicates:
“Parentage without love.
“Irresponsible parentage.
“Parentage on the part of immature or degenerate human beings.
“Voluntary unfertility on the part of a married pair who are competent
to reproduce their kind.
“All manifestations of the sexual life resulting from force or
seduction, or from the disinclination or the incapacity for the proper
fulfilment of sexual intercourse.”
It is interesting to note that Ellen Key prophesies as the result of the
progressive improvement of the species by love’s selection, the
attainment of a state wherein =every= man and =every= woman will be
suited for the reproduction of the species. Then would the ideal of
monogamy, one husband for one wife, one wife for one husband, be for the
first time realized.
Very beautifully, and with a prudent insight into the actual
relationships, Ellen Key discusses the question of the “right to
motherhood,” where she finds occasion to describe the new and very
various types of women which the evolution of modern life has brought
into being. She recognizes only with reservation the general right to
motherhood, but she does not regard it as a desirable example to follow
when a woman becomes a mother without love, either in marriage or out of
it. It is not right to do what is generally done to-day by the
man-haters--namely, to demand from the majority of unmarried women that
they should produce a child without love. This should not even happen
when love exists, but a permanent life-in-common with the father of the
child is impossible. An unmarried woman who determines on motherhood
should be fully =mature=, and already have behind her “the second
springtime” of her life; she must “not only be pure as snow, pure as
fire, but also must be possessed of the full conviction that with the
child of her love she will produce a radiance in her own life and will
endow humanity with new wealth.”
=Such= an unmarried woman really =makes a present= of her child to
humanity, and is quite different from the unmarried woman who “has a
child.”
Indeed, for the =majority=, the ideal always remains that of the ancient
proverb, that man is only half a human being, woman only half; and only
the father and the mother with their child become a whole one!
With regard to divorce, Ellen Key demands that it should be perfectly
free, and should depend only upon the definite desire, held for a
certain lapse of time, of either or both parties. The dissolution of
marriage must be no less easy than the breaking off of an engagement.
“Whatever drawbacks,” she says, “free divorce may involve, they can
hardly be worse than those which marriage has entailed, and still
continues to entail. Marriage has been degraded to the coarsest sexual
customs, the most shameless practices, the most distressing spiritual
murders, the most cruel ill-treatment, and the grossest impairment of
personal freedom, that any province of modern life has exhibited! One
need not go back to the history of civilization; one need simply turn
to the physician and magistrate, in order to learn for what purpose
the ‘sacrament of marriage’ is employed, and frequently employed by
the very same men and women who are professed enthusiasts as to its
moral value!”
Just as little as the relations between friends, between parents and
children, or between brothers and sisters, necessarily give rise to
lasting sentiments of affection, is it possible to expect this of two
lovers. The “marriage fetters,” described with such horrible truth by
John Stuart Mill and Björnstjerne Björnsen, are to-day felt to be
intolerable. The love of the modern man flourishes only in freedom.
“The delicate erotic sentiment of the present day shrinks from
becoming a fetter; it shuns the possibility of becoming a hindrance.”
Free divorce, in a case of unhappy marriage, is no less necessary when
there are children to the marriage. The =duties= of the parents to the
children remain in such cases unaltered, without, however, thus
rendering it necessary that the parents should continue to live
together. For the sorrows of such a union, and the harm done thereby to
the children, are greater than those that would result from divorce.
Human love has its phases of development. It does not remain for ever
the same, but it alters _pari passu_ with the evolution of the
individual. Lifelong love is an ideal, but it is not a duty. Such a
demand would as inevitably destroy personality as would the demand for
the unconditional belief in a doctrine, or for the unconditional pursuit
of a profession.
Very interesting is Ellen Key’s description of the numerous disillusions
of love, which become still more perceptible in a coercive marriage.
There is a whole series of “typical unhappy fates” in marriage, often
with no blame properly attaching to either party, dependent merely upon
incompatibility of temperament, but also upon faults of one or both
parties to the marriage.
Frequently a man or a woman of a thoroughly sympathetic temperament
lives with a woman or a man of such faultless excellence that the home
seems filled with icicles. One day the husband or the wife runs away
because the air has become so thin as to be irrespirable. The general
sentiment is one of commiseration for the--superlatively excellent man
or woman!
In the case of earnest, mature human beings, free divorce will not
increase the number of dissolutions of marriage. On the contrary, the
obligations imposed by a free relationship are greater than those of
legal coercive marriage. The fear also that with the granting of free
divorce every one will enter upon numerous free marriages one after
another is groundless. It is precisely those who are united in free love
to whom such a separation, when it does become necessary, is so
profoundly painful, that life itself forbids the frequent repetition of
such unhappiness.
Very beautiful, and based upon lofty ethical conceptions, are the
writer’s views regarding the necessity for divorce precisely in view of
the existence of children. She says:
“Men and women of earlier times went on patching up for ever and ever.
The psychologically developed generation of to-day is more inclined to
let the broken remain broken. For, except in those cases in which
objective misfortunes, or a retarded evolution, gave rise to a
rupture, patched-up marriage, like patched-up engagements, seldom
prove durable. Often it was owing to profound instincts that the
rupture became inevitable; reconciliations fortify these instincts,
and sooner or later they once more find free vent.
“Thus it happens that even an exceptional nature is strained by the
burden it has to bear, and the children are not then witnesses of
their parents living together, but of their dying together.
“Neither religion nor law, neither society nor a family, can determine
what it is that marriage is killing in a man, or what he finds it
possible to rescue in that state--=he himself alone= knows the one and
suspects the other. He alone can delineate the boundaries, can decide
whether he is satisfied to regard his own existence as closed, and to
remain contented in the life of his children; whether he is able so to
endure the sorrows of a continued married life with such fortitude as
to make it increase his own powers and those of his children.”
The conviction of the rights of love, and the consciousness of the
rights of the children, are to-day unmistakably on the increase. There
is no danger that the latter right, the right of the children, will
suffer in comparison with the rights of love. It is, on the contrary,
characteristic, that out of the very same feeling by which the freer
configuration of the amatory life is demanded, there has also arisen a
=new programme of the rights of children=. This same Ellen Key who
proclaims the inalienable rights of free love, speaks also of the
“=century of the child=,” and devotes to this subject an admirable book.
The most important point with regard to free divorce, in respect to the
children, is that the father and the mother must not separate from one
another in hatred, but in friendship, and that, in the interest of the
children, they should continue to meet one another from time to time.
Ellen Key here rightly condemns the conduct of the good friends and
relatives who simply lay down the law that the separated pair must hate
one another, and must in every relationship torment and cheat one
another. It is precisely such “enmity” of the parents after divorce that
is so full of bad consequences in respect of the children.
We also have to consider this point of view, that sometimes the new
husband or the new wife has a better influence over the children than
their own parents, and that in this way divorce may have brought the
children greater happiness, may have been for them a true blessing.
The closing chapter of her work is devoted by Ellen Key to the
formulation of practical recommendations regarding the new marriage
laws. She indicates as a starting-point of her dissertation that the
ideal form of marriage is the perfectly free union between a man and a
woman. But this ideal can in the meanwhile only be attained through
=transitional forms=. In this the opinion of society regarding the
morality of the sexual relationship must find expression, and thus
remain as the support for undeveloped personalities; but at the same
time, these transitional forms must be sufficiently free to favour a
progressive development of the higher erotic consciousness of the
present day.
There always remains, therefore, the necessity for laws, to some extent
limiting individual freedom; but these laws must admit of an advance
towards perfection in respect of the freer gratification of individual
needs. =The sense of solidarity demands a new marriage law adapted to
new modern erotic needs, since the majority are not yet prepared for
complete freedom.= But it is only the needs of modern civilized human
beings, and not abstract theories concerning the idea of the family or
the “historic origin” of marriage, that should be determinative in this
matter.
In the marriage of the future, above all, the economic and legal
subordination of woman must be abolished. Woman must supervise her own
property and arrange her own work, and she must in the main care for
herself in so far as this is compatible with her maternal duties. She
must, however, have this assurance--that =during the first years of the
life of every child she shall be cared for by society=, and this under
the following conditions:
She must be of full age.
She must have performed her feminine “military service” by a one year’s
course of instruction in the care of children, in the general care of
health, and, whenever possible, in sick-nursing.
She must either care for her child herself or provide another thoroughly
competent nurse.
She must bring proof that she does not possess sufficient personal
property, or sufficient income from her work, in order to provide for
her own support and half of her child’s support, or else that the care
for her children compels her to discontinue her professional occupation.
Only in exceptional cases should this support of motherhood be provided
for a longer time than =during the three first and most important years
of the life of the child=.
The funds for this most necessary of all kinds of insurance must be
provided in the form of a graduated income tax, graduated so as to make
the wealthier classes pay the most, and the =unmarried= should pay just
as much as the married.
In every community the central authorities of this insurance should
consist of “=boards for the care of children=.” The members of these
boards should be two-thirds women and one-third men; they should
distribute the funds and supervise the care of the infants and older
children; in cases in which the mother was not properly fulfilling her
duties to the child, they could cut off supplies, or remove the child
from the mother’s care.
The mother should receive yearly the same sum, but, in addition, she
should receive for each child =half of the cost of its support=, as long
as the number of children is not exceeded which the society has laid
down as desirable. Children born in excess of this number would be a
private concern of the parents. Every father must, from the time of
birth until the child attains the age of =eighteen years=, provide
one-half of the money needed for its support.
The existing immoral distinction between legitimate and illegitimate
children is practically equivalent to freeing unmarried fathers from
their natural responsibility, and drives unmarried mothers to death,
prostitution, or infanticide.
All this would be done away with by a law ensuring from the State
support for the mother during the first, most difficult years, and
ensuring the child a right to support from =both= parents, a right also
to the name of both, and to inheritance from both.
Legal expression is also demanded for the right of each member of a
married couple to possess his or her property; those who wish to make
any other arrangement can do so by special contract after a definite
valuation of their property. And in respect of the right of inheritance,
the =domestic work= of the wife (housekeeping and the care of the
children) must receive due economic consideration--a matter hitherto
ignored. Not only in respect of her property, but also in respect of all
civil rights, and of the right of control over her own person, the
married woman must be placed in the same position as the unmarried.
Ellen Key’s remarks on the removal of the =coercion= exercised at
present on husband and wife =in respect of living together= are very
interesting. She writes:
“There are persons who would have continued to love one another
throughout the whole of their life had they not been compelled--day
after day, year after year--to adapt their customs, their volitions,
and their inclinations entirely according to one another’s tastes. So
much unhappiness depends, indeed, upon matters of almost no
importance, difficulties which two human beings endowed with moral
courage and insight would easily have overcome, had it not been that
the instinct towards happiness was overpowered by regard for ordinary
opinion. The more personal freedom a woman (or man) has had before
marriage, the more does she (or he) suffer in a home in which she does
not possess an hour or a corner for her own undisturbed use. And the
more the modern human being gains an increase in his individual
freedom of movement, the more he feels the need for privacy in other
relations, the more also will man and wife need these things in the
married state....
“But at present custom (and law) demand from the married pair that
they should lead a life in common, which often ends in a permanent
separation, merely because conventional considerations prevented them
from living apart!
“Also for those otherwise constituted, the narrow dependence, the
compulsory belonging each to the other, the daily adaptation, the
unceasing mutual consideration, may become oppressive. In continually
increasing numbers people are beginning quietly to transform conjugal
customs, so that they may correspond to the new needs. For instance,
each goes for a journey by himself, when he feels the need for
privacy; one of the pair seeks alone pleasures which the other does
not value; in former times both would have ‘enjoyed’ them together,
against the will of one, or both would have renounced what one could
have genuinely enjoyed. More and more married people have separate
bedrooms, and after a generation, it is probable that =separate
dwelling-houses= for husband and wife will be sufficiently common to
arouse no particular attention.”
With regard to the question of personal freedom in marriage, Ellen Key
takes into account the possibility of marriage being =kept secret= on
urgent grounds; also the introduction of new forms of divorce, the
present procedure giving rise to such detestable practices in the
law-courts--for example, the detailed statement of the grounds for
divorce, or an account of the refusal or the misuse of “conjugal
rights,” or an account of the malicious desertion of one party by the
other.
The author, therefore, makes proposals for a new marriage law and a new
divorce law.
As conditions preliminary to marriage, the new law should insist--
That man and wife should be of full age;
That neither should be more than twenty-five years older than the other;
That neither should be closely related or connected with the other, as
the present law already forbids. The new law must in this respect be
modified in the sense either of greater severity or of relaxation,
according as the scientific knowledge of the future may direct.
Finally, neither party should simultaneously enter upon another
marriage. On both parties will be imposed the duty of providing a
medical certificate regarding the state of their health; a proposed
marriage must be forbidden when either party is suffering from a disease
transmissible to the children (also when suffering from a disease which
would infect the other party?). With regard to other illnesses, the
matter may be left to the free judgment of those wishing to be married.
Marriage will take place before the marriage assessor of the commune,
and before four other witnesses, without any special ceremony; the
contracting parties will enter their names in the register, and their
signatures will be witnessed by those present. When for any reason the
marriage is to be kept secret, the witnesses will, of course, be bound
to secrecy.
This civil marriage is all that the law will direct; the religious
ceremony will be a voluntary affair, and will have no legal force.
In marriage, husband and wife will retain all the =personal= rights
which they had before marriage, over their bodies, their names, their
property, their work, their wages, also the right to choose their own
place of residence, and all other civil rights. For =common= expenses
and debts they will have a common responsibility; whilst each will be
personally responsible for personal expenditure and debts. In case of
divorce, each will retain his or her property. In the event of death,
the widower or widow will inherit half the property, the remainder going
to the children.
For divorce, Ellen Key suggests there should be a “=council of
divorce=,” consisting of four persons, men or women. The first aim of
this council will be, somewhat like that of a court of honour before a
duel, to attempt to reconcile the parties, to adjust any cause of
quarrel. If this attempt fails, the matter must go before the marriage
assessor of the commune; but this cannot take place until the expiration
of =six months= from the time when it was brought before the council of
divorce. The council of divorce must testify before the assessor that
six months before =each party was fully informed regarding the wish of
the other that the marriage should be dissolved, and regarding the
reasons for that wish=. If there are no children, if a division of the
property has been arranged, and if husband and wife have lived
=completely apart= for one year, the divorce will be effected one year
after the commencement of proceedings. When there are children to the
marriage, there will be needed a special “=jury for the care of
children=” to deal with the custody of the children. If either party is
found by the jury and the judge to be =unworthy= for or =incapable= of
the custody of the children, on the ground of his (or her) =morals= or
=character=, he (or she) loses his (or her) rights. If either father or
mother is deprived of the custody of the children, a guardian must be
appointed--a man to represent the father, a woman to represent the
mother--and this guardian will supervise the education of the children
in association with the remaining parent. If both parents are found to
be unfitted for the custody of the children, the education of the latter
must be supervised by a guardian only. If both parents are =equally=
fitted and worthy for the custody of the children, the latter should
remain with the mother until the age of fifteen, and would then have the
right to choose between their parents.
Ellen Key demands severe laws against the seduction and abandonment of
girls =under age=, on the part of unconscientious men; and she considers
that the witting transmission of any infective disorder by means of
sexual intercourse should be punished by imprisonment for a minimum term
of six months. Speaking generally, the law should always come to the
assistance of the weaker party, above all, to the assistance of the
children, and in most cases to the assistance of the mother.
Although the new marriage law is to give to =adult= citizens complete
freedom to arrange their erotic relationships at their own
=responsibility= and risk, =with= or =without= marriage, it remains
necessary that double marriages (bigamy), sexual relationships within
forbidden degrees, or on the part of persons suffering from
transmissible disease, which the law has declared to be a hindrance to
marriage, and also intercourse with persons under eighteen years of age,
should be regarded as punishable offences. The same is true of
homosexual and other perverse manifestations. The =trial= in such cases
will be conducted by a judge, with the assistance of a jury of
=physicians= and =crimino-psychologists=.
The writer does not believe that marriage will be transformed by legal
changes in the way outlined above, but she is of opinion that what will
happen is that “men and women will refuse to submit themselves to the
unworthy forms of marriage, which will remain established by law, and
will form free unions, the so-called ‘=marriage of conscience=,’” such
as those which the Belgian sociologist Mesnil has recommended in his
work, “Le Libre Mariage.”
It is, in fact, in Sweden, Ellen Key’s fatherland, in which these free
marriages of conscience appear to have first obtained adherents. She
records the free union of the professor of national economics at Lund,
Knut Wicksell. Additional reports of free marriages in Sweden are given
by the Swedish physician Anton Nyström.[204] He mentions among those who
have formed free unions, without legal or ecclesiastical ceremony, but
simply by public notification, in addition to the already mentioned
university professor, also the editor of a leading newspaper, a
physician and doctor of philosophy, and a candidate of philosophy. The
latter is engaged in study with his wife at the high school at Göteborg.
In February, 1904, they made a public announcement in the newspaper that
they were entering on a “marriage of conscience,” since they had a
conscientious objection to the ecclesiastical form of marriage. The
principal of the college wrote an address to the young couple, stating
that, although this union was not entered upon on immoral grounds, and
therefore could not be regarded as a punishable offence, still, such a
free union, unrecognized by the State, between man and woman, was not
compatible with the good order of society, that it was injurious to the
general ethical conception of the sacramental character of marriage, and
also constituted a dangerous example, which others might be led to
imitate. The principal therefore urged the young people most earnestly
“to place their union as soon as possible on a legitimate footing.” This
exhortation, however, led to no result.
Moreover, the University of Upsala was more free-thinking than that of
Göteborg, for the above-mentioned professor and his wife were, for a
long time =after= they had become united in free love, matriculated
students at the University of Upsala, and the university authorities
favoured them with no attention with regard to this matter.
In recent years, the public declaration of “free marriages” has also
found observance in other European countries. Thus, not long ago the
author who writes under the pseudonym of “Roda-Roda” announced in the
newspapers his free union with the Baroness von Zeppelin; and in the
_Vossische Zeitung_, No. 410, September 2, 1906, we find the following
announcement:
“Dr. Alfred Rahmer
Wilhelmine Ruth Rahmer
geb. Prinz-Flohr
Frei-Vermählte”
(Free-Wedlock).
Similar public announcements are reported from Holland. Moreover,
according to Nyström, it has since 1734 been legally established in
Sweden, that in certain cases engagement is =equivalent to
marriage=--namely, when the engaged woman becomes pregnant. “When a man
impregnates his fiancée, =the engagement becomes a marriage.... If the
man refuse to go through the ceremony of marriage=, and wishes to break
off the engagement, the woman is legally declared to be his wife, and
enjoys full conjugal rights in his house.” So runs this law.
We can predict with certainty that the adherents of free marriage, the
number of “marriage protestants,” as Ellen Key happily calls them, will
continue to increase. To such will belong all those who have an equal
antipathy to coercive marriage, to the debasing intercourse with
prostitutes, and to the transient casual love, such as is experienced in
ordinary extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, the true “wild” love.
“It is only a question of time”--thus Ellen Key concludes her remarks
on marriage reform--“when the respect felt by society for the sexual
union will not depend upon the form of the life in common, by which
two human beings become parents, but only on the worth of the children
which these two are producing as new links in the chain of the
generations. Men and women will then devote to their spiritual and
physical preparation for sexual intercourse the same religious
earnestness that the Christians devote to the welfare of their souls.
No longer will divine laws regarding the morality of sexual
relationships be considered the mainstay of morality; in place of
these the desire to elevate the human race and a sense of personal
responsibility will be the safeguards of conduct. But the conviction
on the part of the parents =that the purpose of life is also their own
proper life--that is, that they do not exist only for the sake of
children=--should free them from certain other duties of conscience
which at present bind them in respect of children--above all, from the
duty of maintaining a union in which they themselves are perishing.
The home will perhaps become more than it is at present; something at
unity with the mother, something which--far from excluding the
father--carries within itself the germ of a new and higher ‘family
right.’...
“A greater and healthier will-to-live in respect of erotic feelings
and demands--this it is that our time needs! Here from the feminine
side real dangers threaten; and one of several ways in which these
dangers must be averted is by the construction of new forms of
marriage.
“Human material of ever higher worth and capable of higher
evolution--it is this which in the first place we have to create. If
we preserve coercive forms of the sexual life, the possibility of
doing this is a diminishing one; if we adopt free forms of the sexual
life, the possibility of doing it will increase. Not only because the
present time asks for more freedom are its demands full of promise,
but because those demands approximate ever more closely to the central
point of the problem--to the conviction that love is the principal
condition upon which depends the vital advance of the individual and
of humanity at large.”
I have given such a lengthy analysis of Ellen Key’s book because, in the
first place, in no other work do we find so lucid an exposition of all
the points needed for the consideration of the question of free love--an
exposition based upon the richest experience of life and a really
astonishing psychical knowledge of mankind, combined with the finest
understanding of the subtle activities and sentiments of the loving
soul; and, in the second place, because as an actual fact--at any rate,
in Germany--this book has formed the true starting-point of all
endeavours towards the reform of sexual morality. Ellen Key’s “Ueber
Liebe und Ehe” (“Love and Marriage”) is a demonstration of human rights
in the matter of love; it is the evangel for those who have determined
to harmonize love with all the changes and advances attendant on the
evolution of civilization, and have resolved not to allow the forcible
retardation of progress by conditions which were perhaps still tolerable
one hundred or two hundred years ago, but to-day are unconditionally
=hostile to civilization=.
In Germany these endeavours have been centralized in the Bund für
Mutterschutz (the Association for the Protection of Mothers), founded in
the beginning of 1906, whose purpose it is to protect unmarried mothers
and their children from economic and moral dangers, to counteract the
dominant condemnation of such mothers, and thereby also indirectly to
bring about the reform of the existing views on sexual morality. Those
who initiated this most important movement were indeed high-minded
women. I mention, among many, only the names of Ruth Bré, Helene
Stöcker, Maria Lischnewska, Adele Schreiber, Gabriele Reuter, and
Henriette Fürth.
By the preparatory committee to which Maria Lischnewska, Dr. Borgius,
Dr. Max Marcuse, Ruth Bré, and Dr. Helene Stöcker belonged, a committee
meeting was called on January 5, 1905, and the Association for the
Protection of Mothers was founded, its programme having already received
the support of a number of leading personalities from all parts of the
German Empire.
In addition to this committee, to which, besides the above-named members
of the preparatory committee, there belonged Lily Braun, Georg Hirth,
and Werner Sombart, a further committee was formed, the members of which
were: Alfred Blaschko, Iwan Bloch, Hugo Böttger, Lily Braun, Gräfin
Gertrud Bülow von Dennewitz, M. G. Conrad, A. Damaschke, Hedwig Dohm,
Frieda Duensing, Chr. v. Ehrenfels, A. Erkelenz, W. Erb, A. Eulenburg,
Max Flesch, Flechsig, A. Forel, E. Francke, Henriette Fürth, Agnes
Hacker, Hegar, Willy Hellpach, Clara Hirschberg, Georg Hirth, Graf Paul
von Hoensbroech, Bianca Israel, Josef Kohler, Landmann, Hans Leuss,
Maria Lischnewska, R. von Liszt, Lucas, Max Marcuse, Mensinga, Bruno
Meyer, H. Meyer, Metta Meinken, Klara Muche, Moesta, A. Moll, Müller,
Friedrich Naumann, A. Neisser, Franz Oppenheimer, Pelman, Alfred Ploetz,
Heinrich Potthoff, Lydia Rabinowitsch, Gabriele Reuter, Karl Ries, Adele
Schreiber, Heinrich Sohnrey, Werner Sombart, Helene Stöcker, Marie
Stritt, Irma von Troll-Borostyani, Max Weber, Bruno Wille, L. Wilser, L.
Woltmann.
In the programme which the newly founded Association for the Protection
of Mothers speedily published, we are told:
One hundred and eighty thousand illegitimate children are born in
Germany every year, approximately one-tenth of all births. This
important source of our strength as a people, children who at the time
of birth are usually endowed with powerful vitality (for their parents
are commonly in the bloom of youth and health), we allow to go to ruin
because a rigorous moral view bans unmarried mothers, undermines their
economic existence, and compels them to entrust their children for
payment to strange hands.
The momentous consequences of this state of affairs are shown by the
fact that the average number of still-births, in the case of
illegitimate children, amounts to 5 per cent., as compared with 3 per
cent. of still-births among the total number of births; the mortality
of illegitimate children during the first year of life is 28·5 per
cent., as compared with 16·7 per cent. for the mortality of all
children born. And whilst only a diminishing percentage of
illegitimate children ever become fitted for military service, the
world of criminals, prostitutes, and vagabonds, is recruited to an
alarming extent from their ranks. Thus, by unfounded moral prejudices,
we produce artificially an army of enemies to society. At the same
time the birth-rate of Germany is relatively declining. In the year
1876 the number of births per 1,000 living was 41; in the year 1900 it
was only 35-1/2!
To put an end to this robbery of the strength of our people is the aim
of the
ASSOCIATION FOR THE PROTECTION OF MOTHERS.
The attempt has already been made by means of crèches, foundling
institutions, and the like, to deal with this matter. =But the
protection of children without the protection of mothers is, and must
remain, no more than patchwork=; for the mother is the principal
source of life for the child, and is indispensable to the child’s
prosperity. Whatever ensures rest and care to the mother in her most
difficult hours, whatever secures her economic existence for the
future, and protects her from the contempt of her fellow-beings, by
which her health is endangered and her life embittered, will serve to
provide a secure foundation for the bodily and mental prosperity of
the child, and will simultaneously give the mother herself a stronger
moral hold. Therefore the Association for the Protection of Mothers
will, above all, make the mothers’ position safe, by assisting them
to the attainment of
ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE
--especially such as are prepared to bring up their own children--by
the formation in country and in town of
HOMES FOR MOTHERS,
in which, in addition, arrangements will be made for the necessary
care and upbringing of the children, the granting of legal protection,
and the provision of medical aid. Experience has shown that such
provision also corresponds to the wish of many of the fathers, and
assists in retaining their help and interest for mother and child.
The Association will, however, above all, close the sources from which
the present poverty of unmarried mothers arises, and these are more
especially the moral prejudices which at the present day defame them
socially, and the legal regulations which burden them almost
exclusively with the economic care and responsibility for the child,
and which entail on the father not at all, or in a quite insufficient
degree, his contribution to the burden.
THE MORAL DEFAMATION
of unmarried mothers would, perhaps, be comprehensible if we lived in
economic and social conditions rendering it possible for every one to
marry soon after attaining sexual maturity, so that the involuntary
celibacy of adult persons was an abnormal state. In such a time as
ours, however, in which no less than 45 per cent. of all women
competent to bear children are unmarried, and those who actually marry
do so for the most part at a comparatively late age, we must regard as
untenable the view which considers the unmarried woman giving birth to
a child to be an outcast, thrusts her out of society like the basest
criminal, and gives her up to despair. Equally untenable appears
THE PRESENT-DAY LEGAL VIEW,
which, when the actual father has not gone through the forms
prescribed by the State for a marriage, does not regard him as father
in the legal sense, ascribes to him no relationship with the child
procreated by him, and imposes on him no responsibility for the child
or its mother, although in the majority of cases the mother is
economically the weaker, and he himself economically the stronger
party. There must, therefore, be a legal reform in the direction of
equalizing as far as possible the position of the illegitimate and the
legitimate child in relation to the father.
Finally, however, motherhood--legitimate and illegitimate alike--is a
factor of such profound importance to society, that it appears
urgently desirable not to leave it exclusively to private care, with
all the results that private care entails. In the interest of the
community it is desirable that there should be
A GENERAL INSURANCE OF MOTHERHOOD,
the cost of which should be defrayed by contributions from both sexes,
as well as supplemented by grants from public sources. This assurance
must not only suffice to provide for every woman sufficient medical
assistance and skilled care during pregnancy and delivery, but should
also furnish a provision for the education of the child until it is of
an age to earn its own living.
In order to propagate these views and endeavours methodically and upon
the widest possible foundation, the active assistance and
participation of every class in the population is indispensable. We
therefore urge on all those who share our views the pressing demand
TO JOIN THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE PROTECTION OF MOTHERS,
and thus to assist in securing and accelerating the attainment of
these ends.
As the official organ of the Association, was chosen the monthly
magazine, edited by Dr. Phil. Helene Stöcker, _Mutterschutz: Zeitschrift
zur Reform der Sexuellen Ethik_ (_The Protection of Mothers: a Journal
for the Reform of Sexual Ethics_)--hitherto published in the year 1905
twelve numbers, in the year 1906 twelve numbers, and in the year 1907
three numbers.
The foundation of the Association was followed on February 26, 1905, by
the holding of its first public meeting, in the Architektenhaus, under
the presidency of Helene Stöcker; and the meeting was extensively
attended by the general population of Berlin. The aims and endeavours of
the new union were explained, in longer and shorter speeches, by Ruth
Bré, Max Marcuse, Maria Lischnewska, Justizrat Sello, Helene Stöcker,
Ellen Key, Lily Braun, Adele Schreiber, Iwan Bloch, and Bruno Meyer; and
from the standpoint of the advocates of woman’s rights, of jurists, of
physicians, of sociologists, and of moralists, in equal degree, a
radical transformation and reform of the present untenable conditions
was demanded.[205]
Soon afterwards, the Association proceeded to form local groups. The
first was formed in Munich, where on March 28, 1905, the first local
meeting took place. Frau Schönfliess, Margarethe Joachimsen-Böhm, Alfred
Scheel, and Friedrich Bauer belonged to this committee. Further local
groups were founded in Berlin (May 20, 1905--members of this committee,
as distinct from the committee of the general Association: Finkelstein,
Galli, Agnes Hacker, Albert Kohn, Bruno Meyer, Adele Schreiber), and in
Hamburg (president, Regina Ruben).[206]
The first general meeting (_cf._ Helene Stöcker, “Our First General
Meeting,” published in _Mutterschutz_, 1907, No. 2) took place in
Berlin, January 12 to 14. After speeches on the practical protection of
mothers (Maria Lischnewska), the present-day form of marriage (Helene
Stöcker), prostitution and illegitimacy (Max Flesch), limitation of
marriages by economic conditions (Adele Schreiber), limitation of
marriage by hygienic factors (Max Marcuse), the position of the
illegitimate child (Böhmert and Ottmar Spann), the insurance of
motherhood (Mayet), there followed animated discussions, and various
important resolutions were passed, dealing with the equality of husband
and wife in married life, the legal recognition of free marriages, and
of the offspring of such marriages, the necessity for the provision of
certificates of health before the conclusion of marriage, the means to
be employed in the care of illegitimate children, and the insurance of
motherhood. Especially noteworthy was the address of the leading medical
statistician, Professor Mayet, regarding the introduction and management
of the insurance of motherhood. At his suggestion, proposals followed
regarding the enrolling of working-class members in the societies for
insurance against illness and for the insurance of motherhood, the
necessity for contributions on the part of the State, the inclusion of
the agricultural and forest labourers, and of domestic servants of all
kinds, in the schemes of insurance against illness and the insurance of
motherhood, the possibility of a voluntary insurance of all women, what
could be effected by the insurance of motherhood (free provision of
midwives and medical assistance, free lodging in case of need, the
provision of premiums for mothers suckling their own children, the
institution of places where advice could be given to mothers, of homes
for women during pregnancy and child-birth, and homes for women and
infants), and the further development of factory legislation with regard
to nursing mothers. The committee for 1907 was chosen: it consisted of
Helene Stöcker, Maria Lischnewska, Adele Schreiber, Wilhelm Brandt, Iwan
Bloch, Max Marcuse, Heinrich Finkelstein.
In the end of January, 1907, an Austrian Association for the Protection
of Mothers was founded in Vienna, under the presidency of Dr. Hugo
Klein. To the committee of this Society there belong, Siegmund Freud,
Rosa Mayreder, Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, Professor Schauta, and about
forty other well-known persons, physicians, lawyers, schoolmasters, and
many women. In the meeting at which the Association was founded, Dr.
Ofner spoke regarding the legal rights of illegitimate mothers and
children, and Dr. Friedjung regarding the protection of nursing infants.
In the United States also an Association for sexual reform has been
founded, the so-called “Umwertungsgesellschaft” (Revaluation Society),
the principal aim of which is the complete re-estimation of all values
in the amatory life, and the introduction of a more ideal view of love.
The President of this American Association is Emil F. Ruedebusch; the
secretary, Mrs. Lina Janssen; the meeting-place of the society is
Mayville, in the State of Wisconsin. Regular evenings of discussion are
fixed, on which questions of especial interest are debated.
[In Holland also an Association for the Protection of Mothers has been
founded; its name is “Vereeniging Onderlinge Vrouwenbescherming.”]
In the newspaper _Mutterschutz_ (1905, No. 9, pp. 375, 376), we find a
report of the meeting of the American Association held on October 8,
1905, when the topic of discussion was:
=What is the true nature of marriage?=
The answer ran as follows:
Is it the family (parental) relationship?--No; for a married couple
may have no children, may not desire to have children, and can, none
the less, be thoroughly married.
Is it the common home, domestic life?--No; for husband and wife may
live their whole life in a hotel, and, none the less, be thoroughly
married.
Is it the lifelong community of material interests?--No; for man and
wife can keep their property separate, if they wish to do so.
Is it mutual assistance and a state of comradeship throughout
life?--No. When a conjugal union is the exact opposite to this, we
speak of a bad husband and a bad wife; they are, none the less, man
and wife.
Does it signify a contract for a lifelong exclusive love?--Certainly
not; if marriage signified that, all Christians would be opposed to
this institution. And yet these are the things which, according to the
common estimation, make up the nature of marriage, whenever the
question is discussed in a manner which is regarded as “respectable”
and “decent.”--As a matter of fact, there is nothing respectable or
decent in this mystification.
What is it, then, in which the true nature of marriage is to be
found?--It is the possession of a human being for lifelong exclusive
sexual service.
Very various views have prevailed on the question how many human
beings it is legitimate for one human being to employ for his
exclusive sexual gratification, and among different nations, and at
various times, the most widely divergent rules and regulations have
prevailed regarding the mode of sexual possession, and, on the other
hand, regarding the duties towards this sexual property; but wherever
marriage has existed, it has signified a right of property in respect
of sexual utilization.
If we oppose marriage, =we mean that we oppose that which actually
constitutes marriage according to morality, and according to written
law, that which even the most enthusiastic advocates of this
institution regard as so debasing that they are ashamed to name it
openly=.
But, with the exception of the matters relating to sexual service, =we
hold fast to and defend everything which is publicly considered as
marriage=, and we expect that in this case we shall be “=faithful=,”
“=constant=,” and “=trustworthy=” in all circumstances. For, according
to our view, these most important imponderabilia, and these intimate
associations of interest between husband and wife, are not the
inevitable result of the longing for physical enjoyment in common, but
are the much-to-be-desired result of a well-considered longing for any
one or all of the relations entering into the question. According to
our view, however, the duration of this union, and constancy while it
lasted, would not be dependent upon the activity of sexual desires.
A special =Association for Sexual Reform= was founded in Berlin in the
year 1906, at the instance of the editor of the _Die Schönheit_, Karl
Vanselow. It is an Association of cultured men and women who also have
in view the formation of local groups, and the delivery of artistic and
scientific lectures in furtherance of their movement for reform.
In the above-mentioned monthly magazine, _Mutterschutz_, edited by
Helene Stöcker, all the modern problems of love, marriage, friendship,
parentage, prostitution, and all the associated problems of morality,
and of the entire sexual life, are discussed from their philosophical,
historical, legal, medical, social, and ethical aspects.
The editor herself, a talented disciple of Nietzsche, has since the year
1893 been chiefly occupied in the study of the psychological and ethical
aspects of the problems of higher love, and has recently published her
collected writings on this subject in a single volume.[207]
It is an interesting literary physiognomy which is offered to us in this
book; we encounter here a lofty, free, and pure conception of the love
of the future. After the first spiritual wanderings and confusions,
which no one in emotional pursuit of the ideal can escape, we see this
courageous and undismayed advocate of the eternal, inalienable rights of
love, ultimately insisting on the recognition of the lofty mission of
love, in accordance with the saying of Nietzsche, which she lovingly
quotes: “Ye shall not propagate onwards, but upwards!” (“Nicht fort
sollt Ihr Euch pflanzen, sondern hinauf!”). She especially insists on
the =duty= and =responsibility= of individual love. No one can take a
more earnest view of love than is taken here. Helene Stöcker is
throughout no radical revolutionist, but an evolutionist and reformer.
She sees quite clearly that to-day there is no panacea, no unfailing
solution of sexual problems. While she energetically contests the old
sexual morality, and demands its replacement by a new freer conception
of sexual relationships, she, none the less, recognizes throughout the
significance and the value of self-command, of relative asceticism, the
wonderful influence of which, in the deepening of emotional life, she
has most rightly emphasized. Especially the soul of woman, she believes,
has by the asceticism imposed on women by conventional morality, gained
in a high degree, depth, fulness, and comprehensiveness. The inward
development of woman will be greatly advantaged by the newer valuation
of love. This will be characterized, neither by an arid renunciation and
denial of life, nor by a coarse, egoistic search for pleasure, but by a
joyful affirmation of life and all its healthy powers and impulses.
Whilst Helene Stocker has laid especial stress upon the psychological
and ethical relationships of free love, its equal importance from
economical and social points of view has been discussed by Friedrich
Naumann,[208] W. Borgius,[209] Lily Braun,[210] Maria Lischnewska,[211]
and Henriette Fürth.[212]
Naumann rightly draws attention to the fact that our purely monetary
economic system is favourable to the production of sterility, for the
reason that in this system motherhood is equivalent to loss of money,
because the wife ceases to earn money in a degree proportionate to the
extent to which she becomes a mother. The burden of the upbringing of
children must be made an affair of the community. At the present time,
on the contrary, the producer of human beings is burdened upon all
sides. He who has children has more rent to pay, and increased school
expenses. Therefore, Naumann demands, as a first step to the recognition
of the fact that it is a public duty to educate children, that school
expenses shall no longer be demanded from the individual parent. Above
all, however, it must be made easier to the wife to be a mother.
The wife as a personality demands her right to work, and her right to
motherhood. The fact of the compulsory celibacy of an ever-increasing
number of women competent to become mothers is the problem which here
demands solution. According to the census of 1900, there were in Germany
no less than 4,210,955 women between the ages of eighteen and forty
years unmarried, the total number of women of corresponding age being
9,568,659--that is, 44 per cent. were unmarried. Among these there were
2,830,538 between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years, the period
most suitable to child-bearing, the total number of women of
corresponding age being 3,593,644--that is, no less than 78 per cent.
According to Lily Braun, there remain from 2,000,000 to 2,500,000 German
women permanently unmarried; and we may expect the number of female
celibates to increase. The economic conditions, the previously described
unhealthy conditions of coercive marriage, and the efforts of women for
emancipation, have a combined influence hostile to marriage. On the
other hand, law and conventional morality co-operate in making life a
martyrdom for the unmarried mother and for the illegitimate child.[213]
The woman who becomes a mother, when united only in the bonds of free
love, is at the present day defamed, despised, a being without rights.
The question of “=maintenance=” is a scandal of our time! It is the
proof of the degree to which most men are devoid of conscience. An
experienced lawyer has very forcibly described the intolerable
conditions which at present obtain in this matter.[214] He published the
following characteristic letter from a young master-butcher, which shows
how meanly even a simple-minded man may endeavour to escape the duty of
maintenance. The letter runs:
“DEAR DORA,
“I wanted to come round to-day, and wished to deal with the matter by
word of mouth, but I can’t do it, and so I must write to tell you that
we cannot marry, for, in fact, I have now less money even than when I
was a journeyman. The few hundred marks that I had I have put into the
business; and, in fact, I really cannot marry; if I did, I couldn’t
exist at all. I should have to shut up the shop. What should we do
then? I shouldn’t be able to show my face in H---- again; besides, at
best, the business is not worth very much. So, my dear Dora, write to
me now how we can settle matters; you mustn’t draw the string too
tight, or ask too much; if you do, you see, you will have to find your
own way out of the trouble. Of course, I shall be glad enough to do
what’s right, because I am as much to blame as you are. If after a
while I get on as well as my brothers have done, I can do more for
you. =But just now I can’t help you much.= Let’s hope you may find
some other man with whom you may live more happily than you have lived
with me. Dear Dora, don’t make such a fuss about it: there are plenty
more in the same case, up and down the world; you are not the only
one. Now, write to me directly what you want to do; let’s get the
matter settled quietly; that’ll be better for you. Your mother won’t
leave you in the lurch, and you will find it will all come right.
“Best love.
“FRITZ H.
“P.S.--Write soon.”
Let us imagine the state of mind of the young woman who receives this
letter, characterized as it is by such crafty heartlessness! And yet
this heartlessness is no greater than that of modern European society,
which =simultaneously= makes fun of the “old maid” and condemns the
unmarried mother to infamy. This double-faced, putrescent “morality” is
profoundly =immoral=, it is =radically evil=. It is moral and good to
contest it with all our energy, to enter the lists on behalf of the
right to free love, to “unmarried” motherhood. Let us make a clearance
of this medieval bugbear of coercive marriage morality, which is a
disgrace in respect of our state of civilization and economical
development. Two million women in a condition of =compulsory= celibacy
and--coercive marriage morality. It is merely necessary to place these
two facts side by side, in order to display before our eyes the complete
ethical bankruptcy of our time in the province of sexual morality.
In addition to this necessity for a radical alteration in sexual
morality, we must, in the second place, enunciate the demand for a
general =insurance of motherhood=, for =the foundation of homes for
pregnant women, for women in child-birth, and for infants=. The
fulfilment of these demands alone will bring us a great step forward in
the restoration to health of our sexual life, and in the preparation of
a more beautiful future.[215]
If it be true, as W. B. Stevenson reports,[216] that King Charles IV.
decreed that all foundling children in Spanish America were to be
regarded as of noble birth, in order that all professions might be open
to them, we cannot but consider that this mode of thought and action, on
the part of a ruler in the country of the Inquisition, was a shining
example for our own time.
“Society,” says Eduard Reich, “as well as the Church, =sins against
the laws of morality, as long as= it stands in the way of the
advancement of illegitimate children, either by the maintenance of
miserable prejudices against these poor beings, or by positive
decrees. We shall never be able, even should the human race enter
Paradise, to make it impossible for extra-conjugal procreation to
occur: love-children will always exist. Since, then, it is not the
fault of the latter that their parents have brought them into the
world; and, further, since, even if =all= men were married, one could
not impute it to a man as a moral transgression, if he, in the
plenitude of his procreative powers, had intercourse with a beautiful
girl, instead of with his wife (suffering, for example, from cancer,
or some other serious disease); and since, on the other hand, a wife
still in the full bloom of youth could not be blamed for
unfaithfulness if, her elderly husband having been impotent for
several years, she now has intercourse with a vigorous and healthy
young man--for such reasons, let us throw the veil of forgetfulness
over all well-intentioned human weaknesses, and no longer ask whether
a citizen of the world has been engendered in the marriage-bed, or has
sprung from the well-spring of love. To the reasonable being it is the
man himself who is of value; and only blockheads, simpletons, and
donkeys will inquire as to his origin.”[217]
And yet one more question I will address in conclusion to the adherents
of coercive marriage morality. =How many= free-love relationships, how
many illegitimate children have there not been at all times among the
cultured classes, even among the pillars of the throne and the altar,
=precisely among those= who, on account of their higher spiritual
development, ought to possess a stronger ethical sensibility (_nota
bene_, from the standpoint of coercive marriage morality). It would be
an interesting task to collect =statistics relating to such free unions,
and the resulting= “illegitimate” offspring, in the case of notable men
and women! The marriage fanatics would be horrified! Quite apart from
the =innumerable secret relationships= of this nature, and their
consequences, a short observation and enumeration of the illegitimate
loves and parentage of men and women of high standing, alike spiritual
and moral, would alone suffice to illuminate the actual conditions, and
would enable us to draw remarkable conclusions regarding coercive
marriage. It is my intention, as soon as possible, to represent in a
brief work the rôle of free love in the history of civilization, and to
adduce proofs that free love is very well compatible with a moral life.
Who would venture to reproach with immorality a Bürger, a Jean Paul, a
Gutzkow, a Karoline Schlegel, a George Sand, or even a Goethe?[218]
It is a simple evolutionary necessity that free love, in association
with progressive differentiation and with the reshaping of economic
conditions, will find its moral justification also for those who at
present judge and condemn it from the point of view of long outworn
social conditions.
[186] M. Nordau, “The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization.” See also
P. Näcke, “Einiges zur Frauenfrage und zur sexuellen Abstinenz”--“A
Contribution to the Woman’s Question and to the Question of Sexual
Abstinence.” Näcke condemns this duplex morality, and demands for the
woman in principle the same sexual freedom that is granted to the man.
[187] One of the most remarkable instances of free love as a popular
institution was the “island custom” of the (so-called) Isle of
Portland. Here, until well on into the nineteenth century,
experimental cohabitation was universal, and marriage did not take
place until the woman became pregnant. But if, as a result of this
experimental cohabitation, “the woman does not prove with child, after
a competent time of courtship, they conclude they are not destined by
Providence for each other; they therefore separate; and =as it is an
established maxim=, which the Portland women observe with great
strictness, =never to admit a plurality of lovers at one time=, their
honour is in no way tarnished. She just as soon gets another suitor
(after the affair is declared to be broken off) as if she had been
left a widow, or that nothing had ever happened, but that she had
remained an immaculate virgin” (Hutchins, “History and Antiquities of
the County of Dorset,” vol. ii., p. 820, 1868). So faithfully was this
“island custom” observed that, on the one hand, during a long period
no single bastard was born on the “island,” and, on the other, every
marriage was fertile. But when, for the further development of the
Portland stone trade, workmen from London, with the “wild love” habits
of the large town, came to reside in Portland, these men took
advantage of the “island custom,” and then refused to marry the girls
with whom they had cohabited. Thus, in consequence of freer
intercourse with the “civilized” world, the “Portland custom” has
gradually fallen into desuetude. But the words I have emphasized in
the quotation show how faithfully the conditions of “free love,” as
defined in this work, were observed in Portland. An account of
Portland, with allusions to the local practice of “free love,” will be
found in Thomas Hardy’s novel, “The Well Beloved.”--TRANSLATOR.
[188] A. Blaschko, “Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century,” p. 12
(Berlin, 1902).
[189] _Cf._ Helen Zimmern, “Mary Wollstonecraft” in _Deutsche
Rundschau_, 1889, vol. xv., Heft 11, pp. 259-263. Consult also C.
Kegan Paul, “William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries,” 2 vols.
(London, 1876).
[190] “Shelley’s Poetical Works,” edited by Edward Dowden, p. 42
(Macmillan, 1891).
[191] _Ibid._, p. 44.
[192] _Cf._ the admirable critical investigation by Georg Hirth,
“Goethe’s Christiane,” published in “Ways to Love,” pp. 323-366,
containing new and valuable aids to our judgment of this relationship.
[193] A. Wernich, “Geographical and Medical Studies, based upon
Experiences obtained in a Journey Round the World,” p. 137 (Berlin,
1878). Among the Malays of the Dutch Indies divorce is very easy; it
costs only a few gulden, and is often carried out “very much to the
advantage of husband and wife who are not held together by love. =But
it is by no means rare for a divorced couple to remarry after a
certain time=” (Ernst Haeckel, “Aus Insulinde, Malayische
Reisebriefe”--“From the Indian Archipelago, Malay Letters of Travel”),
p. 242 (Bonn, 1901).
[194] Kuno Fischer, “History of Recent Philosophy,” vol. vii., p. 135
(Heidelberg, 1898).
[195] _Cf._ in this connexion my pseudonymous work, “Rétif de la
Bretonne: the Man, the Author, and the Reformer,” p. 500 (Berlin,
1906).
[196] _Cf._ George Gissing’s powerful novel, “The Odd
Women.”--TRANSLATOR.
[197] A brief sketch of tetragamy is also given by Schopenhauer in the
fragments of his “Lecture on Philosophy” (“Schopenhauer’s Legacy,” ed.
Grisebach, vol. iv., pp. 405, 406), also in the manuscript books,
“Pandektä” and “Spicilegia” (_op. cit._, pp. 418, 419).
[198] Charles Albert, “Free Love.”--We may also allude to the more
generally philosophic work by Armand Charpentier, “L’Évangile du
Bonheur. Mariage. Union Libre. Amour Libre” (Paris, 1898).
[199] L. Gumplowicz, “Marriage and Free Love” (Berlin, 1902, second
edition).
[200] In this connexion English readers will do well to consult Karl
Pearson’s admirable “The Ethic of Freethought.” In the third or
sociological section of that book there are numerous references to the
subject of free love in relation to the economic structure of society.
One of these will, however, for the present, suffice for quotation:
“The economic independence of women will, for the first time, render
it possible for the highest human relationship to become again a
matter of pure affection, raised above every suspicion of restraint
and every taint of commercialism.” It will be seen that Karl Pearson,
like Albert, Gumplowicz, Bebel, and Socialists in general, believes
that collectivism and the economic independence of women are
indispensable preliminaries to a far-reaching reform of our sex
relationships in the direction of free love.--TRANSLATOR.
[201] I must here call attention to the fact that the celebrated
philosopher Eugen Dühring, in his notable work, “The Value of Life,”
pp. 155-158 (Leipzig, 1881, third edition), made a violent attack on
the coercive marriage system, and demanded on ethical grounds a
transformation of our amatory life in the direction of freedom and of
personal love.
[202] Edward Carpenter, “Love’s Coming-of-Age,” third edition, London,
1902.
[203] Ellen Key, “Love and Marriage,” translated into German by
Francis Maro (Berlin, 1904).
[204] Anton Nyström, “The Sexual Life and its Laws,” pp. 244-247
(Berlin, 1904).
[205] The speeches on this occasion were published by Helene Stöcker
in her pamphlet, “The Association for the Protection of Mothers” (No.
4 of “Modern Questions of the Day,” edited by Dr. Hans Landsberg;
Berlin, 1905).
[206] Unfortunately, Ruth Bré, who has played such a leading part in
the history of the movement for the protection of mothers and for
sexual reform, has recently gone her own way, and has founded an
association of her own for the protection of mothers, which we may
hope will soon be reabsorbed into the general Association. Above all,
in such a province of reform as this, open as it is to attacks of
every kind, unity is essential.
[207] Helene Stöcker, “Die Liebe und die Frauen”--“Love and Women”
(Minden, 1906).
[208] Fr. Naumann, “Women in the New Economic Life,” published in
_Mutterschutz_, 1906, No. 4, pp. 133-149.
[209] W. Borgius, “Mutterschafts-Rentenversicherung,” _ibid._, pp.
149-154.
[210] Lily Braun, “Die Mutterschaftsversicherung,” _ibid._, 1906, Nos.
1-3, pp. 18-24, 69-76, 110-124.
[211] M. Lischnewska, “The Economic Reform of Marriage,” _ibid._, No.
6, pp. 215-236.
[212] H. Fürth, “Motherhood and Marriage,” _ibid._, 1905, Nos. 7,
10-12, pp. 165-169, 389-395, 427-435, 483-489.
[213] The facts to which we have alluded throw a peculiar light upon
the ever-renewed attack, made by certain writers who will not see,
_against_ the emancipation of women, whilst at the same time they
_advocate_ motherhood! A typical example of this is the book written
by the gynecologist Max Runge, “Woman in her Sexual Individuality”
(Berlin, 1896), the objectivity of which, in comparison with other
hostile writings, must, however, be expressly recognized.
[214] “Office Consultations of a Solicitor,” by Severserenus, p. 70
_et seq._ (Hanover, 1902).
[215] The question of _unmarried motherhood_, sociologically of such
profound importance, has recently been treated by Max Marcuse in an
admirable monograph, “Unmarried Mothers” (Berlin, 1907, vol. xxvii. of
the “Documents of Great Towns,” edited by Hans Ostwald). Herein we
find exact data regarding the number, religion, position, profession,
and characteristics of unmarried mothers, also the social and
psychological causes of unmarried motherhood, and the existing and
future means of caring for women in this position. The same author, in
the newspaper _Soziale Medizin und Hygiene_, 1906, vol. i., pp.
657-667, discusses the important question of the =adoption= of
illegitimate children. Valuable monographs concerning =illegitimate
children= are those of Hugo Neumann, “The Illegitimate Children of
Berlin,” Jena, 1900; Ottomar Spann, “Investigations Regarding the
Illegitimate Population of Frankfurt-on-the-Main,” Dresden, 1906;
Frieda Duensing, “The Legal Position of Illegitimate Children,” and
Taube, “Illegitimate Children,” published in “The Book of the Child,”
edited by Adele Schreiber, vol. ii., div. 2, pp. 57-61, 62-69
(Leipzig, 1907); the practical work hitherto effected--already
extensive, but still far less than we could wish--by the Association
for the Protection of Mothers has been detailed by Maria Lischnewska,
in her excellent pamphlet, “The Practical Protection of Mothers”
(Berlin, 1907).
[216] W. B. Stevenson, “Travels in Arauco, Chile, Peru, and Columbia,
in the years 1804-1823,” vol. i., p. 174 (Weimar, 1826).
[217] Eduard Reich, “Immorality and Excess, from the Point of View of
the Medical, Hygienic, Political, and Moral Sciences,” p. 127 (Neuwied
and Leipzig, 1866).
[218] Apart from the study of the numerous free-love relationships of
the poet Goethe, it would be interesting to make an investigation
regarding his illegitimate children. Only a few years ago there died
in Stützerbach one of the last illegitimate grandchildren of Goethe, a
wood-cutter, a man of tall stature and proud gait, resembling in
appearance and demeanour the beloved of all women. _Cf._ A. Trinius,
“From the Mountain-World of Goethe,” published in the _Berliner
Lokal-Anzeiger_, No. 453, of September 6, 1906.
CHAPTER XII
SEDUCTION, THE SENSUAL LIFE (GENUSSLEBEN), AND WILD LOVE (WILDE LIEBE)
“_In the sensual life, imponderabilia play a leading part, and many an
effort towards improvement, many a reform, has been shattered against
them, simply because the would-be reformer has overlooked the finer
threads which connect the human soul with the institutions and customs
of the material world._”--WILLY HELLPACH.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XII
Difference between free love and wild love -- The danger of wild love
-- Forms the bridge to prostitution -- Its connexion with the sensual
life and with seduction -- The peculiarities of modern epicureanism --
Restless character of the sensual life -- The life of “amusement” --
The erotic aim of this life -- Sexual excesses of the present day --
Heedlessness of wild love -- Influence of large towns on the sensual
life -- Nocturnal life -- Character of the pleasures of large towns --
Increase of sexual tension -- Pursuit of pleasure among the common
people -- The increasing number of young embezzlers -- Public
seduction -- Professional seduction -- History of the art of love --
Its gradual spiritualization -- Seducer types -- Don Juan and Casanova
-- British Don-Juanism -- The domineering erotic, and the erotic
genius -- Kierkegaarde, “Diary of a Seducer” -- Pseudo Don-Juanism --
Printed guide-books to the sensual life for the modern man of pleasure
-- Influence of the mode of life upon the sexual life -- Alcohol as
the incorporation of evil in this respect -- Analysis of its influence
on the _vita sexualis_ -- Its peculiar duplex influence -- Utilization
of this influence by prostitutes and seducers -- Alcoholism and
venereal diseases -- Absinthe in France -- Share of alcohol in
producing offences against morality -- Encouragement of wild love by
alcohol -- Connexion of illegitimate births with alcoholic excess --
Increase of wild love at the present day -- “Intimacy” (“das
Verhältnis”) -- Its gradual degeneration -- History of the origination
of the “intimacy,” and psychological explanations thereof --
Increasing similarity between the nature of the “intimacy” and the
conditions of prostitution -- Causes -- Frequent changes of
“intimates” -- The diffusion of venereal diseases by means of wild
love -- Rôle of lies, mistrust, and hatred therein -- Produces
disbelief in love -- Wild love and coercive marriage -- Causes of
sexual corruption -- Need for the campaign against wild love and
sexual libertinism -- Hellmann’s book on sexual libertinism --
Attitude of the medical man towards “extra-conjugal” sexual
intercourse -- Increasing aversion to wild love -- The increase in
free ideal love unions -- Wild love as the transitional stage to
prostitution.
CHAPTER XII
In the previous chapter we repeatedly drew attention to the fact that
free love is not identical with the sexual promiscuity indulged in at
the present day to such an alarming extent and with such disastrous
consequences--sexual promiscuity in the form of extra-conjugal sexual
intercourse, irregular in character, and dependent almost entirely upon
chance.
I am an ardent advocate of “free love,” by which I understand sexual
union based upon intimate love, personal harmony, and spiritual
affinity, entered on by the free resolve of both parties, involving the
assumption of all the duties entailed by such free unions, and with
satisfactory mutual assurances regarding health. But with corresponding
emphasis I must condemn, from the standpoint of the physician and from
that of public hygiene, and also on ethical grounds, the now so widely
diffused “extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse, for which, in order to
distinguish it from the entirely different extra-conjugal “free” love, I
suggest the term “=wild love=.”
This wild love is the true cancer of our society, for its chief
characteristic is that it constitutes =an enduring connexion and means
of transition= between hygienically and ethically unexceptionable sexual
intercourse and prostitution, and thus involves the unceasing risk of
transferring to the former =all the dangers= of the latter. In this
sense, wild love can really be regarded as a kind of =irradiation= of
the whole nature of prostitution into the entirety of sexual relations
in general. Thus, it remains a powerful hindrance to all ennoblement and
resanation of the amatory life, and it is an invincible source of the
moral and physical degeneration and the infective contamination of the
nation.
Wild love is intimately connected with the artificial sensual life of
our time, and with the manifold varieties of seduction[219] arising from
that life. Wild love, the sensual life, and seduction, form, as it were,
a triad, each member of which is the principal predisposing condition of
the others.
He who wishes to characterize in a few words the European civilization
of the present day may say that its nature consists in =epicureanism=,
mitigated by =toil= and the =struggle for life=; but this epicureanism
is of a very peculiar kind. It is no longer the unqualified sensual life
of the eighteenth century, in which sensual lusts and epicurean
refinements were to many the whole object of life, nor is it the
comfortable enjoyment of “the good old times”; it is a quite peculiar
=concentrated= enjoyment of the moment, =in the midst of the hard work
of life=. The _carpe diem_ of Horace has to-day become _carpe horam_!
The forced labour which the fierce struggle for existence at present
entails upon the majority of men leaves no more time for a simple
undisturbed enjoyment of existence, for the inward deep =experience= of
reality, and for a quiet joy therein. No, our sensual life of to-day
bears in it the sting of =pain=, because the will to live, which,
according to Schopenhauer, continually strives for an “=increase of
life=,” has now degenerated into a convulsive search for =the most
violent sensations possible=, into a wild hunt after the strongest
possible and most frequent enjoyments, because the time is lacking for a
peaceful, harmonious existence. Each man asks himself anxiously whether
he may not have “missed” this or that possibility of objective pleasure;
and forgets in doing so that the true happiness of life lies =within
himself=, and that the greatest possible sum of outward enjoyments
cannot procure him this happiness.
The signature of our time is “=amuse oneself=,” a phrase which conveys
the idea of all our modern superficial pleasures, and of our sensual and
spiritual sensations, which must chase one another in rapid succession
in order to enable the modern civilized man to feel that he “lives.”
For the majority of those living in great towns, amusement is equivalent
to a =continued succession of superficial sensual pleasures, as
preparatory stimuli for an equally fugitive and debasing sexual act=.
The frequently heard and favourite phrases “to go through with it,” “to
live one’s life,” “to sow one’s wild oats,” etc., have all the same
significance, in the sense of preparation for sexual indulgence by means
of such stimuli.
From beer-saloons and public-houses of all kinds, especially those at
which the attendants are women, from the cabarets and variety theatres,
the low-class music-halls and dancing-saloons, also, however, from
better-class balls, soirées, and luxurious dinners, the road is open to
the prostitute, or to the arms of a girl excited by similar sensual
stimuli to a similarly transitory sexual desire.
A great physician has said: “We eat three times too much.” I might add,
in amplification of this saying, Not only do we eat three times too
much, but we look for all other sensual pleasures in excess, and for
this reason =we love also three times too much=, or rather, we indulge
=too often= in sexual intercourse.
One of our most talented psychologists, Willy Hellpach, has described
these relationships with great insight:
“To the enormous majority of our young men sexual indulgence is a
matter of course, like their card-parties, their evenings at the club,
their glass of beer; and of the few who live otherwise, a considerable
proportion do so simply from timidity, or from poverty of spirit (they
would like to, but they cannot screw their courage up). Another
portion is honourably continent, but does not dare to make any display
of this adhesion to principle, and rather pretends not to be
distinguished in any way from the majority; and the very few young men
who openly set their faces against the custom may be counted on the
fingers of one hand. It is obvious that in this way the extra-conjugal
sexual act loses the distinction of the unaccustomed; it is effected
continually in a more heedless, light-hearted, frivolous
manner--until, finally, the very idea of danger connected with
indiscriminate sexual indulgence is forgotten; the preventive is
thrown aside with an easy “Nothing has ever happened to me.” Indeed,
many a man goes to his fate in the shape of infection with his eyes
open, and with the most light-hearted confidence: if he is infected,
there will be plenty of time before his marriage to be thoroughly
cured.
“This factor comes the more readily into play in proportion to the
degree in which the whole arrangement of the sensual life culminates
in the stimulation of erotic activities. Such a tendency is inevitably
associated with the development of the modern large town; and there
ensues an imitation of the sensual life of large towns in smaller
towns, and even in country villages.[220]
“Every large town provides the means for a much more extensive
stimulation of the senses than country life; and the alternate
stimulation and deadening of the senses, characteristic of town life,
has in the very large towns of our time reached an unheard-of degree
of intensity. The town is the typical habitat of that sensual and
nervous condition of irritability which historically characterizes our
own generation; the townsman is the typical representative of
“nervousness” in its modern form. The verbal connexion between
“senses” and “sensuality” represents an actual transition; and in
ordinary parlance, by the “sensual” we understand the “erotic.” Where
the senses are more strongly stimulated, there erotic desire grows,
there it loses its periodical course in favour of a continuous
wakefulness, or, at any rate, in favour of a light slumber, which the
slightest stimulus will disturb. And the townsman is more easily
impelled to the sexual act, not merely because the town offers him
prostitutes, “intimates,” etc., in much greater numbers, but also
because his over-stimulated nervous system impels him much more
powerfully to search for these objects, and makes it much more
difficult for him to safeguard himself against their allurements.
“And town life is nocturnal life! The more so, the larger the town;
and we see the extreme form of this in the great capitals of Europe.
The consequences in regard to the opportunities for and incitations to
sexual enjoyment are not lacking. First of all, nocturnal life gives
rise to a summation of stimuli, to an incredible variety of nervous
titillation, and this induces an increasing sensuality; and once the
sensual life has become habitually nocturnal, now, by a vicious
circle, all enjoyment is unavoidably fettered to the town. Natural
recuperation has become a secondary consideration, and in place of the
relief of tension, we have apparent restoration by means of variety.
All, all, tends in favour of a sharpening of sensual stimuli, of
arousing the wish for erotic pleasures. And the town is untiring,
inexhaustible, in its discovery of means for the gratification of
these instincts. Variety theatres, gin-palaces, low music-halls, and
all the amusements of similar kind, are simply unthinkable without the
sensual note; and even where they maintain themselves to be free from
that note, it will be unconsciously sought by the audience, will be
easily found, and if it were absent, its absence would be angrily
resented. The same is true, more or less, of entertainments of a
higher æsthetic rank. With very few exceptions, our theatres are
compelled to take into consideration the instincts of the public, and
the instincts of the population of our large towns are chiefly
concerned with eroticism. Even where sexual questions are elevated
into the sphere of the highest art, and by the artist himself the
common is detested, the audience will, after their kind, merely
extract erotic stimulation; and that the opera and the stage are
sought by many merely on account of these accessory influences, is too
well known to need proof--not to say a word regarding the pantomime
and the ballet.
“Perhaps the worst of all is yet to come. In his public dinners, his
parties, his clubs, his balls, etc., the man of the upper classes, and
also the man of the middle classes, does not find the
much-to-be-desired ethical counterpoise to this characteristic sensual
life of our young men; but rather finds the prolongation of it in a
somewhat more masked and artificial form. From the outset, the
relationship between the sexes is of so suggestive, so purposive a
character, that this exercises a gentle, stimulating influence upon
desire; and a man is thrown into a state of tension for which he often
finds only one outlet, sexual gratification--which he must either buy
or obtain by cunning--and thus he passes straightway from the
influences of the public sensual life, to become the customer of the
prostitute, the partner in the “intimacy,” the seducer in the
nocturnal life of the great town. He then either runs the danger of
infection with venereal diseases, or he occupies himself with their
dissemination; for the man suffering from venereal disease is not
merely a victim: he is commonly also a focus of infection, one who
finds new victims in the shape of girls hitherto uninfected.
“To this evil a remarkable trait in the sensual life of the simpler
woman extends ready assistance--I mean that servility, that erotic
obsequiousness which finds expression already in the gossip, and in
the favourite reading of the lower classes, and which makes them feel
to some extent flattered if they are treated as means of enjoyment by
a man of good position. It is well known that the prostitute in her
talk gladly makes her lover a baron; but, unfortunately, a similar
tendency characterizes the feminine half of the lower classes
throughout, and to our regret, this is more especially true of the
German people. Our commercial-traveller nature, to which, according to
Sombart, we owe a portion of our ascendancy in the markets of the
world, finds its most regrettable and disastrous seamy side in the
readiness with which the masses forget their pride and self-respect,
when it is a question of snatching a pleasure. This characteristic
has, in recent lustra, unfortunately become not better, but rather
worse; the desire to look well at any cost, with which the simple girl
so often makes herself laughable, inspires also her longing to ‘walk
out’ with a distinguished admirer.”[221]
But not only does the simple girl of the people sacrifice her life and
health in this pursuit of pleasure; the young men also are not
behindhand in the pursuit, which they regard as “gentlemanlike,” of
enjoyment and of women. It is astonishing what an increase in recent
times there has been in the number of youthful embezzlers, learners and
clerks in merchants’ offices, whose offences have been committed simply
in order to provide funds for the gratification of their pothouse
pleasures. Among them one meets lads between the ages of fourteen and
eighteen years, a symptom of the earlier sexual maturity of the present
day. When, as usually happens, they are arrested after a few days, it
comes out in evidence that the embezzled money was squandered in the
society of prostitutes, but we learn that the tendency to such excess
had existed in the embezzler long before he actually committed a crime.
If the heads of businesses were to keep themselves better informed
regarding the mode of life of their employees, many a disillusion and
many a loss would be spared them.
Sexual seduction is at the present time effected less by individuals
than by the environment. =The sensual life as such=, the entire
stimulating sensual atmosphere of that life, plays to-day a rôle which
at an earlier time, when our social life and pleasures were less fully
developed, fell to the “seducer,” the _galant homme_ and Don Juan of
earlier days. Our young people are subjected rather to the general
influences of the pursuit of amusement, which fascinates all circles,
than to the allurements of the habitual seducer. =To-day, the victims
of public seduction, by means of the sensual life characteristic of our
time, are far more numerous= than those seduced by isolated individuals,
though such there have been, and will be, at all times.
Before I pass to the consideration of the individual influences of the
modern sensual life, those by which wild love is especially favoured,
and before I describe the general seduction of the present day, I
propose to touch upon the interesting question of “=professional
seduction=,” to consider Don-Juanism and the practice of the “_ars
amandi_.”
It is remarkable how strongly the history of the art of seduction
reflects the general tendency of the evolution of love from purely
physical impulses to spiritual love. This we learn simply from the study
of the numerous =text-books of the art of love=, the so-called “_ars
amandi_.”
Whereas in the earlier text-books of this subject, from Ovid’s “Ars
Amandi,”[222] widely celebrated in antiquity, to the “Practica Artis
Amandi,”[223] the “Morale Galante, ou l’Art de Bien Aimer,”[224] of the
seventeenth century, and Gentil Bernard’s “L’Art d’Aimer,”[225] of the
eighteenth century, the principal stress was laid upon all the possible
sensual stimuli, and upon the superficial gallantry associated with
this; in the modern text-books, in that of Manso[226] (still belonging
to the eighteenth century), but especially in the more recent works by
Stendhal,[227] Paul Bourget,[228] A. Silvestre,[229] Catulle
Mendés,[230] Robert Hessen,[231] and Hjalmar Kjölenson,[232] we find
much more stress laid on all the =spiritual= influences of the art of
love. In this way it is possible to follow in these works the whole
course of the enrichment of the spiritual and emotional life in
love.[233]
The same process of development can be recognized also in the figure of
Don Juan. His type has undergone gradual alteration, always becoming
more and more intellectual. The =purely sensual= Don Juan, as Lord
Chesterfield, for example, characterizes and embodies him, is to-day
quite out of date even among sensual men of the ordinary type; whereas
though Kierkegaard’s “Diary of a Seducer” describes an extreme type,
that of the purely reflective libertine, yet in this extreme, the author
has very rightly recognized the general tendency of evolution.
Recently, Oscar A. H. Schmitz has published an extremely original and
thoughtful study of “Don Juan, Casanova, and other Erotic Characters”
(Stuttgart, 1906), in which he distinguishes very sharply the seducer
type of a Casanova from the seducer-type of a Don Juan. Don Juan is a
deceitful, cunning seducer, to whom the =sense of possession= associated
with the attainment of his aim, the =danger=, the activity of his
=desires for power and dominance=, are the principal matters, but who is
in himself =unerotic=; whereas Casanova is pre-eminently the erotic,
also crafty and deceitful, not, however, for the gratification of his
need for power, but rather for the agreeable satisfaction of his need
for sensual love. Don Juan knows only “women”; for Casanova each one is
“the woman.” Don Juan is demoniacal, devilish he goes on to the complete
destruction of the women seduced by him, deliberately he ensures their
unhappiness; Casanova is human, cares always for the happiness of the
women he loves, and devotes to them a tender reflection. Don Juan
=despises= women, he is of the type of the misogynist, of the satanic
woman-hater; Casanova is the typical feminist, he possesses a profound
understanding of woman’s soul, is not disappointed by love, and needs
for his life’s happiness continuous contact with feminine natures. Don
Juan seduces by means of his own elemental nature, by the attractive
power of brutal wild force; Casanova does so by means of the sensual
atmosphere which surrounds him.
With an accurate psychological insight, Schmitz remarks:
“It seems as if the love of one, or, where possible, of several, women
inoculates the man, as it were, with a vital fluid, and gives his
glance a fire which at times makes him irresistible. Men of pleasure
declare that after the most fortunate nights, when, exhausted, they
were returning home to sleep, on the way the most eager and meaning
glances were cast upon them by the women whom they passed.”
This distinction between the two types of seducer, which Schmitz makes
in his original book, containing excellent observations on the
psychology of love, is indeed not new. Stendhal, in the chapter
“Werther and Don Juan” of his book, “Ueber die Liebe,” pp. 241-251
(German edition, Leipzig, 1903), points out the same types. “The genuine
Don Juans,” he says, “ultimately come to regard women as their enemies,
and find actual pleasure in their manifold unhappiness”; whereas
Werther, the equivalent of Casanova, regards all women as entrancing
beings, towards whom we are far too unjust. The love of Don Juan is “a
similar feeling to the love of the chase”; Werther’s love is gentle,
idealizes the reality, is full of tender and romantic impressions. Don
Juan is the conqueror; Werther is the erotic.
I myself also, in my work on “Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., p. 159
(Berlin, 1903), have, earlier than Schmitz, clearly distinguished from
one another these two seducer types, in a passage in which I depict the
British Don Juan, in contrast to the French and Italian Don Juan.
The passage runs:
“The principal characteristic of the British Don Juans, who are
completely distinct from the libertines of the Latin and of the other
Teutonic countries, is the =cold, brazen= quietude with which they
indulge in the sensual pleasures of life; =love is much less to them
an affair of passion than one of pride and of the gratification of
their consciousness of power=. The French, the Italian Don Juan is
driven by ardent sensuality from conquest to conquest. This is the
=principal motive= of their actions and of their mode of life. The
English Don Juan seduces on principle, for the sake of experiment; he
pursues love as a sport. Sensuality plays a part only in the second
degree, and in the midst of his sensual enjoyment the coldness of his
heart is still painfully apparent.
“This is the =rake=, the type of =Lovelace=, which Richardson, in his
‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ has described with incomparable mastery.”
Taine, also, in his “History of English Literature,” has described this
British Don-Juanism, which hates rather than loves.
Finally, we find these types also in Rosa Mayreder’s book, “Zur Kritik
der Weiblicheit” (“Critique of Femininity,” Leipzig, 1905), especially
in the chapter, “A Few Words on the Powerful Faust” (pp. 210-243). Her
type of the “=masterful erotic=” closely resembles the Don Juan type of
Schmitz, and my own British seducer type.
“Erotic excitement,” says Rosa Mayreder, “gives rise in these men to
the lust of dominion; to them the relationship with women signifies a
grasping possession, an enjoyment of power, and they are unable to
think of women except as subject and dependent. Only in so far as
woman adapts herself to them as a means do they know her; as a
personality, with individual aims, she does not exist for them.”
This masterful eroticism exists among men of quite low social position,
just as much as among men of high position.[234] Their diametrical
opposite is the love-perception of delicately sensitive, erotical,
highly differentiated men, whose highest type constitutes the “=erotic
genius=.” Rosa Mayreder characterizes this latter type in the following
terms:
“The increasing differentiation of erotic perception brings with it a
new faculty, which extinguishes the consciousness of superiority and
transforms the need for contrast into the need for community, for
reciprocity--the capacity for devotion. Thus comes to pass the most
remarkable phenomenon in the masculine psyche, the great miracle,
which effects a complete transformation of the primitive mode of
perception, a transformation of the teleological sexual nature.
“The erotic genius grasps the nature of the opposite sex with
intuitive understanding, and is capable of assimilating it completely.
The other sex is to him the primevally akin and primevally allied; his
love-relationships are accompanied by ideas of enlargement,
fulfilment, liberation of his own essential nature, or even by the
idea of a mystical union. To him sexuality does not denote an
annulment or limitation of personality, but rather an enlargement and
enrichment by means of the individuals with which, in this way, his
personality is associated.”
As an erotic genius of such a kind, Rosa Mayreder points to Richard
Wagner, as he manifests himself in his letters to Mathilde Wesendonk.
The sensibility and refinement of the modern woman, her emergence as a
personality, must continually repel the masterful type of
erotic--although doubtless that type will never be entirely eliminated.
I do not believe in a complete transformation of the teleological sexual
nature of man, which has always assigned to him the active aggressive
rôle. But it is true that the possibilities of existence for the
masterful erotic, the Don Juan type, have become limited. He must, as
Schmitz rightly insists, intellectualize himself if he wishes to
continue to exist. This psychological satanism of the modern Don Juan is
wonderfully described by Kierkegaard, in his “Diary of a Seducer.”[235]
The hero of this book learns best from the girls themselves how they can
be betrayed; he develops in them “spiritual eroticism,” in order then
suddenly to abandon them, but =they themselves= must loosen the tie.
Woman and love are not to him in themselves the principal need; what is
important to him is, as he says at the conclusion, that he has been
able to enrich himself with numerous erotic perceptions. The modern Don
Juan is, therefore, nothing more than a =cold psychological
experimenter=. It is in this way that, with prophetic insight, Choderlos
de Laclos has described him in the Vicomte de Valmont, the hero of his
“Liaisons Dangereuses.”
Yet another interesting Don Juan type of our time has to be considered,
one which indeed is not a genuine Don Juan, but a =pseudo= Don Juan, or
rather a pseudo Casanova; and this type makes its appearance also in the
female sex.
Like Rétif de la Bretonne, it is the man or woman seeking eternally for
the ideal, for true love; a type which only, in consequence of the
ever-repeated disillusions and errors, assumes a Don Juanesque
character. At the present day, we meet this type very often. It is only
the expression of the increasing difficulty of the proper love choice,
owing to the progressive differentiation of our time; and it is not
originated by the desire for sensual lust, but rather by the eternally
disillusioned yearning for genuine individual love.
But we must return after this excursion to the consideration of the
commonest type of public seduction by means of the sensual life of our
time. It is significant that this also possesses its literary guides and
course of instruction, in the form of the numerous printed =handbooks
for the world of pleasure=. Among these we may mention, “Guides du
Viveur,” “Guides de Plaisir,” “Führer durch das Nächtliche Berlin”
(“Guide to Berlin by Night”), “New London Guide to the Night Houses,”
“Die Geheimnisse der Berliner Passage” (“Secrets of the ‘Passage’ of
Berlin”), “Paris by Night,” “The Swell’s Night Guide through the
Metropolis,” “Bruxelles la Nuit, Physiologie des Établissements
Nocturnes de Bruxelles” (for Englishmen of pleasure, published under the
title of “Brussels by Gas-light”), “Paris and Brussels after Dark,” “The
Gentleman’s Night Guide,” “Hamburgs galante Häuser bei Nacht und Nebel”
(“Hamburg’s Fast Houses by Night and Cloud”), “Das Galante Berlin,”
“Naturgeschichte der galanten Frauen in Berlin” (“Natural History of the
Fast Women of Berlin”), “Paris Intime et Mystérieux,” “Guide des
Plaisirs Mondains et des Plaisirs Secrets à Paris.” All these have
appeared during the last thirty years, some of them in several editions.
For Vienna, Buda-Pesth, St. Petersburg, Rome, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid,
Marseilles, Rotterdam, and New York, there also exist such guides to all
open and secret enjoyments.
In order to give an idea of the contents of such a guide to the sensual
life, I need merely enumerate the chapter headings of a book published
in 1905, and, as the Paris bookseller from whom I obtained it informed
me, immediately confiscated, but =none the less= still openly sold in
the bookshops of the Boulevards and the Rue de Rivoli. It bears the
title, “=Pour s’Amuser=. Guide du Viveur à Paris, par Victor Leca”
(Paris, 1905). In his versified dedication, the compiler writes:
“Nous connaissons la Capitale,
Et nous l’aimons avec ferveur;
Ma science expérimentale
A fait ce ‘Guide du Viveur.’”
[“We know the Capital,
And we love it with fervour;
My experimental science
Has made this Guide for the Man about Town.”]
And he states in the preface that all the various pleasures of Paris,
for the eye, the ear, and the sense of taste, lead ultimately to--woman,
in complete agreement with the definition which I gave above of the
sensual life of our time. All these pleasures concur in leading to
sexual indulgence--that is the end, the climax of every “amusement,” the
true _punctum saliens_ of the life of pleasure of our large towns. Thus
Leca, in his comprehensive and elaborate guide for men of pleasure, lays
the principal stress on announcements regarding eroticism and on
opportunities for erotic adventures in the individual places of
pleasure. He enumerates these in series: the theatre, especially the
“théâtres très légers,” the “cafés-concerts,” the dancing-saloons, the
hippodromes, and circuses, the cabarets of Montmartre, the Quartier
Latin, the women’s cafés, the boulevards, the halls of the central
market, the brothels (with an exact indication of the streets, and with
the numbers of the houses!!), the houses of accommodation (_maisons de
rendezvous_), the likenesses of a few “ladies of pleasure,” the arcades,
the parks and public gardens, the popular festivals, the races,
drives, public bathing establishments, cemeteries, museums, and
exhibitions--all, always, in relation to the feminine element.
These handbooks of the art of enjoyment are existing proofs, from the
point of view of the history of civilization, of the fact =that the
sexual impulse is, in every possible way, influenced, increased,
elaborated, and complicated, by the civilization of the present day=.
Especially the life of great towns, where the essence of modern
civilization is found in its most concentrated form, is a sexual
stimulant in the highest degree, with its haste and hunting, its
“nocturnal life,”[236] with its multiplicity of enjoyments for all the
senses, with its gastronomic and alcoholic excesses--in short, with its
new device that after work comes =pleasure=, and not repose.
In my “Sexual Life in England” (vol. ii., p. 261 _et seq._) I have
described the momentous influence of the mode of life upon sexuality,
and have proved how both in the old England and in the new the excessive
consumption of meat and of alcoholic beverages has unnaturally
stimulated the sexual impulse, and has conducted it into devious paths.
But of Germany also we may say that, apart from the times of “meat
famine,” we eat =too much meat= and drink =too much alcohol=, the former
especially among the higher classes, the latter among all classes of
society.
The sexually stimulating influence of luxurious feeding, which, for
example, Gabriele d’Annunzio describes in the early part of his romance
“Lust,” and which Tolstoi, in the “Kreutzer Sonata,” describes as the
principal cause of incitation to lasciviousness, is indeed a well-known
fact of experience; and the =later= in the day these heavy meals are
consumed, the more dangerous are they in respect of their influence on
the sexual impulse. I am fully convinced that the good old German custom
of taking the principal meal of the day at noon =is greatly preferable=
to the so-called “English dinner,” when the principal meal is deferred
to four or six o’clock. Luxurious suppers, or even midnight dinners,
such as at the present day are quite customary, must be definitely
regarded as aphrodisiac.
A far more momentous rôle is played by =alcohol= in the modern sensual
life. A writer who is not himself a strict teetotaller may yet feel it
his duty to lay all possible stress on this fact. Indeed, from the
standpoint of medical experience and observation, I am prepared to term
alcohol the =evil genius= of the modern sexual life, because in a
malicious and underhand manner it delivers its victim to sexual
misleading and corruption, to venereal infection, and to all the
consequences of casual sexual intercourse.[237]
This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the drink question,
or for stating the reasons for my own opinion, that complete abstinence
is a Utopian idea, and that the =moderate= and careful use of alcohol,
in quantities suited to the particular individuality, and at =suitable=
times, does no harm worth mentioning. Though this be so, I cannot fail
to recognize the deeply tragic rôle which the customary abuse of alcohol
plays in the sexual corruption of our time. As to the connexion between
alcohol and the sexual life, I must therefore speak at greater
length.[238]
The influence of alcohol upon the sexual life and upon the psyche is a
very peculiar one. Beer or wine, taken in =very moderate= quantities,
unquestionably give rise, in addition to their general psychical
stimulating influence, to sexual excitement of greater or less degree.
This sexual excitement, if more alcohol is now taken, endures =longer=
than the psychical excitement, which soon gives place to psychical
paralysis, to a discontinuance of the inhibitory influences proceeding
from the brain. It is in this unequal influence exercised upon the
purely sensual-sexual and upon the psychical processes, that the
peculiar danger of alcoholic excesses appears to me to depend. The
sexual stimulation produced by the first draught of alcohol continues at
a time when the man has already lost all control over reason and will,
and thus he becomes an easy prey to sexual seduction.
It is only in this way that we can explain the momentous influence of
alcohol, for we know, generally speaking, it is not a means for the
increase of sexual power. On the contrary, it increases voluptuousness
and sexual desire, but almost always hinders erection and delays the
sexual orgasm.
=Thus, a man under the influence of alcohol requires a longer time for
the completion of the act of sexual intercourse than a sober man=, and
in this way the danger of venereal infection is notably increased, for
the contact with the infecting person is considerably longer. I have
inquired of many patients who were infected during intercourse with
prostitutes after alcoholic excess, and was almost always informed that
the act of intercourse, owing to the well-known relative impotence
produced by alcohol, was exceptionally long in duration, and this
naturally gave more opportunity for excessive contact, for mechanical
injuries dependent upon increased friction, etc., and thus brought about
infection.
In medical literature, numerous cases are reported in which two men have
completed intercourse with an infected prostitute, shortly after one
another, and, remarkable to relate, one only became infected, whilst the
other remained healthy. More exact inquiry would show without doubt in
many such cases that the uninfected man was sober, in comparison with
the infected man, who must have been under the influence of alcohol.
In the case of women, with regard to whom there can be no question of
any specific effect upon sexual “potency,” the influence of alcohol in
exciting libido, in association with its withdrawal of all psychical
inhibitions, makes itself all the more manifest. Thus, to woman, who,
speaking generally, is far more intolerant of the drug than man, very
moderate enjoyment of alcohol entails dangers.[239]
The seducer, the procuress, and the prostitute are all familiar with the
above-described peculiar influence of alcohol upon the libido sexualis
and upon the psyche, and it is precisely this discriminative duplex
influence which is utilized by them. Not only in the so-called
“Animierkneipen”--that is, the drinking-saloons with women
attendants--and in the brothels does alcohol subserve this purpose, but
the street-walkers also await their victims by preference outside the
doors of the great restaurants, or after festival dinners, and keep an
eye especially on drunken men, because in the case of these, in whom all
self-command has been lost, they have, in every respect, an easy
prey.[240]
A man under the influence of alcohol is as easily led and as devoid of
will-power as a child. He is not particular in his choice: he generally
fails to notice whether the prostitute who accosts him is young or old,
pretty or ugly, clean or dirty; he follows her blindly, and in most
cases with results disastrous to his pocket and to his health. The
following case illustrates very clearly this loss of will produced in a
man by indulgence in alcohol:
An officer of high rank, a married man, in general a man of solid
repute, left the officers’ casino after a banquet late at night, very
tipsy, to seek his house. Suddenly he felt an arm thrust into his; it
was a prostitute who had noticed his condition, and she had turned it to
her own advantage. Without reflection and without exercise of will, he
allowed her to lead him to her dwelling, and there, still in a quite
apathetic condition, had intercourse with her, without taking any
precautions whatever. It was not until afterwards that he saw, being
then somewhat sobered, that he was in the company of an elderly
prostitute of the lowest class. His dread of venereal infection was
justified a few days later by the appearance of a urethral discharge. In
great alarm he consulted me. Microscopic examination of the urethral
secretion, and the cure which ensued in a few days, showed me that he
was suffering from a simple urethral catarrh, and not from gonorrhœa.
Such cases as this, however, do not always end so fortunately. It is
notorious, and has been proved by the researches of leading physicians
and medical statisticians, that the majority of venereal infections take
place under the influence of alcohol.
For this reason, =the continued increase in the consumption of alcohol
leads to a further diffusion of venereal diseases=. While our ancestors
consumed alcoholic beverages to excess only on Sundays and festival
days, at the present time spirits are freely consumed on weekdays--above
all, during the evenings. Brandy and beer have become everyday
beverages, especially beer, whose consumption increases year by year, so
that in the year 1898 the beer drunk in Germany was valued at
£100,000,000! Strümpell showed that labourers earning three marks a day
are accustomed to spend eighty pfennige--that is, more than one-third of
their income--on beer; these are by no means notorious drinkers, but
steady fellows who only follow the general “custom.” The part played by
beer in Germany is played by absinthe in France; the well-known
“apéritif” to which prostitutes of Paris so often invite their male
clients is in most cases absinthe. Wine, as the experienced Fiaux says,
is merely an “ideal drink” in the dreams of the ordinary Parisian
prostitute.
We shall return in subsequent chapters of this work to the consideration
of alcohol in its relations to the sexual life in general, and to
abnormal sexual manifestations in particular. We shall also have
occasion to speak of the momentous rôle played by alcohol in the
causation of offences against morality. Baer goes so far as to assert
that alcohol is the cause in 77 per cent. of such offences.
Here we shall only once more insist upon the high degree to which the
excessive enjoyment of alcohol assists in seduction and favours wild
love--that is, sexual intercourse free from all choice and all
regulation. This is to be seen with especial clearness at popular
festivals and other occasions giving rise to alcoholic excesses; and the
effects are later shown by the resulting increase in the number of
illegitimate births.
Magnus Hirschfeld relates that when he was a student he spent one
Christmas Eve in the company of a professor of medicine in Breslau.
Among the guests were two of the maternity assistants, and first one,
then the other, was called away to attend confinements. An old physician
who was present thereupon remarked: “Yes, yes; these are the children of
the Emperor’s birthday.” Hirschfeld, who asked for an explanation of
this incomprehensible phrase, was told that on Christmas Night the lying
in hospitals were overcrowded, because then the illegitimate children
were born which had been procreated nine months earlier, on March 22,
the birthday of the old Emperor, celebrated as a popular holiday.
The increase in wild love, in sexual intercourse dependent upon the
inclination of the moment and upon chance, with a rapid succession of
different individuals--this increase, which is associated in the way
above described with the sensual life, is a characteristic of our own
time.
In addition to prostitution, which we shall treat in a separate chapter,
the so-called “=intimacy=” constitutes the true nucleus of wild love.
When those who support coercive marriage speak of free love, they do not
mean the free love, the higher individual love, which we have described
in the previous chapter, but they always refer to the latter-day
“intimacy,” which, in fact, does involve the most serious dangers, alike
from the physical and from the moral point of view; for, on the one
hand, the “intimacy” forms the principal intermediate agent in the wider
diffusion of venereal diseases, and, on the other hand, this new form
of sexual relationship has above all introduced the element of
hypocrisy, lying, and mistrust, which poisons love to-day, separates the
sexes continually more each from the other, and gives rise to that
tragic =sexual hate=, enmity of men on the part of women, and misogyny
on the part of men, which is also peculiarly characteristic of our own
time.
The gradual differentiation of the originally ideal intimacy, to the
wild love of the present day, has been admirably described and
psychologically elucidated by Hellpach in his short work on “Love and
Amatory Life in the Nineteenth Century.”
In this admirable characterization of the “intimacy,” the fact is first
established, that it is above all and through and through a product of
great towns, and consequently that it is closely connected with the
capitalistic evolution which compels thousands of young girls to earn
their own living, so that from them are especially recruited the great
human class of shop-girls, and all the allied varieties, so typical of
large towns. This is the soil in which the “intimacy” naturally
develops. [Hellpach writes first of conditions of a generation ago, and
then passes on thirty years to our own day.]
“By day these girls were occupied. When the evening came, bringing
with it the greatly desired closing of the shop, the prospect opened
to them of going home to poor surroundings, often enough of taking
part in painful family scenes, then going to bed, and the next morning
early returning to business. This was their life, day in, day out.
Here was no very pleasant calendar, especially when the way from the
places of business to their home led through streets crowded with
brilliantly lighted beer saloons, cafes, theatres, and concert-halls.
And all this during the years of sexual blossoming, when the ardent
sensual desire for the first time ran through all the nerves! Who can
wonder that the longing became absolutely fiery, after all the work of
the day, to enjoy a little share of all the glories of the great town
which lay extended before their gaze? After the confinement of the
shop, not to return straightway to the confinement of the family, but
to learn to know a little about the freedom of pleasure--and this
under the most entrancing form of a little love affair?
“And the social conditions were such as to make it possible for this
yearning to be fulfilled. Were there not thousands of young shopmen,
hundreds of students, clerks, non-commissioned officers, who would
rather walk about in the evening with a girl on their arm than alone?
Prostitutes would be little suited for such companionship. Besides, it
would not be always the young man’s intention to proceed to an
extremity, to have a night of love following the evening of amusement;
the young man simply was in the mood to walk about with the girl, to
gossip, perhaps to embrace and kiss her a little.
“Here was the beginning. The young man accosted a shop-girl,
accompanied her a little way, made an appointment for the following
evening; then he went a little further; he saw how pleased the little
one was; the _tutoyer_ and the kiss followed. So it went on for a few
evenings, and the young man felt that the happy girl was quite as
eager as he himself was to take the last step; and when this was done,
there was the “intimacy” complete. And in all respects it appeared
preferable to prostitution; it was inexpensive, unassuming, very
pleasant, and--involved no risk to health. Moreover, to both this
amatory life did not seem a ‘necessary evil’ on the contrary, it was a
glorious pleasure, and there were only two little shadows in the
bright picture: the fear of having a child, and the thought of
separation. Moreover, this cloud troubled the man only; girls then, as
to-day, thought very little about matters so remote.
“In the development of the ‘intimacy’ during the last thirty years,
many details have undergone change, but the picture as a whole has
been but little affected. The young shop-girl of to-day does not need
a long courting; she enters her business already fully aware that she
will soon be ‘intimate’ with some one. At first she will always prefer
to choose a man of whom it is possible to assume that he may marry
her. A young shopman, a non-commissioned officer, will, therefore, be
most in demand. It is not till later, when resignation comes, and the
only remaining wish is for amusement, that University students have
the preference; they are jollier, more entertaining, and the girl is
vain about their position. That has all remained just as it used to
be; only thirty years ago there were many shop-girls who,
notwithstanding all their desire, remained untouched. For the girl
brought up in the atmosphere of the lower middle classes there was a
certain ill-odour about free sexual intercourse. =This has completely
passed away.= The girls of this stratum, who, with open eyes,
withstand all allurements, might be counted on the fingers. At the
present day, these ‘intimacies’ extend deeply into the middle classes
of society.
“As regards the men, there has certainly been one marked change. The
illusion that sexual intercourse with an ‘intimate’ offered any
guarantee against the danger of venereal disease has now long been
dispelled. We are to-day confronted with the fact that the intimacy is
the focus of venereal infection to a far greater extent[241] than is
actual prostitution. In order to understand this, we must glance at
the dissolution of the intimacy.
“We have already pointed out that in the German ‘intimacy’ there has
never occurred a thorough development of a life like that of the
Parisian ‘grisette’; and there will be no change in this respect
within a time which we can at present foresee. Even in Berlin there
are not many dwellings in which the landlord would tolerate the visits
of ladies of doubtful reputation on any account whatever. But even
those who let quarters on easy terms, or, as the student calls them,
‘storm-free’ rooms, would never allow their lodger to entertain a
woman day after day, and could not do so without running the risk of
being suspected by the police of procurement. Thus, the only thing
that unites the two parties in the intimacy is in almost all cases
sexual intercourse. The characteristic of grisette-love, the prose of
the life in common, day after day, is hardly ever experienced in the
‘intimacy.’ =In consequence of this, on the man’s side satiety very
readily ensues.= New impressions enchain and stimulate him. He breaks
off the intimacy, and this is not usually done with tenderness. The
possibilities are numerous, but the only decent way, the open verbal
communication of the fact, is probably the rarest. He breaks off the
intimacy without a word, and as far as he is concerned the matter is
at an end; he is richer by an agreeable experience, and after a while
begins to look round once more.
“The girl also. But for her, this dissolution of the intimacy is very
often the first step upon a very steep downward path. At first there
perhaps ensues a short period of bitterness, but the sexual impulse
makes light of all other activities; a new intimacy begins. And now,
gradually, the idea gains ground in her mind that a change in love is,
after all, not such a bad thing. The second breach is borne with
equanimity; =and very soon it is by no means rare for the girl to
limit her love associations to a few days, and ultimately, as a matter
of daily custom, to seek fresh gratification with a new associate=. It
is not yet professional prostitution; psychologically also there is
still a difference. There is still sensual perception at the root of
her actions, and of such a strength, increasing owing to excess in
sexual intercourse, that the personality of the partner in the sexual
act becomes almost a matter of indifference. But now an economic
difficulty commonly intervenes: discharge from her position, expulsion
from her parents’ house, either or both being due to her dissipated
life, with its heedlessness and the resulting dislike to hard
work--and then the avalanche falls. Hunger drives her to do that for
payment which hitherto she has done only for the gratification of her
own desires. Prostitution has one victim the more.
“But the whole period between the beginning of the second intimacy and
her enrolment in the list of prostitutes by the police offers to all
her lovers the greatest possible danger of venereal infection. =For
the majority of girls actually become infected in their very first
intimacy.= The explanation of this goes back to the time in which the
intimacy first began to become fashionable, and in which the control
of prostitutes with regard to their condition of health was even more
defective, and the safeguarding against the danger of venereal
infection was even less understood than at the present day. In the
majority of cases the young men of the large towns were infected in
their very first experience of love; for it was with prostitutes that
they always sought their first sexual gratification, as is still
customary at the present day. For the inexperienced youth this course
is easier, making, as it does, fewer demands on his adroitness, and
none at all on his seductive skill; whereas in the formation of an
‘intimacy’ these qualities are somewhat in demand. Later, when he had
had enough of prostitution, he sought an ‘intimate,’ and since at that
time the treatment of gonorrhœa was still extremely defective, he
promptly infected his partner in the intimacy. =In this manner the
girls engaged in intimacies, since they first became fashionable, have
been systematically infected.=”
Next to =prostitution=, the =intimacy= is the great focus of sexual
infection; and wild love, from the psychological and ethical points of
view, involves the same danger as prostitution. The frequent changes,
the multiplicity of sexual intercourse in intimacies, allows no deeper
spiritual relationships to be formed; thus, the girls are debased to
become the simple objects of physical sensuality, and they are forced
more and more to depend on the financially stronger men; thus, they
rapidly become partial or complete prostitutes. To them now the sensual
life, the pursuit of pleasure, is the principal thing, not love.
Venereal infection is soon superadded, to deprave them more thoroughly.
Still worse is the corruption of the world of men, who transfer to the
intimacy the practices they have learned in their association with
prostitutes; but, above all, they come finally to seek and to desire the
rude sexual act solely for its own sake, without feeling the need for
any deeper spiritual association. Hence results the fugitive character
of these sexual relationships, the frequent changes on both sides, and
the end--=lies, mistrust, hatred=.
Belief in and hope for true love disappear for ever; there remains only
the cold, desolate, unspeakably embittered disillusionment, the
=distrust= of the other sex which is so characteristic of our time.
Never before were there so many woman-haters and man-haters on
principle. In the intercourse between the sexes, neither believes the
other any longer; and on both sides the “intimacy” is entered on without
any illusions, the sole aim of both parties being to satisfy in the
intensest possible way their desire for enjoyment and their sensual
lusts.
Prostitution can destroy no illusions, for its true character is
manifest at the first glance; but the modern intimacy has become the
grave of love, and has given rise to a new corruption of the sexual
life, which appears almost more dangerous than the old corruption
dependent on prostitution. It has, moreover, become a second, and not
less dangerous, focus of venereal infection, to the diffusion of which
it is extraordinarily favourable.
He, therefore, who wishes to take part in the fight against the moral
degeneration of our amatory life, and to assist in the campaign against
venereal diseases, =must attack and endeavour to suppress the modern
development of the life of “intimacy” just as energetically as he
attacks prostitution=.
The =wild love= of the present day, “extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse
(which, as I cannot too often repeat, has nothing whatever to do with
“free love”), and =coercive marriage=, are the true causes of sexual
corruption. They are intimately associated one with the other. The
social, economic, and spiritual civilization of the present day demands
free love, with which neither coercive marriage nor wild love is
compatible.
Neither for prostitution, nor for the wild extra-conjugal sexual
intercourse of our time, can any justification be found from the point
of view of medicine, racial hygiene, or sociology. In their nature both
lead to the same end: the death and destruction of all individual love,
of all the finer activities of love, by which the spiritual nature of
man is so greatly enriched; and they both give rise to a continuous
increase and rapid diffusion of venereal diseases.
The salvation of our people is not to be found in the “recommendation”
of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse for all those who are not in a
position to marry--and the number of these grows from day to day--but it
is to be found in the =reform of marriage=, in a =freer= configuration
of the amatory life, in connexion with which we can confidently trust
Ibsen’s saying in the “Lady from the Sea”:
“We can’t get away from this--that a voluntary promise is to the full
as binding as a marriage.”
There shall not and must not be “=sexual freedom=,”[242] but there must
be “freedom of love.”
When anyone asks me whether I should advise him to indulge in
“extra-conjugal sexual intercourse,” as a physician and a man of science
I am compelled to answer with a bald “No,” because I cannot undertake
the responsibility of the consequences of such advice.
Fortunately, alike in the world of women and in the world of men, there
manifests itself an increasing disapproval of wild love as it exhibits
itself in the modern “intimacies.” There are already numerous intimacies
which closely resemble free love, and in which all the conditions of
free love are fulfilled, in respect of duration, of a profound spiritual
relationship, a sense of sexual responsibility alike physical and
moral, and in the joyful acceptance of the consequences in respect of
offspring.
We must, however, continually keep up the fight against wild love as the
enduring associate of prostitution, to which it constitutes the bridge
or stage of transition. Therein lies its greatest danger. This we shall
recognize more clearly in the ensuing chapter, in which we turn to
consider the subject of =prostitution=.
[219] In the titular heading to this chapter, throughout the chapter,
and in most cases throughout the book, the German word _Verführung_
has been translated as _seduction_. _Verführung_ means “leading
astray,” and one of the commonest uses of the term is to denote
_sexual_ leading astray--the _seduction_ of a woman by a man. But in
some cases _Verführung_, like the English _seduction_, is used in its
more primitive and wider signification. The context will suffice to
show the sense in which the word is employed.--TRANSLATOR.
[220] Thus, at the present day, in quite small country towns, we find
variety theatres and low music-halls; and with these, prostitutes are
commonly introduced into the town, so that the wild love, which was
previously free from danger, now becomes a focus of venereal
infection.
[221] Willy Hellpach, “Our Sensual Life and Venereal Diseases,”
published in the “Reports of the German Society for the Suppression of
Venereal Diseases,” 1905, vol. iii., Nos. 5 and 6, pp. 103-105.
[222] Of this work there recently appeared an excellent German
translation, admirably modernized in blank verse by Karl Ettlinger,
“Ovid’s Art of Love: a Modern Translation.” (An English translation of
Ovid’s “Art of Love,” revised by Charles W. Ryle, was published in
1907 by Sisley.--TRANSLATOR.)
[223] Hilarii Drudonis, “Practica Artis Amandi” (Amsterdam, 1652).
[224] Paris, 1659.
[225] Paris, 1775.
[226] J. F. C. Manso, “Die Kunst zu Lieben” (Berlin, 1794).
[227] Henry Beyle (Stendhal), “On Love.”
[228] Paul Bourget, “Physiologie de l’Amour Moderne.”
[229] Armand Silvestre, “Le Petit Art d’Aimer” (Paris, 1897).
[230] Catulle Mendés, “L’Art d’Aimer” (Paris).
[231] Robert Hessen, “Das Glück in der Liebe: Eine technische Studie”
(Stuttgart, 1899).
[232] Hjalmar Kjölenson, “Die Erschliessung des Liebesglückes”
(Leipzig, 1905).
[233] An exhaustive study of the history and literature of the _ars
amandi_, by the author of the present work, is in course of
preparation, and will appear shortly.
[234] _Cf._ regarding masterful erotics, also the exposition of Georg
Hirth in “The Ways to Love,” p. 563.
[235] S. Kierkegaard, “Entweder--Oder. Ein Lebensfragment,” pp.
221-311. German translation by O. Gleib (Dresden and Leipzig, 1904).
[236] “The sun,” says Grillparzer in his “Diary,” “is hostile to
voluptuousness. But the artificial sun of our nocturnal illumination
in our large town, has the opposite effect.”
[237] The old proverb says: “From the two V’s, Vinum (wine) and Venus
(woman), there arises a big W, Weh (woe or pain).”
[238] _Cf._, in addition to the great works on the subject of alcohol,
the special monograph by B. Laquer, “A Lecture on Alcohol and Sexual
Hygiene,” published in the “Reports of the German Society for the
Suppression of Venereal Diseases,” 1904, vol. ii., Nos. 3 and 4, pp.
56-63; W. Hellpach, _op. cit._, pp. 100-102; Magnus Hirschfeld, “The
Influence of Alcohol on the Sexual Life,” Berlin, 1905; Magnus
Hirschfeld, “Alcohol and Family Life,” Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1906;
Otto Lang, “Alcohol and Crime,” Basel; Oscar Rosenthal, “Alcohol and
Prostitution,” Berlin, 1906; G. Rosenfeld, “Alcohol and the Sexual
Life,” published in the _Journal for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases_, 1905, pp. 321-335.
[239] It has been established by Bonhoeffer, Hoppe, A. H. Hübner, and
others, that chronic alcoholism constitutes an important cause of
prostitution in the case of the so-called “late prostitutes”--that is
to say, in those women who do not commence a life of professional
prostitution at puberty, but usually after the age of twenty-five
years. _Cf._ Artur Hermann Hübner, “Prostitutes in Relation to
Criminal Jurisdiction,” published in _Monatsschr. für
Kriminalpsychologie_, edited by G. Aschaffenburg, 1907, p. 5.
[240] At the great public dinner which, in 1890, the town of Berlin
gave in the Rathaus to the members of the International Medical
Congress, and at which 4,000 persons consumed 15,382 bottles of wine,
22 hectolitres (484 gallons) of beer, and 300 bottles of brandy, there
were witnessed in and outside the Rathaus the most disgusting scenes
of drunkenness. “As the blowflies gather round a piece of carrion, so
in the street in front of the Rathaus there had gathered a swarm of
prostitutes, who found a rich booty among the drunken, staggering
guests” (_cf._ Rosenfeld, _op. cit._, p. 325).--A striking example of
the manner in which alcohol sometimes completely annihilates every
æsthetic perception is reported by E. Kraepelin (“The Psychiatric
Duties of the State,” p. 6; Jena, 1900): “A number of students were
infected by a prostitute, who from early youth had been weak-minded,
and who was suffering from both lupus of the nose and recent
syphilis.”
[241] It is not yet quite so bad as this. But the number of venereal
infections that occur in consequence of wild love, and of free sexual
intercourse in these relations of “intimacy,” is continually on the
increase.
[242] Sexual freedom--that is to say, the formal organization of
sexual promiscuity--was demanded by a certain Dr. Roderich Hellmann in
a book which has now become very rare, because it was confiscated
immediately after publication. Its title was “Sexual Freedom: a
Philosophic Attempt to Increase Human Happiness” (Berlin, 1878). The
author demands that immediately after puberty “the sexual organs shall
have the opportunity of a regulated activity,” and that it shall now
be allowed to persons of both sexes “to indulge in sexual intercourse
as much as they please,” of course, with the avoidance of injury to
health and of pregnancy. This remarkable freak proceeds to demand that
public lavatories shall be done away with, so that persons of both
sexes shall relieve themselves freely in one another’s presence in the
open street, and, with equal freedom, shall display their sexual
organs to one another for the purpose of sexual allurement!!
CHAPTER XIII
PROSTITUTION
“_On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions
that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds
and civilizations arise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity,
blasted for the sins of the people._”--LECKY.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XIII
Prostitution and venereal disease the central problem of the sexual
question -- My belief in the possibility of the suppression of both --
Only in recent years has the scientific attack on both begun -- The
_plaie sociale_ -- Internal and local treatment -- The scientific
literature of prostitution -- Rosenbaum’s work on prostitution in
antiquity -- Aretino, Delgado, and Veniero on the prostitution of the
renascence -- Franckenaus’s first medical polemic against brothels --
The commencement of the scientific study of prostitution and venereal
diseases in the eighteenth century -- Rétif de la Bretonne and his
“Pornographe” -- “Moral Control” -- Parent-Duchatelet’s fundamental
work -- Analysis of this book -- Contemporary works on prostitution in
Paris, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lisbon, Lyons, and Algiers -- First
employment of the term “male prostitution” -- A peculiar species of
souteneur -- Prostitution in Hamburg -- Dr. Lippert’s book -- “Memoirs
of a Prostitute,” the predecessor of the “Diary of a Lost Woman” --
Gross-Hoffinger’s book on “Prostitution in Austria” -- Demonstration
of the connexion between prostitution and coercive marriage --
Celebrated chapter on “Maidservants and Prostitution” -- Schrank on
prostitution in Vienna -- Prostitution in Leipzig -- In New York --
General works on prostitution -- Jeannel, Acton and Hügel -- Books on
secret prostitution, on prostitution of girls under age, on regulation
and on brothels, and on the social importance of prostitution --
Blaschko’s recent critical investigation on the subject of
prostitution -- Results of this investigation -- Lombroso’s
anthropological theory -- The works of Tarnowsky and Ströhmberg, of
Fiaux and von Düring.
Conception and definition of prostitution -- Genuine and
pseudo-prostitutes -- Prostitution among primitive peoples --
Religious prostitution as the germinal form of modern prostitution --
This latter the product of the growth of large towns -- Medieval
conditions -- Diminution in the number of brothels since that time --
The demand for prostitutes -- Relation between the number of
prostitutes and the male population -- The supply greater than the
demand -- Causes of the male demand for prostitutes -- Prostitution as
a product of civilization -- Repression of primitive sexual instincts
by civilization -- The sexual supra- and sub-consciousness --
Transient elemental activities of the sub-consciousness -- Reports of
J. P. Jakobsen and other writers on this subject -- Gratification of
these instincts by means of prostitution -- This in part the product
of the physiological masochism of men.
The numerous causes of prostitution -- The anthropological theory and
the doctrine of the congenital prostitute -- Criticism of this view --
Proof that many of the physical and mental peculiarities of
prostitutes are acquired -- The obliteration of the secondary and
tertiary sexual characters in prostitutes -- The nucleus of Lombroso’s
theory -- The economic factors of prostitution -- Actual and relative
poverty as a cause -- Poverty a cause of prostitution in the mass --
Women’s and children’s work -- Prostitution as an accessory occupation
-- Insufficient wages -- The inquiries of 1887 and 1903 on this
subject -- Examples -- The large proportion of maidservants who become
prostitutes -- Explanation of this -- Relative poverty of maidservants
-- Psychological factors of maidservant prostitution -- Overcrowded
dwellings -- Families living in single rooms, and taking in lodgers
for the night -- Alcoholism -- The traffic in girls -- Sources of this
-- National and international preventive measures -- Work done by the
Jewish Committee to prevent the traffic in girls in Galatia --
Measures taken in Buenos Ayres -- The central police organization in
Berlin for the suppression of the traffic in girls.
The localities of prostitution -- Public prostitution -- Street
prostitution -- Character and dangers of street prostitution -- Still
_greater_ dangers of brothels -- Brothels as centres of sexual
corruption and perversity, and as foci of venereal infection -- The
high school of psychopathia sexualis -- The brothel jargon --
“Animierkneipen” -- Dancing saloons, variety theatres, low
music-halls, cabarets, and “Rummel” -- “Pensions” and houses of
accommodation -- Massage institutes -- Cafés with female attendants.
_Appendix: The Half-World._ -- Origin of the name -- The “Demi-Monde”
of the younger Alexandre Dumas -- Change undergone by the conception
at the present day -- Analogy with the Greek hetairæ -- Connexion of
the half-world with high life -- Origin -- The social influence of the
“grandes cocottes” -- The half-world in Germany -- The international
prostitute.
CHAPTER XIII
=Prostitution=, and the =venereal diseases= so intimately connected with
it, constitute, properly speaking, the =nucleus=, the =central problem=,
of the sexual question. The abolition of prostitution and the
suppression of venereal diseases would be almost tantamount to the
solution of the entire sexual problem. Imagine the extension and the
intension of the idea: No prostitution, no more venereal disease!
There is, in fact, no more gratifying notion, no more illuminating
ideal, than that of moral and physical purity in the relations between
the sexes. At a time in which, especially in social spheres, such
abundant activity and such far-seeing ideas of reform are apparent, this
notion of a campaign against prostitution and venereal diseases, in the
hope of eradicating both evils, should stand in the forefront of all the
demands of civilization, in order that finally the tragical influence,
the poisonous sting, should be removed from the disordered, unhappy,
amatory life of the present day, and herewith, unquestionably, a proper
=foundation= should be laid for a more beautiful future for that life.
This idea is unique; it is the greatest of all that man, at length
become self-conscious,[243] has ever grasped; and to this idea belongs
the future!
The French term prostitution and venereal diseases _une plaie sociale_,
a rodent ulcer in the body of society. I take this apt comparison, and
carry it a stage further, to show a clear picture of the way along which
we must go in order to eradicate prostitution; for in this respect I am
a confirmed optimist. I =believe= in the possibility of the eradication
of venereal diseases, and of the abolition of prostitution within the
civilized world by national and international measures. I do not join in
the chorus of those who say, “because prostitution has always existed,
it must always exist in the future; because venereal diseases have
always[244] existed, they are unavoidable accompaniments of
civilization.”
=How long is it=, then, since any attempt has been made to oppose
prostitution and venereal diseases? As regards the latter, it is only
within the =last few years= that we have begun, in the battle against
them, to make systematic use of the results of scientific research; and
the study of prostitution, and the measures based on that study for its
control and prevention, do not date further back than the second half of
the eighteenth century. In fact, for practical purposes, they date from
the appearance of the classical and epoch-making work of
Parent-Duchatelet (1836).
We are, indeed, =in the very first stages= of the campaign against
prostitution and venereal diseases. All that has hitherto been done has
been to make inadequate, isolated attempts to introduce unsuitable and
half-considered regulations, based upon successive misconceptions, which
have only made matters worse. =To-day= medicine, social science,
pedagogy, jurisprudence, and ethics have combined in a =common=
campaign; and this is not national merely, but unites all civilized
nations in a common cause.
Here we find an actual prospect, a credible hope, of a radical cure of
the _plaie sociale_. But such an ulcer can only be radically cured when
we are not content merely with the =local= treatment of the existing
sore; we must simultaneously attack the =internal= causes of this
chronic disease, and in the case with which we have to do the internal
causes are even more important than the external--that is to say,
=ethics=, =pedagogy=, and =social science= are even more important and
indispensable in the campaign against prostitution than =medicine= and
=hygiene=. We shall never attain our goal by considering and fighting
prostitution and venereal diseases, the consequences of prostitution,
purely from the medical and hygienic standpoint. In this case,
one-sidedness will prove tantamount to failure. The problem of
prostitution must be approached from many sides, because the causes that
have to be considered are =manifold=, alike anthropological, economic,
social, and psychological, in their nature. There are =many varieties=
of prostitution; in the same way there are numerous and various =types=
of prostitutes. It is, therefore, impossible for one who is acquainted
with actual life to hold fast in a one-sided manner to a single theory.
Thus, in one and the same case the most various points of view have to
be considered.
The =history= of prostitution is an extremely interesting chapter of the
general history of civilization, which has =not hitherto= been written
in a manner satisfying scientific and critical demands; but the
=literature= of prostitution is already alarmingly comprehensive. Here,
also, critical grasp and mode of presentation are still entirely
wanting. It is impossible, in this place, in which we speak only of the
present-day conditions, to enter at any length into the historical and
literary aspects of the question of prostitution. This I must leave for
a later, comprehensive work, for which I have for several years been
collecting the materials. Here I shall only briefly refer, for the sake
of the reader interested in the matter, to the most important writings
on the subject of prostitution which have any scientific and historical
importance.
Prostitution in antiquity is treated in a masterly manner by Julius
Rosenbaum in his celebrated “History of Syphilis in Antiquity” (Halle,
1839); this is, down to the present day, the chief source of our
knowledge of the conditions in antiquity. It is true that he starts from
the false assumption that syphilis already existed in ancient times, a
view which in the second volume of my book on the “Origin of Syphilis”
(now in course of preparation) I show to be incorrect; this work will
also contain a thorough study of prostitution among the ancients, based
upon the more recent researches published since the year 1839, when
Rosenbaum’s book appeared.
The first truly classical descriptions of the nature of modern
prostitution dated from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; these
are not scientific, belonging rather to the province of belles-lettres;
but they are of great value in respect of the accuracy of their
observations, and of their psychological insight into the nature of
prostitution. I refer above all to the celebrated “Ragionamenti” of
Pietro Aretino;[245] next, to the not less important work, published
earlier, in 1528, “Lozana Andaluza,” by Francisco Delgado (Francesco
Delicado).[246] Both these books, and also the celebrated “Zafetta” of
Lorenzo Veniero (_circa_ 1535), describe the conditions of prostitution
at the time of the Italian renascence; these display a most astonishing
similarity to the conditions of the present day, and the books mentioned
have therefore still an instructive value.[247]
From the seventeenth century we have as important documents of
civilization the description of prostitution in Holland in the
interesting work “Le Putanisme d’Amsterdam” (Brussels, 1883; the
original Dutch edition, Amsterdam, 1681), and also in the work published
in the same year, 1681, “Disputatio Medica qua Lupanaria ex Principiis
quoque Medicis Improbantur,” by Georg Franck von Franckenau,[248]
noteworthy as being the first medical polemic against brothels.
Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the study of prostitution
was most active in France.[249] In the second half of the eighteenth
century, according to the expression of the de Goncourts,
“pornognomonie” was a scientific problem. Various attempts at reform
were made; as early as 1763 “=moral control=” was recommended; and in
1769 there appeared the celebrated “Pornographe” of Rétif de la
Bretonne,[250] the first extensive work on the =state regulation= of
prostitution, the great historical importance of which was recognized by
Mireur, the well-known syphilologist of Marseilles, by the publication
of a new edition (Brussels, 1879).
But it was with the publication of the immortal and most admirable work
of Parent-Duchatelet,[251] on prostitution in Paris, that in the year
1836 the modern =scientific= literature of prostitution really began. It
is the first work in which full justice is done to the importance of
prostitution in =all= its relations, and it is based upon exact medical
observations and psychological and social studies. Even to-day it
remains unique in its kind, and a standing example of critical research
and of French learned zeal.
A very short account of the contents of this epoch-making book of
Parent-Duchatelet will best teach us its importance, and will give us an
insight into all the problems connected with prostitution, and
considered by the French author.
In the introduction, Parent-Duchatelet explains the reasons which led
him to undertake the work, and the literary sources he has consulted.
The first chapter then proceeds to the consideration of certain general
problems, gives a =definition= of the term prostitute, an estimate of
the =number= of prostitutes in Paris, their =origin= in respect of
native country, position, culture, profession, their =age=, and the
=first cause of their adoption of this profession=. The second chapter
discusses the =manners and customs= of prostitutes, the opinion they
have of themselves, their religious ideas, their sense of shame, their
spiritual qualities, tattooing, occupation, uncleanliness, speech,
defects and good qualities, the various classes of prostitutes, and,
finally, the _souteneurs_. The third chapter contains =physiological
observations= concerning prostitutes--namely, concerning their obesity,
the changes in their voice, peculiarities in the colour of the hair and
the eyes, the stature, the condition of the genital organs, and
fertility. In the fourth chapter he deals with the =influence of
professional prostitution on the health of the girls=, and describes the
various morbid conditions which may result from their occupation. The
fifth chapter treats of the public =houses of prostitution= (brothels),
their advantages and disadvantages, the question of brothel streets, and
the localization of prostitution in definite quarters of the town. In
the sixth chapter the =inscription of prostitutes in police lists= is
discussed; in the seventh =procurement and the owners of brothels=.
Chapters eight, nine, and ten deal with =secret prostitution= in houses
of accommodation, drinking-saloons, coffee-houses, tobacconists’ shops,
etc.; chapter eleven discusses =street prostitution=; chapter twelve,
the =diffusion of prostitution= in the various parts of Paris; chapter
thirteen, the =relation of prostitution to military life=; chapter
fourteen, =prostitution in the environs of Paris=. The fifteenth chapter
describes the =ultimate destiny= of prostitutes; the sixteenth deals
with their =medical treatment=--above all, the methods of examination to
ascertain their state of health are accurately described. Chapters
seventeen and eighteen deal with =hospitals= and =prisons= for
prostitutes; chapter nineteen, with the former taxation of prostitutes;
chapter twenty considers =questions relating to administration, and the
special branch of police dealing with the institution=--for example, the
suggestion (recently revived) is discussed of the medical examination of
the male clients of prostitutes; prurient pictures and books are also
considered, and thefts in brothels. The twenty-first chapter is devoted
to the question which still attracts attention at the present day, viz.,
the =peculiar relationship between the owner of a house and the
prostitutes living there=, and deals also with the legal aspect of the
punishments decreed against prostitutes. Chapter twenty-two is occupied
with a general discussion of the =legal questions= connected with
prostitution. At the conclusion, in chapters twenty-three and
twenty-four, the author discusses the question =whether prostitutes are
necessary=, and this question (_nota bene_, from the standpoint of
coercive marriage morality) he answers in the affirmative; he asks also
=whether the police should be entrusted with the application of measures
for the prevention of venereal diseases=, and this he agrees to
conditionally only, for he considers that the =public= recommendation of
protective measures should be forbidden by police ordinance. Finally, in
the last chapter, the twenty-fifth, he speaks of the =institutions for
the rescue of fallen women=, and he concludes his comprehensive work, in
which he has dealt so thoroughly with all the subdivisions of his
general topic, with the words:
“My work is at an end. When I commenced it, I pointed out what reasons
I had for undertaking it, what aim I wished to attain. Had I not been
firmly convinced that the investigations begun by me regarding the
nature of prostitutes might favour health and morality, I should not
have published them. I have exposed to the public gaze great
infirmities of mankind; thoughtful men, for whom I have written, will
thank me for doing so. He who loves his fellow-men will without
anxiety follow me into the department of knowledge I have described,
and will not turn away his glance from the pictures I have drawn. =He
who wishes to know the good that remains to be done, and who wishes to
learn how to pursue with good results the way by which something
better is to be attained, must first know what actually exists; he
must know the truth.=
“The profession of prostitution is an evil of all times, all
countries, and appears to be innate in the social structure of
mankind. It will perhaps never be entirely eradicated; still, all the
more we must strive to limit its extent and its dangers. With
prostitution itself it is as with vice, crime, and disease; the
teacher of morals endeavours to prevent the vices, the lawgiver to
prevent the crimes, the physician to cure the diseases. All alike know
that they will never fully attain their goal; but they pursue their
work none the less in the conviction that he who does only a little
good yet does a great service to the weak man. I follow their example.
A friend whose loss I shall always mourn drew my attention to the fate
of the prostitute. I studied them, I wished to learn the causes of
their degradation, and wherever possible to discover the means by
which their number could be limited. What experience has taught me on
this subject I have openly stated, and I am convinced that the
lawgiver, the man whom the State has empowered with authority to care
for public health and morality, will find in my book useful
information.”
Parent-Duchatelet’s book, no less admirable in its execution than in its
design, still remains the foundation for the scientific study of
prostitution. It is the exemplar for all contemporary and subsequent
works.
The powerful influence exercised by this book was shown above all in
this--that works on prostitution appeared in rapid succession in the
various capitals of the civilized world. These were all based to a
greater or less extent upon the work of Parent-Duchatelet, and thus they
constitute extremely valuable scientific monographs regarding the
conditions of prostitution in particular towns, such as since that date
have not been issued. Here there still lies hidden a wealth of material,
a large part of which has not yet been utilized.
As an enlargement and continuation of the work of Parent-Duchatelet,
there appeared three years later, in the year 1839, the work of the
Commissary of Police Béraud[252] on the prostitutes of Paris and on the
Parisian _police des mœurs_. The book is more especially distinguished
by an elaborate history of prostitution, and by the wealth of
psychological observations it contains; also by its exact information
regarding secret prostitution.
In the same year a well-known London physician, Dr. Michael Ryan,[253]
published his important book on =Prostitution in London=,[254] with a
comparison of the conditions in Paris and New York. Ryan first dealt
with the general =social= and =economic= causes of prostitution, with
critical acumen, as we could not but expect from an Englishman. His book
also contained an interesting account of the extraordinary diffusion in
England at that time of pornographic books and pictures,[255] and
concerning their publication and sale by pedlars, and the measures
undertaken to repress this traffic. Valuable also are the detailed
reports given in this book, on pp. 212-252, regarding prostitution in
the United States, and especially in New York.
The example of Ryan was followed by his countrymen, Dr. William Tait and
the Rev. Ralph Wardlaw. The former treated in a comprehensive work the
subject of prostitution in Edinburgh;[256] the latter, in a shorter
book, described prostitution in Glasgow.[257]
Very interesting is the book, of which a few copies only ever reached
Germany (one of which is in my own possession), and which even in
Portugal is extremely rare, of Dr. Francisco Ignacio dos Santos Cruz
regarding prostitution in Lisbon,[258] in which the whole subject of
Portuguese prostitution is admirably described, with special reference
to the capital city. Santos Cruz gives most careful attention to the
legislative aspect of the question. He was the first to advocate a
measure which has recently been proposed also by Lesser (doubtless in
ignorance of the work of his predecessor)--viz., the =formation of
polyclinics for the gratuitous treatment of prostitutes=.[259]
Regarding prostitution in the town of Lyons, renowned for its
immorality, Dr. Potton wrote a celebrated book, which received a prize
from the Medical Society of Lyons in the year 1841. This work was based
on official sources, and had especial reference to the relationships of
prostitution to the hygienic and economic conditions of the
population.[260]
A valuable book, also, is the work on prostitution in Algiers by E. A.
Duchesne.[261] It contains an elaborate account of “=male
prostitution=”--that is, prostitution of men for men--an expansion of
the idea of prostitution which is, as far as my knowledge goes, found
here for the first time. Naturally, in earlier works we find allusions
to men who practise pederasty for money, but the idea “prostitution” had
hitherto been strictly limited to the class of purchasable women.
We see this, for example, in the anonymous book “=Prostitution in
Berlin, and its Victims=,”[262] published in Berlin seven years before
the appearance of the work of Duchesne. The author definitely states
that “the admirable book of Parent-Duchatelet on prostitution in the
town of Paris, and its remarkable success, have chiefly given occasion
to the publication of my own work.” The book is, however, quite
independent in character, and treats of the individual relationships of
prostitution in Berlin, on the basis of =official= sources and
experience, in historical, moral, medical, and political relations, and
also from the point of view of police administration. It contains an
appendix on “=prostituted men=” (p. 207), who, however, are not
homosexual prostitutes, but, according to the writer’s own definition,
“men who make it their profession to serve for payment =voluptuous
women= by the gratification of the latter’s unnatural passions.” This
species still exists at the present day, but there is no particular name
for the type. (In the seventies, in Vienna, men who could be hired to
perform coitus were known locally as “stallions”--Ger. =Hengste=.) We
must include them in the great army of _souteneurs_, although the term
is not strictly applicable. Later we shall return to the consideration
of this peculiar variety of male prostitution.
As an enlargement of the work just mentioned, we can regard the book
published in the same year, 1846, by the Criminal Commissary, Dr. Carl
Röhrmann, on =Prostitution in Berlin=.[263]
This book is especially remarkable from the fact that it contains
“complete and candid biographies of the best-known prostitutes in
Berlin,” an idea which has recently been revived, for example, in W.
Hammer’s “The Life-History of Ten Public Prostitutes in Berlin” (Berlin
and Leipzig, 1905).
Very valuable official material is, finally, to be found in a third work
on prostitution in Berlin, written by the celebrated syphilologist F. J.
Behrend.[264] It begins with a careful history of the police regulations
regarding prostitution in Berlin, then discusses the consequences of the
abolition of the Berlin brothels in the year 1845, and proceeds to
demand new measures and regulations for the control of prostitution and
for the prevention of syphilis in Berlin. As a collection of material,
the book is of considerable value.
Little known, but thoroughly original, is the work of the Hamburg
physician, Dr. Lippert, on =prostitution in Hamburg=.[265] Blaschko even
fails to mention it in the bibliography at the end of his own work,
presently to be described. Lippert adduces numerous and interesting new
contributions to our knowledge of “the many-headed hydra, the
colour-changing chameleon,” of prostitution. After an introductory
sketch regarding the historical development of prostitution in Hamburg,
he gives a “characterization of the present moral condition of Hamburg,”
embodying important information regarding the number of brothel
prostitutes and street-walkers, the topographical distribution of
prostitution and of brothels, the secret houses of accommodation, the
remarkable decline in the number of marriages, the relationship between
legitimate and illegitimate births, and the number of drinking-saloons
and dancing-halls; and he goes on to describe with more detail these
individual factors of prostitution, and especially the opportunities
for prostitution. The third chapter contains an extremely interesting
physiological and pathological description of the Hamburg prostitutes.
According to Lippert, the principal motives of prostitution are
“=idleness=, =frivolity=, and, above all, the =love of finery=.” He
rightly lays especial stress upon the last-named cause, which, in the
more recent scientific investigations regarding the causes of
prostitution, has, unfortunately, been too much neglected. Then follow
data regarding the age, nationality, class, and occupation of
prostitutes. We learn that as early as the date of this book of
Lippert’s the greatest number of public prostitutes had originally been
=maidservants= (p. 79), not girls of the labouring classes. Thus the
fact that prostitutes recruit their ranks chiefly from the servant class
is not, as recent writers assert, exclusively the consequence of the
increasing mental culture of the modern proletariat, but is most
probably rather connected with the freer configuration of the amatory
life among the labouring classes, where the nobler form of “free love”
has long been dominant. From the very nature of the case, this must lead
to a limitation of the supply of prostitutes from this class. The
chapter closes with an elaborate description of the physical and mental
peculiarities of the Hamburg prostitutes, and of the diseases observed
in them. In the fourth chapter the various classes of prostitutes are
considered more closely--the brothel prostitutes (with an exact
description of the celebrated brothel streets of Hamburg), the
prostitutes living alone, the street-walkers, the “kept women,” the
large group of secret prostitutes. There follow in an appendix
interesting accounts of the public places which are related to
prostitution; of prostitution in the Hamburger Berg and in the suburb of
St. Pauli; and of the rescue work of Hamburg.
A very good account of prostitution in Hamburg is also found in a book
contemporary with that of Lippert, entitled “=Memoirs of a Prostitute,
or Prostitution in Hamburg=” (St. Pauli, 1847). This work, which is now
extraordinarily rare, resembles the book which recently gained such
celebrity, the “Tagebuch einer Verlorenen” (“Diary of a Lost Woman”), by
Margaret Böhme, in that it was edited by a Dr. J. Zeisig, professedly
after the “original manuscript.” As usual, it has all happened before!
In the preface to his book, Lippert remarks that, since prostitution in
Berlin and in Hamburg has now been adequately described, it was
desirable that an analogous book should be compiled regarding Vienna, in
order that we might have the necessary comparative statistics of “the
three principal towns and principal factors of German prostitution.”
The actual account of prostitution in Vienna did not, however, appear
till forty years later, in the year 1886. Still, as early as 1847 the
book of Dr. Anton J. Gross-Hoffinger was published, describing
exclusively the conditions of prostitution in Austria, and naturally
chiefly concerned with conditions in Vienna.[266] In my opinion, this
book has an epoch-making significance, because therein we find asserted
for the first time, with all possible emphasis, that the institution of
=coercive marriage= is the ultimate cause of prostitution, to which all
the other causes are subsidiary. In no other book do we find so painful
a description, drawn with such astonishing clearness, of the horrible
conditions resulting from the artificial preservation of the official
and ecclesiastical coercive marriage, which was really based upon
economic conditions peculiar to the remote past. The two first sections,
“Woman the Slave of Civilization” and “Woman in her Degradation,” are
the most frightful accusations of conventional marriage. On pp. 190 and
191 the author formulates in fifteen paragraphs a law of marriage
reform, which has a very close resemblance to the previously described
ideas of Ellen Key. A perfect classic is the chapter on servant-girls
(pp. 226-284), unique in its thoroughness, and affording an admirable
description of the legal, moral, and economic relationships of domestic
service.
“=The great army of domestic servants=,” he writes, “=constitute the
ever-ready reserve force of prostitution. Daily from this reserve are
drawn new recruits for the regular service, and daily the vacant
places in the reserve are once more filled.=”
Gross-Hoffinger, in 1847, came also to the conclusion that in “free
love” or “free marriage” was to be found the only salvation from the
misery of prostitution.
The comprehensive work of Schrank upon prostitution in Vienna[267] is
distinguished by an abundance of interesting isolated observations, and
these are especially to be found in the earlier historical portion. The
second part is occupied with the administration and hygiene of
prostitution in Vienna. The work gives an exhaustive account of Viennese
prostitution down to the year 1885.
Prostitution in Leipzig was described in three chapters of a general
work on prostitution, published in the year 1854.[268] The titles of
these three chapters are: “Moral Corruption in Leipzig”; “Tolerated
Prostitutes and Tolerated Houses in Leipzig”; “Tolerated Prostitutes in
Leipzig: their Morals, their Customs, their Hygienic Condition, their
End.” Very interesting is the statement of the author that of the 3,000
maidservants in Leipzig, _one-third_ were engaged in secret
prostitution.
The prostitution in the largest town of the new world, in New York, also
found an admirable description in the sixth decade of the nineteenth
century in the great historical work of the New York physician, William
M. Sanger.[269] Of the 685 large octavo pages which the book contains,
pages 450 to 676 are devoted to the description of the conditions of
prostitution in New York. The historical portion of the book is also
extremely valuable, being based upon the best historical authorities.
With the year 1860, or thereabouts, this first period of the scientific
literature of prostitution, characterized by monographs dealing with
individual =towns=, in pursuance of the example of Parent-Duchatelet,
came to a close. Just as Parent-Duchatelet had inaugurated this kind of
description, so the French now undertook the introduction of the further
researches into prostitution. First of all, Dr. J. Jeannel summarized
the results of the books we have already mentioned in a general work on
prostitution,[270] which contained a comparative view of the conditions
in various countries and towns. An Englishman, W. Acton, also wrote a
similar general work on prostitution;[271] whilst yet another general
work on the subject was written by the German Hügel.[272]
The extremely important question of =secret= prostitution has been
elucidated especially by the writings of Martineau[273] and
Commenge;[274] the not less important question of prostitution practised
by =girls under full age= is treated by Augagneur;[275] the =problems
of regulation and of brothels= have been studied by Fiaux, whose work is
comprehensive and based upon carefully compiled statistics, and the
author attempts the solution of these problems;[276] the sometime French
Minister Yves Guyot has discussed the problem of prostitution from the
higher philosophical and social point of view;[277] in short, the French
physicians illuminated this obscure province of thought from every side,
and =laid the foundations for the scientific and critical study of
prostitution=, which began with the last decade of the nineteenth
century.
To Alfred Blaschko unquestionably belongs the credit of having broken
entirely new ground in connexion with the problem of prostitution, by
means of the debate instituted by him in the year 1892 in the Medical
Society of Berlin, and by several works distinguished by a
sharp-sighted, critical faculty.[278] Upon his exhaustive scientific
studies, and upon the most careful practical considerations, Blaschko
bases the demands:
“=Abolish Regulation!=
=Away with Brothels!=”
At the same time, Blaschko is a convinced advocate of the economic
theory of prostitution.
Almost at the same time, Cesare Lombroso, the celebrated alienist and
criminal anthropologist of Turin, propounded his =anthropological=
theory of prostitution, and enunciated the doctrine, which attracted so
much attention, of the “Donna delinquinte e prostituta,” of the
“=congenital prostitute=.”[279] This doctrine found an unconditional
supporter in the St. Petersburg syphilologist Tarnowsky; whilst the
latter strongly opposed the efforts made by the International
Federation, founded in 1875 by Mrs. Josephine Butler, for the abolition
of the regulation of prostitution.[280] Ströhmberg, in an interesting
work on prostitution,[281] takes the same standpoint as Lombroso and
Tarnowsky.
It is, however, noteworthy that quite recently the French observers
also, and, above all, the experienced Fiaux, are inclining to the views
of Blaschko, of the accuracy of which I myself am now fully convinced,
notwithstanding the fact that in my work on prostitution in
England,[282] which appeared eight years ago (October, 1900), I still
advocated regulation. E. von Düring also, who, as professor of medicine
in Constantinople for many years, has made elaborate study of the
conditions of prostitution in that town, adheres, in an essay well worth
reading, without qualification to the opinion of Blaschko regarding the
uselessness of regulation and of brothels.[283]
After this brief enumeration of the most important descriptive and
scientific studies of prostitution, we shall now proceed to a short
account of the conditions that obtain at the present day.
The idea of “=prostitution=” is in no respect clearly and sharply
limited. Parent-Duchatelet considered that prostitution only occurred
“when a woman was known to have accepted money for this purpose on
several successive occasions, when she was openly recognized as being
engaged in this occupation, when an arrest had occurred and the
offence had thus been definitely discovered, or when in any other way
it was proved to the satisfaction of the police” (vol. i., p. 11).
But in this way he entirely excluded the so-called “secret”
prostitution--that is to say, he excluded by far the largest category of
prostitution.
As soon as we take this latter into consideration, we find it necessary
to have a wider conception of the term “prostitution.” This is
recognized by the French physician Rey in his little book on “=Public
and Secret Prostitution=” (German edition, p. 1; Leipzig, 1851). He
regards as prostitution the act “by which a woman allows the =use of her
body by any man, without distinction=, and =for a payment made or
expected=.”
In this admirable definition we see the two most important
characteristics of prostitution: =complete indifference with regard to
the person of the man demanding the use of her body=, and the fact that
=the act is done for reward=. The only point omitted from consideration
is the condition mentioned by Parent-Duchatelet--namely, the =frequent
repetition= of the act of prostitution with =different= men.
Schrank combines all these characteristics of prostitution in a much
briefer phrase, by defining them as “=professional acts of fornication
performed with the human body=,” by which, in the first place, we
include male and female =homosexual= prostitution, which are not covered
by the definitions previously quoted, and, in the second place,
Schrank’s definition lays stress on the fact that in =genuine=
prostitution the =monetary reward= is the aim of the act of prostitution
much more than any kind of enjoyment. Where enjoyment plays a prominent
part, =in addition to= the earning of money, we are no longer concerned
with genuine prostitution. Even a prostitute, who in other respects is
typically a woman of that class, ceases at that moment and for that time
to be a prostitute, when her earnings become a secondary consideration,
and the =man= to whom she gives herself the principal consideration.
For this reason, strictly speaking, a large proportion of secret
prostitutes and numerous members of the half-world cannot be reckoned as
prostitutes in the proper sense of the term--at any rate, =not always=;
not when, for instance, the man who supports and pays them is at the
same time their “lover”;[284] they then belong for the time being to the
not less dangerous province of “wild love.” But in practice this
distinction cannot be strictly maintained, for the =same= woman will
very frequently undertake a genuine act of prostitution.
It is only the “sale of the sweet name of love,” as the celebrated
politician Louis Blanc expresses it, which constitutes prostitution--the
=complete lack= of all spiritual and all personal relationships on the
one side, and the ignominious predominance of the =mercantile= character
of the sexual union on the other. Hence there may be prostitution in
marriage, although this always remains widely different from the sale of
the body to =numerous= and =frequently changing= individuals.
The “prostitution” of primeval times, in which social relationships were
so utterly different from ours, unquestionably resembled rather the wild
love of the present day than our own prostitution. It was sexual
promiscuity, not professional fornication. According to Heinrich
Schurtz, prostitution is indeed not an exclusive product of higher
civilization, but occurs also among primitive peoples, and appears
everywhere where the unrestricted sexual intercourse of youth--wild
love--is prevented, without early marriage taking its place. But what he
describes as prostitution--for example, the living of several unmarried
girls in the houses of men--is still no more than a peculiar form of
wild love. Still, according to the reports of numerous travellers, there
are among primitive peoples also =purchasable= women, and this must be
explained, just as in our own case, from the combined influence of
individual, social, and economic conditions.
To my mind there is no doubt that the so-called “=religious=”
prostitution is to be regarded as at least a =germinal form= and
=predecessor= of the prostitution of the present day. In this case also
we had to do with =professional= fornication; only, although the
temple-girls, just like our modern prostitutes, gave themselves
=indifferently to any man= that offered the money paid for this service,
that money did not, in the case of religious prostitution, go to the
girl herself, but to the deity, or to the crafty priests who represented
him; thus the priests really played the part of our modern
brothel-keepers. It is absolutely unquestionable that in this religious
prostitution a more ideal element also played a part. This subject was
discussed at considerable length above (pp. 100-112).
Prostitution is everywhere a product of the =growth of large towns=; its
peculiar characteristics are developed only in large towns. To the
country it was always foreign until those beautiful times of the middle
ages, in which prostitution was regarded as a =necessary of life=, like
eating and drinking, and was organized in guilds, so that everywhere
“women-houses” were instituted for the public, unconstrained use of all
classes, for peasant and prince. At that time quite small towns also had
their brothels. The appearance of syphilis, and the awakening of modern
individualism, brought these conditions to an end; the brothels
disappeared everywhere; and this tendency to a =continuous decrease= of
barrack prostitution, to a progressive diminution in the number of
brothels, has continually strengthened. On the whole, the rural
districts to-day do not know prostitution; there we have only free love
and wild love. The existence of prostitution is confined to the large
towns, because in these all the necessary conditions are fulfilled, and,
above all, because in large towns the possibilities for the
gratification of the sexual impulse by marriage or by free love are in
the case of men much more limited than they are in the country. In the
town there is even a =demand= for prostitutes, but not in the country.
It is true that the demand on the part of men does not correspond to the
extension which modern prostitution has assumed in the large towns; this
demand corresponds, as it were, to a portion only of prostitution. In
his admirable work on the campaign against prostitution (_Journal for
the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, vol. ii., pp. 311-313) F.
Schiller proves that prostitution has not increased merely in proportion
to the increase in the male population, =but that in reality, in recent
decades, it has increased, on the whole, in a much greater proportion
than the population, and that different towns exhibit the most
remarkable contrasts in the respective ratios of prostitutes to male
population=.
For example, in Berlin prostitution has increased =to an extent almost
double= that of the increase in male population. A similar relationship
is to be observed in other large towns. Everywhere the supply of
prostitutes =exceeds= the demand; and we cannot doubt that by this great
supply the need for prostitutes is to a large extent at first aroused.
Street-walkers and brothels =allure= many men to sexual intercourse who
otherwise would not have felt any need for it.
But, on the other hand, the existence of a =voluntary demand= for
prostitutes on the part of =men= is a fact which cannot be denied. In
this sense prostitution has been described as mainly a “man’s question.”
Here we touch upon an extremely difficult problem, and one which, as far
as I can see, no one before myself has definitely stated, perhaps
because no one has =ventured= to do it--and yet, for our knowledge of
prostitution, the question is one of great importance.
What precisely is the “need of man for prostitution” of which Blaschko
speaks? Is it merely the sexual impulse? Or is there any other factor in
operation?
Certainly the sexual impulse, simple sensuality, plays a large part in
this male demand for prostitutes; but this does not explain the fact why
married men, and so many men who, if not married, have yet opportunities
for other sexual intercourse, have recourse to prostitutes; it does not
explain the fact, by which I am myself continually and anew astonished,
of the peculiar attractive force which prostitutes exercise upon
cultured men with delicate æsthetic and ethical perceptions. Is there
any deeper physiological relationship here involved?
I answer this question unconditionally in the affirmative.
It is not by chance that prostitution is mainly a product of
civilization, that it finds in civilization its proper vital conditions,
whereas in primitive states it cannot properly thrive.
In primitive times, unrestrained by the (just) demands of a higher
civilization, and by the social morality intimately associated
therewith, men could, without fear or regret, satisfy their wild
impulses, no less in the sexual sphere than in others; they could
give free play to those peculiar biological instincts of a sexual
nature which lie hidden in every man. Their sexual “supra- and
sub-consciousness,” to use the happy phrase which Chr. von Ehrenfels
invented to denote the dualism of modern sexuality, were still
=monistic=. To-day, however, the primitive instincts are =repressed= by
the necessities of civilized life, and by the coercive force of
conventional morality; but these instincts still slumber in every one.
Each one of us has also his sexual sub-consciousness. Sometimes it
awakens, demands activity, free from all restraint, from all coercion,
from all convention. In such moments it seems as if the man were an
entirely different being. Here the “two souls” in our breast become a
reality. Is this still the celebrated man of learning, the refined
idealist, the sensitive æsthetic, the artist who has enriched us with
the most magnificent and the purest works of poetry or of plastic art?
We recognize him no longer, because in such moments something quite
different has awakened to life; =another= nature stirs within him and
urges him with an elemental force to do things from which his
“supra-consciousness,” the consciousness of the civilized man, would
draw back in horror.
Such a delicate sensitive nature, open to the finest spiritual
activities, as that of the Danish poet J. P. Jakobsen, must feel this
contrast in an especially painful manner; it is precisely such
natures--those in which the extremes we have described appear most
sharply and most clearly--which afford us proof of the existence of a
double consciousness. The primitive instinct breaks out, like a
monomania--of which old psychiatric doctrine of “monomania” we are
involuntarily reminded when we see how even men of light and leading,
men who in other respects live only in the highest regions of the
spirit, are subjected to the domination of this purely instinctive
sexualism, so that they lead a “secret” inner life, of whose existence
the world has no suspicion.
In “Niels Lyhne” J. P. Jakobsen has admirably characterized this double
life.
“But when,” he writes, “he had served God truly for eleven days, it
often happened that =other powers= gained the upper hand in him; by an
overwhelming force he was driven to the coarse lust of coarse
enjoyments; he yielded, overcome by the human passion for
self-annihilation, which, while the blood burns as blood only can
burn, demands degradation, perversity, dirt, and foulness, with no
less force than the force which inspires the equally human passion for
becoming greater than one is, and purer.”
These human instincts can be satisfied only by prostitution. By the
purchasable prostitute this desire, described so aptly and with so much
insight by Jakobsen, can be fully satisfied. To the origin of the desire
we shall return in another connexion. The common, the rough, the brutal
animal in the nature of prostitution, exercises a formal magical
attractive force on large numbers of men.
Ludwig Pietsch, in his “Recollections of Sixty Years,” vol. ii., p. 337
(Berlin, 1894), tells of the celebrated cocotte of the Second French
Empire, Cora Pearl, whom he saw in Baden-Baden:
“I have never been able to understand how it was that she exercised so
powerful an attraction. In her appearance, her tumid, painted
‘pug-face,’ the secret was certainly not to be found. Perhaps the
influence which she exercised on so many men rested principally in the
quality which the royal friend of the Danish Countess Danner described
to the latter, when explaining to her the reason of the power, to
others quite incomprehensible, which Cora Pearl had exercised on his
own heart. He said: ‘=She is so gloriously vulgar=.’”
This word speaks volumes, and illuminates the peculiar influence of
prostitutes and prostitution upon man in an apt and powerful way.[285]
Admirably, also, has Stefan Grimmen, in his novelette “Die Landpartie”
(published in _Die Welt am Montag_, No. 22, May 28, 1906), described
this influence, which in this case was exercised by two demi-mondaines
lying in the grass, upon the masculine members of a picnic-party, who
were so enthralled as completely to forget the ladies of their company.
The de Goncourts were also aware of the specific allurement exercised by
prostitutes, for in one place in their diary they recommend a wife to
adopt certain customs of prostitutes, in order to bind her husband to
her for a long time.
In this respect, we cannot fail to recognize a certain masochistic trait
in the sensibility of men, which appears especially remarkable when we
call to mind the contrast between the nature of the above described
spiritually lofty persons and the nature of a prostitute. In this way we
should be led to the view that =prostitution is in part a product of the
physiological male masochism=--that is to say, of the impulse from time
to time to plunge into the depths of coarse, brutal, sexual lust and of
self-mortification and self-abasement, by surrender to a comparatively
worthless creature. This attraction towards prostitutes is one of the
most remarkable phenomena in the psyche of the modern civilized man; it
is the curse of the evolution of civilization.
“The most ideal man also is unable to free himself from his body,”
says Heinrich Schurtz; “refinement leads ultimately to an unnatural
over-nicety, =which must necessarily be permeated from time to time by
a breath of fresh unrefinement and coarse naturalism=, if it is not to
perish from its own inward contradiction.”
In a certain sense the same need finds expression also in Gutzkow’s
remark in the “Neue Serapionsbrüder,” vol. i., p. 198 (Breslau, 1877),
that man sometimes has a need for “=woman-in-herself=,” not woman with
the thousand and one tricks and whimsies of wives, mothers, and
daughters.
Without question, this need is much more characteristic of man than of
woman. Still, I am not prepared altogether to deny its existence in the
latter. In another connexion I shall return to this extremely important
question.
Naturally in this we see no more than a =favouring factor= of the
appearance of prostitution =in the mass=; we do not speak of it as the
definite cause of the production of any individual prostitute.
Speaking generally, I consider the dispute regarding the causes of
prostitution as superfluous; a number of causes are in operation, and in
each individual case it is always an unfortunate =concatenation= of
circumstances, of subjective and objective influences, which have driven
the girl to prostitution. The various =theories= regarding the causes of
prostitution have therefore only a relative value. Not one of them
explains it wholly; each explanation demands the assistance of others.
This is, above all, true of the celebrated theory of Lombroso, regarding
the “=born prostitute=,” a theory which states, to put the matter
shortly and clearly, that the girl is born with all the =rudimentary
characteristics= of a prostitute, and that these rudimentary
characteristics have also a =physical= foundation, in the form of
demonstrable =stigmata of degeneration=.
Lombroso’s “born prostitute” is, above all, distinguished by a complete
lack of the moral sense, by typical “moral insanity,” which is the true
“=root=” of the prostitute life, for he regards that life as very little
dependent upon the sexual. Prostitution, therefore, according to
Lombroso, “is only a special case of the early tendency to all evil, of
the desire which characterizes the morally idiotic human being from
childhood upwards, to do that which is forbidden.”[286] The individual
cause of prostitution, according to this view, is to be found, not in
the sexual, but in the ethical province. With the ethical defects are
associated greediness, the love of finery, a tendency to drink, vanity,
dislike of work, mendacity, and an inclination towards criminality. To
this moral degeneration there corresponds the presence of stigmata of
degeneration, such as anomalies of the teeth, cleft palate, abnormal
distribution of the hair, prominent ears, asymmetry of the face, etc.
The above-described type of degenerate woman does, as a fact, exist.
But, in the first place, such women constitute only a small fraction of
prostitutes, and such women are found =following other occupations=.
Thus, the expression “born prostitute” is a false one; it should run,
“born degenerate,” for not all born degenerates become prostitutes.
In the second place, =not all degenerate prostitutes are born
degenerates=. In many cases the degeneration is a result of the
professional unchastity.
“No one,” says Friedrich Hammer, “who has not personally investigated
the matter can conceive how =rapidly= and =completely= the =process of
transformation from an honourable girl into a prostitute
proceeds=--the transformation into a street-walker. A few weeks before
she was clean-looking and trim, perhaps with a somewhat frivolous
appearance, but still able to understand the position in which she
found herself; now, however, she seems to have completely ‘gone to
pieces’; she is dirty and verminous, and on her face is an expression
of absolute wretchedness, not, as you perhaps might imagine, of
unbridled sensuality--=no, rather one of indifference=, of complete
helplessness and loss of will, of unresponsiveness alike to punishment
and to benefit.”[287]
The earlier investigators of prostitution, including the first of all,
Parent-Duchatelet, did not fail to recognize that the mental and
physical abnormalities of the prostitute were =changes= due to her mode
of life. In many prostitutes we can observe a =typical obliteration of
the secondary and tertiary sexual characters= after a prolonged practice
of their profession. Virey remarked, very justly, that “in consequence
of the frequent embraces of men, prostitutes gain a more or less
masculine appearance”: their neck is thicker, their voice harsher and
more masculine (J. J. Virey, “Woman,” pp. 157, 158; Leipzig, 1827).
Most prostitutes have done more or less injury to the functions of the
human body, have completely disordered their sexual life, and are
sterile. It is not to be wondered at that this sometimes manifests
itself in their outward appearance--as, for example, in the slight
development of the breasts, which often amounts to a simple atrophy. The
“unmistakable development” of the tertiary characters of the male in
individual prostitutes, which has led Kurella to propound the
interesting hypothesis that prostitutes are a sub-variety of the
homosexual,[288] rests for the most part upon their assumption of a
masculine mode of life and masculine habits, which in the long-run
cannot fail to influence also the bodily development--as, for example,
smoking and the excessive use of alcohol, pot-house life, gluttony, and
other masculine habits. The “deep masculine voice” of many prostitutes
is unquestionably in most cases the result of the excessive use of
tobacco and alcohol. To this striking =gradual= change in the voice
Parent-Duchatelet devoted considerable attention (vol. i., pp. 86-88, of
the German edition); it also attracted Lippert’s notice.
Parent-Duchatelet refers the common development in prostitutes of the
masculine voice to their excessive indulgence in alcoholic beverages,
and to their exposure to frequent changes of weather (catching cold,
etc.). Smoking also certainly plays a part.
Lippert draws attention to other changes (“Prostitution in Hamburg,” pp.
80 and 90):
“By the daily practice of their profession for many years their eyes
acquire a piercing, rolling expression; they are somewhat unduly
prominent in consequence of the continued tension of the ocular
muscles, since the eyes are principally employed to spy out and
attract clients. In many the organs of mastication are strongly
developed; the mouth, in continuous activity either in eating or in
kissing, is conspicuous; the forehead is often flat; the occipital
region is at times extremely prominent; the hair of the head is often
scanty--in fact, a good many become actually bald. For this reasons
are not lacking: above all, the restless mode of life; the continued
running about in all weathers in the open street, sometimes with the
head bare; the often long-lasting fluor albus from which they
suffer;[289] the incessant brushing, manipulation, frizzling, and
pomading of the hair; and, among the lower classes of prostitutes, the
use of brandy.
“The rough voice is the physiological characteristic of the woman who
has lost her proper functions--those of the mother.”
However, the =majority= of =youthful prostitutes= exhibit purely
=feminine= characteristics; it is only late in life that the
above-described type becomes predominant, and this shows us that the
masculine characteristics are the result of =objective= influences. From
five to ten years bring about a notable difference. In the year 1898 I
treated a maidservant for syphilis. At that time she was of an elegant,
genuinely feminine appearance. Seven years later, in the year 1905, I
saw her once more. What a change! Her face was bloated and widened; her
eyes, once so bright and clear, had become cloudy and expressionless;
her voice was rough; all the specific feminine forms and characters had
been obliterated by extreme corpulence. It was no longer a woman, it was
a “prostitute,” a special type of humanity, but one which had been
=gradually produced=, and as a result of no more than six years of the
practice of professional prostitution.
These facts do not by any means exclude the existence of =genuine
degenerates= among prostitutes in a greater percentage than among
non-prostitutes;[290] nor do they exclude the existence of genuine
homosexuals among prostitutes. To this extent Lombroso’s theory contains
a nucleus of truth; but it concerns only a fraction of the entire world
of prostitutes. Lombroso has himself been repeatedly compelled to
recognize the frequency with which he has encountered among prostitutes
women of normal appearance, and even beautiful women.[291]
Finally, the doctrine of the “born prostitute” is contradicted by the
fact that the same types of degenerate which are described by Lombroso
among prostitutes are found also among women who are not
prostitutes.[292] In fact, Lombroso has been led to this view by the
recognition of an “equivalent of prostitutes among the upper classes”;
but in this way he has only proved that the =same= moral degeneration
that is encountered in a certain proportion of prostitutes is also seen
in misconducted women of other and higher classes. There are, in fact,
prostitute natures among the “upper ten thousand.”
The best limitation of the general value of the doctrine of the “born
prostitute” is the concluding chapter of Lombroso’s book upon
“Occasional Prostitutes.” He begins with the pertinent remark:
“Not all prostitutes are ethically indifferent--that is to say, they
are =not all born prostitutes=; in this province =opportunity= also
plays its part.”
Lombroso proceeds to develop this thesis, thus markedly limiting the
application of his own theory, and recognizing that, in addition to
natural predisposition, quite other causes and influences come into play
in the production of prostitution.
Above all, the =economic= factors are of greater importance in the
genesis and growth of prostitution, even though their influence is not
an exclusive one.
I distinguish here between =real, genuine poverty= (lack of food, proper
housing accommodation, etc.) and merely =relative poverty=. Hitherto, in
considering the economic causes of prostitution, these two elements have
not been distinguished with sufficient clearness.
=The fact that real, absolute poverty and lack of the necessaries of
life drives many girls to a life of prostitution can, in view of recent
statistical data, no longer be disputed.= More exact material dealing
with this subject is to be found in the above mentioned writings of
Blaschko, one of the principal advocates of the economic theory of
prostitution; also in the works of Georg Keben,[293] Oda Olberg,[294]
Anna Pappritz,[295] Pfeiffer,[296] Paul Kampffmeyer,[297] E. von
Düring,[298] and many others. Here we have a superabundant material, a
quantity of distressing and tragical individual data and proofs of
Gutzkow’s thesis, that =the material evils of society always and
everywhere undergo transformation into immorality=. Here unquestionably
must we =first= apply the lever for the removal of this economic
predisposing condition of prostitution. _Hic Rhodus, hic salta!_ I am
myself firmly convinced of this fact, although I do =not= consider that
the causes of prostitution are to be found =exclusively= in economic
conditions--an opinion which Anna Pappritz, for example, maintains in
the most extreme form. It is quite true, however, that our entire sexual
life at the present day is so intimately connected with the =social
question= that the reform of the sexual life demands as an unconditional
preliminary a reform of economic conditions. Prostitution =on the large
scale=, as it manifests itself in modern days, and its =continuous
increase= to an extent quite unparalleled in former times, is only
explicable by the rapid transformation of economic conditions--as, for
example, by the concentration of population in large towns, by the
industrial revolution, and by the development of great aggregations of
capital, by the consequent greatly increased severity of the struggle
for existence, the postponement of marriage, and the ever-increasing
number of individuals who are not economically and professionally
independent. The increase in =child-labour= (naturally we refer
especially to children of the female sex) has also to be considered as a
remarkable phenomenon of modern industrial life; but, above all, we must
take into account the fact that =woman’s work= is on the average
regarded at a very low valuation, and is paid accordingly.
The insufficiency of their earnings is the immediate cause of the fact
that so many women and girls seek =accessory earnings= in the form of
prostitution. It is well known that employers reckon on this fact in
drawing up their pay-lists, and frequently are so brutally cynical as to
point out to their female employees the possibility of increasing their
earnings in this manner--one very convenient to the employer!
The _Reichsarbeitsblatt_, No. 2, of the year 1903, publishes a very
remarkable account of the conditions of work and life of the =unmarried
female factory employees= in Berlin. It is based upon the reports of the
professional factory inspectors in Berlin, who have access to material
affording them accurate information regarding the mode of life of
factory women. The reports concern 939 unmarried factory hands, and
include all occupations in which in Berlin a considerable number of
women were employed. The average age of the women who came under
observation was 22-1/2 years; the oldest was 54 years; 53·5 % of the
whole number were over 21 years of age; 42 % were between 16 and 21
years of age; 4·5 % were below 16 years of age. The average number of
hours of daily work was 9-1/2; 3·2 % of all the women worked from 7-1/2
to 8 hours; 37·2 %, 8 to 9 hours; 47·7 %, 9 to 10 hours; and 11·9 %, 10
to 11 hours. The weekly wage amounted on the average to 11·36 marks
(shillings); individually, the wages were very variable; 4·3 % of the
women were paid less than 6 marks (shillings); 1·1 % were paid from 20
to 30 marks (shillings). =In a very large majority of instances the
wages varied between 8 and 15 marks.= Supplies from a source independent
of their wages, in the form of money, clothing, and means of
subsistence, were received, according to their own statement, by 88 of
the women; among these, 41 were assisted by parents, 4 by other
relatives, 3 in other ways; 542 of those examined lived with their
parents, 57 with other relatives--that is, altogether 64·2 of the total
number--21·5 % lived in common lodging-houses, 14 % in their own rooms.
The worst-paid workwomen lived chiefly with their parents; as soon as
the wage sufficed to support them away from home a great many left their
parents’ houses. The housing accommodation was ascertained in 846
instances; in 758 of these a single room constituted the dwelling, in 82
cases a kitchen, in 2 cases an attic, in 3 some other room. In isolated
cases quite unsuitable places were used to sleep in. =Speaking
generally, the conditions were worse= than appears from the above
figures. Of 832 workwomen, only 169 had a room to themselves; 193 slept
in a room with one other person, and 470--that is, 56·6 %--=with several
persons=. With regard to the cost of their dwellings, there were 464
reports; the average payment was 1·79 marks (shillings) per week. The
cost of the food (dinner and lesser meals) amounted on the average, in
the case of 568, to 6·77 marks (shillings); of these, 205 paid less than
6 marks (shillings), 109 more than 8 marks (shillings) per week. The
total cost for lodging and food amounted in the case of 867 workwomen on
the average to 7·62 marks; 44·7 % had their principal meal at midday;
55·3 % in the evening; 79·4 % took it at home; 9·4 % in the factory;
11·2 % in a public kitchen, a cooking-school, or an eating-house. With
regard to the expenditure for clothing, etc., =very scanty= details were
obtained--too scanty to be worth recording. Of the 939 workwomen of whom
inquiry was made on the point, 197, or 21 %, contributed money to the
education or support of relatives or children; about 10 % paid (direct)
taxes, with a mean expenditure of 8 pfennige (one penny) per week. For
amusement, 233 women recorded an average weekly expenditure of 1 mark
(shilling). To a considerable number of those examined it was possible
to put a little money by; in most cases the amount averaged from half to
one mark (sixpence to one shilling) per week; in many cases, however,
the money saved =was spent at some other time during the year=, in
consequence of diminished earnings or illness. The figures obtained,
although in many cases they require further examination, elaboration,
and illustration, still suffice to show that much remains to be done for
the improvement of the conditions of life of female factory employees.
That these wages are quite insufficient is shown by the following table
of the daily expenditure of a sempstress for food and lodging (based on
the reports of von Stülpnagel):
Mk. Pf.
Bedroom and coffee 0 20
Second breakfast 0 15
Dinner (midday) 0 30
Afternoon tea 0 15
Supper 0 20
Two bottles of beer 0 20
-------
Total 1 20
That amounts per week to 8 marks 40 pfennige (eight shillings and
fivepence) for board-lodging. For the rest, clothing, washing, and a
little amusement, have to be provided for, and this is only possible in
the case of the highest wages, varying from 12 to 15 marks; but this
higher wage =often enough= suffices, as Anna Pappritz herself admits. In
many cases the weekly wage is only 5 to 8 marks. In the majority of
occupations connected with the manufacture of ready-made clothing, trade
is only brisk for four to six months in each year. Thus, there is
necessarily a great deal of unemployment.
According to the Statistical Annual for the town of Berlin for the year
1907, the =annual wages= amounted:
For tailoresses to 457 marks
„ sempstresses „ 486 „
„ hand buttonhole workers „ 354 „
„ machine buttonhole workers „ 700 „
„ other women factory employees „ 354 „
According to the report of the Statistical Bureau, the average yearly
income of women factory employees throughout the German Empire was only
322 marks!
It is, therefore, no matter for surprise that the industrial councillors
of Frankfurt-on-the-Main and of Wiesbaden, in their published reports on
the wages of female factory employees for the year 1887, state:
“In Frankfurt, at the end of last month, among 226 persons under the
observation of the _police des mœurs_ (that is, not reckoning secret
prostitution), 98 were female factory employees. Since for their
necessary bare support (food and sleeping accommodation only), the
minimum daily sum needed is 1·25 marks, it appears that the wages
which can be earned by female employees of 1·50 to 1·80 marks can
hardly suffice to provide for all their needs. It would seem,
therefore, that the lowness of their earnings must play some part in
the matter under discussion.”
The reports of the industrial councillors of Düsseldorf, Posen, Stettin,
Neuss, Barmen, Elberfeld, Gladbach, Erfurt, etc., have a similar
signification.
Important in relation to the incontrovertible connexion between material
poverty and prostitution is the fact that in the majority of cases the
prostitution of female factory employees is only =occasional=, and not
professional prostitution--that is to say, such women have recourse to
prostitution only when compelled thereto by deficient means.
As regards genuine =professional= prostitution, female factory
employees, who live in a state of comparative freedom, contribute a
smaller contingent of recruits than =maidservants=, whose position is
always a =more dependent= one, and who are much less experienced in the
struggle for existence, although, generally speaking, they live in
better conditions. From a computation based upon figures for the years
1855, 1873, and 1898 (those for 1855 and 1898 relating to far too small
a number of cases), Blaschko derives the opinion that formerly female
factory employees provided a greater number of recruits to prostitution
than they do at present; but that, on the contrary, the contribution of
maidservants to the ranks of professional prostitution has enormously
increased. This assertion cannot pass without contradiction.
Gross-Hoffinger, in the work previously mentioned, pointed out that the
class of maidservants was the true nucleus of prostitution, and devoted
to this fact a long and illuminating chapter of his book. And at about
the same time (1848) Lippert also wrote (_op. cit._, p. 79): “The
principal sources of prostitution are =maidservants=, sempstresses,
flower-girls, tailoresses, hairdressers, shop-girls, and barmaids.”
(Gross-Hoffinger himself emphasizes the word “=maidservants=.”)
We see, therefore, that the preponderance of ex-maidservants in the
ranks of professional prostitution is by no means a new phenomenon,
although, possibly, that preponderance is even =greater= now than it was
in former times. And though in isolated instances it may happen that
simple poverty forces a maidservant to become a prostitute, this
explanation does not suffice for the generality of cases. The same
reservation must be made in respect of seduction and illegitimate
motherhood as causes of prostitution. And in so far as poverty is a
cause, we must speak rather of =relative= poverty, poverty which has
more of a subjective than an objective character.
Schiller rightly remarks, in his admirable essay on the “Prevention of
Prostitution,” that in respect of prostitutes who have been
maidservants, in the majority of cases there can be no question of
insufficient wages and actual poverty (if we except the badly paid
servants in public-houses, laundry-maids, and a few others), since the
maidservant receives, in addition to her wages, free board and lodging,
and therefore is in a much better position than the majority of female
factory employees and of women engaged in home industries.
Notwithstanding this, maidservants supply the largest proportion of
prostitutes.
The majority of maidservants come from the country, where lax views
prevail regarding sexual relationships. In addition, girls usually come
to town when still very young. The want of education and experience of
life is, in their case, very striking; and this is increased by their
permanently dependent position, in contrast with the early independence
of the town factory-women, who are speedily initiated into all the
possible evils of town life. In addition, there comes into the question
an influence which hitherto has been underestimated: the =love of
finery=. Among maidservants this is especially powerful, since, in this
respect, they are continually exposed to suggestive influences, arising
from the clothing of their mistresses. This love of dress, in
association with a far greater unscrupulousness in sexual matters than
exists among workwomen, drives many servant-girls, even =without= real
poverty, to prostitution. After they have lost their place, after they
have acquired a distaste for work, have given birth to an illegitimate
child, or have been infected with venereal disease, they very readily
enter the ranks of professional prostitution.
This =subjective psychological= factor plays nearly as great a rôle as
the economic factor. Blaschko himself draws attention to the fact that,
in proportion to the hundreds of thousands of women who are compelled to
earn their bread by hard, badly paid toil, the number of those who
ultimately become prostitutes is really almost infinitesimally small;
and that, therefore, we must regard as accessory causes of prostitution,
defective will-power, want of industry, of perseverance, and
of moral instincts, and, finally, also--and here Lombroso is
justified--congenital deficiency. Hellpach is right when, in his most
readable essay on “Prostitution and Prostitutes” (Berlin, 1905), he lays
the principal stress on this “social-psychological” explanation of
prostitution, and regards the purely economic factor as “the ultimate
turning-point” in the fatal road that leads to prostitution. (Earlier
than Hellpach, Anton Baumgarten attempted to give a social-psychological
explanation of prostitution. See his essays, containing much valuable
material, “Police and Prostitution,” and “The Relations of Prostitution
to Crime,” published in the eighth and eleventh volumes respectively of
the “Archives of Criminal Anthropology.”)
We must, therefore, hold firmly to the fact that the most =diverse= and
=heterogeneous= vital conditions may ultimately lead to prostitution.
Among these, =lack of education=, =premature habituation= to sexual
depravation by =casual observation= and by =deliberate seduction=, play
an important rôle. And these causes are themselves to a large extent
secondary to the =miserable housing conditions= in great towns, recently
so dramatically described by von Pfeiffer and Kampffmeyer.
“It is easier,” says Pfeiffer, “to thunder against immorality from the
top of a lofty tower, than it is to resist every allurement in dull,
narrow dwellings, in the midst of poverty and deprivation.... The
lodger flirts with the wife; the married or free-loving pair, also
living in the house, do not wait to begin their caresses until the
children are out of the way. The children are witnesses of many scenes
which are little adapted to the preservation of pure morals; they see
things which they later come to regard as matters of course, and when
they have the opportunity they act in the same way themselves, for
they have not learned otherwise, and they think that every one does
the same....
“The servant-girl becomes pregnant; no one knows what has become of
her child’s father. Driven out of her place, she remembers that she
has a married sister, and after long search she finds her in a damp
basement dwelling. This dwelling consists of a single room and a dark
kitchen; three shivering, dirty children are playing on the floor; the
husband is out of employment; but still they can find room for this
sister-in-law and her illegitimate child. Then perhaps there are
better days for a time. But within the narrow limits of the one-roomed
dwelling the association is too intimate, and the sister-in-law again
becomes pregnant, and ultimately in the same week both the sisters are
delivered as the result of impregnation by the same man. When we think
how all this has taken place in the =only= available room, we can
understand that the children must have seen a great deal little suited
to childish eyes.”
The housing statistics of Berlin for the year 1900 give horrible reports
regarding this, and even much worse conditions--conditions which are
sufficiently explained when we consider how often families living in a
single room take in a =male= or a =female lodger= for the night.
One-roomed dwellings in which from four to seven sleep every night are
common; those in which eight to ten sleep are by no means rare!
After what has been said above, no elaborate demonstration is needed to
show that =alcoholism= everywhere, in the most diverse conditions,
prepares the soil for prostitution. Kräpelin and O. Rosenthal have
thoroughly exposed this intimate connexion between prostitution and
alcoholism.
An even more important source of prostitution is to be found in
=procurement= and in the =traffic in girls=--this grave social evil of
our time. How often are children initiated into the practice of
prostitution, for the sake of pecuniary gain, by their own parents, or
by some other individual devoid of all moral feeling, and taught to
serve as mere instruments of earning money by lust! Paris offers more
examples of this traffic than any other European city, but London is not
far behind, as was proved by the _Pall Mall Gazette_ scandals of 1883,
to which we shall return in another connexion. In Berlin itself in
recent years the number of half-grown, and even childish, prostitutes
has enormously increased. Prostitutes from thirteen to fourteen years of
age are no longer rare.
An even sadder phenomenon is the modern =traffic in girls=, a
characteristic product of the age of commerce, although earlier times
were, indeed, familiar with it, especially France in the eighteenth
century,[299] witness more especially the accounts of the celebrated
_Parc-aux-Cerfs_.
The modern traffic in girls[300] is intimately connected with the
=brothel question=. We can, in fact, assert that if there were no
brothels there would be no traffic in girls. This is proved also by the
=growing dislike= to brothels felt by prostitutes, who prefer a free
life. For this reason, it becomes more and more difficult for the
keepers of brothels to obtain inmates, and the international traffic in
girls attempts to fill the continually increasing deficiency in the
number of girls entering brothels.
The traffic in girls is to-day almost exclusively recruited from Eastern
Europe. As regards its original sources, we find that Galicia--_i.e._,
Austrian Poland--supplies 40 %, Russia 15 %, Italy 11 %, Austria-Hungary
10 %, Germany 8 %, of the “White Slave Trade.” Most of the girls are
transported to the Argentine, where we find them in the brothels.[301]
The traders in girls, or “kaften” as they are called in Brazil, are, for
the most part, Polish Jews. Rosenack shows, in his report on the
campaign against the traffic in girls (a campaign actively taken up by
the Western European Jewish Unions, and especially by the Jewish
Association for the Protection of Girls and Women), that five out of six
of the Galician Jews engaged in this traffic are what are called
“Luftmenschen” (men of air)--that is, men without any definite or secure
means of livelihood--and that only an improvement in their social
conditions can put an end to the traffic in girls. As regards that part
of the world, he considers that the measures resolved upon by the
=National= and =International Conference for the Suppression of the
Traffic in Girls= (Berlin, 1903; Frankfurt-on-the-Main, 1905) are not
adapted to offer any important hindrances to the traffic. More effective
has been the work of the Jewish Branch Committee in Germany for the
suppression of the Galician traffic in girls. Dr. Rosenack, Berta
Pappenheim, and Dr. Sera Rabinowitsch, in furtherance of the work of the
committee, studied the local conditions; the population was instructed
verbally and by leaflets and pamphlets. Endeavours have been made to
improve the economic condition of the workwomen of Galicia. For this
purpose, instructed female assistants are sent from Germany to Galicia.
It has been possible to awaken in Galicia general interest in the work
of the suppression of traffic in girls. In a Conference held at Lemberg,
the Galician clubs and Jewish committees made representations to German
and other societies, in order to formulate a plan, and to devise
measures for the improvement of Galician conditions.
In Buenos Ayres, the principal town of entry for Galician girls, a
committee has been formed to oppose the traffic in girls, the members of
this committee being of all religions and nationalities. This has had
one good effect--that the traders in girls have become alarmed; they no
longer practise their profession so openly as before. The Argentine
police are also taking an active part in the fight with the traffic. Not
more than two of the judges at Buenos Ayres were found to make common
cause with the “traders,” and to discharge them on receipt of large
bribes. A law has been drafted for the punishment of those engaged in
this traffic, by imprisonment for six years and confiscation of their
property.
The traders in girls constitute an international ring, and the centre of
their organization is in Buenos Ayres.
In Berlin, since 1904, there has existed a =central police organization=
for the suppression of the international traffic in girls, the activity
of which extends throughout the Empire. Every case of this traffic which
comes to the notice of the police in Germany is reported to the central
police organization. This draws up a list of all the traders in girls
whose names are definitely known. It has started an album containing
photographs of traders who have been punished, and it exchanges
experiences with the police of other countries. It is to be hoped that
in comparison with the other countries of Europe the number of German
girls exported to brothels abroad will continually grow smaller, and
that the local measures undertaken in Galicia and the Argentine will
have a good effect in limiting, and ultimately suppressing, this
traffic.
Henne am Rhyn has shown that to and from other countries--for example,
from England to Belgium and Germany (Hamburg), from Galicia to Turkey,
from Italy to North America, etc.--individual girls are transported.
According to Felix Baumann, the number of traders in girls in New York
approaches 20,000. They have close relations to the police, and they
employ young handsome men, called “cadets,” to attract the girls. The
abolition of brothels would here also be the best means of abolishing
the traffic in girls.
Having now learned the sources of prostitution, we must proceed to give
a brief account of the places in which it is carried on. Here we have
first of all to distinguish =public= from =secret= prostitution.
As regards public prostitution, there are only =two= principal varieties
to consider: street prostitution, where the women seek their victims in
the streets, in order to carry them off either to their =own dwellings=
or to =houses of accommodation=; and =brothel prostitution=. At the
present day in most countries public street prostitution is far the most
general form, and this is especially true as regards Germany, where in a
few towns only brothels continue to exist. In many places this street
prostitution--for example, in the Friedrichstrasse of Berlin, and also
on the boulevards of Paris--gives rise to conditions which recall the
worst days of imperial Rome. The =contact= between public life and
professional prostitution is unquestionably a great evil. The activity
of prostitutes in the open streets, the shameless and lascivious display
of their sexual charms, their bold solicitation _coram publico_, the
stimulating character of professional unchastity--all these poison our
public life, obliterate the boundary between cleanliness and
contamination, and display daily a picture of sexual corruption--alike
before the eyes of the pure, blameless girl, those of the honourable
wife, and those of the immature boy. Aptly has this =street=
prostitution been termed the _cloaca_ of our social life, which empties
into the open street, whereas at least =brothel= prostitution only
represented a hidden _cloaca_, whose offensive odour need not annoy all
the world, as inevitably happens in the case of street prostitution. In
addition, we have to consider the serious dangers involved in the
practice of professional fornication in private dwellings and houses of
accommodation, as they involve the decent families living in such
houses. What do the children living in such houses see and hear?
Frequently prostitutes are admitted to confidential family intercourse,
and they seduce the daughters of poor people to join them in the
practice of prostitution, and the sons to a vicious life or to become
souteneurs. That the danger of contamination of the lower classes of the
population by means of prostitution is by no means imaginary, is clearly
shown by numerous examples from actual life. I subscribe to all that the
advocates of brothels say in this respect.
And yet =brothels= are a =still= greater evil! They constitute an
incomparably =more dangerous= centre of =sexual corruption=, a worse
=breeding-ground of sexual aberrations= of every kind, and last, not
least, the =greatest focus of sexual infection=. With reference to the
last point, the matter will be discussed more fully in the chapter
dealing with the question of regulation in connexion with the
suppression of venereal diseases.
The brothel is the =high-school= of refined sexual lust and perversity.
The detailed proof of this I must leave to the descriptions of the two
writers most experienced in the life of brothels, Léo Taxil[302] and
Louis Fiaux.[303]
It is a fact well known to all that many young men learn in brothels for
the first time the manifold and artificial ways in which natural sexual
intercourse can be replaced by perverse methods of sexual activity.
=Here, in the brothel, psychopathia sexualis is systematically taught.=
And what the old debauchee demands from the prostitute and pays her for,
perverse intercourse, is =spontaneously offered to the youthful
initiate=, because competition between the prostitutes, and the hope of
a higher payment, lead them to do so. The opinion of the French authors
just mentioned is perfectly credible--that there are young men who in
this way have learned about perverse sexuality =before= they were fully
acquainted with natural sexuality, and who thus have permanently
acquired more inclination for these mysteries of Venus than for a
natural and normal sexual intercourse.
“=Brothel-jargon=,” or “=brothel-slang=,” contains a number of words
almost peculiar to this dialect, by which the contra-natural, abnormal
methods of sexual intercourse are denoted in a more or less cynical
manner; for example, _faire feuille de rose_ = anilinctus; _sfogliar la
rosa_ (to pluck the leaves from the rose) = pædicare; _faire tête-bêche_
= reciprocal cunnilinctus of two tribades; _punta di penna_ =
masturbatio labialis; _pulci lavoratrici_ (learned fleas!) = tribades,
etc.
A learned investigator like Fiaux is led by his observations of many
years to the conclusion that =brothels= constitute not only the most
=dangerous= form of public prostitution, but the most dangerous kind of
prostitution that exists at all, and that it is urgently necessary that
they should be abolished in all countries as soon as possible.
In addition to the two varieties and localities of “public”
prostitution--that is, prostitution carried on under the observation of
the police--there is a much more extensive =secret= prostitution, in
connexion with which, however, the word “secret” must always be accepted
with reserve, since in its case also it comes more or less under the eye
of the public. This secret prostitution is, for example, accessible at
numerous places, and these are very different one from another. Secret
prostitution also has its types, its peculiarities--in short, its
definite local colouring, according to the place in which it is
practised. Let us give a brief account of the various localities of
secret prostitution.
1. =Public-houses with Women Attendants, the so-called
“Animierkneipen.”=--The =waitress= (barmaid) is the true exemplar of the
secret prostitute, and further, in consequence of the perpetual
association with alcoholism, is the most dangerous variety;[304] for the
barmaid allures the guest even more to the excessive consumption of
alcohol than to sexual indulgence. For this purpose barmaids receive a
percentage of the receipts from the sale of liquor, and this sum, in
addition to free board, is their only wage.
The “animierkneipen”[305] and the restaurants with women attendants can
be plainly distinguished from a considerable distance by their
=curtained= windows, and by the =red, green, or blue glass panes= over
the doors of entry. These coloured panes are so characteristic of these
places of lust and gluttony that at the last year’s District Synod of
the Friedrichswerder section of the town of Berlin the attempt was made
(_cf._ _Vossische Zeitung_, No. 248, May 30, 1906) to forbid the use of
such illuminated panes for the advertisement of the houses of
entertainment in Berlin with female attendants. To this proposal the
reasonable objection was made that if this distinguishing mark were
abolished, there would be no means of recognizing such places, and
therefore no warning signal for blameless individuals.
Many “animierkneipen”--the French similarly term the girls in such
places “_les inviteuses_”[306]--by their mysterious-looking interior; by
the heavy curtains, which produce semi-obscurity; by small very discreet
_chambres séparées_, lighted by little coloured lanterns and with erotic
pictures on the walls; by their Spanish walls and their enormous
couches--obtain the appearance of small lupanars. To these the richer
customers and the initiates are brought, whilst the ordinary habitual
guests commonly assemble in the larger bars, where also music--it must
be admitted very bad music--in the form of a piano- or a zither-player,
is not wanting.
The whole shameless activity of these “animierkneipen,” in which alcohol
and indecency play the principal rôle, has recently been described by
Hermann Seyffert in a manner no less perspicuous than true to life.[307]
The clients of such places are, for the most part, immature lads, who
squander here the money of their parents or their employers; but we find
there also the habitual guests, usually elderly married men, who find in
this atmosphere a welcome variety in comparison with the monotony of
their homes. The quantities of alcohol which are consumed in the
“animierkneipen,” both by the guests and by the attendants, are
enormous. The barmaids must always drink at the cost of the guests, in
order that the sales of liquor may be larger. O. Rosenthal[308] speaks
of barmaids who consume twenty to thirty glasses of beer a day, and
more, without mentioning brandy and liqueurs!
2. =Ball-Rooms and Dancing-Saloons.=[309]--Properly speaking, these are
only a sub-variety of the places described in Section 1; they are
enlarged “animierkneipen,” with the addition of (better) music and of
dancing. But the beautiful days of the Bal Mabille and the Closerie des
Lilas, or of Cremorne Gardens, the Portland Rooms, the Argyll Rooms, and
the Orpheum have long passed away. The majority of the ball-rooms of
Berlin and Paris (in London they disappeared long ago) have sunk to a
lower level. Prostitution is now dominant. The “intimacy,” which in the
earlier more idyllic ball-rooms felt so much at home, is now no longer
to be found there. It is only necessary to visit the celebrated
ball-rooms of Berlin--the Ballhaus in the Joachimstrasse, the
“Blumensäle,” etc., not to speak of the seats of baser prostitution, as,
for example, Lestmann’s Dancing-Saloon--in order to be aware of this
fact. Here also the principal thing is drinking, and always more
drinking! In Paris, in the dancing-rooms of Montmartre, we can see the
“inviteuses” in full cry; some of the French dancing-rooms, however,
appear more attractive from the æsthetic point of view than the haunts
of Terpsichore in Berlin. A dancing-saloon that was not exclusively
concerned with prostitution was that of Emberg in the Schumannstrasse,
but in the year 1906 this was closed for ever. Now, similar great
ball-rooms exist, properly speaking, only in the suburbs--in Halensee,
Grünau, Nieder-Schönhausen, etc. Here also, however, the dance is not
the principal thing--procurement and prostitution are widely diffused,
as was pointed out fifty years ago by Thomas Bade in his essay, in this
respect most convincing, “Ueber Gelegenheitsmacherei und Öffentliches
Tanzvergnügen”--“Procurement in Relation to Public Ball-Rooms” (Berlin,
1858).
3. =Variety Theatres, Low Music-Halls, and Cabarets.=--The principal
object of these places, so characteristic of our time, is “to kill time”
in as amusing a manner as possible, “amusement” being what the “average
sensual man” of to-day, dull and empty-headed, demands. What he wants is
the satisfaction of his desire for sensations by the appearance of more
or less décolleté singers, dancers, acrobats, male and female, by the
representation of tableaux vivants in which the parts are played by
beautiful women, by the kinematograph, or by pantomime, by spicy songs,
by the performance of clever jugglers, by wrestling and boxing matches
between men and women, by juggling, and all kinds of spectacles, etc. In
short, the most diverse “varieties”--hence the name--of amusement are
offered here, and it is significant that these places of pleasure first
appeared in the great seaports of Liverpool, London, Hamburg, and
Marseilles, where the sailors, after the weary monotony of long sea
voyages, found satisfaction in the variegated display of enjoyment
offered to them in such places. Now the monotony, the emptiness of their
life, drives innumerable crowds of townsmen to the variety theatres,
which, even though as little as the drinking-saloons can they be called
true “places” of prostitution, still serve as localities in which
prostitutes meet their clients; and in this way evening after evening a
large number use them as the field of their activities.
The lowest class of variety theatre, the “_Tingel-Tangel_” (low
music-hall), also euphemistically called “Academy of Music,” is, in
fact, nothing more than a brothel, the only difference being that the
actual sexual intercourse does not take place in the house itself, as so
often occurs in the similar “animierkneipen.” The singers appearing in
these “tingel-tangel” are all low-class prostitutes. In most cases,
whilst one of their number is practising the “art of song” (_sit venia
verbo_), the others, sitting about the hall in shameless décolleté,
display their charms, and incite (“animieren”) the visitors to drink.
Clerks and students form the indulgent audience; in seaport towns the
audience consists generally of sailors. Who is not familiar with the
most celebrated tingel-tangel streets in the world, the Spielbudenplatz
and the Reeperbahn, in St. Pauli, near the docks of Hamburg? In these
streets we see one variety theatre after another, and all are crowded by
a smoking, drinking audience, taking part in the choruses of the songs.
A peculiar kind of these places of pleasure is constituted by the
so-called “=Rummel=,” a speciality of Berlin. Wherever, within or
without the town limits, by the demolition of old houses or in any other
way, a large area remains free from building for a considerable time,
these tingel-tangel proprietors invade the place, erect merry-go-rounds
and cake-stalls, and there develops in the place a manifold activity, in
which the lower classes of the population exclusively share. Here the
very lowest types of prostitute seek their prey, and find it.
4. “=Boarding-Houses=” (“=Pensionate=”) =and Maisons de Passe= (=Houses
of Accommodation=).--Anyone walking through the streets of Berlin will
not fail to notice boards at the doors of certain houses, bearing the
inscription, “Here rooms can be hired by the month, week, or day.” I do
not assert that this announcement =always= represents an invitation to
fornication, or the provision of an opportunity therefor; but in many
cases these announcements serve as indications of the “intercourse”
obtainable in such dwellings. Often several stories, or even the entire
house, is devoted to this purpose. It professes to be a “Private Hotel”
or Furnished Lodgings; but in reality it is a masked brothel, a “house
of accommodation” for prostitutes and their clients, a place in which
the landlord--in most cases the landlord is of the female sex--has for
principal occupation the practice of procurement. Other dwellings,
=without= these sufficiently well-known and suspicious boards attached
to the door-posts, passing under the less striking name of a “pension,”
are adapted rather for the exquisite and artificial enjoyment of the
richer classes, and are employed for sexual orgies of a more extensive
character, for the procurement and seduction of young girls, and for the
assignations of the higher classes of the demi-monde and their
clientèle.
5. “=Massage Institutes.=”--To these distinctly modern establishments,
which mainly subserve the purposes of masochistic prostitution, we shall
return in the chapter on masochism. Many prostitutes have some knowledge
of massage, and masquerade as “masseuses”; their supplementary
profession is ordinary prostitution, and for this reason we are
justified in alluding to them in this section.
6. =The Weibercafés.=--These are found in all the large towns,
especially in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Buda-Pesth, and they
serve as the principal places in which =prostitution is carried on by
day=. Prostitutes sit here in great numbers hour after hour, and wait
for their clients, who, of course, must pay for drinks which are
consumed. Certain cafés in Berlin--as, for example, the “Café National,”
the Café Keck in the Leipziger Strasse, etc.--are typical =nocturnal
cafes=, in which from the onset of darkness until early in the morning
prostitutes await their clients.
Naturally, the above classification does not include all varieties of
modern prostitution, which exhibits many other modes of activity. Most
of these others, however, have some sort of relationship to the
varieties already described, and it is, therefore, unnecessary to deal
with them all at length. Prostitution can, of course, be practised
anywhere; and its allurements are found in all places in which great
numbers of human beings come together.
APPENDIX
THE HALF-WORLD
To prostitution in the wider sense of the term belongs also the
“=half-world=” (“demi-monde”), under which name, first used by the
younger Dumas, we include the various categories of “mistresses,” femmes
soutenues (kept women), lorettes, cocottes, and fast women.
Alexandre Dumas, in the celebrated passage of his play “Demi-Monde” (Act
II., Scene 9), gives by the mouth of Olivier de Jalin the following
definition of the half-world:
“All these women have made a false step in their past; they have a
small black spot upon their name, and they go in company as much as
possible, so that the spot may be less conspicuous. They have the same
origin, the same appearance, the same prejudices as good society; but
they no longer belong to it, and they form that which we call the
half-world (demi-monde), which floats like an island upon the ocean of
Paris, and draws towards itself, assumes, and recognizes, everything
which falls from the firm land, or which wanders out or runs away from
the firm land, without counting the foreign shipwrecked individuals
who come no man knows whence.
“Since the married men, under the protection of the legal code, have
had the right to banish from the bosom of the family a woman who has
forgotten her duty, the morals of married life have undergone a
revolution which has created a new world--for what becomes of all
these expelled, compromised women? The first of them who found herself
shown the door, bewailed her fault, and hid her shame in retirement;
but--the second? She sought the first one out, and as soon as there
were two of them, they called the fault a misfortune, the crime a
mistake, and began to make excuses for one another mutually. Having
become three, they asked one another to dinner; having become
four--they danced a quadrille. Now round these women there grouped
themselves young girls also who had begun their life with a false
step; false widows; women who bore the name of the lovers with whom
they lived; some of those rapid ‘marriages’ which had lasted as
liaisons of many years’ duration; finally, all the women who wished
people to believe that they were something else than they really were,
and did not wish to appear in their true colours. At the present day
this irregular world is in full bloom, and its bastard society is
greatly loved by young men. For here love is less difficult than in
circles above--and not so expensive as in circles below.”
From the last sentence we see that the original idea of the “half-world”
was not so wide as that of the present day; above all, the former notion
did not, as it does at present, include the idea of prostitution. The
ladies of the half-world of Dumas were “not so expensive” as ordinary
prostitutes. Our modern demi-mondaines are characterized by the fact
that their price is high. They are prostitutes for the upper ten
thousand. And yet they have this in common with the other
demi-monde--that they do not, like prostitutes properly speaking, give
themselves indifferently to anyone able to pay the price, but they lay
stress on the social position of their lover for the time being, and
upon his character as a “gentleman.” They can even exhibit something of
the nature of love. The modern half-world can most aptly be compared
with the Greek hetairism. It forms a characteristic constituent of
modern “high life.” Whether this especially manifests itself on the
racecourse, at first nights at the theatre, in great charitable bazaars,
at masked balls, at fashionable seaside resorts, at Monte Carlo, at
floral festivals, and the like, there also we encounter the half-world;
and its members, in respect of beauty, toilet, distinguished appearance,
cultivation, and conversation, are in no way to be distinguished from
the ladies of high society. Certain types of the demi-monde realize, in
fact, the ideal of the Greek hetairæ; but even more than these, the
modern demi-mondaine represents elaborated enjoyment. These women are
thoroughly cultivated, the true law-givers of fashion, the arbiters in
every question of taste. Mondaines and demi-mondaines are in outward
appearance hardly to be distinguished one from the other; at least,
this is the case in Paris, where a witty writer defined the distinction
between them in this way--that the former received their lovers only in
the daytime, the latter also by night.[310] It is only the connoisseur
who is able to detect the “half-world aroma,” that indefinable quality
which gives the demi-mondaine such an exceptional value in the eyes of
the _jeunesse dorée_.
From what circles do the recruits of the half-world come? The ladies of
the theatre, the stars of the variety stage and of the ballet, send
their contingent; the aristocracy is also represented in their ranks;
but many a distinguished lorette or “fille de marbre” is of low origin,
and yet understands admirably how to adapt herself rapidly to all the
demands of high life, to drive her dog-cart as smartly as the most
genuine Countess, and in Longchamps, Karlshorst, Ostend, or Trouville,
to play the part of the fine lady.
The one distinction between them--and it is the distinction of half a
world--is the fact that this fashionable life of the demi-monde is not
provided out of their own means, but out of the pockets of one, or more
often of several, rich galants.
The type of the “grande cocotte” is encountered in its genuine and
unadulterated form only in Paris. Here the demi-mondaine plays a great
part in public life. The time of the earlier mistresses of princes, with
their political intrigues and their far-reaching spheres of influence,
is indeed over--a Lola Montez, an Aurora Königsmark is to-day no longer
possible; and yet the Parisian demi-mondaine maintains influential
relationships with the new great power of our time--the power of the
=press=. The journalists who are in the service of the demi-monde are by
George Dahlen termed the “Press-Fridoline,” because “their pens are
paid, not with ducats, but with more or less enviable hours of love in
distinguished boudoirs”;[311] and Victor Joze also describes the
advertisements--paid for by a night of love, or perhaps only by a
smile--which the writers of Paris give in the newspapers to the
distinguished cocottes of the Quartier Marbœuf or of the Avenue du Bois
de Boulogne, in order to attract the attention of Indian nabobs, Russian
Grand Dukes, or American millionaires, to this or that fashionable
beauty. This is characteristic of Paris. In other great capitals
marketable gallantry does not seek publicity in this way, but pursues a
more hidden course.
For what the German, and especially what the Berliners, term the
“half-world” is very different from the type we have just described of
the true Parisian demi-mondaine. Our half-world (the half-world of
Berlin) is recruited for the most part from intelligent prostitutes, who
are to be found chiefly in the public gardens, in the Zoological
Gardens, in the Lehrter Ausstellungspark, and in the leading
restaurants. Here =every evening= they seek new prey, every evening they
sell their charms to a new lover for a definite sum of money; whereas
the true lady of the half-world never has at any time more than one or
two admirers, who provide for all the expenses of her life, and she
never--at any rate =in public=--practises professional prostitution, as
do the women just described.
Finally, there is yet another type, which must not be confused with the
demi-monde. This is the =international prostitute=, who journeys from
one place to another, has indeed often the appearance of a distinguished
lorette, but leads a much more insecure, unstable life than the true
demi-mondaine, and often combines with prostitution the profession of an
adventuress. Now she is in Paris, now in London, now at Biarritz, now at
Monte Carlo (the principal field of her activity), now in
Constantinople, Smyrna, St. Petersburg, or Berlin. Sometimes she
undertakes a voyage of discovery to the New World. Germany provides a
not insignificant percentage of these international cocottes. Such
wanderers are especially well known in the circles of officers and of
speculators on the Bourse; by these they are not seldom “recommended,”
after the manner in which a traveller is given letters of introduction.
They may even be “raffled for,” as recently happened in an officers’
mess in Munich, and so pass to the share of the fortunate (generally
much to be commiserated) winner. Abroad they prefer to adopt French or
exotic names.
[243] Here, in the phrase “man at length become self-conscious,” we
have the animating idea of this work, as it is of all fruitful efforts
at the amelioration of the human lot. See the admirable development of
this idea in E. Ray Lankester’s Romanes lecture, “Nature and Man”; and
also in H. G. Wells’s later writings, more especially “A Modern
Utopia” and “New Worlds for Old.”--TRANSLATOR.
[244] That this opinion is false, I have proved incontestably as
regards syphilis in my book, “The Origin of Syphilis” (Jena, 1901).
For the European and Asiatic world, syphilis is a specifically modern
disease, not more than 400 years old.
[245] Venice, 1534.
[246] “La Lozana Andaluza” (“The Gentle Andalusian”), by Francesco
Delicado. Traduit pour la première fois, texte Espagnol en regard par
Alcide Bonneau, 2 vols., Paris, 1888. Regarding this work, see my book
“The Origin of Syphilis,” vol. i., pp. 36-43.
[247] _Cf._ also the interesting work of Salvatore di Giacomo,
“Prostitution in Naples in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth
Centuries, based on Unpublished Documents,” revised in accordance with
the German translation, and provided with an introduction by Dr. Iwan
Bloch (Dresden, 1904).
[248] Reprinted in his “Satyræ Medicæ XX.,” pp. 528-549 (Leipzig,
1722).
[249] _Cf._ my work on “Rétif de la Bretonne,” p. 504 _et seq._
(Berlin, 1906).
[250] The contents of this work are enumerated in my above-mentioned
book, pp. 505-512.
[251] A. J. B. Parent-Duchatelet, “De la Prostitution dans la Ville de
Paris,” third edition, 1857 (Paris, 1836).
[252] F. F. A. Béraud, “Les Filles Publiques de Paris” (Brussels,
1839, 2 vols.).
[253] Dr. Michael Ryan was an acquaintance of Arthur Schopenhauer, who
in June, 1829, sent Ryan a copy of his book “Theoria Colorum.” _Cf._
Eduard Grisebach, “Schopenhauer: the History of His Life,” p. 168
(Berlin, 1897).
[254] M. Ryan, “Prostitution in London, with a Comparative View of
that of Paris and New York” (London, 1839).
[255] _Cf._ in this connexion also the report from other sources given
in my “Sexual Life in England,” vol. iii., pp. 315-319, 440-447
(Berlin, 1903).
[256] W. Tait, “Magdalenism: An Inquiry into the Extent, Causes, and
Consequences of Prostitution in Edinburgh,” second edition (Edinburgh,
1842).
[257] R. Wardlaw, “Lectures on Female Prostitution; its Nature,
Extent, Effects, Guilt, Causes, and Remedy,” third edition (Glasgow,
1843).
[258] F. I. dos Santos Cruz, “Da Prostituiçao na Cidade de Lisboa”
(Lisbon, 1841).
[259] “Estabelecimentos de Beneficencia para as Consultas Gratuitas,”
pp. 203-206.
[260] A. Potton, “De la Prostitution et de ses Conséquences dans les
Grandes Villes, dans la Ville de Lyon en Particulier” (Paris and
Lyons, 1842).
[261] E. A. Duchesne, “De la Prostitution dans la Ville d’Alger depuis
la Conquête” (Paris, 1853).
[262] “Die Prostitution in Berlin und ihre Opfer” (Berlin, 1846).
[263] C. Röhrmann, “Der sittliche Zustand von Berlin nach Aufhebung
der geduldeten Prostitution des weiblichen Geschlechts”--“The Moral
Condition of Berlin after the Abolition of Tolerated Prostitution of
the Female Sex” (Leipzig, 1846).
[264] F. J. Behrend, “Prostitution in Berlin, and the Measures it is
Desirable to Adopt against Prostitution and against Syphilis,” etc. A
work based on official sources, and dedicated to His Excellency the
Minister von Ladenberg (Erlangen, 1850).
[265] H. Lippert, “Prostitution in Hamburg” (Hamburg, 1848).
[266] A. J. Gross-Hoffinger, “The Fate of Women and Prostitution, in
Relation to the Principle of the Indissolubility of Catholic Marriage,
and especially in Relation to the Laws of Austria and the Philosophy
of our Time” (Leipzig, 1847).
[267] Josef Schrank, “Prostitution in Vienna in Historical,
Administrative, and Hygienic Relations” (Vienna, 1886, 2 vols).
[268] “The Moral Corruption of Our Time and its Victims in their
Relationship to the State, to the family, and to Morality, with
especial Reference to the Conditions of Prostitution in Leipzig”
(Leipzig, 1854).
[269] W. M. Sanger, “The History of Prostitution” (New York, 1859).
[270] J. Jeannel, “Prostitution in Large Towns in the Nineteenth
Century, and the Abolition of Venereal Diseases.”
[271] W. Acton, “Prostitution in its Various Aspects,” second edition
(London. 1874).
[272] Hügel, “The History, Statistics, and Regulation of Prostitution”
(Vienna. 1865).
[273] L. Martineau, “La Prostitution Clandestine” (Paris, 1885).
[274] O. Commenge, “La Prostitution Clandestine à Paris” (Paris,
1897).
[275] V. Augagneur, “La Prostitution des Filles Mineures” (Paris,
1888).
[276] L. Fiaux, “La Police des Mœurs en France et dans les Principales
Villes de l’Europe” (Paris, 1888); “Les Maisons de Tolérance, leur
Fermeture,” 3me édition (Paris, 1862); “La Prostitution ‘Cloitrée’”
(Brussels, 1902).
[277] Yves Guyot, “La Prostitution: Étude de Physiologie Sociale”
(Paris, 1882).
[278] A. Blaschko, “The Problem of Prostitution,” published in the
_Berliner Klin. Wochenschrift_, pp. 430-435 (1892); “Syphilis and
Prostitution from the Hygienic Standpoint” (Berlin, 1893); “Hygiene of
Prostitution and of Venereal Diseases” (Jena, 1900); “Prostitution in
the Nineteenth Century” (Berlin, 1902); “The Dangers to Health
resulting from Prostitution, and the Contest with these Dangers”
(Berlin, 1904).
[279] C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero, “Woman as Criminal and Prostitute.”
[280] B. Tarnowsky, “Prostitution and Abolitionism” (Hamburg, 1890).
[281] C. Ströhmberg, “Prostitution: a Socio-Medical Study” (Stuttgart,
1899).
[282] E. Dühren (Iwan Bloch), “The Sexual Life in England,” vol. i.,
pp. 201-445 (Charlottenburg, 1901).
[283] E. von Düring, “Prostitution and Venereal Diseases” (Leipzig,
1905).
[284] Goethe, in the poem “Der Gott und die Bajadere,” has very
beautifully described the ennoblement of gross love by means of ideal
love.
[285] Henry Murger, in his “Vie de Bohème,” also alludes to the
“incomprehensible” fact that “persons of standing who sometimes
possess spirit, a name, and a coat cut according to the fashion, out
of their love for the common will go so far as to raise to the level
of an object of fashion a creature whom their very servant would not
have chosen as a mistress.”
[286] C. Lombroso, “Woman as Criminal and Prostitute,” p. 550.
[287] Friedrich Hammer, “The Regulation of Prostitution,” published in
_The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, vol. iii., No.
10, p. 380 (Leipzig, 1905).
[288] H. Kurella, “A Contribution to the Biological Comprehension of
Physical and Psychical Bisexuality,” published in the _Zentralblatt
für Nervenheilkunde_, 1896, vol. xix., p. 239.
[289] Syphilis is not to be forgotten.
[290] This modified Lombrosism is advocated by B. A. H. Hübner in his
interesting work concerning prostitutes and their legal relations
(_Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie_, 1907, pp. 1-11). He found
that among sixty-four insane prostitutes, under observation in the
Hertzberg Asylum in Berlin, not less than 59·45 % were already
intellectually defective at the time they had come under police
control as prostitutes.
[291] C. Lombroso, “Recent Advances in the Study of Criminals.”
[292] Schrank observes (“Prostitution in Vienna,” vol. ii., p. 216)
that striking physical peculiarities do not appear to be either more
or less frequent among prostitutes than they are among the generality
of the population.
[293] G. Keben, “Prostitution in its Relation to Modern Realistic
Literature” (Zurich, 1892).
[294] Oda Olberg, “Poverty in the Domestic Industry of Making
Ready-made Clothing” (Leipzig, 1896).
[295] Anna Pappritz, “The Economic Causes of Prostitution” (Berlin,
1903).
[296] Pfeiffer, “Poverty and Overcrowding in Great Towns and in
Relation to Prostitution and to Venereal Diseases,” published in _The
Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1903, vol. i., pp.
135-144.
[297] P. Kampffmeyer, “Poverty and Overcrowding in Great Towns,” etc.,
published in _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_,
1903, vol. i., pp. 145-160; “Bad Housing Accommodation in Relation to
Prostitution and ‘Night-Lodgers’; the Necessary Legal Reforms,” _op.
cit._, 1905, vol. iii., pp. 165-229.
[298] E. v. Düring, “Prostitution and Venereal Diseases.” p. 11.
[299] _Cf._ the description of the astonishing development of the
French procurement of that day which is given in my “New Researches
concerning the Marquis de Sade,” pp. 88-98 (Berlin, 1904). The Marquis
de Sade, in his novel “The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom,” has
very fully described the traffic in girls of his time. Incredible
revelations of this traffic, of the almost absolute power of the
procuresses, and of their relations to the police, led in October,
1906, to an action against the procuress Regine Riehl, who, under the
mask of a dressmaker’s shop, had for years conducted a brothel, in
which the girls were entirely robbed of their freedom, were subjected
to corporal punishment, and never received payment for their “work.”
_Cf._ A. Blaschko, _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases_, 1906, vol. v., pp. 427-433; also Karl Kraus, “The Riehl
Trial” (Vienna, 1906).
[300] The literature of the “White Slave Trade” is extensive. I shall
mention a few works only: Alfred S. Dyer, “The Trade in English Girls”
(Berlin, 1881); the celebrated work of Alexis Splingard, “Clarissa,
from the Dark Houses of Belgium,” with an introduction by Otto Henne
am Rhyn, fourth edition (Leipzig, 1897); Otto Henne am Rhyn,
“Prostitution and the Traffic in Girls” (Leipzig, 1903); Julius
Kemény, “Hungara--Hungarian Girls in the Market: Revelations regarding
the International Traffic in Girls” (Buda-Pesth, 1903). _Cf._ also the
extensive references in _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases_, 1904, vol. ii., pp. 207-212 (Report of the Jewish
Commission for the Suppression of the Traffic in Girls). Regarding the
traffic in girls in Holland, _cf._ J. Rutgers, “Sketches from
Holland,” _ibid._, 1906, vol. v., pp. 531-355.
[301] _Cf._ regarding the conditions in South America, the report of
Major D. Wagner, Secretary of the German National Committee for the
Suppression of the Traffic in Girls, published in _The Journal for the
Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1900, vol. v., pp. 378-382.
[302] Léo Taxil, “La Corruption Fin-de-Siècle,” p. 169 _et seq._
(Paris, 1894).
[303] Louis Fiaux, “Les Maisons de Tolérance: leur Fermeture,”
troisième édition, pp. 169 _et seq._, 248, 250, 251 (Paris, 1892).
[304] According to recent statistical data, from 80 to 90 % of
barmaids (in Germany) are infected with venereal diseases, so that
they perhaps represent the most dangerous class of prostitutes.
[305, 306] “=Animierkneipen.=”--_Kneipe_ signifies a drinking-saloon
or pothouse, equivalent to the French _cabaret_. The _Animierkneipe_
is a beer-saloon at which the attendants are women (_Kellnerinnen_),
who are engaged on the terms described in the text, and whose
function, therefore, is to attract the male customers of the place, to
incite them (_animieren_) to drink freely, and to play the part of
prostitutes when required. Thus they correspond to _les inviteuses_ of
the similar drinking-saloons in Paris.--TRANSLATOR.
[307] H. Seyffert, “Die Animierkneipen und ihre Geheimnisse”
(“Animierkneipen and their Secrets”), published in _Freie Meinung_,
1906, Nos. 26 and 27. See also “Impropriety at Inns with Female
Attendants in Prussia, with especial Reference to the Conditions in
Cologne” (1891).
[308] O. Rosenthal, “Alcoholism and Prostitution,” p. 46 (1905).
[309] _Cf._ the elaborate descriptions by Hans Ostwald, “Berliner
Tanzlokale” (Berlin and Leipzig); regarding the earlier dancing-rooms
of London, see my “Sexual Life in England,” vol. i., pp. 324-334.
[310] Victor Joze, “Paris-Gomorrhe. Mœurs du Jour,” p. 173 (Paris,
1898).
[311] Georg Dahlen, “Sketches of European Society,” p. 126 (Berlin,
1885).
CHAPTER XIV
VENEREAL DISEASES
“_In co-operation with alcoholic intoxication and with tuberculosis,
syphilis plays in our day the part which in the middle ages was played
by bubonic plague._”--ALFRED FOURNIER.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XIV
Prostitution the focus, not the cause, of venereal diseases --
Philosophy of venereal diseases -- Their age -- Time and place of
their first appearance -- The origin of syphilis -- Practical
importance of the proof of the recent character of syphilis -- The
theologico-animistic theory of venereal diseases -- Refutation of this
theory -- Blameless infection (_syphilis innocentium_) -- The notion
of specific infective disease -- Scientific campaign against venereal
diseases -- Syphilis as a specific disease of modern times --
Description of its symptoms, its course, and its termination --
Consequences of syphilis to the family, to the offspring, and to the
race -- Congenital syphilis of the first and second generations --
Racial degeneration in consequence of syphilis -- The age at which
infection with syphilis occurs in man and in woman -- The soft chancre
(chancroid) -- Gonorrhœa -- Change in our views regarding the dangers
of gonorrhœa -- Urethral gonorrhœa in the male -- Acute and chronic
stages -- Complications -- Gonorrhœa in women -- The “diseases of
women” -- Blindness due to gonorrhœa.
_Appendix_: Venereal Diseases in the Homosexual.
CHAPTER XIV
The central problem of the sexual question is, as I pointed out at the
commencement of the previous chapter, the suppression of prostitution
and of =venereal diseases=, the former evil being the principal focus of
the latter. I say the principal “=focus=,” not the “cause.” For, if all
prostitutes were =healthy=, we could leave prostitution quietly
alone--leaving out of consideration the moral depravity to which it
gives rise--and venereal diseases would spontaneously disappear.
This opinion I advance at the beginning of the chapter on venereal
diseases because, even at the present day, there is a remarkable species
of =philosophy, or rather theology, of venereal diseases=, which
propounds the most extraordinary hypothesis regarding their =origin=.
For example, the Alsatian writer Alexander Weill, in his confused work
“The Laws and Mysteries of Love,” writes:
“Why should we bother our heads about the cure of syphilis? If anyone
wishes to get rid of any evil, he must first of all ascertain its
causes in order to remove these. If the cause of it is removed, the
evil disappears spontaneously. If the snake has been killed, its
poison no longer does any harm. But how can we put an end to the
causes of syphilis, when this disease is spontaneously renewed and
increased day by day by means of neglected prostitution, and by our
social laws which combine to oppose the monogamy of youth and the
increase of population? If to-day we could cure all patients suffering
from syphilis, =to-morrow the same disease would return in a new form,
for it would be recreated by the same irregularities that first led to
its production= (!) It is absolutely useless to employ iodide of
potassium and mercury, for every new infringement of natural laws
would again bring into being new incurable diseases, which can only be
avoided by those who have firmly resolved to observe these laws
strictly.”
Weill, indeed, goes so far as to maintain that every man who
=simultaneously, or rather in brief succession, has intercourse with two
healthy women, acquires syphilis=, even although both these women remain
faithful to him, because “=any kind of libertinism in sexual intercourse
suffices by itself to give rise to this disease=!”
According to this view, which is shared by many members of the laity,
venereal diseases, and, above all, the worst of them, syphilis, would be
as old as sexual licentiousness itself--that is, =as old as the human
race, and an inalienable associate of that race=.
In my book on “The Origin of Syphilis” I have disproved this view. I
have answered the question, so important alike on general philosophical
and on social-hygienic grounds, regarding the true nature of syphilis,
and have proved that syphilis (and also the other venereal diseases) had
a definite =local= and =temporal= origin; that syphilis has not existed
since the beginning of time; and that some day, when certain definite
conditions are fulfilled, the disease will disappear.
The history of syphilis is a matter of profound =practical= importance.
From that history we learn with certainty that the most dangerous and
most dreaded of the venereal diseases has, for the European world, and
for the “old world” in general, the character of a =pure chance comer=;
and we learn that =retrospectively=--regarded from the point of view of
our present experience--at the time when the disease first began to
flourish, it might perhaps have been nipped in the bud.
It is hardly possible to overestimate the =practical= importance of the
recognition of this fact--that for the old civilized world syphilis
represents a historical phenomenon, that it has a history, a beginning,
or, as Voltaire half-ironically remarks, a genealogy.
Is there not a deliverance, a redemption, in the idea that for the old
world there was a time in which syphilis did not exist; that this time,
in comparison with the time which has elapsed since syphilis first
appeared, was almost infinitely long; and that for this reason, when we
look out into the future, the history of the lues venerea assumes the
character of a simple episode in the history of European civilized
humanity?
At the same time, the definite acceptance of this view would be an
urgent warning to all those obscurantists of both sexes who imagine that
the problem of the diffusion of venereal diseases can be solved
exclusively by religious and moral considerations, and who thus confuse
the simplest and clearest relationships, place everything upon an
insecure foundation, and exclude every possibility of a successful
campaign against syphilis.
Even to-day it unfortunately happens that many continue, as of old, to
believe that sexual intercourse is a sin for which a punishment has been
provided, and that this punishment is a venereal disease--for example,
syphilis. Tylor, the celebrated English anthropologist, has proved that
this idea has developed out of the =animism= extending back into
prehistoric times, which regarded all illnesses as the work of demons.
We are still influenced by this doctrine, this gloomy, demoniacal
conception in respect of everything sexual. I need hardly remind the
reader of the ideas of Tolstoi, and of his disciple, the unhappy Dr.
Weininger, a disciple exceeding even his master in respect of fanatical
condemnation of sexual intercourse. Until recently the laws regulating
our German system of workmen’s insurance against illness continued to
exhibit definite traces of our legislators’ adhesion to this view. The
majority of physicians and historians who said that syphilis was as old
as sexual intercourse itself, who employed the phrase _ubi Venus ibi
syphilis_, were unconsciously influenced by this idea, that venereal
diseases are to be regarded as a mark of the Divine wrath.
This theological theory, as we may call it, of the origin of syphilis is
opposed by certain incontrovertible facts, which suffice to show its
utter nullity and untenability.
The mere fact that there exists a =blameless= infection with syphilis
(_syphilis innocentium_), that, for example, in certain districts of
Russia as many as 90 % of the cases of this disease are acquired =quite
independently= of sexual intercourse, by simple contact, shows the
absurdity of this superstitious idea.
In the second place, it is a widely known fact that quite frequently
persons who are still entirely uncontaminated, blameless initiates,
become infected with syphilis on the very first occasion in which they
have sexual intercourse, whilst greater experience and more exact
knowledge of the threatening dangers induce notorious debauchees to
adopt effective measures of protection (which, however, would be useless
if syphilis were really a divinely decreed punishment for licentiousness
of this kind!).
In the third place, the occurrence of syphilis =in little
children=--partly owing to inheritance, partly, however, acquired in the
way already mentioned by casual contact--affords a striking refutation
of the above idea, which, unfortunately, still dominates and fascinates
a large circle of people.
We could adduce further arguments against this view, but what we have
said should suffice to show clearly the untenability of such a
superstition. The syphilis of one individual is not the consequence of
sexual intercourse, but the consequence of another case of syphilis in
another individual--that is to say, syphilis is a =specific infective
disease=, transmissible only by means of its peculiar specific virus,
and this transmission can be effected =without any sexual intercourse=,
by means of contacts of other kinds. =Syphilis arises only from
syphilis.=
We have, therefore, to attack =this= disease precisely in the same
manner as the other venereal diseases. As a Portuguese physician has
most aptly remarked, to the tyranny of syphilis we must oppose the
tyranny of human reason. The principal aim of a campaign against
venereal diseases will be the =organization= of the means offered to us
by reason and experience to cope with the disease. The knowledge of
these means must be diffused in ever-wider circles of humanity, and care
must be taken that every individual is fully and clearly informed
regarding the importance and the dangers of syphilis and the other
venereal diseases.
Here also history is our teacher, our lamp of truth, and promises us
complete success as the result of our campaign against venereal
diseases.
The results of my investigations regarding the origin of syphilis all
point to a =single= extremely important fact--namely, that in the case
of syphilis, and as regards the “old world,” we have to do with a
=specific disease of modern times=, which made its first appearance =at
the end of the fifteenth century=, and of the previous existence of
which, even in the most distant prehistoric times, not the minutest
trace remains. This view was held by very eminent physicians, even
before the publication of my own critical work, based upon entirely new
sources of study. Among these authorities I may mention Jean Astruc and
Christoph Girtanner, in the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth
century, the Spanish army surgeon Montejo, and of German physicians,
above all, Rudolf Virchow, A. Geigel, von Liebermeister, C. Binz, and P.
G. Unna. The great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer held the same
view.[312]
Ricord, the celebrated French syphilologist, spoke once of a romance of
syphilis which still remained to be written. I should rather compare it
with a =drama=, the separate acts of which are =centuries=. Of this
drama, =four= acts have already been played. At the present moment we
find ourselves at the =beginning= of the =fifth= act. Thus, we have an
=entire= century before us, in which, with all the powers placed at our
disposal by scientific medical research, by practical therapeutics, and
by hygiene in association with social measures, we must work to this
end, that this fifth act shall also be the =last=, as it is in the case
of a proper drama.
The history of syphilis has remained so long obscure, because, until the
time of Philipp Ricord--=that is to say, until the beginning of the
second half of the nineteenth century=--the three venereal diseases,
=syphilis=, or =lues=, the so-called =soft chancre= (=venereal ulcer or
chancroid=), and =gonorrhœa=, were regarded as essentially one disease;
whereas we know to-day that syphilis is a specific infective disease of
a =constitutional= character, which permeates the whole body, and must
be absolutely distinguished from the other venereal diseases, these
latter being purely =local= in character. This earlier belief in the
identity of all venereal infections, an error held even by so great an
authority as John Hunter, who was misled by falsely interpreted
experiments, renders it necessary that the historical side of the
question should be considered also from this point of view.
If gonorrhœa and chancroid were of a syphilitic nature, then certainly
syphilis must have existed from very early times. It would not be
difficult to refer to syphilis some descriptions and accounts of
diseases of the genital organs given by the ancient and medieval
writers. It was the progressive enlightenment regarding the essential
differences between the three venereal diseases which first proved the
untenability of such opinions; we were further assisted by the knowledge
of =pseudo-venereal= and =pseudo-syphilitic= diseases which we have
obtained from modern dermatology. Moreover, in the old world syphilitic
bones belonging to ancient or medieval times have =never= been
discovered.[313] The first syphilitic bones date from =after the time of
the discovery of America=. They appear, above all, =after the outbreak
of the great epidemic of syphilis which followed the Italian campaign of
King Charles VIII. of France, in the years 1494 and 1495=; it was then
that syphilis first became diffused in the old world.
In my work on “The Origin of Syphilis” (Jena, 1901),[314] I have adduced
proof, basing my views upon the criticism of older opinions, and
assisted by the utilization of very abundant new sources of material,
that syphilis was first introduced into Spain in the years 1493 and 1494
by the crew of Columbus, who brought it from Central America, and more
especially from the island of =Hayti=; from Spain it was carried by the
army of Charles VIII. to Italy, where it assumed an epidemic form; and
after the army was disbanded the disease was transported by the soldiers
to the other countries of Europe, and also was soon taken by the
Portuguese to the Far East, to India, China, and Japan. At the time of
its first appearance in the old world, syphilis was extraordinarily
=virulent=. All the morbid phenomena produced by the disease had a more
rapid and violent course than at the present day; the mortality was much
higher; the consequences, even when a cure was effected, were much more
severe. This virulence of syphilis at the time of its first introduction
can only be explained, in accordance with our modern views of the nature
and mode of appearances of the disease, by the fact that the nations of
the old world (who, _nota bene_, were =all= attacked with equal
intensity) had, until that time, been =completely free= from syphilis.
=All classes= of the people and =all nations= were visited by syphilis
to an equal extent and with the same violence.
Even to-day we observe everywhere, when syphilis is introduced into
regions which have hitherto been =free= from the disease, that it has
the same acute course, the same violence of morbid manifestations, that
characterized its first appearance in Europe. In the four centuries that
have elapsed since its introduction into Europe there has occurred a
gradual =mitigation= of the syphilitic virus, or rather a certain degree
of immunization of European humanity against the disease. Speaking
generally, syphilis has to-day--in comparison with that earlier time--a
relatively mild course. To this point we shall return later.[315]
The two other venereal diseases, =gonorrhœa= and =chancroid=,
unquestionably existed in Europe in the days of antiquity. But they also
are =specific infective diseases=, and are only produced by the virus
peculiar to each, just as syphilis has its own peculiar virus.
Ricord (1800-1889), in the years 1830 to 1850, proved the complete
=diversity= of syphilis and gonorrhœa, established the doctrine of the
three stages of syphilis--primary, secondary, and tertiary--and,
finally, taught us to distinguish the =soft, non-syphilitic chancre=
(=chancroid=) from the =hard, syphilitic chancre=. Virchow, in his
celebrated essay on “The Nature of Constitutional Syphilitic Affections”
(_Virchow’s Archiv_, 1858, vol. xv., p. 217 _et seq._), then threw a
clear light on the peculiar course of constitutional syphilis and on the
causes of the occasional disappearance and sudden reappearance of the
morbid phenomena. Hitherto, however, our knowledge of venereal diseases
had rested on an extremely insecure foundation; and =the truly
scientific study of the subject= may be said to have begun in the year
1879, with Albert Neisser’s epoch-making discovery of the =gonococcus=
as the specific exciting cause of gonorrhœa. In the years 1889 to 1892
there followed the discovery of the =bacillus of chancroid= by Ducrey
and Unna, by means of which discovery the complete distinction between
the soft and the hard chancre was definitely proved; and, finally, the
three years 1903 to 1906 were characterized by =remarkable discoveries=,
the full importance of which is not as yet fully realized, =regarding
the nature of the syphilitic virus=. In the year 1903 Eli Metchnikoff
succeeded in transmitting syphilis from human beings to =apes=, and thus
laid the foundation for progressive research regarding syphilis by means
of experiments on animals; this was carried further by Lassar, by the
inoculation of the syphilitic virus from one ape to another, and also by
A. Neisser in his experimental researches in Java;[316] and in March,
1905, the Berlin protozoologist Fritz Schaudinn, since prematurely lost
to the world of science, published his first studies on the probable
exciting cause of syphilis, the so-called “=spirochæte pallida=.”
Numerous subsequent investigations have established the connexion
between this spirilla-form, belonging to the order of protozoa, and
syphilitic disease. In this way we have been brought notably nearer to
the discovery of the certain cure of syphilis and to the discovery of
means of immunization against the disease. In this direction quite new
views are opening before our eyes.[317] Numerous ideas suggested by
recent discoveries in the province of syphilitic research are described
in the admirable essay by J. Jadassohn, “Contributions to Syphilology,”
published in the German “Archives for Dermatology and Syphilis,” 1907.
_Cf._ also the account of the recent doctrines regarding syphilis by P.
G. Unna and Iwan Bloch, “Die Praxis der Hautkrankheiten,” pp. 548-592
(Vienna and Berlin, 1908).
When some day humanity has been freed from the “=sexual plague=,” from
the hydra of venereal diseases, and when a monument is erected to the
liberators, four names will there be commemorated: Ricord, Neisser,
Metchnikoff, and Schaudinn!
After these preliminary remarks on the nature of venereal diseases, I
proceed to a short description of them, and I begin with the most
dangerous of all the venereal diseases, =syphilis=.[318]
The first manifestations of syphilis make their appearance about three
or four weeks =after= infection, at the place at which infection has
occurred, and this is not in every case the genital organs. It is true
that syphilis is most commonly transmitted by means of sexual
intercourse, but frequently also by contacts of other kinds--for
example, by =kissing=; by gynecological or surgical examinations and
operations; by =drinking from a glass= which has previously been used by
some one suffering from syphilis; by the use of uncleansed
pocket-handkerchiefs, towels, and bedding, which have been used by a
syphilitic patient; by the use of tobacco-pipes, wind-instruments,
tooth-brushes, tooth-picks, a glass-blower’s mouthpiece, etc., belonging
to strangers; =by an uncleansed razor=; by the nasty habit of licking
the point of a pencil; by moistening postage-stamps with the tongue; by
sucking the wound in circumcision; =by the suckling of the infant at the
breast of a syphilitic wet-nurse=, etc.[319] In England the custom, when
taking a judicial oath, of kissing the Bible has repeatedly sufficed to
transmit syphilitic infection.
In certain districts in which the level of civilization is a low
one--as, for example, in some parts of Russia and of Turkey--as many as
50 to 60 % of all infections occur independently of sexual intercourse.
All the =discharges= from syphilitic lesions in all three stages of the
disease are infective. The infective character of the tertiary stage of
syphilis was formerly doubted, but has recently been proved beyond
dispute. =Blood= also, although more rarely, can prove infective. On the
other hand, the =pure= secretions--that is, the physiological
secretions, not contaminated by morbid products--such as the saliva,
tears, and milk, are not infective. Syphilis is, however, very
frequently transmitted by means of the =semen=.
Infection occurs in places in which there is a solution of continuity of
the skin or mucous membrane, such as a scratch or a superficial wound,
through which the virus can enter. In this way an apparently healthy
syphilitic patient--when, for example, he gets a small abrasion on the
penis (or, in the case of a woman, in the vagina)--can transmit syphilis
if the other individual also has a similar abrasion through which
infection can occur.
As we have said, it is not till the lapse of two to four weeks after
infection has occurred that the first manifestations of syphilis appear,
in the form of a small vesicle or nodule in the infected area; less
often merely an abraded area of a peculiar red colour. Gradually this
nodule or area enlarges, and becomes continually =harder= at the base,
whilst the surface often undergoes ulceration, and secretes extremely
infective pus (the so-called “=hard chancre=” or “=primary
lesion=”[320]).
This induration is in most cases a certain sign that the syphilitic
virus has already entered the body; at least, it has only been possible
in a few very rare cases, by excision or cauterization of the hard
chancre, to prevent syphilis from entering the blood. Almost always,
notwithstanding such endeavours, the manifestations of general infection
of the body soon appear.
From the place of infection--that is, from the place at which the hard
chancre forms--the syphilitic virus next passes by way of the
lymph-stream into the inguinal glands, so that these, in the third or
fourth week after the appearance of the hard chancre, begin to swell and
to become hard. This swelling of the inguinal glands is painless (the
so-called “=indolent bubo=”), in contrast to the painful swelling which
accompanies the soft chancre. From this region the poison now proceeds
by way of the bloodvessels and lymph paths on its wanderings all over
the body, the individual stages of which can be detected by swellings of
the lymph-glands of the axilla, the elbow, the neck, etc. Sometimes
other symptoms of general infection are noticeable; above all, the
appearance of =fever= (never earlier than forty days after infection),
=pains= in the muscles, joints, nerves, also severe headaches, a general
feeling of =lassitude=, =pallor=, and a falling-off in the nutritive
condition.
These are the forerunners of the so-called =secondary= stage of
syphilis, which now manifests itself by the appearance of a multiform
=skin eruption=, rendering the diagnosis of syphilis absolutely
certain. For this reason, in doubtful cases of ulceration of the genital
organs the patient should inspect his skin very carefully every day for
several weeks or months, and keep watch for the appearance of red spots
or nodules. This syphilitic eruption on the skin is also in the later
periods one of the most certain and most characteristic insignia of the
disease.
The eruption commonly appears first on the trunk, in the form of
rose-coloured spots (the so-called “=roseola syphilitica=”), spreads
thence over the whole body, and in many cases, simultaneously with or
shortly after the spotted eruption, =nodules= appear on the skin, and
marked thickenings form on the mucous membranes, especially at the anus,
in the mouth, and on the tongue (the so-called “=plaques muqueuses=,” or
“=condylomata=”). The patient’s attention is spontaneously directed to
these lesions by painful sensations in the mouth or by itching of the
anus. Often it is these painful sensations, associated with a violent
inflammation of the tonsils and pharynx (the so-called “=angina
syphilitica=”), which first lead the patient to consult a doctor, after
all the earlier symptoms have passed by unnoticed! As characteristic
forms of the secondary syphilitic changes in the skin must, therefore,
be mentioned the so-called “=corona Veneris=,” by which distinguished
name is denoted an eruption on the forehead, especially along the margin
of the hair, which by members of the laity is easily confused with other
affections of the skin common in this locality; the so-called “=collier
de Venus=,” or =leukoderma syphiliticum=, a peculiar pigmentation of the
skin on the throat and the back of the neck in the form of =brown=
patches with =white= intervening areas. This symptom, =which occurs
almost exclusively= in women, is an absolutely certain sign of syphilis.
Equally characteristic is the so-called “=syphilitic psoriasis=,” the
appearance of peculiar patches and thickenings on the palms of the hands
and the soles of the feet; characteristic also is the syphilitic =loss
of hair=, by its sudden onset and by the patchy way in which it occurs.
Not rarely do we see =purulent= eruptions on the skin in this secondary
stage of syphilis.
The syphilitic eruption of the skin is only an external manifestation of
a disease affecting the entire body, for the internal organs also
suffer. The affection of the liver manifests itself by jaundice; that of
the brain and the meninges by headaches and by =weakness of memory=,
which is often well marked at this stage; that of the spleen by
swelling; that of the kidneys by the appearance of albumin in the urine;
that of the bones by very painful inflammatory swellings; that of the
eyes specially by the well-known =syphilitic iritis= (60 % of all
inflammations of the iris are syphilitic in nature!).
If the disease remains untreated, the appearances just described become
more general and continually more severe; and after some time, quite new
morbid symptoms are superadded (often as early as the third year, on the
average five to ten years after infection, but also later), resulting
from the transformation of the syphilitic morbid process into the
=tertiary= stage. To these new manifestations belong the appearance of
large =nodules= in the skin and other organs, which sooner or later
undergo ulceration, the so-called “=syphilitic gummata=”; their
ulcerative destruction may entail the greatest disfigurement or danger
to life--for example, perforation of the hard palate; sinking of the
bridge of the nose (the syphilitic “=saddle-nose=”); ulcerative
destruction of large portions of the bones of the skull, of the
intestine, of the liver, the lungs, the testicles, the bloodvessels
(especially dangerous are gummous diseases of the bloodvessels of the
brain), the brain, and the spinal cord. =Apoplectic strokes= occurring
in comparatively young persons and =nervous paralysis= of the most
various kinds, as well as sudden =deafness= and =blindness=, are in most
cases referable to syphilitic disease. Many chronic diseases of the
liver, kidneys, and nervous system, are consequences of previous
syphilis; also =calcification of the arteries=, the very dangerous
dilatation of the great bloodvessels, especially of the aorta (aneurism
of the aorta), are very often of syphilitic origin.
By the researches of Alfred Fournier and Wilhelm Erb, we know to-day
that two severe diseases of the central nervous system--=tabes dorsalis=
or =locomotor ataxy=, and =general paralysis of the insane= (=paralytic
dementia=)--are almost always (in about 95 % of the cases) referable to
earlier syphilis. Among 5,749 cases of syphilis encountered in his own
private practice, Fournier observed no less than 758 cases of brain
syphilis, 631 cases of tabes, and 83 cases of softening of the brain.
Tabes and general paralysis of the insane are all the more dangerous
because they are no longer, properly speaking, “syphilitic” diseases,
and therefore they cannot be cured by antisyphilitic treatment; they are
severe degenerative changes of the central nervous system, which has
been, as it were, prepared for their occurrence by the previous
syphilis. These belong to the class of the so-called “=parasyphilitic=”
diseases in which antisyphilitic treatment has little or no good effect.
Even more tragic are the consequences of syphilis to the =family=, the
=offspring=, and the =race=. =Syphilis in married life=, =congenital
syphilis=, and the =degeneration of the race by syphilis=--these are the
tragic manifestations which come under consideration in this connexion.
In his admirable work on “Syphilis and Marriage,” Alfred Fournier, the
greatest living authority on syphilis in all its manifestations and
relationships, has described the momentous influence exercised by
syphilis in conjugal life; and in his recently published work, “Syphilis
a Social Danger,” he has dealt also with congenital syphilis and racial
degeneration. He found that, on the average, among 100 women suffering
from syphilis, 20 had been infected by their husbands, either at the
very commencement of married life, or in its later course, or finally
through the offspring after conception. Divorce on the ground of
syphilitic infection by the husband is at the present day of frequent
occurrence.
The transmission of syphilis to the child by =inheritance= may be
effected either by the father or the mother; when both the father and
the mother are syphilitic, it occurs with absolute certainty. The
various possibilities of transmission, and the contingent immunity of
mother or child, as they are expressed in Colles’s law (Baumès’s law),
and in Profeta’s law, cannot here be further dealt with. If the mother
has herself been infected with syphilis, or if she was previously
syphilitic, either the child is not carried until term, abortion or
miscarriage ensuing, or, finally, it is born with symptoms of congenital
syphilis.[321]
The frequent occurrence of premature births and still-births in any
family suggests strong suspicions that they are due to syphilis. The
=general mortality= of the children in a family is regarded by Fournier
as an important sign to the physician of congenital syphilis. Syphilitic
infection of the father gives rise to a mortality in the children of
28 %; syphilis in the mother causes a mortality in the children of 60 %;
when the disease affects both parents, the mortality among the children
amounts to 68 %. Absolutely astounding is the mortality of the children
of syphilitic prostitutes; it amounts to from 84 to 86 %.
Children born =alive=, suffering from congenital syphilis, are generally
weakly,[322] of deficient body-weight; have often a flaccid, wrinkled
skin, covered with typical syphilitic eruptions, and frequently with
great purulent vesicles, especially on the palms of the hands and the
soles of the feet (“pemphigus syphiliticus”); the internal organs also,
the spleen, the liver, and the bones, exhibit morbid changes.
Characteristic is the syphilitic affection of the upper air-passages,
especially the syphilitic “cold in the head” (=syphilitic
rhinitis=--“snuffles”), of new-born congenitally syphilitic children.
Congenital syphilis further gives rise to severe =disturbances of
development= and to phenomena to which Fournier has given the name of
“=late syphilis=” (“syphilis hereditaria tarda”), because they first
make their appearance in the later years of life.[323] Permanent
=debility=, =arrest of development=, =stigmata of degeneration=, in the
form of various =malformations=--as, for example, notching of the edge
of the upper central incisor permanent teeth (a symptom first described
by Jonathan Hutchinson), malformations of the nose, the ears, and the
palate, dwarfing, deaf-mutism, malformations of the external and
internal reproductive organs, rickets,[324] epilepsy, and mental
weakness--are the consequences of congenital syphilis. Tarnowsky,
Fournier, and Barthélémy have traced the consequences of congenital
syphilis into the second and third generation, and so have discovered an
important cause of racial degeneration. Syphilis in the grandfather can
still exercise its disastrous influence in the grandson, and give rise
to the above-mentioned stigmata of degeneration.[325] Indeed, congenital
syphilis of the second generation often appears with the same severity
as that of the first generation; and, like acquired syphilis, congenital
syphilis in women can cause a predisposition to miscarriages and
still-births.
According to statistics obtained by Edmond Fournier, relating to 11,000
cases of syphilis (10,000 men, 1,000 women) from the private practice
of his father, Alfred Fournier, regarding the age at which infection
occurs, it appears that in =men= it most commonly occurs between the
ages of twenty and twenty-six years (the maximum number of infections
during the twenty-third year); in =women=, between the ages of eighteen
and twenty-one; 8 % of syphilitic males and 20 % of syphilitic females
were infected before the age of twenty years. Syphilis is to a
considerable extent at the present day a disease of =inexperienced
youth=. This fact is important in relation to the problem of prevention
and the problem of enlightenment.[326]
Of much less importance than syphilis is the purely local =soft
chancre=, or chancroid, which never results in general infection.
Chancroid is produced by a specific exciting cause, a chain-forming
bacillus (streptobacillus), _Bacillus ulceris cancrosi_, which is found
in the pus secreted by the ulcer. =One or two days= after infection, a
small pustule forms at the site of inoculation, generally on the
external genital organs. This pustule soon bursts, and a deeply hollowed
ulcer makes its appearance, which usually undergoes rapid increase, and
frequently, owing to the infective character of the pus, gives rise to
new chancres in the neighbourhood of the original one, so that the soft
chancre is commonly multiple. When suitably treated with antiseptic
powders and cauterization, chancroid usually heals quickly; there are,
however, very dangerous varieties of chancroid--for instance, the
=serpiginous= chancre, which continues to creep irresistibly forward;
and the =phagedænic= or =gangrenous= chancre, which puts the skill of
the physician to the utmost test. A less dangerous but extremely
disagreeable complication of chancroid is inflammation of the inguinal
glands, most commonly only on one side; this painful “bubo” (painful in
contrast with the painless syphilitic bubo) has a well-marked tendency
to suppuration. If this occurs, and the pus finds its way to the
surface, fistulas and new chancrous ulcers are liable to occur at the
place where it opens. By rest in bed, the inunction of iodide ointment,
the application of cold compresses, the injection into the bubo of a
solution of nitrate of silver, and the internal use of iodide of
potassium, this unfortunate course may be prevented.
A remarkable =change of views= has, in the course of the last thirty
years, taken place in respect of the nature and importance of
=gonorrhœa=.[327] Whereas formerly this was regarded as a comparatively
harmless disease, we know to-day that gonorrhœa in the male, and still
more in the female, gives rise to tedious dangers and painful morbid
phenomena, and is the source of unspeakable sorrows, and of the
miserable ill-health of numerous women, and that it is the chief cause
of =sterility= in both sexes.
Gonorrhœa is principally a =disease of the mucous membrane=, and is, in
this way, distinguished from syphilis, which is a general disorder,
diffusing itself by way of the bloodvessels. In rare cases, indeed,
gonorrhœa can exhibit general morbid manifestations, the so-called
=gonorrhœal rheumatism=, gonorrhœal affections of the spinal cord and of
the heart, and gonorrhœal nervous troubles, all of which are so rare,
that for practical purposes they can be left out of consideration.
The typical seat of gonorrhœa is the =mucous membrane of the urinary and
the genital organs= of the male and the female; in the male affecting
=chiefly= the urinary organs, and in the female affecting chiefly the
genital organs. The cause of =genuine= gonorrhœa is always infection,
the transmission from one human being to another of the purulent
inflammation produced by the =gonococcus= discovered by Neisser in 1879.
=Simple urethral inflammations= with a purulent discharge also occur in
which no gonococci are found. These arise also from infection, but their
actual exciting cause has not yet been discovered. Not less obscure is
the relationship of many of the irritants giving rise to simple urethral
catarrh--for example, that which is active during menstruation--to the
supposed exciting cause. In any case, these simple catarrhs have a very
mild course, and undergo a cure after a few days or weeks, spontaneously
or as a result of treatment with mild injections.
Quite otherwise is it with genuine gonorrhœa. In the male it begins from
two to six days after the infective intercourse, with a burning
sensation on passing water, itching at the urethral orifice, which very
easily becomes reddened, and this is soon followed by the discharge,
either spontaneously or as a result of pressure on the urethra, of a
thick fluid, at first mucous, later purulent, and then of a yellow or a
greenish colour. Inflammation, discharge, and pain, the latter
especially in association with urination, increase during the subsequent
weeks; in addition, in a good many cases there are slight fever,
lassitude, and mental depression, and the patient is tormented,
especially during the night, by violent, painful erections. In
exceptional cases there are hæmorrhages from the urethra (the so-called
“=Russian clap=”). In some cases the disease terminates favourably; this
is especially observed after the first attack of gonorrhœa. As early as
the third week the above symptoms become less severe, and in the fourth
or sixth week after infection the whole morbid process may come to an
end, the discharge ceases, the urine becomes clear once more, and, in
fact, definite cure of the gonorrhœa ensues.
But the number of those who are so fortunate is comparatively small. In
the majority of cases, there are other morbid phenomena and
complications; the gonorrhœa becomes “=subacute=,” and later
“=chronic=.” Ricord wrote many years ago: “When anyone has once acquired
gonorrhœa, God only knows when he will get well again!” Happily, this
pessimism is no longer fully justified at the present day; but it is a
fact that in the majority of cases =even to-day= gonorrhœa is a very
obstinate, wearisome illness, a long-continued burden, not only for the
patient, but also for the doctor. The gonococci proliferate in the
deeper layers of the mucous membrane, and pass upwards into the
=posterior= part of the urethra, this latter migration being manifested
especially by frequent and painful =strangury=; further, the =bladder=,
the =prostate gland=, and the =epididymis= may be attacked. Bilateral
epididymitis has often serious consequences as regards the procreative
capacity. In about 50 % of the cases incapacity for fertilization
(impotentia generandi) has resulted.
If the gonorrhœa becomes chronic, thickenings occur in isolated portions
of the urethral mucous membrane; the urine remains turbid for a long
time; the discharge, it is true, becomes scantier, but shows itself with
the most annoying persistency every morning as soon as the patient
leaves his bed, in the form of the so-called =“bon jour” drops= in the
meatus; there are also troubles connected with the prostate (painful
sensations, especially during defæcation), and symptoms of stricture of
the urethra may occur. Very often, also, relative impotence and severe
sexual neurasthenia are observed, as consequences of chronic gonorrhœa.
Worst of all is the =long duration of the infectivity=. There is always
the danger that somewhere or other some gonococci may remain hidden,
and, given an opportunity, may start the process all over again, or may
transmit the infection to another person. Zweifel reports a case in
which a man actually infected a woman thirteen years after he had first
acquired gonorrhœa!
The infection of a woman with gonorrhœa, as we know to-day, is a
disaster. It is the immortal service of the German-American physician
Noeggerath that, in the year 1872, he proved that the majority of the
stubborn “=diseases of women=” were nothing more than the consequences
of gonorrhœal infection. Gonorrhœa selects by preference the internal
reproductive organs of woman; upon the extensive mucous membranes of
these organs the gonococci find the most favourable conditions for their
persistent life; they find a thousand out-of-the-way comers and
hiding-places, where they can elude the therapeutic activity of the
physician.
“They grow luxuriantly, like a weed which it has not been possible to
uproot, over the entire surface of the genital mucous membrane,
attacking with the same vigour the mucous membrane of the uterus and
that of the Fallopian tubes. In women, as in men, they induce
ulceration, they cause adhesions, and they give rise to sterility. But
in the case of women, something further must be added--that, namely,
this disease has upon them a miserably depressing effect, and that, in
contradistinction from men, they are likely to suffer for many years
from intense pains. Whenever they execute certain bodily movements, it
may be during ten years in succession, they experience pains, often
horribly severe, and in most cases they are condemned to a life of
deprivation and misery--not usually for any fault of their own, since
most women are infected by their husbands” (Zweifel).
Gonorrhœa in women, attacking successively the vagina, the uterus, the
Fallopian tubes, the ovaries, and the peritoneum, is a true martyrdom, a
hell upon earth. Sick in body and in mind, these unhappy women drag out
a miserable existence; and to them so often the last consolation, that
of motherhood, is denied, for gonorrhœa is the most frequent cause of
sterility in woman.
Patients infected with gonorrhœa further run the danger of =blindness=,
by transference of the gonorrhœal virus to the =eye=. This is one of the
most distressing of the possible results of the disease. New-born
children whose mothers are infected with gonorrhœa are during birth
exposed to the same danger of eye infection, as they pass down the
genital passage. In earlier days a very large proportion of the blind
were persons who had lost their sight in this way very shortly after
birth. Since Crédé advocated the admirable method of introducing nitrate
of silver solution into the conjunctival sacs of new-born children,
gonorrhœal inflammation of the eye has become one of the greatest
rarities.
APPENDIX
VENEREAL DISEASES IN THE HOMOSEXUAL
It is an old belief, shared by the homosexual themselves, that venereal
infections are extremely rare among them. If male homosexual persons had
sexual intercourse =only with one another=, this assumption would be in
some degree plausible. For the principal focus of venereal infection is
feminine prostitution, by which venereal diseases are transmitted to
heterosexual men. But since these homosexual men often undertake sexual
acts with heterosexual men--apart from occasional sexual intercourse
with women--a priori there is a possibility of infection in their case,
and such infection is, in fact, observed. Above all, many male
prostitutes also indulge in intercourse with women, and thus diffuse
venereal troubles among homosexual men.
It is obvious that =syphilis= can be diffused among the homosexual as
easily as among the heterosexual, for syphilis is transmitted by many
varieties of contact--by kisses, other caresses, etc. But how is it as
regards =gonorrhœa=?
In the case of heterosexual men and women gonorrhœa is almost
exclusively transmitted by the sexual act, by the introduction of the
male penis into the female vagina. The analogous act between men--that
is to say, pæderasty, _immissio penis in anum_--is unquestionably far
=rarer= than the ordinary sexual act between men and women; it is
commonly replaced by mutual onanism, by kisses and other caresses, and
quite frequently by _coitus in os_. This last is much commoner than
genuine pædication. Of gonorrhœa of the rectum produced by pædication
when the active man is suffering from gonorrhœa, we very rarely hear.
But is there, in the case of homosexual men, any possibility of
gonorrhœal infection due to _coitus in os_?
There can be no doubt that typical =gonorrhœa of the mouth= occurs. The
observations of Kuttler, Atkinson, Rosinski, Dohrn, and Kast, have
proved it.[328] Horand and Cazenave have even observed gonorrhœal
infection of the urethra as a result of oral coitus![329] A homosexual
patient told me that some years before, after _coitus in os_ with a man,
he had for several weeks had a discharge from the urethra, which
spontaneously ceased, and therefore cannot have been genuine gonorrhœa,
but only urethritis resulting from infection by contagious angina. In
the case in question, the urethral catarrh was certainly due to the
_coitus in os_, since any other sources of infection could be excluded.
On the other hand, in a second case an apparently =gonorrhœal infection
of the oral cavity= was transmitted from the urethra.
A homosexual man, forty-five years of age, one day allowed a
=heterosexual= man to perform _coitus in os_ on him. Some days
afterwards he experienced difficulty in swallowing, was feverish, and
saw in the looking-glass that the uvula was swollen. A specialist for
throat troubles diagnosed merely a catarrhal infection. The illness
became worse, and a second throat specialist detected the presence of
a purulent angina of both tonsils, ordered painting with argentamin,
also vapour baths, and an astringent gargle, whereupon the affection
gradually subsided. Six weeks later the patient had swelling and pain
in the joints of the right knee and foot; under cold compresses these
swellings subsided after a fortnight. Of the whole trouble nothing now
remains.
This description, on the part of a patient who is thoroughly
trustworthy, aroused strong suspicion of a =gonorrhœal angina=, with a
consecutive gonorrhœal arthritis. Unfortunately, the purulent discharge
from the tonsils was not examined for gonococci by either of the
physicians in attendance. The case remains, anyhow, very remarkable.
In the case of homosexual women, it is obvious that syphilis, and also
gonorrhœa, can be transmitted, the latter by mutual friction of the
genital organs. I do not know what actually occurs in practice.
[312] _Cf._ Iwan Bloch, “Schopenhauer’s Illness in the Year 1823. A
Contribution to Pathography based upon an Unpublished Document.”
Published in _Medizinische Klinik_, 1906, Nos. 25 and 26. (This gives
an account of all Schopenhauer’s utterances regarding syphilis.)
[313] At a meeting of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, held on
April 19, 1906, I read a paper on “La Syphilis Prétendue
Préhistorique,” in which I discussed this question. The important
question of ancient bones is further considered in the second volume
of my work on “The Origin of Syphilis,” pp. 317-364 (now in the
press).
[314] The results of this study I have briefly epitomized in an
address given before the Social Science Congress in Berlin, entitled
“The First Appearance of Syphilis in Europe” (Jena, 1904).
[315] Regarding the gradual acquirement (by means of natural
selection) of immunity to epidemic diseases, the works of Archdall
Reid may be most profitably consulted (“The Present Evolution of Man,”
London, 1896; “The Principles of Heredity,” London, 1905). Dr. Reid’s
views on the part played in human history by the transference of
diseases from immunized to non-immunized races are of especial
interest. Unfortunately, as regards syphilis, he accepts Hirsch’s
erroneous statements relative to the antiquity of that disease, and
its origin in the eastern hemisphere (see also p. 384, note
^{346}).--TRANSLATOR.
[316] _Cf._ A. Neisser, “The Experimental Investigation of Syphilis as
it Stands at the Present Day” (Berlin, 1906).
[317] _Cf._ Erich Hoffmann, “The Etiology of Syphilis” (Berlin, 1906);
Hans Hübner, “Recent Researches into the Nature of Syphilis,”
published in the _Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_,
1906, vol. v., pp. 468-481.
[318] I must not omit allusion to some recent admirable works on
venereal diseases: A. Blaschko, “Venereal Diseases”--a popular
exposition--(Berlin, 1904); Paul Zweifel, “Venereal Diseases and their
Importance to Health” (Leipzig, 1902); Alfred Fournier, “Syphilis a
Social Danger”; Karl Ries, “Blameless Sexual Infection” (Stuttgart,
1904); O. Burwinkel, “Venereal Diseases” (Leipzig, 1905); Waldvogel,
“The Dangers of Venereal Diseases and their Prevention” (Stuttgart,
1905). In view of the large number of popular works on venereal
diseases, those without professional knowledge should confine
themselves to the best names, because in this province trashy
literature is extraordinarily abundant, and by the false and erroneous
views it diffuses, it does much more harm than good. The writings
mentioned in this note I am able to recommend as thoroughly scientific
and =trustworthy=.
[319] Galewsky, “The Transmission of Venereal Diseases in the Suckling
of Children,” published in the _Journal for the Suppression of
Venereal Diseases_, 1906, vol. v., pp. 365-371.
[320] It is true that such a hardening may also occur in other
non-syphilitic affections of the genital organs--for example, when
they are peculiarly situated or as a result of cauterization. Only the
physician can determine whether in such a case syphilitic infection
has actually occurred.
[321, 322] According to English experience, the congenitally
syphilitic child rarely exhibits any sign of syphilis when born. Thus,
Hutchinson writes (“Syphilis,” p. 73): “At the time of birth, the
congenitally syphilitic infant almost invariably has a clear skin, and
appears to be in perfect health.” According to Osler also (“Medicine,”
sixth edition, p. 269): “The child may be born healthy-looking or with
well-marked evidence of the disease. In the majority of instances the
former is the case, and within the first month or two the signs of the
disease appear.”--TRANSLATOR.
[323] _Cf._ the recently published admirable work of Edmond Fournier,
“Recherches et Diagnostic de l’Hérédo-Syphilis Tardive” (Paris, 1907).
[324] Parrot regarded rickets as a manifestation of congenital
syphilis, but this view has never found acceptance in England.
Hutchinson remarks (“Syphilis,” p. 408): “The typical forms of rickets
are constantly met with in conditions which do not lend the slightest
support to the suggestion of syphilis.” As Cheadle remarks: “Syphilis
modifies rickets; it does not create it.”--TRANSLATOR.
[325] This view must be accepted with reserve. See, for instance,
Osler’s “Medicine,” sixth edition, p. 271: “Is syphilis transmitted to
the third generation? The general opinion is opposed to this view.
Occasionally, however, cases of pronounced congenital syphilis are met
with in the children of parents who are perfectly healthy, and who
have not, so far as is known, had syphilis, and yet, as remarked by
Coutts, who reported such a group of cases, they do not bear careful
scrutiny. The existing difference of opinion is well illustrated in
the account by G. Boeck (_Berl. Klin. Wochenschrift_, September 12,
1904) of four instances of hereditary lues in the second generation,
while in the same journal Jonathan Hutchinson expresses his belief
that syphilis is not transmitted to the third
generation.”--TRANSLATOR.
[326] As more important scientific works on syphilis I must mention
that of Isidor Neumann (Vienna, 1899, second edition), containing the
entire bibliography of the subject; that of Joseph Lang (Wiesbaden,
1896, second edition); but, above all, the epoch-making work of Alfred
Fournier, “Traité de Syphilis” (Paris, 1898)--English translation,
Fournier, “The Treatment and Prophylaxis of Syphilis” (Rebman Ltd.,
London, 1906).
[327] The most important scientific work on gonorrhœa is that of
Ernest Finger, “Blennorrhœa of the Sexual Organs,” fifth edition
(Leipzig and Vienna, 1901).
[328] _Cf._ M. von Zeissl, “Diagnosis and Treatment of Venereal
Diseases,” third edition, pp. 171, 172 (Berlin and Vienna, 1905).
[329] _Op cit._, p. 172.
CHAPTER XV
PROPHYLAXIS, TREATMENT, AND SUPPRESSION (BEKÄMPFUNG) OF VENEREAL
DISEASES
“_The friend of humanity may with some confidence anticipate a gradual
diminution in the prevalence of venereal diseases, and may hope for
their complete extinction in a not too distant future. All that is
requisite for the attainment of this end is that those engaged in the
study and practice of general hygiene, and those concerned in the
safeguarding of public morality, should not weary in their efforts;
and that scientific research should pursue its aims firmly and
clearly, uninfluenced by the tyranny of custom, and independent of
prejudice._”--K. F. MARX.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XV
The suppression of venereal diseases -- Organization of the campaign
against them -- International Conference in Brussels -- Foundation of
the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases -- Three
methods of carrying on the campaign against venereal diseases.
_Personal Prophylaxis against Venereal Diseases_: Rôle of cleanliness
-- The preputial secretion and balanitis -- Importance of circumcision
-- Technique of the cleansing of the genital organs before and after
sexual intercourse -- Examination for disease -- Dangers of repeated
coitus -- Special protective measures -- The condom -- Varieties and
technique of its use -- The instillation of solutions of silver salts
-- Their relative value -- The inunction of fat -- Metchnikoff’s
ointment for the prevention of syphilis -- Antiseptic washings -- The
public advertisement of protective measures -- Legal protection
against venereal infection -- Opinions of legal authorities on this
subject (von Liszt, von Bar, Schmölder).
_The Suppression of Venereal Diseases by Medical Treatment_:
Favourable conditions as regards syphilis -- Mitigation of the
syphilitic virus -- Mercury and its importance -- A “triumph of
medicine” -- Methods of employing mercury in the treatment of syphilis
-- Mode of action of the mercury cure -- Means for the after-treatment
of syphilis -- Curability of syphilis -- Treatment of gonorrhœa --
Necessity for microscopical examination and the scientific methods to
be employed -- The different modes of treatment -- The determination
of the cure of gonorrhœa -- Facilitation of the treatment of venereal
diseases for the great mass of the public -- “Krankenkassen”[330] and
venereal diseases.
_State Action and Public Action in the Campaign against Venereal
Diseases_: Statistics of venereal troubles -- Blaschko’s researches --
Frequency of venereal diseases in Denmark -- Among various classes in
Germany -- Prussian statistics of April 30, 1900 -- Conclusions
deducible from these statistics -- The different sources of infection
-- Prostitution the principal source of infection -- Danger of
youthful prostitutes -- Measures to be taken by the State against the
diffusion of diseases by prostitution -- Regulation -- Criticism of
this measure -- Its illegality -- Its uselessness and its dangers --
Favourable results of the withdrawal of “moral control” --
Prostitution and crime -- Soutenage -- Criticism of Lombroso’s theory
of the relations between prostitution and criminality -- The brothel
question -- Diminution in the number of brothels -- Dangers of
brothels -- Brothel streets and the limitation of prostitution to
definite quarters -- Proposals for the examination of the male
clientèle -- Criticism of these proposals -- The true way towards the
suppression of prostitution.
CHAPTER XV
The motto which I have placed at the head of this chapter on the
campaign against venereal diseases and on the attempt to suppress them
is taken from an interesting academic essay by the former professor of
medicine at Göttingen, K. F. H. Marx, who is well known to have been the
physician of Heinrich Heine during the latter’s student life in
Göttingen. The title of this essay is “The Diminution of Diseases in
Consequence of Advancing Civilization,” p. 35 (Göttingen, 1844).
The hopeful view which is here expressed by the university professor
regarding the ultimate eradication of venereal diseases was shared at
that time by the eminently =practical physician= Parent-Duchatelet. He
appeals, unfortunately, not to medical men and students of social
hygiene, but to the police:
“Pursue without cessation the diseases which are diffused by means of
prostitutes; =take it as your goal to cause them to disappear from the
list of human troubles; do not doubt that your labours will ultimately
be crowned with success, although the task may be one that will occupy
several generations=.”[331]
Two complete generations had, however, to pass away before =the campaign
against venereal diseases and the attempt to suppress them became a
burning question of the time=, became a question of =public health= and
social hygiene, like those which concern the fight with tuberculosis,
with infant mortality, and with alcoholism. Once again I must repeat
that the =organized systematic campaign against venereal diseases is
still in its very earliest stages=. Strictly speaking, it dates only
from seven years ago, when the =first international congress for the
prophylaxis of syphilis and other venereal diseases= was held in
Brussels, from September 4 to 8, 1899. Almost all the civilized
countries, European and other, took part in this congress, and not only
physicians and dermatologists, but also lawyers, clergymen, attachés of
embassies, authors, and philanthropists, explained their views, and
thereby showed that the question of the suppression of venereal diseases
was one of equal interest to all classes of society, and one which must
exercise the activity of the community at large. At the conclusion of
this first international conference in 1899, there was founded the
=International Society for the Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis of
Syphilis and other Venereal Diseases=, which has its seat in Brussels,
and meets at periodical intervals for international conferences.
Especially in Germany has this organization aroused active interest, and
it was soon decided to found a national =German Society for the
Suppression of Venereal Diseases=, whose first meeting was held on
October 19, 1903, in the hall of the Berlin Rathaus. The meeting was
opened by a speech from Albert Neisser, after which Alfred Blaschko
spoke on “The Diffusion of Venereal Diseases,” Edmund Lesser on “The
Dangers of Venereal Diseases,” Martin Kirchner on “The Social Importance
of Venereal Diseases,” and Albert Neisser on “The Aims of the German
Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases.” The =committee= of
the Society consists of Messrs. A. Neisser, president; E. Lesser,
vice-president and treasurer; and A. Blaschko, general secretary. The
organ of the Society is issued six times yearly, under the title,
_Reports of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases_, and has been published for the last four years; it is
supplied gratis to members; to non-members the yearly subscription is
only three marks. In the spring of the year 1903 there was founded a
larger _Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, of which five
volumes have hitherto appeared; this serves for the publication of more
comprehensive critical studies.
Still in the same year, 1902, there were formed the first =branches= and
=local groups= of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases in Hanover, Wiesbaden, Breslau, and Berlin. Subsequently other
branches were formed in Mannheim, Munich, Cologne, Beuthen, Danzig,
Stettin, Posen, Dortmund, Elberfeld, Frankfurt-on-the-Main, Görlitz,
Hamburg, Königsberg, Nürnberg, Stuttgart, and Heidelberg.
During the last four years, by means of lectures, the circulation of
pamphlets and leaflets, and by public discussions, information regarding
the dangers of venereal diseases has been diffused among the widest
circles of the population. Of the other activities and measures of the
Society we shall have to speak later.
We pass on to the consideration of the principal elements of the modern
campaign against venereal diseases. In view of the limits of this work
our discussion of this question must necessarily be a brief one. The
eradication of venereal diseases must be effected in a =threefold=
manner:
1. By measures of =personal prophylaxis= against infection.
2. By the proper =medical treatment= of all cases of venereal disease.
3. By measures belonging to the province of =public hygiene=, to that of
=state action=, and to that of =education=.
The =personal prophylaxis= of venereal diseases[332] has made great
progress with the increasing scientific knowledge of the causes and
modes of infection of these diseases. We know now precisely where and
how we can lay down =personal= rules which give us at least a =fairly
secure guarantee= that in an individual case venereal infection will not
occur. Various points of view must then be taken into consideration, the
combined influence of which will alone promise a successful result. No
one single measure will suffice to gain this end.
Above all, in this department of the prophylaxis of venereal diseases,
experienced physicians, alike of earlier and more recent times, will
unanimously agree in this proposition, that the principal preliminary
means for the avoidance of venereal infection, means which it is
absolutely essential to employ in every instance, consist of =perfect
cleanliness= on both sides. He who insists on the most scrupulous
cleanliness of body, clothing, and underclothing, will be sure to get
rid =immediately= of any uncleanliness acquired in sexual intercourse.
Cleanliness and health are often (not always) identical. In any case,
the =greatest mistrust= should be felt as regards a person evidently
unclean, with a neglected exterior, for this is always a sign that such
a person is not particular as regards choice in matters of sexual
intercourse. “=Germany, get into your bath!=” Heinrich Laube once
exclaimed. This would be a good device to adopt in the campaign against
venereal diseases. Every uncleanliness is an irritant; it impairs the
intactness of the skin; and especially is this true of any uncleanliness
of the genital organs, and above all of the male genital organs, where,
under the foreskin, the “smegma” (the sebaceous secretion of the
preputial glands) often undergoes decomposition, and gives rise to an
inflammation, the so-called =balanitis=, which greatly favours the
probability of infection.[333]
If the foreskin has been removed by circumcision, this secretion
entirely ceases, and the mucous membrane covering the glans penis is
transformed into a thick skin, which is much less readily affected by
the causes of infection. There is no doubt that circumcision is to a
certain extent a protective measure against syphilitic infection, whilst
it does not in any way protect against gonorrhœa. Neustätter has
recently collected some very remarkable facts relating to this
question.[334]
Breitenstein has contrasted 15,000 indigenous =circumcised= soldiers
with 18,000 =uncircumcised= European soldiers of the army of the Dutch
Indies, living under similar local and hygienic conditions. Thus, in the
year 1895 there were infected with venereal diseases, of the circumcised
16 %, of the uncircumcised 41 %. As regards infections with syphilis, of
the circumcised 0·8 % were infected; of the uncircumcised, on the other
hand, 4·1 %--that is, five times as many. Similar observations were made
by the celebrated English syphilologist Jonathan Hutchinson, one of the
most ardent advocates of the general introduction of circumcision as a
protective measure against venereal, and above all against syphilitic,
infection. Moreover, with regard to the observations made in Java, the
difference did not depend upon race, because similar differences have
been observed as regards comparative immunity from infection in respect
of circumcised Christians, circumcised on account of phimosis and other
troubles, whose number is by no means insignificant.
Since, however, it is unlikely that circumcision will come into general
use in Europe as a prophylactic measure, it only remains to recommend
that, as a fundamental procedure, the greatest possible care should be
employed in the daily and delicate cleansing of the preputial sac. By
this means inflammation and laceration of these parts will be most
effectually prevented, and even without circumcision a certain resisting
power will be induced. For washing this region, lukewarm water which has
been boiled and cooled may best be employed; then dry the part
carefully, so as not to rub off the skin. In the case of women,
frequent washings of the external genital organs, and vaginal douches,
are also of great importance in regard to the prevention of venereal
infection. =Before= and =after= the sexual act, these measures are of
especial value, because =often by simple mechanical means=, infective
material already deposited may be carried away. The same purpose is
subserved by urination, a procedure certainly adapted for washing out
gonorrhœal pus which has found its way into the urethra, before the
gonococci have had time to establish themselves in the mucous membrane.
I know a number of patients who =use no other means of protection in
sexual intercourse beyond the observation of extreme cleanliness, by
washing and douching, in both sexes=, before and after sexual
intercourse, and by passing water immediately after intercourse, and
thus have remained free from infection; but who promptly became infected
=as soon as they discontinued these simple measures=.
For this reason, these measures, where possible with the assistance of
=soap=, which certainly exercises some antiseptic influence, cannot be
too warmly recommended, although they naturally =do not offer any
absolute security=. They have, however, the advantage that, in the first
place, they can always be employed, even when the true protective
measures of which we speak below are not available, and that, in the
second place, they can always be used in addition to these. It sounds,
perhaps, somewhat absurd, and yet it is true, to say that =washing= and
=urination= are the =first= and =most important= protective measures
against sexual infection.
The second point, which must also be considered important in this
connexion, is the =exercise of self-command= before and during the
sexual act, as far as this is possible in view of the nature of sexual
excitement, which always lessens the personal responsibility, and
overcomes reason and understanding. Yet no one should have sexual
intercourse when =in a state of alcoholic intoxication=, in which
self-control is =completely= lost; as we have shown in an earlier
passage (pp. 292-296), there are several reasons why intercourse is apt
to be disastrous to a drunken man. Moreover, =love= prefers the dark,
but =precaution= prefers =the sunlight=. Before having intercourse with
a woman previously unknown to him, a man should inspect her in clear
daylight, with a view to her state of health. Suspicious spots on the
skin, especially on the forehead and on the trunk; white areas on the
lips, the tongue, the throat, and the back of the neck; visible
glandular swellings; a marked discharge from the genital organs;
ulcerated areas in this region, etc., are of an extremely suspicious
nature, and should cause abstinence from intercourse. French physicians
go so far as to recommend examination of the inguinal and cervical
glands under the harmless form of pretended caresses; but persons
without medical education would seldom be sufficiently skilled to be
able to detect glandular swellings unless these were unusually well
developed. Especially enlargement of the cervical glands--this “pulse of
syphilis,” as Alfred Fournier terms it--is a comparatively certain
indication of syphilis.
It is dangerous also in many cases to repeat the sexual act =several
times= in brief succession, because old experience has taught us that
infective material may first make its appearance at the second or third
act of coitus, and thus infect then only. This affords an explanation
also of a fact often observed--that in intercourse with an infected
woman on the part of two healthy men, with but a brief interval between
the acts, the one who had intercourse first often remains healthy,
whilst the second is infected.
I pass on to consider the =special protective measures= which have long
been recommended for the prophylaxis of venereal infection.
1. =The Condom.=--This is the =oldest= and even to-day beyond question
the best and =most trustworthy= artificial protective measure. Employed
long ago in the days of antiquity, it was in the sixteenth century once
more recommended by the Italian physician Fallopius, and therefore is
not the invention of a physician “Conton,” after whom it is said to have
been named (perhaps the name is connected with that of the French town
“Condom”). Hans Ferdy (A. Meyerhof) suggests that the word is derived
from “condus”--that is, one who =preserves= or protects--and that the
article should properly be called “condus” instead of “condom.”[335]
The condom is a protective membrane, with which the penis is covered
before intercourse. We distinguish as “=rubber condoms=” those made of
rubber, gutta-percha, or caoutchouc; and as “=cæcal condoms=” those made
out of the cæcal mucous membrane of the goat or sheep (incorrectly
termed also “isinglass condoms”). The cæcal condom is thinner and more
delicate, and blunts sensation less, than the rubber condom. The rubber
condom, however, is more =trustworthy=, in respect of durability and its
slighter liability to laceration, if the little precaution is not
neglected to keep it in a cool place, and to protect it from the
long-continued influence of warmth. The habit of carrying about a rubber
condom in the pocket for a long time favours its rapidly becoming
untrustworthy and easily torn. Cæcal condoms, on the other hand, very
readily become fragile and pervious, although the contrary is the common
opinion, and they are preferred to rubber condoms in the belief that the
dearer article must be the better. Advertisement is exceedingly active
in this direction, and every kind of speciality is widely recommended.
In England condoms are sometimes sold bearing the portrait of some
celebrated person!
The condom is a “=general protective measure=”--that is, it protects
against both gonorrhœa and syphilis, in so far as the latter disease, as
is usually the case, is transmitted from the genital organs. All the
leading physicians engaged more especially in the treatment of venereal
diseases are agreed that the condom, when of good quality, when properly
applied, and when removed with care (for in the removal material
adhering to the outer surface may very readily give rise to infection),
constitutes the =very best= and =most certain= of all the protective
measures hitherto advocated. It is true that it can be used by men only,
but when used by the man it simultaneously protects the woman from
gonorrhœal infection, and not rarely also from syphilitic infection.
2. =The Instillation of Solutions of Silver Salts.=[336]--These serve
exclusively for the prophylaxis of gonorrhœa, and are not, therefore,
general protective measures. We owe their introduction to Blokusewski,
who recommended the use of a =two % solution of nitrate of silver=. More
recently, the albuminates of silver have been preferred, such as
=protargol= in a 10 to 20 % solution, =albargin= in a 4 to 10 %
solution, or a solution of 20 % protargol-gelatine. These solutions can
be carried about in small drop-bottles--for example, as the “Sanitas”
(silver nitrate) of Blokusewski, the “Viro” or the “Phallokos” apparatus
(these are trade names for proprietary preparations--solutions of
protargol). All solutions of silver salts must be kept in the dark, and
after the lapse of any considerable time, some freshly prepared solution
must be introduced, for time and the influence of light destroy their
efficacy. Immediately after intercourse and urination, one or two drops
of the solution are instilled into the urethra, and a drop or two also
allowed to run over the frænum præputii.[337]
The views regarding the value of these protective measures are
conflicting. Beyond question, they are less trustworthy than the condom.
Infection has been observed in spite of the use of instillations. Above
all, however, the continued use of these methods gives rise to
disagreeable =irritative manifestations= in the urethra and may even
cause =catarrhal inflammation=, and thus artificially increase the
liability to infection. Hence, these instillations should be reserved
for =occasional= use; =habitually=, only the condom should be employed.
3. =Inunction.=--Whereas the instillation of chemical solutions serves
to protect against gonorrhœa only, the practice recommended for a much
longer time of =anointing= the penis with a simple fatty material, or
with an antiseptic ointment, =before= or =after= sexual intercourse,
protects against syphilis only. It is obvious that a layer of fatty
material covering the penis exercises the purely mechanical function of
preventing the passage of infective matters to the skin. It is, however,
equally obvious that by the to-and-fro friction during sexual
intercourse, especially when this occupies a considerable time, this
fatty covering will be rubbed away, so that the virus can find a means
of entrance. The protection is thus extremely relative. Still, such
authors as Neisser, Max Joseph, Loeb, and Campagnolle, report favourable
experiences regarding the prevention of syphilis by the inunction of the
penis, for which purpose simple vaseline, or Schleich’s wax-soap cream,
which is sold with the “Viro” apparatus, may be employed. In any case,
this method is better than nothing at all. He who has no other
protective measure available should remember that in every house there
is always some fat or ointment obtainable which can be used for this
purpose.
In order, whilst using this method, to protect simultaneously against
gonorrhœa, it has been recommended that antiseptic ointment should be
inserted into the urethra before intercourse, but this is a very
unsatisfactory and untrustworthy method.
Well worth attention is the inunction recently recommended by
Metchnikoff[338] of =a specific mercurial ointment=, after intercourse,
for the destruction of any syphilitic virus which may have been
deposited.[339] He used for this purpose, not the strongly irritant blue
ointment, but the =white precipitate ointment=, an ointment of the
=salicyl-arseniate of mercury= (=enesol=), and, above all, a =30 %
calomel ointment=. After any suspicious coitus, this ointment should be
rubbed for four or five minutes into the area of possible infection;
this should be done without delay; but even after the lapse of eighteen
to twenty-four hours an effect has been traced. The experiments on apes
inoculated with syphilis gave positive results; also in the case of a
student of medicine who voluntarily offered himself for inoculation with
the syphilitic virus, the inunction of calomel ointment appears to have
prevented the outbreak of the disease.
=In any case, these new methods for the prophylaxis of syphilis demand
the most careful attention.= Further experience is needed to determine
whether they deserve general application.
4. =Antiseptic Washes.=--Washing of the penis and douching of the vagina
with antiseptic lotions (sublimate, lysol, permanganate of potassium)
after intercourse are among the most uncertain of protective measures,
because the sublimate solution, or whatever may be used, does not find
its way into any possible lacerations; and because, in consequence of
the profuse secretion of the sebaceous glands of the male and female
genital organs, these organs are covered with a layer of fatty material,
which prevents the contact of watery fluids, but does not in the same
degree prevent the entrance of the syphilitic poison. Antiseptic washes
=after= the sexual act have as little value as the same used before the
sexual act.
The knowledge of these protective measures--above all, of those named
under the first, second, and third headings--ought to be very much more
general than it is. Unfortunately, however, in public life such measures
are still viewed largely from the standpoint of the moralist as
“=indecent=” or “=improper=”; and the criminal law classifies them thus,
so that their =public recommendation= and diffusion is still exposed to
great hindrances.
At the second congress of the Society for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases, held in Munich in March, 1905, the question of the public
recommendation of protective measures was opened to discussion, and was
dealt with in two admirable addresses by O. Neustätter[340] and Georg
Bernhard.[341] Bernhard proposed that to Section 184, paragraph 3, of
the Criminal Code, which declares it to be a punishable offence to
“expose for sale articles intended for an indecent use, or to recommend
or sell such articles to the public,” should be added a =legal
definition= in the following sense: =articles which are used either to
prevent venereal diseases or to prevent conception are not regarded as
“intended for an indecent use”=; and Neustätter pleaded for an
=alteration of the existing state of the law=, in the sense that =the
public recommendation of means for the prevention and cure of venereal
diseases= should be legally permissible, being restricted merely by
certain =regulations against quackery, extortion, and other misuse=. The
regulation of the recommendation could best =be associated with the
necessary control of the recommendation of therapeutic and preventive
measures in general. A supreme sanitary authority= should be
constituted, =part of whose duties= should be to =examine the form and
contents= of recommendations of this character.
Another juristic relationship of the prophylaxis of venereal diseases
concerns =legal protection against venereal infection=. Franz von
Liszt,[342] von Bar,[343] and Schmölder,[344] opened the discussion on
the biological and criminal aspects of the prophylaxis of venereal
diseases at the first congress of the Society for the Suppression of
Venereal Diseases, held at Frankfurt-on-the-Main in the year 1903.
Hitherto the heedless or deliberate transmission of venereal disease was
punishable only as personal injury, since in the Criminal Code there was
no paragraph directly relating to this matter. Only in the Criminal Code
of Oldenburg of 1884 was such punishment expressly provided for (Article
387), and by this provision =the intercourse of an infected person with
a healthy one was punishable, without regard to the subsequent
infection=. In the legal regulations of other countries than Germany, we
find several instances in which the witting transmission of venereal
infection by means of sexual intercourse is punishable. In Germany a
measure proposing this was rejected by the Reichstag in 1900. Von Liszt
advocated the introduction of the following paragraph into the Criminal
Code:
“One who, being aware that he is suffering from a contagious venereal
disorder, performs coitus, or in any other way exposes another human
being to the danger of infection, shall be punished with imprisonment
for a term of two to three years, and in addition shall be deprived of
civil rights.”
Schmölder enlarged this clause by an amendment relating to the
punishment of prostitutes disseminating venereal diseases.
On the other hand, von Bar drew attention to the inconveniences and
dangers which a punishment of this nature would involve, especially to
the dangers of =blackmail=, and to the =duty it would impose on
physicians= of breaking their obligations of professional secrecy.
Moreover, a proof of the =knowledge= of venereal infection is difficult
to obtain; the proof that infection is derived from a definite person is
also far from easy. Von Bar opposed the addition of such a clause on
this and other grounds. In the discussion upon the motion, this view was
shared by C. Fränkel, Ries, Oppenheimer, and others; Neisser was in
favour of a punishment of this kind, because then, at any rate, there
would be a public recognition of the fact that such an action was open
to severe =punishment=, and was a =disgraceful= one; thus, by the mere
existence of the paragraph an =educative influence= would be exerted.
In any case, such a punishment would be a two-edged weapon, and as far
as present necessity goes, we have sufficient powers in the application
to such offences of the paragraphs of the Criminal Code relating to
bodily injury.
* * * * *
The second great means for the limitation and entire suppression of
venereal diseases is =to deal with them by medical treatment, to cure as
speedily as possible persons suffering from syphilis of gonorrhœa, and
thus to prevent these persons from becoming sources of fresh infection.
Systematic, methodical treatment on a large scale=--that is the =goal=
at which we have to aim. To the poor man or woman suffering from
venereal infection the same advantages should be opened as to the
wealthy voluptuary. The provision of means of treatment of venereal
diseases =cannot be too free=. In public hospitals, private clinics,
ambulatoria, and sanatoria, in convalescent homes, and polyclinics for
prostitutes, everywhere must be provided means for an intelligent
treatment of venereal diseases. Just as tuberculosis is now attacked
systematically and vigorously, so must it be with venereal diseases.
Since =syphilis= constitutes only about 25 %--only one-fourth part, that
is to say--of venereal diseases in general, since also during the last
four centuries the disease has shown a natural tendency to decline in
virulence, since a mitigation in the intensity of the virus is clearly
recognizable, it is in the case of this disease that the =hope of
radical success= is especially great.
Our forefathers carried out for us a great part of the campaign against
syphilis. The =comparatively mild= course of syphilis in the majority of
uncomplicated cases leads us to infer that there has been a relative
immunization against syphilitic poison.
Albert Reibmayr remarks that “=during the last 400 years, every human
being now living in Europe has had about 4,000 ancestors; of these,
however disagreeable the fact may seem, a considerable number must have
had to contend with syphilis=.”[345]
But this undoubted fact, that =all of us= have been to a certain extent
“=syphilized=,”[346] plays its part to our advantage in the campaign
against syphilis--that campaign which our own time has taken up with
joyful hope of success.
Above all, let honour be paid to the ever youthful and fresh master and
Nestor of European research into the subject of syphilis, Alfred
Fournier, the evening of whose life is devoted to the campaign against
syphilis as a “social danger.” To the great scientific works of his life
he has now added the small, but not less valuable, =explanatory
writings=, which are being sold at a low price all over France, and in
part also have already been translated into German and English.[347]
Their aim is to get the =people= on our side in the campaign against
syphilis.
When, in April, 1906, I paid the master a visit, he gave me the last of
these popular campaign writings. Its title was in the form of a
question:
“En Guérit-on?” (“Is it Curable?”).
And the answer given on p. 4 runs: “=Yes, it is curable, for of all
diseases syphilis is the one which can best, most easily, and most
certainly be cured.=” And why? Because we have a wonderful specific
against this disease, which, when given =at the proper time= and =in the
proper manner=, works a miracle. This remedy is
=Mercury=.
I put this name clearly and visibly before the eyes of the reader, a
name which for every physician to whose lot it falls to treat cases of
syphilis has a truly miraculous sound, a name against which =the
unconscientious ignoramuses, the evil-disposed enemies= of the human
race have spoken their anathema, one which a great thinker and
honourable man like Schopenhauer regarded as a “triumph of medicine,” a
fact which he experienced personally in his own body. All honourable,
critical, and scientific physicians agree in this opinion. In my work on
“The Origin of Syphilis,” vol. i., p. 127, I have expressed the matter
in the following words:
“Mercury is and remains--notwithstanding the ignorant and
ill-considered hostility of quacks and their kindred--the =divine
means= for the treatment of syphilis; mercury is to syphilis what
=water is to fire=, in the hands =of that physician who knows how to
use the drug rightly=, how to apply it =at the right time= and =in the
right form=, who watches closely the =course= of the disease in his
patient, and who supports the mercury cure (always of =primary
importance=) by other therapeutic measures as indicated.”
Only the =physician=, the scientifically trained medical man, can cure
syphilis; the quack certainly cannot; in his hands mercury is truly
enough a dangerous “poison.” But he has no right to say, and he speaks
deliberate untruths when he says, that we physicians “poison” the
“unfortunate” syphilitics with mercury. To such preposterous accusations
we can give a brief and incisive answer.
Therefore, during my lecturing journey, undertaken recently[348] under
the auspices of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases, I prepared the following brief account of the therapeutic
employment of mercury in syphilis, which in my opinion suffices to throw
the proper light upon the value and importance of the mercurial
treatment of the disease; it is a sufficient answer to the
“Nature-Healers,” who are opposed to the use of this “poison”:
1. =In innumerable instances it has been observed by the most
experienced and scientific physicians, that cases of syphilis treated
without mercury run a very severe course, accompanied by the most
dangerous symptoms, such as extensive destructive lesions of the skin,
lesions of the internal organs, brain syphilis, eating away of the
bones, loss of the nose, etc.=
2. =In cases which previously have been treated without mercury, the
administration of the latter drug immediately arrests the destructive
processes, and saves the patient from death, or from very severe
illness, and from physical disfigurement.=
3. =No less an authority than Virchow, in his celebrated treatise “On
the Nature of Constitutional Syphilitic Affections,” pp. 7-14 (Berlin,
1859), has shown that the hypothesis of Hermann[349] is entirely devoid
of foundation in fact.=
4. =I should feel conscientiously compelled to denounce myself for the
commission of grievous bodily harm if I ventured to-day, after the
accumulated experience of four centuries, to treat a case of syphilis
without mercury.=
What use is it to continue to fight against the disbelief and
superstition which clings to mercury? Why should we for ever be occupied
in contradicting the false accusations brought against this drug? For
four centuries the divine mercury has withstood all attacks, and will
continue to withstand them, until a greatly desired and even better
measure is discovered--=prophylactic immunization against syphilitic
infection=.[350]
How mercury is to be given, whether in the form of the long-prized
“=schmierkur=” (=cure by inunction=), or by =hypodermic injection=, or
by =ordinary internal use=, must be left in individual cases to the
decision of the medical man, for numerous considerations, which can only
be properly weighed by the physician, have to be taken into account. A
mercury cure is a =serious= matter, but always also one which repays all
the trouble that we take. In “En Guérit-on?” Fournier has most admirably
described the wonderful results of a =critically considered and
carefully conducted= mercury cure. I do not, indeed, belong to the
“doctors who build for themselves a house of pure quicksilver,” when
they enter the field against the “French” (= syphilis), as the phrase
runs in Schiller’s work “The Robbers.” I hold by a =reasonable,
measured= use of mercury in the course of the treatment of syphilis, and
I advise a good “=after-treatment=” in addition to the treatment with
mercury.[351] Mercury, when given in moderate but sufficient doses, not
only destroys the syphilitic virus, but also has a very favourable
influence on the general condition, and sometimes even gives rise to an
increase in the number of the red blood-corpuscles. Thus, mercury is not
only not a poison: it is a most valuable =restorative and vitalizing
means=. This is well illustrated by the following case, which came under
my own observation, and which I recommend to the Nature-Healers, in the
hope that it may lead them to revise their views regarding the action of
mercury:
The case was that of an official, thirty years of age, who had been
under my care several times before since the year 1898 for other
troubles (gonorrhœa, etc.), and who was always pale and with hollow
cheeks, in no way giving the impression of possessing a constitution
with strong powers of resistance. Late in the summer he was infected
with syphilis; the attack proved a severe one, running a serious
course, complicated by an extremely painful suppurative inflammation
of the lymphatic vessels of the penis, and accompanied by fever,
lassitude, and a sense of exhaustion. An energetic inunction cure was
immediately begun. Under this not only did the morbid symptoms rapidly
disappear, but there occurred a remarkable change in the general
condition, in the sense of an increase of strength, such as had not
existed before the illness. Notwithstanding slight stomatitis, the
patient during and after the cure =felt stronger and more fit for work
than he ever had before=, and even now this favourable state continues
unaltered, as is manifested above all by the increase in the
body-weight, by the good appearance, etc. =The patient=, who now, one
and a half years after the cure, has had no relapse, =informed me
repeatedly and spontaneously that this delightful improvement in his
health could only be attributed to his syphilis (!) or to the
mercury!=
A =single= mercury cure will suffice, in some cases, to cure syphilis
for ever! Regarding this, we have numerous trustworthy observations. In
most cases, indeed, during the early years relapses occur, and then we
need to use the indispensable mercury cure once more =with care=, and to
employ all the other measures which make up the above-mentioned
“after-treatment,” the supplementary means being, above all, =iodide of
potassium, sulphur= (in the long-celebrated sulphur-baths of Aix,
Nenndorf, etc.) and =arsenic= (first recommended by me); also the water
cure, brine-baths, and iodide-baths, and a visit to the seaside or to
the mountains, and massage, are good accessory means to the cure. Above
all, however, =the State of nutrition= of the patient[352] must always
be kept under consideration, and assisted where necessary, for which
purpose preparations of iron, nutritive preparations like sanatogen, and
milk cures, are of value. =Strict abstinence= from alcohol is always
necessary in the treatment of syphilis. Alcohol has a =very
unfavourable= influence on the syphilitic process, and is often the only
cause of continually recurring relapses of this disease.
The =thorough= treatment of syphilis is a matter of several years,
during which the patient must repeatedly present himself to the
physician for examination, and should any relapse occur, he must be
subjected to renewed treatment. Such thoroughness will invariably be
rewarded. =Attention to detail= will always bear fruit. Syphilis is
=curable=. It is purely fanciful to say that syphilis is never cured,
that it pursues its victims up to the end of life, that it knows no
pardon. That is not true. =Treat= your syphilitic patients, treat them
properly and thoroughly, if necessary for years in succession, and they
will be freed from the disease. “Syphilis,” says Fournier, “is a
misfortune, but it is a misfortune from which complete recovery is
possible.” From the day when the patient becomes aware that he is
suffering from syphilis, he must face the situation “in a calm and manly
fashion,” and must say to himself:
“Now there is to be a fight between syphilis and me. To work,
therefore, and courage! Courage, because science assures me that with
the aid of =mercury=, of =hygiene=, and of =time=, an end will come to
the syphilis, and because science gives me an absolute assurance that
some day I shall be as healthy as I was before, and that I shall again
have the right to a family, that I shall attain the freedom and the
happiness of being a father!”[353]
With these admirable words of the greatest living authority on syphilis,
I close my account of the suppression of syphilis by medical treatment,
and turn to the not less important question of the =management of
gonorrhœa=.
Recent scientific researches, especially those of A. Neisser and E.
Finger, have shown that the infective urethritis of the male produced
by gonococci is by no means the “trifling and childish complaint” which
it was formerly supposed to be, but, on the contrary, is a very serious
and obstinate trouble, often resisting the very best means of treatment,
so that it may =persist for years=, and =remain for years infective=.
Still worse is it as regards gonorrhœa of the female genital organs, the
cure of which is even more difficult, and the consequences of which are
even more disastrous than in the case of the male. If the =physician= is
needed for the cure of syphilis, still more is this the case as regards
gonorrhœa. He only can command the scientific methods, and the very
complicated technique of the treatment of gonorrhœa. He only can
undertake the =indispensable= control of the treatment by means of
=microscopic= and other methods of investigation. Every cobbler thinks
he can cure gonorrhœa, and yet it is this disease which, even more than
syphilis, demands the most precise knowledge of the local anatomical and
pathological conditions. Blaschko rightly says:
“While no one gives a damaged watch to a baker to mend, or a torn coat
to a tinsmith, every one seems to believe that in order to restore the
most valuable gift of humanity, health, it is unnecessary to possess
the profoundest knowledge of the human body, and to understand the
nature and the causes of the disease. Anyone who has come to grief in
his ordinary profession, but who understands how with a brazen voice
to denounce the so-called ‘medicine of the schools,’ and to praise
with sufficient confidence his own successes, is supposed to possess
the wonderful power, without any exact knowledge at all, of charming
all the illnesses of mankind out of the world.”
Gonorrhœa is also a =curable= disease, though curable often with great
difficulty. We see this from the fact that, notwithstanding the
extraordinarily wide diffusion of gonorrhœa (for a far greater number of
infections with gonorrhœa occur than of infections with syphilis), still
ultimately the =majority= of the men, and a large proportion of the
women, infected with gonorrhœa are =completely cured= of their trouble.
The treatment of gonorrhœa is a complicated affair. =Within the first
two days=, by the injection of =powerful caustic agents=, we are
sometimes able to cut the matter short and to put an end completely to
the gonococci. In every case the patient, as soon as he perceives a
discharge, though not yet purulent, from the urethra, should
=immediately= consult a physician, in order to determine the nature of
his disease, which, in the majority of cases, will be found to be true
gonorrhœa. If it is not possible to abort the gonorrhœa, then the
disease will have to run its course. The best measure, whenever
possible, is =rest in bed= for a week or two, in association with a
=mild, unstimulating diet=, and the =absolute prohibition of all
alcoholic beverages=--the last is indispensable throughout the duration
of the gonorrhœa--the drinking of uva ursi tea, and, if the inflammatory
symptoms are severe, the application of cold compresses to the penis.
Only when the first more severe symptoms have passed away, by which
time, owing to the reaction of the urethral mucous membrane, a large
proportion of the exciters of the disease will already have been
expelled, is it time to begin =injections= or =irrigations= of the
=urethra=, containing medicaments the nature of which must be left to
the decision of the experienced =physician=, who will regard each
individual case on its own merits. If rest in bed is not possible, the
patient must wear a so-called “=suspensory=” bandage, in order to give
as much rest as possible to the testicles and the epididymis, which are
gravely endangered in every attack of gonorrhœa. If, as often happens,
gonorrhœa ascends to the posterior part of the urethra, or to the
bladder, or to the prostate, or if, finally, it becomes chronic, then
special methods of treatment, with =internal medicines, with local
cauterization, massage, distension, medicated bougies, baths=, etc., are
needful. The cure will ensue very gradually; relapses are frequent; even
cessation of the discharge is no certain sign of cure, as the presence
in the still turbid urine of “threads” containing gonococci sufficiently
proves. Only when the urine has become perfectly clear, and any threads
which it may contain are shown by repeated search to contain no more
gonococci; when also the prostate, a favourite seat of the last remnants
of gonorrhœa, is free from inflammation, can the cure be regarded as
complete. Even more difficult is the determination of a cure in women.
But persistency in the treatment, and frequently repeated examinations,
will lead also in women to the desired goal, or, at any rate, will
overcome the capacity for spreading the infection.
In the campaign against venereal diseases by the methods of medical
treatment, the =facilitation= of treatment for the =great masses of
impecunious= persons, for the proletariat, is of great value. For them,
above all, the provision of _Krankenkassen_[354] is needed, and it is
very satisfactory to note that during recent years the Krankenkassen
have especially directed their attention to venereal diseases, since A.
Blaschko,[355] A. Neisser,[356] R. Ledermann,[357] and Albert Kohn[358]
drew attention to the duties of Krankenkassen in this relationship in a
number of admirable works. Krankenkassen are in a position to obtain
exact statistics regarding venereal diseases; to diffuse information,
verbally and in writing, to the widest extent among their members; to
facilitate hospital treatment, and treatment by specialists; to give
medical aid as required to infected relatives of the insured; to carry
out regularly every year, once or twice, a medical examination of all
members, and to distribute among all these writings on the prophylaxis
of venereal diseases. The question also of payment on the part of the
patient requires new regulations as regards venereal diseases.[359]
Finally, it has been recommended that, in association with the
Krankenkassen there should be founded “=daily sanatoria=” (Neisser),
“=work sanatoria=” (Saalfeld), “=ambulatory places for treatment=”
(Ledermann), and “=convalescent homes=” (Stern), for members of
Krankenkassen suffering from venereal disease, and for insured persons
similarly affected. All these institutions would, moreover, be valuable
to the community at large.
What admirable results are obtainable by such a =systematic= treatment
of as far as possible =all= the venereal patients throughout an entire
country has been shown by the astonishing decline in the number of cases
of venereal diseases in Sweden and Norway, and in Bosnia, where a
gratuitous treatment of all such patients at the cost of the state has
been introduced. Thus the =organized campaign= against venereal
diseases, which during recent years has been initiated in all the
civilized countries of Europe, has led more particularly to efforts in
the direction of the sufficient treatment and speedy cure of =recent=
syphilis and =recent= gonorrhœa.
* * * * *
We pass now to the consideration of the =third= factor in the campaign
against venereal disease, which comprises the duty of the =state=, the
task of =social hygiene=, and the task of =public pedagogy=.
The =foundation= for the suppression of venereal diseases by state
effort consists in a knowledge of the =extent of the diffusion= of these
diseases; we need, that is to say, =accurate statistics regarding
venereal diseases=.
It is once more the great service of Blaschko to have been the first in
Germany to work on these lines.[360]
Dismissing from consideration the distribution of venereal diseases in
countries outside of Europe, regarding which he gives interesting
reports, we find that the European conditions are of such a nature that
the large towns, the centres of industry and manufacture, garrison
towns, and university towns, are most severely affected; that the
smaller provincial towns suffer less; that the agricultural population
is comparatively free from this disease, with the exception of the
uncultivated country districts of Russia and of the Balkan States, where
the country people suffer from syphilis to a terrible extent. No exact
statistical data are at present available regarding the diffusion of
venereal diseases in the individual countries of Europe. The best
measure of the prevalence of these diseases is afforded by the figures
for the different armies. From these we learn that Denmark, Germany,
German Austria, and Switzerland, show the most favourable conditions;
next come Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, North and Middle Italy.
Worst of all are the conditions in Southern Italy, Greece, Turkey,
Russia, and--England. These army statistics are, however, insufficient,
for, as a matter of fact, =England= is most favourably placed in respect
of the diffusion of venereal diseases. The most exact reports come from
the Scandinavian countries, from Norway and Denmark, in which for
several years =all physicians= have kept a list of all the infective
diseases treated by them, as they are compelled =every week= to make a
return to the Board of Public Health. According to these reports, it
appears that venereal diseases in Copenhagen constitute the greater part
of such diseases in the entire country; but in the period between 1876
and 1895 these diseases have notably =declined= in frequency in
Copenhagen, and all venereal diseases have shared in this decline;
gonorrhœa constitutes 70 % =of all= cases of venereal disease. With
regard to the diffusion of infection, it appears from the Copenhagen
statistics that =one= woman with venereal disease serves to transmit it
to =four= men; on the other hand, of =four= men with venereal disease,
=one= only will transmit that disease to a woman. On the average, there
are infected with venereal disease every year 16 to 20 % of all young
men between the ages of twenty and thirty years; with gonorrhœa 1 in 8
are infected; with syphilis 1 in 55 are infected. In these last ten
years, for every 100 young men living, there have been 119 infections
during ten years; that is to say, =on the average every one has been
infected once, and a great many have been infected more than once=; in
the same period of ten years, for every 100 young men, there have been
18 infected with syphilis--that is to say, 1 for every 5·5.
Especially valuable also are the figures which Blaschko obtained in 1898
from the carefully kept books of a large mercantile Krankenkasse whose
operations were diffused throughout Germany; these figures also give the
result of an inquiry regarding venereal diseases amongst workmen,
waiting-maids, secret prostitutes, and students. The result of these
statistics, as regards Berlin, are given briefly in the following table:
+---------------------------------------------------------+
| |
|============================== Secret Prostitutes, 30 %. |
| |
|========================= Students, 25 %. |
| |
|================ Shop Employees, 16 %. |
| |
|========= Workmen, 9 %. |
| |
|==== Soldiers, 4 %. |
| |
+---------------------------------------------------------+
VENEREAL DISEASES AFFECTING VARIOUS CLASSES OF THE POPULATION OF BERLIN
(AFTER BLASCHKO).
According to these statistics, the diffusion of venereal diseases among
=shop employees=, =students=, and =secret prostitutes= (chiefly
=barmaids= and =waitresses=), is the greatest; it is much =less= among
=workmen= and =soldiers=. It further appears, from Blaschko’s inquiry,
that =of the men who entered on marriage for the first time when above
the age of thirty years, each one had, on the average, had gonorrhœa
twice=, and =about one in four or five had been infected with syphilis=.
Wilhelm Erb, in Heidelberg, obtained similar results.
Still more remarkable were the results of the statistical investigation
which was carried out for the =entire Kingdom of Prussia= by the
Prussian Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Instruction on
April 30, 1900.[361]
According to this investigation, it appeared that on this day, in
Prussia, there were 41,000 persons suffering from venereal disease,
among whom 11,000 were infected with recent syphilis; in Berlin, on the
same day, there were 11,600 cases of venereal disease, among whom 3,000
were infected with recent syphilis. The general relations are shown in
the following table:
+------------------------------------------------+
| |
|=== The whole of Prussia, 0·28 %. |
| |
|============== Berlin, 1·42 %. |
| |
|========== Towns over 100,000 inhabitants, 1 %. |
| |
|====== Towns over 30,000 inhabitants, 0·58 %. |
| |
|===== Towns below 30,000 inhabitants, 0·45 %. |
| |
|== The Army, 0·15 %. |
| |
+------------------------------------------------+
VENEREAL DISEASES AFFECTING THE MALE POPULATION OF PRUSSIA, APRIL 30,
1900 (AFTER BLASCHKO).
Thus, for every 10,000 adult men there were on this day persons
suffering from venereal diseases to the following numbers: in Berlin,
142; in the remaining large towns, 100; in the smaller towns, 50; and in
the whole of Prussia, on the average, 28. Naturally the figures should
in reality be larger, for of the physicians to whom inquiries were sent,
only 63 % returned an answer. Moreover, the =annual= figure of cases is
a very much larger one. Kirchner[362] assumes that =every day= in
Prussia more than =100,000 individuals=--that is to say, about 3 per
mille--are suffering from a transmissible venereal disease, and he
estimates the damage to the national property by typhoid fever as about
8 million marks annually, but that from venereal diseases as not less
than =ninety million marks annually=. In these reports of April 30,
1900, the ratio of men to women suffering from recent syphilis was as
3 : 1.
In order to obtain more exact information regarding the diffusion of
venereal diseases, and the actual number of those affected by them, it
is of very great importance that there should be a =revision= of the
duty of medical men in respect of the =notification of diseases=, and
also in respect of the duty of =professional secrecy=.[363]
This latter question is also of importance in respect of the prevention
of venereal infection in married life. (The question of syphilitic
infection of married women by their husbands has recently been
considered by Alfred Fournier: “Syphilis in Honourable Women.”)
In addition to the question of the diffusion and frequency of venereal
diseases, the greatest interest attaches to the =sources of dangerous
infections=--that is to say, the question where men and women most
frequently contract venereal disease.
Here also Blaschko has obtained interesting information; he states:
Of 487 syphilitic men, the disease was acquired by 395 (81·1 %) from
professional prostitutes (officially inscribed or secret); 23 (4·7 %)
from waitresses and barmaids; 23 (4·9 %) from their “intimate”; 45
(9·2 %) from casual acquaintances, shop-girls, or workwomen.
According to this report, it appears that =prostitution=, public and
secret (under which heading the waitresses and “casual acquaintances”
must be numbered), forms the =principal focus= of venereal infection.
And that wild sexual intercourse is here almost exclusively to blame is
shown by the following statistics, given by Blaschko:
Of 67 syphilitic wives, almost all the wives of workmen, 64 were
infected by their =husbands=; whereas, =on the contrary=, of 106
husbands, 7 only acquired the disease from their wives; the remaining 99
acquired it by =extra-conjugal sexual intercourse=, either before or
after marriage.
Another very valuable set of statistics dealing with the sources of
infection has been published by Heinrich Loeb.[364]
These relate to the conditions in Mannheim. It appears that the sources
of infection were as follows:
Waitresses and barmaids 155 instances.
Maidservants, cooks 67 „
Shop-girls 65 „
Middle-class girls 29 „
Seamstresses and embroidery workers 27 „
Chambermaids 20 „
Factory workwomen 17 „
Artistes, singers, and ballet-girls 16 „
Wife or betrothed 12 „
Tailoresses and modistes 11 „
Ironers 9 „
Book-keepers 4 „
Widows 4 „
Country girls 3 „
Mistresses 3 „
---
Total 442
Here, as we see, the chief types of =secret= prostitution, the
=waitresses= and =barmaids=, play the principal part; next, but a long
way after, come maidservants and shop-girls. This, however, does not
amount to saying that public prostitution is less dangerous. We know
that a prostitute who has never been infected with venereal disease is
something very rarely seen; that prostitutes under regulation are almost
all, especially when still quite young, in an infective state, and that
they serve just as much as secret prostitutes for the diffusion of
venereal disease. It is a well-known fact that youthful prostitutes are
=more dangerous= than women who have long practised prostitution,
because the former are all suffering from more or less recent infection,
and both gonorrhœa and syphilis are present in them in the stages in
which they are still strongly infective. H. Berger bases upon
statistical investigations[365] his belief that red-haired girls have
the most delicate epithelium, fall sick most rapidly and in the greatest
numbers; dark haired women at first suffer less. After they have been
prostitutes for some time, there is no important difference between
blonde, brown, and black-haired women; but black-haired prostitutes are,
in fact, more inclined to infection =later= in their career, because
they are more in request.
Now that we have learned that at the present day =prostitution= remains
the principal source of venereal infection, the following question
immediately demands an answer: =What can the state do in order to remove
these sources of infection? and have the measures which the state has
hitherto put into operation been of any use in this direction?= To put
it shortly, what part has been played by the state =regulation= of
prostitution, as hitherto practised, in the campaign against venereal
diseases?
With Schmölder,[366] we understand by “regulation” the following
practice, which is what obtains in the majority of civilized countries:
The police keep a list in which the girls and women regarded by them as
prostitutes have their names entered. The “inscribed” (_inscrites_)
receive a “_licentia stupri_”--that is to say, =the permission to
practise professional fornication under continual observation on
the part of the police= (the renowned “moral control”[367]), which
is associated with a number of commands, prohibitions, and
regulations--above all, with the =necessity of submitting to medical
examination at definitely stated intervals=, and, where necessary, to
=compulsory medical treatment=. At the same time, public prostitution on
the part of those who are not inscribed is suppressed as much as
possible. Berger has admirably described (“Prostitution in Hanover,” pp.
1-19) the methods of regulation and their consequences. Above all,
however, have Blaschko, Schmölder, and Neisser considered the modes of
regulation customary at the present day from the moral, legal, and
medical points of view, and have in part entirely condemned them
(Blaschko and Schmölder), in part declared them to be gravely in need of
reform (Neisser).[368]
Among those who have recently discussed the question of the regulation
of prostitution, we may mention Anna Pappritz,[369] who condemns the
practice; Clausmann, who is in favour of it;[370] Friedrich Hammer, also
in favour of it;[371] and, finally, S. Bettmann, who leaves the question
open.[372]
In our consideration of the coercive system of regulation, we take a
=single standpoint=--namely, that of its possible value for the
suppression of venereal diseases. Some demand the =abolition= of
regulation on ethical and humanitarian grounds, and we do not wish in
any way to make light of these grounds. But they could not be decisive,
if, as an actual fact, regulation had an effect either in diminishing
the prevalence of venereal diseases or in checking prostitution; but, in
truth, the =reverse= is the case!
Schmölder[373] has shown beyond dispute that the compulsory inscription
of prostitutes, introduced from France, is in our country an utterly
=illegal= measure, arbitrarily enforced by the police. It has been amply
proved that this illegal compulsory inscription has actually made
prostitutes of many girls who had no inclination to permanent
professional prostitution; that this method =produces artificial
prostitutes=. What errors of judgment, what abuses of power, occur on
the part of the police, in connexion with this compulsory inscription!
How often does the inscription result from a denunciation made on
grounds of private spite! The “Committee of Fifteen,” constituted for
the study of prostitution in New York, declares in its report:
“Men with political insight are of opinion that every limitation of
the freedom of the individual is in itself an evil, and that such a
limitation can only be justified in cases in which the good derived
from the infringement can really be estimated at a very high
valuation. A system which permits the police, simply on grounds of
suspicion, to arrest a citizen, to submit him to an injurious
examination, only with the aim of discovering a disease he is
suspected to have, and then to put him into prison, on the suspicion
that he might have indulged in immoral intercourse if he had been left
at liberty, cannot possibly be regarded as harmonizing with the
principles of personal freedom.”[374]
Blaschko and Fiaux have proved that regulation concerns only a =small
fraction= of prostitutes, usually the older ones; whereas the
=beginners=, who are precisely those most dangerous in respect of
venereal infection, and, further, the army of =secret prostitutes=,
=half prostitutes=, =occasional prostitutes=, and the =half-world=,
remain free from regulation--are probably left free deliberately--and
anyhow could not possibly be supervised, on account of the enormous cost
of supervision. In Berlin, speaking generally, only =one-fifth= part of
the girls arrested are subjected to regulation, four-fifths are simply
“warned and discharged”; and even of this fifth part, in reality a large
percentage does not come under control because “escape from the lists”
renders permanent observation impossible. Fiaux proves that =more than
50 %= of the medical examinations which ought to have been made on the
4,000 women under regulation in Berlin during the years 1888 to 1901,
=were in fact neglected=.[375]
It is =certain= that regulated prostitution is =more dangerous= from the
point of view of public health than free prostitution. The prostitute
remaining under surveillance is in constant fear of compulsory treatment
in the lock hospital, and therefore endeavours to conceal her illness
=as long as possible, or temporarily to avoid medical examination
altogether=. The free prostitute has a personal interest in becoming
well again as soon as possible, and generally goes voluntarily and at
once to seek treatment from a physician. Thus it happens that, among the
regulated prostitutes, the number of those infected =appears=
surprisingly small. In addition, we have to consider the =inadequacy of
the medical examination=, because the number of the physicians and the
time assigned to them are too small. And whilst it appears to be a fact
that every third prostitute is infected with gonorrhœa, in Berlin,
during the year 1889, as the result of official examination under
regulation, only one prostitute in 200 was declared infected, and in
1884 only 1 in 1,873. Moreover, =very many= infected prostitutes under
compulsory medical treatment are, as Blaschko proves, allowed to resume
their professional occupation in an uncured state, and to diffuse their
illness freely once more. The figures given by Blaschko speak very
clearly on this point:
+---------------+-------------+-------------------------+
| | | _Annual Percentage of |
| | | Prostitutes attacked |
| _Place._ | _Date._ | by Syphilis._ |
| | +------------+------------+
| | | Regulated. | Free. |
+---------------+-------------+------------+------------+
|Paris | 1878-1887 | 12·2 | 7·0 |
|Brussels | 1887-1889 | 25·0 | 9·0 |
|St. Petersburg | 1890 | 33·5 | 12·0 |
|Antwerp | 1882-1884 | 51·3 | 7·7 |
+---------------+-------------+------------+------------+
From this it is clear that the =abolition= of the regulation of
prostitutes will not have an unfavourable, but, on the contrary, will
have a thoroughly =favourable=, influence in respect of the frequency of
venereal diseases. The conditions in England and Norway show this very
clearly. In Christiania, after the abolition of regulation in the year
1888, syphilis declined in frequency--in the first place, because the
number of girls who applied for treatment increased, whilst prior to the
abolition of regulation they had concealed their illness in order to
avoid falling into the hands of the police; and in the second place,
because now the fear of venereal infection kept many young men from
having intercourse with prostitutes, whereas previously they had
erroneously believed that the “control” would free them from the danger
of venereal infection. The same was the case in London, where there is
no regulation; the frequency of venereal disease has decreased because
young men now avoid intercourse with prostitutes as much as possible. In
France, the country in which regulation was first introduced, the
commission formed for the study of prostitution came to the conclusion
that “=regulation of prostitutes should be abolished=.” The principal
reason for which the police continue to advocate the preservation of the
system of regulation--namely, that they have an interest in the matter
on account of the =intimate connexion between many prostitutes and
criminality=--will not bear examination. It is true enough that
=soutenage=[376] is inseparable from prostitution. Moreover, =the world
of criminals= is very near to prostitution, in the first place, because
the prostitute also has need of a man on whom she can lean, who can be
something to her from the =personal= point of view, to whom she is not
simply a chattel;[377] and, in the second place, because the prostitute
is, like the criminal, =despised and defamed=--she shares with the
criminal the pariah nature. Lombroso’s doctrine that prostitution is
throughout equivalent to criminality is certainly not justified. =It is
only by the outward circumstances of their life that the bulk of
prostitutes are driven into intimate relations with criminality.= And
among these outward circumstances, =regulation=, and the =expulsion= of
prostitutes from honourable society (which is a necessary part of
regulation) play the principal rôle! For this reason, if for this reason
alone, regulation must be abolished, because then a strong supplement to
criminality from the circles of prostitution would be cut off.
Even before investigators had become convinced of the uselessness and
danger of regulation the cry arose: “=Away with the brothels!=” We have
already alluded to the continuous =decline= in the number of brothels in
all large towns. In 1841 there were in Paris still 235 brothels (to
1,200,000 inhabitants); in 1900 there were only 48 brothels (to
3,600,000 inhabitants); and for St. Petersburg and other large towns a
similar decline in the number of brothels can be established,
notwithstanding the fact that everywhere the population has markedly
increased. This proves that the brothels no longer correspond to any
real need.[378] At the present day, owing to the great development of
intercourse in modern times, brothels are a public calamity; they bring
the quarter of the town in which they exist into disrepute, and deprive
the neighbourhood of its proper monetary value. Moreover, the time is
past for slave-holding on the part of the brothel-owner. The existence
of brothels favours the traffic in girls (the “White Slave Trade”),
encourages sexual perversities, and increases the diffusion of venereal
diseases. The prostitute living in a brothel is sometimes compelled to
have intercourse with ten or twelve men in a single day, and is thus
pre-eminently exposed to venereal infection, all the more because she
must admit the embraces of =every= man who pays the brothel-keeper
money; whilst the prostitute living freely can at least refuse to have
anything to do with a man who appears to her to be ill. According to
Lecour, Mireur, Diday, and Sperk, prostitutes in brothels suffer from
syphilis about =three times as often= as free prostitutes.[379]
Other modifications of brothel life, such as the so-called “=controlled
streets=,”[380] the best known of which are in Bremen[381]--that is to
say, streets closed to ordinary traffic, the houses of which are
inhabited only by prostitutes under control, but the girls being in
other respects free and not living under the domination of a
brothel-keeper; also the “=Kasernierung=”[382] of prostitutes, their
confinement to particular streets, or special “quarters” of the town
(“Dirnenquartiere”)[383]--are all to be rejected on the same grounds.
The whole nature of brothel life, and the very serious dangers it
involves, have been discussed in excellent works by E. von Düring,[384]
Henriette Fürth,[385] Karl Nötzel,[386] and Martin Bruck.[387] They
illumine the whole question, and provide sufficient grounds for the
condemnation of brothels.
A few authors, however, continue to advocate the preservation of
brothels, and some of these wish to enforce medical examination, not
only of prostitutes, but also of their masculine clients. This
proposition is made, for example, by Ernst Kromayer in his work, which,
notwithstanding many Utopian ideas, is nevertheless very stimulating,
“The Eradication of Syphilis,” pp. 67, 68 (Berlin, 1898). Von Düring, in
his criticism of these ideas, rightly points out that this
recommendation would be quite useless in practice, because, in the first
place, only a small proportion of men visit brothels at all. In the
second place, in the hurry in these resorts no proper examination could
be undertaken. In the third place, the doctors who were to be appointed
as a kind of medical porters to brothels, would not easily be found to
accept such situations. Lassar, who answers this last criticism, is of
opinion that the brothel-master, or anybody with a little experience,
could easily undertake this examination in the case of men.[388]
But these men would probably also decline the office; and even if they
were willing, it is very doubtful if they would be in a position to make
the suggested examinations, which, after all, require =real medical
skill=; and, finally, the only result would be--to increase the number
of quacks. Therefore, this idea of the examination of the male visitors
to brothels is Utopian.
No, the true hope lies in =absolute freedom=; in =relieving prostitution
from the oppression of the police=; in its gradual =separation from
criminality=; in--I am not afraid of the word--in an “=ennoblement=” of
prostitution.[389] The “prostitute” (German _Dirne_ = drab) must
disappear, and the “human being” must reawaken. The prostituted woman
must be readmitted into the social community. No more coercion! =Free
and voluntary treatment=, in polyclinics[390] and hospitals; the
“=rescue=” of youthful prostitutes,[391] not in the prison-like
“=Magdalen Homes=,” but by means of ethically instructive influence
=from human being to human being=, of the value of which the “Letters to
Prostitutes” of the noble philanthropist Frau Eggers-Smidt,[392] and
also the experiences of the Salvation Army,[393] give such admirable
evidence.
Very aptly, also, Kromayer has shown to what an extent a change in our
present attitude towards sexual intercourse outside the conditions of
coercive marriage, the removal of the stamp of infamy from such
intercourse, would limit prostitution, and therewith also limit venereal
diseases.[394] This is as clear as daylight. But, unfortunately, those
very persons who declare the existing conditions in respect of
prostitution to be absolutely intolerable will not admit its truth.
The misery of the life of these unhappy creatures must be relieved, but
=we= must do it =ourselves=, and soon; for they are not in a position to
do so. The last, the highest goal of the campaign against venereal
disease is the humanization of the prostitute.[395]
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE.--In the essay on “The Woman’s Question” in the
sociological section of his work, “The Ethic of Free-Thought,” Karl
Pearson discusses the question of Prostitution in relation to the
Woman’s Question at large. His remarks have especial interest in view
of what is said above about “the ennoblement of prostitution” and “the
humanization of the prostitute,” and it seems expedient to quote the
passage at length (_op. cit._, 1888, pp. 379-382).--TRANSLATOR.
“The emancipation of woman, while placing her in a position of social
responsibility, will make it her duty to investigate many matters of
which she is at present frequently assumed to be ignorant. It may be
doubted whether the identification of purity and ignorance has had
wholly good effects in the past; indeed, it has frequently been the
false cry with which men have sought to hide their own anti-social
conduct. It is certain, however, that it cannot last in the future,
and man will have to face the fact that woman’s views and social
action with regard to many sex-problems may widely differ from his
own. It is of the utmost importance that woman, not only on account of
the part she already plays in the education of the young, but also
because of the social responsibilities her emancipation must bring,
should have a full knowledge of the laws of sex. Every attempt
hitherto to grapple with prostitution has been a failure. What will
women do when they thoroughly grasp the problem, and have a voice in
the attitude the state should assume in regard to it? At present
hundreds do not know of its existence; thousands only know of it to
despise those who earn their living by it; one in ten thousand has
examined the causes which lead to it, has felt that degradation, if
there be any, lies not in the prostitute, but in the society where it
exists; not in the women of the streets, but in the thousands of women
in society, who are ignorant of the problem, ignore it, or fear to
face it. What will be the result of woman’s action in the matter? Can
it possibly be effectual, or will it merely tend to embitter the
relations of men and women? Possibly an expression of woman’s opinion
on this point in society and the press would do much, but then it must
be an educated opinion, one which recognizes facts and knows the
difficulties of the problem. An appeal to chivalry, to a Christian
dogma, to a Biblical text, will hardly avail. The description we have
of Calvin’s Geneva shows that puritanic suppression is wholly idle.
What form will be taken by the reasoned action of women, cognizant of
historical and sexualogical fact?
“Perhaps it may be that women, when they fully grasp the problem, will
despair, as many men do, of its solution. They may remark that
prostitution has existed in nearly all historic times, and among
nearly all races of men. It has existed as an institution as long as
monogamic marriage has existed; it may be itself the outcome of that
marriage. I do not know whether any trace of a like promiscuity has
been found in the animals nearest allied to man--I believe not. The
periodic instinct has probably preserved them from it. How mankind
came to lose the periodic instinct, and how that loss may possibly be
related to the solely human institution of marriage, are problems not
without interest. On the one hand, it has been asserted that
prostitution is a logical outcome of our _present_ social relations,
while, on the other hand, it is held to be a survival of matriarchal
licence, and not a _sine qua non_ of all forms of human society. There
is very considerable evidence to show that a large percentage of women
are driven to prostitution by absolute want, or by the extremities to
which a seduced woman is forced by the society which casts her out.
This point is important. It may, perhaps, be that our social system,
quite as much as man’s supposed needs, keeps prostitution alive. The
frequency with which prostitutes, for the sake of their own living,
seduce comparative boys, may be as much a cause of the evil as male
passion itself. The socialists hold the sale of a woman’s person to be
directly associated with the monopoly of surplus labour. Is the
emancipated woman likely to adopt this view? and if so shall we not
have a wide-reaching social reconstruction forced upon us? That
emancipated woman would strive for a vast economic reorganization, as
the only means of preserving the self-respect and independence of her
sex, is a possibility with the gravest and most wide-reaching
consequences. We cannot emancipate woman without placing her in a
position of political and social influence equal to man’s. It may well
be that she will regard economic and sexual problems from a very
different standpoint, and the result will infallibly lead to the
formation of a woman’s party, and to a more or less conscious struggle
between the sexes. Would this end in an increased social stability or
another subjection of sex?
“Woman may, however, conclude that the alternative is true--that
prostitution is not the outcome of our present social organisation,
but a feature of all forms of human society. She must, then, treat it
as a necessary evil or as a necessary good. In the former case she
will at least insist on an equal social stigma attaching to both sexes
if she does not demand, as in the instance of any other form of
anti-social conduct, so far as practicable its legal repression. In
the latter case--that is, if its existence really tends in some way to
the welfare or stability of society--women will have to admit that
prostitution is an honourable profession; they cannot shirk that
conclusion, bitter as it may appear to some. The ‘social outcast’
would then have to be recognized as filling a social function, and the
problem would reduce to the amelioration of her life, and to her
elevation in the social scale. Either there is a means of abolishing
prostitution, or all participators must be treated alike as
anti-social, or the prostitute is an honourable woman--no other
possibility suggests itself. Society has hitherto failed to find a
remedy, perhaps because only man has sought for one; woman, when she
for the time fully grasps the problem, must be prepared for one, or
must recognize the alternatives. There cannot be a doubt, however,
that in a matter so closely concerning her personal dignity she will
take action, and that, if only in this one matter, her freedom will
raise questions, which many would prefer to ignore, and which, when
raised, will undoubtedly touch principles apparently fundamental to
our existing social organization.”
[330] See note to p. 390.
[331] Parent-Duchatelet, “The Moral Corruption of the Female Sex in
Paris,” vol. ii., p. 234 (Leipzig, 1837). Similarly, Julius Donarth
remarks (“The Beginnings of the Human Spirit,” p. 19; Stuttgart,
1898): “=Syphilis and alcoholism= can by social arrangement and
carefully adapted measures =be suppressed just as much as plague and
cholera=.”
[332] The literature of this subject is very extensive. In addition to
a comprehensive work dealing with the older literature, by J. K.
Proksch, “The Prevention of Venereal Diseases” (Vienna, 1872), I must
mention the following: E. Lang, “The Prevention of Venereal Diseases”
(Vienna, 1894); M. Joseph, “Prophylaxis of Cutaneous and Venereal
Diseases” (Munich, 1900); Neuberger, “The Prophylaxis of Venereal
Diseases,” pp. 35-37 (Munich and Berlin, 1904); Felix Block, “How
shall We protect Ourselves against Venereal Diseases and their Evil
Consequences?” second edition (Leipzig, 1905); E. Boureau, “Conseils
Pratiques à la Jeunesse pour Éviter les Avaries” (Paris, 1905); Suarez
de Mendoza, “Conseils de Prophylaxie Sanitaire et Morale” (Paris,
1906); same author, “ABC à l’Usage des Mères de Famille pour la
Défense de Leurs Foyers contre les Grands Fléaux du XXe Siècle:
Tuberculose, Avariose [= Syphilis], Neissérose [= Gonorrhœa],
Alcoolisme, Mortalité Infantile” (Paris, 1905); same author, “Avariose
des Innocents” (Paris, 1905).
[333] _Cf_. also the valuable remarks of Robert Hessen, “Cleanliness
or Morality?” published in _Die Zukunft_, June 9, 1906, pp. 367-377
(also separately printed in Munich, 1906).
[334] Otto Neustätter, “The Public Recommendation of Protective
Measures,” published in _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases_, vol. v., No. 3, pp. 225-227 (Leipzig, 1905).
[335] H. Ferdy, “The History of the Cæcal Condom,” published in _The
Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1905, vol. iii.,
No. 4, pp. 144-147.
[336] _Cf._ in this connexion the admirable essay, distinguished by a
critical spirit, of R. de Campagnolle, “The Value of the Modern
Prophylaxis of Gonorrhœa by Means of Instillations,” published in _The
Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1904, vol. iii.,
Nos. 1-4, pp. 1-31, 51-115, 148 (with a complete bibliography).
[337] In place of these solutions, Cronquist (“Contributions to the
Personal Prophylaxis against Gonorrhœa,” published in _Medizinische
Klinik_, No. 10, 1906) recommends the use of little rods or bougies
containing 2 per cent. of =albargin=, which melt from the body-heat
when introduced into the urethra (these are sold under the trade name
of “antigon-rods”); they are used, like the solutions, immediately
after coitus. The advantage they possess is their greater durability.
[338] The same idea had already been advanced in Germany by Eduard
Richter and S. Behrmann.
[339] E. Metchnikoff, “The Prophylaxis of Syphilis,” published in
_Medizinische Klinik_, 1906, No. 15, pp. 372, 373. _Cf._ also Paul
Maisonneuve, “Experimentation sur la Prophylaxie de la Syphilis”
(Paris, 1906); and A. Neisser. “Experimental Research regarding
Syphilis,” pp. 81-83 (Berlin, 1906).
[340] O. Neustätter, “The Public Recommendation of Protective
Measures,” published in _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases_, 1905, vol. iv., pp. 203-252.
[341] G. Bernhard, “The Criminal Law and Protective Measures against
Venereal Diseases,” _ibid._, pp. 253-273.
[342] F. von Liszt, “Legal Protection against Dangers to Health from
Venereal Diseases,” published in _The Journal for the Suppression of
Venereal Diseases_, 1903, vol. i., pp. 1-25.
[343] Von Bar, “The Need for a Special Law against Blameworthy
Venereal Infection,” _ibid._, pp. 64-72.
[344] R. Schmölder, “Criminal and Civil Juridicial Significance of
Venereal Diseases,” _ibid._, pp. 73-106.
[345] Albert Reibmayr, “The Immunization of Families by Inheritable
Diseases (Tuberculosis, Lues, Mental Disorders),” p. 17 (Leipzig and
Vienna, 1899).
[346] This conception of “partial syphilization” of our race appears
somewhat vague. If we take care to think clearly, and in terms of
exact biological knowledge, we shall see that--apart from a
spontaneous loss of intensity on the part of the syphilitic virus (of
which we have no precise knowledge whatever)--the only known way of
accounting for syphilis having become milder is by natural selection,
by the death of those who suffered most severely from the disease.
Now, in 400 years, ten or twelve human generations, there has hardly
been time for the development of immunity to a disease to which at
most a small fraction only of the population has ever been exposed. It
appears to me, however, that we may reasonably doubt the alleged
decline in the severity of syphilis. It must be remembered that the
entire absence of mercurial treatment at first, and the misuse of that
specific for many years after its value had been proved, will account
for much in respect of the apparent greater virulence of medieval as
compared with modern syphilis. (See also p. 356, and footnote to that
page referring to the writings of Archdall Reid).--TRANSLATOR.
[347] Alfred Fournier, “The Treatment and Prophylaxis of Syphilis.”
One vol. Rebman, London.
[348] _Cf._ Iwan Bloch, “Personal Reminiscences of my Lecturing
Journey this Year,” published in _Medizinische Klinik_, 1906, No. 10.
[349] Hermann is a fanatical _medical_ opponent of mercury. There are,
in fact, such oddities. They are very rare birds in the medical world.
[350] Recently R. Kaufmann has collected in a small readable essay the
scientific views of the present day, “The Therapeutic Use of Mercury”
(Leipzig, 1906). I warmly recommend this book to all who are
interested in the question.
[351] _Cf._ Iwan Bloch, “The After-Treatment of Syphilis,” published
in _Medizinische Klinik_, 1905, No. 4, pp. 88-91.
[352] _Cf._ Iwan Bloch, “Nutritive Therapeutics in Cases of Syphilis,”
published in _Medizinische Klinik_, 1905, No. 18, pp. 442-446.
[353] Alfred Fournier, “En Guérit-on?” pp. 95, 96 (Paris, 1906).
[354] “=Krankenkassen.=”--I have to employ the German term, since in
England we do not possess the institution, nor even the name. In
Germany there is a general system of insurance against illness, to
which workmen have to contribute a proportion of their wages, the fund
being supplemented by contributions from the employers of labour. When
ill the workman applies to the _Krankenkasse_ for the necessary
medical advice and treatment.--TRANSLATOR.
[355] A. Blaschko, “The Treatment of Venereal Diseases in
Krankenkassen” (Berlin, 1890).
[356] A. Neisser, “Krankenkassen and the Campaign against Venereal
Diseases,” published in _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases_, 1904, vol. ii., pp. 161-169, 181-194, 221-247.
[357] R. Ledermann, “Do the Provisions of the Law for Insurance
against Sickness Provide for the Cure of Venereal Disease?” _ibid._,
1905, vol. iii., pp. 449-463.
[358] Albert Kohn, “Should Krankenkassen send Delegates to Hygienic
Congresses?” _ibid._, 1906, vol. v., pp. 121-130.
[359] Rudolf Lennhoff, in an address on February 8, 1907, to the local
group of Berlin of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases on “Venereal Diseases and Social Legislation,” drew especial
attention to the necessity of enrolling in the scheme of insurance
against illness wider circles of the impecunious population,
especially the class of domestic servants. Servants suffering from
venereal disease, since at the present day they usually preserve
secrecy as to their trouble, in order that they may not lose their
place, constitute a dangerous source of infection for their employers
and the latters’ children. Therefore, a particularly thorough and
speedy treatment of servants suffering from venereal diseases is
necessary. It is further necessary to insist that all the employees of
the Krankenkassen should observe the duty of professional secrecy.
Recently the Landesversicherungsanstalt (an insurance institution) of
Berlin started a dispensary of its own in Lichtenberg for patients
suffering from venereal disease, in which every year more than 400
patients undergo treatment.
[360] A. Blaschko, “The Diffusion of Venereal Diseases,” published in
_The Hygiene of Prostitution and of Venereal Diseases_, pp. 19-36
(Jena, 1900).
[361] “Diffusion of Venereal Diseases in Prussia, as well as the
Measures Necessary in the Campaign against these Diseases,” edited by
A. Guttstadt; Berlin, 1901 (_Journal of the Royal Prussian Statistical
Bureau_).
[362] M. Kirchner, “The Social Importance of Venereal Diseases.”
[363] _Cf._ Chotzen and Simonson, “The Duty of Notification and the
Obligation of Professional Secrecy on the Part of Physicians in the
Case of Venereal Diseases,” published in _The Journal for the
Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1904, vol. ii., pp. 433-474; A.
Neisser, “Amendment of § 300 of the Criminal Code, and the Medical
Duty of Notification, in Relation to the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases,” _op. cit._, 1905, vol. iv., pp. 1-28; Bernstein, “Medical
Professional Secrecy and Venereal Diseases,” _ibid._, pp. 29-31; M.
Flesch, “Medical Professional Secrecy and the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases,” _ibid._, pp. 32-51; Magnus Möller, “The Duty of
Professional Secrecy on the Part of Physicians, the Notification of
Diseases, and the Ascertainment of the Sources of Infection in the
Case of Venereal Diseases,” _ibid._, 1906, vol. vi., pp. 241-258,
283-301; Ludwig Bendix, “Professional Secrecy on the Part of
Physicians,” _ibid._, 1906, pp. 372-376.
[364] H. Loeb, “Statistics Relating to Venereal Diseases in Mannheim,”
published in _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_,
vol. ii., pp. 97, 98 (1904).
[365] H. Berger, “Prostitution in Hanover,” pp. 37, 38 (Berlin, 1902).
[366] Schmölder, “The State and Prostitution,” p. 1 (Berlin, 1900).
[367] _Cf._ J. Fabry, “The Question of Inscription under Police
Surveillance, with especial Regard to the Conditions in Dortmund,”
published in _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_,
1906, vol. v., pp. 325-342.
[368] A. Neisser, “In what Direction can the Regulation of
Prostitution be Reformed?” published in _The Journal for the
Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1903, vol. i., pp. 163-356.
[369] Anna Pappritz, “Is the Present Method of the Regulation of
Prostitution Capable of Reform, and in What Manner?” published in _The
Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1903, vol. i., pp.
367-372.
[370] Clausmann, “Prostitution, Police, and Justice,” _op. cit._,
1906, vol. v., pp. 219-225.
[371] Friedrich Hammer, “The Regulation of Prostitution,” published in
_The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1904, 1905,
vol. iii., pp. 373-385, 426-435.
[372] S. Bettmann, “The Medical Treatment of Prostitutes” (Jena,
1905)--a thorough study of all the available material.
[373] Schmölder, “Professional Fornication and Compulsory Inscription
on the List of Prostitutes” (Berlin, 1894).
[374] “The Social Evil, with Especial Reference to Conditions existing
in the City of New York. A Report prepared under the Direction of the
‘Committee of Fifteen,’” pp. 91, 92 (New York and London, 1902).
[375] A severe criticism of regulation and its consequences is to be
found in the excellent dissertation of Paul Emile Morhardt, “Les
Maladies Vénériennes et la Réglementation de la Prostitution au Point
de Vue de l’Hygiène Sociale” (Paris, 1906).
[376] _Cf._ the admirable description of soutenage given by Hans
Ostwald, “Soutenage in Berlin” (Berlin and Leipzig, 1905).
[377] “The human being awakens in the prostitute. That is the whole
secret and the cause of soutenage.”--H. OSTWALD.
[378] The dislike to the brothels of Paris is confirmed by Lassar
(“Prostitution in Paris,” _Berliner klinische Wochenschrift_, 1892,
No. 5).
[379] J. Rutgers (“Sketches from Holland,” published in _The Journal
for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1906, vol. v., p. 345) has
admirably expressed this fact in the following words: “=The danger of
infection is directly proportionable to centralization.=”
[380] Anna Pappritz, “What Protection can Brothel Streets Offer?”
published in _The Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_,
1904, 1905, vol. iii., pp. 417-424.
[381] Stachow, “The Controlled Streets of Bremen,” _ibid._, 1905, vol.
iv., pp. 77-87.
[382] Fabry, “Brothels and Brothel Streets,” _ibid._, 1905, pp.
167-169 (in favour of “Kasernierung”); Wolff, “The Question of
Kasernierung,” _ibid._, 1905, vol. iv., pp. 73-76 (in favour of
“Kasernierung”); F. Block, “The Kasernierung of Prostitution in
Hanover” (Hanover, 1907).
[383] F. Zinsser, “The Conditions of Prostitution in the Town of
Cologne,” _ibid._, 1906, vol. v., pp. 201-218.
[384] E. von Düring, “The Brothel Question,” _ibid._, 1905, pp.
111-128.
[385] H. Fürth, “The Suppression of Venereal Diseases and the Brothel
Question,” _ibid._, pp. 129-156.
[386] K. Nötzel, “Brothels in Russia,” _ibid._, 1906, pp. 41-66,
81-106.
[387] M. Bruck, “Good Morals and the Brothel Trade,” _ibid._, pp.
57-62.
[388] O. Lassar, “Prostitution and Venereal Diseases,” published in
_Hygienische Rundschau_, 1891, No. 23.
[389] See note at end of chapter.
[390] B. Marcuse, “Treatment of Prostitutes,” published in _The
Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1906, pp. 1-8.
[391] F. Schiller, “Rescue-Work and the Suppression of Prostitution,”
_ibid._, 1903, 1904, vol. ii., pp. 294-313, 341-349.
[392] _Ibid._, 1906, vol. iii., pp. 336-350.
[393] P. Kampffmeyer, “Educational Work in Connexion with
Prostitutes,” _ibid._, pp. 351, 352.
[394] E. Kromayer, “The Physician and the Protection of Motherhood,”
published in _Mutterschutz_, 1905, vol. iii., pp. 351-352.
[395] Quite recently--October, 1906--the =first= step in this
direction has been taken. The Chief Commissioner of the Berlin Police
addressed to the medical specialists in venereal diseases an inquiry
whether they were prepared to treat gratuitously impecunious
prostitutes who were not under police control. The girls would then be
given a register of these doctors. If they presented themselves for
treatment, no particulars about them would be demanded from the
physician. The presentation by the patients to the police of a
certificate from a medical man =would suffice to exempt them from
police control, and from compulsory examination and treatment at the
police department of the section of the town to which they belonged=.
Further details will be arranged later in co-operation with the
Committee of the Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases.
In his valuable study, “The Future of Prostitution,” published in the
monthly magazine _Mutterschutz_, July, 1907, pp. 274-288, Havelook
Ellis also takes an extremely optimistic view regarding the gradual
and inevitable diminution of prostitution by indirect means--that is
to say, in this way we are elevating ourselves socially and
economically to a higher stage of humanity.
CHAPTER XVI
STATES OF SEXUAL IRRITABILITY AND SEXUAL WEAKNESS
(Auto-erotism, Masturbation, Sexual Hyperæsthesia and Sexual Anæsthesia,
Seminal Emissions, Impotence, and Sexual Neurasthenia).
“_The conditions of modern civilization render auto-erotism a
phenomenon of increasing social importance._”--HAVELOCK ELLIS.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVI
Wide diffusion of auto-erotic phenomena -- Their significance in
relation to civilization -- Physiological and pathological relations
-- Their diffusion among animals and among primitive peoples -- The
auto-erotic instrumentarium -- Causes of auto-erotism and of
masturbation -- New views regarding the masturbation of sucklings --
The sexual tension of puberty -- Sexual toxins -- Mechanical stimuli
in sexual tension -- Sedative and anodyne effects of masturbation --
Seduction as the cause of masturbation -- Group-masturbation in
schools, etc. -- Diseases as causes of masturbation -- Inheritance of
the tendency to masturbation -- Masturbation in the female sex -- Its
frequency -- Psychical onanism -- Sexual day-dreams -- Erotic
correspondence -- Consequences of masturbation -- Exaggerated views of
former times -- Analysis of the harmfulness of masturbation -- Changes
of the psyche and of the will -- Explanation of certain phenomena of
our time as due to masturbation -- Physical consequences of
masturbation -- Local changes in the genital organs -- Abnormalities
in the libido sexualis -- Treatment and cure of masturbation --
Clothing -- Trousers and masturbation -- Doctor Bernhard Faust’s book
-- Various medical methods employed in the treatment of masturbation.
Sexual neurasthenia -- Its connexion with masturbation -- Relative
independence of its symptoms -- Abnormal increase of the sexual
impulse (sexual hyperæsthesia) -- Causes -- Peculiar form of nocturnal
increase of the sexual impulse -- Satyriasis and priapism --
Nymphomania -- Causes of Nymphomania -- Examples -- Treatment of
sexual hyperæsthesia -- Abnormal diminution of the sexual impulse
(sexual anæsthesia) -- Causes -- Frequency of sexual frigidity in
women -- Causes -- Vaginismus -- Treatment of frigidity in women --
Frigidity and prostitution -- Frigidity and marriage -- Erotomania --
Seminal emissions -- Lallemand’s distinction between normal and
abnormal pollutions -- Morbid pollutions -- Diurnal pollutions --
Abnormalities of the genital organs and of the sensation during
pollutions -- Spermatorrhœa and prostatorrhœa -- Pollutions in women
-- Older and more recent observations -- Medical treatment of
pollutions.
Impotence -- Its principal forms -- Malformations of the genital
organs -- Castration -- Gonorrhœal diseases -- Azoospermia --
Smallness and injuries of the penis -- Incomplete erections -- Central
and peripheral causes of erection -- Functional impotence -- General
disorders -- Deleterious influence of alcohol and tobacco -- Nervous
impotence -- The psychical impotence of the wedding night -- Examples
-- Mental work and potency -- The effect of sudden mental impressions
-- Reflective impotence -- Rousseau’s Venetian adventure --
Neurasthenic impotence -- Its forms and symptoms -- Impotence due to
abstinence -- Senile impotence -- Treatment of impotence.
Other phenomena of sexual neurasthenia (gastric disorders, etc.) --
Sexual hypochondria -- The treatment of sexual neurasthenia.
CHAPTER XVI
Almost as widely diffused as venereal diseases are the abnormal sexual
manifestations to be considered in this chapter under the general title
of “States of Sexual Irritability and Sexual Weakness.” They arise in
part out of the =very nature of mankind=; in part they are the external
manifestations of a =natural impulse=, of an instinctive excitement, in
which form we see them also in other animals; in part they are connected
with man’s =spiritual= nature, with =civilization=. We may, indeed, say
that the duplex nature of man, his bodily-spiritual dualism, is most
clearly reflected in this phenomenon of his sexuality. In this respect
he is wholly human.
It is a great service performed by Havelock Ellis[396] that he was the
first to direct attention to the “involuntary” manifestations of the
sexual impulse peculiar to mankind, occurring =without= relation to the
other sex. He gives them the distinctive name of “=auto-erotism=,” by
which he means “the phenomenon of spontaneous sexual excitement
manifesting itself =without any stimulus, direct or indirect, supplied
by any other person=.” For the most part, therefore, the normal
manifestations of art and poetry belong also to the province of
auto-erotism, in so far as they are the result of erotic perception; and
the same is true of all those manifestations which I have termed
“=sexual equivalents=,” all transformations of sexual energy, such as
religio-sexual phenomena, the transformation of individual love into the
general love of mankind, the stimuli of fashion, and =every powerful
activity= by means of which sexual tension finds a mode of discharge,
even though this sexual relationship is usually of an unconscious
nature, as in the dance, in society games, and other enjoyments.
In my essay on “The Perverse,” pp. 14, 15 (Berlin, 1905), I have shown
that there is no doubt that these sexual equivalents, taken in their
entirety, have played an extremely important part in the course of the
evolution of mankind; that they represent =the natural outlets= for
feelings of tension and excessive forces of sexual origin; and that they
should not be unnecessarily suppressed, unless we wish to evoke =much
worse and far more dangerous= variations of their activity--as, for
example, in the political sphere.
Appositely, I find in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Posthumous Works” (vol.
xii. of the “Collected Works,” p. 149; Leipzig, 1901) an interesting
remark bearing on the question:
“Many of our impulses find an outlet in a mechanically powerful
activity, which =can= be directed by intelligent purpose; unless this
is done, these manifestations are destructive and harmful. Hate,
anger, =the sexual impulse=, etc., can be =set to the machine= and
taught to do useful work--for example, to chop wood, to carry letters,
or to drive the plough. =Our impulses must be worked out.= The life of
the learned man more especially demands something of the kind.”
What a wise and apt remark! Our whole civilization is permeated with
sexual equivalents of this kind; the pleasure of life and the joy of
existence are based thereon, however much our puritans and asexual
“morality-fanatics” may strive against this fact. And it is well that
the sexual impulse has been “civilized,” that there are now so many
spontaneous modes of its discharge, that the sphere of auto-erotism
increases _pari passu_ with the growth of civilization. Many new, finer,
and nobler incitations and stimuli stream therefrom into love and life,
upon which they exercise a rejuvenating and strengthening influence.
Still, this light throws a shadow, inasmuch as fantastic and unnatural
aberrations of the sexual life are also apt to ensue.
Auto-erotism (including its grosser form, masturbation) is therefore, to
a certain extent, a =physiological= manifestation; it becomes morbid
only in certain conditions--that is to say, in individuals who are
previously =morbid=. This is, indeed, an old medical doctrine, that
there exists a physiological masturbation _faute de mieux_, and a morbid
masturbation in cases of neurasthenia, mental disorder, and other
troubles. The same is true of auto-erotism in its entire extent. When
Fürbringer describes masturbation as “an =unnatural= gratification of
the sexual impulse,”[397] this is only partly true. There exists a
=natural, physiological masturbation=, a =normal= auto-erotism.
Metchnikoff shares this view.[398] He says: “=It is man’s constitution
itself= that permits the premature development of sexual sensibility,
before the reproductive elements are mature.” The ultimate cause of such
auto-erotic manifestations as belong neither to the category of “vice”
nor to that of “crime” is to be found, he thinks, in a =disharmony= in
the nature of man in respect of the premature development of sexual
sensibility. For this reason we meet with these manifestations just as
much among the lowest races of mankind as we do among civilized
peoples; even among =animals= auto-erotism is a widely diffused
phenomenon. This can be observed, not only among the monkeys (perhaps
already a little civilized) of our Zoological Gardens, which masturbate
freely _coram publico_, but it may be seen also in horses, which shake
the penis to and fro until seminal emission occurs; also in mares, which
rub themselves against any available firm object. We see the same thing
in wild deer. Even elephants masturbate. Among primitive races
masturbation is, perhaps, even more general than among civilized races.
Among South African tribes, Gustav Fritsch reports, masturbation is
actually a popular custom.
Havelock Ellis has described the entire auto-erotic instrumentarium, and
it appears from his account that savage races manufacture onanistic
stimulatory apparatus for women quite as elaborate as those which are
produced by the most highly developed lewd industry of civilized
peoples. Most frequently articles in everyday use are employed for
auto-erotic gratification--as in Hawaii, bananas; in our own part of the
world, cucumbers, carrots, and beetroots. Further, in the vagina and
bladder have been found pencils, sticks of sealing-wax, empty reels,
bodkins, knitting-needles, needle-cases, compasses, glass stoppers,
candles, corks, tumblers, forks, toothpicks, pomade-boxes,
cockchafers,[399] hens’ eggs, and, with especial frequency, =hairpins=.
I may allude here, in passing, to the fact that C. Posner refers the
discovery of various bodies in the male urethra to other causes than
masturbation in some cases. He states that often they have been
introduced by other persons than the one in whom they are found, and is
of opinion that the introducer is a man with sadistic tendencies, and
usually homosexual (see C. Posner, “The Introduction of Foreign Bodies
into the Male Urethra, with Remarks on the Psychology of such Cases,”
published in _Therapie der Gegenwart_, September, 1902). In the year
1862 masturbation with the aid of hairpins was so widely practised in
Germany that a surgeon invented a special instrument for the removal of
hairpins from the female bladder! At the present day this hairpin
masturbation is extremely common.[400] Still more elaborate are
artificial imitations of the male penis, the so-called _godemichés_
(_gaude mihi_, _dildoes_, _consolateurs_, “_bijoux indiscrets_,”
etc.),[401] of which we find representations in ancient Babylonian
sculpture, in Egypt, and in the “Mimiamben” of Herondas[402] (third
century before Christ); and since very ancient times they have been in
use in Eastern Asia, where the Spaniards found them in the Philippines.
Particularly well known are the wax phalli of the Balinesian women. In
Europe, as early as the twelfth century, Bishop Burchard of Worms
condemned the use of artificial penes. Their use was especially common
at the time of the Italian renascence; the technique of their employment
became continually more elaborate. The culmination was reached in the
eighteenth century France. No less a man than Mirabeau, the celebrated
French politician, in his erotic romance, “Le Rideau Levé, ou
l’Education de Laure,” describes such an artificial phallus, and I
append his description in order to enable the reader to represent to
himself the extremely elaborate technique that was used in the
application of such auto-erotic instruments:
“The instrument resembled in every respect the natural penis. The only
difference consisted in this, that from the apex to the root it was
shaped in transverse waves, in order to render the rubbing action more
powerful. Made entirely of silver, it was covered with a kind of
smooth and very hard varnish, giving it the natural colours. For the
rest, it was very light and thin, being hollow. Through the middle of
the hollow interior there passed a round tube, made also of silver,
and about twice the diameter of a goose-quill, and within this tube
was a piston; the tube was firmly closed at the other end by means of
a screw. This screw was perforated, and firmly soldered to the base of
the head. Consequently there was an empty space between the central
tube and the outer wall of the instrument. This outer cavity of the
godemiché was filled with water warmed to blood-heat, and then closed
with a well-fitting cork. The small central tube was filled with a
thin, whitish solution of isinglass (!), which was previously
prepared. The warmth of the water was immediately communicated to the
isinglass solution; and the latter then represented, as far as was
possible, the human semen.”
This description dates from the year 1786! But even to-day apparatus of
this kind are advertised in the catalogues of certain traders, under
the title of “Parisian Rubber Articles.” Whether they really exist I do
not know, for I have never actually seen anything of the kind. Havelock
Ellis assumes that they are still used to-day. In brothels, prostitutes
use at the present time very primitive leathern phalli, such as were
described by Herondas and Aristophanes, for erotic practices and
demonstration.
In addition to these, there are numerous other methods of purely
peripheral-mechanical masturbation. Thus, the rubbing and movement of
the genital organs in bicycle-riding, horse-riding, very frequently in
working the treadle of a sewing-machine, and in travelling on the
railway, may give rise to masturbatory stimulation. Very commonly in
women merely rubbing the thighs against one another is sufficient to
induce a sexual orgasm; whereas men almost always need to have
recourse to more powerful manipulation, such as manual friction
(_manustupratio_).
What are the general physiological =factors= of auto-erotic phenomena,
more especially of masturbation? In this connexion it is interesting to
note that =auto-erotism is almost always a precursor of completely
developed sexuality=, and manifests itself a long time =before= puberty;
and may even appear soon after birth, for the older and more recent
medical literature of the subject contains numerous observations of
masturbation in =sucklings=, not to speak of masturbation in older
children. The auto-erotism of sucklings is =purely peripheral= in its
nature, and depends upon the mechanical stimulation of certain parts of
the body, the first “erogenic” zones of man. Freud enumerates among the
regions of the body by the stimulation of which sexual pleasure is most
readily obtained, the lips of the infant, which, in sucking the mother’s
breast or its substitute, receive an instinctive perception of pleasure,
in which the stimulation produced by the warm flow of milk also plays a
part. This “ecstatic sucking” of infants is auto-erotic in character.
Not infrequently, while sucking in this voluptuous manner, the infant
simultaneously rubs certain sensitive parts of the body, such as the
breast and the external genital organs. A kind of orgasm occurs,
followed by sleep. Freud aptly compares this phenomenon with the fact
that in later life sexual gratification is often the best means of
inducing sleep. Freud also regards the masturbation of sucklings as
being within certain limits a physiological phenomenon, as exhibiting on
the part of Nature an intention “to establish the future primacy of
these erogenic zones for sexual activity.”[403]
With the onset of puberty the auto-erotic instincts are newly
stimulated; new sources of auto-erotism become active, principally owing
to the development of the genital organs and to the evacuation of the
reproductive products. Various theories have been propounded to explain
by what means the =sexual tension= occurring at puberty is induced, this
sexual tension being regarded as the ultimate cause of the masturbation
of sexually mature human beings. The most plausible hypothesis is the
=chemical= theory of sexual tension and sexual excitement, which was
explained in more detail above (p. 47). It may be that, as Freud
assumes, a substance generally diffused throughout the organism is
destroyed by the stimulation of the erogenic zones, and that the
products of decomposition of this substance give rise to a discharge of
sexual energy; it may be that the reproductive organs themselves produce
such chemical substances, =sexual toxins=. This assumption is supported
by the experimental observation that when in animals the ovaries and all
the nerves connected with these organs have been removed, and
consequently the ordinary periodic recurrence of sexual activity is no
longer seen, if now ovarian extract is injected into the body of such
animals, rutting once more occurs. Starling introduced the term
“=hormone=” to denote these chemical sexual substances. They appear also
to play a part in connexion with certain abnormalities and perversions
of the sexual impulse--a matter to which we shall return later. R.
Kossmann also speaks of a “=neuro-chemical=” injury--a kind of
intoxication of the nervous system induced by “retained secretions or
excretions of the reproductive organs.”[404]
The same author also advances the =neuro-mechanical= theory of sexual
tension. He understands by this that the purely mechanical =distension=
of the organs belonging to the reproductive apparatus exercises a
=mechanical stimulus= on the genital nerves, and thus has a reflex
action upon the centres of the brain and spinal cord, which reflex
stimulation is allayed by orgasm and ejaculation. Haig explains the
feeling of relief after masturbation, and the consequent discharge of
sexual tension, as rather dependent upon the mechanism of the
blood-pressure. He remarks:
“Since the sexual act gives rise to a low and falling blood-pressure,
it must necessarily alleviate conditions which are due to high and
increasing blood-pressure--for example, mental depression and
ill-humour--and if my observations are correct, we have here an
explanation of the relation between conditions of high blood-pressure
with mental and physical depression, on the one hand, and masturbatory
practices on the other, for such practices alleviate this condition,
and are readily indulged in for this purpose” (quoted by Havelock
Ellis).
The statement made to Dr. Garnier by a monk, thirty-three years of age,
bears out this view:
“If no nocturnal seminal emissions occur, the tension of the semen
gives rise to general depression, headache, and sleeplessness. I admit
that sometimes, in order to obtain relief, I lie upon the abdomen, and
so produce a seminal discharge. I immediately feel =freed=, as if a
=burden= had been lifted from me, and sleep returns” (_ibid._, p.
273).
Similar motives for masturbation are alleged by many otherwise healthy
onanists. They apply, moreover, in an equal degree to the normal, not
excessive, sexual intercourse of ordinary human beings. Persons
belonging to the most diverse classes of society--men of letters,
shopmen, labourers, etc.--of whom I have inquired regarding the effect
of seminal emissions, whether produced by masturbation or by coitus,
have unanimously agreed in describing to me this sense of “freeing” from
a burden, from pressure, from harmful substances accumulated in the
body--a sense of mental energy and creative power after such discharges
of sexual tension not exceeding normal limits. The frequency of these
discharges varies in different individuals; in one the intervals were
short, in another they were long. This point has a very important
bearing upon the “question of sexual abstinence,” and we shall return to
it in the discussion of that topic.
Masturbation is often the means for inducing sleep and repose; it dulls
nervous sensibility, and connected with this is the fact that _pain_ is
often allayed by masturbation. Here I may refer once more to the
previously quoted (p. 44) view of a talented young alienist, Edmund
Forster, that, in association with sexual tension, there occurs an
increased stimulation of the =pain-perceiving nerves= of the genital
organs. It is conceivable that sexual tension, especially if it depends
upon chemical causes, also increases pains arising from other areas of
the body, and that the discharge of sexual tension would thus alleviate
or completely allay these pains. Coe reports (_American Journal of
Obstetrics_, 1889, p. 766) the case of a woman who was accustomed by
masturbation to obtain immediate relief of intense menstrual ovarian
pains. It is very remarkable that =these pains were accompanied by a
powerful sexual impulse=, which ceased when the pain ceased, and did
not return during the intermenstrual period. Here we have a striking
testimony of the accuracy of Forster’s view. The phrenologist Gall was
aware of the manner in which masturbation relieves pain.
In addition to these more natural causes of masturbation, which in
themselves suffice to explain the wide diffusion of the practice, we
have also to consider masturbation dependent upon =seduction= and upon
=morbid states=.
To seduction must be referred all the phenomena of =group-masturbation=
(masturbation on the large scale) in =schools=,[405] training-ships,
barracks, factories (especially in this case as regards female
employees!), prisons, etc. One leads another astray, and masturbation is
diffused like an epidemic disease; the individuals are subjected to the
influence of the =suggestion of the crowd=, which they are unable to
resist. Thomalla describes boarding-schools in which masturbation was
practised for a wager, and that boy won the prize in whom seminal
emission first occurred! He further speaks of a school club in which
obscene readings were held, and in which by means of forbidden pictures
the boys were sexually excited until erection occurred, then followed
general masturbation, also accompanied by wagers.
This group-masturbation is the best proof of the fact that those who
masturbate are not simply individuals with an inherited morbid
predisposition; for nothing is easier to suggest than masturbation.
Havelock Ellis[406] reports the following case of an unmarried healthy
young woman, thirty-one years of age, which throws a strong light on
this suggested manifestation:
“When I was about twenty-six years of age, a female friend informed me
that she had masturbated already for several years, and was so much
enslaved by the habit that she suffered seriously from its
ill-effects. I listened to her account with sympathy and interest, but
felt rather sceptical, =and I resolved to make the attempt on myself=,
with the intention of understanding the matter better, so that I might
be able to help my friend. With a little trouble I =succeeded in
awakening what had hitherto slumbered in me unknown=. I intentionally
allowed the habit to become stronger, and one night--for I usually did
it just before going to sleep, never in the morning--I really
experienced an extremely agreeable sensation. But the next morning my
conscience was aroused, and I felt pains also in the back of the head
and along the spine. For a time I discontinued the habit, but later
began it again, masturbating with considerable regularity once a
month, a few days after each menstruation.... The habit overcame me
with alarming rapidity, and I soon became more or less its slave....
In conclusion, I must say that masturbation has proved to me one of
the blind chances in my life’s history, out of which I have derived
many valuable experiences.”
Frequently local morbid changes in or near the genital organs lead to
the practice of masturbation, such as skin troubles, intestinal worms,
phimosis, inflammatory states of the penis or near the entrance of the
vagina, prurigo and other itching affections of the penis,
constipation, urinary anomalies, etc. Further, mental disorders,
epilepsy, and degenerative nerve troubles, are frequent causes of
masturbation. Masturbation has been observed after epileptic paroxysms
in patients who at other times never masturbate. There is no doubt that
neurasthenia powerfully predisposes to masturbation. =Excessive=
masturbation is almost always the consequence, not the cause, of
associated neurasthenia; it is “the manifestation of a disease in
course of development or of a permanently existing degenerative
predisposition.”[407] To these cases of invincible, habitual, excessive
masturbation Oppenheim’s view applies--that the disposition to onanism
is often =inherited=. A characteristic instance of this is offered by an
observation of Block’s (Havelock Ellis, _op. cit._, p. 240) in the case
of a little girl, who began to masturbate at the early age of two years,
and had probably inherited this tendency from her mother and
grandmother, for they had both masturbated throughout life, whilst the
grandmother had actually died in an asylum of “masturbatory insanity.”
In the majority of cases in which =masturbation makes its first
appearance in sucklings= we have to do with such an inheritance. In many
cases the peculiar oscillatory movements of sucklings may merely be the
expression of the sense of general comfort, as Fürbringer believes, and
may have nothing to do with actual masturbation; but, on the other hand,
it cannot be denied that veritable masturbation may be observed in the
first and second years of life. Havelock Ellis, J. P. West, and Louis
Mayer have reported such cases. In children somewhat older than
this--from three years upwards--seduction and suggestion certainly play
a great part. The author of “Splitter” was told by a professor that,
when visiting an institution for small children in St. G[allen], he saw
a girl about three years of age who was making suspicious movements. The
matron, whose attention was called to the matter, said that almost all
babies were already infected when they first came to the institution
(“Splitter,” p. 375).
Another disputed question relates to the =diffusion of masturbation in
the female sex=. Is the practice commoner or less common among women
than among men? Metchnikoff[408] is of opinion that in girls it is much
less common than in boys, because sexual excitability generally develops
much later in the female sex. Female monkeys masturbate only in
exceptional cases, whereas in male monkeys masturbation is very common.
The circumstance which Metchnikoff adduces in further support of his
view of the rarity of masturbation in women--that, namely, most girls
are enlightened regarding sexual sensibility only after marriage--proves
very little, because the sensations aroused in woman by masturbation are
of a very different nature from those produced by coitus, and coitus
often first makes them acquainted with entirely new sensations. Tissot
regards masturbation as commoner in women than in men; Deslandes
believed that there was no difference between the sexes. Lawson Tait,
Spitzka, and Dana, inclined rather to Metchnikoff’s view as to the
greater rarity of the practice among women. Albert Eulenburg considers
masturbation “not quite so common among young women as among young men,”
but still “far more common than parents, teachers, and the laity of both
sexes as a rule imagine.”[409] Havelock Ellis considers that =after=
puberty masturbation is commoner in women because men can then much more
readily obtain gratification in a normal manner by means of intercourse
with the other sex. Otto Adler estimates the frequency of masturbation
to be very great, because he regards it as the principal cause of
deficient sexual sensibility in women, which latter condition he also
believes to be extremely common, although he does not go so far as to
accept Rohleder’s enormous proportion of 95 masturbators in every 100
women (!).[410] L. Löwenfeld, who characterizes Rohleder’s and Berger’s
(99 %) estimates as exaggerations, considers that the frequency of
masturbation in women is not so great as in men.[411] In reality,
masturbation, given similar circumstances and causes, is probably
diffused to an approximately equal extent among both sexes.
But this relates only to peripheral-mechanical masturbation; from this
“=psychical onanism=” has rightly been separated--that form of
masturbation in which, simply by ideas, without the assistance of manual
stimulation of the genital organs, sexual excitement is caused and the
orgasm is induced. Psychical onanism, of which Eduard Reich[412]
remarked that our own time nourishes it to the fullest possible extent,
develops in the majority of cases out of masturbation proper. In this
form the =imagination= is tasked with representing all the factors of
normal sexual gratification. The simple physical act suffices only in
the first beginnings of this vice. Every practised onanist understands
that he must soon call his imagination to his aid in order to produce
sexual gratification, and that ultimately ideas alone dominate the
entire libido, and the orgasm often enough terminates an act which in
every respect has throughout remained purely ideal.
“So great is the power of imagination,” remarks the experienced
Rouband, “that quite alone, without the assistance of physical
stimulation, it can produce the venereal orgasm, with ejaculation of
the semen, as happened to one of my fellow-students every time he
thought of his beloved.”[413]
Hammond even knew an actual sect of such “onanists by means of simple
ideal unchastity,” who formed a sort of club or society, and who were
known to one another by certain signs.[414] A patient related to him
that in his thoughts of women whom he met, or those who were sitting
opposite to him in the railway-carriage, he was accustomed to undress
them in imagination; he then would represent to himself very plainly
their genital organs, and during this representation he experienced very
active voluptuous sensations, culminating in ejaculation. Löwenfeld has
also observed several such cases. Eulenburg speaks of an “ideal
cohabitation.” The ideas are usually of a lascivious nature, but this is
not always the case. Von Schrenck-Notzing reports the case of a lady
twenty years of age in whom the simple idea of men, but also agreeable
sensory perceptions, such as theatrical scenes, or musical impressions,
or beautiful pictures, gave rise to the sexual orgasm.[415]
Allied with psychical onanism is the brooding over sexual ideas--the
_delectatio morosa_ of the theologians--and erotic excitement associated
with dream-imaginations, or “sexual day-dreams” (Havelock Ellis). This
is the spinning out of a continuous erotic history with any hero or any
heroine, which is carried on from day to day. Most commonly this occurs
in bed before going to sleep. Sexual activities form the material of
these histories. We often find carefully worked out and more or less
erotic day-dreams in young men, and especially in young women,
frequently containing perverse elements. This dreaming, according to
Havelock Ellis, does not necessarily lead to masturbation, although it
often induces seminal discharges. It occurs both in healthy and in
abnormal persons, especially in imaginative individuals. Rousseau
experienced such erotic day-dreams. The American author Garland, in his
novel, “Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly,” has admirably described the part
played by a circus-rider in the erotic day-dreams of a =normal healthy
girl= during the =period of puberty=.[416]
In close relationship with these psychical-onanistic day-dreams there
stands another phenomenon, to which, as far as I know, I was the first
to refer, which I have denoted by the term =erotographomania=.[417]
There are numerous men and women who induce their lovers--male or
female, as the case may be--prostitutes, masseuses, etc., to write to
them =letters= with a sexually stimulating content; or also, as very
frequently occurs, they themselves write such letters, containing
numerous obscenities. Such correspondence, filled with ardent erotism,
seems recently to have made its appearance as a peculiar refinement of
sexuality; this also has the effect of a kind of psychical onanism. The
interchange of obscene letters of this character recently played a part
in the trial of two homosexual individuals in East Prussia. There
exists, also, a comparatively blameless, more or less physiological,
erotographomania of the time of puberty, in which most passionate
letters are written to imaginary lovers, and the still obscure sexual
impulse finds a satisfaction in these erotic imaginations.
After this brief account of the various forms and varieties of
masturbation, we now turn to consider the =consequences= of the
practice. In the course of time there has been a remarkable change of
views in respect of this matter. The true founder of the scientific
literature of masturbation, Tissot, in his celebrated monograph
(“Masturbation; or, the Treatment of the Diseases that result from
Self-Abuse”; St. Petersburg, 1774), regarded masturbation as the evil of
all evils, and deduced from it all possible severe troubles. His book
bears as motto the verse by Von Canitz:
“Wenn schnöde Wollust dich erfüllt,
So werde durch ein Schreckensbild
Verdorrter Totenknochen
Der Kitzel unterbrochen.”
[“When base lust fills thy thoughts,
Let a horrible picture rise before thy mind
Of withered dead men’s bones,
So let the sensual stimulation be driven away.”]
It is dominated by a thoroughgoing pessimism. In this view he is
followed by Voltaire, in his “Dictionnaire Philosophique,” and by the
authors of the first seventy years of the nineteenth century. Such
gloomy views are expressed, above all, by Lallemand, in his celebrated
book upon involuntary losses of semen; but they are shared by German
physicians also, as, for example, B. Hermann Leitner, in his treatise,
“_De Masturbatione_” (Buda-Pesth, 1844), and in the preface to his book
we read: “The writers who speak of the terrible results of self-abuse do
not exaggerate; on the contrary, their picture is not sufficiently
gloomy.”[418] Modern medical science has, however, reduced these
exaggerations to a reasonable measure. For this we have, above all, to
thank W. Erb and Fürbringer. The old belief in the enormous dangers and
the eminent injuriousness of masturbation, still remains as a bugbear in
certain popular writings, some of which have been published in hundreds
of editions. Who has not heard of the “Selbstbewahrung” (“Self-Abuse”)
of Retaus,[419] the prototype of this dangerous literature, which must
be regarded as the principal source of sexual hypochondria; frequently,
also, it induces direct sexual stimulation, because it does indeed
describe the devil, but describes also voluptuousness!
At the present day all experienced physicians who have been occupied in
the study of masturbation and its consequences hold the view that
=moderate= masturbation in healthy persons, without morbid inheritance,
has no bad results at all. It is only excess that does harm; but even
excess in healthy persons does less harm than in those with inherited
morbid predisposition. I may express the matter in this way: it is not
masturbation (Ger. _Onanie_) that is harmful, but “=onanism=” (Ger.
_Onanismus_)--that is to say, the habitual and excessive practice of
masturbation, continued for a number of years, =which certainly has an
injurious influence on health=. The boundary line at which the harmless
masturbation (_Onanie_) ceases and the injurious onanism (_Onanismus_)
begins cannot generally be defined. The difference between individuals
makes their reactions in this respect very different. For example,
Curschmann reports the case of a talented and brilliant author who,
notwithstanding the fact that he had masturbated to excess for eleven
years, remained physically and mentally vigorous, and pursued his
literary labours with notable success. Fürbringer reports a similar case
in a University lecturer. The following case, which came under my own
observation, shows that even excessive masturbation need not impair
health and working powers. A man of letters, forty years of age,
probably misled by a nursemaid in the first instance, had masturbated
without intermission since the age of five, and since puberty had done
so =several times a day= (three to ten times), without any interference
with his powers for work. He is a big, powerful, healthy man, of a
really imposing appearance. No one would suspect him to be a habitual
masturbator. That from the masturbation (Ger. _Onanie_) of childhood and
youth there developed a condition of formal onanism (Ger. _Onanismus_)
in the adult is in this case principally to be ascribed to the continued
abuse of alcohol. The patient drinks daily twelve to fourteen glasses of
Munich beer. He is also a heavy smoker. No evidence of inherited
predisposition to masturbation can be obtained. For the patient the
female sex exists only in the imagination; he has very rarely had sexual
intercourse, and avoids ladies’ society, although he has good fortune
with women. It is the same with masturbation as it is with sexual
intercourse: the effects vary according to the individual. Recently
masturbation and coitus have been compared in this respect. Sir James
Paget in his lecture on “Sexual Hypochondriasis” says: “Masturbation
does neither more nor less harm than sexual intercourse practised with
the same frequency in the same conditions of general health and age and
circumstance.” Erb and Curschmann go even further; for they consider
that masturbation has less influence on the nervous system than coitus.
=In reality=, however, masturbation is almost always more harmful than
coitus. The reasons for this are obvious. In the first place,
masturbation is begun much earlier, generally at an age when the body
has not yet developed any marked capacity for resistance. Masturbation
in childhood is, therefore, especially harmful.[420] Löwenfeld (_op.
cit._, p. 127) is of opinion that self-abuse begun before virility is
attained more readily gives rise to weakness of the nervous system than
masturbation begun later in life. In neuropathic children he saw several
times, as a consequence of masturbation, well-marked general
nervousness, paroxysms of anxiety, sleeplessness, and arrest of mental
development. In the second place, masturbation is more dangerous than
coitus in this way--that it can be carried out =much more frequently=,
on account of the more frequent opportunities, so that masturbation
four, five, or even more, times in a =single= day is by no means rare.
In the third place, the =spiritual influence= of masturbation is much
more harmful than that of normal coitus. The “solitary” vice influences
the psyche and the character in the mere child. The youthful masturbator
seeks solitude, becomes shy of human beings, reserved, morose, unhappy,
hypochondriacal. In the adult the sense of the debasing character and of
the sinfulness of masturbation is much more lively; self-confidence
departs; the masturbator regards himself as absolutely “=enslaved=” by
his vice, the eternal =struggle= against the ever-recurring impulse
gives rise more to mental depression than to actual physical harm. From
this there results a whole series of diseases of the will, for by
masturbation much less harm is done to the intellect than to the vital
energy, the capacity for spiritual and physical activity. The cold,
blasé manner of many young men, who seem never to have known the natural
youthful joy of life, the whole “demi-virginity” of modern young
girls--all these are without doubt dependent upon masturbation and upon
psychical onanism. The egoism of the onanist in the sexual relationship
increases his egoism in other respects, gives rise to cold-heartedness,
and blunts the more delicate ethical perceptions. The campaign against
masturbation as a group manifestation is eminently a _social_ campaign
for altruism; it insists that young people should take their share in
all questions relating to the common good. Peculiar extravagances and
unnatural characteristics in art and literature may also be partly
attributed to masturbation. Many works clearly bear its imprints. Thus
Havelock Ellis rightly refers in this connexion to the peculiar
melancholy in Gogol’s stories, for Gogol masturbated to great excess. It
would be possible to mention also certain writings of our own time which
inevitably give rise to such a suspicion.
The reader will do well to consult the interesting discussion of
masturbation from the philosophical standpoint by Schopenhauer (“Neue
Paralipomena,” ed. Grisebach, pp. 226, 227).
The =physical= consequences of immoderate and habitual masturbation may
also be really serious. The =eye= especially suffers manifold injuries,
as has been proved by the investigations of Hermann Cohn. Irritable
states of the conjunctiva, spasms of the eyelids, weakness of
accommodation, subjective sensations of light, and photophobia, may
result from masturbation. The =heart= also is sympathetically affected.
Krehl even speaks of “=masturbator’s heart=” as a consequence of the
long-lasting nervous hyperexcitability, which injures the heart and the
vessels, and is manifested by irregularity of the pulse and by
sensations of pressure and pain in the cardiac region, by palpitation,
etc. Discontinuance of the habit leads to an immediate disappearance of
all these alarming symptoms. Very important is also the causal connexion
between masturbation and =nervous= or =mental disorders=. Here, however,
as Aschaffenburg has recently insisted, we must distinguish clearly
between masturbation =resulting= from previously existing
nervo-psychical troubles, in which a vicious circle develops--for here
the masturbation is partly the consequence of the original trouble,
partly the cause of an aggravation of this trouble--and the effects of
onanism on the =healthy= central nervous system. Here Aschaffenburg is
in agreement with the views of those who consider these effects are less
serious than earlier writers were accustomed to assume. Aschaffenburg
also recognizes that the most harmful effect is to be found in the
=psychical= influence of masturbation, in the continuous, but ever-vain,
contest against the habit. This is the source of the majority of the
hypochondriacal and other troubles. He often succeeded, by the discovery
of this psychical mode of origin, in putting an end to a number of
morbid manifestations. As soon as the patient =becomes aware= that these
have a purely mental cause, he at once feels himself freed from them.
That masturbation is =never= a direct cause of mental disorder is now
generally recognized by alienists.[421] At the most, masturbation is no
more than a favouring element in the production of such disorder.
“=Masturbatory insanity=” occurs only in those with marked hereditary
predisposition, and who already have been extremely neurasthenic.[422]
But masturbation can unquestionably give rise to =purely local changes=
in the genital organs, such as =inflammatory states of the prostate
gland=, =spermatorrhœa=, and =prostatorrhœa=; in women =fluor albus=,
=excessively painful menstruation=, and =other disturbances of the
menstrual function=, and in connexion with these phenomena there may
appear the morbid picture of “=sexual neurasthenia=,” which we have soon
to describe.
A very serious result of onanism (not of _Onanie_) is the
=disinclination to normal sexual intercourse= to which the habit gives
rise, and the =production of sexual perversions=. The former is more
marked in the female sex, the latter more in the male sex. Masturbation
is the principal cause of sexual frigidity in women and of a
disinclination to normal intercourse. Undoubtedly psychical influences
here play the principal part; but also a certain blunting of the
sensations of the genital organs by means of excessive masturbatory
stimulation. They are no longer susceptible to the normal stimulatory
influence of coitus. Moreover, masturbation is often effected by
stimulation applied to =some definite portion= of the female
reproductive organs, most frequently to the clitoris or the labia; and
these parts in such cases are not sufficiently stimulated by coitus. In
the male the especially sensitive portions of the penis are stimulated
alike by masturbation and in coitus, for which reason man,
notwithstanding the practice of masturbation, is much more readily able
to obtain sexual gratification in the course of ordinary sexual
intercourse. Notwithstanding this, there are also certain peculiar
methods of masturbation in the male, the effect of which is not attained
by coitus. In such cases men also may fail to induce the sexual orgasm
by ordinary intercourse.
The close relationship of masturbation to sexual perversions is obvious.
The more frequently the onanistic act is repeated, the more the normal
sensibility is blunted, the stronger and more peculiar are the stimuli,
which must be of a nature diverging from the ordinary, demanded in order
to induce a sexual orgasm. The content of the lascivious ideas must be
varied more and more frequently, and soon passes entirely into the
sphere of the perverse. Gradually these perverse sexual ideas become
more firmly rooted, and ultimately develop into complete sexual
=perversions=. A classical example of this is the case reported by
Tardieu[423] of a man who was in the habit of =masturbating seven or
eight times every day=, and ultimately inflamed his imagination to the
point of representing the act of intercourse with female corpses. At
length he passed to the =practical carrying out= of this horrible idea,
which had now assumed definite sadistic characters. He arranged to
obtain a view of opened female bodies, killed dogs, dug up human
corpses--all in order thereby to provide satisfaction for his
imagination, which had been disordered in consequence of masturbation,
and thus to obtain sexual gratification. In the etiology of
pseudo-homosexuality masturbation unquestionably plays a part--a fact to
which Havelock Ellis has drawn attention.[424] The Mexican “mujerados”
are trained for pæderasty by means of masturbation repeated several
times daily. Ideas of bestial intercourse may even be aroused by
masturbation. Von Schrenck-Notzing[425] reports the case of a woman who
had masturbated for thirty years, and ultimately came to represent to
herself in imagination that she was having intercourse with a stallion.
The prospects of the satisfactory =treatment= and =cure= of masturbation
are unquestionably greater in the case of children. To attain perfect
success, parents, teachers, and physicians must co-operate. Above all,
it is necessary to relieve any local and general morbid conditions
favouring the practice of masturbation. The diet should be light and
unstimulating, the clothing and bedding light and cool. In the year 1791
the body physician of the Schaumburg-Lippe family, Dr. Bernhard
Christian Faust, published a remarkable work under the title “How to
Regulate the Human Sexual Impulse,” with a preface by the celebrated
pedagogue J. H. Campe (Brunswick, 1791). In this book he maintained the
thesis that the principal cause of masturbation in boys was the wearing
of =breeches=. According to him, the =wrapping up= of children in
swaddling clothes causes premature stimulation of the sexual organs.
Later, in consequence of wearing breeches, there is produced “a great
and damp warmth, which is especially marked in the region of the sexual
organs, where the shirt falls into folds” (p. 46). Also, the boy, “when
he wishes to pass water, must take his little penis out of his breeches.
At first, and for a long time after he begins to wear them, the little
boy cannot manage this himself; other children, maids, and menservants,
help him, and pull and play with his sexual parts. By this handling,
pulling, and playing, which he himself does, or which others do for him,
with his sexual organs, the boy is led (also the girl, who very often
assists, and whom the blameless boy, out of gratitude, wishes to help in
return) into constant acquaintanceship with parts which he would
otherwise have regarded as sacred, unclean, and shameful. The child
becomes accustomed to play with his sexual organs, and =occasional
masturbation= develops into habitual self-abuse, =all brought about by
wearing breeches=” (p. 45). To prevent all this, he suggested that boys
from nine to fourteen years of age should wear clothing resembling
rather that of girls. Then these children would be “according to Nature,
children, and would ripen late; and the human sexual impulse would come
under control, and mankind would be better and happier” (p. 217).
Although the far-reaching and systematic development of this thesis
appears ludicrous, still, there is an element of truth in it, and
unsuitably tight and warm clothing certainly favours the tendency to
masturbation.
According to the suggestion of Ultzmann, in the case of nursing infants
and of small children, the hands may be confined in little bags or tied
to the side of the bed. The methods of the older physicians, who
appeared before the child armed with great knives and scissors, and
threatened a painful operation, or even to cut off the genital organs,
may often be found useful, and may effect a radical cure. The =actual=
carrying out of small operations is also sometimes helpful. Fürbringer
cured a young fellow in whom no instruction and no punishment had proved
effective, by simply cutting off the anterior part of his foreskin with
jagged scissors. In the case of a young lady who often in company
indulged her passionate impulse towards masturbation, he brought about a
cure by repeated cauterization of the vulva. Other physicians perforate
the foreskin and introduce a ring. Cages have even been provided for the
genital organs to prevent masturbation, the key being kept by the father
(!). Enveloping the penis in bandages without any opening has also been
tried. Corporal punishment sometimes has a good effect. Of the greatest
value is =continuous care, to safeguard the children against seduction=.
“Parents, protect your children from servants,” exclaimed Rétif de la
Bretonne. Valuable also are =earnest warnings and explanations=,
=increase of energy and force of will= (by sports and games, and by work
in the garden, and by the setting of tasks which stimulate ambition).
=Climatic cures= and =hydro-therapeutic methods= are also valuable
means in the treatment of masturbation. The same measures may be
employed in the treatment of masturbation in =adults=. In their case,
however, =psycho-therapeutics= plays the principal part. In many cases
here also local cauterization of the urethra and massage of the prostate
may bring about a cure. =Utterly perverse= would it be to introduce
youthful onanists to actual sexual intercourse, after the manner of the
Parisian “soup-merchants,” as the common speech names them, who, in
order to cure their youthful scholars of masturbation, take them into
brothels.[426]
* * * * *
Masturbation is intimately connected with =irritable nervous weakness=,
or “=neurasthenia=,” this typical disease of civilization, and more
especially with the genital form of the disease, “=sexual
neurasthenia=.” In an analysis of 333 cases of neurasthenia Collins and
Philipp found that 123 cases--that is, more than one-third--resulted
from overwork or from masturbation.[427] Freud, von Krafft-Ebing,
Savill, Gattel, and Rohleder see in masturbation the true cause of
neurasthenia. Fürbringer, Löwenfeld, and Eulenburg are of opinion that
other injuries must also come into play in order to produce the typical
picture of sexual neurasthenia. It is certain that very frequently the
order of causation is reversed, =neurasthenia= being the =primary= and
masturbation the secondary disorder. Masturbation is then only a
=symptom= of sexual neurasthenia. The same duplex mode of consideration
may also be applied to the other morbid phenomena of which the clinical
picture of sexual neurasthenia is composed. Every one of these symptoms
of irritable weakness, the excessive sexual excitability, the deficient
sexual sensibility, the seminal discharges, and the impotence, can, like
masturbation, exhibit a certain =independence=, can be induced by
various causes, and may lead to sexual neurasthenia; it may be, on the
other hand, that they first developed in the soil of sexual
neurasthenia. It is often impossible to determine the true =beginning=
of the vicious circle. It therefore appears to be more practical to
describe the morbid picture of sexual neurasthenia (which we owe to
Beard)[428] according to its individual symptoms, as is done also by A.
Eulenburg[429] in an admirable essay, and by L. Löwenfeld in his
well-known work on “The Sexual Life and Nervous Disorders.”
The =abnormal increase in the sexual impulse= (=sexual hyperæsthesia=,
=satyriasis=, =nymphomania=) begins at the point at which the normal
sexual impulse is exceeded; and that point is subject to wide individual
variations, according to the age, race, habits, and external influences.
The normal sexual impulse can also be temporarily increased by special
circumstances--as, for example, by prolonged sexual abstinence, and by
various kinds of erotic stimulation, without our being justified in
speaking of “hyperæsthesia.” This is always an abnormal condition, which
may be referred to various causes. It is more frequent in men
(“satyriasis”) than in women (“nymphomania”); it may be permanent or
periodic; it almost always arises from lascivious =ideas=, and,
according to its cause, is accompanied by a greater or less diminution
of responsibility, or even by complete lack of responsibility. The
readiness with which sexual ideas give rise to an abnormally increased
desire and to reaction on the part of the genital apparatus is
characteristic of sexual hyperæsthesia; and this may attain such a
degree that the man (or woman) may really be “sexually insane,” and,
like the wild animals, rush at the first creature he meets of the
opposite sex in order to gratify his lust; or he may be overpowered by
some abnormal variety of the sexual impulse, so that he seizes in sexual
embrace any other living or lifeless object, and in this state may
perform acts of pæderasty, bestiality, violation of children, etc. In
these most severe cases we can always demonstrate the existence of
mental disorder, general paralysis, mania, or periodical insanity, and
very often of =epilepsy= (Lombroso), as a cause. In a more chronic and
milder form, sexual hyperæsthesia is observed after excessive
masturbation, often also in association with a congenitally neuropathic
constitution. Löwenfeld describes a peculiar form of =nocturnal= sexual
hyperæsthesia occurring in married men, especially men in the forties or
fifties, who for various reasons are compelled to abstain from conjugal
intercourse, and who live continently. =In the daytime= these patients
were free from their trouble; it appeared only at =night=. Soon, or some
hours after going to sleep, a =violent, painful, enduring erection of
the penis= (=priapism=) set in, which disturbed their sleep, and left
them in the morning with a feeling of enervation. In such a case
obviously there is a hyperexcitability of the genital erection centre.
The erection results as a reflex effect of stimuli proceeding from the
genital organs, but manifests itself only when, during sleep, the
inhibitions proceeding from the brain are in abeyance. This nocturnal
priapism may, according to Löwenfeld’s observations, last for
years.[430]
Sexual hyperæsthesia in women, or “=nymphomania=,” is, in its slighter
forms, also in most cases a consequence of excessive masturbation. Such
women do not so much exhibit a more powerful inclination towards sexual
intercourse, which, on the contrary, is incompetent to satisfy their
abnormal and perverse sexual excitability. We rather see in them an
impulsion to obtain new sensations in their sexual organs in any
possible way. These are the women who, for example, consult the
gynæcologist as often as possible, because examination with the speculum
or other manipulations induce in them sexual excitement. During the
climacteric--the time when menstruation ceases--such states are also met
with. Nymphomania proper always develops upon the foundation of severe
neurasthenia and hysteria, or of direct brain and mental disorder. Then
is produced the type of the “=man-mad=” woman, as described by Juvenal
in the person of the Empress Messalina, who in the brothel gave herself
to all comers, without obtaining complete satisfaction of her sexual
desire. Such types exist also at the present day. Thus, the brothers de
Goncourt in their Diary reported the case of an old housekeeper who for
several decades indulged in the most lascivious love orgies, had
innumerable lovers, and a “secret life full of nocturnal orgies in
strange beds, full of nymphomaniac lusts.”[431] There recently lived in
Charlottenburg the wife of a workman, well known on account of her
incredible sexual ardour and man-mania. Her husband, a professional
stabber, was imprisoned for life. His wife often gave herself in a
single day to four or five different men; every male creature that
approached her she asked to perform the sexual act with her.--The
following almost incredible case of this nature is reported by Trélat:
Madame V., of a strong constitution, agreeable exterior, good-natured
manner, but very reserved, came under the care of Trélat on January 1,
1854. Notwithstanding the fact that she was sixty years of age, she
still worked very diligently, and hardly spared herself time for
meals. Nothing in her outward appearance or in her actions indicated
during her stay in the asylum that she was in any way affected with
mental disorder. During the four years not a single obscene word, not
a gesture, not the slightest passionate movement, indicated anger or
impatience.
Since her earliest years she has pursued handsome men and given
herself to them. When a young girl, by this degrading conduct she
reduced her parents to despair. Of an amiable character, she blushed
when anyone spoke a word to her. She cast her eyes down when in the
presence of several persons; but as soon as she was alone with a young
or old man, or even with a child, she was immediately transformed; she
lifted her petticoats, and attacked with a raging energy him who was
the object of her insane love. In such moments she was a Messalina,
whereas a few instants before one would have regarded her as a virgin.
A few times she met with resistance, and received severe moral
lectures, but far more often there was no obstacle to her desires.
Although various distressing adventures occurred, her parents arranged
for her marriage, in the hope thereby to put an end to the moral
disturbance. But her marriage was only a new scandal. She loved her
husband passionately; and she loved with the like passion every man
with whom she happened to be alone; and she exhibited so much cunning
and cleverness that she made a mock of any attempts at watching her,
and often attained her end. Now it was a manual worker busy at his
trade, now some one walking past her in the street, to whom she spoke,
and whom she brought home with her on any possible excuse--a young
man, a servant, a child returning from school! In her exterior she
appeared so blameless, and she spoke so gently, that every one
followed her without mistrust. More than once she was beaten or
robbed; but this did not prevent her continuing the same way of life.
Even when she had become a grandmother there was no change.
One day she enticed a boy, twelve years of age, into her house, having
told him that his mother was coming to see her. She gave him sweets,
embraced and kissed him, and as she then began to take off his clothes
and approached him with obscene gestures, the boy strove to resist
her. He struck her, and he related everything to his brother,
twenty-four years of age. The brother entered the house pointed out by
the boy, and abused the corrupt woman to the uttermost, saying: “In
such circumstances one helps oneself, without having recourse to law,
in order not to bring one’s name into disrepute by public proceedings.
I hope this disturbance will teach you not to behave in this way
again.” While this scene was going on, the woman’s son-in-law chanced
to come in, realized the situation before there was time to tell him
anything, and at once took sides with the incensed young man.
She was shut up in a convent, where she behaved in so good, sweet,
amiable, and modest a manner, that no one would have believed that she
had ever committed the slightest fault, and representations were made
to the effect that she ought to be allowed to return to her home. All
the inmates of the convent had been charmed by the zeal with which she
took part in the religious exercises. When she was free again, the
scandalous doings were immediately resumed, and so it went on all
through her life.
After she had reduced her husband and children to despair, they
finally hoped that age would extinguish the fire with which she was
consumed. They were mistaken. The more excesses she committed, the
more she wanted to commit, the more vigorous she appeared. It is
hardly credible that such debased ideas and habits should leave
intact such a sweet expression of countenance, a voice so youthful, a
behaviour so full of calm repose, and a glance of such clear
assurance. She became a widow. Her children, on account of her
horrible mode of life, could not any longer keep her at home, and they
sent her to a distant place, where they provided her with an
allowance. Since she was now old, she was at length compelled to offer
payment for the shameful services which she demanded; and as the small
allowance she received did not suffice for this purpose, she worked
with untiring zeal in order to be able to pay the great number of her
lovers.
To see the old, alert woman sitting at her work, as I myself saw her,
when aged seventy or upwards, without spectacles, always cleanly and
carefully, but not strikingly, dressed, with a simple and honourable
appearance, and an open countenance--to suspect her shameful mode of
life would never occur to anyone. Several of the wretched men who were
paid by her related how diligent she was. She assured Trélat of her
morality, in the hope that he would discharge her, and so enable her
to resume her mode of life. Trélat could not agree to this, and he
succeeded in obtaining from one of these men an accurate account of
her shameless loves.
This corrupt woman preserved her repose of manner, her excellent
appearance, and her honourable demeanour until her death. She died at
the age of seventy-four years from a cerebral hæmorrhage. There was no
remarkable change in the brain (_Journ. de Méd. de Paris_, 1889, No.
16).
With regard to the treatment of abnormal sexual hyperexcitability, the
severer forms--satyriasis and nymphomania--urgently need =asylum
treatment=. In the slighter forms favourable results will be obtained by
means of psycho-therapeutics, the internal use of sedatives (such as
monobromide of camphor and bromide of potassium), regulation of the
diet, suitable clothing and bedding.[432]
The converse of sexual hyperæsthesia is =sexual anæsthesia=, or the
=abnormal diminution of the sexual impulse=. It occurs in both sexes as
a =congenital= condition, owing in such cases to atrophy or absence of
the genital organs, after exhausting diseases, or in consequence of
arrest of development of the reproductive organs from unknown causes.
This latter condition is denoted by A. Eulenburg by the name of
“=psycho-sexual infantilism=.” The same author also terms sexual
anæsthesia “sexual loss of appetite.” It is commoner in women than in
men. It is often merely =apparent=--a pseudo-anæsthesia--because the
man does not understand how to awaken the still slumbering sexual
perceptions (_vide supra_, p. 86). Recently Otto Adler has written a
comprehensive and interesting monograph on this “Deficient Sexual
Sensibility in Women” (Berlin, 1904). According to him, the statement of
Guttzeit, =that of ten women, four have no sensation at all “in coitu,”
and submit to it without any agreeable sensation at all during the
friction, and without any intimation of the intense pleasure of
ejaculation=--that is, that 40 % of women suffer from coldness and lack
of sensibility, from “=frigidity=”--is indeed somewhat exaggerated in
respect of the percentage; but still it is a correct expression of the
fact that deficient sexual sensibility is much commoner in women than it
is in men, in whom Effertz,[433] for example, estimates the frequency of
frigidity at only 1 %.[434] In women various circumstances explain the
frequency of deficient sexual sensibility. First of all, =masturbation=
lowers sexual excitability in women much more than it does in man, and,
above all, it blunts sensibility for normal sexual intercourse, both by
means of psychical influences and by the insensibility of the external
genital organs, owing to deficient stimulation of the clitoris during
normal intercourse, whereas this organ is most powerfully stimulated
during masturbation. Sexual frigidity also occurs in women in
consequence of maladroitness and brutality of the man _in coitu_, giving
rise rather to pain than to voluptuous sensations, and very frequently
being the cause of the first onset of the so-called =vaginal spasm=, or
“=vaginismus=.”[435] It is also due in some cases to impotence on the
part of the man.
In an interesting and valuable work, Carl Laker, in the year 1889,
described, as “A Peculiar Form of Perversion of the Sexual Impulse in
the Female” (German _Archives of Gynæcology_, 1889, vol. xxxiv., No. 3,
pp. 293 _et seq._), cases of sexual frigidity in woman _in coitu_, which
are not to be regarded as cases of “anæsthesia sexualis,” since the
=sexual impulse= was normal--indeed, frequently was increased--and it
was sexual gratification in normal intercourse which was completely
wanting. In these cases gratification was obtainable only by simple or
mutual onanism. There existed a normal inclination towards the other
sex, associated with mental and physical health. The author assumes
that, in consequence of some anatomical abnormality, stimulation of the
sensory nerves by which the voluptuous sensation is perceived,
especially those of the clitoris, failed to occur; but perhaps by a
change of posture _in coitu_ this stimulation can still be effected. The
case previously reported by me on page 86 belongs to this category of
=relative= or =temporary= sexual anæsthesia; whereas in cases of genuine
=absolute= sexual anæsthesia the sexual =impulse= also is in abeyance at
the outset, or disappears in consequence of excesses and in female
libertines and in prostitutes.
The =treatment= of deficient sexual sensibility in women must, above
all, take into consideration psychical influences, and depends,
therefore, more on the husband or lover than it does on the physician;
the conditions of intercourse must be adapted to the particular
circumstances of the case (as by change of posture in coitus,
preparatory tenderness, etc.). Painful sensibility in vaginismus can
sometimes be cured by mechanical treatment, by the removal of painful
remnants of the hymen, by the cure of small lesions, and also by
extension by means of the speculum. It also appears, as is evidenced by
an observation of Courty, that at the time of impregnation there occurs
a stronger stimulation and voluptuous sensation _in coitu_ in women who
are at other times frigid.
Sexually frigid women of the lower classes are apt, as Effertz points
out, to become prostitutes. During the practice of their profession they
always keep a cool head, because they are at first and always sexually
insensitive, and can devote their whole energy and regulate all their
actions towards the plunder of the man. The following case reported by
Effertz (_op. cit._, p. 51) illustrates this connexion very clearly:
“I was once consulted by a very highly placed hetaira on account of
supposed articular rheumatism. When I informed her of my diagnosis of
lues, she was greatly moved, and said to me that I should not
therefore think the worse of her. She was better than her occupation;
she had never followed it on account of evil passions; she was quite
insensitive; she had done it only in order to provide for her parents
freedom from care in the evening of their life, and to secure the
future of her small child. She also told me on this occasion that she
owed her success to her coldness, =for which condition she was
extremely thankful=. She never gave herself for less than 1,000 marks
(£50). At the same time, she made a mock of her colleagues--those
stupid and wicked girls who frequently, when their heads were fired by
champagne, would give themselves for nothing, and would even run after
men.”
Otto Adler describes Madame de Warens, in Rousseau’s “Confessions,” as a
type of such a _femme de glace_. Frigid women marry with comparatively
greater frequency than women who are sexually very excitable, because
their natural reserve endows them with greater value in the eyes of men,
and also offers a certain security for their faithfulness. Such
marriages are naturally in almost all cases unhappy, for the man soon
grasps the true nature of the case, and since most will say with Ovid,
_odi concubitus qui non utrimque resolvunt_, he seeks outside the house
some =response= for his love.[436] In some cases, indeed, frigid women
make a pretence of experiencing libido and the sexual orgasm, so that
the man is deceived. In some cases, also, notwithstanding a manifest
frigidity on the part of the wife, the marriage is none the less happy
when the husband is partially or wholly impotent, and voluntarily
renounces coitus. Such a case I myself recently observed.
“The case was that of a merchant, physically and bodily in excellent
health, aged a little under forty years, who, since the eleventh year
of his age down to the present time, has continued to masturbate
(between the eleventh and eighteenth years of his life, twice daily).
He has often had ejaculation =without= erection. When twenty years of
age, he frequently attempted coitus, but could not obtain an erection.
Generally speaking, he never had an erection when his attention was
directed to the matter, but only without his co-operation, on other
occasions than those of attempted sexual intercourse. Thus, until his
engagement, in the thirtieth year of his age, he had never completed
normal coitus, but had only obtained sexual gratification by means of
masturbation, and therefore married with considerable hesitation,
although during the eleven months of his engagement he had masturbated
much less frequently. On the wedding-night, however, and later, it
=appeared= that his wife had a =natural disinclination to coitus=, was
=extremely frigid=, and only had traces of sexual sensation when, by
means of onanistic stimulation on the part of her husband, her libido
was slightly stimulated. Spontaneously she never felt any desire for
sexual gratification, not even in consequence of masturbation. The two
have lived for seven years in =most happy= married life, and love one
another tenderly, =without= ever having completed coitus. This
deficient sensibility in the wife, and her failure to respond, have
naturally not relieved the impotence of the husband, and he gratifies
himself now, as before, by solitary masturbation.”
This case proves that the capacity for love is to a certain extent
independent of the strength of the libido; frigid men and women can be
thoroughly “erotic”; that is to say, they can experience the need for
tenderness, just as “erotomania”--that is to say, the excessive longing
for love--is completely different in its nature from satyriasis and
nymphomania (= excessive sexual desire).[437]
Julius Pagel and other authors have recently drawn attention to the fact
that the condition of “erotomania”--excessive amativeness--was fully
described by the ancient and medieval physicians, who regarded it as a
morbid state. He published (in the _Deutsche Medizinal-Zeitung_, 1892,
p. 841) under the title, “A Historical Contribution to the Chapter of
‘Cures by Disgust,’” the translation of a passage from the _Lilium
Medicinæ_ of Bernhard von Gordon in Montpelier, a well-known and
favourite compendium of the beginning of the fourteenth century, in
which, following the example of Avicenna, the _amor (h)ereos_ was
numbered among the _melancholicæ passiones_, and was considered to
constitute a particular section of the group of diseases of the brain
(see the edition of the _Lilium Medicinæ_, p. 210 (Lyons, 1550)). It is,
unfortunately, impossible here to deal at any length with the
exceedingly instructive and remarkable contents. One of the methods of
treatment was to find an old hag as hideous and repulsive as possible,
who was to hold under the nose of the erotomaniac a chemise stained with
menstrual blood, saying at the same time, _talis est amica tua_. We may
remark, in passing, that this genuine medieval “cure by disgust”
diverges, much to its disadvantage, from the manner in which in
antiquity (three centuries before Christ) Erasistratos, the pupil of
Aristotle, a celebrated physician of the Alexandrian school, cured the
son of King Antiochus, who had fallen in love with his stepmother
Stratonica. An account of the ancient therapeutic art is also to be
found in another work by J. Pagel, “Introduction to the History of
Medicine” (Berlin, 1898). In a comprehensive work, “The History of Love
Considered as a Disease,” this topic has recently been considered by
Hjalmar Crohns. Here we have a theme the literature of which is very
extensive, and which might be suitably dealt with in a special treatise.
In the male, sexual frigidity in the majority of cases is associated
with sexual weakness or with impotence--that is to say, with the
impossibility of copulating or of procreation. The former variety of
sexual incapacity (_impotentia cœundi_) is, properly speaking, peculiar
to the male. The second form--true “sterility” (_impotentia
generandi_)--occurs in women as well as in men.
In the case of male impotence, various symptoms, preliminary
disturbances, and associated phenomena, make their appearance, and these
we shall have to describe separately, since they often occur as
independent disorders.
This is, above all, true of the =outflow of sexual secretions from the
urethra=, =seminal losses= (=pollutions=[438] and =spermatorrhœa=), and
the evacuation of the =secretion of the prostate gland=, the so-called
“=prostatorrhœa=.” The literature of these conditions, which are partly
physiological (as a proportion of pollutions) and partly morbid, is
enormous. Of fundamental importance, notwithstanding the serious
exaggerations of the author, is the celebrated work of Dr. M. Lallemand,
“Involuntary Losses of Semen.” In recent times this important province
of sexual pathology has been more especially advanced by the researches
of leading German physicians, above all by those of Curschmann and
Fürbringer.
The most important question with regard to seminal losses or pollutions
in any case is this: have we to do with physiological processes, lying
within the range of health, or have we to do with morbid processes?
As normal, not morbid, seminal losses Lallemand regarded pollutions in
=healthy, sexually mature, continent= individuals, occurring
=spontaneously during sleep=, associated with =erection= of the penis
and voluptuous sensations. He rightly regarded these as physiologically
necessary, indicated their purpose to be the discharge of sexual
tension, the prevention of an excessive accumulation of the reproductive
products, and compared their effect with that of hæmorrhages from the
nose, which are so common in youth, and in most cases are distinctly
beneficial. But he drew attention to the =indeterminate, fluctuating
boundary-line= between normal and morbid pollutions. This latter point
of view is dealt with also by Eulenburg (“Sexual Neurasthenia,” p. 171),
in opposition to other authors who regarded all pollutions, even the
physiological, as abnormal. In practice, however, it is generally not
difficult to distinguish between physiological and morbid seminal
losses. The former are characterized, not only by the distinctive signs
already mentioned, but also by their occurrence =at longer intervals=,
and by the =absence= of any disadvantageous effect upon the general
state of health. As soon as pollutions have such a deleterious influence
they are morbid; and they are generally morbid when they occur
abnormally =early=, before puberty, with abnormal =frequency=, at
abnormal =times of the day=, and in association with abnormal
=conditions of the genital organs=. According to Fürbringer, the normal
intervals between pollutions in the case of continent youths vary
between ten and thirty days. Löwenfeld considers pollutions occurring
once a week, and even the transient occurrence of pollutions on several
successive nights, as a result of sexual excitement, as being still
within normal bounds. But if these repeated pollutions within a single
week, or even within a single day, continue =for a long time=, we are
always concerned with morbid pollutions. These sometimes occur not only
at night, but also--a fact to which the German physician Wichmann, in
his dissertation _De Pollutione Diurna_ (Göttingen, 1782), drew
attention--they occur =by day= (“diurnal pollutions”), in the waking
state, without masturbation or coitus, upon slight mechanical or
physical stimulation. In such cases erection of the penis is often
completely =wanting=; ejaculation of the semen takes place with the
organ flaccid, and even without any voluptuous sensation. In many cases,
indeed, these pollutions are accompanied by actual =painful= sensations
in the genital organs, and instead of voluptuous dreams or thoughts, the
nocturnal ejaculation is accompanied by anxious dreams, the daylight
pollution by an extremely disagreeable sensation. Commonly in these
pollutions ordinary semen is at first evacuated--a mixture of the
secretions of the testicles, the prostate, the vesiculæ seminales, and
Cowper’s glands--containing numerous =spermatozoa=. After the trouble
has lasted a long time the semen becomes thinner (owing to its
containing a smaller proportion of the thick testicular secretion) and
more transparent; the spermatozoa are less numerous and mostly
undeveloped, and ultimately they may be completely absent. Löwenfeld
observed a peculiar form of pollution in which the semen was ejaculated
only in drops, or might be =completely wanting=--that is to say, there
might be a pollution =without= ejaculation, purely a voluptuous
orgasm.[439]
In such cases Löwenfeld was able to prove that it is not the loss of
semen which weakens, as Lallemand assumed, but that it is the =nervous
disturbance= of the lumbar spinal cord which plays the principal part.
This irritable weakness of the lumbar spinal cord may have existed
for a long time before, or may have developed only as the result of
repeated pollutions or of excessive sexual excitement; it may give
rise, not only to proper seminal emissions, but, in addition,
to “=spermatorrhœa=”--that is to say, to the =outflow of semen
accompanying urination or defecation=; and it may also cause the rarer
“=prostatorrhœa=”--the outflow of the secretion of the prostate gland. A
long duration of all these morbid discharges has a serious effect on the
health, and induces the typical picture of sexual neurasthenia. As a
=cause= of seminal losses we must mention masturbation, excessive sexual
intercourse, chronic inflammation of the urethra (especially after
=gonorrhœa=), stricture of the urethra, rectal affections, alcoholism,
diabetes, and tabes dorsalis.
In =women=, also, =processes analogous to pollution= may be observed,
although much more rarely than in men, and generally as a consequence of
masturbation practised for several years. According to Adler (_op.
cit._, p. 130), pollutions--that is to say, evacuations of the secretion
of the vaginal glands and of the uterine mucous membrane, as well as of
the secretion of Bartholin’s glands near the vaginal inlet--never occur
in chaste and intact virgins, but only in women who have already learned
the enjoyment of sexual intercourse, and who are subsequently compelled
to lead a continent life. For this reason pollutions are a “trouble of
young widows,” and occur in young girls only when they have learned to
know the nature of sexual pleasure by means of masturbation. Eulenburg
remarks (“Sexual Neurasthenia,” p. 174):
“In connexion with lascivious dreams there occur spontaneous, more or
less abundant, discharges of the clear muco-gelatinous secretion of
the glands. These form a striking manifestation of sexual
neurasthenia in women, and can be compared with the morbid pollutions
occurring in similar circumstances in male neurasthenics. We hear less
about them, however, and they are insufficiently known, even by
medical men. For this reason especially, when they occur in
association with physical virginity and a normal genital condition in
other respects, they do not usually receive sufficient attention.”
The older physicians, especially those of the eighteenth century,[440]
described these pollutions in women very well and thoroughly; in erotic
and pornographic literature they have always played a great part. An
interesting observation on peculiar processes analogous to pollutions is
reported by Paul Bernhardt.[441] A hysterical sempstress, twenty-five
years of age, as the result of any kind of =annoyance=, experienced
sexual excitement completely resembling the sensation of sexual
intercourse, and ending with a discharge of mucus. This was, however,
never accompanied by any trace of voluptuous sensation; on the contrary,
it gave rise to lumbar pains. Also, when she dreamed of anything
=disagreeable= or had =nightmare=, this condition recurred. Erotically
the patient is very indifferent, and denies the practice of
masturbation.
To the category suggested by P. Bernhardt of sexual excitement induced
by anxiety and trouble belongs the case reported to me by Dr. Emil Bock
of a boy of fifteen years of age, who, when very anxious about his
inability to complete a school task, experienced an ejaculation for the
first time. To the literature of impotence belongs the work by Nicolo
Barrucco, “Sexual Neurasthenia, and its Relations to the Diseases of the
Genital Organs.” Regarding physiological pollutions, and the trifling
difference between them and normal seminal discharge during coitus,
Schopenhauer makes some apt observations in his “Neue Paralipomena,” pp.
230, 231.
In the =treatment= of pollutions, which always demands the most careful
medical observation and examination of the individual case, the most
important measures are =dietetic and hygienic treatment=, =change of
scene= from town to =country=, and especially to =mountain air=,
methodical =hydrotherapeutic measures=, =warm baths=, =massage=,
=electricity=, =hyperalimentation=, the use of =bromides=, =local
treatment of the urethra=, etc., etc.
The last and most important of the phenomena connected with sexual
neurasthenia is =sexual weakness= or =impotence= in its various
forms.[442]
We distinguish in the male =two principal forms= of impotence: (1)
“=Impotentia coeundi=”--that is, incapacity for erection of the penis
and the completion of coitus; (2) “=impotentia generandi=”--that is, the
impossibility of fertilization (owing to want of semen or to the lack of
fertilizing quality in this fluid).
Congenital malformations of the genital organs giving rise to impotence
are extremely rare. Gyurkovechky, amongst 6,000 men fit for military
service, found three such men only. More frequently are =acquired=
defects met with as causes of impotence, such as complete or partial
loss of the penis and testicles, as in eunuchs and castrated persons. It
is well known that, notwithstanding the removal of the external genital
organs, sexual desire may persist; and when the penis is retained,
though the testicles have been removed, erection and copulation are
possible, providing the castration was effected after puberty. But it is
obvious that in most cases potency is very markedly interfered with, and
ultimately it may entirely disappear. More light is thrown on the
question by the occurrence of impotence after =unilateral= castration. A
tragical case of this latter kind is reported by von Gyurkovechky (_op.
cit._, p. 71):
“A former colleague of mine at the University of Vienna had to have
one of his testicles removed in consequence of obstinate inflammation
resulting from gonorrhœa; thereafter the second testicle underwent
complete atrophy. The much-to-be-pitied, handsome, elegant, and
amiable young man remained for some years capable of performing
coitus, was greatly pleased with himself for this reason, and paid
ostentatious court to ladies. Still, he was seldom in a position to
perform coitus, and after three years he completely withdrew himself
from the society of ladies, and became gradually morose and reserved,
until one day he disappeared from Vienna, discontinued his studies,
and never let any of us hear from him again. This case has remained
very vividly in my memory, and it illustrates most clearly the
influence of virile potency upon the entire being of the individual.”
If the second testicle remains intact, the capacity for sexual
intercourse is not interfered with; and reproductive capacity also
persists, although it may be diminished in degree.
An important source of sterility in the male, in which the capacity for
sexual intercourse remains unimpaired, is =bilateral epididymitis=,
consequent upon =gonorrhœa=. This represents more than 50 % of all the
cases of incapacity for procreation in the male. Finger found in 85 % of
cases of epididymitis that the =spermatozoa were absent from the semen=
(the so-called “=azoospermia=”); and Fürbringer is led by his own
experience to believe that 80 % of men who have had double epididymitis
are incapable of procreation. Thus we may really speak of “=gonorrhœal
sterility in the male=.” In many sterile marriages the fault lies with
the husband, as was first clearly proved by F. Kehrer’s fundamental
investigations. And the no less momentous gonorrhœal sterility in women
is also, in the majority of cases, ultimately dependent upon the
husband, who has presented his wife with “gonorrhœal infection as a
wedding gift.”[443]
An extremely =small size= of the penis, also a =relatively small size=
of this organ in cases of obesity and tumours, =malformations= of the
penis, also the by no means rare mechanical hindrances to erections due
to injuries and indurations in the corpora cavernosa (especially as a
result of gonorrhœal inflammation)--all these may make coitus
impossible. Fürbringer and Finger have also seen peculiar chronic
shrinking processes of the corpora cavernosa occur independently of
gonorrhœa and tumours. All these conditions give rise to =incomplete=
erection, in which the penis is bent at an angle at some point or other,
or is curved, so that it cannot be introduced into the vagina (chordee).
All the hitherto described forms of impotentia coeundi are less frequent
than those =in which the external genital organs are completely intact=,
and in which we have to do simply with =imperfection= or =complete
failure of erection= in consequence of various =general disorders=.
Erection of the penis is induced both =centrally= from the brain (by
voluptuous ideas), and from the spinal cord (by direct stimulation),
and also =peripherally= from the genital organs (by friction of the
glans penis), by stimuli proceeding from the urethra, bladder, prostate,
seminal vesicles, rectum, and the neighbourhood of the genital organs
(as, for example, the buttocks), and may be either of a morbid or of a
physiological character. When there are inflammatory conditions of the
genital organs, especially gonorrhœa of the anterior and posterior
urethra, erections occur very readily. From the full bladder there also
proceed stimuli giving rise to erection, thus inducing the well-known
“=morning erection=,” utilized by many who would otherwise be completely
impotent. Blows on the buttocks also give rise to erections--a subject
to which we shall return when we come to discuss flagellation.
The =nature= of erection can be very briefly described as consisting in
a stiffening of the penis by the profuse =streaming of blood= into the
=reticular spaces= of the =corpora cavernosa=, enlarged by =stimulation=
of the =erection nerves=. The consequent erection of the penis is
dependent upon the action of a particular muscle--the ischio-cavernosus
muscle.
Impotence when the external organs are intact is in most cases due to
central causes, and ultimately to psychical causes, even though severe
bodily affections or local morbid states play a predisposing part (the
so-called “=functional impotence=”).
This impotence is sometimes one of the =earliest= symptoms of =diabetes
mellitus= and of =chronic Bright’s disease with contracted kidney=, also
of =severe conditions of exhaustion=--to which consumption offers a
significant exception, signalized already by the old saying, _phthisicus
salax_--of =obesity=, and of =tabes dorsalis=, in which the sexual
potency gradually disappears, but libido outlasts the capacity for
erection. Certain =poisons= also particularly damage potency. This is
especially the case with =alcohol=, the deleterious influence of which
on potency has already been described (pp. 293, 294). Georg Hirth goes
so far as to recognize a special “=impotentia alcoholica=.”
“Above all, no alcohol,” says he, “especially not as a means for
producing erection. In youth a man needs no such stimulus, and in age
he will be apt to find, with the porter in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’
(Act ii., Scene 3), that ‘drink may be said to be an equivocator with
lechery,’ for, as he says, ‘it provokes the desire, but it takes away
the performance; it makes lechery, and it mars him; it sets him on and
takes him off; it persuades him and disheartens him; makes him stand
to and not stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him into sleep, and,
giving him the lie, leaves him.’”[444]
Fürbringer’s view, that alcohol, taken up to the degree of slight
intoxication, rather increases potency, in connexion with which he
refers to sexual invalids who are only able to perform sexual
intercourse in a state of moderate intoxication, cannot be regarded as
generally true. It is possible that in these admitted sexual invalids
alcoholic intoxication overcomes =stronger psychical inhibitions=, which
in the state of sobriety had hindered erection. For the normal
individual alcohol is not a means for the increase of sexual potency,
but the reverse.
=The free use of tobacco= certainly also impairs sexual potency.[445]
Nicotine and love are as little compatible as alcohol and love.
Fürbringer, Hirth, and Eulenburg, ascribe to the excessive use of
tobacco a diminution in sexual potency. The following interesting
passage is from the Diary of the De Goncourts (_op. cit._, p. 89):
“=There is an antagonism between tobacco and women. The taste for one
diminishes the taste for the other=. So true is this, that passionate
Lotharios usually give up smoking, =because they feel or believe that
tobacco diminishes their sexual appetite and their powers of love=.”
=Coffee= and =tea=, taken in excess, and, above all, =morphine=, are
also antagonistic to potency. Dupuy has observed the frequent occurrence
of impotence in men who were in the habit of drinking large quantities
of strong coffee (five or six breakfast-cups every day). Sexual potency
returned as soon as the use of coffee was discontinued; whilst when the
use of the beverage was resumed the impotence again appeared (_Comptes
Rendus de la Société de Biologie_, 1886, No. 27).
The majority of cases of functional disturbances of potency depend upon
nervous impotence. It is the form which at the present day the physician
most frequently encounters. It is intimately connected with the state of
“irritable nervous weakness,” or sexual neurasthenia, the most important
symptom of which is represented by “psychical” impotence. There exist,
also--and this justifies the independent consideration of psychical
impotence--numerous cases of impotence =without= neurasthenia
(Fürbringer). This remarkable form occurs especially in perfectly
=healthy= young =husbands=, who often before were completely potent, and
had previously effected coitus in a perfectly normal manner, or had
lived a quiet, continent life, without having injured themselves in any
way by masturbation. Such individuals, in consequence of the excitement,
shame, and embarrassment of the wedding-night, often suffer from
psychical impotence. Réti[446] speaks of “=impotence due to
compassion=,” arising from “the sympathy felt with the pains suffered by
the still virgin wife” when the attempt at coitus is made.
“The young married pair kiss one another and vie with one another in
tenderness, but when the matter becomes serious--when the husband
wants to enjoy his rights as a husband--the wife experiences
incredible anxiety; she trembles in all her limbs, writhes, screams,
and weeps. The man becomes exhausted, and at length, when the wife is
resigned, and willing to surrender herself to her fate, he has become
unfitted for his share in intercourse.”
It is clear that these forms of psychical impotence, which appear in
very various shades, are mostly transient phenomena, and exhibit a good
prospect of complete cure.
Much more difficult is the matter when we have to do with cases,
becoming commoner every day, of psychical impotence in consequence of
=sexual perversions=. Sadistic, masochistic, fetichistic, and homosexual
inclinations may, in certain individuals, predominate to such an extent
that either copulation cannot be effected without the =preliminary=
gratification of these perverse instincts, or else the latter =entirely
usurp the place= of normal coitus, which has become, generally speaking,
quite impossible (relative and absolute psychical impotence in
consequence of sexual perversions). To the former category belong, for
example, those cases, which are by no means rarely seen, in which
homosexual persons are only able to have intercourse with their wives
after preliminary caresses by their male friends; or masochists must be
subjected to a preparatory flagellation in order to become potent. In
the second category copulation has become quite impossible; the orgasm
takes place only in connexion with the activity of the perverse impulse,
and there often exists an actual repugnance to normal coitus.
Well known also is that rare relative psychical impotence in which the
man can perform coitus only with =prostitutes=, whereas he is impotent
as regards decent women. This, however, may often be associated with the
existence of sexual perversions, which are gratified only during
intercourse with prostitutes.
Another form of relative psychical impotence is =temporary= impotence,
in which the potency is entirely subject to =custom=, and a change in
the custom induces impotence. Thus, Frenzel reports the case of a man
who had always had intercourse with his wife immediately on going to
bed, and proved completely impotent when this habit was interrupted, and
he now wished to perform the act early in the morning. Only gradually
did he recover his lost potency and become able to adapt himself to the
changed conditions.[447]
Another form of impotence by no means rare, and occurring in otherwise
healthy men, is that produced by powerful =mental= activity or
=artistic= production, the impotence of literary men and of artists. It
is usually of a transient nature,[448] manifesting itself only during
the periods of intellectual activity, and it is explicable in accordance
with the law of sexual equivalents, according to which the sexual
potency appears in the latent form of spiritual productive activity. A
remarkable case of this impotence of literary men is reported by the
just quoted Frenzel.[449] Allied with this variety of impotence is the
form due to transient =mental distraction=, to =instantaneous ideas=,
which suddenly act as psychical inhibitions. These sudden ideas can be
of a very varied content--joyful, sad, anxious, annoying; in every case
they are capable of annulling the =already existing potency=, and of
making the further erection of the penis impossible. Such conditions
occur alike in healthy persons and in those who are readily excitable
and neurasthenic. A classical instance of this nature is J. J.
Rousseau’s adventure with the Venetian courtesan Giulietta, which he
describes very vividly in his “Confession.” He went to see her full of
passionate desire for sexual enjoyment, but Nature “had put into his
head a poison against this unspeakable happiness” for which his heart
yearned. Hardly had he glanced at the beautiful girl than an idea came
to him which moved him to tears, and completely diverted him from his
purpose. He became more deeply absorbed in this idea, the sexual desires
completely disappeared, and he was no longer in a position to prove his
manhood. To this tragi-comic episode we owe the exclamation of the
disappointed girl, which has passed into a proverb: “Lascia le donne e
studia la matematica” (“Leave women alone, and go and study
mathematics”). In the =reflective love= of Kierkegaard, Grillparzer,
Alfred de Musset, and other men of remarkable genius, there is also
recognizable an element of impotence.
The majority of all cases of impotence belong to the class of true
=nervous, neurasthenic= impotence, and these are diffused especially
among the circles who supply the greatest contingent to the ranks of
neurasthenics in general--that is, among officers, merchants,
physicians, and other classes of the cultured part of our population
whose professional duties are arduous. Among the causes of neurasthenic
impotence, excessive masturbation and chronic gonorrhœa, with its
consequences, play the principal part. Neurasthenic impotence manifests
itself, above all, by abnormal conditions of erection and ejaculation,
either of which may by itself be diminished or completely prevented; or,
again, both may exhibit abnormalities, whilst in some cases even
erection may be =very frequent=, =unusually powerful=, and
=long-lasting= (the so-called “=priapism=”), whilst ejaculation and
voluptuous sensation are completely wanting, and these erections are in
most cases accompanied by very =painful= sensations. An extremely
characteristic symptom of nervous impotence is a =premature discharge of
the semen=, not merely _ante portas_, but often even at the first signs
of activity of the libido sexualis, at which time erection may be very
well developed. In other cases, again, erection occurs, but no
ejaculation of the semen. Finally, both may be completely wanting (the
so-called “=paralytic impotence=”).
* * * * *
The following cases, which came under my own observation, show some of
the above-mentioned types of impotence:
1. A man, twenty-nine years of age, married for ten months, complains,
after obviously excessively frequent enjoyment of his conjugal rights,
of a sense of weakness and weariness after intercourse, such as he has
never previously experienced, as well as of a continually earlier
ejaculation, latterly even on simple contact of his penis with the
vulva. Erection is always present and is powerful. On further inquiry
he admitted that in his four-weeks’ honeymoon he had connexion once
daily, and thenceforward two or three times a week.
2. A man, twenty-one years of age, states that a year and a half ago
for the first time he endeavoured to have sexual intercourse; he has
never yet succeeded in completing coitus. Since the age of fourteen
years he has suffered from frequent pollutions and from marked sexual
excitability. He has often tried to effect coitus, but there has
always resulted precipitate ejaculation, with his penis in a flaccid
condition. He has, properly speaking, only morning erections,
dependent upon a full bladder. It is possible that a marked varicocele
on the left side has something to do with the genesis of this
impotence.
3. A man, forty-eight years of age, has noticed for some years a
distinct decline in sexual potency. Ejaculation always occurs shortly
before _immissio membri_, when the penis is flaccid or only
semi-erect. If erection is complete, on the other hand, then
ejaculation fails to occur.
Very peculiar, and offering a kind of analogy to vaginismus in women, is
impotence consequent upon =excessively painful sensibility of the glans
penis=, as a result of sexual neurasthenia or of local inflammatory
processes (balanitis, etc.). The pains during coitus in these cases are
often so severe that those thus affected completely abandon any attempt
at intercourse.
The question =whether impotence can result from sexual abstinence= is
still disputed. Fürbringer does not know of any certain cases. According
to Virey,[450] by “complete and continuous abstinence from intercourse”
in the male the organs by which the semen is prepared--the testicles,
the seminal vesicles, and the vasa deferentia--and also the penis,
become smaller, “unsightly, wrinkled, and inactive.” Galen reports the
same of the athletes of the Roman Empire, men who had to live a life of
strict continence. Virey alludes to an “extremely chaste saint, in whom
after death no trace of genital organs could be discovered” (!). That
absolute abstinence must ultimately limit potency, if only by psychical
means, is _a priori_ probable.
Recent observations confirm the view that long-continued absolute sexual
abstinence exercises a harmful influence upon potency, and especially
upon potentia coeundi. As a proof of this, I may more especially mention
two cases of University professors, not yet thirty years of age, both of
whom until a little while ago had had no experience of sexual
intercourse, one having remained continent during two years of married
life! Quite recently both of them repeatedly attempted normal coitus,
but with complete failure _quoad erectionem_. Von Schrenck-Notzing[451]
also reported a case of this character not long ago, in which,
notwithstanding the strong desire for normal sexual intercourse, in the
case of a literary man thirty-five years of age, who prior to marriage
had lived a life of =complete abstinence=, and had never practised
masturbation, every attempt at coitus proved a failure.
Finally, we have to consider the more or less physiological =presenile
and senile impotence= which accompanies the commencement of old age, but
naturally occurs at very different times in different individuals, for
some men are already old at the age of forty years, and others are not
yet old at the age of seventy years. Von Gyurkovechky dates the first
decline in the sexual powers from the fortieth year of life, and
considers that normally these powers are completely extinguished at
about sixty-five years. But there are numerous exceptions. Complete
potency in respect of libido, erection, and ejaculation has been
observed in men of seventy and eighty years; and isolated cases have
even been recorded in which men of ninety and one hundred years have
procreated children.[452] In the sense of Metchnikoff and Hirth, who in
their writings proclaim the prevention of senility as a hygienic ideal,
this physiological _potentia senilis_ is no Utopia, and a future
scientific macrobiotic will defer the onset of old age by from ten to
twenty years.
“I do not ask,” says Georg Hirth, “that the man in advanced age should
play with his sexual powers; but that he should possess =the
consciousness of being able to use them=--that I do demand” (“Ways to
Love,” p. 462).
The treatment of impotence in the male in its various forms is indeed a
difficult matter in individual cases, more especially in view of the
great number of existing methods of treatment; but treatment promises
good results when it is based upon an exact, critical, individual
analysis of the separate causes and symptoms. It is partly =local= and
partly =general=. In the case of impotence resulting from excessive
masturbation, or in the case of the well-known “gonorrhœal” impotence,
good results will be obtained from =slight cauterization of the urethra=
and =massage of the prostate=, =local carbonic-acid douches= or
carbonic-acid baths, =warm or cold sitz-baths, or electrical treatment=,
with which, however, great care must be exercised. In some cases
imperfect erection will be benefited by the application of a 10 %
=ethereal solution of camphor=, in the form of friction or a spray, to
the entire genital region. Mechanical apparatus have also been employed
to favour erection, as, for example, the so-called “=schlitten=,”
consisting of a conducting instrument for an insufficiently erect penis,
made up of two thin, suitably shaped laminæ of metal, or the “=erector=”
of Gassen, which works in a similar manner. Apparatus of this nature are
useful only to this extent, that they give the penis a certain purchase.
We cannot allow that they possess any other effect, any more than
Gassen’s other apparatus, the “compressor,” the “cumulator,” and the
“ultimo” (Löwenfeld, Fürbringer). Any local changes that can be detected
as having some connexion with the occurrence of impotence must receive
attention. This is obvious; and no less obvious is the treatment of any
general disorders which may give rise to the impotence. As regards the
general treatment of impotence, =psychical= influence must first be
considered. =In most cases= this must take the form of temporary
withdrawal of the thoughts from the sexual sphere in general, for which
the strict prohibition of sexual activity (masturbation, etc.) forms the
foundation; in addition, =will= and =self-confidence= must be
strengthened. In these matters an intelligent wife can do much to
supplement the work of the physician. Sometimes a mere =change= in the
mode of life or in the relations between husband and wife, above all, a
change in the mode of performing sexual intercourse (a change in
posture, greater responsiveness on the part of the wife, etc.), may have
a manifest curative influence. The treatment of the neurasthenia which
may have caused the impotence will also have a favourable effect.
Alcohol and tobacco are best entirely forbidden. Innumerable =drugs=
have been recommended for the treatment of impotence. The belief in the
beneficial effect of cantharides is as much a superstition as the belief
in the aphrodisiac action of celery, asparagus, caviare, and truffles.
Certainly all these may cause excitement of the genital organs, but this
is merely due to an increased flow of blood to these organs, which is of
a very fugitive nature, and when the effect is often repeated
(especially when cantharides is used for this purpose), it may have
serious consequences. The influence of these substances may be compared
with the purely stimulating effect of flagellation. More confidence may
be placed in =phosphorus=, =strychnine=, and, above all, in =yohimbin=,
a drug prepared from the bark of a West African tree,[453] which is
warmly recommended in cases of neurasthenic impotence by Mendel and
Eulenburg. Having myself seen good results from the use of Yohimbin
Riedel in two cases of pre-senile gonorrhœal impotence, I can confirm
the favourable judgment of Eulenburg. In the case of pre-senile
impotence in a man nearly sixty years of age yohimbin was the only means
which, after several years’ intermission, enabled him once more to have
erections, and repeatedly to perform coitus. Eulenburg reports the case
of a man, which is probably unique, in whom, =after a few days’ use=,
yohimbin restored sexual potency after he had been impotent for twelve
years! This interesting drug is certainly a valuable enrichment of our
aphrodisiac armamentarium, and the first drug of this nature to which
the name of a specific against impotence can justly be given.
Quite recently Eulenburg, Posner, Nevinny, and others, have warmly
recommended as a true specific in cases of functional impotence a
combination of lecithin with the active principle of the Brazilian plant
_Muira Puama_. This new drug is by Eulenburg termed “muiracithin.”
From the above-described individual troubles (masturbation, sexual
hyperæsthesia, sexual anæsthesia, pollutions, and impotence) is composed
the clinical picture of =sexual neurasthenia=, which, however, is
manifested also by other symptoms, among which we must mention certain
=perceptions of anxiety= and certain =coercive ideas=, such as the
condition, known also to the laity, of =agoraphobia=, which is very
frequently met with in sexual neurasthenia; also the fear of travelling
alone by railway, or sudden anxiety in the theatre or concert-hall, in
the form of the fear of fire, with the accompanying irresistible impulse
to rush out into the open; further, =lumbar pains= and =neuralgia of the
genital organs=, and =anomalies= and =pains connected with the
evacuation of urine=; =an inclination to sexual perversions=; =gastric
affections=,[454] such as nervous retching and vomiting, painful cramps
of the stomach, loss of appetite, also excessive hunger, nervous
dyspepsia, etc.; =migraine= and =heart troubles= of manifold kinds. It
is not to be wondered at that when sexual neurasthenia is markedly
developed, and when several of the above-described manifestations occur,
the disease may pass on into a condition of complete =mental
exhaustion=, associated with =morbid irritability= and =hypochondriacal=
and =melancholy= ideas. We then ultimately see the development of
typical =sexual hypochondria=.
The treatment of sexual neurasthenia--which in the last-described
general symptom-complex occurs also in women, associated in their case
with =amenorrhœa=, =dysmenorrhœa=, or =menorrhagia=[455]--consists for
the most part in the already described treatment of the individual
symptoms. In addition, we have to make use of hyperalimentation,
=hydro-therapeutic methods=, =gymnastic= treatment, general =massage=,
and =climatic= cures.
[396] Havelock Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sense of Shame.”
[397] Fürbringer’s article, “Masturbation,” in Eulenburg’s
_Real-Enzykldopädie der gesamten Heilkunde_, vol. xvii., p. 523, third
edition (Vienna and Leipzig, 1898).
[398] Metchnikoff, “The Nature of Man,” pp. 95-99.
[399] A French erotic work describes how an impotent man, in the hope
of obtaining an erection, allowed a cockchafer to crawl about his
penis.
[400] Probably the following case of an onanist, sixty-four years of
age, is unique. It is reported by A. Wild (“A Contribution to the
Refinements of Masturbation,” published in the _Münchener Medizinische
Wochenschrift_, No. 11, 1906). He introduced a twig of a pine-tree
into the urethra, and in such a way that when the attempt was made to
draw it out, the pine-needles acted as barbs; consequently the twig
broke off short, and it was necessary for the medical man to remove it
with the aid of dressing forceps!
[401] _Cf._ the complete historical and literary account of
_godemichés_, given in my “Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii., pp.
284-292 (Berlin, 1903).
[402] _Cf._ the explanation of this passage by Iwan Bloch, “Were the
Ancients aware of the Contagious Character of Venereal Diseases?”
published in the _Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift_, No. 5, 1899.
[403] S. Freud, “Three Papers on the Sexual Theory,” pp. 37, 42
(Leipzig and Vienna, 1905).
[404] R. Kossmann, “Is the Medical Man Justified in Recommending
Extra-Conjugal Sexual Intercourse?” published in the _Journal for the
Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1905, vol. iii., p. 126.
[405] _Cf._ R. Thomalla, “Masturbation in the School: its Consequences
and its Suppression,” published in the _Journal for the Suppression of
Venereal Diseases_, 1906, vol. v., pp. 63-68.
[406] H. Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sense of Shame.”
[407] Gustav Aschaffenburg, “The Relations of the Sexual Life to the
Origin of Nervous and Mental Disorders,” published in the _Münchener
Medizinische Wochenschrift_, 1906, No. 37, p. 1794.
[408] Metchnikoff, “The Nature of Man” (English edition), p. 96.
[409] A. Eulenburg, “Sexual Neuropathy,” p. 80 (Leipzig, 1895).
[410] Otto Adler, “Deficient Sexual Sensibility in Woman,” p. 112
(Berlin, 1904). Mendel observed excessive masturbation in
hypochondriacal women (_Deutsche Medizinal-Zeitung_, 1889, No. 15, p.
180).
[411] L. Löwenfeld, “The Sexual Life and Nervous Disorders,” fourth
edition, p. 114 (Wiesbaden, 1906).
[412] Eduard Reich, “Immorality and Immoderation,” p. 122 (Neuwied and
Leipzig, 1866).
[413] Felix Roubaud, “Treatise on Impotence and Sterility in Man and
Woman,” third edition, p. 7 (Paris, 1876).
[414] W. A. Hammond, “Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female Sexes.”
[415] A. von Schrenck-Notzing, “Therapeutic Suggestion in Cases of
Morbid Manifestations of the Sexual Sensibility,” pp. 66, 67
(Stuttgart, 1892).
[416] _Cf._ Havelock Ellis, “The Sexual Impulse and the Sense of
Shame,” pp. 184-186.
[417] Iwan Bloch, “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 107, 108 (Dresden, 1903).
[418] On p. 18 of his treatise he goes so far as to say: “There is no
disease of the body or the mind which cannot be referred to
masturbation.”
[419] Eulenburg refers also to “Persönliche Schutz,” by Laurentius;
the “Jugendspiegel,” by Bernhard; the “Johannistrieb,” by B. Mohrmann;
the “Krankheit der Welt,” by A. Damm.
[420] According to A. Jacobi (“The History of Pædiatry, and its
Relation to Other Arts and Sciences,” p. 66 (Berlin, 1905)), this is
not true of quite young children, at ages of from one to ten years, in
whom masturbation does less harm than in half-grown or adult
individuals.
[421] _Cf._ H. Rohleder, “Die Masturbation,” pp. 185-192 (Berlin,
1899).
[422] _Cf._ L. Löwenfeld, _op. cit._, p. 137.
[423] A. Tardieu, “Étude Médico-Légale sur les Attentats aux Moeurs,”
p. 114 (Paris, 1878).
[424] _Cf._ my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis,” vol. i., p. 135.
[425] Von Schrenk-Notzing, _op. cit._, p. 9.
[426] _Cf._ A. Weill, “The Laws and Mysteries of Love,” p. 101
(Berlin, 1895).
[427] Havelock Ellis, _op. cit._, p. 266.
[428] G. M. Beard, “Sexual Neurasthenia,” second edition (Leipzig and
Vienna, 1890).
[429] A. Eulenburg, “Sexual Neurasthenia,” published in _Deutsche
Klinik_, 1902, vol. vi., pp. 163-206.
[430] L. Löwenfeld, _op. cit._, pp. 273, 274.
[431] Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, “Leaves from a Diary.”
[432] “During my life I have had under observation many a lecherous
man and many a wanton woman, and I have always found that, without
exception, voluptuous persons clothe themselves very warmly, and sleep
under very warm bed-clothes. In earlier years I have reported several
cases observed by me of warm clothing of the genital organs on the
part of women who distinguished themselves by lasciviousness, and I
could increase the number of examples of this kind by several dozen”
(E. Reich, “Immorality and Intemperance,” pp. 43, 44).
[433] O. Effertz, “Neurasthenia Sexualis,” p. 46 (New York, 1894).
[434] Effertz estimates the frequency of frigidity in women at about
10 per cent. The truth probably lies midway between the views of
Effertz and those of Guttzeit.
[435] By vaginismus we understand involuntary convulsive contraction
of the vaginal muscles, associated with abnormal sensibility of the
vaginal inlet, dependent on masturbation, or induced by the
above-mentioned painful sensations and injuries which occur in
maladroit and brutal coitus (this is by far the commonest cause of
vaginismus), especially when the penis is very large and the vaginal
inlet very small, or when the female genital organs are further
forward than usual. Vaginismus generally arises from small injuries
and lacerations, produced in this manner; with the physical sense of
pain is associated also psychical anxiety with regard to renewed
attempts at intercourse; and in this way the reflex spasm is produced.
Sometimes the vaginal spasm does not begin until after the penis has
been introduced, so that this organ is retained (_penis captivus_). A
few years ago a remarkable case of this kind occurred in Bremen.
One of the dock labourers was having sexual intercourse in an
out-of-the-way corner of the docks, when the woman became affected
with this involuntary spasm, and the man was unable to free himself
from his imprisonment. A great crowd assembled, from the midst of
which the unfortunate couple were removed in a closed carriage, and
taken to the hospital, and not until chloroform had been administered
to the girl did the spasm pass off and free the man!
[436] A very clever study of the conditions here described will be
found in a recent English novel, “Mr. and Mrs. Villiers,” by Hubert
Wales (Heinemann, London, 1907).--TRANSLATOR.
[437] Rozier describes two typical examples of feminine erotomania
(“The Secret Aberrations of the Female Sex,” pp. 123-128; Leipzig,
1831).
[438] POLLUTIONS.--This term has not perhaps as yet acquired a right
of residence in the English tongue, but I use it because it is needed.
There is no other word which can be employed as a general term (1) to
include all involuntary emissions of semen, whether nocturnal or
diurnal; and (2) to include involuntary sexual orgasm in the female as
well as in the male. In the female the term “seminal emission” is
inapplicable; but the term “pollution” can be applied in English (as
it is in German) to either sex. By American writers the term
“pollution” is now generally used (see, for instance, Allen,
“Disorders of the Male Sexual Organs,” _Twentieth Century Practice_,
vol. vii., p. 612 _et seq._).--TRANSLATOR.
[439] L. Löwenfeld, _op. cit._, pp. 206, 207.
[440] Swediaur relates: “I have, although much more rarely, seen the
aforesaid diseases also in the other sex” (he speaks of diurnal
pollutions). “At the present time I have under treatment a woman,
twenty-eight years of age, who for a year and a half, since the time
when she had a miscarriage, suffers from very frequent _involuntary_
nocturnal pollutions, which are induced by very voluptuous dreams, and
are accompanied by all the symptoms of wasting of the spinal cord,
which Hippocrates describes as a disease peculiar to the male sex.”
Quoted by L. Deslandes, “Masturbation and other Aberrations of Sexual
Intercourse,” p. 204 (Leipzig, 1835).
[441] Paul Bernhardt, “Processes Resembling Pollutions Occurring in
Women, without Sexual Ideas or Lustful Feelings,” published in _Die
ärztliche Praxis_, 1903, No. 17, pp. 193-197.
[442] The best recent work on impotence is Fürbringer’s “The
Disturbances of the Sexual Function in Man,” second edition (Vienna,
1901). See also Frenzel, “On Incapacity for Procreation” (Wittenberg,
1800); F. Roubaud, “Traité de l’Impuissance et de la Stérilité chez
l’Homme et chez la Femme” (Paris, 1878); V. von Gyurkovechky,
“Pathology and Therapeutics of Impotence in the Male” (Vienna and
Leipzig, 1897); J. Steinbacher, “Impotence in the Male,” fifth edition
(Berlin, 1892); W. A. Hammond, “Sexual Impotence in the Male and
Female Sexes” (Berlin, 1891); A. Eulenburg, “Sexual Neurasthenia” (pp.
177-183); Leopold Casper, “Impotentia et Sterilitas Virilis” (Munich,
1890).
[443] W. Schallmayer, “Infection as a Wedding Gift,” published in the
_Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1903, vol. iv.,
pp. 389-419.
[444] G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” pp. 461, 463.
[445] Jacquemart reports a striking case of impotentia coeundi, which
he saw in an engineer who received an appointment in a State tobacco
factory. After he had resigned his appointment, the patient fully
recovered his sexual powers (_cf._ Loebisch, article “Tobacco,” in
Eulenburg’s _Real-Enzyklopädie_, 1900, vol. xxiv., p. 19).
[446] S. Réti, “Sexuelle Gebrechen,” second edition, p. 15 (Halle,
1904).
[447] J. S. T. Frenzel, “Impotence,” Part I., p. 164 (Wittenberg,
1800).
[448] In some cases it is said to have given rise to permanent
impotence.
[449] Frenzel, _op. cit._, pp. 155, 156.
[450] J. J. Virey, “Woman,” p. 367 (Leipzig, 1827).
[451] Von Schrenck-Notzing, “Studies in Crimino-Psychology and
Psycho-Pathology,” p. 176 (Leipzig, 1902).
[452] The Englishman Thomas Parr, who attained the age of one hundred
and fifty-two years, remarried at the age of a hundred and twenty
years, and his wife is said “to have noticed no defects in him on
account of his age” (_cf._ William Ebstein, “The Art of Prolonging
Human Life,” p. 70 (Wiesbaden, 1891)).
[453] In the drug trade we find two brands, known respectively as
“Yohimbin Spiegel” and “Yohimbin Riedel”; both preparations are of
equal value. [In a letter to the translator under date January 8,
1908, Dr. Bloch writes that “Yohimbin Riedel” is preferable to
“Yohimbin Spiegel.”]
[454] _Cf._ Alexander Peyer, “Affections of the Stomach Associated
with Disorders of the Male Genital Organs” (Leipzig, 1890).
[455] _Cf._ Koblanck, “Some Clinical Observations on Disturbances of
the Physiological Functions of the Female Reproductive Organs,”
published in the _Zeitschrift für Geburtshilfe und Gynäkologie_, vol.
xliii., No. 3. Moriz Porosz (“Sexual Truths,” pp. 213-218; Leipzig,
1907) devotes with good reason a special chapter to the neurasthenia
of young married women. The change from the virgin state into married
life often gives rise to such transient neurasthenic conditions in the
young wife, especially when there exists any sort of disharmony in
respect of marital intercourse.
CHAPTER XVII
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECT OF PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS
“_I hope that in the not distant future, for the advancement of
science, physicians will be glad to ally themselves with folk-lorists
and ethnologists._”--FREDERICK S. KRAUSS.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVII
Anthropological and clinical views of sexual anomalies -- Ubiquity and
enduring nature of psychopathia sexualis -- Secondary rôle of
civilization and degeneration -- The fable of “the good old times” --
The ungrounded fear of degeneration -- “Nervous degeneration” in
earlier times -- Recent arguments against the degeneration theory --
Metchnikoff’s book, “The Nature of Man” -- Georg Hirth’s idea of
“Hereditary Enfranchisement.”
Elements of the anthropological theory of psychopathia sexualis -- The
need for variety in sexual relationships -- Sexual perversions in
healthy persons -- The effect of external influences -- Morbid
impressions -- Artificial production of perversions (repetition,
suggestion, imitation, seduction) -- Importance of sexual
differentiation -- Congenital character of perversions -- The
diffusion of perversions among savage races -- Examples -- Immorality
in the country -- Influence of race and nationality -- Of age and sex
-- Social differences -- Influence of civilization -- Influence of
conventionality -- The unrest of the present day -- Spiritual
configuration of modern perversity.
_Appendix: Sexual Perversions due to Diseases._ -- General survey --
Epilepsy and sexual perversions -- Other mental diseases-Syphilis and
sexual perversions -- Abnormalities of the genital organs.
CHAPTER XVII
In my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,”
published in the years 1902 and 1903, I for the first time attempted to
deal systematically, from the standpoint of the =anthropologist= and
=ethnologist=, with the great province of the so-called “psychopathia
sexualis,” the field of sexual aberrations, degenerations, anomalies,
perversities, and perversions. I started from the point of view that, in
order to obtain new ideas regarding the nature of psychopathia sexualis,
and in order to revise the old ideas in the light of recent knowledge,
we must keep before our eyes, not one-sidedly “=the sick man=,” but
comprehensively “=man as man=,” both as =civilized man= and as =savage
man=.
Previously the doctrine of psychopathia sexualis had been dominated
exclusively by =clinical, purely medical conceptions=. Observations had
been limited to morbid phenomena, occurring in individuals with an
abnormal _vita sexualis_. Thus there had arisen a general view of the
=nature= of sexual anomalies, by which these anomalies were allotted
almost entirely to the province of the physician, and were described as
=stigmata of degeneration=. H. J. Löwenstein,[456] Häussler,[457] and
Kaan,[458] in the third and fifth decades of the nineteenth century,
were the first to adopt this medical point of view of sexual
aberrations; and finally, in the last quarter of the same century,
Richard von Krafft-Ebing[459] converted modern sexual pathology into a
comprehensive scientific system,[460] which stands and falls with the
idea of =degeneration=.
Von Krafft-Ebing is, and remains, the true founder of modern sexual
pathology. Without wishing in the slightest degree to underestimate the
value of the clinical researches he carried out in this province of
research, characterized by precision and profound scientific
zeal--without undervaluing for a moment these extraordinary services--I
am compelled to point out that his purely medical view of sexual
aberrations is one-sided, and to insist that it must be amplified and
rectified by anthropological and ethnological researches.
Let us leave the hospital and the medical consulting-room; let us make a
journey round the world; let us observe the sexual activity of the
_genus homo_ in its manifold phenomena, not as physicians, but as
ordinary observers; let us compare the sexuality of the civilized human
being with that of the savage: then we shall recognize the vast
extension of our visual field for the comprehension of psychopathia
sexualis; we shall see how the civilized and temporary phenomenon
becomes absorbed into the general human phenomenon, presenting amid all
local variations =the same fundamental lineaments=. Psychopathia
sexualis exists =everywhere= and =at all times=. Culture, civilization,
and diseases play only the parts of favouring, modifying, intensifying
factors.
I do not go so far as Freud, who, on account of the now generally
recognized wide diffusion of perverse sexual tendencies, is compelled to
adopt the view “that the rudiments of perversions are the =primeval=
general rudiments of the human sexual impulse, out of which the normal
sexual mode of behaviour is developed in the course of evolution, in
consequence of organic changes and psychical inhibitions”;[461] but I do
maintain that sexual perversities and perversions appertain to the human
race as such, and independently of civilization. I am convinced that
they are =supplementary= to normal sexual manifestations, and that their
diffusion among civilized and savage peoples =extends far more widely
than the circle of true degenerative phenomena=.
The sexual impulse, as a purely physical function, is neither an object
of comparison nor a distinctive characteristic between primitive and
civilized humanity. The “elementary ideas” of humanity return everywhere
again in the elementary manifestations of sexual aberrations.
From the investigations collected and published in the above-mentioned
work I have been led to the firm conviction, which I must now put
forward as a =scientific truth= based upon the teaching of anthropology,
folk-lore, and the history of civilization, that at the present day, in
our time so widely decried as “nervous,” “degenerate,” and
“overcivilized,” not only are there no more sexually “perverse” persons
than there were in former days--let us think only of the middle ages,
with their frightful excesses, appearing in epidemic diffusion--but,
further, that the greater part of the perversions of the present day are
not to be regarded as “degenerations” at all; and, finally, that the
factors which are to weaken and undermine the vital forces of a nation
must be something other than purely sexual factors. For sexual
aberrations alone have, taken as a whole, but a trifling influence in
effecting the decadence of a nation. They first gain such an influence
in combination with causes, which we cannot now discuss, of an economic
and political nature.
As old as humanity is the fable of the good old times, of the golden
youth of the human race, of the glorious past, to which an always
corrupt, physically and morally rotten =present= is supposed to have
succeeded.[462] The ancients held this view; it recurred at the time of
the renascence; and since the time of Rousseau’s unfortunate
condemnation of all civilization, it has been, in the hands of all
zealots, moral fanatics, backsliders, and guardians of conventional
morality, a greatly prized weapon, and one, also, of great power when
used to influence the ignorant and easily misled. Anthropology, the
history of primitive man, and the history of civilization in general,
have utterly destroyed this beautiful dream of the good old times and of
the =better= days of the past. Nothing has been left but the ever =more
beautiful= present!
The critical and far-sighted Lessing opposed Rousseau’s hypothesis of
corruption by means of “civilization.” It was true, he said, that
Athens, standing so high in civilization, and at the same time so
corrupt, passed away; but the =virtuous= Sparta, did not this also pass
away? Rousseau himself had to admit that the destruction of civilization
would be of no use, that the world would then relapse into barbarism,
and that the corruption would =none the less= persist. The philologist
Muff,[463] discussing this question, added that if civilization had not
come, vice would still have been dominant, and that civilization,
involving as it does =intellectual= progress, provides also the means
for counteracting vice.
Physicians and natural philosophers have long protested against the
theory of the corrupt and degenerate “present.” For instance, a
countryman of Rousseau’s, Dr. Delvincourt,[464] exclaimed:
“How false is the assumption of the fanatics and the pious who
attribute to the moral corruption of our century the majority of
diseases, and, above all, venereal diseases; who maintain that the
race is degenerating; and who thunder an anathema against modern young
men, whom they would gladly muzzle as we muzzle an animal.”
Must we, then, he asks, at a moment when civilization is marching
forward with giant strides, have our ears wearied with sophisms which
can no longer deceive even the ignorant masses? And he shows how =since
primeval times, everywhere=, all over the earth, vice has been diffused.
He rightly points to the innumerable _monuments de turpitude_ of all
ages.
About the same time (be it noted, more than sixty years ago) in Germany
the celebrated natural philosopher Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, in an
academic speech with the distinctive title “=The Fear that Progressive
Intellectual Development will Lead to Physical National Degeneration: A
Demonstration that this Fear is entirely devoid of Scientific and
Medical Foundation=” (Berlin, 1842), opposed the belief in the
unwholesome influence of civilization upon the popular strength and
popular morals. Of special interest to us are his remarks upon the
alleged deleterious influence of civilization upon sexuality. He says
(p. 8):
“The occurrence of puberty in warm climates at a comparatively early
age (from ten to fifteen years), in cold climates somewhat later (from
fourteen to eighteen years), is a natural measure of human
intelligence and power; and if our sexually mature youths at school,
at the time at which their development has naturally progressed to
this point, experience also sexual stimulation, this is entirely
according to the nature of things, and only imposes upon those in
charge of schools, and upon parents, the special duty of watchfulness
in these respects. Even if secret vice becomes general anywhere among
young fellows in a manner open to regret, still, this does not mean
that our schools are the cause of physical weakness, of
overstimulation, and of deterioration of the people and of the epoch;
it merely indicates a local deficiency in energetic purposive
education, and a lack of the necessary watchfulness over the youths in
the particular institution in which the trouble has occurred, or that
the family life of the children thus affected is less strictly moral
than we could wish; and the evil is only to be overcome by
counteracting its especial causes. In many cases we may compare
outbreaks of premature sexuality with epidemics of disease, which also
find entrance through lack of sufficient care. Just the same is it in
respect of the great mass of adults who, by exhortation and example on
the part of those whose business it is to give them counsel, are in
most cases so easily led in the right direction, but who, in the
absence of such judicious treatment, often give way to the most
unbridled licentiousness. The student of popular history will easily
find numerous instances of cause and effect, now of the former and now
of the latter kind.”
Ehrenberg comes to the conclusion, most encouraging to ourselves and to
our time, and one which may be unhesitatingly accepted, that the entire
history of humanity, in so far as that history is open to us, leads us
to believe, not that the progress of civilization[465] has given rise to
infirmity or to nervous overstimulation of the people, but, on the
contrary, that as the centuries pass, =our bodies are as powerfully
developed as formerly=, and that there is an ever-happier development of
all the nobler human activities, such as can only result from an
improvement in our mental faculties.
At the fifty-ninth Congress of German Natural Philosophers and
Physicians, held at Berlin in the year 1886, the celebrated physicist
Werner von Siemens, discussing the same problem in a formal speech,
proved the nullity of the hypothesis of the evil influence of
civilization upon the physical and moral nature of humanity, and
expressed himself as fully convinced that
“our activity in research and discovery conducts humanity to higher
stages of civilization, ennobles humanity, and makes ideal aims more
easily accessible; that the coming scientific age will diminish
poverty and illness, will increase the enjoyment of life, and will
make humanity better, happier, and more contented with its lot.”
“Has humanity degenerated?” asks a celebrated specialist,[466] who,
owing to the nature of his speciality, has been able to obtain
exhaustive information regarding what is often believed to be a symptom
of degeneration--namely, falling out of the hair and baldness--and he
answers:
“=Certainly not!= In the process of civilization, which has lasted for
many thousands of years, our organization has not experienced any
serious convulsion of its fundamental nature. Superficially only have
the battles we have had to fight made any mark upon us.”
To a frightful extent in earlier times the great infective epidemic
diseases decimated civilized humanity, to an extent which is hardly
realized at the present day, and those of more powerful constitution
were undoubtedly carried off quite as much as those endowed with weaker
powers of resistance. Bubonic plague, small-pox, leprosy, the sweating
sickness, scarlatina, cholera, and syphilis (which at its commencement
was a far more severe disease than it is at the present day), have often
annihilated the blossoms of youth; and yet mankind as a whole has not
suffered therefrom. Formerly there were much more violent and obstinate
nervous troubles than our modern “nervousness,” which, to a large
extent, represents merely a =phenomenon of adaptation=, not a disease in
the proper sense of the term. St. Vitus’s dance, the dancing mania, and
similar psycho-nervous epidemics, disturbed medieval humanity, without,
however, giving rise to any permanent injury, and without causing
progressive degeneration. And the most frightful sexual excesses can do
no harm to the strength of the nation.
With regard to this point, the reputed connexion between sexual excesses
and the political downfall of a nation, Carl Bleibtreu[467] rightly
remarks:
“Ancient Rome produced its greatest men during a period of moral
degeneration. The finest blossoms of Hellenic civilization coincided
with a period of fundamental immorality. We might easily urge that
after Pericles, Phidias, Aristophanes, Euripides, Alcibiades, and
Socrates, the decay of the Greek race began, notwithstanding the fact
that much later in Greek history the vital force of the nation was
proved by the appearance of men of the first rank, such as Alexander,
Aristotle, and Demosthenes. But this rejoinder does not help us much,
for in the earliest days of Greek history, in the legal codes of Solon
and Lycurgus, we find the most notable and clear indications that
precisely in respect of sexual relationship, and more especially in
regard to marriage and the procreation of children, the morals of this
fresh and youthful race were disordered to the greatest possible
extent.
“Just the same do we find it at the time of the Italian renascence and
at the time of the Hohenstaufen dynasty--a complete confusion of
sexual relationships. The eighteenth century, also, notwithstanding
all the justified jeremiads of Rousseau regarding the widespread
unnaturalness of the time, and notwithstanding all the sorrows of the
young Werther, was distinguished by the production of an incredible
abundance of men of genius; and in contemporary France, the country
which was most severely affected by this moral decay, there flourished
the generation to which such men as Mirabeau and Napoleon
belonged--men whose unparalleled vitality influences us to this
moment.”
Finally, I must refer to two leading authors of recent years, Eli
Metchnikoff and Georg Hirth, whose writings exhibit a remarkable
similarity in respect of general philosophical foundation. Both have
energetically opposed the unfounded fantasies of degeneration (there
exists also a =justified= campaign against the continuously effective
causes of degeneration in the form of alcohol, syphilis, etc.), and both
have advocated a belief in life and in the life-force.
In his work “The Nature of Man” (English translation by Chalmers
Mitchell; Heinemann, 1903), Metchnikoff advances an “optimistic
philosophy,” in opposition to the pessimistic degenerative theory of our
time, of which latter P. J. Möbius may be regarded as the chief
advocate, and he proves how the imperfections and “disharmonies” of the
human organism may give place to a further development and
perfectibility of human nature, and this =precisely in connexion with
culture and civilization. It is now that humanity first begins really to
live.=[468] Mankind has not degenerated in consequence of civilization,
but has, on the contrary, by means of civilization, first attained the
possibility of establishing “physiological old age” and “physiological
death.” Our device is not =backwards=, but =forwards=! The pessimists
cry out: “Existence has no meaning! For what purpose do we live, and for
what purpose do we die?” This dreadful “=for what purpose=” with which
Friedrich von Hellwald concludes his history of civilization, disturbs
day by day emotional minds. Metchnikoff proves that this problem is
connected with the existence of the disharmonies of human nature. But
evolution continues to transform these disharmonies into harmonies
(“orthobiosis”). Thus the aim of human existence lies in “the completion
of the entire physiological cycle of life with a normal old age, so
that, with the cessation of the instinct to live, and with the
appearance of the instinct for natural death, the cycle comes to an
end.” This is, to a certain extent, the =scientific= formulation of the
“superman” of Nietzsche, who based upon quite similar considerations his
opposition to the hypothesis of degeneration, and who, out of the
disharmonies, imperfections, and pains of life, also created the
conviction of a progressive evolution, and thus, like Metchnikoff,
thoroughly =affirmed= life. Metchnikoff’s ideal human being of the
future is realizable, but only by means of the principles of science and
intelligent culture.
Similar views to those of Metchnikoff are advanced by Georg Hirth. He,
above all, has introduced into science the most felicitous conception
of “=hereditary enfranchisement=.”[469] Thus to the pessimistic
degeneration theories and the psychical paralysis evoked by the idea of
“hereditary taint” (we now hear the expression from every mouth), Hirth
opposes a =word of power=, a word expressing “an energetic opposing
stream of tendency.” Thus the incontestable fact finds simple
expression, that
“The requirements of all individuals through millions of generations
=constitute an inalienable, progressively influential common
possession of the whole of humanity=, an =impulsive force= based upon
natural law, which marches victoriously forward over the sins and
failures of individuals.... That is to say, that in our entire
organism, so long as it continues to =live=, in addition to the
disturbing influences which we have inherited or have acquired by our
own faults, there exists also a mass of =old= and =new= constructive
influences, which work towards the =restitution of the former
condition=.... =Enfranchisement= by means of primevally old, healthy,
and strong reproductive cells is stronger than the quite recent
=tainting= by means of weakly and diseased germs. If it were not so,
the entire human race would long since have passed away, for there can
hardly exist a single family tree at the foot of which there are not
somewhere worms gnawing.”
I cannot here examine more closely the extremely interesting foundation
of this view, which rightly places in the foreground the capacity for
=self-regeneration=, for the removal of morbid vital stimuli, and their
replacement by new and healthy vital stimuli, and which notably limits
the extension of hereditary “tainting.” The conclusion which Hirth draws
from this view is identical with that of Metchnikoff--namely, =that our
life remains capable of upward progress=, a view which Hirth everywhere
happily employs in his battle “with the forces of obscurity and
degeneration.”
The theory of degeneration finds a thorough scientific refutation also
in the admirable work by Dr. William Hirsch, “Genius and Degeneration: a
Psychological Study” (Berlin and Leipzig, 1904). At the end of the book
(p. 340) the writer says:
“In view of the investigations I have made, we are necessarily led to
the conclusion that the authors mentioned have =by no means= adduced
proof of a general degeneration of the civilized nations. Humanity
need not be alarmed with regard to the alleged ‘black plague of
degeneration,’ and the world need be as little concerned by these
fables of the ‘twilight of the nations’ as by Herr Falb’s prophecies
of the approaching destruction of our planet.”
It cannot be denied that the wide diffusion of the deleterious means of
sensual gratification (alcohol, tobacco, etc.), the increase in the
number of large towns, and the rapid growth in their population, by
means of which prostitution and the spread of venereal diseases are
especially favoured, constitute important etiological factors for the
degeneration of the race. Still, the wide diffusion of public hygiene,
which is more and more brought under the notice of the individual,
affords here an effective counterpoise. “Enfranchisement” in Hirth’s
sense is here clearly manifested.
After we have seen that the “degeneration” of our time, to the medical
idea of which we shall return to speak more exactly in the next chapter,
is not greater now than it was in earlier epochs, and that sexual
anomalies have always existed, let us return to consider this point, to
the anthropological view of psychopathia sexualis.
In my “Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis” I have collected the general
human phenomena of the sexual impulse in primitive and civilized
states--that is, the everywhere recurring fundamental lineaments and
phenomena of the _vita sexualis_ peculiar to the _genus homo_ as such.
As the principal result of this inquiry, the following propositions
appear to me to be established:
=Degeneration cannot be employed, as von Krafft-Ebing has employed it in
his “Psychopathia Sexualis,” as a heuristic principle in the
investigation, recognition, and judgment of sexual aberrations and
perversions.=
At the most, degeneration is no more than a =favouring= factor of the
diffusion of sexual abnormalities, an influence which =increases the
frequency= of their appearance.
=On the contrary, the ultimate cause of all sexual perversions,
aberrations, abnormalities, and irrationalities, is the need for variety
in sexual relationships peculiar to the genus homo, which is to be
regarded as a physiological phenomenon, and the increase of which to the
degree of a sexual irritable hunger is competent to produce the most
severe sexual perversions.=
In contrast with this, “degeneration” or diseases play only a
subordinate part, and can be invoked for the explanation of only a small
number of sexual aberrations--at most for those which come to the notice
of physicians on account of pathological conditions or _in foro_. In
fact, the =majority= of cases of sexual perversions which come the way
of the physicians in clinical or forensic relationships =are=
pathological, but these constitute only a =minority of all cases=. The
large majority of cases do =not= come within the scope of
degeneration.[470]
Freud, in his “Three Essays on the Sexual Theory,” recognizes the
justice of my view, and on p. 80 he writes:
“Physicians who have first studied perversions in well-marked examples
and peculiar conditions are naturally inclined to regard them as signs
of disease or as stigmata of degeneration, just as in the case of
sexual inversion. Daily experience has shown that the majority of
these transgressions--at any rate, the less marked of them--constitute
a seldom lacking constituent of the sexual life of healthy persons. In
favourable conditions =the normal individual may exhibit such a
perversion for a considerable length of time in the place of his
normal sexual activity; or the perversion may take its place beside
the normal sexual activity. Probably there is no healthy person in
whom there does not exist, at some time or other, some kind of
supplement to his normal sexual activity, to which we should be
justified in giving the name of ‘perversity.’=”[471]
A =second= important factor in the genesis of sexual anomalies is the
=ease with which the sexual impulse is affected by external influences,
the associative inclusion of manifold external stimuli in sexual
perception itself=, the “=synæsthetic stimuli=,” as I myself have called
them, in the amatory life of mankind. In this way gradually all the
relations of art, religion, fashion, etc., to sexuality have developed,
and they offer, in conjunction with the sensory impressions and the
psychical and physical imaginative associations which accompany the
sexual act, an incredibly rich material for the manifold realizations of
the sexual need for variation.
The need for variety in sexual relationships, in conjunction with the
sexual “demand for stimulation” (Hoche),[472] plays a great part,
especially in the occurrence of sexual perversions in =adult= persons
and at a more advanced age of life. The effect of =external influences=
is most clearly noticeable in =childhood=, when it is experienced most
deeply and in a most enduring manner, and when it can become permanently
associated with sexual perception (Binet and von Schrenck-Notzing).
Alexander von Humboldt, in his “Cosmos” (vol. ii., Introduction), drew
attention to the well-known experience that “=sensual impressions and
apparently chance occurrences are, in the case of youthful emotional
individuals, often capable of determining the entire course of a human
life=.” Freud draws attention to the psychological fact that impressions
of childhood, which have apparently been forgotten, may,
notwithstanding, have left the most profound marks upon our psychical
life, and may have determined our entire subsequent development. The
impressions of childhood are often incorporated fate. For this reason,
for example, the children of criminals become criminals themselves, not
because they are “born” criminals, but because, as =children=, they grow
up in the atmosphere of crime, and the impressions they here receive
become firmly and deeply rooted in their natures. Hence the campaign
against crime must in the first place take into consideration the
=education of the children of criminals=!
From the need for variety in sexual relationships, and from the effect
of external influences, we deduce the possibility and the actual
frequency of the =acquirement= and the =artificial production= of sexual
perversions and perversities; and these, in proportion to the
=intensity= of the sexual impulse (=very variable= in strength in
different individuals, according to the ease with which it is excited),
will appear now earlier, now later, will be now transient and now
enduring.
The =third= important etiological factor in the origination of sexual
perversions is the =frequent repetition= of the =same= sexual
aberration. There can be no doubt whatever that the normal human being
can become =accustomed= to the most diverse sexual aberrations, so that
these become perversions, which appear in =healthy= human beings just as
they do in the diseased.
=Fourthly=, =suggestion= and =imitation= play an extremely important
rôle in the _vita sexualis_ alike of primitive and of civilized nations,
in accordance with which certain aberrations in the sexual sphere become
diffused with great rapidity, and make their appearance as customs,
fashions, and psychical epidemics. Those who everywhere trace
perversities from morbid rudiments underestimate the powerful influence
which =example= and =seduction= exercise in the human sexual life. This
is especially noticeable to-day in those sexual perversions which have
become =national customs=. The most celebrated example is that of
=Hellenic pæderasty=, reputedly introduced from Crete, but probably in
the first place originated by a few =genuinely= homosexual individuals,
who in their own interest transmitted artificially by suggestion their
peculiar tendencies to a few heterosexual individuals, until at last the
love of boys became a national custom which every heterosexual man
adopted. The momentous part which modern =prostitution=, and more
especially =brothels=, plays in the suggestion of perversions has
already been mentioned. It is a matter to which we shall frequently have
occasion to return. Schrank alludes (“Prostitution in Vienna,” vol. i.,
p. 285) to a prostitute who enjoyed a “European reputation” as an artist
in sexual perversities of every kind, and who enjoyed the nickname of
“the Ever-Virgin,” because she allowed men every possible kind of
enjoyment except that of regular normal intercourse (which she avoided
for fear of becoming impregnated).
=Fifthly=, the =difference= between man and woman in the essence, the
kind, and the intensity, of sexual perception (sexual activity in man,
sexual passivity in woman) constitutes a rich source of sexual
aberrations, most of which belong to the provinces of masochism and
sadism.
=Sixthly=, and lastly, in otherwise =healthy individuals there occur at
a very early age=, and probably in consequence of =congenital=
conditions, changes in the direction and the aim of sexual perception,
variations from the type of differentiated heterosexual love. =Genuine
homosexuality= is the principal phenomenon to be considered under this
head. It occurs in perfectly =healthy= individuals quite independently
of degeneration and of civilization; and it is diffused throughout the
whole world.
From all these facts may be deduced the =untenability= of a purely
=clinical and pathological= conception of sexual aberrations and
perversions. We must now accept the point of view that, although
numerous morbid degenerate and psychopathic individuals exhibit sexual
anomalies, yet these =identical= anomalies and aberrations are
extraordinarily common in =healthy= persons.
Ethnological research, for more exact details of which I may refer
to my own work already mentioned, and to the pioneer works of
Ploss-Bartels,[473] Mantegazza,[474] Friedrich S. Krauss,[475] and
Havelock Ellis,[476] has adduced stringent proof that sexual
aberrations and perversions are =ubiquitous=, diffused throughout the
entire world, just as much among primitive races as among civilized
nations, that on the psycho-physical side they are “elementary ideas” in
Bastian’s sense, that they recur everywhere in a qualitatively identical
manner as a result of similar conditions. As it is with prostitution, so
it is also with sexual perversions--a tendency to sexual aberration is
deeply rooted in human nature. It is a primitive, purely anthropological
phenomenon, which is not strengthened by civilization, but, on the
contrary, is mitigated thereby. Charles Darwin rightly points out that
the =hatred= of sexual immorality and of sexual aberrations is a “modern
virtue,” appertaining exclusively to “civilized life,” and entirely
foreign to the nature of primitive man. Primitive man revelled in wild
indecency (as Wilhelm Roscher also proves), in sexual perversions, and
libertinism.[477] The sexual aberrations of civilized mankind are for
the most part =imitations= of the examples given by primitive peoples.
Thus, the well-known “stimulating rings” of European rubber
manufacturers (_cf._ Weissenberg, in the “Transactions of the
Anthropological Society of Berlin,” 1893, p. 135) correspond to the
“stimulating stones” of the Battaks (Staudinger, _op. cit._, 1891, p.
351), to the “penis stones” of the savage Orang Sinnoi in Malacca
(Vaughan Stevens in the _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1896, pp. 181,
182), the “ampallang” of the Sunda Islands (see Miklucho-Maclay in the
“Transactions of the Anthropological Society of Berlin,” 1876, pp.
22-28). The “renifleurs” and “gamahucheurs” of the Parisian brothels and
houses of accommodation find their typical analogues in the urine
fetichists and cunnilingi of the Island of Ponape, in the Carolines
(_cf._ Ploss-Bartels), who are, in truth, far removed from the
_fin-de-siècle_ life. And what a perverse imagination have the women of
this same island! According to Otto Finsch (_Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, 1880, p. 316), the men of this island have all only =one=
testicle, because in boys at the age of seven or eight years the left
testicle is removed by a piece of sharpened bamboo. This is said to make
the men more desirable =to the women=! Among the Masai, for similar
reasons, circumcision is effected in such a manner that a portion of the
prepuce is left behind to form a kind of firm button of skin. “This mode
of circumcision is greatly prized by the women. Among the black races,
indeed, everything turns round the question of sensual enjoyment”
(“Medical Notes from Central Africa,” by M. C., published in the
_Deutsche Medizinische Presse_, 1902, No. 14, p. 116). And how can our
roués compete with the Tauni islanders of the South Seas? These select
certain women, who are not allowed to marry, but are reserved as simple
“objects of sensual pleasure,” and with these every kind of sexual
artifice is practised (Dempwolf, “Medical Notes on the Tauni Islanders,”
published in the _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1902, p. 335).
Thus between primitive and civilized races in these respects there are
no important differences; and according to recent researches we find the
same may be said with regard to civilized nations, that there is no
difference between =town= and =country=.[478] I quote here the account
given by an experienced author sixty years ago:
“People usually believe that in the country morals are much better
than in the towns, but this belief is quite erroneous. Brothels and
professional prostitutes naturally cannot exist in the country, but
nearly every peasant-girl in the country is equivalent to a secret
prostitute. It is incredible what sexual excesses go on between the
masculine and feminine inhabitants of the villages. Every barn, every
shed, every haystack, every copse, bears witness to this. Especially
disadvantageous to morals is it when in the heat of summer persons of
different sexes work side by side, half undressed, in remote fields
for the whole day, and lie down to rest side by side.”[479]
We may here allude to a fact that we shall have to discuss later--that
young men, after the conclusion of their term of military service, carry
back with them to the country the knowledge of sexual excesses and
perversities which they have acquired in the town, and thus diffuse
these tendencies more and more widely.
Since sexual anomalies constitute a phenomenon generally characteristic
of humanity, =race= and =nationality=, as such, have less to do with the
matter than is commonly imagined. The Mongol and the Malay are not less
voluptuous than the Semites, or than many Aryan races. Among the
Semites, the Arabs and the Turks are pre-eminently sexually perverse
nations. They seek sexual gratification indifferently in the female
harem and in the boys’ brothel (see numerous descriptions of travellers
on the moral customs of Turkey, the Levant, Cairo, Morocco, the Arabian
Soudan, the Arabs in Africa, etc.). Among the Aryan races the Aryans of
India must be considered pre-eminent as refined practitioners of
psychopathia sexualis, which they have reduced to a =system=. In
addition to recognizing forty-eight _figuræ Veneris_ (different postures
in sexual intercourse), they practise every possible variety of sexual
perversion; and they have in various textbooks[480] a systematic
introduction to sexual immorality. Here there is manifestly no trace of
morbid conditions, of degeneration, or of psychopathia; it is simply a
matter of popular manners and customs. Sexual perversion among the
Greeks and the Romans, two other Aryan nations, is too well known to
need detailed description. In modern Europe the French were at one time
believed to lead the way in sexual artifices. For a long time this has
ceased to be true, and, in fact, never was true. They do, indeed, excel,
if one may use the expression, all other nations in the outward
technique and in the elegance of their sexual excesses. To them from
very early times there has been ascribed a certain preference for the
skatological element in the sexual life; but according to the recent
researches of Friedrich S. Krauss regarding the Slavs, published in his
“Anthropophyteia,” this alleged pre-eminence is extremely doubtful. That
among the Slavs sexual perversions of every kind have an extraordinarily
wide diffusion has been shown by this investigator by the collection of
an enormous mass of material. It is also very generally known that the
English from early days have exhibited a marked tendency to sadistic
practices, and especially to flagellation. I will return later to this
remarkable phenomenon. The French accuse the Germans of an especial
tendency to homosexuality (_le vice Allemand_), but there are no
sufficient grounds for this accusation. In psychopathia sexualis, the
Germans are as cosmopolitan as they are in other respects.
With regard to the =age= of the individual in relation to sexual
perversions, the frequency of these is greater after puberty than
before,[481] and the frequency increases with advancing years. The time
at which the imagination unfolds its greatest activity, the commencement
of manhood, is extremely favourable to the origination of sexual
aberrations, and to their becoming habitual practices; and, again, the
age at which the sexual powers begin to decline, and when for their
incitation new stimuli are needed, is one at which abnormal varieties
of sexual gratification frequently originate.[482]
Which =sex= is more inclined to abnormalities of the sexual impulse, the
male or the female?
The primitively more powerful sexual impulsive life of man in
association with his greater use of alcohol makes him distinctly more
inclined to follow sexual bypaths than woman, whose sexuality at first
develops very gradually, and experiences, in consequence of motherhood,
powerful inhibitions to the development of any sexual anomalies. On the
other hand, the much =more difficult development= of voluptuous
sensations in women, by means of normal coitus, is not rarely the cause
of a tendency to perverse varieties of sexual intercourse. They often
seduce man in this direction, and excel him in the discovery of sexual
artifices. Among primitive races, where the relationships are clearest,
this is still easily recognizable, whereas by civilization the matter is
often obscured. All the artificial deformities of the male genital
organs amongst savages, which give the man much more trouble than
pleasure, but which, on the other hand, increase the voluptuous
enjoyment of the woman during the sexual act, cannot otherwise be
explained except on the ground of an original demand on the part of
women. To this category belong incisions in the glans penis, and the
implanting of small stones in the wounds until the skin has a warty
appearance (Java); perforation of the penis to enable rods beset with
bristles, feathers, rods with balls (the well-known “ampallang” of the
Dyaks of Borneo), bodkins, rings, bell-shaped apparatus, to be inserted
through these perforations; the wrapping up of the penis in strips of
fur with the hair outwards, or enveloping it in a leaden cylinder, etc.
The feminine imagination has proved inexhaustible in this direction.
Miklucho-Maclay, the great authority on the sexual psychology of the
savage races of the Malay Archipelago and the South Sea Islands,
declares it to be extremely probable =that all these customs and all
these apparatus were invented by or for women=. The women reject all men
who do not possess these stimulating apparatus on the penis. Finsch and
Kubary confirm this, and state that in most cases it is the frigidity of
the women which makes them desire such means of artificial stimulation.
Among civilized races, also, abundant material can be collected with
regard to sexual perversities among women, as has recently been done by
Paul de Régla in “Les Perversités de la Femme” (Paris, 1904), and by
René Schwaeblé in “Les Détraquées de Paris” (Paris, 1904).
The following case shows that European women sometimes demand artificial
changes in the male genital organs, in order to increase their
voluptuous sensations. Some years ago a man, fifty years of age, was
admitted into the syphilis wards of the Laibacher Hospital. The
discharge from the penis was, however, found to be due merely to
balanitis. On examination the greatly enlarged penis was found to be
perforated by rod-shaped objects, and an incision through the skin
showed that these were pins and hairpins. The pins were about two inches
long, with brass heads the size of a peppercorn, and they were at least
ten in number. One of the pins was run partly into the testicle. After
the foreign objects had been removed, the man informed us that his
mistress had stuck these in, in order that she might experience more
ardent sensations. The pins were all subcutaneous; several of them ran
right round the penis.
=Social differences= in respect of the frequency of sexual perversions
do not exist. Sexual perversions are just as widely diffused among the
lower classes as among the upper. A. Ferguson, Havelock Ellis,
Tarnowsky, and J. A. Symonds are all in agreement regarding this fact,
which, indeed, in view of the anthropological conception of psychopathia
sexualis, does not require additional explanation.
Finally, we come to the last and most important point--to the question
of the relation of =culture= and =civilization= to psychopathia
sexualis. Even though psychopathia sexualis is in its =essence=
independent of culture, is a general human phenomenon, still we cannot
fail to recognize that civilization has exercised a certain influence
upon the external mode of manifestation, and also upon the inner
psychical configuration of sexual aberrations. Especially as regards the
latter--the psychical relationships--the perversity of the civilized man
is more complicated than that of primitive man, although in =essence=
the two are identical.
The modern civilized man is in respect of his sexuality a peculiar =dual
being=. The sexuality within him leads a kind of independent existence,
notwithstanding its intimate relationship to the whole of the rest of
his spiritual life. There are moments in which, even in men of lofty
spiritual nature, pure sexuality becomes separated from love, and
manifests itself in its utterly elementary nature beyond good and evil.
I expressed earlier the idea that this frequent phenomenon reminded me
of the “monomania” of the older alienists. “Il y a en nous deux êtres,
l’être moral et la bête: l’être moral sait ce que mérite l’amour
véritable, la bête aspire à la fange où on la pousse,” we find in a
French erotic work (“Impressions d’une Fille” par Léna de Mauregard,
vol. i., pp. 57, 68; Paris, 1900).
No other human impulsive manifestation is so ill adapted as sexuality to
the =coercion= and =conventionality= which civilization necessarily
entails. Carl Hauptmann, in an interesting socio-psychological study,
“Unsere Wirklichkeit” (“Our Reality”; Munich, 1902), has described very
impressively this frightful conventionality, especially characteristic
of our own time, which so painfully represses the “reality” of love,
suppresses everything primitive in it, banishes it into the darkness of
its own interior, and only allows the conventionally sanctioned forms of
sexual love to subsist. This coercion, this outward pressure, develops a
volcano of elementary sexuality, which usually slumbers, but may
suddenly break out in eruption, and give free vent to excesses of the
wildest nature. Dingelstedt in his poem “Ein Roman,” has excellently
described this condition:
“Wenn du die =Leidenschaft= willst kennen lernen,
Musst du dich nur nicht aus der Welt entfernen.
Such’ sie nicht auf in friedlicher Idylle,
In strohgedeckter und begnügter Stille...
Da suche sie in festlich vollem Saale
Bei Spiel und Tanz, an feierlichem Mahle,
Dort, eingeschnürt =in Form und Zwang und Sitte=,
Thront sie wie Banquos Geist in ihrer Mitte.”
[“If you wish to learn to know passion,
You must, above all, not remove yourself from the world.
Do not look for it in a peaceful idyll,
In padded and satisfied quietude....
Look for it in the full festal hall,
At the game and the dance, at the brilliant banquet;
There, entrapped amid form, and coercion, and custom,
Enthroned, like Banquo’s ghost, it sits amid the throng.”]
Similarly, Charles Albert[483] remarks:
“If love nowadays so often manifests itself in the form of aberration
or passion, this is almost always to be explained by the hindrances of
every kind which have been opposed to it. No other feeling is so
hindered, opposed, detested, and loaded with material and moral
fetters. We know how education makes a beginning in this way,
declaring that love is something forbidden, and how the hardness of
economic life continues the process. Hardly has a young man or a young
girl gone out into life, hardly have they begun to feel their way
into society, but they encounter a thousand difficulties which are
opposed to their living out their life from a sexual point of view.
How would it be possible that, in the limits of such a society, love
could become anything else but a fixed idea of the individual, and how
could it fail to give rise to continuous restlessness? Nature does not
allow herself to be inhibited by our artificial social arrangements.
The need for love within us remains active; it cries out in
unsatisfied desire; and when no answer is forthcoming, beyond the echo
of its own pain, it takes a perverse form. The love which is prevented
from obtaining complete satisfaction and repose is to many an
intensely painful torment.... The over-rich imagination and the
unsatisfied longing give rise to the most horrible and abnormal forms
of love. Above all, in a society which will make no room for love, the
love-passion must give rise to the greatest devastation. The impulse
to love which is repressed by the organization of society does not
only fight violently for air--the inevitable consequence of any
pressure--but it discovers also all those artifices and corruptions
which are supposed to make the enjoyment of love more intense.
Conscious of being despised by society, it endeavours to regain by
violence what is wanting to it in sensuality.”
The struggle for reality in love, for the elementary and the primitive,
manifests itself in the search for the greatest possible =contrast= to
the conventional, to the commonly sanctioned mode of sexual activity.
Love cries out for “nature,” and comes thereby to the “unnatural,” to
the =coarsest, commonest= dissipation. This connexion has been already
explained (pp. 322-325). Certain temporary phenomena exhibit also this
fact--for example, the remarkable preference for the most brutal, the
coarsest, the commonest dances, mere limb dislocations, such as the
cancan, the croquette (machicha), the cake-walk, and other wild negro
dances, which rejoice the modern public more than the most beautiful and
gracious spiritual ballet. It was only when the above-described
connexion became clear to me that I was able to understand the
remarkable alluring power of these dances, which had hitherto been
incomprehensible to me.
An additional factor which favours the origination of sexual perversions
is the =unrest= always connected with the advance of civilization, the
haste and hurry, the more severe struggle for existence, the rapid and
frequent change of new impressions. Fifty years ago the celebrated
alienist Guislain exclaimed:
“What is it with which our thoughts are filled? Plans, novelties,
reforms. What is it that we Europeans are striving for? Movement,
excitement. What do we obtain? Stimulation, illusion, deception.”[484]
There is no longer any time for quiet, enduring love, for an inward
profundity of feeling, for the culture of the =heart=. The struggle for
life and the intellectual contest of our time leaves the possibility
only for transient sensations; the shorter they are, the more =violent=,
the more intense must they be, in order to replace the failing _grande
passion_ of former times. Love becomes a mere =sensation=, which in a
brief moment must contain within itself an entire world. Modern youth
eagerly desires such =experience= of a whole world by means of love. The
everlasting feeling of our classic period had been transformed, more
especially among our leading spirits, into a passionate yearning to
reflect within themselves truly the spirit of the time, to live through
in themselves all the unrest, all the joy, all the sorrow, of modern
civilization.
From this there results a peculiar, more spiritual configuration of
modern perversity, a distinctive spiritualization of psychopathia
sexualis, a true wandering journey, an “Odyssey” of the spirit,
throughout the wide province of sexual excesses. Without doubt the
French have gone furthest in this direction, and the names of
Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Verlaine, Hannon, Haraucourt, Jean
Larocque, and Guy de Maupassant, indicate nearly as many peculiar
spiritual refinements and enrichments of the purely sensual life.
We have no longer to deal with the pure love of reflection, as in the
case of Kierkegaard and Grillparzer, and in the writings of young
Germany, where, indeed, reflection predominates, but which still more
extends to the direction of =higher love=. Contrasted with this is the
=simple lust of the senses=, by means of which new psychical influences
are to be obtained. Voluptuousness becomes a cerebral phenomenon,
ethereal. In this way the most remarkable, unheard-of, sensory
associations appear in the province of sexuality--true _fin-de-siècle_
products which are, above all, specifically =modern=, and could not
possibly exist in former times. For it is always the same play of
emotion, the same effects, the same terminal results: ordinary
voluptuousness. The dream of Hermann Bahr, of “non-sexual
voluptuousness,” and the replacement of the animal impulse by means of
finer organs, is only a dream. The elemental sexual impulse resists
every attempt at dismemberment and sublimation. It returns always
unaltered, always the same. It is vain to expect new manifestations of
this impulse. Such efforts end either in bodily and mental impotence, or
else in sexual perversities. In these relationships the imagination of
civilized man is unable to create novelties in the =essence=; it can do
so only as regards the objective =manifestations=. This is confirmed by
the increase of purely ideal sexual perversities in connexion with
certain spiritual tendencies of our time. Martial d’Estoc, in his book,
“Paris Eros” (Paris, 1903), has given a clear description of these
peculiar spiritual modifications of sexual aberrations. (It is
interesting to note that Schopenhauer remarks, in his “Neue
Paralipomena,” pp. 234 and 235: “The caprices arising from the sexual
impulse resemble a will-o’-the-wisp. They deceive us most effectively;
but if we follow them, they lead us into the marsh and disappear.”)
APPENDIX
SEXUAL PERVERSIONS DUE TO DISEASE
It is the immortal service of Casper and von Krafft-Ebing to have
insisted energetically upon the fact that =numerous= individuals whose
_vita sexualis_ is abnormal are persons suffering from =disease=. This
is their _monumentum ære perennius_ in the history of medicine and of
civilization. Purely medical, anatomical, physical, and psychiatric
investigations show beyond question that there are many persons whose
abnormal sexual life is pathologically based.
I shall not here discuss the peculiar =borderland state between health
and disease=, the existence of which can be established in many sexually
perverse individuals; I shall not refer to the “abnormalities,” the
“psychopathic deficiencies,” the “unbalanced,” etc.; nor shall I discuss
the question of the significance of the stigmata of degeneration,
because these will be adequately dealt with in connexion with the
forensic consideration of punishable sexual perversions.
Here we shall speak only of actual and easily determined diseases which
possess a causal importance in the origination and activity of sexual
perversions. The great majority of these are, naturally, =mental
disorders=.
Von Krafft-Ebing, to whom we owe the most important observations
regarding the pathological etiology of sexual perversions, enumerates
the following conditions: Psychical developmental inhibitions (idiocy
and imbecility), acquired weak-mindedness (after mental disorders,
apoplexy, injuries to the head, syphilis, in consequence of general
paralysis), epilepsy, periodical insanity, mania, melancholia, hysteria,
paranoia.
Among these, =epilepsy= possesses the greatest importance.[485] It comes
into play =much more frequently= as a causal morbid influence in the
case of sexually perverse actions and offences than has hitherto been
believed. The psychiatrist Arndt maintains that wherever an abnormal
sexual life exists, we must always consider the possibility of epileptic
influence. Lombroso assumes that all premature and peculiar instances of
satyriasis are instances of larval epilepsy. He gives several examples
in support of this view, and also a case of Macdonald’s which
illustrates the connexion between epilepsy and sexual perversity.[486]
Especially in the so-called epileptic “confusional states” do we meet
with sexually perverse actions; exhibitionism and other manifestations
of sexual activity _coram publico_ are frequently referable to epileptic
disease. Similar impulsive sexual activities and similar confusional
states are seen after =injuries to the head= and in =alcoholic
intoxication=, also after =severe exhaustion=. Many cases of “=periodic
psychopathia sexualis=” are due to epilepsy.
=Senile dementia= and =paralytic dementia= (general paralysis of the
insane), also severe forms of =neurasthenia= and =hysteria=, often
change the sexual life in a morbid direction, and favour the origin of
sexual perversions.
It is a fact of great interest that Tarnowsky and Freud attribute to
=syphilis= an important rôle in the pathogenesis of sexual anomalies. In
50 % of his sexual pathological cases Freud found that the abnormal
sexual constitution was to be regarded as the last manifestation of a
syphilitic inheritance (Freud, _op. cit._, p. 74). Tarnowsky observed
that congenital syphilitics, and also persons whose parents had been
syphilitic, but who themselves had never exhibited any definite symptoms
of the disease, were apt later to show manifestations of a perverse
sexual sensibility (Tarnowsky, _op. cit._, pp. 34 and 35). =Obviously
this is to be explained by the deleterious influence upon the nervous
system (perhaps by means of toxins?) which syphilis is also supposed to
exert in the causation of tabes dorsalis and general paralysis of the
insane.= When investigating the clinical history of cases of sexual
perversion, it appears that previous syphilis is a fact to which some
importance should be attached.[487]
From syphilis we pass to consider direct =physical= abnormalities and
=morbid changes in the genital organs= as causes of sexual anomalies. In
women prolapsus uteri sometimes leads to perverse gratification of the
sexual impulse--for example, by pædication;[488] in men, shortness of
the frænum preputii plays a similar part,[489] also phimosis. Wollenmann
reports the case of a young man suffering from phimosis, who, at the
first attempt at coitus, experienced severe pain, and since that time
had an antipathy to normal sexual intercourse. He passed under the
influence of a seducer to the practice of mutual masturbation. Only
after operative treatment of the phimosis did his inclination towards
the male sex pass away, and the sexual perversion then completely
disappeared.[490]
[456] Hermann Joseph Löwenstein, “De Mentis Aberrationibus ex Partium
Sexualium Conditione Abnormi Oriundis” (Bonn, 1823).
[457] Joseph Häussler, “The Relations of the Sexual System to the
Psyche” (Würzburg, 1826).
[458] Heinrich Kaan, “Psychopathia Sexualis” (Leipzig, 1844).
[459] R. von Krafft-Ebing, “Psychopathia Sexualis” (Stuttgart, 1882).
[460] We must not omit to mention the fact that a little earlier the
French physician Moreau de Tours published a comprehensive work upon
psychopathia sexualis, entitled “Des Aberrations du Sens Génésique”
(Paris, 1880).
[461] S. Freud, “Three Essays in Contribution to the Sexual Theory,”
p. 70.
[462] _Cf._ the interesting remarks of G. H. C. Lippert, “Mankind in a
State of Nature,” p. 1 _et seq._ (Elberfeld, 1818).
[463] Christian Muff, “What is Civilization?” pp. 30, 31 (Halle,
1880).
[464] G. L. N. Delvincourt, “De la Mucite Génito-Sexuelle,” p. 64
(Paris, 1834). Apt remarks on the alleged degeneration of the French
are to be found also in the work of P. Näcko, “The Alleged
Degeneration of the Latin Races, more Especially of the French,”
published in _Archives for Racial and Social Biology_, 1906, vol. iii.
[465] As, for example, Immermann, in his work “Epigonen,” published at
the same period (1836), assumes. In the mouth of the physician he puts
the following words: “The physician has a great task to perform in the
present day. _Diseases, especially nervous troubles, to which for a
number of years the human race has been especially disposed, are a
modern product._” _Cf._ Leopold Hirschberg, “Medical Matters as dealt
with in General Literature: the Judgment of a Member of the Laity
regarding Nervousness in the Year 1876,” published in _Medizinische
Wochenschrift_, 1906, No. 41, p 428. Seventy years ago the German
people was “nervous”; thirty-four years before _Sedan_, thirty years
after _Jena_! Therefore neither Jena nor Sedan can be connected with
the nervous “degeneration.” The authors of the eighteenth century (!)
made similar complaints of the nervousness of their time, upon which
Cullen and Brown founded their medical theories.
[466] J. Pohl-Pincus, “The Diseases of the Human Hair, and the Care of
the Hair,” third edition, p. 57 (Leipzig, 1885).
[467] Carl Bleibtreu, “Paradoxes the Conventional Lies,” sixth
edition, pp. 1, 2 (Berlin, 1888).
[468] See “Nature and Man,” E. Ray Lankester’s Romanes Lecture,
1905.--TRANSLATOR.
[469] G. Hirth, “Hereditary Enfranchisement,” published in “Ways to
Freedom,” pp. 106-127 (Munich, 1903).
[470] Näcke’s thesis is in agreement with this, that “all sexual
abnormal practices in an asylum are =for the most part much more rare=
than the laity, =or even many physicians, imagine=.” _Cf._ P. Näcke,
“Some Psychologically Obscure Cases of Sexual Aberrations in the
Asylum,” published in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_,
vol. v., p. 196 (Leipzig, 1903). See also, by the same author,
“Problemi nel Campo delle Psicopatie Sessuali,” in _Archivio delle
Psicopatie Sessuali_, 1896; “Sexual Perversities in the Asylum,” in
the _Wiener klinische Rundschau_, 1899, Nos. 27-30.
[471] S. Freud, _op. cit._, pp. 19, 20.
[472] A. Hoche, “The Problem of the Forensic Condemnation of Sexual
Transgressions,” published in the _Neurologisches Centralblatt_, 1896,
p. 58.
[473] Ploss-Bartels, “Das Weib in der Natur- und Volkerkunde,” eighth
edition, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1906).
[474] Mantegazza, “Anthropological and Historical Studies on the
Sexual Relationship of Mankind.”
[475] F. S. Krauss, “Morals and Customs relating to Sexual
Reproduction among the Southern Slavs,” published in “Kryptadia,”
vols. vi.-viii. (Paris, 1899-1902); and in the larger work,
“Anthropophyteia” (Leipzig, 1904-1906).
[476] In all his works.
[477] _Cf._ Charles Darwin, “The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex,” vol. i., p. 182 (2 vols., London, 1898).
[478] _Cf._ the inquiry of C. Wagner, containing extremely valuable
material, “The Sexual and Moral Relationships of the Protestant
Agricultural Population of the German Empire” (3 vols., Leipzig, 1897,
1898).
[479] “Prostitution in Berlin and its Victims,” p. 27 (Berlin, 1846).
[480] _Cf._ the detailed bibliography of these works in my
“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp.
29, 30.
[481] Typical sexual perversions have, however, been observed even in
children, and it is this fact which has chiefly given rise to the
doctrine of the “congenital” character of sexual perversions.
[482] _Cf._ the remarks of the Marquis de Sade regarding the abnormal
sexuality of elderly men, in my “New Research Concerning the Marquis
de Sade,” pp. 421, 422 (Berlin, 1904).
[483] C. Albert, “Free Love,” p. 148.
[484] Joseph Guislain, “Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases,” p. 229
(Berlin, 1854).
[485] Kowalewski, “Perversions of Sexual Sensibility in Epileptics,”
published in the _Jahrbücher für Psychiatrie_, 1887, vol. vii., No. 3.
[486] C. Lombroso, “Recent Advances in the Study of Criminology,” pp.
197-200 (Gera, 1899).--Tarnowsky has even described a form of
“epileptic pæderasty” (_cf._ B. Tarnowsky, “Morbid Phenomena of Sexual
Sensibility,” pp. 8, 51; Berlin, 1886).
[487] E. Laurent (“Morbid Love,” pp. 43-45; Leipzig, 1895) regards
tubercular inheritance as an important etiological factor of sexual
anomalies, for these occur more frequently in blonde, weakly
individuals, than in brunettes (?).
[488] Bacon, “The Effect of Developmental Anomalies and Disorders of
the Female Reproductive Organs upon the Sexual Impulse,” published in
the _American Journal of Dermatology_, 1899, vol. iii., No. 2.
[489] M. Féré, “Sexual Hyperæsthesia in Association with Shortness of
the Frænum Preputii,” published in the _Monatshefte für praktische
Dermatologie_, 1896, vol. xxiii., p. 45.
[490] A. G. Wollenmann, “Phimosis as a Cause of Perversion of Sexual
Sensibility,” published in _Der ärztliche Praktiker_, 1895, No. 23.
Matthaes has shown that morbid changes of the genital sphere or its
vicinity are apt to give rise to offences against morality (“The
Statistics of Offences against Morality,” published in the _Archiv für
Kriminalanthropologie_, 1903, vol. xii., p. 319).
CHAPTER XVIII
MISOGYNY
“_Thou priestess of the most flowery life, how is it possible that
such things should draw near to thee--one of those pale phantoms, one
of those general maxims, which philosophers and moralists have
invented in their despair of the human race?_”--G. JUNG.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVIII
Non-identity of misogyny with homosexuality -- History of misogyny --
Misogyny among the Greeks -- Christian misogyny the true source of the
modern contempt for women -- Characteristics of modern misogyny -- De
Sade and his modern disciples (Schopenhauer, Strindberg, Weininger) --
Scientific misogyny (Möbius, Schurtz, B. Friedländer, E. von Mayer) --
Distinctions between the individual varieties -- Counteracting
tendencies -- Beginnings of a new amatory life of the sexes -- A
common share in life -- Freedom _with_, not without, woman.
CHAPTER XVIII
Before proceeding to the consideration of homosexuality I propose to
give a brief account of contemporary misogyny, in order to avoid
confusing these two distinct phenomena under one head, and also to avoid
making the male homosexuals, who are often erroneously regarded as
“woman-haters,” responsible for the momentarily prevalent spiritual
epidemic of hatred of women. This would be a gross injustice, because,
in the first place, this movement has =in no way= proceeded from the
homosexual, but rather from heterosexual individuals, such as
Schopenhauer, Strindberg, etc.; and because, in the second place, the
homosexual as such are not misogynists at all, and it is only a minority
of them who shout in chorus to the misogynist tirades of Strindberg and
Weininger.
The misogynists form to-day a kind of “=fourth sex=,”[491] to belong to
which appears to be the fashion, or rather has =once more= become the
fashion, for misogyny is an old story. There have always been times in
which men have cried out: “Woman, what have I to do with you? I belong
to the century”;[492] times in which woman was renounced as a soulless
being, and the world of men became intoxicated with itself, and was
proud of its “splendid isolation.”
Of less importance is it that the Chinese since ancient times have
denied to woman a soul, and therewith a justification for
existence,[493] than that among the most highly developed civilized
races of antiquity such men as Hesiod, Simonides,[494] and, above all,
Euripides, were all fierce misogynists. In the “Ion,” the “Hippolytus,”
the “Hecuba,” and the “Cyclops” we find the most incisive attacks on
the female sex. The most celebrated passage is that in the “Hippolytus”
(verses 602-637, 650-655):
“Wherefore, O Jove, beneath the solar beams
That evil, woman, didst thou cause to dwell?
For if it was thy will the human race
Should multiply, this ought not by such means
To be effected; better in thy fane
Each votary, on presenting brass or steel,
Or massive ingots of resplendent gold,
Proportioned to his offering, might from thee
Obtain a race of sons, and under roofs
Which genuine freedom visits, unannoyed
By women, live.”[495]
In this passage we have the entire quintessence of modern misogyny. But
Euripides betrays to us also the real motive of misogyny. In a fragment
of his we read “the =most invincible= of all things is a woman”! _Hinc
illæ lacrimæ!_ It is only the men who are not a =match= for woman, who
do not allow woman as a free personality to influence them, =who are so
little sure of themselves= that they are afraid of suffering at the
hands of woman damage, limitation, or even annihilation of their own
individuality. These only are the true misogynists.
It is indisputable that this Hellenic misogyny was closely connected
with the love of boys as a popular custom. To this we shall return when
we come to describe Greek pæderasty.
Among the Romans woman occupied a far higher position than among the
Greeks--a fact which the institution of the vestal virgins alone
suffices to prove. Among the Germans, also, woman was regarded as worthy
of all honour.
The =true source= of modern misogyny is Christianity--the Christian
doctrine of the fundamentally sinful, evil, devilish nature of woman. A
Strindberg, a Weininger, even a Benedikt Friedländer, notwithstanding
his hatred of priests--all are the last offshoots of a movement against
the being and the value of woman--a movement which has persisted
throughout the Christian period of the history of the world.
“If I were asked,” says Finck,[496] “to name the most influential,
refining element of modern civilization, I should answer: ‘Woman,
beauty, love, and marriage’! If I were asked, however, to name the
most inward and peculiar essence of the early middle ages, my answer
would be: ‘Deadly hostility to everything feminine, to beauty, to
love, and to marriage.’”
The history of medieval misogyny was described by J. Michelet in his
book “The Witch.” Since woman and the contact with woman were regarded
as radically evil, it followed that in theory and practice asceticism
was the ideal; celibacy was only the natural consequence of this hatred
of woman; so also were the later witch trials the natural consequence.
Therefore to this medieval misogyny, in contrast with modern misogyny,
which represents only a weak imitation, we cannot deny a certain
justification. The misogyny of the middle ages was earnestly meant; but
it has become to-day mere phrase-making, dilettante imitation, and
ostentation. In contrast with the utterances of the modern misogynist,
the coarse abuse of women by such a writer as Abraham a Santa Clara has
a refreshing and amusing character.[497]
Modern misogyny is certainly an inheritance of Christian doctrine, and a
tradition handed down from much earlier times, but still it has its own
characteristic peculiarities. Misogyny is, however, now much more an
affair of =satiety= or =disillusion= than of =belief= or =conviction=;
whereas in the days of medieval Christianity belief and conviction were
the effective causal factors of misogyny. In addition, among our
neo-misogynists we have the factor of the =spiritual pride= of a man
who, from the standpoint of academic theoretical culture (which to men
of this kind appears the highest summit of existence), looks down upon
women, whom he regards as mentally insignificant, while he sympathizes
with her “physiological weak-mindedness.” He smiles on her with pity,
and completely overlooks the profound life of emotion and feeling
characteristic of every true woman, which forms a counterpoise to any
amount of purely theoretical knowledge--quite apart from the fact that
women of intellectual cultivation are by no means rare.
If, in fact, we regard the =lives= of those who have reduced modern
misogyny to a system, we shall be able to detect the above-mentioned
causes in their personal experiences and impressions. The first
important modern advocate of misogyny, the Marquis de Sade, lived an
extremely unhappy married life, was deceived also in a love
relationship, and nourished his hatred of women by a dissolute life and
a consequent state of satiety.
And as regards Schopenhauer, who does not recall his unhappy relations
with his mother? For he who has really loved his =mother=, he who has
experienced the unutterable tenderness and self-sacrifice of maternal
love, can never become a genuine, thoroughgoing woman-hater. But the
mutual relationship of Schopenhauer and his mother was rather =hatred=
than love. Beyond question, also, his infection with syphilis, to which
I was the first to draw attention, played a part in his subsequent
hatred of women.
Strindberg, in his “Confessions of a Fool,” has himself offered us the
proof of the causal connexion between his misogyny and his personal
experiences and disillusions; and in Weininger’s book we can read only
too clearly that he had had no good fortune with women, or had had
disagreeable experiences in his relations with them.
De Sade, who, perhaps, was not unknown to Schopenhauer,[498] was the
first advocate of consistent misogyny on principle. It is an interesting
fact, to which I have alluded in an earlier work (“Recent Researches
regarding the Marquis de Sade,” p. 433), that de Sade’s and
Schopenhauer’s opinions on the physical characteristics of women are to
some extent =verbally= identical. While Schopenhauer, in his essay “On
Women” (“Works,” ed. Grisebach, vol. v., p. 654), speaks of the
“stunted, narrow-shouldered, wide-hipped and =short-legged= sex,” which
only a masculine intellect when =clouded by sexual desire= could
possibly call “beautiful,” we find in the “Juliette” (vol. iii., pp.
187, 188) of the Marquis de Sade the following very similar remarks on
the feminine body: “Take the clothes off one of these idols of yours! Is
it these two =short= and crooked legs which have =turned your head= like
this?” This physical hatefulness of women corresponds to the mental
hatefulness of which de Sade gives a similar repellent picture
(“Juliette,” vol iii., pp. 188, 189). In all his works we find the same
fanatical hatred of women. Sarmiento, in “Aline et Valcour” (vol. ii.,
p. 115), would like to annihilate all women, and calls that man happy
who has learned to renounce completely intercourse with this “debased,
false, and noxious sex.”
Quite in the spirit of de Sade, to whom the misogynists of the Second
Empire referred as an authority, Schopenhauer, in the previously quoted
essay “On Women,” Strindberg, in the “Confessions of a Fool,” and
Weininger, in “Sex and Character,” preached contempt for the feminine
nature;[499] and this seed has fallen upon fruitful soil in modern
youth. Every young blockhead inflates himself with his “masculine
pride,” and feels himself to be the “knight of the spirit” in relation
to the inferior sex; every disillusioned and satiated debauchee
cultivates (as a rule, indeed, transiently) the fashion of misogyny,
which strengthens his sentiment of self-esteem. If we wish to speak at
all of “physiological weak-mindedness,” let us apply the term to this
disagreeable type of men. As Georg Hirth truly remarks (“Ways to
Freedom,” p. 281), such masculine =arrogance= is merely a variety of
“mental defect.”
Unfortunately, this misogyny has intruded itself also into science. The
work of P. J. Möbius,[500] notwithstanding the esteem I feel for the
valuable services of the celebrated neurologist in other departments,
can only be termed an aberration, a _lapsus calami_.[501] But he does
not stand alone. The admirable work of Heinrich Schurtz, also, upon “Age
Classes and Associations of Men” (Berlin, 1902), is permeated by this
misogynist aura; not less so is the equally stimulating work, “The Vital
Laws of Civilization” (Halle, 1904), by Eduard von Mayer. This book, in
association with the equally thoughtful and compendious work “The
Renascence of Eros Uranios” (Berlin, 1904), by Benedikt Friedländer, and
in conjunction with the efforts of Adolf Brand, the editor of the
homosexual newspaper _Der Eigene_, and Edwin Bab (_cf._ this writer’s
“The Woman’s Movement and the Love of Friends”; Berlin, 1904), to found
a special homosexual group demanding the “=emancipation of men=,” have
been the principal causes of the belief that the male homosexuals are
the true “repudiators of woman,” and that from them has proceeded the
increasing diffusion of modern misogyny. I repeat that this connexion is
true only for the above-named group; that, on the contrary, genuine
misogyny has been taught us by the world’s typically heterosexual men,
such as Schopenhauer and Strindberg. Benedikt Friedländer and Eduard von
Mayer preached, above all, a “masculine civilization,” a deepening of
the spiritual relationships between men; whereas Strindberg and
Schopenhauer, and even Weininger, really leave us in uncertainty as to
what they imagine is to take woman’s place. All five agree in this, that
the “intercourse” of man with woman is to be limited as much as
possible; but only the two first-named openly and freely advocate
homosexual relationships, or at least a “physiological friendship” (B.
Friedländer), between men. Schopenhauer, Strindberg, and Weininger did
not venture to deduce these consequences. Yet this is the =necessary=
consequence of misogyny based on principle.
To the heterosexual men--and such men form an =enormous majority=--the
noble, ideal, asexual friendship of man for man appears in quite another
light from that in which it appears to the misogynist, to whom it is to
serve to =replace= sexual love, whereas for heterosexual men friendship
for other men is a valuable treasure =additional= to the love of woman.
Is there, then, any reason for this contempt and hatred for woman? Do
not the signs increase on all hands to show us that =new= relationships
are forming between the sexes, that a number of new points of contact of
the spiritual nature are making their appearance--in a word, that =an
entirely new, nobler, most promising amatory life= is developing? I will
not fall into the contrary error to misogyny and inscribe a dithyramb of
praise to feminine nature, as Wedde, Daumer, Quensel, Groddeck, and
others, have done; but I merely indicate the signs of the times when I
say =that woman also is awakening=! Woman is awakening to the entirely
new existence of a free personality, conscious of her rights and of her
duties. Woman, also, will have her share in the content and in the tasks
of life; she will not enslave us, as the misogynists clamour, for she
wishes to see =free men= by her side. What would become of woman if men
became slaves? How could slaves give love?
Life has to-day become a difficult task both for man and for woman. Man
and woman alike must endeavour to perform that task with confidence in
their respective powers; but each, also, must have confidence in the
powers of the other--a confidence which becomes =palpable= in the form
of love or friendship, so that those who feel it have their own powers
strengthened.
Not “Free =from= woman” is the watchword of the future, but “Free =with=
woman.”
[491] V. Hoffmann, in a bad novel, “Das vierte Geschlecht” (Berlin,
1902), gives this name to the non-homosexual misogynists.
[492] Karl Gutzkow, “Säkularbilder,” vol. i., p. 55 (Frankfurt, 1846).
[493] In the Shi-king we find the following characterization of woman:
“Enough for her to avoid evil,
For what can a woman do that is good?”
Indian literature is also full of such ideas. _Cf._ H. Schurtz,
“Altersklassen und Männerbunde” (Age Classes and Associations of Men),
p. 52.
[494] Simonides considered that women were derived from various
animals. W. Schubert (“From the Berlin Collection of Papyri,”
published in the _Vossische Zeitung_, No. 23, January 15, 1907)
reproduces long fragments of a Greek anthology which collates praise
and blame of woman in the original words of the poets.
[495] I quote from “The Plays of Euripides in English,” in two
volumes, vol. ii., p. 136 (Everyman’s Library, Dent,
London).--TRANSLATOR.
[496] H. T. Finck, “Romantic Love and Personal Beauty,” vol. i., pp.
186, 187 (Breslau, 1894).
[497] Equally amusing is the misogynist “Alphabet de l’Imperfection et
Malice des Femmes,” by Jacques Olivier (Rouen, 1646), in which all the
bad qualities of woman, observed down to the year 1646, are described
with effective care and completeness.
[498] We know that Schopenhauer was a lover of erotic writings; a
fuller account of this matter will be found in Grisebach’s
“Conversations and Soliloquies of Schopenhauer.”
[499] That Nietzsche is wrongly accredited with misogyny is
convincingly proved by Helene Stocker (“Nietzsches Frauenfeindschaft,”
published in _Zukunft_, 1903; reprinted in “Love and Women,” pp.
65-74; Minden, 1906).
[500] P. J. Möbius, “The Physiological Weak-mindedness of Woman,”
fourth edition (Halle, 1902). Näcke terms the recently deceased Möbius
the “German Lombroso,” in order by this term to indicate, on the one
hand, the man’s indubitable genius, and on the other hand the
superficiality and purely hypothetical character of his scientific
deductions.
[501] The grounds for this opinion were given in the fifth chapter.
CHAPTER XIX
THE RIDDLE OF HOMOSEXUALITY
“_Through Science to Justice!_”--MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XIX
Actual existence of original congenital homosexuality -- Its
distinction from pseudo-homosexuality -- Homosexuality an
anthropological phenomenon, not a manifestation of degeneration --
Secondary origin of “homosexual neurasthenia” -- Rarity of stigmata of
degeneration among homosexuals -- Early spontaneous appearance of
homosexuality -- As an essential product of personality --
Homosexuality in the child -- Physical and mental characteristics of
completely developed homosexuality -- Effeminate and virile urnings --
Physical peculiarities of the homosexual -- Mental peculiarities --
Diffusion -- Numbers -- Ethnology of homosexuality -- Earlier history
and literature -- Celebrated homosexual individuals -- Modes of
activity of homosexual love -- Relations between homosexual and
heterosexual individuals -- Mode of sexual intercourse -- Examples --
Social relationships of the homosexual -- Places of rendezvous -- The
“Allée des Veuves” of Paris -- An adventure of Victor Hugo’s -- Urning
clubs in the Second Empire -- Urning balls at Paris -- Social
relationships of the homosexuals of Berlin -- Meeting-places of
urnings -- Men’s balls in Berlin -- Male prostitution -- Male brothels
-- Blackmail -- § 175 -- Criticism of this section -- Demonstration of
the necessity for its repeal -- Blackmail of homosexuals and suicide
-- Need for the diffusion of general enlightenment regarding
homosexuality -- Activity of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee --
Homosexuality in women -- The smaller percentage of genuine female
homosexuals -- “Thoughts of a Solitary Woman” -- Relations of
homosexual women to men -- The Woman’s Movement and homosexuality --
Sexual relationships of tribades -- The “protectrices” -- Social life
of tribades -- Lesbian prostitution.
_Appendix: Theory of Homosexuality._ -- Homosexuality a heterogeneous
sexuality -- Insufficiency of the theory of intermediate stages -- My
own theory of homosexuality -- The significance of homosexuality in
relation to civilization.
CHAPTER XIX
Homosexuality--=love between man and man= (uranism), or =between woman
and woman= (tribadism), a =congenital state=, or =one spontaneously
appearing in very early childhood=--I consider “a riddle,” because, in
fact, the more closely in recent years I have come to know it, the more
I have endeavoured to study it scientifically, the more enigmatical, the
more obscure, the more incomprehensible, it has become to me. But it
=exists=. About that there is no doubt.
In the years 1905 and 1906 I was occupied almost exclusively with the
problem of homosexuality, and I had the opportunity of seeing and
examining a very large number of genuine homosexual individuals, both
men and women. I was able to observe them during long periods, both at
home and in public life. I learnt to know them--their mode of life,
their habits, their opinions, their whole activity, not only in relation
to one another, but also in relation to other non-homosexual individuals
and to persons of the opposite sex. This experience taught me the
indubitable fact that the diffusion of true homosexuality as a
congenital natural phenomenon is =far greater= than I had earlier
assumed;[502] so that I find myself now compelled to separate from true
homosexuality the other category of =acquired, apparent, occasional
homosexuality=, of the existence of which I am now, as formerly, =firmly
convinced=. I denote this latter by the term “=pseudo-homosexuality=,”
and treat of it in a separate chapter.
Formerly I believed that true homosexuality was only a variety of
pseudo-homosexuality--in a sense larval pseudo-homosexuality. Now,
however, I must recognize that true homosexuality constitutes a =special
well-defined group=, sharply distinguishable from all forms of
pseudo-homosexuality. From my medical observations, which have been as
exact and objective as possible, I must draw the conclusion that among
=thoroughly healthy individuals= of both sexes, not to be distinguished
from other normal human beings, there appears =in very early childhood=,
and certainly not evoked by any kind of external influence, an
=inclination=, and after puberty a =sexual impulse, towards persons of
the same sex=; and that this inclination and this impulse are =as
little to be altered= as it is possible to expel from a heterosexual man
the impulse towards woman.
Above all, in this definition of true original homosexuality I lay the
stress upon the word “=healthy=”; for von Krafft-Ebing, though he admits
the existence of congenital homosexuality yet regards it as a morbid
degenerative phenomenon, as the expression of severe hereditary taint
and of a neuro-psychopathic constitution; and this view is shared by
many alienists.[503] Now, we must admit that a =portion= of genuine
homosexuals--just as is the case with a portion of heterosexual
individuals--possess such a morbid constitution; and we must acknowledge
that yet =another portion= exhibit =manifestations of nervousness= and
neurasthenia, which, beyond doubt, have developed during life out of an
originally healthy state, in consequence of the struggle for life, the
painful experience of being “different” from the great mass of people,
etc.; but we ascertain that a =third=, and, in fact, the =largest,
section= of original homosexuals are thoroughly =healthy, free from
hereditary taint, physically and psychically normal=.
I have observed a great number of homosexuals belonging to all ages and
occupations in whom not the slightest trace of morbidity was to be
detected. They were just as healthy and normal as are heterosexuals. At
an earlier date, though I was not yet aware of the relatively great
frequency of true original homosexuality, it had become clear to me, on
the ground of my own anthropological theory of sexual anomalies, that
homosexuality might just as well appear in healthy human beings as in
diseased. Therein I have always agreed with Magnus Hirschfeld, the
principal advocate of this view, in opposition to the theory of the
degenerative nature of homosexuality. For me there is no longer any
doubt =that homosexuality is compatible with complete mental and
physical health=.
It is very interesting to note that von Krafft-Ebing himself later came
to the same view, and thus formally abandoned the degenerative
hypothesis. In his “New Studies in the Domain of Homosexuality” he
writes:[504]
“In view of the experience that contrary sexuality is a congenital
anomaly, that it represents a disturbance in the evolution of the
sexual life, and of the physical and mental development, in normal
relationship to the kind of reproductive glands which the individual
possesses, =it has become impossible to maintain in this connexion the
idea of ‘disease.’= Rather, in such a case we must speak of a
malformation, and treat the anomaly as parallel with physical
malformation--for example, anatomical deviations from the structural
type. At the same time, the assumption of a simultaneous psychopathia
is not prejudiced, for persons who exhibit such an anatomical
differentiation from type (_stigmata degenerationis_) =may remain
physically healthy throughout life, and even be above the average in
this respect=. Of course, a difference from the generality so
important as contrary sexual sensation must have a much greater
importance to the psyche than the majority of other anatomical or
functional variations. In this way it is to be explained that a
disturbance in the development in the normal sexual life may often be
antagonistic to the development of a harmonious psychical personality.
“Not infrequently in the case of those with contrary sexuality do we
find neuropathic and psychopathic predispositions, as, for example,
predisposition to constitutional neurasthenia and hysteria, to the
milder forms of periodic psychosis, to the inhibition of the
development of psychical energy (intelligence, moral sense), and in
some of these cases the ethical deficiency (especially when
hypersexuality is associated with the contrary sexuality) may lead to
the most severe aberrations of the sexual impulse. And yet we can
always prove that, relatively speaking, the heterosexual are apt to be
much more depraved than the homosexual.
“Moreover, other manifestations of degeneration in the sexual spheres,
in the form of sadism, masochism, and fetichism, are relatively much
commoner among the former.
“That contrary sexual sensation =cannot= thus be necessarily regarded
as =psychical= degeneration, or even as a manifestation of disease, is
shown by various considerations, one of the principal of which is
=that these variations of the sexual life may actually be associated
with mental superiority=.... The proof of this is the existence of men
of all nations whose contrary sexuality is an established fact, and
who, none the less, are the pride of their nation as authors, poets,
artists, leaders of armies, and statesmen.
“A further proof of the fact that contrary sexual sensation is =not
necessarily disease, nor necessarily a vicious self-surrender to the
immoral=, is to be found in the fact that all the noble activities of
the heart which can be associated with heterosexual love can equally
be associated with homosexual love... in the form of noble-mindedness,
self-sacrifice, philanthropy, artistic sense, poietic activity, etc.,
but also the passions and defects of love (jealousy, suicide, murder,
unhappy love, with its deleterious influence on soul and body, etc.).”
According to my own investigations and observations, the =relationship
between health and disease= is among homosexuals =originally identical
with that among heterosexuals=, and only in the course of life, in
consequence of the social and individual isolation of the homosexual,
which acts on them as a =psychical trauma=, is this relationship
somewhat altered in favour of the predominance of disease. Here,
however, we have, as a rule, to do chiefly with =acquired= nervous
troubles and disorders, with the development of a peculiar type of
“=homosexual neurasthenia=,” and in these cases by superficial observers
there may easily be a confusion between _post hoc_ and _propter hoc_.
Magnus Hirschfeld, who unquestionably possesses, relatively and
absolutely, the greatest experience in the domain of homosexuality,
maintains[505] that, according to his material of investigation--and
this is of gigantic extent--at least 75 % of homosexuals are born of
healthy parents and of happy marriages, often prolific marriages, and
that nervous or mental anomalies, alcoholism, blood-relationship, and
syphilis are no more frequent among the ancestors of homosexuals than
among the ancestors of those endowed with normal sexuality. Only among
from 20 to 25 % of homosexuals was he able, in conjunction with E.
Burchard, to find hereditary taint. Only in 16 % could they find
well-developed “stigmata of degeneration”; and, indeed, those with
stigmata were throughout hereditarily tainted. This view is supported
also by the facts (to which I already alluded in my “Etiology of
Psychopathia Sexualis”) that homosexuality is universally diffused in
space and time; that it is independent of civilization, occurs among
savage races who are not exposed to the conditions giving rise to
degeneration in the same degree as civilized races; and that it is
prevalent in the country, where the degenerative influence of life in
large towns is not operative.
The most important characteristic of genuine homosexuality, its
=spontaneous appearance very early in life=, which can only be referred
to natural inheritance, appears to me to be a fact proved altogether
beyond dispute. Men of the highest and most respected professions--above
all, =judges=, =practising physicians=, =men of science=, =theologians=,
and =scholars=--have described themselves to me as having been through
and through homosexual from early childhood, so that I am thoroughly
convinced that primary homosexuality makes its appearance at any rate
very early in life.
The reports of physicians are of especially great importance. Hirschfeld
(_op. cit._, p. 12) quotes the utterance of a leading alienist, himself
homosexual: “I can and must declare that I have never known a case of
homosexuality which I could regard as other than congenital,” and the
accuracy of this statement has been confirmed to me personally by
several homosexual physicians. The idea “congenital” harmonizes very
well with the demonstrable casual =objective= cause of the first
homosexual tendencies, which we are able to learn in almost every case
of homosexuality. These can, as is well known, also occur transiently in
heterosexual individuals--a matter which is discussed in the chapter
“Pseudo-Homosexuality.” In the case of genuine homosexuality, however,
these homosexual activities play from the very beginning a predominant
rôle, and =remain permanent=, because they result from a natural
inheritance, from a deeply rooted impulse. This is shown in the
following interesting autobiography of a man of letters thirty years of
age:
“From my earliest childhood there was something girlish in my whole
nature, both outwardly and (more especially) inwardly. I was very
quiet, obedient, diligent, sensitive to praise and blame, rather
bright. I associated chiefly with adults, and was generally beloved.
Sexual activity began in me unusually early. When I was about six
years of age a tutor sat down on my bed, in which I was lying in a
fever. He caressed me, and with his hand _membrum meum tetigit_. The
voluptuous sensation which resulted was so intense that it has never
disappeared from my memory. At school, where I always distinguished
myself by my application and success, I sometimes enjoyed mutual
‘feeling’ with several other boys. From which side I inherited the
unusual intensity of the sexual impulse I do not know, but I remember
that when I was about twelve years old I already suffered a good deal
from sexual desire, and that it came to me as a solution of a great
difficulty when a comrade instructed me in the practice of
masturbation. It is remarkable that for some time afterwards there was
no evacuation of semen. When this first appeared I was very much
alarmed and disquieted, but I soon became accustomed to it, and this
the more readily because I had no doubt whatever that all men
regularly indulged in the same pleasure. This ‘paradisaical’ state did
not, however, last for long; and after a time, when I recognized the
unnatural and dangerous nature of my conduct, I conducted a severe and
unsuccessful contest against my desires. In my life generally I had a
good deal to bear, and I can say that I have hardly preserved a single
really pleasant memory of my past; and yet I could look back to this
past with a certain pride and satisfaction if it had not been that the
sexual side of my life has left such gloomy shadows in my soul.
“I remember that from very early days my eyes involuntarily turned
with longing towards elderly vigorous men, but I did not pay much
attention to this fact. I believed that I only practised masturbation
(the influence of which I doubtless exaggerate in memory to some
extent) because it was not possible for me to have sexual intercourse
with women. I was accustomed sometimes to have friendly association
with young girls, who appeared to be extremely attracted towards me. I
always took care, however, that such love tendencies were nipped in
the bud, because I felt that it was impossible for me to go any
further with them. Ultimately I determined to seek salvation in
intercourse with prostitutes, although they were disagreeable to my
æsthetic and moral feelings; but I got no help here: either I was
unable to complete the normal sexual act, or in other cases it was
completed without any particular pleasure, and I was always consumed
with anxiety with respect to infection. I had, indeed, often the
opportunity of forming an ‘intimacy’ with a woman, but I did not do
it, and always supposed that my failure to do so depended upon my
ridiculous bashfulness and upon the excessive sensitiveness of my
conscience. But though there is some truth in both of these
suggestions, I have not taken into account the principal
grounds--namely, that I am congenitally homosexual, and that I feel no
physical attraction, or almost none, towards the other sex. This
suffices to explain the fact (which can be explained in no other way)
that when masturbating I almost always represented in imagination
handsome elderly men. In my lascivious dreams, also, such men play the
principal rôle. These longings were so powerful that it was impossible
that I should not soon have my attention directed to them; but as I
could not understand them and would not take the matter seriously (I
knew, indeed, that man =must= feel drawn towards woman, and not
towards man), I continued unceasingly and despairingly to fight
against these fixed ideas, while at the same time with varying success
I endeavoured to cure myself of masturbation; for in the first place
it now gave very little satisfaction, and in the second place it
destroyed my hopes of eventually procreating healthy children. I had
almost come to believe myself no longer competent for the sexual life
when I noticed one day that the view of a _membrum virile_ set my
blood flowing fiercely. I then remembered that this had sometimes
happened before, although to a less marked extent. I was now compelled
to recognize that I was not the same as every one else. This fact,
which I had before suspected, and of which I now became more and more
firmly convinced, reduced me to despair, which was all the greater
because in other ways I felt extremely unhappy, and because I did not
dare to speak of it to any human being. Sometimes I still thought that
there must be some ‘misunderstanding,’ and that there must be some
salvation for me. Then it happened that a simple girl fell in love
with me, and I went so far as to enter into an intimacy with her,
although I openly assured her that as far as I was concerned it was
simply a matter of physical enjoyment, and that I could not in any way
make myself responsible for her future, for which reason care must be
taken that there should be no offspring. During this intimacy, which
lasted several months, I sometimes overcame my enduring inclinations
towards men, but completely to suppress them was impossible. My
association with the girl was still continuing, when one day in a
public lavatory I saw an elderly gentleman whose appearance greatly
pleased me. He looked at me tentatively. Cautiously he leaned over, in
order _membrum meum videre_; he gradually drew near to me, moved his
shaking hand and ... _membrum meum tetigit_. I was so much surprised
and alarmed that I ran away, and avoided for some time afterwards
passing by the same place. All the stronger, however, was the impulse
to find this remarkable man once more, and this was not at all
difficult. What an enigma such a man seemed to me! How could it
happen that he dared to do that of which I had always been able only
to think, to dream, with heart-quaking and horror? Could there,
perhaps, be another man like this--perhaps several such exceptional
beings? A short period convinced me that I was not quite alone in my
way of feeling; but this was a weak consolation. Rather, since that
time--that is to say, during the last five years--my inward battle has
become more unbearable, for earlier my only battle was to reject
homosexual ideas, and to overcome the habit of solitary self-abuse.
Now sometimes I practise with another mutual onanism (to me the proper
‘natural’ mode of sexual gratification), and yet I cannot forgive
myself for doing it because it is effected in so unæsthetic a manner,
and is associated with such dangers. Notwithstanding all my
endeavours, however, I have never been able to resist the temptation
for a long time together; and thus I am hunted always by my impulse as
by a wild animal, and can nowhere and in nothing find repose and
forgetfulness. I have frequently changed my place of residence, but I
always before long form new ‘relationships.’ The tortures which I
suffer in consequence of the incomparable power of the impulse are
greater them I can possibly express in words. I can only wonder that I
did not lose my reason, and that in the eyes of my friends and
acquaintances I am now, as before, ‘the most normal of all human
beings.’ In the senseless and utterly unsuccessful contest with an
impulse which, as far as I am concerned, is wholly, or almost wholly,
congenital, I have lost the best of my powers, although I have long
recognized the fact that this impulse in and by itself is neither
morbid nor sinful, for a divergence from the norm is not a disease,
and the gratification of a natural impulse, which in no respect and
for no human being leads to evil consequences, cannot be regarded as
sinful. Why, then, must I continue to strive against this impulse like
a madman? Because it is very generally misunderstood, so unpardonably
condemned. What help is it that I am now surrounded by love and
respect? I know that so many would turn away from me with horror if
they were to learn my sexual constitution, although it is a matter
which does not concern them at all. Scorn and contempt would then be
my lot. I should be regarded by the majority of human beings as a
libertine; whereas I feel and know that, notwithstanding all the
sensuality of my nature, I have been created for some other purpose
than simply to follow my lustful desire. Who will believe that I
suffer in the struggle with myself? Who will have compassion upon me?
This idea is intolerable. I am condemned to eternal solitude. I have
not the moral right to found a home, to embrace a child who would give
me the name of ‘father.’ Is not this punishment sufficiently severe
for God knows what sins? Why, then, should the consciousness be
superadded that I am a pariah, an outcast from society? Owing to the
opinion of society regarding the homosexual--an opinion based upon
ignorance, stupidity, and ill-nature--society drives these unhappy
beings to death (or to a marriage which in their case is criminal),
and then triumphantly exclaims: ‘Look what degenerate beings they
are!’ No, they are not degenerates, those whose lives you have made
unbearable; they are for the most part spiritually and morally very
healthy human beings. I will speak of myself. Why do I long for death?
Certainly not because I am mentally abnormal. I am no morbid
pessimist, and I know well enough that life can be very beautiful.
But, unfortunately, it cannot be so for me; for my life is a hell; I
am intolerably weary of my internal conflict; it has become horribly
difficult to me to play the hypocrite, to pretend continually to be a
happy man rejoicing in life; I am bending beneath the burden of my
heavy iron mask. Recently I had myself hypnotized, in order to have my
thoughts turned away as far as possible from sexual matters. My
hypnotist said to me: ‘You see, you will be at rest now,’ and
involuntarily in sleep I had to swallow these words, ‘Be at rest’!
Good God, is that possible? Does the ‘normal’ man know how this word
sounds in our ears? Who will understand my intolerable pain? Perhaps
my dear parents could have done so, as they loved me above all, as if
they had a presentiment that I should be the most unhappy of their
children; but they have been dead for several years, and so,
notwithstanding my numerous relatives and friends, I stand quite alone
in this world, and vainly seek an answer to the questions ‘Why?’ and
‘Wherefore?’”
Genuine homosexuality exhibits, like heterosexuality, the character of
an impulse arising from the =very nature= of the personality, which, in
activity from the cradle to the grave, expresses the =continuity of the
individual= in respect also of this peculiar sexual tendency. Thus there
does not exist a homosexuality =limited= merely to a certain age of
life, as to childhood or youth, to maturity, or even to old age. Hence
we must distinguish from genuine homosexuality the pæderasty of old men
described by Schopenhauer, which does not begin till old age appears. We
must distinguish, also, the love of Greek boys for elderly men; these
must be included in the category of =pseudo-homosexuality=. An
inclination which, like original homosexuality, is an =outflow of the
essential nature= of the individual concerned, cannot disappear so long
as the individual himself persists, cannot begin or end except with the
beginning or end of his life. Homosexuality extends throughout the
lifetime, and if by any cause whatever--for example, enforced
marriage--it is apparently temporarily suppressed, it always reappears.
It seems very doubtful if there really exists, as von Krafft-Ebing[506]
assumes, a genuine =retarded= homosexuality--that is, original
homosexuality which does not manifest itself until a comparatively
advanced age. There do, doubtless, exist transient cases of
pseudo-homosexuality, which have in some cases developed in those
previously heterosexual, and which in other cases are superimposed upon
a bisexual basis. These belong to the category of “=acquired=”
homosexuality, which is always a pseudo-homosexuality.
The course of life of genuine homosexuals is a complete expression of
the results of simple inversion of the sexual impulse, and the
homosexual type makes its appearance in childhood. The fact of the
“=difference=” between the homosexual and others is not experienced
merely by the person himself, but is also noticed =very early= by those
who have care of him. The “girlish” (in the case of female
homosexuality, “boyish”) and “peculiar” nature is often observed by
members of the family, by comrades, and by tutors, and gives rise to the
use of nicknames. These manifestations and perceptions are a valuable
objective confirmation of the subjective sensations of homosexual
children. A Protestant clergyman whose homosexual son also studied
theology remarked to M. Hirschfeld: “He was from the very beginning
different from my five other sons.” The physical and moral peculiarities
presently to be described are often manifested in very early childhood.
Hirschfeld has frequently been able to diagnose “homosexuality” in
children from ten to fourteen years of age. He alludes, among others, to
a very timid boy, twelve years of age, who suffered from migraine, who
cried frequently, who kept himself apart from his schoolfellows, and
corresponded daily with a boy friend. He was fond of flowers and music;
he had very little inclination to mathematics (according to Hirschfeld,
a somewhat characteristic phenomenon in cases of homosexuality). The
examination of the boy, who was extremely bashful, showed that =the
genital organs were still completely undeveloped=, the penis resembling
that of a boy of four years, whilst the breasts were markedly developed
like those of a girl at the commencement of puberty.
I doubt whether the fondness on the part of boys for girls’ games, or on
the part of girls for boys’ games, can be regarded as a symptom of
diagnostic importance in regard to the existence of homosexuality, for a
fondness for playing with girls and for cooking may often be observed in
boys who later prove thoroughly heterosexual. Still, these things do
play a great part in the autobiography of homosexuals, and have, in
fact, great importance in cases in which these tendencies persist
=after= puberty, when the heterosexually differentiated psyche would,
after the transitory episode of these youthful games, display activities
now corresponding to the fully developed sexual sensibility.
Puberty is the most important period with regard to the final
=determination= of homosexuality by means of particular =physical= and
=mental= characteristics.
The consideration of the physical and mental characters of male
homosexuals leads clearly to the distinction of two different types--the
=effeminate= and the =virile= urnings. With regard to the relative
numbers of these two types there exist no definite data. Hirschfeld, in
his “Urnings,” describes chiefly the type of the more or less effeminate
urnings--that is, of those who show the greatest resemblance to the
feminine nature--and does not express an opinion as to whether the
number of effeminate homosexuals is greater than the number of virile
homosexuals--that is, of those whose nature is predominantly masculine.
Another experienced observer of urnings, Dr. J. E. Meisner,[507] is of
opinion that in the =majority= of cases the male type of homosexuals is
encountered rather than the female. According to my own observations, it
appears to me that the number of virile and of effeminate urnings is
about identical.[508] There are certainly numerous virile homosexuals,
or rather homosexuals of a thoroughly =masculine= build of body, without
great deviations from the normal type, who yet have a more or less
feminine mode of sensibility. The distinction between effeminate and
virile homosexuals would appear therefore to be only relative, and for
the majority of cases Hirschfeld’s remarks (“Urnings,” p. 86) apply:
“A homosexual who was not distinguishable physically and mentally from
the complete man is a being I have not yet encountered among fifteen
hundred cases, and I am therefore unable to believe in the existence
of such until I personally encounter one.”
More especially after removing any beard or moustache that may be
present, we sometimes see much more clearly the feminine expression of
face in a male homosexual, whilst before the hair was removed they
appeared quite man-like. Still more important for the determination of a
feminine habitus are direct physical characteristics. Among these there
must be mentioned a =considerable deposit of fat=, by which the
resemblance to the feminine type is produced, the contours of the body
being more rounded than in the case of the normal male. In
correspondence with this the =muscular system= is less powerfully
developed than it is in heterosexual men, the skin is delicate and soft,
and the complexion is much clearer than is usual in men. Last winter I
attended an urnings’ ball, and I was much impressed, when looking at the
_décolleté_ men, with the remarkable whiteness of their skin on the
shoulders, neck, and back--also in those who had not applied powder--and
by the fact that the little acne spots almost always present in normal
men were absent in these. The peculiar rounding of the shoulders was
also remarkable, from its resemblance to what one sees in women.
According to Hirschfeld, the skin of the urning almost always feels
warmer than his environment. He refers the expression commonly used
among the people (in Germany), “warm brothers,” to this circumstance,
and derives the Latin _homo mollis_ (“soft man”) from the softness of
the skin and of the muscular system (though in my opinion this term is
applied rather to the =entire= effeminate, soft nature of the urning).
Of great interest is the relation =between the breadth of the shoulders
and the width of the pelvis= in homosexual men. Whilst the breadth of
the shoulders of heterosexual men is several centimetres in excess of
the width of the pelvis, and in women the width of the pelvis is greater
than the breadth of the shoulders, according to Hirschfeld in the urning
there is little or no difference between these two measurements. This,
in respect of the bodily structure, would completely justify the
expression “intermediate stage,” and would give the homosexual man a
position between the heterosexual man and the heterosexual woman. Still,
there are, without doubt, numerous virile homosexual men in whom this
great width of the pelvis is not present. Investigations regarding the
corresponding relationships among homosexual women have not to my
knowledge hitherto been made. Very striking is the =often luxuriant
growth of hair=, especially in the effeminate types, whereas the virile
homosexuals are in this respect more approximate to normal men, baldness
being common among them.
Our attention having been recently directed by the investigation of H.
Swoboda to the existence of =equivalents of menstruation= in men, the
occurrence of such equivalents among urnings is of interest. Hirschfeld
reports the case of an effeminate homosexual who since the age of
fourteen had suffered at intervals of twenty-eight days from migraine,
associated with severe pains in the back and loins, so that his
stepmother said to him: “It is with you just as it is with us.”
The =gait= and the =movements= of effeminate urnings also have a
somewhat womanly appearance, and attract the attention even of one who
is not in the secret. Short, tripping paces and elegant movements are
characteristic of the effeminate.
In an earlier chapter we came to the conclusion that the fully adult
normal woman was approximate in physical characteristics rather to the
child and to the youthful human being than to the adult man; and in this
connexion it is of interest that we must describe as a distinctively
=feminine= characteristic the peculiarity of many male homosexuals,
which enables them =for a long time to preserve a youthful appearance
and demeanour=.
Very remarkable is the behaviour of the voice. The change in the voice
may not occur at all, or does not occur till very late. The capacity for
singing soprano or falsetto is also long preserved. Others, in whom the
change of voice had failed to occur, were able to lower the pitch
considerably by practice. A typical and well-known example is that of
the baritone singer Willibald von Sadler-Grün, whom I had the
opportunity of hearing recently, when, under the name of “Urany Verde,”
he made a professional journey through Germany, and sang his songs
dressed as a woman. He said of himself: “My voice has never cracked in a
definite way. At twenty-three years of age I could sing soprano, and can
still do so to-day, at the age of thirty. The deeper tones for speech
and singing I acquired only by instruction and practice” (Hirschfeld,
“Urnings,” p. 65). In this typical effeminate, the breasts also had a
completely feminine character, as, according to Hirschfeld, is by no
means rare in boy urnings, who at puberty experience swelling of the
breasts, associated with painful sensations.[509] I must, however,
maintain, in opposition to Hirschfeld, that abnormally marked
development of the breasts is by no means rare in perfectly normal
heterosexual men. For the diagnosis of homosexuality, the imperfect
development of the larynx, and the failure of the voice to crack, are
more important than the marked development of the breasts. I remember
distinctly that in the case of a fellow-student of mine years ago his
high voice used greatly to strike me. To-day I am able to understand how
this fact was associated with his complete disinclination to sexual
intercourse with women and his insensibility to feminine charms in
general; and I am able in his case to diagnose homosexuality with
absolute certainty.
In the case of =virile= homosexuals, all the above-mentioned physical
peculiarities are far less noticeable. In their outward appearance they
much more nearly resemble heterosexual men, but still they always have
=comparatively= more of the feminine in their nature than the latter.
Such a typically virile homosexual, in whose appearance the impression
of femininity was entirely absent, I was able recently to recognize
during a railway journey, in the course of which he confided to me
misogynous opinions against other fellow-travellers, and also said that
in the whole of his life--he was a man of a little over thirty--he had
not had intercourse with women more than three or four times. During the
long wait of the train at a station I took the opportunity, having
mentioned that I was a physician by profession, to ask him if he was not
homosexual, a fact which he at once admitted. Already in very early
childhood he had felt himself distinctly drawn only towards masculine
beings, and had =never= experienced the least inclination towards women.
In this case also any kind of outward influence was excluded, because he
had grown up at home and chiefly in a =feminine= environment. As I have
already said, in appearance he was masculine, and he himself stated that
he had no physical characteristics which suggested a feminine
impression. That this is the case in numerous virile homosexuals is
proved by the distinctive fact that many of them are =professional
soldiers=, especially officers, in respect of whose appearance virility
is very strongly insisted on.
The =mental= qualities of male homosexuals correspond fully to the
physical, and occupy a middle region between the psyche of the
heterosexual man and that of woman. But every =emotional element= is in
them more prominent than energetic will-power and clear-sighted reason.
Something soft and pliable is characteristic of the majority of urnings.
This adaptability manifests itself in good-humouredness, in inclination
to self-sacrifice, but, above all, in a most astonishing =mobility of
the imaginative life=, which seems to be something characteristic of the
homosexual, and to explain his frequent artistic capacity, above all his
talents for =music=, for which vocation, indeed, his less fixed and more
sketchy nature especially fits him, but also for poetry, painting,
acting, and sculpture. “For all the fine arts,” says Hirschfeld, “from
cooking and artistic needlework to sculpture, we find that urnings have
exceptional talent.” The inclination to intellectual occupation is
distinctly greater among homosexuals than the inclination to bodily
work. Associated with this is the ambition to distinguish themselves
mentally above those by whom they are surrounded. Hirschfeld’s assertion
that homosexuals belonging to the lower classes exhibit intellectual
predominance over their environment, I am able emphatically to confirm,
after frequent conversations with homosexual workmen and menservants.
The peculiarity of their congenital tendencies has here early given rise
to a certain intellectual profundity, has early taught these men to
=reflect= about the world and about human existence. Every homosexual is
a philosopher for himself. Most heterosexuals, especially those of the
lower classes, never arrive at thinking so much about themselves and
about their relations to the external world, as is a matter of course
among homosexuals. The =imaginative=, the =dreamy=, is much more
predominant in the homosexual than a crude sense of reality. This
expresses itself particularly in his love, which far less frequently and
exclusively than among the heterosexual takes the form of a gross and
material sensuality. On the contrary, it permits us to recognize the
inward need for tenderness and delicacy, for a peculiar ideal colouring.
Goethe has contrasted this latter with the more sensual heterosexual
love; he speaks of the
“remarkable phenomenon of the love of men for each other. Let it be
admitted that this love is seldom pushed to the highest degree of
sensuality, but rather occupies the intermediate region between
inclination and passion. I am able to say that I have seen with my own
eyes the most beautiful manifestations of this love, such as we have
handed down to us from the days of Greek antiquity; and as an
observant student of human nature I was able to observe the
intellectual and moral elements of this love.”[510]
The ideal conception of Platonic--that is, of homosexual--love was a
non-sensual, assexual love. The psychical element also plays an
important part in modern uranism--a part overlooked or underestimated,
whereas the sensual side is exaggerated.
Homosexuality as an anthropological phenomenon is diffused throughout
all classes of the population. We find it among workmen just as much as
among aristocrats, princely personalities, and intellectual heroes.
Physicians, lawyers, theologians, philosophers, merchants, artists,
etc., all contribute their contingents to uranism. If the
extraordinarily frequent occurrence of homosexuality in the highest
classes of society, especially in the leaders of the aristocracy, may
possibly be brought into relationship with the processes of
“degeneration,” still, on the other hand, numerous homosexuals are
derived from healthy families, such as have not transmitted hereditary
taint through a long series of ancestors. Recently G. Merzbach[511] has
studied the relationship between homosexuality and the choice of a
profession, and has proved that this choice is usually a consequence of
the natural tendency. Thus we find an especially large number of
homosexuals engaged in the production of ready-made clothing and in
other manufacturing trades; others become music-hall comedians playing
women’s parts, actors, dancers. Actors and singers appearing on the
stage as women are to a large extent original homosexuals.[512] Among
hairdressers and waiters we find also a relatively large number of
urnings.
As regards the =diffusion= of homosexuality, the data obtainable up to
the most recent times have been extremely contradictory. The first exact
information is to be found in the work of a physician, published under
the name of M. Kertbeny,[513] on Ҥ 143 of the Prussian Criminal Code of
April 14, 1851, and its Continuance as § 152 in the Proposal for a
Criminal Code for the North German Bund” (Leipzig, 1869). The author
enumerates in Berlin 10,000 homosexuals among 700,000 inhabitants (equal
to 1·425 %). A patient of von Krafft-Ebing, living in a town of 13,000
inhabitants, was acquainted with 14 urnings; and in another town of
60,000 he knew of at least 80. Many other equally uncertain estimates
are recorded by Magnus Hirschfeld. They vary between 2 % and
0·1 %--vary, that is to say, within very wide limits. In view,
therefore, of the importance of the exact determination of the number of
homosexuals, which I myself had earlier declared to be desirable, we owe
great thanks to Magnus Hirschfeld for having made an attempt[514] to
obtain some exact data regarding this matter. He deduces from a
compilation of thirty test investigations (reports regarding homosexuals
in various classes of the population), and by means of an inquiry made
with sealed letters, that the proportion of male homosexuals to the
population =is about= 1·5 %. That is a very much =greater= percentage
than has hitherto been assumed to exist. Formerly I doubted the accuracy
of this figure, but since numerous respected, honourable, well-behaved
persons, of whom I had not suspected it, have assured me that they have
been homosexual since childhood, I have no longer any doubt regarding
the approximate accuracy of Hirschfeld’s statistics. The enquiry made by
Dr. von Römer in Amsterdam gave similar results, for he found the
proportion of homosexuals to be 1·9 %. A third enquiry made by
Hirschfeld among the metal-workers of Berlin gave a proportion of 1·1 %.
=Normal heterosexual= love was reported in about 94 to 96 % of the three
inquiries.
“An imposing recognition of the love of man for woman, a powerful
manifestation of the provision for the preservation of the species,
and a contradiction to the fear that the uranian element in the
population could ever seriously impair the well-being of the great
majority” (Hirschfeld).
As “=bisexual=”--that is, as exhibiting tendencies towards both
sexes--the average of the three enquiries reported 3·9 %, of whom,
however, 0·8 % were mainly homosexual.
The total number of the purely and mainly homosexual was thus 2·2 %.
Hence, according to the results of the last census of 1900, in the total
population of the German Empire, numbering 56,367,178, there would be
about 1,200,000 =homosexuals=; whilst of the population of Berlin,
numbering 2,500,000, 56,000 would be homosexual.
In the interest of the scientific and social study of homosexuality, it
is urgently necessary that these statistical investigations should be
pursued, for if it should appear that the above estimates really apply
to the whole Empire--which I do not feel justified in assuming without
further evidence, since it is naturally possible that Berlin might
contain a relatively greater number of homosexuals--uranism would, in
fact, have a greater social importance than it has hitherto been assumed
to possess. In any case, the number of urnings is large enough to make
them appear a remarkable anthropological variety of our race.
The truth of this assertion is supported by the fact of the ubiquitous
diffusion of uranism in time and space. In addition to homosexuality as
a popular custom, genuine homosexuality also played a part in antiquity;
and F. Karsch[515] has proved in an admirable book its occurrence among
all savage races, although unquestionably numerous cases of non-genuine
homosexuality must have been included. That homosexuality is in no
way a sign of “degeneration” is proved also by the fact that it is
more widely diffused among the still thoroughly vigorous Germans and
Anglo-Saxons than it is among the Latin peoples. It is especially
frequent in the German Ostsee provinces. It existed among the ancient
Scandinavians.[516] Recently F. Karsch has announced the publication of
ethnological researches on homosexuality, the first volume of which
has already been issued, under the title “Homosexual Life among
the Inhabitants of Eastern Asia: the Chinese, the Japanese, and
the Koreans”[517] (Munich, 1906). In the preface he states expressly
that he treats not only of original homosexuality, but also of
artificially produced or acquired homosexuality--that which I call
“pseudo-homosexuality.”
My earlier view, that true homosexuality is rare among the =Jews=, I
find it necessary to revise, for recently I have made the acquaintance
of numerous Jewish homosexuals.
For the =earlier history and literature of homosexuality= the most
important, and, in fact, nearly exhaustive, sources are the article
“Pæderasty,” by Meier, in Ersch and Gruber’s “General Encyclopædia,”
section iii., part 9, pp. 149-189 (Leipzig, 1837); Rosenbaum’s “History
of Syphilis in Antiquity,” pp. 119-227[518] (Halle, 1893); and, finally,
the writings of the earliest German student of homosexuality, containing
numerous interesting data, the Hanoverian official Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs,[519] who, under the pseudonym “Numa Numantius,” published
numerous works devoted to the emancipation of homosexuals, and to the
proof of the congenital nature of homosexuality. The general title of
these works is “Anthropological Studies on the Sexual Love of Man for
Man.” They were published under various peculiar separate titles, such
as: “Vindex” (Leipzig, 1864); “Inclusa” (Leipzig, 1864); “Vindicta”
(Leipzig, 1865); “Formatrix” (Leipzig, 1865); “Ara Spei” (Leipzig,
1865); “Gladius Furens” (Kassel, 1868); “Memnon” (Schleiz, 1868);
“Incubus” (Leipzig, 1869); “Argonauticus” (Leipzig, 1869); “Araxes”
(Schleiz, 1870); “Uranus” (Leipzig, 1870); “Kritische Pfeile”
(Stuttgart, 1879). In addition, Ulrichs, whose lifetime extended from
1825 to 1895, published uranian poetry under the title of “Auf Bienchens
Flügeln” (“On the Wings of the Bee”); Leipzig, 1875. These writings,
most of which are very rare in their original editions (although many
were reprinted in the year 1898), contained a number of new points of
view for the consideration of homosexuality, which have been recognized
as sound by recent investigators.
Important contributions to the knowledge of homosexuality are afforded
us by the studies of the life and works of celebrated and intellectually
distinguished urnings. As unquestionably homosexual we may mention the
poet Platen,[520] Michael Angelo,[521] Heinrich Hössli,[522] Heinrich
Bulthaupt,[523] Johannes von Müller (the historian),[524] King Henry
III. of France,[525] the musician Franz von Holstein,[526] Peter
Tschaikowsky,[527] the authors Count Emmerich von Stadion and Emil Mario
Vacano,[528] Duke August von Gotha,[529] George Eekhoud,[530] and the
Belgian sculptor Jérôme Duquesnoy (1602-1654).[531] The following
celebrated persons have also been regarded as urnings, but, as it
appears to me, on insufficient proofs: Frederick the Great; J. J.
Winkelmann, who at most was bisexual, since we know of passionate
letters written by him to a woman; and Alexander von Sternberg,[532] of
whom the same is true; the reformers Beza[533] and Calvin,[534] who have
unquestionably been wrongfully accused; and finally Byron and
Grillparzer,[535] without troubling to enumerate hypotheses utterly
without foundation. It is unquestionably a fact that a large number of
intellectually prominent men were genuine homosexuals, and that their
abnormal congenital tendencies did not prevent their doing important
work in other spheres of activity. But this happened =notwithstanding=,
and =not=, as many talented apologists wish to prove, =because of= their
uranism.
When we pass to consider the =activity= of homosexual love, we find that
homosexuals may, and actually do, love either other homosexual or
heterosexual individuals. According to the account given by Meisner
(“Uranism,” pp. 19, 20), the amatory ideal of most homosexual men is a
heterosexual man, and intercourse between two urnings is, properly
speaking, only a matter of necessity. But by several homosexuals with
whom I discussed the matter this view was declared to be erroneous; in
the majority of cases the attraction between two homosexuals plays the
principal rôle. Ulrichs endeavoured to provide a theoretical
justification for the sexual relationship between two homosexuals, and
maintained (_cf._, for example, “Inclusa,” pp. 64, 65) that Nature
destined the heterosexual, or “dioning,” as he calls them, by no means
for woman alone, but also for the urning, for the “fulfilment of the
sexual purposes of Nature, not directed towards reproduction.” According
to Hirschfeld (“Urnings,” pp. 22, 23), it is unquestionable that, whilst
many homosexuals greatly prefer to associate with those who also feel in
a uranian manner, and whilst to many also it is a matter of indifference
whether or not those with whom they have sexual relations are themselves
endowed with contrary sexuality, quite a number of urnings feel
attracted =exclusively= to normal, sexually powerful natures. As a rule,
it is not difficult for homosexuals to gratify their inclinations in
intercourse with heterosexual individuals. A middle-aged urning informed
me that young heterosexual men =almost always= acceded in this matter
to the expressed wish of homosexuals--in the first place from simple
curiosity, and in the second place by no means rarely from sexual
excitement. Indeed, according to this authority, effeminate homosexual
men often produce in powerfully sensual heterosexual men the impression
of femininity, and are seduced by the latter to mutual masturbation,
especially in a state of alcoholic intoxication. Not infrequently does
it happen--a striking example having come to my knowledge--that a young
heterosexual has a love intimacy with a girl, and yet occasionally, when
he is for any reason unable to have sexual intercourse with her, he
=very willingly= transfers his affections to a homosexual man. Male
prostitutes are also, to a large extent, heterosexual men who give
themselves to homosexuals for pecuniary reward. Occasionally, moreover,
heterosexual men mistake very effeminate urnings going about in women’s
clothing for genuine women, and have intercourse with them in this
belief--a belief which these latter are clever enough to keep up until
the last possible moment.
Passing now to the consideration of the special circumstances of sexual
attraction, we find that the true love of boys,[536] or rather the love
of children (=pædophilia=), is rare in homosexuals. The age chiefly
preferred is that between seventeen and twenty-five years, alike by
mature homosexual men and by old men. On the other hand, it =is by no
means an exceptional phenomenon= for youths, or even mature men, to feel
attracted exclusively by elderly men (the so-called “=gerontophilia=”).
There exists also a heterosexual “gerontophilia”--that is to say,
abnormal love exhibited by young men for old women, or by young women
for old men. Thus Féré reports (“Note sur une Anomalie de l’Instinct
Sexuel: Gerontophilie,” published in the _Journal de Neurologie_, 1905)
the case of a man twenty-seven years of age who was sexually attracted
only by white-haired, elderly women. He referred this to an impression
received in very early youth. When four years old he slept in the same
bed with an elderly lady, a family friend, who was visiting the house,
and he then for the first time experienced sexual excitement. He had a
dislike to young girls and young married women. A white-haired elderly
woman whom he loved dyed her hair light brown, whereupon he ceased to
care for her. Further, effeminate urnings prefer virile homosexuals;
whereas many of these latter have a great dislike to effeminates and to
men in women’s clothing--to those male “women” who adopt by preference
feminine nicknames, such as Louisa instead of Louis, Georgina instead of
George, and who speak to one another as “sister,” just as the Roman
Emperor Heliogabalus wished to be addressed as “mistress” instead of
“lord.” Many urnings love beardless men; others love men with a
moustache or a full beard; many homosexuals are fascinated by
bright-coloured cloth, just as women are. Moreover, every possible
individual detail may here have an attractive force, just as is the case
with heterosexual love (the hair, the stature, the gait, the eyes, the
intelligence, and the character).
Ideal love and the gratification of the grossest sensuality are also the
two poles between which the =amatory manifestations= of male homosexuals
oscillate. Many confine themselves to simple contacts, caresses, kisses
and embraces. Most frequently sexual gratification is obtained by mutual
masturbation. The idea that the non-homosexual especially associates
with the word “pæderasty” is “pædication”[537]--that is, _immissio
membri in anum_. This sexual act is, however, far less frequent than it
is commonly assumed to be by heterosexuals. According to Magnus
Hirschfeld, it occurs only in 8 %, according to G. Merzbach only in 6 %,
of all cases of intercourse between male homosexuals. In an essay on
pædication which I possess, written by a homosexual, it is represented
as much commoner, and as “the most natural and least harmful means of
gratification.” According to a verbal communication made to me, the
author of this essay knew of one hundred cases of pædication in which no
harm had resulted. Frequently _coitus inter femora_ takes the place of
pædication; still more frequently “fellation,” or _coitus in os_, and
the widely diffused “tongue kiss.”[538] Other perverse manifestations of
the homosexual impulse also occur, such as anilinctus, fetichism,
masochism, sadism, exhibitionism, etc., just as they occur in
heterosexual individuals.
With regard to the relations of true homosexuals to women, generally
speaking they =loathe sexual intercourse= with woman, but they do not
dislike woman herself. Women, on the contrary, are greatly liked by most
homosexuals; effeminate urnings more especially gladly seek their
society, in order to gossip with them about all kinds of feminine
belongings. =Marriages= are often contracted by homosexuals who are
really ignorant as to their own condition, or who hope to conceal it
from the world, or simply for pecuniary considerations. They result most
unhappily if the wife has need of love, and understands the real nature
of the case; or, again, if she becomes jealous of her husband’s male
lovers; but when the wife is frigid, they may turn out quite happily.
They are, however, always very unnatural. Hirschfeld[539] has thoroughly
discussed the question of the marriage of homosexuals, and has also
alluded to the occasional marriages between homosexual men and
homosexual women. The fact proved by him that among homosexuals the
impulse towards the preservation of the species is almost entirely
wanting--not more than 3 % have the wish to possess children--shows how
little fitted they are for the purposes of marriage.
The above-described sexual relationships may be illustrated by a few
original reports taken from the autobiographies of homosexuals. For
example, a homosexual man, twenty-seven years of age, writes:
“When I was young, from four to six years of age, I loved to look at
the male generative organs, without knowing why they attracted me. I
liked to look at sculpture and pictures representing male nudity. I
detest woman’s work and the fashions of the day: a simple costume
suffices for me. I learned the ‘great secret of the world’ when I was
twelve years old, but woman had no interest for me, and I was always
asking little boys of from ten to fourteen years of age to show me
their private parts. I commenced to have carnal intercourse with boys
(aged eighteen to twenty-four) when I was myself twenty-four. Only
_coitus inter femora_, face to face, never from behind. I always
assume the active rôle. A young man from eighteen to twenty-four years
of age is to me like a woman. A woman is to me a thing (!), not so a
man. Perhaps it is original, odd for our time; but what is to be done?
Woman is a machine for producing children, and nothing more. I am not
married, and never shall marry.”
Another homosexual writes:
“I was about five years old when, walking with a nursemaid in the
pleasure gardens, I saw a man masturbating. Although I did not know
what he was doing, the picture busied my imagination for many years.
In my dreams, up to the age of fourteen years, the thought of living
together with a companion of the same age as myself played the
principal part. At the age of thirteen I fell in love with a
schoolfellow, who was, however, but little inclined towards me. What
perhaps especially interested me in him was that he brought sexual
enlightenment to our class. Through moving to another town I lost
sight of him. Although at that time I knew nothing of the real sexual
life, still I sought for objects which excited my sensuality.
“An unknown man of about thirty-five years of age seduced me, and
practised pæderasty with me on the first occasion that he met me. I
felt that there was something altogether wrong about this practice,
but was too weak to withdraw myself from his influence. After about
three months he disappeared. Now also I knew what masturbation was,
for in the school this practice was common.
“At the age of eighteen I left the school, and as in my comrades the
impulse towards women now showed itself, I, for my part, felt all the
more how everything directed me towards man. I often endeavoured, in
obedience to the urging of my friends, to form relationships with
women of the half-world, but this always filled me with the greatest
horror and repugnance. To me it is a dreadful feeling when I notice
that a woman is interested in me. All the more, on the other hand, did
the male sex interest me. When I love a man I do not think (only) of
sexual union, but I try to read in him what I am myself prepared to
give: a sole interest, faithfulness, unselfish surrender. If I love a
man, anyone else is nothing to me.
“Every man of standing of twenty to forty years of age is interesting
to me--every one who is not positively repulsive--but most of all
anyone who possesses a distinguished psyche. In isolated cases
sympathy has also led me to love.
“The kiss is of the highest importance to me, and precisely because I
regard love as created only for a holy purpose, so that human beings
may be mutually ennobled and morally advanced by this passion, it has
always been repulsive to me to observe how men flirt with one another,
just as is the case with heterosexuals. For this reason I am
disinclined to visit places of general resort--such as, for example,
the Casino of Dresden, where all kinds of people come together. I have
met hardly any other urning who shares my sentiments in this respect.”
A homosexual physician, thirty-two years of age, gives the following
account of his sexuality:
“I cannot tell you at what age sexual inclinations first appeared in
me. My sexual impulse is directed towards males. Before and during the
time of puberty the impulse was quite indeterminate. I believe that at
this time I even cherished the idea of some day carrying out
intercourse with a girl. But this was not love; it was a purely
physical desire. The spiritual side of the impulse was at this time
completely wanting. The sexual impulse now extends only towards young
men. I have hitherto had sexual intercourse neither with males nor
with females, but I believe that I should be competent for the normal
sexual act. This act, however, would give me no pleasure; it would be
nothing more than masturbation. I feel complete indifference towards
the female sex, but I do not feel hatred or disgust. Sexual
dreams[540] relate always to persons of the same sex. On the stage,
in the circus, it is always the men who interest me more than the
women. In addition, I admire celebrated actresses and female singers,
but my interest in them is purely artistic. From this standpoint also
I am fully able to do justice to the beauty of young women, and have
often wished to paint a girl, but this interest is always that of a
painter--the colour of the hair, the complexion, interesting features.
Social intercourse with persons of the other sex is quite
unrestrained. The sense of shame I feel more in regard to women, but
still I have also a strong sense of shame with regard to men. I always
have a great difficulty to overcome when I have to take off my clothes
in the presence of other men, and it is also very difficult to me to
urinate when other men are present.
“My love exists only towards youths from the ages of seventeen to
twenty-four, or, to speak more strictly, towards youths at the time of
puberty. One of these of whom I am fond is sixteen years of age, but
sexually he is completely mature, so that every one imagines him to be
twenty.
“The direction of my sexual impulse has first become perfectly clear
to me since reading the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_. I was
already fully aware of the fact that young men were especially
interesting to me, but had not previously understood that this
interest was of a sexual nature. I had, indeed, heard of
pæderasty--the case of Krupp and others--but I imagined that these
individuals had developed such a tendency in consequence of satiety.
‘You,’ I said to myself, ‘are purer and nobler in sentiment. Pæderasty
is loathsome to you; no human being will ever understand you.’
“Every young man at the age of puberty awakens in me a certain sexual
interest. This is especially the case when they are slender and wiry
in build, not fat, with well-developed, but not excessively powerful,
muscles, with gentle and modest character. Roughness always suffices
to destroy completely the commencement of inclination. Sturdy, plump
youths, and those with an excessive development of fat under the skin,
or with a wide, feminine aspect of the buttocks, leave me
comparatively cold. The youthful forms embodied in Grecian sculpture
are my ideal type. It is indispensable that they should be beardless,
or at most have the merest beginnings of a beard. A youth with a heavy
moustache leaves me cold; he is too masculine for me. Intellectual
culture plays no part in the attraction; modesty and gentleness are
necessary to render an intimate relationship possible. I find no
preference for any particular profession. I have, indeed, pedagogic
inclinations, but these appear to me to play no part in producing
attraction, but come into action only later. One whom one loves is one
in whom one would be glad to produce spiritual perfection. The
attraction depends, in the first place, upon beauty of the body;
beauty of the face is only of secondary importance. Smell has no
influence upon the attraction.”
It will be noted that this writer, now thirty-two years of age, has
hitherto had no experience of sexual intercourse, either heterosexual
or homosexual. This is characteristic. Homosexuals in general, in
contrast to heterosexuals, often proceed =at a comparatively late age=
to actual experience of their sexual impulse in action. He goes on to
describe the first beginnings of his love for a beautiful youth,
eighteen years of age. He writes:
“My eyes watched every movement of the body, which continually
displayed new beauties. I should have loved to fall upon his neck and
kiss him. For sexual intercourse he appeared to me too pure, too
noble; I should rather have lain before him in the dust and prayed to
his beauty. I felt that I should have been a poet in order to be able
to clothe in the right words this delicate and holy sentiment. And I
must shut this all up within myself, must remain outwardly cold. It
was enough to drive me to madness! Have compassion on us, and allow us
at least an embrace, a kiss. That certainly can do no one any harm,
and for me it would be a good action. The distressing tension which
tortures us to death would be for the time relaxed. I always have a
feeling that the process of sexual attraction must be of an electrical
nature. I seem to myself to be charged with electricity, the tension
increasing up to the highest point when the beloved is near me, and a
prolonged contact or a stroking with the hand already suffices to
bring about a certain calming of the nerves. The tension is to some
degree diminished. The various components of sexual enjoyment appear
to be developed in human beings with very different strength. In this
way it is explicable that in one person the odour of the loved one, in
another the changing tones of the voice, in a third the taste of the
kiss (the tongue kiss), is most stimulating. It is, indeed, even
conceivable that there exists a purely mental sexual enjoyment, and
that to some individuals merely to look at the beloved person, or to
read a letter from him, suffices.
“Sexual intercourse had hitherto never been practised, but I can
asseverate that the mode of my desire is rather feminine. It would be
my ideal if the loved one should feel sexual ardour for me; I should
be a willing sacrifice. I should like to possess feminine sexual
organs, in order to appear desirable to the loved one.
“I have battled powerfully against my nature, and have felt very
unhappy. I regard myself as physically and mentally healthy. I have
received at birth a double nature (alas! two souls dwell within my
breast). My body is that of a man, my soul rather that of a woman;
hence the conflict, hence my sexual desires, considered outwardly and
only from the physical point of view, are contrary to nature. Alas! my
soul can be seen by no one.
“Why do I only love a young man? Because he in ideal fashion enlarges
my nature. My sexual sensibility is mainly feminine, and is directed,
therefore, towards the masculine, and more especially towards the
masculine in the time of youth, because the feminine sensibility in my
nature is damped by a small masculine note. The effeminate urning
probably loves the complete man as the best complement of his own
nature. The slightly masculine note of my own sexual perception
demands also in the man whom I love a slight feminine note, such as we
find in the youth. He has, in fact, something feminine in
him--beardlessness, no immoderate strength of the muscular system, a
gentle disposition, receptive emotions--and yet he is masculine and
sexually mature. Sexual maturity is a necessary part of every love.
The young man, therefore, is the ideal conception of my nature. My
love is as great, as holy, and as pure, as heterosexual love; it is
capable of self-sacrifice. Believe me, for a loved one who fully
understood me in every respect, I would gladly go to my death.
“Ah! how painful it is to us when we are regarded as debauchees or as
sick persons!”
I must say that the above account, given to me by a much respected
medical colleague, one whose nature is characterized alike by
intellectual power and ideal sensibility, has made the deepest
impression upon me, and has been an important influence in confirming my
views regarding the nature of original homosexuality. Similar oral
communications have been received by me from other physicians who have
been homosexual from childhood onwards, one a neurologist and the other
an alienist, and I attribute the greatest importance to the account
given by this colleague of mine, who has a =twofold= understanding of
the matter in question--as physician and as homosexual. It is also
important to note that uranian physicians declare the majority of
homosexuals to be physically and mentally healthy, a fact which I myself
had not previously doubted, and that they contest the general validity
of the degeneration theory.
Whilst in the smaller provincial towns and in the country homosexuals
are for the most part thrust back into themselves, compelled to conceal
their nature, or at most able to communicate only with isolated
individuals of like nature with themselves, in the larger towns from
early days the homosexuals have been able to get into touch with one
another. Certain meeting-places--places of rendezvous for urnings
only--have been formed; in certain =streets= and =squares= there have
been formed urning-clubs, boarding-houses, and restaurants, and even
urning-balls, while certain health resorts are to a degree monopolized
by them. Moreover, the individual social groups of the homosexuals form
unions. Thus, for example, Hirschfeld[541] reports the existence of an
evening association consisting exclusively of homosexual princes,
counts, and barons. Such pæderastic meeting-places and unions existed in
the eighteenth century in Paris. From this time until about 1840 certain
dark lateral alleys of the Champs Elysées, the thickets from the Place
de la Concorde to the Allée des Veuves, between the Grand Avenue des
Champs Elysées and the Cour de la Reine, served from the commencement
of twilight for the rendezvous of homosexuals, not simply as a place of
masculine prostitution, but as a meeting-place of urnings in general,
who here in the dark sought and found love. The central point of this
evening activity was the Allée des Veuves (now known as the Avenue
Montaigne), the “Widow’s Alley”--“widow” was at that time the term used
to denote the passive pæderast. This region of the Champs Elysées was to
a certain extent monopolized by the homosexuals. They would not tolerate
here the presence of any heterosexuals; they closed the entrances with
cords, and placed guards at the openings of the alleys, who demanded a
pass-word from every comer. Even the police did not venture into this
dark region.
“Victor Hugo, who in the year 1831 lived in the Rue Jean Goujon in
this neighbourhood, often accompanied his friends who had been
visiting him part of the way home at a late hour of the night. They
walked in groups, talking of literature and art as far as the Place de
la Concorde. There the celebrated poet parted from his guests and
returned alone homewards, composing new verses by the way. He often
noticed individuals who, as he passed the entrance to the Rue des
Veuves, watched him from afar off without speaking to him. He could
not believe that these people were thieves, and asked himself what
could be the cause of their always waiting in this lonely place; but
notwithstanding the frequent occurrence of these scenes, he made no
further inquiry into the matter. But once in the midst of his poetical
reverie he was disturbed by a man who stepped forward from the
darkness of a thicket, and with a polite greeting said to him: ‘Sir,
we beg you not to wait any longer in this place. We know who you are,
and we should not wish that any one of us who does not know you should
cause you any uneasiness.’ ‘What are you doing there, then?’ answered
Victor Hugo. ‘Every evening I see people walking about here, and
disappearing among the trees.’ ‘Don’t concern yourself about it, sir,’
was the brisk answer; ‘we disturb no one and do no one any harm, but
we shall not permit anyone to disturb us or to do us any harm; =we are
here in our own grounds=.’ Victor Hugo understood, bowed, and pursued
his way. As on another evening, walking with his friends, he wished to
pass through another alley running parallel to the Allée des Veuves,
he found that this was closed by a number of chairs, which were
fastened together with cords. ‘There is no thoroughfare,’ called out a
threatening voice; but another, speaking more quietly, added: ‘We beg
Monsieur Victor Hugo on this occasion to pass along the other side of
the Avenue des Champs Elysées.’”[542]
During the Second Empire the Allée des Veuves maintained its former
position as a place of rendezvous for homosexuals. An urnings’ club, the
members of which belonged to the highest classes of society, being
persons of the Imperial Court, senators, great financiers, etc., had
their meeting-place in a beautifully furnished hotel in the Allée des
Veuves, in which soldiers of the Empress’s bodyguard (Dragons de
l’Impératrice) and of the Hundred Guard of the Emperor served, in return
for valuable presents, as the beloved of the various distinguished
urnings, for which function the term “faire l’Impératrice” came into
use. In the hotel there also lived from time to time transient unknown
persons, who were only admitted after showing a kind of medal bearing a
secret inscription. When the police made an examination of the hotel,
they found a number of women’s dresses and similar articles, such as
those which the Empress Eugénie was accustomed to wear on festival
occasions. Numerous letters were also discovered which had been
exchanged by the members of the club and their favourites of the Hundred
Guard or of the Empress’s guard. A report was made to the Emperor of the
results of the examination of this house. When he saw that persons of
the highest position, and bearing most celebrated names, were involved
in the affair, he at once ordered that the matter should be dismissed,
and said to the Procureur-General: “We must spare our people and our
country from such a scandal, which would do no one any good, and would
do a great deal of harm.” In fact, almost no details of this affair
became public.[543] Tardieu gave an account of another urnings’ club of
the Second Empire, where there were concealed closets, on the walls of
which erotic pictures were displayed. The manner in which the urnings
made acquaintance with homosexuals is shown in a police report of July
16, 1864, in which the conduct of a literary homosexual, “un vieux
monsieur fort bien et puissamment riche,” is described in the following
terms:
“He enters the Café Truffaut, sees a young soldier who pleases him. By
the intermediation of the waiter he makes an appointment, and departs
without waiting for an answer. If the soldier agrees, he goes to the
appointed place of meeting, and never goes alone, because Father
C----n (the elderly urning) is well known. As soon as the two have
met, other soldiers make their appearance, beat the old man, and
compel him to give them all the money which he has about him. He does
this willingly, and without ceasing prays for pardon. When he has not
a single sou left, and when he has also given up his watch, he goes
away weeping, and continually repeating the words, ‘What a miserable
man I am!’”
This elderly urning was manifestly also a masochist, and therefore a
very suitable victim of blackmailers, whom we here see at their work. In
the police report to which we have already referred homosexual orgies
are also described, the participants in which assumed women’s names and
practised mutual masturbation and fellation, and also carried out
obscene practices with a bitch. When Oscar Metenier in his book “Vertus
et Vices Allemands” (Paris, 1904) states that Berlin has a monopoly in
the matter of urnings’ balls, which, in his opinion, were not possible
in Paris, he is unquestionably wrong as regards the time of the Second
Empire. In this police report two typical urnings’ balls are mentioned.
One of these took place in a house in the Place de la Madeleine,
belonging to E. D., a man of business, who gave the ball on January 2,
1864. The second urnings’ ball was given by the Vicomte de M. in the
Pavilion Rohan, Rue de Rivoli, on January 16, 1864, at which at least
150 men, many of them in woman’s clothing, took part. In many cases the
appearance was so deceptive that even those who had invited the guests
were not always able to determine the sex with certainty.
It is doubtless true that there is no other town in which there are so
many social unions of homosexuals as there are in Berlin. Hirschfeld
records--in addition to private parties--dinners, suppers, evening
parties, five o’clock teas, picnics, dances, and summer festivals of
homosexuals, which are arranged every winter by urnings, and by female
homosexuals or their friends. Moreover, the male and female homosexuals
meet in certain restaurants, cafés, eating-houses, and public-houses
frequented only by themselves.[544]
Such localities exclusively for the use of urnings exist in Berlin to
the number of eighteen to twenty. There are also social literary unions,
such as the club “Lohengrin,” the antifeministic “Gesellschaft der
Eigenen,” the “Platen-Gemeinschaft,” etc. There are also cabarets
(public-houses) for urnings. Hirschfeld, in his book “Berlin’s Third
Sex,” written in a popular style, but extremely valuable owing to the
clearness of his descriptions, gives an exhaustive account of all these
institutions for urnings, and for further details I may refer my readers
to this interesting work, the authenticity of which I am able to confirm
as the result of my own visits to the above-mentioned places of meeting
for urnings.[545]
In Paris there no longer exist places of entertainment frequented solely
by urnings. In this respect they are replaced by certain Turkish baths,
whose patrons are almost without exception homosexuals--men whose age
varies from about twenty years upwards. In the industrial quarter, in
the neighbourhood of the Place de la République, there existed a few
years ago a Turkish bath, visited almost exclusively by young
homosexuals between the ages of fifteen and twenty years. On the great
boulevard there is a bath of a very expensive character, visited only by
wealthy homosexuals, frequented, among others, by a celebrated French
composer.[546]
A peculiar species of meeting-places for the urnings of Berlin is
represented by the soldiers’ public-houses in the neighbourhood of the
barracks, where soldiers are met and treated by homosexuals, and where
arrangements are made for subsequent meetings. There also exists a
“soldiers’ promenade,” where the soldiers walk up and down and offer
themselves to homosexuals. Athletes also enter freely into relationships
with homosexuals.
Urnings’ balls are to-day especially characteristic of Berlin. Von
Krafft-Ebing has described them in detail, and recently also Hirschfeld
has alluded to them in the above-mentioned work. I myself not long ago
attended such a “men’s ball,” at which from eight hundred to a thousand
homosexuals were present, some in men’s clothing, some in women’s
clothing, some in fancy dress. The homosexuals dressed as women could
have been distinguished from real women only by those in the secret.
More particularly do I recall an elegant sylph, who, on the arm of a
partner, glided across the hall--“glided” is the correct expression.
During the dance his delicate features were leaning on the shoulder of
the man, and he coquetted continually with ardent black eyes. I really
believed this was a woman, but was assured that it was a male
hairdresser. In the case of another urning dressed as a woman the
diagnosis was rendered easier by a well-developed moustache.
The seamy side of the relationships of homosexuals in public life is
constituted by the so-called “=male prostitution=,” which existed even
in ancient times, and in our own day was especially well organized
during the Second Empire, as we learn from the details given by Tardieu.
The ranks of male prostitution are recruited partly from homosexual and
partly from heterosexual men of the lower and more poverty-stricken
classes, who give themselves for payment to well-to-do urnings, and are
practised in all the arts of elaborate coquetry (they use rouge, make a
coquettish display of male charms, etc.). These are the so-called
“aunts.” In all large towns there exists what is called a “Strich”
(promenade), where male prostitutes are accustomed to walk, in order to
attract their clients. In Berlin the principal promenades are the
Friedrichstrasse, the Passage,[547] and some of the walks in the
Tiergarten. Like female prostitution, so also male prostitution has its
“=houses of accommodation=”; and in France there even existed, and still
exist, typical “=male brothels=.” From 1820 to 1826 such a brothel was
to be found in the Rue du Doyenne in Paris. In the neighbourhood of the
Louvre the male inmates of this establishment were even subjected to
regular medical examination, in order to protect their clients from
venereal infection. With the fall of twilight the visitors made their
appearance, and were received by young effeminates.[548] Still worse was
another form of male prostitution, at the time of the Restoration, and
in the earlier years of the reign of Louis Philippe--namely, the
so-called _grande montre des culs_ in the Rue des Marais, where a number
of male prostitutes displayed and offered their charms to the
homosexuals visiting the place. A detailed account of the way in which
this was done cannot be given, but is sufficiently indicated by what has
already been said.[549]
Male brothels exist even at the present day in Paris. Thus, at the end
of the year 1905 in the Rue St. Martin there was a small hotel whose
homosexual proprietor not only let rooms to urnings for a brief stay,
but also kept on the premises five or six young men between the ages of
fifteen and twenty-two years, whose services were always available for
homosexuals for payment. Besides this hotel there existed also in the
year 1905 a kind of male brothel in the house of an urning, where at
midday half a dozen young fellows were to be found, or could be fetched
at brief notice, for the choice of homosexual visitors, for whose use a
room was available at so many francs per hour.[550]
A phenomenon intimately related with male prostitution is =blackmail=,
or “=chantage=.” Tardieu (_op. cit._, pp. 128-130) describes these
relationships in vivid colours, and lays stress on the close
relationship between male prostitution and criminality. Blackmail has
become to-day a kind of special profession,[551] which is not directed
solely against homosexuals, but also against heterosexuals, and the
punishment of which cannot be too severe. Frequently these individuals,
whose activity is a danger to the community at large, persecute their
victims for many years in succession. Tardieu reports the case of a
celebrated literary man, “whose purse the blackmailers regarded as their
own.” =For more than twenty years in succession= he was plucked by
successive generations of blackmailers, who considered him an assured
source of income. He was “passed on from one to another.” As a rule,
blackmailers wait for their victims in public lavatories; they suddenly
assert that they have been indecently assaulted, and demand hush-money,
which is commonly given to them, even by heterosexuals. A case of the
last-mentioned kind recently occurred in Berlin, when a quite innocent
young merchant was being plundered in this way, and his wife, by a
courageous denunciation of the shameless blackmailer, freed him from
this tyranny. It is, however, unquestionable that blackmail often ensues
upon real advances on the part of homosexuals, and after the performance
of sexual acts; and there is no doubt that in Germany the existence of §
175 of the Criminal Code has been most advantageous to professional
blackmailers, has led to numerous scandals (alike disagreeable and
dangerous to the community), and has given rise to numerous suicides.
This celebrated § 175 runs as follows:
“Unnatural vice between two persons of the male sex, or between a man
and an animal, is punishable with imprisonment; it can also be
punished with loss of civil rights.”
This paragraph of the Imperial Criminal Code is identical with § 143 of
the former Prussian Criminal Code. Similar ordinances,[552] in some
cases even more severe, are found in the laws of Austria-Hungary,
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Bulgaria, the State of New York, most
of the cantons of Switzerland, and more especially in Great Britain,
where the most severe punishments are inflicted, and, at any rate
logically, are inflicted also on women who practise homosexual
intercourse. On the other hand, punishment for homosexual intercourse
has been completely =abolished= in France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal,
Turkey, Italy, Spain, the Swiss Cantons of Genf, Wallis, Waadt and
Tessin, the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, the Principality of Monaco, and in
Mexico.
§ 143 of the Prussian Criminal Code was adopted as the basis of § 175 of
the German Criminal Code, in view of “the consciousness of right of the
people,” who “condemn such practices not only as vicious, but also as
criminal.” But this consciousness of right is based upon defective
knowledge, and upon an erroneous view of homosexuality. As soon as we
recognize that in homosexuality we have to do with a primary natural
disposition, and as soon as this view has permeated wide circles of the
population, the old consciousness of right will be replaced by a =new=
one, =which will demand the repeal of a criminal law=, by which =a
natural phenomenon= is regarded as a vice and a crime, and is esteemed
as infamous. My studies in recent years having convinced me that in
homosexuality we have to do with a typical biological phenomenon, I feel
that I must unhesitatingly approve of the efforts of the =Scientific and
Humanitarian Committee=, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, which aims at
making the people understand the nature of homosexuality, and demands
the repeal of § 175 of the German Criminal Code. All the more is this
reform demanded because real homosexual =crimes= can be very readily
dealt with by means of the sections of the Criminal Code relating to
sexual delinquencies in general.
Apart from this general codification of the injustice of § 175, and
apart from the above-mentioned tragical consequences of the existence of
this section, it is also necessary to point out that the expressions
used therein are absurd and illogical.
1. Unnatural vice between men is punished, whereas that between women is
left impune. But why should this latter be the case, if we adopt the
standpoint (which we have, indeed, seen to be untenable) that homosexual
intercourse is in itself vicious and criminal--why should homosexual
intercourse between women be less vicious and criminal than homosexual
intercourse between men?
2. The idea “unnatural vice” is equally absurd and inconsequent, and
makes justice in respect of these offences absolutely impossible. By
this term is understood not merely pædication (_immissio membri in
anum_), but also any kind of intercourse between men “resembling sexual
intercourse”--that is, _coitus in os_, _coitus inter femora_, even
simple _frictio membri_--whilst mutual masturbation and other perverse
practices are not punishable.
3. § 175 does not safeguard any citizen,[553] for the sexual freedom of
the individual is not disturbed in any way by the intercourse between
two adult men who fully understand what they are doing, nor is the
general moral sense injured in any way if the act is not seen by any
third person. In this latter respect, however, § 183 of the Criminal
Code, which punishes annoyance to the public by improper conduct,
already affords sufficient protection.
4. If § 175 is maintained with especial reference to the existence of
professional male unchastity, von Liszt has rightly replied to this
contention that the latter form of unchastity can be rendered harmless
by a modified reading of § 361_b_ of the Criminal Code, just as the
protection of virtue can be safeguarded by other sections of the Code.
5. The effectiveness of § 175 is extremely limited. According to
Hirschfeld (“Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages,” vol. vi., p. 175),
no more than 0·007 % of the existing punishable homosexual practices of
the present day are detected and punished. Therefore a few =isolated=
individuals are punished for an offence which thousands of others commit
with impunity.
6. When § 175 of the Criminal Code was drawn up, the law-givers knew
absolutely nothing about the homosexual impulse as an essential outcome
of the personality; they merely wished to punish heterosexuals who
committed homosexual practices, not to punish genuine homosexuals (_cf._
Numa Prætorius, “The Question of the Responsibility of Homosexuals,”
published in the _Monthly Review of Criminal Psychology_, edited by G.
Aschaffenburg, 1906, p. 561).
The worst and most tragic consequence of § 175 is the permanent infamy
and social contempt suffered by persons who, =without any blame to
themselves=, have a mode of sexual perception diverging from that of the
great majority. The state itself commits a crime when it enrols in the
category of vice and crime a biological phenomenon which has recently
been recognized as such even by the Evangelical and Catholic
Churches,[554] and has been freed by these Churches from the stigma of
immorality. The continuance of this great injustice is the frequent
cause of the =suicide= of homosexuals, especially of such as are men of
exceptional spiritual and moral cultivation, and =frequently before they
have actually indulged in their homosexual impulse=, the best proof that
we have to do, not with vicious, but with unhappy men, who are unable to
bear the misery of being socially despised and unjustly misunderstood by
their associates. How many suicides from homosexual grounds occur it is
impossible to establish exactly. We can only suspect the cause from
certain attendant circumstances. A highly respected literary man writes
to me regarding this question of the suicide of homosexuals: “When a
fine young fellow, suffering frightfully as a result of his inherited
disposition, shoots himself, his family will rather suggest that the
cause was a chancre (which he has never had), than they will admit his
homosexuality.” Several such cases have come under his notice. “A better
cause,” he suggests, “for the suicide would have been unhappy love, for
that is the actual truth.” Zola,[555] speaking of the letters of a
homosexual, says that they exhibited “the most heart-breaking cry of
human agony” that he had ever known.
“He earnestly resisted yielding to such shameful, lustful love, and he
longed to know whence came this contempt of all men, whence this
continuous readiness of the law-courts to crush him down, when in his
flesh and blood were inborn a disgust towards woman, whilst he had
brought into the world with him a true feeling of love towards man.
Never had one possessed by a demon, never had a poor human body given
up to and tortured by the unknown powers of the sexual impulse, so
painfully expressed his misery. Have we not here a truly physiological
case definitely displayed before our eyes--an inversion, an error, on
the part of Nature? Nothing, in my opinion, is more tragical, and
nothing demands more urgently investigation and a means of cure, if
such can possibly be found.”
The =complete enlightenment= of the people would give rise to a
spontaneous change in their conception of homosexuality, to which,
moreover, the greater number of homosexuals belonging to the better
classes could contribute, if they would freely and openly admit their
tendencies. The secrecy and hypocrisy of many urnings is partly
responsible for the hitherto prevailing false views on homosexuality. We
cannot spare them this reproach.
Finally, § 175 is not merely an injustice to homosexuals, but it is also
a danger to heterosexuals, in consequence of the =blackmail= which is so
intimately associated with the existence of this section. It is not
enough that these criminals of the most debased kind, who to a small
extent only are recruited from the ranks of male prostitutes, reduce
numerous unhappy urnings to social and financial ruin, and drive many
others to suicide or to crime, of which the remarkable case of a County
Court Judge a few years ago afforded a typical example. These wretches
also dare with ever-greater success to make use of § 175 for the purpose
of blackmailing =completely normal heterosexuals=. In fact, they often
succeed better with these latter than they do with homosexuals, because
to the normal man the idea of being regarded as homosexual is so
repulsive.
A remedy for all these evils--for the suicides as well as for the
blackmailing--can only be found in the =enlightenment= of the whole
people--the first and most important thing to do--and in the
=unconditional repeal= of § 175 of the Criminal Code.
It has been a most useful service on the part of the Scientific and
Humanitarian Committee--a service the value of which has not yet been
sufficiently recognized--that it has endeavoured, above all, to bring
about the enlightenment of the people by means of popular writings,[556]
and of the learned by means of scientific publications, such as the most
successful _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_ (8 volumes,
1899-1906), and by means of lectures, by the convocation of public
meetings, by petitions, etc.
The petition of the committee to the legislative bodies of the German
Empire, asking for the repeal of § 175 of the Criminal Code, was signed
by 5,000 persons belonging to the circles of men of science, judges,
physicians, priests, schoolmasters, authors, and artists, among whom
were some of the most celebrated names of cultured Germany. I cite here
a few only: Ferdinand Avenarius, Hans von Basedow, Woldemar von
Biedermann, H. Bulthaupt, Professor Crédé, Albert Eulenburg, Theodor
Gaedertz, Rudolf von Gottschall, Franz Görres, O. E. Hartleben, Gerhart
Hauptmann, S. Jadassohn, Hermann Kaulbach, R. von Krafft-Ebing, Joseph
Kürschner, H. Kurella, Walter Leistikow, Leppmann, Max Liebermann, G.
von Liebig, Detlev von Lilieneron, Franz von Liszt, Berthold Litzmann,
Ph. Lotmar, John Henry Mackay, Mendel, Friedrich Moritz, P. Näcke, Paul
Natorp, Albert Neisser, Max Nordau, A. von Oechelhäuser, A. von
Oppenheim, J. Pagel, Pelman, R. Penzig, Placzek, Felix Poppenberg,
Rainer Maria Rilke, O. Rosenbach, Wilhelm Roux, Max Rubner, Benno
Rüttenauer, Johannes Schlaf, Arthur Schnitzler, A. von Schrenck-Notzing,
Alwin Schulz, Moritz Schwalb, Georg Schweinfurth, Adolf von Sonnenthal,
K. von Tepper-Laski, H. Unverricht, Max Verworn, A. Vierkandt, Richard
Voss, Hans Wachenhusen, Felix Weingartner, Adolf Wilbrandt, Ernst von
Wildenbruch, F. von Winkel, E. von Wolzogen, Ernst Ziegler, Theobald
Ziegler, Theophil Zolling.
In addition, we might mention that in the year 1904 not less than 2,800
German physicians, as well as 750 head masters and masters of higher
schools, signed the petition to the Reichstag for the repeal of § 175.
Owing to certain scandals by which the highest circles were
sympathetically affected--I need recall only the cases of Hohenau,
Krupp, Israel, von Schenk, etc.--the conviction has been forced upon
members of the most influential political circles that the repeal of the
paragraphs of the Criminal Code relating to urnings is an unconditional
necessity. We may, therefore, expect that the repeal will be effected
within the next few years.
* * * * *
Compared with true original homosexuality in men, the same condition in
women is of considerably less importance, because in women homosexuality
is undoubtedly =much less common= than it is in men. In comparison with
the number of urnings, the number of =female homosexuals=--of
“=urnindes=,” “=Lesbian lovers=,” or “=tribades=”--is relatively small;
whereas in many women, even at a comparatively advanced age, the
so-called “pseudo-homosexuality” (see the next chapter) is much more
frequently met with than it is in men. In the case of heterosexual men
it is usually impossible to induce a homosexual mode of perception or to
give rise to any kind of taste for homosexual activity; whereas in
heterosexual women the corresponding change certainly occurs much more
easily. Tendernesses and caresses play, indeed, among normal
heterosexual women a rôle which makes it easier for us to understand how
readily in woman pseudo-homosexual tendencies may arise. =Still, it is
impossible to doubt the existence also of original homosexuality in
women.= These are the cases in which, just as in urnings, the homosexual
impulse appears in very early childhood, often long before puberty, in
which case also the girl is distinguished from her heterosexual comrades
in external appearance, exhibiting indications of a masculine build of
body (slight development of the breasts, narrowness of the pelvis,
development of a moustache, a deep voice, etc.); but such indications
may be entirely absent, and the girl may not be distinguished from
others in any respect beyond the perverse direction of the sexual
impulse. These true tribades are much rarer than the false tribades, the
pseudo-Lesbian lovers. For example, when visiting an urnings’ ball we
may be quite sure that 99 % of the male homosexuals assembled there are
true homosexuals; but at a tribades’ ball--such, also, are given in
Berlin--certainly a much smaller percentage are “genuine”; the bulk of
the women present are pseudo-homosexuals. I here append the interesting
reminiscences of a genuine urninde, by which this relationship between
original homosexuality and pseudo-homosexuality in women is very clearly
shown:
THOUGHTS OF A LONELY WOMAN!
“Born in the country, the daughter of a merchant, I grew up as a very
dreamy being, with an unceasing yearning after something unknown,
beautiful, great--with a longing to become a singer or an artist. At
the age of twelve I was already completely ‘woman,’ very luxuriantly
developed, although still half a child, =filled always with an
uncontrollable longing for a beloved feminine being who should kiss me
and caress me=, whom I was to regard with love and with a sentiment of
self-sacrifice. At the age of thirteen I came to live with relatives
in a provincial town, where for a year I attended a young ladies’
school. Of my dreams no single one could be fulfilled. My mother, who
was widowed when I was only three years old, had a severe economical
struggle, being encumbered with six small children. After my elder
brothers and sisters were married, I myself, being then twenty-four
years of age, had to go out into the world to seek my own living,
ignorant of the world and its dangers, delivered up to commonness and
intrigue. I got a position in the house of a widow, filling the post
of ‘companion.’ My ‘principal,’ a woman sixty years of age, was at
first unsympathetic to me, but she treated me in a loving and motherly
manner, which pleased me, for I was of a pliant and receptive
disposition. Gradually I became her confidante. Every evening I had to
get into bed with her (I slept close by); I must touch her with my
hands. I did not then really understand why I had to stroke her legs;
but one evening this sexagenarian guided my hand into a forbidden
place. Now it became clear to me that this woman still had erotic
perceptions. I felt how she quivered under my touch, pressed me firmly
to herself, etc.; but I, for my part, felt nothing. It might have
been different had she been a friend of my own age. I had not at that
time any idea that ‘psychically’ I was different from other girls. I
had an unceasing yearning for love, not directly sensual love, but
spiritual love, out of which sensual love might later develop. Among
the inmates of our house was a young merchant, a fine-looking man, who
besieged me with his love, and, after long hesitation, I at length one
day consented to give him the best that woman has to give. He took
possession of my body with brutal voluptuousness. I was under the
delusion that he would make me his wife. I had in the sexual act =no
perception at all=, and was disillusioned. One day my seducer told me
that he was going to be married, asking me to return him the ring he
had given me, and offering me money. Moved to the inmost soul, without
any human being to give me counsel or help (from a feeling of shame I
had not disclosed the matter to my principal), I threw the ring at
him, resigned my position, and made myself independent. I will only
say in a few words how I had to struggle, to fight for my existence,
how I was lied to and deceived by rascally men. When I came to Berlin
I heard and read of homosexual love, but could not find what I dreamed
of--namely, spiritual love, out of which sensual love might spring. I
learned to know homosexual women, but they exhibited to me such
elemental passion, brutality, sensuality, that, notwithstanding all my
yearning for ‘homosexual’ love, I remained unresponsive. Only in
kissing the lips of a woman sympathetic to me I have experienced an
agreeable sensation, but that sweet state which I was able to induce
in others by contact with them was =in me= not forthcoming. I began to
wonder whether Nature had denied me this sensation, though I was
myself also a normally developed woman. For years I lived
‘ascetically,’ since I regarded myself as a ‘psychological’ problem--I
avoided every kind of intercourse--I only had a desire for tenderness
and caresses. I often loved handsome women, feeling the wish to kiss
them and to touch them, and I had learned to know women of the kind
who prostitute themselves to other women for money. These were hateful
to me, and never could I form a friendship with such, because they
knew only common brutal sensuality, towards which I was not
responsive.
“Some years ago I suffered from a severe abdominal and nervous
disorder. I have already passed my fortieth year. After an illness
lasting two years, I still feel the desire for homosexual love.
Hitherto I have lived unhappily, continually asking myself why Nature
has treated me so cruelly. Is it not possible once at least to enjoy
this perception? A few weeks ago I made the acquaintance of a married
woman, whose husband has been impotent for years, whilst she, on the
other hand, is a very passionate character. Unfortunately, this woman,
although in other respects she is very sympathetic to me, is upon a
comparatively low plane of culture, and, what frightens me more, she
has an intimacy with a female friend who is quite uncultured, but who
resembles her in respect of sexual love, and who night after night
lies with her in bed =beside the husband=, and the two women indulge
their perverse voluptuousness, the friend playing the ‘man’s’ part. I
have seen many strange things in my course through life, but =such a
marriage= is a new experience to me. The man terms himself an artist,
a painter, and allows his wife free play in bisexual love. I believe
that this man himself experiences a titillation of the senses when he
sees the two women together, and also that he makes drawings of
‘acts,’ out of which he makes a profit. In this house I have seen into
a deep abyss, yet other bisexual women visit it. Although I have found
my peace disturbed by these women, although I have been to a certain
extent intoxicated, the conditions are too repulsive to me--since this
woman is sunk into a morass deeper than she herself understands. Only
through me does she begin to understand it. But a longer intercourse
with her is impossible, for she lacks all the qualities that I look
for in a woman whom I could love. In actual fact I envy this creature,
for she is happy, since she experiences to the full those sweet
sensations which Nature denies to me. Are there any more beings
unhappy like myself? Perhaps the acquaintanceship with a woman whose
feelings were similar to my own would be a happiness, if Fate would
only have so much pity upon me as to throw a sorrowful companion in my
way. I hope for it, but I do not believe that it will happen.
“To what sex do I really belong?”
In the love-history of this genuine urninde the ideal element is
especially manifest; likewise the instinctive disinclination to man,
which, remarkably enough, is often more powerfully developed in strongly
feminine characters than in the more masculine tribades, as the
prototype of which latter we may mention the painter Rosa Bonheur.
During childhood Rosa Bonheur felt herself to be a boy, and preferred
the society of boys to that of girls.[557] Throughout her life,
notwithstanding her homosexual love, she felt strong sympathy with men.
Such a double relationship occurs also among urnindes of the first kind.
Even the true urninde, I may say, is =not so extremely homosexual= as is
the true urning. Take, for example, the following account[558] of an
original homosexual, and you will see the difference:
“I have not lost any of the valuable things of life--far otherwise.
Many-sided, many-shadowed intellectual sympathy leads any man of lofty
mind into harmony with me. There emanates unconsciously from my soul a
profound, tender charm. My friends find me necessary to them. I share
their interests. In our relationship there pass between us the most
wonderful shades of sympathetic feeling--what the French so
expressively speak of as _l’amitié amoureuse_. Thus my mode of being
becomes absorbed into that of my friend, a peculiar melody passes to
and fro between us, and a peculiar melody sounds in the stillness of
my own soul. All the fine and delicate sensations which I have
received from my friends become in me transformed into poietic
force--the ecstasies of my spirit assume form and substance. From the
spiritualization of the impulse there springs a stream clear as
crystal, there arise passion and ardour; my exceptional soul lifts me
upwards, above all sorrows and vexations. In this way is a talent
conceived, and amid ecstasy it is born.”
The need for a spiritual contact with men is among homosexual women much
stronger than the corresponding inclination on the part of urnings for
spiritual contact with woman natures. For this reason there is no doubt
that the “=Woman’s Movement=”--that is, in the movement directed towards
the acquirement by women of all the attainments of masculine
culture--homosexual women have played a notable part.[559] Indeed,
according to one author,[560] the “Woman’s Question” is mainly the
question regarding the destiny of virile homosexual women. I find it
necessary to doubt whether, as Hammer maintains,[561] the raging hatred
of men--the converse quality to the anti-feminism of the male
urnings--really proceeds from the uranian group of the Woman’s Movement,
for there exist no literary documents of importance to prove the
suggested connexion. Homosexual women of intellectual weight have also
assured me that among them there does at times exist an enmity to men on
principle, just as, _mutatis mutandis_, misogyny has been developed as a
system both from the heterosexual and from the homosexual side. For the
diffusion of pseudo-homosexuality the Woman’s Movement is of great
importance, as we shall see later.
The individual and social relationships of feminine uranism are nearly
the same as those of male uranism. In both cases there exists an entire
scale, running from pure Platonism to ardent sensuality. One kind of
Platonic tribades are those described by Catulle Mendés in his sketch
“Protectrices.” These are ladies of position who allow themselves the
luxury of a “protégée,” generally a girl employed at the theatre, with
whom during the performances they exchange glances, whose expenses they
pay, with whom they go out driving, without the matter proceeding to
actual sexual relations. In other cases, however, sensual gratification
is the desired goal, which is attained by kisses, embraces, friction of
the genital organs, or cuninilinctus (the so-called “=Sapphism=”). In
this intercourse one party--the “father”--plays the active part, the
other--“the mother”--the passive part. There exist passionate and
intimate relationships of long duration--true “marriages”--among
tribades. Thus, d’Estoc reports (“Paris-Eros,” p. 58) relationships of
this kind which have lasted thirty years. Still, as a general rule,
feminine homosexuals change their relationships more frequently than
male homosexuals. An elderly tribade, whose correspondence lies before
me, had within four years three love relationships. In these
relationships jealousy plays an even greater part than in heterosexual
liaisons. Two sympathetic urnindes who lived together described to me
very vividly the joys and sorrows of the _amor lesbicus_. The cause of
the troubles is always a _tertia_, never a _tertius gaudens_.
Like the urnings, the tribades also have their meeting-places, _jour
fixes_. One such meeting, at which four genuine female homosexuals and
one male homosexual assembled, I had the opportunity of attending. They
have their parties, and even their balls, at which the virile tribades
appear in men’s clothing,[562] and (as also when at home) use male
nicknames. There also exist female prostitutes who devote their services
entirely to urnindes. This tribadistic prostitution is especially
widespread in Paris. Such prostitutes are called _gouines_, or
_gougnottes_, or _chevalières du clair de lune_. Theatrical agents are
said to be especially occupied with tribadistic procurement. There also
exist tribadistic brothels in Paris.[563]
APPENDIX
THEORY OF HOMOSEXUALITY
Original, congenital, enduring homosexuality would appear to be an
exclusively human peculiarity. It is very doubtful whether a similar
condition exists among animals. We recognize among the lower animals
homosexual acts, but no homosexuality.[564] Thus we have no philogenetic
starting-point for the explanation of homosexuality. Moreover,
homosexuality is fundamentally different from the other sexual
perversions, sadism and masochism. These represent quite =extreme= forms
of biological phenomena, an abnormal increase of physiological impulsive
manifestations that occur in the normal heterosexual life, as part of
sexuality in general. But homosexuality is an alteration =in the
direction of the very impulse itself=--a change in the very nature of
sexuality. To put the matter shortly, it is the appearance of a
sexuality =heterogeneous to and not corresponding with the bodily
structure=. To define homosexuality as the appearance of a feminine
sexual psyche in a masculine body, or of a masculine sexual psyche in a
feminine body, does not apply to all cases--for example, it does not
apply to virile urnings or to tribades who remain womanly. The
definition of homosexuality as a sexuality which does not correspond to
the bodily structure embraces both these possibilities.
Whenever homosexuality in men is associated with a marked development of
feminine secondary sexual characters, or in women with a marked
development of masculine secondary sexual characters, the homosexual
sensibility may be said to have to some extent a physical basis, but not
completely so. For the “intermediate stage theory” proposed by
Hirschfeld--the intermixture of feminine and masculine characters--may
apply satisfactorily to “bisexuality,” to indeterminate sexual
sensibility; but it does not apply to the thoroughly one-sided, monistic
sexual sensibility, directed =only= towards members of the same sex, and
often appearing very early, before the days of puberty. Moreover, in
heterosexual male individuals the external appearance may at times
suggest that there is a strong intermixture of feminine characters.
These men, though heterosexual, have a womanly appearance.
The “intermediate stage theory” of Hirschfeld, which von Krafft-Ebing
also appears to have recognized in his last work (“New Studies in the
Subject of Homosexuality”), a theory which explains homosexual phenomena
as dependent upon the existence of transitional stages between the sexes
(“sexual links” of Hirschfeld), and which, moreover, erroneously
includes the typical hermaphrodite states--this interesting theory
explains =a portion only= of original homosexuality. It fails in cases
=in which homosexuality occurs in the absence of any divergence from
type=--for example, in those cases in which male individuals with
thoroughly normal masculine bodies exhibit marked homosexual sensibility
in early childhood, long before puberty. But these are the cases which
offer the greatest possible difficulties to a scientific explanation.
_Hic Rhodus, hic salta!_
Ulrich’s “feminine soul in a masculine body” applies to =effeminate
urnings=, such as he was himself. But is the mode of sensibility of
=virile= homosexuals “effeminate”? Why do we speak of a third sex? Here
lie difficulties which we cannot overcome without further assistance.
How does it come to pass that the central organs in homosexuals do not
correspond to the peripheral sexual organs, although the latter are
formed embryologically long before the former, so that the central
organs should properly be guided in their development by the peripheral
organs? But they are not so guided. That is only explicable in this
way--that the association between the central organs and the peripheral
organs is interrupted by a third influence, and that =this last
influence has a peculiar effect= upon the central organs =altogether
independent of the nature of the reproductive glands=.
I will formulate this new theory of homosexuality in the following
terms:
1. The so-called “undifferentiated stage” of the sexual impulse (Max
Dessoir) may often fail to appear in cases in which the sexual impulse,
either in heterosexuals or homosexuals, is definitely directed before
puberty unmistakably towards the members of one particular sex.
Especially in homosexuals do we often see =before= puberty the clear and
unmistakable direction of the sexual impulse towards members of the
=same= sex.
2. A critical theory of homosexuality must also explain the extreme
cases; above all, it must also explain male homosexuality associated
with complete virility.
3. The sexual organs and the reproductive glands cannot be the
determining cause, because homosexuality makes its appearance in
association with thoroughly typical male reproductive organs; nor can
the brain be the determining cause in cases of true homosexuality, for,
notwithstanding the intentional and unintentional operation of
heterosexual influences on thought and imagination, homosexuality cannot
be eradicated, and continues to develop.
4. Since this homosexuality often makes its appearance as an inclination
(not as the sexual impulse) long =before= puberty, and =before= the
proper activity of the reproductive glands is developed, it appears a
reasonable suggestion that in homosexuality some physiological
manifestation associated with “sexuality,” but not directly associated
with the reproductive glands, undergoes a =change= which results in an
alteration of the direction of the sexual impulse.
6. The most obvious influences to think of in this connexion are
=chemical= influences, changes in the chemistry of sexual tension, which
latter is certainly to a large extent =independent= of the reproductive
glands, since it may persist in eunuchs. But the nature of this sexual
chemistry is still entirely obscure.
Such a way of conceiving the process is thoroughly reasonable and
tenable on scientific grounds, as was shown by E. H. Starling and L.
Krehl[565] in their communication to the Scientific Congress at
Stuttgart in the year 1905, regarding disturbances of chemical
correlation in the organism, especially disturbances of the chemical
influences proceeding from the reproductive organs. All minuter details
regarding these “sexual hormone” (to use Starling’s own phrase) are
still unknown, but the experiments to which we alluded in an earlier
chapter have proved their existence. In my view, the anatomical
contradiction, the natural monstrosity, of a feminine--or, at any rate,
an unmanly--psyche in a typical masculine body, or that of a feminine or
unmanly sexual psyche associated with normally developed and normally
functioning male genital organs, can only be explained in this manner by
taking into account this intercurrent third factor. This can be deduced
very readily from some early =embryonic disturbances= of sexual
chemistry. This would also explain why it is that homosexuality so often
occurs in perfectly healthy families, as an isolated phenomenon which
has nothing to do either with inheritance or with degeneration. When von
Römer, on the contrary, describes homosexuality as a process of
“regeneration,” we must maintain that for this view there are no
sufficient grounds. Here begins the =riddle= of homosexuality; for me,
at any rate, it is one. My own theory only attempts to explain the
proper physiological connexions of homosexuality better, and, above all,
more scientifically than earlier theories. With regard to the ultimate
cause of the relatively frequent occurrence of homosexuality as an
original phenomenon, this theory has, however, nothing to say.
I do not suggest that I am able for a moment to find the ultimate reason
of the being and nature of homosexuality. There remains here a riddle to
be solved. But from the standpoint of civilization and reproduction
homosexuality is a senseless and aimless dysteleological phenomenon,
like many another “natural product”--as, for example, the human cæcum.
In an earlier chapter I drew attention to the fact that civilization has
entailed an increasingly sharp sexual differentiation--that is, the
antithesis between “man” and “woman” has become continually clearer.
The distinction between the sexes is a product rather of civilization
than of primitive nature. All sexual indifference, all sexual links, are
primitive characters. Eduard von Mayer rightly believes that in the
earliest days of the human race homosexuality was much more widely
diffused than it is at present, that, in fact, it came into being side
by side with heterosexual love. Civilization by means of inheritance,
adaptation, and differentiation, has continually more and more limited
the extent of the homosexual impulse. Unquestionably the homosexual
human being, =as human being=, has the same right to exist as the
heterosexual. To doubt it would be preposterous. Also, as a sexual
being, in so far as only the individual aspect of love comes under
consideration, the homosexual has an equal right. But for the species,
and also for the advancement of civilization, homosexuality has no
importance, or very little. It is obvious that, as a kind of enduring
“monosexuality,” it contradicts the purposes of the species. Equally
obvious is it that the whole of civilization is the product of the
physical and mental differentiation of the sexes, that civilization has,
in fact, to a certain extent, a heterosexual character. The greatest
spiritual values we owe to heterosexuals, not to homosexuals. =Moreover,
reproduction first renders possible the preservation and permanence of
new spiritual values.= In the last resort the latter are not possible
without the former. However obvious it may appear, we must still repeat
that spiritual values exist only in respect of the =future=, that they
only attain their true significance =in the connexion and the succession
of the generations=, and that they are, therefore, eternally dependent
upon heterosexual love as the intermediary by which this continuity is
produced. The monosexual and homosexual instincts permanently limited to
their own ego or their own sex are, therefore, in their innermost nature
=dysteleological= and =anti-evolutionistic=. In speaking thus we leave
entirely out of consideration the possibility that temporarily and for
the purposes of individual development they may possess a relative
justification.[566]
Moreover, the majority of homosexuals have a deeply rooted sentiment of
the lack of purpose and the aimlessness of their mode of sexual
perception, and this often gives them a very tragical and pitiable
expression. Especially in the case of noble, spiritually important
homosexuals, true carriers of civilization, is this sense of the
incongruity between homosexuality and life most plainly felt. Even the
talented Numa Prætorius (_Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, vol.
vi., p. 543) recognizes that--
“The love of the majority of men towards the other sex, based upon
heterosexual impulse, has undergone a development and refinement, and
has obtained a significance which makes homosexual love, in comparison
with it, play quite a subordinate part.”
[502] “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol.
i., p. 219.
[503] Lombroso, at the Sixth International Congress of Criminal
Anthropologists at Turin, May, 1906, actually drew a parallel between
congenital homosexuality and the congenital tendency to crime! That
this parallel is utterly non-existent and that crime and homosexuality
differ toto cælo is shown luminously by Paul Näcke (“Comparison
between Criminality and Homosexuality,” published in the
_Monatsschrift für Kriminalpsychologie_, 1906, pp. 477-487).
[504] Published in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, edited
by Magnus Hirschfeld, vol. iii., p. 5 (Leipzig, 1901). _Cf._ also the
account of the newer views by P. Näcke, “Problems in the Domain of
Homosexuality,” published in the _Allgemeine Zeitschrift für
Psychiatrie_, 1902, vol. lix., pp. 805-829 (this writer also maintains
the existence of normal, healthy homosexual individuals).
[505] Magnus Hirschfeld, “Der Urnische Mensch,” p. 139 _et seq._
(Leipzig, 1903).
[506] Von Krafft-Ebing, “Retarded Homosexuality,” published in the
_Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1901, vol. iii., pp. 7-20.
[507] J. E. Meisner, “Uranism, or the so-called Homosexual Love,” p.
11 (Leipzig, 1906).
[508] Max Katte (“Virile Homosexuals,” published in the _Annual for
Sexual Intermediate Stages_, vol. vii., p. 94; Leipzig, 1905) remarks
that it is an error on the part of recent writers in the domain of
homosexuality to describe and vindicate so prominently the effeminate
type of homosexual man, and to neglect the virile type. The same is
true as regards the description of the corresponding types of
homosexual women.
[509] This occurs also in heterosexual boys. I extract the following
passage from the unpublished autobiography of a homosexual
=physician=: “When puberty occurred I am not able to say--I expect it
was about the age of sixteen or seventeen--but I know certainly that I
noticed at the time of puberty a swelling of the breasts. There was
only a slight forward curvature, which did not extend much beyond the
areola, and was painful on pressure. I remember distinctly that I was
anxious about the matter, and was afraid that there was some
inflammation beginning. =However, the same seems to occur in every
normal man.= A student whom I asked about the matter said that he had
noticed a swelling of the mammary glands about the age of fifteen;
recently, at the age of seventeen, he has had his first pollutions;
his sexual sensibility is normal.”
[510] “Goethe’s Letters,” vol. vii., p. 314: letter of December 29,
1787, from Rome to Karl August (Weimar, 1890).
[511] G. Merzbach, “Homosexuality and Occupation,” published in the
_Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1902, vol. iv., pp. 187-198.
[512] _Cf._ W. S., “Woman-Man on the Stage,” published in the _Annual
for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, vol. ii., pp. 313-325.
[513] This writer is also the inventor of the word “homosexual,” which
is found for the first time in his book.
[514] Magnus Hirschfeld, “Result of the Statistical Investigations
regarding the Percentage of Homosexuals,” published in the _Annual for
Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1904, vol. vi., pp. 109-178.
[515] F. Karsch, “Uranism or Pæderasty and Tribadism among Savage
Races,” published in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_,
1901, vol. iii., pp. 72-201.
[516] “Traces of Contrary Sexuality among the Ancient Scandinavians:
Reports of a Norwegian Literary Man,” published in the _Annual for
Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1902, vol. v., pp. 244-263.
[517] Regarding homosexuality in Japan, _cf._ also “Pæderasty in
Japan,” by Suyewo Iwaya, published in the _Annual for Sexual
Intermediate Stages_, 1902, vol. iv., pp. 264-271.
[518] In the second volume, now in course of preparation, of my work
on “The Origin of Syphilis,” will be found a detailed critical
investigation, based upon the most recent data, of homosexuality and
pseudo-homosexuality in ancient times and during the middle ages.
[519] _Cf._ “Four Letters of Carl Heinrich Ulrichs (‘Numa Numantius’)
to his Relatives,” published in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate
Stages_, 1899, vol. i., pp. 36-96 (with portrait).
[520] Ludwig Frey, “The Spiritual Life of Count Platen,” published in
the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1899, vol. i., pp.
159-214; and 1904, vol. vi., pp. 357-448.
[521] Numa Prätorius, “Michael Angelo as an Urning,” _op. cit._, 1900,
vol. ii., pp. 254-267.
[522] F. Karsch, “Heinrich Hössli,” _op. cit._, 1903, vol. v., pp.
449-556. Hössli was the author of the work “Eros: the Greek Love of
Men” (Glarus and St. Gallen, 1836 and 1838, 2 vols.), which, according
to Karsch, represented for our own time what Plato’s “Symposium” and
“Phædrus” represents for antiquity. Karsch gives an excellent table of
the contents and an analysis of the books under consideration.
[523] J. E. Meisner, “Uranism,” p. 16 (Leipzig); also verbal
communications by Meisner, who was personally acquainted with
Bulthaupt, to myself.
[524] F. Karsch, “Our Sources for the Consideration of Reputed and
Real Urnings,” “Johann von Müller the Historian (1752-1809),”
published in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1902, vol.
iv., pp. 349-457.
[525] L. S. A. M. von Römer, “Henry III., King of France and Poland,”
_op. cit._, vol. iv., pp. 572-669.
[526] J. E. Meisner, _op. cit._, p. 17.
[527] Magnus Hirschfeld, “Sexual Transitional Stages,” Plate XXXII.
(Leipzig, 1905).
[528] _Op. cit._, Plate XXXII.
[529] F. Karsch, “Duke August the Fortunate (1772-1822),” published in
the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1903, vol. v., pp.
615-693.
[530] Numa Prätorius, “Georges Eekhoud: a Preface,” published in the
_Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1900, vol. ii., pp. 268-277.
[531] G. Eekhoud, “An Illustrious Urning of the Seventeenth Century,
Jerom Duquesnoy, the Flemish Sculptor,” _op. cit._, pp. 277-287.
[532] F. Karsch, “A. von Sternberg, the Novelist,” _op. cit._, 1902,
vol. iv., pp. 458-571. He obtained sexual gratification by
masturbating while looking at masculine posteriora, but also
frequently had relations with women.
[533] F. Karsch, “Theodor Beza, the Reformer (1519-1605),” _op. cit._,
pp. 291-349.
[534] H. J. Schouten, “The Alleged Pæderasty of the Reformer John
Calvin,” _op. cit._, 1905, vol. vii., pp. 291-306.
[535] Hans Rau, “Franz Grillparzer and his Amatory Life.” (Berlin,
1903).
[536] The love of boys, the “pæderasty,” of the Greeks related to
young adult men.
[537] I have used the established spelling for this word, although
probably its more correct spelling would be “pedication” (derived from
pedex = podex).
[538] _Cf._ P. Näcko, “The Kiss of the Homosexual,” published in the
_Archives for Criminal Anthropology and Criminal Statistics_, by H.
Gross, 1904, vol. xvii., Nos. 1, 2, p. 177. _Cf._ also the reports on
the tongue kiss published in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate
Stages_, 1905, vol. vii., pp. 757-759.
[539] M. Hirschfeld, “Are Sexual Intermediate Stages Suited for
Marriage?” published in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_,
1901, vol. iii., pp. 37-71.
[540] We owe to Näcke the recognition of the importance of sexual
dreams in the diagnosis of homosexuality and heterosexuality. _Cf._
his essay, “The Forensic Significance of Dreams,” published in _the
Archives for Criminal Anthropology_, 1889, vol. iii.; also P. Näcke,
“The Dream as the Most Delicate Reagent for the Detection of the Mode
of Sexual Sensibility,” published in the _Annual Review of Criminal
Psychology_, 1905.
[541] M. Hirschfeld, “Berlin’s Third Sex,” p. 26 (Berlin and Leipzig,
1905).
[542] The description of this interesting scene, with other details
regarding the organization of the homosexuals of Paris, is found in
the work of Pisanus Fraxi (Henry Spencer Ashbee). “Centuria Librorum
Absconditorum,” pp. 406-416 (London, 1879) (based upon personal
reports by Paul Lacroix).
[543] Ambroise Tardieu, “Offences against Morality from the Point of
View of State Medicine,” German translation by F. W. Theile, pp. 133,
134 (Weimar, 1860).
[544] There are also numerous places of public resort which are indeed
largely attended by urnings, but are also frequented by heterosexuals.
[545] _Cf._ in this connexion also the remarks of P. Näcke, “A Visit
to the Homosexuals of Berlin,” published in the _Archives of Criminal
Anthropology_, 1904, vol. xv., Nos. 1 and 2.
[546] _Cf._ P. Näcke, “Quelques Détails sur les Homosexuels de Paris,”
published in the _Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle_, 1905, new
series, iv., No. 138. See the reference in the _Annual for Sexual
Intermediate Stages_, 1906, vol. viii., pp. 795, 796.
[547] _Cf._ “The Secrets of the Berlin Passage,” pp. 19, 20 (Berlin,
1877).
[548] _Cf._ Pisanus Fraxi, “Centuria Librorum Absconditorum,” pp.
404-406 (London, 1879) (according to the reports of Paul Lacroix, who
himself was a witness of the occurrences).
[549] _Op. cit._, pp. 404-407.
[550] _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1906, vol. viii., pp.
796, 797. According to d’Estoc (“Paris-Eros,” pp. 207, 208), the male
prostitutes in these brothels are more especially men from southern
countries--Italians, Orientals, Berbers, and negroes.
[551] _Cf._ Ludwig Frey, “Characterization of Blackmail,” published in
the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1899, vol. i., pp. 71-96.
[552] _Cf._ Numa Prætorius, “The Criminal Character of Homosexual
Intercourse, Considered Historically and Critically,” published in the
_Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1899, vol. i., pp. 97-158.
[553] _Cf._ Z. Richter, “Does § 175 afford any Protection? A
Criminalogical Study,” published in the _Annual for Sexual
Intermediate Stages_, 1900, vol. ii., pp. 30-52.
[554] “Opinions of Roman Catholic Priests on the Attitude of
Christianity towards the Criminal Prosecution of Homosexual Love”
(_Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1900, vol. ii., pp.
161-203); “What Position should the Church Assume towards Homosexual
Love and its Criminal Prosecution?” by an Evangelical Theologian (_op.
cit._, vol. iii., pp. 204-210); Caspar Wirz, “Urnings before the
Church and Scripture” (Orthodox-Evangelical) (_op. cit._, vol. iv.,
pp. 63-108); “Homosexuality in the Bible,” by a Catholic priest (_op.
cit._, vol. iv., pp. 199-243); “From the Memoirs of a (Catholic)
Priest” (_op. cit._, pp. 1172-1178).
[555] A letter from Emile Zola to Dr. Laupts on the problem of
homosexuality; translated, with an introduction, by Rudolf von
Beulwitz (_Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1905, vol. ii., pp.
371-386).
[556] “What should the People know about the Third Sex?” An
instructive work, published by the Scientific and Humanitarian
Committee (Leipzig, 1904).
[557] _Cf._ “The Truth about Myself: Autobiography of a
Contrary-Sexual,” published in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate
Stages_, vol. iii., pp. 292-307.
[558] M. F., “How I See the Matter,” _op. cit._, pp. 308-312.
[559] _Cf._ Anna Rüling, “What Interest has the Woman’s Movement in
the Solution of the Homosexual Problem?” (_Annual for Sexual
Intermediate Stages_, vol. vii., pp. 131-151).
[560] Arduin, “The Woman’s Question and Sexual Intermediate Stages”
(_op. cit._, 1900, vol. ii., pp. 211-223).
[561] W. Hammer, “Tribadism in Berlin,” p. 97 (Berlin, 1906).
[562] _Cf._ “A Description of an Urnindes’ Ball,” given by M.
Hirschfeld, “Berlin’s Third Sex,” pp. 56, 57.
[563] _Cf._ Martial d’Estoc, “Paris-Eros,” p. 59 _et seq._
[564] _Cf._ F. Karsch, “Pæderasty and Tribadism among Animals as
recorded in Literature,” published in the _Annual for Sexual
Intermediate Stages_, 1900, vol. ii., pp. 126-160; P. Näcke,
“Pæderasty in Animals,” published in the _Archives of Criminal
Anthropology_, 1904, vol. xiv., pp. 361, 362.
[565] L. Krehl, “The Disturbance of Chemical Correlations in the
Organism” (Leipzig, 1907). Here, on p. 3, we find: “If we are
compelled to assume that many varieties of cells in their rudimentary
condition already bear the imprint of a masculine or feminine nature,
=still this masculine or feminine nature doubtless only undergoes its
real development under the enduring chemical influence of the ovaries
and the testicles=.”
[566] This latter view has been maintained especially by Max Katte, in
his treatise “The Purpose of the Existence of Homosexuals” (_Annual
for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, vol. iv., pp. 272-288), but he
completely ignores the evolutionary points of view. In the same way,
Hans Freimark neglects them (“The Meaning of Uranism,” p. 14; Leipzig,
1906); he regards homosexuality as a transition to a state in which
“mankind will no longer need gross material contact for purposes of
reproduction.”
CHAPTER XX
PSEUDO-HOMOSEXUALITY (GREEK AND ORIENTAL PÆDERASTY, HERMAPHRODITISM,
BISEXUAL VARIETIES)
“_Nous sommes les enfants des anciennes Sodomes;_
_Puisque l’on nous voit beaux, laissons-nous nous aimer._
_Notre sort est le plus désirable: charmer,_
_Nous sommes adorés des femmes et des hommes!_”
RACHILDE.
[“_We are children of the ancient Sodom;_
_Since people regard us as beautiful, let us continue to love one
another;_
_Our lot is the most desirable: to charm,_
_We are adored both by women and by men._”]
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XX
Connexion between pseudo-homosexuality and bisexuality -- Great
antiquity of the idea of bisexuality -- Magnus Hirschfeld’s
treatise on bisexuality -- Bisexuality of the time of puberty --
Pseudo-homosexual tendencies at this period of life -- Examples
(Gutzkow, Grillparzer) -- On the large scale -- Analogy to the
pseudo-heterosexuality of youthful homosexuals -- Persistence of
bisexuality -- The “Junores” -- Delusion of sexual metamorphosis --
Cultivation of pæderasts -- Women-men and men-women -- Brouardel’s
type of effeminate Parisian street-arab -- Homosexuality in the state
of trance -- Pseudo-homosexuality owing to the lack of heterosexual
intercourse -- Anal masturbators -- Pseudo-homosexuality of
prostitutes -- Temporary pseudo-tribadism in Paris -- Pseudo-uranism
as a popular custom -- Explanation of the Greek love of boys -- Its
fundamental difference from modern true homosexuality -- Value of the
noble asexual friendship of men for men -- A letter of Gutzkow’s --
The Platonic Eros and Græco-Oriental pæderasty -- Bisexuality in
German romanticism -- Explanation of this -- Hermaphroditism --
Previous under-estimation of the importance of hermaphroditism --
Recent researches -- True hermaphroditism -- Pseudo-hermaphroditism --
Male and female apparent hermaphrodites.
CHAPTER XX
The dispute whether homosexuality is a congenital or an acquired
phenomenon was one hitherto impossible to settle, because the whole
province of those homosexual manifestations for which I suggest the name
of “=pseudo-homosexuality=” had not been separated with sufficient
clearness from true homosexuality for the essential difference between
the two classes to receive accurate expression. True homosexuality is
congenital. It is an original, =permanent, essential outflow= of the
personality: pseudo-homosexuality, on the contrary, is either a
homosexual sensibility suggested from without, transient, and not
associated with the essence of the personality; or else it is merely
=apparent= homosexuality, the illusion being dependent upon
hermaphroditism or upon some other physical or mental abnormality.
The pseudo-homosexuality of the former category is explicable only by
means of the fact of “=bisexuality=,” the existence of which has been
scientifically proved only within recent years. By bisexuality we
understand the possibility of two distinct modes of sexual perception
occurring in one and the same person; and this, again, finds its
explanation in the bisexual germinal vestiges which exist in every
individual. There remains in every man a vestige of woman, in every
woman a vestige of man, in a sense in a state of potential energy,
which, however, is capable, by the action of various external
influences, of being transformed into kinetic energy; but this vestige
=always= plays a small part in comparison with the true specific sexual
nature. This bisexuality was discussed in an earlier chapter of this
book (pp. 39, 40 and 70, 71), and was there characterized as a
phenomenon secondary in every respect, to which no great importance
could be attached. The idea of bisexuality is not new; neither Fliess
nor Weininger was its discoverer. It was already known to the
ancients.[567] Heinse, in “Ardinghello,” gives expression to the idea in
almost the same words as Weininger (see p. 40). Recently Magnus
Hirschfeld[568] has collected the historical and literary details of the
subject of bisexuality.
Bisexuality manifests itself more especially at the period of puberty,
during the time of obscure yearnings and impulses--the so-called
indifferent period which precedes the awakening of the sexual impulse.
Physical bisexuality, therefore, often enough corresponds to psychical
bisexuality. In the boy there is a trace of girlishness, in the girl a
trace of boyishness; we have the two types of the dreamy youth and of
the tomboy. Then there readily arise delicate inclinations between
individuals of like sexes, especially as the result of continuous
companionship, so that an obscure impulse of transient homosexual
perception manifests itself between two boys, or between two girls, of
the same age; or, again, this transient homosexuality may take the form
of a worshipful admiration of an older person of the same sex. Gutzkow
distinguished these two forms of pseudo-homosexuality, of which he had
had experience in his own person. In his “Secular Pictures,” vol. i.,
pp. 50, 51 (Frankfort, 1856), he remarks:
“The feeling of love originates in most feminine natures, not from the
quiet consideration of the secrets of love, but from a magnetic
attraction towards other individuals, whom they regard as being better
and more beautiful than themselves. Commonly the love for a man is
preceded by an often illimitable love for a woman. Young girls fall in
love with older girls--a phenomenon which often occurs also in boys,
as I myself experienced when a boy, feeling the most ardent passion
for one of my comrades, who now is extremely disagreeable to me.”
A similar explanation suffices for the transient tender love exhibited
by Grillparzer towards Altmüller (_cf._ Grillparzer’s “Diary,” edition
of Glossy and Sauer, pp. 24-26; Stuttgart). In boarding-schools,
barracks, and training-schools we often find these pseudo-homosexual
liaisons. The prison is said by Parent-Duchatelet to be a high-school of
tribadism. He and other French authors report the epidemic diffusion of
homosexual practices in prisons for women. Whenever homosexuality
appears =suddenly= in an epidemic manner, =affecting large numbers of
individuals=, we have to do, not with genuine original uranism, but with
pseudo-homosexuality. As regards boarding-schools, which exhibit a
lascivious environment extremely open to manifestations of this kind,
Hans von Kahlenberg, in his “Nixchen,” p. 41 (Vienna, 1904), has vividly
described the matter.
Youthful bisexuality is to be found in slighter forms in almost every
human being, but it is a typical phenomenon of puberty, and disappears
with the passing of this epoch, to make room for the completely
developed heterosexuality of the adult. There occurs also in
homosexuals, in whom homosexual sensibility first makes itself
definitely manifest after puberty, a quite analogous inclination to the
other sex before and during puberty. Thus, a typical homosexual
twenty-three years of age, who now exhibits _horror feminæ_, related to
me that at the age of sixteen or seventeen years he was very fond of
girls, and pursued them a great deal, but without definite sexual
desire. This transient obscure attraction of homosexuals towards the
other sex is a kind of “pseudo-heterosexuality.”
Sometimes bisexuality will continue after the period of puberty, and in
exceptional cases will persist throughout life. According to Hirschfeld,
this occurs especially in men of genius, and in those inclined to become
priests or schoolmasters. But in most cases even then one or other
impulsive tendency--the heterosexual or the homosexual--is predominant.
These individuals have been called “psychical hermaphrodites” (von
Krafft-Ebing). These bisexual varieties may manifest themselves in very
various ways, in most cases gynandry or androgyny is purely spiritual,
and finds expression only in association with particular tendencies,
especially =fetichistic= tendencies. The two following very remarkable
cases throw a clear light on this peculiar form of bisexuality. We may
as well accept for the more or less specific form of bisexuality
described in these cases the suggested name of “junores.”
1.The case of a psychical hermaphrodite:
N. N., an American journalist, thirty-three years of age, writes:
“From earliest youth I had an impulse to appear dressed in women’s
clothing, and whenever I had an opportunity I had elegant body linen
made for me, silken chemises, and whatever was the fashion. Even as a
boy I used to borrow my sister’s clothing and wear it secretly. Only
later, after my mother’s death, was I able to give free rein to my
wishes, and I came into the possession of a wardrobe resembling that
of the most elegant lady of fashion. Although compelled in the daytime
to appear as a man, still I wear, under these clothes, a complete
outfit of women’s underclothing--stays, open-work stockings, and
everything proper to a woman, a bracelet also, and patent-leather
women’s boots, with elegant high heels. When the evening comes, I
breathe more freely. Then I can throw off the burdensome mask, and
feel wholly woman. Wrapped in a tea-gown of an elegant cut, and
wearing the finest underclothing, I am able to occupy myself in my
favourite employments, among which may be mentioned the study of the
primitive history of mankind, or I give myself up to some routine
duties. A feeling of repose takes possession of me, such as is
impossible during the day, when I have to wear men’s clothing.
Although fully woman, I do not feel any need to give myself to a man.
I feel flattered, certainly, if, when appearing in women’s dress, I
please others, but I have no definite sexual desire towards my own
sex. It may be that I have not yet discovered my _alter ego_.
Notwithstanding all my well-developed feminine customs, I married, and
am the father of a powerful, beautiful girl, who exhibits no
tendencies whatever resembling mine. My wife, an energetic, cultured
lady, was fully aware of my passion, but hoped in the course of time
to wean me from it. In this, however, she was not successful. I
performed my marital duties, but I gave myself up all the more to my
customs. My wife obtained a separation, and at the time at which I now
write she is intimate with another man, and is pregnant. My physique
is thoroughly masculine, with the exception of the pelvis and of the
calves of the legs, which are feminine in form. Summary: Outward
appearance masculine. When wearing women’s dress I have completely the
corresponding figure--waist, 20 inches; chest measurement, 34 inches;
height, 176 centimetres (5 feet 9 inches); weight 125 pounds. Hands
long and narrow, sensibility feminine. When wearing men’s clothing I
feel a certain uneasiness. When I see an elegant lady or actress, I
think how well I should appear in her dress. I have an abundance of
earrings, pearls, lace scarves, and similar articles of adornment, and
at a dance I give myself up to the idea of how delightful it would be
to appear in women’s dress. If it were possible, I should completely
abandon men’s clothing.”
2. “At about the age of fifteen and a half years I began to take an
interest in women’s dress. I felt an inward impulse, which drove me to
the windows of the shops displaying articles of women’s
dress--corsets, etc. In shoemakers’ windows it was the women’s boots
and shoes which attracted my attention rather than the men’s. The same
was the case with dress fabrics, among which self-coloured materials
for women’s dress pleased me best. Beautiful blue stuffs (satin)
especially attracted me; also, I had an ardent love for blue velvet.
As time passed, I felt a desire to possess such things, and to wear
them. But since at home I had no means to spend in this way, whilst
the desire sometimes was so violent as to give me no rest, I
endeavoured to resist it with all the religious and rational grounds I
could call to mind; yet this was of little help to me, for whenever I
met a woman clothed to my taste, the longing was immediately
reawakened. If I met a woman whose appearance aroused this desire
(which henceforth I will call my ‘costume-stimulus’), I looked round,
in order to overcome this costume-stimulus, to try to find a woman who
displeased me. Within me there raged a conflict (which at that time
was obscure even to myself) between the masculine nature and the
feminine. One day the feminine in me gained the victory, as it
impelled me (when my parents were absent from the house) to try on
some of my sisters’ clothes; but as soon as I had put on the corset I
had an erection, immediately followed by an ejaculation of semen. This
gave me no gratification; on the contrary, I was very angry that
putting on the corset should have given rise to an ejaculation of
semen. At varying intervals I repeated this attempt to dress myself as
a woman, and in doing so always endeavoured to avoid anything that
could give rise to an erection. Gradually I succeeded in this matter
of dressing; but I was now consumed also with the desire for caressing
a feminine being, and therefore the dressing alone failed to satisfy
me. Moreover, this dressing-up also failed to give me real pleasure,
because I did not possess any costume which really suited me; but
still, apart from sexual excitement, it produced a feeling of
well-being. After I had dressed up as a woman, my imagination always
busied itself with the idea of how beautiful it would be if I had a
beloved before whom I might display myself unrestrainedly, just as I
then was. In these fancies I always pictured to myself a girl of my
own age, with long hair and well-developed breasts and hips. This
imagination generally resulted in a pollution, which I sometimes
endeavoured to prevent by taking off the articles of clothing as
rapidly as possible.
“By a colleague I was initiated into the practice of masturbation. He
explained to me that if I had no woman who would give herself to me, I
was in a position to satisfy myself. The first time I resisted the
impulse; but the costume-stimulus tormented me, and I had discovered
that after a seminal emission I was at peace for a time; moreover,
when dressing up, I was always exposed to the danger of being
discovered, and so I began the practice of self-abuse. Masturbation
did not give me proper gratification, and therefore, after practising
it, I always experienced a great feeling of regret and also a feeling
of exhaustion; moreover, it did not produce the feeling of well-being
which resulted from dressing up as a woman.
“I was shy, and was very readily embarrassed in the presence of the
female sex; I therefore avoided seeing much of women; I avoided it,
also, on account of my costume-stimulus. It would have been preferable
to me if, physically, Nature had made me a woman, so that I could have
gone about freely among girls of my own age. For the reasons already
given I did not learn to dance; moreover, the turning round made me
very giddy, and from the age of seventeen and a half to nineteen years
I suffered from attacks of syncope. At about the age of twenty-two
years I fell in love with my present wife, who attracted me on account
of her grace, her figure, and her character. My wife was even more
bashful than myself. My inclination drew me towards her, but on
account of my costume-stimulus, I avoided being alone with her. From
now onwards I began to consider what I could possibly do in order to
explain to my betrothed my true nature, but all the attempts which I
made were failures. After six months’ engagement, I left the place
where my betrothed was living. The engagement lasted seven years
before we were married. The principal reason for the delay was that we
were both impecunious. When I was alone with my betrothed, I was
always thinking of my costume-stimulus. Shortly before we were married
I told my betrothed in a letter of my peculiar tendency, for I felt it
was my duty to do so. She could not understand how I could find
pleasure in dressing myself up as a woman. At first she was
indifferent regarding my costume-stimulus; later she thought it was
morbid, an impulse bordering on the insane. I often had to call my
imagination to my help in order to produce an erection. My marriage
became more unhappy year by year. My wife, on account of my morbid
tendency, suspected me of all possible perversities, and was of
opinion that an individual predisposed as I was could not be capable
of true, upright love for a woman. How I was to get woman’s clothing
to my taste I did not know. In my marriage I was no better off as
regards the costume-stimulus, but rather worse. I had more sleepless
nights on account of this costume-stimulus than I had had before I
married. As time passed, I became continually more ill-humoured, and
was occasionally cross to my wife, which afterwards made me very
sorry. In the sleepless nights I puzzled how I could possibly manage
that my wife should not concern herself any more about the
costume-stimulus, and how I could possibly fulfil my wishes in this
respect. Gradually I succeeded in winning my wife to my side to this
extent, that she agreed to make a costume for me, but I must not have
many such.
“My wife was always looking for a reason. She believed that dressing
up must have some cause, or must produce in me some effect, which I
was unwilling to tell her. She was continually tormenting me about
this; she would not believe that I spoke the truth, and she no longer
felt any confidence in me. She believed that every one must perceive
that I had this morbid impulse. She endeavoured to learn something
about the matter from other women. Those whom she asked could only
tell her evil and common things about men with tendencies like mine;
some said I must be unconditionally an urning; others that I must have
intercourse with other women behind my wife’s back; others that I
wanted to lay aside men’s clothing in order to please girls under age,
and so on. I suffered horribly from these false accusations.
“I endeavoured once again, in an essay I composed, which I entitled
‘The Junores,’ to make the matter clear to my wife. By junores I
indicated men who wished to assume, or who did assume, the outward
appearance of women in the matter of clothing, demeanour, and figure,
but who sexually were masculine. All this was of no help to me. Our
life together became continually more unbearable with the lapse of
time; often there were scenes which had the most depressing effect on
my mind. After violent scenes there occurred in me nocturnal
pollutions, accompanied by no sensation of pleasure; also after these
scenes erections were for a long time incomplete, so that a kind of
impotence ensued.
“After every new accusation which my wife made against me I avoided
going home in the evening. I wandered for hours in by-streets,
overwhelmed by a feeling of futility and vacuity; my nerves all
vibrated; sometimes I could not keep my limbs still. If I had had no
children, or if I had known that they would be properly cared for, I
should have known what to do in such a mood. One thing still torments
me. Will my children be hereditarily tainted?”
I have myself seen both of these cases. The men concerned appear
somewhat nervous, but they are otherwise quite healthy and manly, and
both deny that they feel any sexual inclination towards men. The desire
to wear women’s clothing, and to feel as a woman, may also make its
appearance as a =morbid= phenomenon later in life, in the form of the
“delusion of sexual metamorphosis” (_metamorphosis sexualis paranoica_);
or it may be =artificially induced=, as among the ancient Scythians and
among the Mexican “mujerados.” These latter are selected as men
originally =most powerful=, and entirely free from any feminine
appearance, and by incessant riding on horseback and by excessive
masturbation they are made impotent (through atrophy of the genital
organs) and effeminate, so that there may even occur a secondary
development of the breasts (Hammond). All this belongs to the category
of pseudo-homosexuality.
With regard to numerous historical women-men and men-women--such as, for
example, the celebrated Chevalier d’Eon, Mademoiselle de Maupin
(immortalized by Gautier in the romance of this name), and many other
women going about in men’s clothing, or men going about in women’s
clothing--it is, as a rule, no longer possible to determine whether they
were genuinely homosexual, pseudo-homosexual, or bisexual.
I regard, however, the interesting type of =effeminate Parisian
street-arab=, described by Brouardel at the Second Congress of Criminal
Anthropologists at Berlin in the year 1889, as characteristically and
originally homosexual.
“At the age from twelve to sixteen years the lad is still small,
grasps ideas very slowly, and has little will-power. At the time of
puberty he has experienced an inhibition of development, and his
bodily growth has remained stationary. The penis is thin and flaccid,
the testicles are small, the pubic hair is scanty, the skin is smooth,
and the beard is very thin; the skeleton does not develop fully, like
that of the normal male; the pelvis becomes wide, and the general
outlines of the body become rounded (_potelées_) because there is an
undoubted deposit of fat in the subcutaneous tissues, so that the
breasts also become enlarged.”
This state persists. Brouardel found it still present in individuals of
twenty-five to thirty years of age. These children of great towns are
characterized by intellectual sterility and by incapacity for
procreation. This type is found also among the well-to-do middle
classes, and from such, according to Brouardel, the _décadents_ are
recruited, while the effeminate gamins either become professional
pæderasts, or undertake the preparation of _articles de Paris_.[569]
It is not difficult, in this description, to recognize true
homosexuality.
Magnus Hirschfeld gives an account of a peculiar form of
pseudo-homosexuality occurring in an individual who in ordinary life was
asexual.[570]
The person concerned was an extremely effeminate and neurasthenic member
of a spiritualistic club, who in his normal condition felt sensual
attraction neither to woman nor to man, but who in the trance state
felt himself to be an Indian woman, and then became inspired with an
ardent passion for one of his fellow-members.
Also in chronic intoxications, especially in alcoholism,
pseudo-homosexuality may make its appearance, in some cases as an
enduring and in others as a transient condition.
An important category of pseudo-homosexuality is constituted by persons
in whom it arises owing to =insufficient opportunity for sexual
intercourse with members of the opposite sex=--as, for example, in the
absence of women on board ship, in monasteries, in prisons for men, in
the French foreign legion; and as regards lack of men in nunneries, and
in the case of unmarried or unhappily married women, who supply a large
contingent to pseudo-tribadism.[571] An account of pæderasty in prisons
is given by Charles Perrier, “La Pédérastie en Prison” (Lyons, 1900).
In this category we must also mention the “debauchee pæderasts” for
which =truly existent= kind of pseudo-homosexuals I propose the name of
“=anal masturbators=.” These are heterosexual individuals in whom either
primarily the anus plays the part of an erogenic zone, or in whom this
region becomes erogenic in consequence of the exhaustion of all other
varieties of sexual stimulus. Hammond, von Schrenck-Notzing, and Taxil
have proved the existence of these anal masturbators and the frequent
occurrence in them of pseudo-homosexual tendencies.[572]
An interesting phenomenon is the =pseudo-homosexuality of female
prostitutes=. We certainly encounter among prostitutes a number of
genuine tribades, who owe their adoption of professional prostitution to
the existence of this original tendency to homosexual love, because in
their relations with men the heart plays, and can play, no part (see
above, p. 434). Prostitutes who are heterosexual by nature may become
homosexual for two reasons: first, by intercourse with, and owing to the
influence of, truly Lesbian associates, in whom the inward sense of
solidarity possessed by all prostitutes is especially strong; in the
second place, in consequence of the antipathy to intercourse with men,
created by their experience of life, and striking always deeper roots,
for they learn to know man only in his brutal sexual coarseness. The
continuous compulsion to which they are subjected to satisfy the animal
sensuality of worn-out roués by the most disgusting procedures
ultimately produces in them the most unconquerable antipathy to the male
sex, so that all the delicate sensibility of which they are capable is
directed towards their own sex. The homosexual union appears to them, as
Eulenburg rightly points out (“Sexual Neuropathy,” pp. 143, 144), to be
something “higher, purer, and comparatively blameless.” They regard it
in a more ideal light than sexual intercourse with men. Women owners of
brothels also favour tribadistic love, because thereby they safeguard
the prostitutes in their houses from the influence of _souteneurs_.[573]
As J. de Vaudère describes in his “Demi-Sexes,” pseudo-tribadism is
especially diffused in Paris as a fashionable practice, and manifests
itself here in the form described by Martineau,[574] of a =temporary=
homosexuality, which is subserved by an extensive prostitution, and
which clearly exhibits its pseudo-homosexual characteristics by its
intermittent appearance in the form of spiritual epidemics.
Unquestionably we have to do with pseudo-homosexuality also in all those
cases in which homosexual love makes its appearance as a =national
custom= among a percentage widely exceeding the usual percentage of
ordinary homosexuality. The typical example of this kind is =the love of
boys of ancient Greece=--“pæderasty,” in the better sense of the word.
Since in this work I am discussing the sexual life of the present day, I
do not propose here to deal at length with this interesting topic, and
must refer the reader to the second volume (in course of preparation) of
my work on “The Origin of Syphilis,” in which I have discussed the
subject at considerable length.
Since the Hellenic love of boys was a widely diffused custom, the origin
of which may be directly referred to Crete, indirectly to the Orient, it
is evident that only a fraction of the pæderasts can have been true
homosexuals. The majority were pseudo-homosexuals. It is possible that
the custom was first introduced by original homosexuals, and also that
it was subsequently maintained by these. But soon it became a general
practice for a man to regard his wife simply as a “procreative machine,”
and to seek for true =spiritual= love from a youth. Since to the men of
antiquity woman had no soul and no individuality, =the love of boys
appeared to them something natural and morally justifiable=. It would,
however, be completely unnatural if for the heterosexual community of
our own time we wished to reintroduce the antique love of boys, since we
modern men have learned that woman also has a =soul=; that she also has
the same justification as man for the development of her human nature;
that she can be, and ought to be, the object of individual, spiritual,
profound love. I rejoice, that those who are fighting for the rights of
the genuine congenital homosexuals, that men like Magnus Hirschfeld,
Numa Prætorius, and other investigators, have recently expressed
themselves in energetic terms as opposed to those whose aim is a
sort of propaganda for the diffusion of the love of men among
heterosexuals--whose endeavour it is, in fact, to introduce a formal
cult of uranism. This movement can do nothing but harm to the just cause
of homosexuals.
No one can prize more highly than I do myself a =noble friendship=
between men, which at the present day is far too little practised;[575]
no one can wish more heartily than I do that men could speak to one
another of love, without being exposed to the suspicion of
homosexuality.[576] In a certain sense I am in thorough agreement with
the beautiful demonstrations of Heinrich Schurtz and Benedict
Friedländer on masculine friendship as a normal fundamental impulse of
humanity and as the foundation of social intercourse.[577] But this
friendship between heterosexual men, based upon natural sympathy and
community of occupation, has =not the least sexual admixture=, whereas
only in the beautiful dialogues of Plato can the Greek love of boys,
which some advocate at the present day, be ascribed to the spiritual
Eros.[578] In reality, however, the Greek love of boys degenerated into
the grossest sensuality, since the youth stimulated sexual desire like a
woman, and was used as such,[579] so that the originally ideal character
of the relationship disappeared.
In the =Oriental= love of boys[580] this ideal element was probably
never present, and sensual relationships played the principal part from
the very first. The boys’ brothels of the Mohammedan East were visited
by heterosexual men just as much as by homosexuals. The same men derived
pleasure from intercourse both with women and with boys. Bisexuality was
in this case put into practice as a matter of course.
German civilization also passed through an epoch in which bisexual
activities of feeling were clearly manifest in both sexes, without,
however, leading at any time to the physical practice of
pseudo-homosexuality. This remarkable period was the time of transition
between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The “Sturm und Drang” had quieted down; its fiercely active forces had
been controlled; its vigorous will had been pacified, and guided in
concrete directions; its kinetic energy had in a sense become potential
in two new formative and emotional tendencies of the time, which
progressed side by side, and, notwithstanding all the differences
between them, influenced one another mutually to a considerable
extent--classicism and romanticism. Classicism, under the stimulating
influence of Winckelmann, looked back to the “noble simplicity and quiet
greatness” of the antique, to the beauty exhibited simply in =form=,
whose wonder Goethe more than any other has made manifest to us.
Romanticism, on the other hand, was the term employed to indicate the
boundless enlargement and increasing profundity of the emotional life,
of which the =formless= is especially characteristic. This appears most
clearly in the work of Novalis, Tieck, and Wackenroder; but both
tendencies meet in the sphere of the sexual. I need only mention the
name of Winckelmann to indicate how markedly the purely æsthetic
contemplation,[581] and the purely æsthetic enjoyment, of the beautiful
human form must have favoured the development of homosexual modes of
perception. We may in this connexion speak of the “Greek Renascence.” On
the other hand, the romantic mood, the deepening of the individual life
of feeling, the eternal searching for new, peculiar sensations, was very
apt to awaken those activities of feeling slumbering so deeply beneath
the threshold of consciousness, which we to-day denote by the term
“bisexuality.” In Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde,” for example, we find
frequent allusions to this bisexual mode of perception, as in the place
in which he speaks of a confusion of the masculine and feminine rôles in
the love contest. When, in so much of the published “Correspondence” of
this period, kisses, embraces, caresses, and tendernesses between two
men or two women appear to fly to and fro, it may be that this is
neither to be regarded as purely homosexual perception, nor as a simply
conventional contemporary custom, but rather as the very characteristic
expression of a tendency to bisexual imaginations and dreams induced by
the hypertension, overdriving, and artificial increase, of the emotional
life. Thus only, for example, can we explain the passionate profusion of
tenderness which appears in many of the letters of Jean Paul, written by
him to men; for Jean Paul was unquestionably heterosexual.[582]
The same is true of the women of this time. According to Welcker, the
friendships of the women of the romantic period exhibited this character
of a Platonic love. Since the dominion of romanticism “influenced
emotional young men in very various ways, in more than one morally
strict circle, two women friends were so inseparable and so
indispensable to one another that those round them used sometimes to
laugh at this amativeness, of which, however, a serious suspicion was
impossible.”[583]
An interesting proof of the existence of pseudo-homosexuality among the
women of that time is afforded by a passage[584] from a romance by Ernst
Wagner (1760-1812), one of the scholars of Jean Paul. The book is
entitled “Isidora,” and in it the Lesbian love-scene between the
Princess Isidora and her friend Olympia is very plainly described,
although both of them at the same time are passionately in love with
men.
The last and not unimportant phenomenal form of pseudo-homosexuality is
=hermaphroditism=. It is a remarkable fact that only in recent years has
science attempted a serious study of hermaphroditic states, which
previously, as Blumreich[585] points out, were to a large extent
ignored, both as regards their social importance and their frequency. It
was the great service of Neugebauer[586] and Magnus Hirschfeld[587] that
they drew general attention to these remarkable sexual intermediate
stages, and proved their eminent practical importance, which had
previously been suspected by no one. How completely the matter had been
ignored is proved by the remarkable fact that the new Civil Code for the
German Empire completely ignores the juridical determinations of the
former Prussian Civil Code regarding hermaphrodites, alleging that there
existed no persons whose sex was indeterminate or indeterminable!
The so-called “=true hermaphroditism=”--the condition in which male and
female reproductive glands (testicles and ovaries) are met with =in a
single individual=--is one of the greatest rarities. By the
investigations of Salen (1899), Garré-Simon (1903), and Ludwig Pick
(1905), the existence of such individuals with mixed reproductive
glands (“ovotestes”) has been proved as an actual fact. Walter Simon, in
the one hundred and seventy-second volume of _Virchow’s Archives_, has
described the rare case of true hermaphroditism observed by Garré. In a
person twenty-one years of age, brought up as a man, and having
thoroughly masculine feelings, there suddenly occurred, associated with
swelling of the breasts (gynecomasty), monthly recurring hæmorrhages,
proceeding from the supposed intertesticular fissure; also from time to
time, associated with voluptuous erection of the penis, there was
discharged whitish mucus, and the libidinous ideas connected with this
discharge referred always to women. The physical structure and facial
expression of this individual were feminine; the build of the thorax,
the shoulders, and the shape of the arms exhibited male characteristics.
In a right-sided swelling, resembling an inguinal hernia, were found a
testicle-ovary (Ger. _Hodeneierstock_), an epididymis, a parovarium, a
spermatic cord, and a Fallopian tube.
More frequent than these cases, in which naturally the determination of
sex is practically impossible, are cases of =pseudo-hermaphroditism=,
which also possess the greatest importance in connexion with the problem
of pseudo-homosexuality. In these cases of pseudo-hermaphroditism the
reproductive glands are, in fact, distinctively male or female, but the
characteristics of the =excretory organs= and of the =external genital
organs= do not enable us to determine the sex, for they are in part
male, in part female, and in part completely undifferentiated,
which is to be explained as dependent upon an incomplete or entirely
wanting differentiation of the primitively identical rudiment of
the external genital organs of the two sexes (inhibition of the
processes of growth at some stage of development). Thus there arises
_pseudo-hermaphroditismus masculinus_, in cases in which the genital
fissure is not completely closed, so that the urethra possesses a
fissure below (hypospadias); also the two halves of the scrotum may fail
to join, so that a fissure is left between them, simulating a vaginal
inlet. Since in these cases the testicles are commonly retained within
the abdominal cavity, or else appear in the inguinal region, simulating
an inguinal hernia, the penis is believed to be a kind of enlarged
clitoris, and the individual is mistaken for a woman (_erreur de sexe_).
If it further happens that, on account of the supposed inguinal hernia,
the individual is ordered to wear, and continues to wear, a truss, the
testicular tissue disappears completely as a result of pressure atrophy,
and the correct diagnosis becomes more difficult than ever. I recently
saw a case of this kind in a male hermaphrodite, twenty-two years of
age, who had been brought up as a woman. He had, however, always felt
attraction towards women, and, having a large membrum, he was able,
notwithstanding the existence of hypospadias, to complete regular
coitus. In the ejaculated semen the examining physician had =not found
any spermatozoa=; but in this case the testicles had doubtless atrophied
in consequence of the wearing of a truss. This pseudo-hermaphrodite has
recently published the history of his upbringing as a “woman.” The work
is of great interest from the psychological point of view, and is
entitled “A Man’s Years as a Girl,” by “Nobody” (Berlin, 1907).
Where the reproductive glands are female there results a
_pseudo-hermaphroditismus femininus_ in cases in which the external
genital organs of this female pseudo-hermaphrodite exhibit a certain
similarity with the genital organs of the male--for example, when the
clitoris is exceptionally large, and the labia majora have grown
together, so that the vaginal inlet appears to be wanting. In this case
also there may be a mistake in diagnosis, and, consequently, the
individual having been educated as a man, apparent homosexuality may
result when the natural sexual inclination towards the male manifests
itself in due course.
In both varieties of pseudo-hermaphroditism there exist very various
anatomical and physiological possibilities in respect of the
relationship of the secondary sexual characters to the anatomical
character of the reproductive glands, in respect of the menstrual
equivalents in male pseudo-hermaphrodites, in respect of the
relationship of the sexual impulse to the reproductive glands, in
respect of the greater or less strength of the impulse, in respect of
periodic genital hæmorrhages in male pseudo-hermaphrodites, in respect
of possible sexual aberrations, etc. For more exact details I must refer
the reader to the works of Neugebauer and Hirschfeld. Here I will only
refer to a case described by the last-named author, of a male
pseudo-hermaphrodite, forty years of age, Friderike S., who had been
brought up as a “woman,” who at a very early age had exhibited an
inclination towards women =only=, and an antipathy to sexual intercourse
with men. In this individual a reproductive gland resembling a testicle
could be detected, out of which there issued a structure resembling the
spermatic cord. In the left inguinal canal was an atrophied reproductive
gland of indeterminate character. The membrum was something between
penis and clitoris. The labia majora and minora bounded a short cæcal
vagina. Internal female reproductive organs could not be detected. On
the other hand, there appeared to be a prostate gland. In the sexual
secretion, which was discharged by a different opening from the urine,
H. Friedenthal =was able to detect very numerous completely normal
spermatozoa=, whereby the male character of this pseudo-woman was
completely proved, and whereby also the alleged “homosexual” tendencies
were now shown to be heterosexual.
[567] _Cf._ L. S. A. M. von Römer, “Regarding the Androgynous Idea of
Life,” _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1903, vol. v., pp.
707-940.
[568] M. Hirschfeld, “The Theory and History of Bisexuality,”
published in “The Nature of Love,” pp. 93-133 (Leipzig, 1895). _Cf._
also P. Näcke, “Some Psychiatric Experiences in Support of the
Doctrine of Bisexual Vestiges in Mankind,” published in _The Annual
for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1906, vol. viii., pp. 583-603.
[569] _Cf._ C. Lombroso, “Recent Advances in the Study of
Criminality,” pp. 109-111 (Gera, 1899).
[570] M. Hirschfeld, “Berlin’s Third Sex,” p. 13.
[571] These pseudo-tribades, belonging mainly to the aristocracy and
to the upper middle classes, are known in Parisian slang as “Sapphos,”
in contrast to the genuine “Lesbian lovers.”
[572] _Cf._ my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 224-227.
[573] _Cf._ L. Martineau, “Leçons sur les Déformations Vulvaires et
Anales,” p. 21 (Paris, 1885).
[574] _Op. cit._, pp. 29-31.
[575] Karl Gutzkow writes in a beautiful letter to Max Ring: “Our time
is so separative, our hearts beat in so solitary a manner, and yet the
need of intimate bonds is there, but who dares to tie them? Any
intimate friendship formed between men in early youth disappears like
dust before the wind. Then comes the love of woman, which fills the
whole of our heart; then follows the care for material existence,
which increases our egoism; and the danger that our heart will shrink
makes its appearance all too soon. Who draws near to another human
being? Who admits that he has need of others, and that his life is a
life without love? We all suffer in this way; we should form warm
friendships between man and man” (“Berlin in the Time of Reaction,”
reminiscences by Max Ring, published in _Deutsche Dichtung_, 1898,
vol. xxiii., pp. 51, 52).
[576] Such a noble love between men shines, for example, from the
letters of Count Arthur Gobineau to Prince Philipp zu
Eulenburg-Hertefeld. _Cf._ Prince zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld’s “Eine
Erinnerung an Graf Arthur Gobineau,” especially pp. 22, 23 (Stuttgart,
1906).
[577] _Cf._ H. Schurtz, “Age Classes and Associations of Men” (Berlin,
1904); B. Friedländer, “Physiological Friendship as a Normal
Fundamental Impulse of Humanity and as the Foundation of Social
Intercourse,” in the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1900,
vol. vi., pp. 179, 214; and the same author’s “Renascence of Eros
Uranios,” pp. 163-211 (Berlin, 1904).
[578] O. Kiefer, “Plato’s Attitude towards Homosexuality,” _Annual for
Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1905, vol. vii., pp. 107-126. _Cf._ also
“Lyrical and Bucolic Poetry,” _op. cit._, 1906, viii., pp. 619-684.
[579] This connexion was recognized, although in the inverse
direction, by Heinrich Laube. In a passage of “Junge Europa” (vol. i.,
p. 72 of the new edition; Vienna, 1876) we read: “Constantia is the
most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Outline, muscles, figure, eyes,
speech, mind, feeling--everything in her is beautiful; she is the
ideal of a man found in the feminine form. I love this power in woman
above everything; the soft, the non-resisting, does not offer me
enough opposition. _Perhaps such women as these form the transition to
the Hellenic love of boys._”
[580] _Cf._, in this connexion, also P. Näcke, “Homosexuality in the
Orient,” published in the _Archives for Criminal Anthropology_, 1904,
vol. xvi., pp. 333 _et seq._
[581] Goethe confirms this in a conversation with Chancellor von
Müller, in which he deduces the “aberration” of Greek love from this,
“that, according to his own æsthetic judgment, man has always been
more beautiful, more perfect, more complete, than woman. Such a
feeling, when it has once originated, easily passes over into the
animal and the grossly material.” _Cf._ _Annual for Sexual
Intermediate Stages_, 1905, vol. vii., p. 127.
[582] Especially instructive is his correspondence with Christian Otto
(_cf._ “Jean Paul’s Correspondence with his Wife and with Christian
Otto,” edited by Paul Nerrlich; Berlin, 1902). For example, he writes
once to this friend: “Ah, my friend, if I could only once more clasp
your form to my breast.” _Cf._ also the interesting remarks on the
peculiarly intimate masculine friendship of this period given in the
last (eighth) volume of the “German History” of Karl Lamprecht
(Freiburg, 1906).
[583] F. G. Welcker, “The Odes of Sappho,” published in the
_Rheinisches Museum für Philologie_, 1856, vol. xi., p. 237.
[584] I reproduce this passage in the eighth volume of _The Annual for
Sexual Intermediate Stages_, pp. 609, 610.
[585] L. Blumreich, “Diseases of Women, including Sterility,” being
chapter xx. of Senator and Kaminer’s “Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage and the Married State,” published by Rebman Limited
(London, 1906).
[586] Franz Neugebauer, “Seventeen Cases of the Coincidence of Mental
Anomalies with Pseudo-Hermaphroditism, selected from a Collection of
Seven Hundred and Thirteen Observations of Pseudo-Hermaphroditism,”
published in _The Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_, 1902, vol.
ii., pp. 224-253; same author, “Interesting Observations in the
Department of Pseudo-Hermaphroditism,” _op. cit._, 1902, vol. iv., pp.
1-176; same author, “Surgical Surprises in the Domain of
Pseudo-Hermaphroditism, containing One Hundred and Thirty-four
Observations of Cases, with Fifty-four Instances of Erroneous
Determination of Sex, in most Cases proved by the Scalpel,” _op.
cit._, 1903, vol. v., pp. 205-424; same author, “One Hundred and Three
Observations of more or less marked Development of a Uterus in the
Male (_pseudohermaphroditismus masculinus internus_), in addition to a
Compilation of Observations of Regular Periodic Bleeding from the
Genital Organs, Menstruation, Vicarious Menstruation,
Pseudo-Menstruation, Molimina Menstrualia, etc., in
Pseudo-Hermaphrodites,” _op. cit._, 1904, vol. vi., pp. 215-326; same
author, “Compend of the Literature of Hermaphroditism in Human
Beings,” _op. cit._, 1905, vol. vii., pp. 471-670, and 1906, vol.
viii., pp. 685-700.
[587] Magnus Hirschfeld, “Sexual Links: Intermixture of Masculine and
Feminine Sexual Characters (Sexual Intermediate Stages),” Leipzig,
1905.
CHAPTER XXI
ALGOLAGNIA (SADISM AND MASOCHISM)
“_We must continually keep before our minds the fact that in no other
department of life so much as in the sexual life do we find side by
side, and closely associated each with the other, the noblest and the
basest, the superhuman and the subhuman, because the finest and the
deepest roots of our spiritual and bodily existence spring, for the
most part, from this subsoil; and we must remember that man would not
be able to sink so deep, far beneath the level of animality, if he had
not first raised himself by his own powers, in conflict with Nature
and with himself, through an immeasurable height of
civilization._”--ALBERT EULENBURG.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXI
Algolagnia, or painful voluptuousness -- Biological roots of
algolagnia -- Its rôle in the civilized life of mankind -- Connexion
between pain and voluptuousness -- Pain in the _vita sexualis_ --
Sadism and masochism -- Physiological algonagnistic phenomena -- The
sexual enjoyment of spiritual pain -- Philosophical views on this
subject -- Weltschmerz and pessimism as sources of pleasure -- The joy
of grief -- Cruelty as intermediator in the production of algolagnia
-- Theories of cruelty -- The enjoyment of power -- Nietzsche’s
justification of cruelty as a factor in civilization -- Sadistic and
masochistic phenomena of civilization -- Examples from the present day
-- Increase of sexual desire by means of emotional concussion --
Evolutionary theory of algolagnia -- Cruelty of woman -- Debauchees
and prostitutes -- “Tropical frenzy” as an especial form of sadism --
Various explanations of tropical frenzy -- Influence of sexual
differences between man and woman -- Genesis of the “hen-pecked” state
and of “mistress-rule” -- Coquetry and flirtation -- Frequent
association with sadism and masochism -- Flagellation as the principal
form of algolagnia -- Imitation of physiological algolagnia --
Exciting influence of massage and friction -- Various factors of the
sexual influence of passive flagellation -- Active flagellation --
Chance occurrences leading to the development of flagellomania --
Sexual influence of whipping upon children -- Examples --
“Schoolmaster’s flagellantism” (Dippoldism) -- Examples --
Flagellation and prostitution -- Flagellation brothels -- Inclination
of woman to flagellation -- A Parisian “school” -- “Corset discipline”
-- Sadistic bodily injuries and lust-murder -- Characteristics of
lust-murder -- “Girl stabbers” -- Other forms of sadistic bodily
injury -- Sexual vampirism -- Offences against property committed from
sadistic motives -- Vitriol throwing -- Sadistic arson -- Sexual
kleptomania -- Symbolic forms of sadism -- Verbal sadism -- Erotic
dictionaries -- Verbal exhibitionism -- Example -- Other varieties of
symbolical algolagnia -- Satanism -- Wide diffusion of passive
algolagnia, of masochism -- Passive algolagnia -- Examples --
Masochistic instrumentarium -- A masochistic “torture-chamber” --
Masochistic prostitution -- Letter of a masochist -- A “slave” --
Characterization of male masochists -- A very typical case of
masochism -- Masochism in women -- Letter of a female masochist.
_Appendix_: A contribution to the psychology of the Russian revolution
(History of the development of an algolagnistic revolutionist).
CHAPTER XXI
The homosexual and pseudo-homosexual phenomena described in the
preceding chapters constitute a far from universal variety of sexual
impulse, but “=algolagnia=” is much commoner. This name was introduced
by Schrenck-Notzing as a general term for the phenomena of =sadism= and
=masochism=, since these two sexual aberrations are closely related one
to the other.
Algolagnia, or painful lasciviousness, if we exclude from consideration
its most extreme manifestations, such as lust-murder and suicide from
lust, belongs unquestionably to the most widely diffused of sexual
aberrations; indeed, in its slighter forms it is almost universal. An
experienced woman told Havelock Ellis[588] that she had known only one
single man who was entirely free from sadistic lust; and, on the other
hand, there are few women in whose sexuality no algolagnistic phenomena
are demonstrable. This is natural, for algolagnia, differing in this
respect from other sexual aberrations, has the =deepest biological
roots=. Its nucleus, =pleasure in the pain of others or in one’s own
pain= (the term “pain” being here used in the very widest significance,
both physical and mental), is an elementary phenomenon of amatory
activity. “Love is in its very nature pain,” we read in the “Divan” of
the Persian poet Rûmi. It is certain that we have here to do with an
anthropological phenomenon, one that is normal within wide limits.
Algolagnia plays the greatest rôle in the individual life of single
human beings and in the civilized life of humanity at large. It enables
us to get a view into the hidden depths of the human spirit, and
displays to us the remarkable phenomenon of the association of primeval
animal instincts with the highest spirituality. It at the same time
debases love, and renders it more profound, and it touches the most
secret aspects of our nature.
“Der Schmerz beseelt
Und er entfesselt nied’re Triebe,
Die sonst dem Menschenherz gefehlt....
Der Schmerz betäubt--er kann beglücken,
Im Schmerz liegt ein geheimes Fleh’n;
Er lässt mit feurigem Berücken
Ein frevelhaftes Bild ersteh’n,”
[“Pain animates
And unchains lower impulses,
Which had otherwise been absent from the human heart....
Pain benumbs--but may also give happiness,
For in pain is hidden a secret prayer;
With an ardent charm
It gives rise to a wanton idea”]
sings Joseph Lauff in his “Geisslerin” (Cologne, 1901). Is there any
pleasure without pain? is there any love without sorrow? He who is
familiar with the history of civilization will answer these questions in
the negative. Pain is a civilizing factor of the first rank; it is the
necessary pre-condition and the inevitable accompaniment of pleasure and
the affirmation of life. This is the central idea of the philosophy of
Nietzsche. The pain of love is only a special case of the great
immeasurable _Weltschmerz_ and _Weltlust_ (world-pain and world-joy),
which move us so deeply in the powerful descriptions of Schopenhauer,
and have always been the most lofty objects of contemplation to
philosophers and to students of civilization.[589]
That love-pleasure and love-pain, the forces of creation and
destruction--yes, indeed, that love and death (which Leopardi in a
wonderful poem celebrated as twin brothers)--are separated only by a
“thin veil” (Havelock Ellis), was an idea first expressed in the
celebrated work of the formidable Marquis de Sade,[590] whose books,
taken as a whole, are merely a paraphrase of the idea of the connexion
between pain and voluptuousness; and, moreover, de Sade does not
recognize this connexion only in active algolagnia--that is, in the
=infliction of pain=, the voluptuousness of cruelty, the so-called
“sadism”--but he recognizes it equally in passive algolagnia, in the
=suffering of pain=, the voluptuousness of being tortured, in the state
named after the author Sacher-Masoch, “masochism.” De Sade, who was the
first consistent advocate of the anthropologico-ethnological theory of
psychopathia sexualis, himself collected almost all the facts regarding
the biological roots of painful lasciviousness, and regarding
algolagnistic phenomena in ethnology and in the history of civilization.
The foundation for the understanding of active and passive algolagnia is
constituted by the fact that we have here, in the first place, to do
with a =purely biological= phenomenon, which makes its appearance in
every normal love. The sexual act exhibits to us pain and pleasure in an
indissoluble association. Love’s embrace is a “sweet pain,” a painful
pleasure.[591]
The nature of the sense of voluptuousness is still rather obscure, but
it is certain that painful sensations make their appearance as its
accompaniment, probably indeed as an actual part of voluptuousness. I
may remind the reader of the interesting remarks of Edmund Forster,
mentioned on p. 44, regarding the conception of sexual tension as a
stimulation of the pain-perceiving nerves of the genital organs. Still
more clearly is pain reflected (pain both active and passive) in the
love-embrace itself, in the phenomena[592] which we previously (pp.
50-51) described, such as fierce embraces, convulsive seizures, grinding
of the teeth, screaming and biting, both on the part of the man and on
the part of the woman. Lucretius (“De Rerum Natura,” iv., verses
1054-1061) gave a vivid description of the normal sadistic and
masochistic accompaniments of coitus. In this association sadism
certainly predominates on the part of the man, though not exclusively;
and, contrariwise, masochism predominates, though not exclusively, on
the part of the woman. The sadistic “love-bites,” for example, are more
frequently given by the woman, especially among savage races,[593] but
among the Slavonic peoples it is the man rather who practises the
“biting-kiss” during the sexual act.[594]
“Es brausen mir wie Wirbelwind
Im Busen namenlose Triebe:
Ich möchte dich beissen, einzig Kind,
Du süsse Frucht, vor Lust and Liebe,”
[“Nameless impulses are raging
Like a whirlwind in my breast:
I should like to bite you, little one,
Sweet little fruit, to bite you from desire and love”]
writes Karl Beck in his “Stille Lieder.”
How closely these phenomena are connected with the ideas of =blood= and
=cruelty=, and how this connexion is favoured by the redness and the
flow of blood during sexual excitement, are matters previously discussed
(p. 51); and in my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis” (vol. ii., pp. 39-41) I have considered the question at
greater length. In the same category must also be placed the sexually
stimulating influence of red colours.
In association with these algolagnistic manifestations, so long as they
remain within physiological bounds, we do not so much see =actual=
physical pain, the actual infliction of suffering or cruelty, as the
=idea= thereof, as mental pain; indeed, actual pain is often not
lustful, as such, but only in idea. Eulenburg,[595] especially, has
rightly drawn attention to this mental intensification of algolagnia.
Mental pain and tears give a wonderful depth to love, increase passion,
as Goethe describes in his “Stella.” Love needs pain, in order to be
perceived as love. Why? Because pain is something new, a contrast to
pleasure, whose eternity would be unbearable. This is described very
clearly in the “Letters of Ninon de L’Enclos,” which, though apocryphal,
are not less psychologically interesting (German edition, pp. 220, 221;
Berlin, 1906).
“Change in the spiritual state is important to the happiness of both
the lovers. And what could better provide this advantage than a
separation? Have you never experienced the sweetness of a tender
separation? The disquiet, the commiseration, the tears which accompany
the departing lover, are they not something most valuable to a
delicate, sensitive soul? Commonly, lovers regard separation for a few
days as an evil. But if they examined the nature of their reputed pain
a little more closely, they would soon perceive that this pain does
not make a purely disagreeable impression on the soul; on the
contrary, an entrancing joy lies hidden therein. The pain enfolds a
delightful charm; and we learn that the heart, however much it may be
moved with sympathy, always finds itself in an agreeable mood as soon
as it is able to exercise its sensibility.”
Similarly, G. H. Schneider remarks (_op. cit._, pp. 126, 127), that in
all love relationships there arises a need for becoming aware of
“the contrast between the pain and the ecstasy of love, by
misunderstandings, by transient mental torment, by momentary jealousy
on the part of the woman, or by sportive or earnest threats; and this
need is gratified instinctively by man, because he feels instinctively
that love without it disappears or will disappear.”
He explains this necessity for pain and sorrow in love as dependent upon
a degree of exhaustion, a fatigue of the nerve-centres concerned, which
demand a period of repose. In the ancestors of the human race, and in
the lower animals, this repose was obtained by the =alternation= of
quite opposite feelings, such as love and hate; thus the occasional
stimulation of those centres also by which pain is perceived is a
physiological necessity for the nervous system.
Nothing, in fact, is harder to bear than a succession of beautiful days;
this is true even of love. Why is it that the very best, unalterably
tender wives or husbands are so frequently deceived? Certainly it is
because they often forget that with the sweetness of love it is
necessary to intermingle a little bitterness, and so to allow their
partner now and again to experience the “joy of grief.”
“Frau Venus, meine schöne Frau,
Von sussem Wein und Küssen
Ist meine Seele worden krank,
Ich schmachte nach Bitternissen.”
HEINRICH HEINE.
[“Madame Venus, beautiful lady,
Of sweet wine and kisses
I am sick unto death--
I yearn for a taste of bitterness.”]
Mental pain as a general sociological, literary, and philosophical
phenomenon, manifests itself as =Weltschmerz= and =pessimism=. Both
modes of perception conceal intense feelings of pleasure. Schopenhauer,
who was well aware of this fact, remarks (“Works,” ed. Grisebach, i.,
508) that the recognition of the sorrows of existence, of the misery
which extends itself over the whole of life, is accompanied by a =secret
joy=, which by the “most melancholy” of all nations was termed the “joy
of grief.” Admirably also has Kuno Fischer, in his account of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, described the pleasure to be found in the
pessimistic mode of perception; and O. Zimmermann has written an
interesting psychological work upon the “Joy of Grief” (second edition;
Leipzig, 1885).
The pleasure anyone experiences in his own pain, or in that of another,
constitutes the =nucleus= of all algolagnistic phenomena, and to
=cruelty= as an intermediator in this painful lasciviousness there
belongs only a secondary rôle. The deeply-rooted instinct of cruelty,
which first manifests itself in early childhood, is biologically
associated with the perception of pain. Various theories of cruelty have
been propounded. Thus, according to Schopenhauer, cruelty gives rise to
pain in another, in order to diminish its own pain; and, according to
this view, it is only a means of treatment for the relief of one’s own
pain. More illuminating is the explanation of the English psychologist
Bain, who derives cruelty from the consciousness of power and the
enjoyment of power, from the delight felt in dominating the tortured
individual. Nietzsche is the most celebrated apostle of this diffusion
of power, this enjoyment of power in the “superman,” and by means of the
“masterful morality.” He formally does homage to cruelty as a means of
advancing towards higher civilization.
“Almost everything,” he says, “which we call higher civilization
depends upon the spiritualization and deepening of =cruelty=.... That
which constitutes the painful pleasure of comedy is cruelty; that
which is agreeable to our senses in the so-called tragic
sympathy--fundamentally, indeed, whatever is pleasurable to us up to
the most intense and delicate metaphysical horror--obtains its
sweetness only from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty. That which
the Romans enjoyed in the arena, that which Christ enjoyed in the
Passion of the Cross, the Spaniards regarding an _auto-da-fe_ or a
bull-fight, the Japanese of to-day, with his love for the tragic, the
Parisian workman who has a passion for sanguinary revolutions, the
Wagnerian rejoicing in the spectacle of Tristan and Isolde--all alike
enjoy, all alike are suffused with secret ardour as they drain the
Circe’s cup of ‘cruelty.’
“We must therefore,” he continues with justice, “for ever deny the
absurd psychology which attempted to teach regarding cruelty that it
arose only from the view of =another’s= pain! There exists an
abundant--over-abundant--joy also in one’s own pain, in making one’s
own self suffer; and whenever man persuades himself--it may be only to
self-denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation like the
Phœnicians and the ascetics, to self-torment in religion, to the
puritanic convulsive penitence, to the vivisection of conscience, and
to Pascal’s sacrifice of the intellect--in all these alike he is lured
onwards and impelled forwards by his cruelty alone, by that dangerous
emotion of cruelty =directed against himself=.”
With a few brilliant words Nietzsche thus describes the principal
phenomena of algolagnia. Ethnology and the history of the world offer us
in equal measure numerous interesting proofs of the primitive tendency
of human nature to sadistic and masochistic manifestations. We must
learn to recognize the diffusion throughout the entire world of active
and passive algolagnia, making its appearance in the most diverse forms,
in order to understand many occurrences of the present day. In my
“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis” (vol. ii., pp.
43-75, 95, 96, 109-113, 120-157, 228-240) I have collected these
anthropological and ethnological data, regarding the universal diffusion
of algolagnia in all epochs and in all countries; and I have referred
to the occurrence of sadism and masochism as affecting mankind =in the
mass=, a fact of particular importance in this connexion. To give some
examples: Campaigns, gladiatorial combats, man-hunts, beast-baiting,
bull-fights,[596] sensational dramas, public executions, inquisition and
witch trials, lynch-law as practised to-day in North America,[597] in
the behaviour of the crowd of onlookers at the former punishment of the
pillory, especially also in revolutions, of which to-day once more we
have the most horrible examples in Russia (_cf._ also the appendix to
this chapter), in the primeval custom of marriage by capture, in
cannibalism, the belief in witches and werwolves, in slavery,
flagellantism, and the scourgers of the middle ages, the horrible
“satanism” of the same period, gynecocracy or the dominion of woman, the
service of women of the Minne epoch, the Italian _cicisbeato_, and the
Slavonic sexual slavery of men, asceticism and martyrdom, the
ethnological diffusion of skatological, koprological, and urolagnistic
practices, etc. These facts suffice to prove that in all times, and
among all nations, sadism and masochism, in all the forms we still
observe to-day, were most widely diffused; and to show that they arise
from certain instincts deeply rooted in the soul of the people, whose
existence =even to-day= manifests itself everywhere. Take, for example,
the following extract from the _Vossische Zeitung_, No. 475, October 10,
1906:
“A great automobile race which took place in Long Island at the
beginning of the month presented certain features reminding us of the
old gladiatorial games. Three men were killed during the race, a woman
and a boy were so seriously injured that at the time of writing they
are at the point of death, and from twenty to thirty persons suffered
fractures and other grave injuries. From all parts of the United
States as many as half a million persons had assembled to see the
races. At the very outset the huge crowd was in a state of hysterical
excitement. The Automobile Club had taken the utmost care in its
preparations for the safety of the course, and had shut it off on both
sides by a net 8 feet in height. This protecting wall was, however,
torn down by the crowd, which pressed in everywhere, especially at
those places which the cars were to pass at their highest speed.
Notwithstanding all the warnings of the police, those in search of
sensation only tried to get out of the way when the cars were close
upon them. At a turning in the course there were assembled 1,000
persons belonging to the best circles of New York society. Every time
when, at this dangerous point, one of the cars had an accident, these
people rushed forwards, in order to see as closely as possible what
was going on; the women screamed and fainted from excitement, while
the police bludgeoned the people blindly, in order to make room for
the following cars, and in order to prevent worse evils. =The
spectators were as if mad with the desire to see blood.= A lady who
was pressing forward with the crowd, when one of the cars had upset,
expressed her disappointment plainly, ‘=Oh dear, there is no one
killed!=’”
In an essay entitled “Russia as It Now Is,” regarding the Russian
punitive expeditions against the revolutionaries, the St. Petersburg
correspondent of a German paper reports:
“These expeditions have long forgotten the political purpose of their
‘mission’; they murder simply =out of congenital lust to murder=,
=from racial love of blood=, =from plainly perceptible morbid
perversity=. The shooting of boys, the flogging of women, without
mentioning the still worse ‘punishments’ =which we cannot even
venture= to =describe=, which take place in the presence of, or with
the actual assistance of, the greater and lesser provincial satraps,
and regarding which I have collected extensive material--all produced
in me, who have been a student of criminal psychology, very remarkable
reflections.”
In these cases, no doubt, the principal cause of the actions in which
cruelty becomes pleasurable is the =powerful emotional disturbance=, the
violent excitement, which, again, increases sexual desire. De Sade
himself was familiar with the fact that excitement produced by strong
emotions had a powerful influence upon sexual processes; that it
increased them, changed them, and led to abnormal manifestations. “All
sensations increase one another mutually.” Anger, fear, rage, hatred,
cruelty, increase sexual tension, and therewith also increase the
pleasure of the discharge of that tension. Bouillier[598] drew attention
to the fact that frequently in men, who otherwise have exhibited in
their life very genial and sympathetic natures, it is not the desire of
blood and suffering in itself which evokes sexual cruelty, but it is the
desire for this associated increase in emotions. Similarly, Horwicz[599]
explains the joy of martyrdom also as dependent upon the powerful sexual
stimulation which it produces.
A peculiar form of sexual excitement associated with emotional
disturbance has been described by Charles Féré, under the name of
=ergophilia= (“Note sur une Anomalie de l’Instinct Sexuel: Ergophilie,”
published in _Belgique Médicale_, 1905). The case was that of a woman,
twenty-six years of age, who when a child of four had first experienced
sexual excitement at a fair while watching a little girl juggler of her
own age playing with three balls. Subsequently every time when this
scene occurred to her memory she had a sexual orgasm; also when once at
a circus she was watching some gymnasts whose performance was
characterized by elegance and ease, she had the same experience. The
same also occurred when she saw a man use a scythe. In a frigid marriage
she always returned to these imaginations, as the only means of
obtaining sexual gratification. Féré is right in distinguishing from
sadism this form of sexual excitement induced by the view of elegant
bodily exercises. The =generally= exciting view of movement had in this
case a =special= exciting influence upon the genital organs of an
obviously hysterical person. Perhaps also the case reported by Amrain
(_Anthropophyteia_, vol. iv., p. 242) is similar to this--a case in
which a man fifty-three years of age was sexually excited by the
spinning round of prostitutes on rapidly rotating stools.
Helvetius, Bain, Lully, James, Herbert Spencer, Steinmetz, and many
other psychologists and anthropologists, have endeavoured to explain on
=evolutionary= grounds this intimate association between the emotions,
and to establish an association between cruelty and sexuality. They
suggest that the gratification of sexual needs is for the individual a
love-battle, involving the sacrifice of numerous opponents in order to
gain the favour of the beloved being. =In this way there arose an
association between the shedding of blood and sexual enjoyment=; and the
rage of battle, as Marro very rightly insists, may sometimes be suddenly
transferred from the rival to the female herself, and thus assume a
sadistic character. Definite traces of this connexion may still be
observed among the popular customs of many nations, as, for example, in
New Caledonia, where the girls are pursued by their lovers into the
bush, and, after they have been overpowered, and after sexual
intercourse has taken place, “they are brought back, bitten, bruised,
scratched, covered with bites on the shoulders and the back of the
neck.”
I regard the emotional theory of cruelty as the best, because it
provides the easiest explanation of all the facts; and above all,
because it also explains the frequently observed cruelty of =woman=,
who, as the =more easily excited= creature, displays a higher, more
artificial kind of cruelty than man, whose balance is not so easily
disturbed by his emotions. Montaigne[600] makes the acute observation
that cruelty is usually accompanied by a feminine softness. Havelock
Ellis[601] also remarks that the most extreme, most elaborate degree of
sadism is commonly associated with a somewhat feminine organization.
We might explain the cruelty of women, and that of enervated, effeminate
voluptuaries from fear and cowardice, from the debasing consciousness of
the weakness of their own personality, which by means of cruelty takes
=revenge= on the strength of another, and transiently luxuriates in the
associated intoxication of power, in the mere =idea= of superiority. It
is certainly in this way that we must explain the horrible cruelty of
worn-out debauchees, such as is described by de Sade in his romances.
Such types also were Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Heliogabalus,
and Cæsar Borgia; among women, Catherine de Medici and those “delicate
Creole women who, after enjoying voluptuous pleasure in intercourse with
a negro slave, proceed to enjoy the further pleasure of seeing the man
unmercifully flogged.”[602]
In addition, =the blunting of the senses= which results from
long-continued sexual excesses demands the stronger stimulus of cruelty.
Just as in the debauchee, so also in the prostitute, this blunting of
the senses induces a predisposition to sadism. Many prostitutes and
masseuses become sadists quite as much from inclination as from custom
(the latter from intercourse with masochistic clients); and they find
sexual pleasure in tormenting men, regarding themselves as incorporate
ideals of “mistresses.”
Among Europeans, =residence in hot climates= gives rise to a peculiar
form of tropical cruelty, the so-called “=tropical frenzy=.” The
psychology of this condition is complex. Various predisposing causes
must concur in order to produce tropical frenzy. In the first place, it
occurs almost exclusively in Europeans who fill official positions
giving them =very extensive powers=, such as they did not enjoy before
leaving home. Those who become affected live usually in regions in which
all the limitations of conventional morality and of social relationships
with their fellow-countrymen are laid aside, so that the civilized man
is in a position which enables him to follow without restraint his own
inward impulses; also he finds himself in contact with an “inferior”
race, which he regards and treats as half or completely animal.[603] The
influence of climate is also of great importance, as Hans von Becker
assumes. Owing, it may be, to the intense heat, disturbances of
metabolism ensue, and by the formation of toxins, the central nervous
system and the psyche are injured, and thus there is induced a “tropical
moral insanity,” a morbid impulsiveness, associated with complete loss
of understanding of ordinary ethical and moral principles. Or, again, it
is possible that, as Plehn believes, the abnormally high temperature
gives rise to acute outbreaks only in chronic alcoholists, taking the
form of tropical frenzy. In any case, this disorder is with especial
frequency characterized by marked sadistic practices, as is proved by
the colonial scandals of every country. In connexion with this, we do
not need any further demonstration of the manner in which the
institutions of =slavery= and =serfdom= have always induced and
furthered sadistic instincts, and, speaking generally, the same is true
of all relationships by which isolated individuals are given
uncontrolled powers over the bodies and lives of their fellow-men.
A chief cause of algolagnia, of active algolagnia, but more especially
of the passive form, is to be found in the =diverse sexual demeanour of
man and woman= respectively, and this, again, depends upon the
difference between the masculine and feminine natures. Opposed to the
stormy, eager activity of the man, we have the quiet passivity of the
woman. The latter has aptly been compared to a magnet which,
notwithstanding its own apparent immobility, still irresistibly attracts
and holds fast the iron (the man), making the latter in a sense her
slave; upon this passivity depends the unmistakable superiority of woman
in =purely sensual= love. Physical nature alone gives her an advantage
over man, just precisely in the point to which she outwardly appears
subordinated to him. Thus, among the Indians of Central Brazil man is
officially lord and master of woman--and does what she wills.[604] Thus
it has always been in the highest grades of civilization also, wherever
sensual relationships have been solely effective in determining the
relative positions of men and women. The true “=henpecked husband=” (I
say “true,” because there also exist such in appearance only) of our
European civilization is the man who, from the beginning, has been
subjected to the domination of his wife in consequence of his own
immoderate sexual needs; by these needs he has been permanently placed
under her control, and this control has secondarily been extended to
other relationships. This is the psychological secret of the henpecked
state, just as it is also of the “=mistress rule=,” which, beginning as
a purely sexual relationship between king or prince on the one hand and
his mistress on the other, later extends also to the domain of political
activity. The greater the sexual passivity and coldness of the woman,
the more readily does she gain dominion over the man. A favourite means
for this purpose is the practice of “=coquetry=” (a matter previously
discussed), which can also be defined as the activity of women in
fettering men to themselves and in bringing them under feminine
dominion. The Anglo-Saxon “=flirt=” is only a lighter shade of
“coquette,” representing rather spiritual-æsthetic coquetry, whilst the
true coquette makes use of purely =sensual= means, and speculates upon
sex only, without reference to the intellectual qualities. “A truly
coquettish woman listens with pleasure to the rankest flattery of the
most insignificant individual; she takes the trouble to stimulate the
desires of the most contemptible being, although she is daily surrounded
by longing admirers.”[605] Joseph Peladan relates in one of his romances
how a distinguished lady, while getting into her carriage, intentionally
displayed her leg to a poor man standing by, although at the very same
moment she was coquetting audaciously with a gentleman of her own rank.
Woman instinctively aims at the subjection of man, and voluptuous
stimulation serves her as the best-tried means of doing this. In so far
as man becomes the “slave” and victim of his sensuality, does he exhibit
a masochistic disposition; but, in so far as by his force and his
intelligence he overcomes this sexual dependency, and by means of his
natural activity and energy displayed also in sexual relationships,
behaves heedlessly and brutally to the woman, who has now become
completely passive, does the sadistic element preponderate in him. From
this we are able to understand how it is that sadism and masochism may
often appear in the same person; they are only the active and the
passive form respectively of the algolagnia which lies at the basis of
both of them, and in which the true essence of both these phenomena
subsists.
When in the following paragraphs we briefly describe the individual
phenomena and types of sadism and masochism, we do this always with the
tacit implication that the majority of types are not pure forms either
of sadism or masochism, but represent a mixture of both. This is
especially true of the most widely diffused of all algolagnistic
perversions, the so-called =flagellomania= (=sexual desire for
flagellation or flagellantism=)--that is to say, =flogging and
whipping, or being flogged and whipped in order to induce sexual
excitement=. An elaborately critical account of sexual flagellantism in
its physiological, psychological, literary, and historical relationships
is to be found in the second volume of my work on “The Sexual Life in
England,” pp. 336-481 (Berlin, 1903). In this passage there is a fairly
complete collection, alike of the older and of the newer literary
material devoted to this topic.[606]
Flagellation is, therefore, the principal means by which sadistic
tendencies become active, because in this manner all the physiological
sadistic accompaniments of sexual intercourse unite, and make their
appearance with a stronger potentiality. It is an imitation and a
conscious synthesis of these sadistic accompaniments, which in their
most primitive form are to be seen in the lower animals. Especially in
the case of tritons and salamanders we can observe a typical
flagellation, effected by means of the tail, prior to coitus. The
voluptuous gratification during flagellation varies in character
according as the flagellation is active or passive. The nature of the
latter is as follows: by vigorous friction and blows, especially in the
region of the genital organs, and more particularly on the buttocks, a
peculiarly increased voluptuous stimulus is induced by the painful
sensations. Simple =massage= and =friction= of the skin suffices to
produce such an effect, especially after warm baths, as has long been
known in the East, and is employed in the so-called “Turkish baths.”
More especially, the rubbing of the buttocks evokes a =purely physical
reflex stimulation= of the spinal and sympathetic =ejaculatory centre=;
still more rapidly is this produced by flogging and whipping of these
parts (the so-called “lower discipline”). The painful sensations are
said ultimately to undergo complete transformation into voluptuous
sensations; unquestionably the =imagination= must here render much
assistance, and the masochistic element is especially marked in those
who undergo passive flagellation. The increased flow of blood to the
genital organs, to which the flagellation necessarily gives rise, must
also obviously play a part in evoking and strengthening the voluptuous
sensation. Simultaneously also this congestion gives rise to erection of
the penis; hence the very ancient employment of flagellation to relieve
impotence, alluded to by Petronius in a celebrated passage of his
“Satyricon.”
In the case of active flagellation, the voluptuous stimulation is mainly
of a sadistic nature; the view of the parts quivering under the lash,
becoming red or even bleeding, the cries of the person who is being
whipped, the erotic influence of the kallipygian charms, here play the
principal rôle.
The inclination to flagellation, both passive and active, is generally
aroused =by some chance occurrence=, such as looking at a flogging, when
the spectator finds himself to be in a state of sexual excitement and
recognizes its cause--as, for example, in consequence of the official
and ritual practice of flogging in schools, prisons,[607] barracks,
monasteries, etc., also by whipping and giving blows in social games.
Especially dangerous is the whipping of =children=, whose sexual impulse
is only too often aroused by blows upon the buttocks, and then,
unconsciously, this excitement is in their minds permanently endowed
with a causal connexion with whipping, from which ultimately a
perversion (flagellomania) is induced. Well known is Rousseau’s
description of this connexion in his “Confessions.” I append the
following description by a patient of this tendency to flagellation:
“In a similar way to that which you describe, flagellantism was
unfortunately awakened in me in early youth. This was first developed
in me by the fact that my parents allowed the maidservants to exercise
a far-reaching right of chastisement. When I was fourteen years old, I
still received whippings from the servants, with my father’s knowledge
and consent; and these whippings, since my father had forbidden any
other kind of chastisement as harmful to health, took place on the
buttocks, and were always effected after this region of the body had
been bared. I still remember most vividly that when I was at the age
mentioned a maidservant who was hardly two years older than myself
switched me in this region with especial zeal. I remember also that
when I was in my ninth year, owing to the free use which the
maidservants commonly made of their privilege, I had entirely ceased
to dread this chastisement; indeed from that time I often
intentionally incurred a whipping by the maids, which was not
difficult; and from the age of fourteen years I personally gave the
maidservants my permission to chastise me in the above manner without
the knowledge of my parents, and was always thrown by it into a state
of sexual excitement. Such excitement was also produced in me by
merely witnessing the chastisement of my two sisters, who were
somewhat younger than myself, both of whom were still beaten with a
switch when they were fifteen years of age. As regards my two sisters,
this did not lead to desire on their part that this procedure, which
was always disagreeable to them, should be frequently repeated, but
they were always glad to see me whipped; and, as a matter of fact, my
own sensation of pleasure was greatly increased by their being
present, and moreover, especially in later years, I always enjoyed it
more if the maidservant whipped me in the presence of her friends or
if one of them let me hold her hand during the process. I especially
preferred being struck with the bare hands, although occasionally I
endured severe whippings with the stick or with the dog-whip at my own
special request.”
In a second case which came under my own observation, the person
affected being a lawyer, then twenty-eight years of age, the cause of
the development of his flagellomania was different and more indirect.
At the age of eleven or twelve years he was lying on the top of a
dog-kennel and masturbating, and he had tied his feet to the top of
the kennel, lest, when in a state of sexual excitement, he might fall
off. Since then he had always felt an impulse to have himself tied,
which he sought to satisfy in boyish games (robbers, police, etc.);
this always induced in him agreeable sexual feelings, which were
further increased by onanistic friction. At the age of fifteen there
became associated with this desire to be tied a further need to be
whipped while he was tied up. This patient has a disinclination to
normal coitus and to the female genital organs, but he desires to
receive flagellation only from women. Two successive attempts at
normal sexual intercourse were unsuccessful. The patient induced in a
maidservant the inclination to passive and active flagellation, and
this woman, although she resisted at first, was subsequently, six
months later, a passionate flagellant. In other respects the patient
is thoroughly healthy, and has been through his one-year term of
military service in the cavalry.
With regard to the origin of “=schoolmaster’s sadism=,” which is,
unfortunately, very widely diffused, the well-known case of the
schoolmaster Dippold recently gave a horrible example.[608]
The teacher or schoolmaster may, at the commencement of his activity, be
entirely free from any flagellantic tendency. This tendency makes its
appearance in the course of the customary exercise of his duties of
physical chastisement. This gradually induces in him a sense of sexual
pleasure. As long as these chastisements are kept within normal bounds,
and only occasionally undertaken, we have to do merely with a tendency,
with an aberration of sexual gratification, such as occurs in numerous
healthy individuals, even when they are not teachers or schoolmasters,
persons who seek and find an opportunity for the exercise of these
tendencies in the brothel or with “masseuses.” When, however, a
systematic flagellomania develops, and the person affected no longer
merely chastises, but maltreats and tortures, and does this habitually
and with bestial cruelty, as in Dippold’s case, we certainly have always
to do with sadism developed in the soil of a morbid predisposition. The
following cases appear to be of this nature:
1. A case which reminds us of that of Dippold recently appeared before
the Second Criminal Chamber in Hamburg. The accused was a man
belonging to the cultured classes, who had had a University education,
had become a reserve officer, and had filled many other positions,
finally that of the editor of a journal published by an advertising
firm. The accused lived in Berlin in the years 1900 to 1903. There he
formed an intimacy with a woman, whom he induced to entrust him with
her son, for the continuance of his education. Going himself to live
in Hamburg in July, 1903, the boy was sent to him in that town in
January, 1904, and was placed in a boarding school. “In order not to
be disturbed in his teaching,” the man also rented a room in the
neighbourhood of the school. When engaging this room he asked the
landlady if there were curtains to cover the windows. On the first day
on which she visited the room the landlady noticed that the accused
flogged the boy, and as she did not wish to allow this in her
dwelling, she reported the matter to the police. After some time the
woman learned by questioning the boy certain remarkable facts,
especially with regard to the “educational methods” which the accused
had carried out in Berlin, and in her report to the police she added
certain details, which led to the arrest of the accused. The accused
admitted that he had caned the boy severely, and he declared that he
had done this only for educational reasons, as the boy was of a bad
character. In this respect the statement of the accused was confuted
by the evidence of the boy’s teacher in Berlin, that of his teacher in
Hamburg, and that of the inmates of the pension in which he lived; all
of these gave him a very good character. With respect to the mode of
chastisement, the details of which were heard _in camera_, the court
held that there was no doubt that the accused had chastised the boy,
not for educational reasons, but on account of perverse tendencies of
his own, and condemned him to imprisonment for one year and loss of
civil rights for two years. It is a noteworthy fact that the accused,
during the latter part of this period of association with the boy, had
lived in a happy marriage with a young woman.
2. A disciple of Dippold. The following remarkable case was published
in the _Berliner Tageblatt_, No. 629, December 11, 1903: A
furniture-polisher of this town accosted boys whom he met in the
street, gave them some trifling commission, and so arranged matters
with them that they must ultimately return to him at his room. Here he
gave himself out to be a detective officer, showed the boy a token
which he pretended was his official commission, and then gave the boy
a severe lecture. “He regretted,” he said in conclusion, that, owing
to the misconduct of the lad, it would be necessary to fine his
parents, unless the offences were condoned by the immediate
chastisement of the boy. The “detective” easily persuaded his victims
that it would be better to accept the immediate flogging. After he had
stretched his victim across his knees and beaten him with a stick, he
looked to see that the blows had not made too obvious marks, and sent
the lad away with a further brief admonition. In most instances the
boys who had been whipped concealed what had happened from their
parents; but still the matter came to light, and this new Dippold is
to be tried for causing grievous bodily harm, and for the false
pretence that he occupied an official position. The accused is a young
man, twenty-five years of age, and, with his small and slender figure
and with a blonde moustache, he makes rather the impression of a young
man of eighteen.
Very frequently the tendency to flagellation is at first artificially
evoked in brothels. Hogarth, in his “A Harlot’s Progress,” has rightly
depicted the switch as a necessary requisite of the interior of a
brothel, and this simple instrument of flagellation is rarely absent
from a prostitute’s dwelling. It appears to be England alone, the
classical country of flagellomania, in which actual “flagellation
brothels” have existed.[609] A historical example is that of the
celebrated establishment of Theresa Berkley, the inventor of an especial
apparatus for the whipping of men, the so-called “Berkley-Horse.” It
appears that in England the female sex has a taste for active and
passive flagellation; and we find that a German author[610] attributes
to woman a greater inclination towards flagellomania than that exhibited
by man. This tendency is encouraged by certain male flagellants, who
obtain sexual gratification by the flagellation of women. Guénolé (_op.
cit._, pp. 151, 152) reports the existence of secret places in Paris
where young women and girls combine to form a kind of “school,” in which
male sadists carry out “instruction” with the switch!
In connexion with flagellation we must consider the peculiar tendency to
the =fettering= of the individual to be flogged, who desires to be
rendered =defenceless=. For this purpose various apparatus exist of the
same kind as the “fettering-chair” invented in the eighteenth century by
the Duke of Fronsac.[611] Of the same nature also is the impulse to wear
very tight shoes and gloves and very small corsets, the so-called
“=corset discipline=,” in which the person affected, who may be of
either sex, is laced up very tightly in a very small corset. This is met
with chiefly in England, especially in association with sexual
flagellation.
In comparatively rare cases flagellomania is a morbid condition by which
responsibility is entirely abrogated; but from the medico-legal point of
view responsibility is impaired or suspended in the majority of cases of
well-marked sadism, which we have now to describe. To this category
belong:
1. =Sadistic Bodily Injuries and “Lust-Murder.”=--The main types of this
category are the “girl-stabbers” and the “lust-murderers,” who simply
for the purpose of producing sexual excitement, or when already under
the influence of such excitement, inflict on women more or less severe
injuries with a knife or other murderous instrument. The actual
intention to =kill= is present only in very rare cases. The lust-murder
is, as a rule, only a murder as a =sequel= of a sexual act committed by
force, the murder being done from fear of discovery, etc.; thus the
murder has not in these cases anything directly to do with the sexual
act. In other cases we have what appears to be a lust-murder in which
death has resulted, contrary to the wish of the offender, from a
sadistic bodily injury. Killing from a purely sexual motive is a very
rare occurrence, of which, however, some very widely known cases are on
record--like those of Andreas Bickel, Menesclou, Alton, Gruyo,
Verzeni,[612] and “Jack the Ripper,” the Whitechapel murderer.
[Regarding the Whitechapel murders, see E. C. Spitza, “The Whitechapel
Murders: their Medico-Legal and Historical Aspects,” published in the
_Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases_, December, 1888. Great
attention and alarm was aroused in Paris in the years 1818-1819 by a
girl-stabber (_piqueur_). In numerous caricatures, popular songs, and
vaudevilles these assaults were “celebrated,” of which a very rare
pamphlet, “La Piqure à la Mode” (Paris, 1819), gives evidence. _Cf._ J.
Grand-Carteret in “Les Images Galantes” (1907, No. 7). Much alarm was
caused in July, 1902, by the crimes of a new “Jack the Ripper” in New
York, and by the horrible child-murders committed in Berlin by an
obviously insane sadist, not yet arrested. In a single day he ripped up
the abdomens of several small children with a pair of scissors.] Many
“murder epidemics” (_manie homicide_), such as the murders recently
committed in Sweden by Nordlund, who, though indubitably insane, was
executed for them, are certainly connected with sexuality. The two
following cases from German experience relate to typical
“girl-stabbers”:
_Ludwigshafen am Rhein, March 26, 1901._--After the manner of the
Whitechapel murderer, an unknown criminal had for several weeks made
the parts of the town lying in the direction of the suburb of
Mundenheim unsafe. Not less than eleven girls were seriously injured
after nightfall by stabs in the abdomen. To-night the police succeeded
in arresting the criminal, who is a drover, Wilhelm Damian by name,
twenty-eight years of age. Five years ago he was suspected of having
committed a lust-murder on a servant-girl; he was arrested at this
time, but was discharged owing to the lack of sufficient proof. Now
the suspicion is aroused that Damian is responsible also for the
lust-murder committed two years ago near Mundenheim on a little girl
seven years of age, because the circumstances of that case suggested
that the murderer was a butcher by occupation, and this applies to
Damian.
_Kiel, November 29, 1901._--It is not yet possible to arrest the
stabber who, during the last week, has been active in the poorest
quarter of the town. At first he limited himself to the northern
districts, and there wounded only women and girls; but in the last day
or two he appeared, not only in the central parts of the town, but
also in the southern quarter, where, the day before yesterday, in the
evening, he wounded a girl by two stabs, one in the neck and one in
the hip. Since then a man has been stabbed, apparently by this same
evil-doer, but was not seriously hurt. This happened in one of the
busiest streets of the town, so that the escape of the criminal is
very remarkable.
Other peculiar sadistic injuries sometimes occur. Thus, in the year 1902
a printer, twenty-two years of age, was condemned by the criminal court
of Breslau, because in =thirteen= cases he had thrown =oil of vitriol=
at young ladies! Here also we have probably to do with a sadistic
tendency. In the end of October, 1906, in Berlin, a case came under
notice in which a young girl took another girl to the dentist (!) and
(after previous anæsthetization) had two teeth drawn unnecessarily; but
whether this case was or was not of a sadistic nature remains
undetermined. But we certainly have to do with sadism in those cases in
which men or women inflict slight injuries on their love-partner for the
purpose of sucking blood, which gives them sexual gratification (=sexual
vampirism=). Many =murders by poison= (women murderers commonly prefer
the use of poison to that of any other instrument) also arise from
sadistic tendencies. At any rate, the majority of professional female
prisoners, such as Jegado, Brinvilliers, Ursinus, Gottfried (the
celebrated poisoner of Bremen), and others, were unquestionably women
given to sexual excesses or sexually very excitable, so that here
voluptuousness and the lust for murder appear to have an intimate
causal connexion.
The following remarkable case of sadistic deprivation of freedom is
reported by Kiernan (“A Remarkable Case of Fetishism,” published in _The
Alienist and Neurologist_, 1906, p. 462):
“Two citizens of good position, of Wladikaukas, in Russia, had
repeatedly carried off girls of good family, and had treated them in
an extraordinary way. On account of senile dementia they were
acquitted of criminality, and were sent to an asylum. The last victim
was a young heiress, who was kept prisoner by them for an entire year.
Two masked elderly men fell upon her by night, gagged her, put a
bandage over her eyes, and drove away with her in a carriage. When the
bandage was taken off, she was in a well-furnished drawing-room. The
two old men, without saying a word, gave her a scanty dress of
feathers, and shut her up in a great gilded cage, which stood in the
drawing-room. One of them--she never saw the other again--came in
silence to visit her every morning, looked at her through the bars of
the cage, often threw her lumps of sugar, and every morning brought
her a can of hot water, which he emptied into a vessel inside the
cage, saying, ‘Take a bath, little bird.’ These were the only words
which she heard. After a year had passed, the man let her out of the
cage, put a bandage over her eyes, and drove her in a carriage to a
place near her house. No similar case is known to me in medical
literature. Everything was conducted Platonically; there was no
coitus, no exhibitionism or masturbation, either before or after
looking at this peculiar bird. Certainly there must have been some
kind of abortive sexual gratification, of a sadistic character, and
with the limitation that only young girls of good family, dressed as
birds and kept in a cage, could excite libido. But why must they have
the appearance of a bird? Possibly in the subconsciousness the idea of
the bird as a lascivious animal played a certain part. But why did one
only come and see the ‘bird’ every day? That they must be young girls
is natural in the case of old men: extremes meet; but that they must
be of good family suggests a sadistic element, and still more is this
suggested by the imprisonment.”
2. =Offences against Property committed from Sadistic Motives.=--To this
class belong all sadistic injuries not of the person, but of property.
For example, pouring vitriol over the clothing, of which the following
case (_Vossische Zeitung_, No. 574, December 7, 1905) is an example:
At the present time an unknown man is making the south-eastern
districts of Berlin unsafe by the use of oil of vitriol. This
dangerous criminal pours the liquid upon women’s clothing, selecting
by preference light-coloured fabrics. Yesterday evening he almost
completely ruined the new light-coloured dress of a young lady who was
passing along the Hermannstrasse. The offender, who apparently derives
pleasure from injuring women’s clothing, is of middle height, about
twenty-five years of age, has fair hair, and wears a fashionable
overcoat.
To the same category belongs =arson= from sexual motives, which was
formerly[613] attributed to a “passion for fire” (pyromania); but when
sexual motives play a part, it is unquestionably of a purely sadistic
nature.[614]
Of the same character is =sexual kleptomania=--theft from sexual
motives. Lichtenberg was familiar with this, for he says “the sexual
impulse very frequently leads to thefts,” and he alludes to the proposal
which has been made in England to castrate thieves.[615]
The organic causation of the kleptomania so often seen at the present
day in large shops is very frequently of a sexual nature, dependent upon
puberty, the climacteric, menstrual anomalies, etc. Cases of this
character have been reported by Worbe, Gönner, Schmidtlein, Unzer,
Häussler, Lombroso, and Ferrero. The suspicion of sexual sadistic
grounds for kleptomania may always be justifiably entertained when rich
ladies repeatedly steal articles of small value of which they have no
need.
A typical case of sexual kleptomania is reported by H. Zingerle
(“Contributions to the Psychological Genesis of Sexual Perversities,”
published in the _Annual for Psychiatry and Neurology_, 1900):
A woman, twenty-one years of age, who from childhood had been
psychopathic, had from her school-days onwards had a definite desire
to appropriate certain objects, especially such as were made of brown
leather (brown shoes), umbrellas, money. Only the act of stealing gave
her any gratification, not the keeping of the stolen objects, which
she usually destroyed or gave away. =During the act of theft she had a
well-developed sense of voluptuousness, accompanied by a discharge of
secretion from the genital organs.= She performed these thefts as the
result of an irresistible impulse, and after them she felt remorse.
She preferred large objects such as were difficult to hide, and it was
=precisely when there were great hindrances to be overcome and dangers
to be run=, and when in the pursuit of her aim she was =subjected to
emotional disturbances=, that the accompanying =voluptuous sensations
were most prominent=. The psychopathic basis of this condition is
unquestionable.
In addition to these two categories of sadism, which for the most part
depend upon morbid conditions, we meet also with a =symbolic= form of
sadism, where this manifests itself rather in idea than in reality, and
where the person thus affected luxuriates in all possible =fantasies=
of the infliction of pain and of abasement.[616] This mitigated sadism
is certainly to some extent connected with physiological sadism. Thus
the so-called =verbal sadism= is nothing more than an increase in, an
emphatic instance of, the physiological voluptuous sighing and crying
_in coitu_, whose influence in verbal sadism is increased, and exercises
a stronger stimulus, by the accentuation of the =animal=, the =brutal=,
the =coarse=, and the =obscene=. Verbal sadism is not a peculiar
refinement of modern debauchees, but a phenomenon belonging to folk-lore
and ethnology, an extraordinarily widely diffused mode of expression of
the primitive sadistic instinct of the genus homo. In the popular speech
of all countries we find that =abusive terms= and =curses= are
intermingled with extraordinary frequency with sexual matters and ideas.
The naïveté of this sexual depravity and cursing, with its thousandfold
variations, shows its origin from the purely instinctive sources of the
popular soul, as the celebrated brothers Grimm recognized when they
devoted a careful, critical investigation in their well-known dictionary
to the obscene verbal treasury of the Germans. A rich material for the
study of the sources of verbal sadism is offered by the _vocabularia
erotica_ of Hesychios; also by the =collections= of local and provincial
=riddles= and =proverbs=.[617] A typically developed verbal sadism is
found among the Hindus, especially the women. The Indian erotist
Vātsyāyana rightly deduces it from the various sounds which are uttered
in normal coitus. In European brothels the verbal sadists and verbal
masochists are well-known phenomena--men who find sexual enjoyment in
the expression of the coarsest, commonest, obscene words, curses, and
abusive language; in some cases by doing this themselves (verbal
sadism), in other cases by listening to it when done by others (verbal
masochism). Such verbal sadists, also, are the individuals described by
A. Eulenburg (“Sexual Neuropathy,” p. 104) as “verbal exhibitionists,”
people who gladly indulge in lascivious conversation in the presence of
women, or who whisper obscene words in women’s ears. Many men visit
prostitutes, not for the purpose of having sexual intercourse with them,
but merely for the opportunity of such lecherous conversation. The
following case, complicated by bisexual or masochistic features, is
characteristic of this:
A leading merchant of middle age visits a cocotte from time to time,
and puts on the girl’s silken clothing, whilst she must put on man’s
dress; they then go out walking arm-in-arm in dark, unfrequented
streets, and converse meanwhile in an extremely obscene, indecent
manner; this alone suffices him for sexual gratification. During the
whole time he does not touch the girl.
This sexual depravity and obscene language can also be conducted by
correspondence. Thus we have a kind of “=epistolary sadism=” and
“=epistolary masochism=.” The former, especially, is frequently employed
in the circles of the “masseuses” and “strict governesses,” in relation
to their masochistic _clientèle_, whilst the answers belong to the
second category.
A remarkable symbolic form of sadism or masochism is represented by
=inunction= and =lathering=, for the purpose of sexual gratification.
Lathering with soap more especially is a phenomenon with which those who
have to do with brothels are especially familiar. Either the man finds
sexual pleasure in lathering the prostitute or he experiences
gratification in the passive attitude when she lathers him. Some time
ago, in a trial in which a man belonging to one of our leading
mercantile houses was accused, I referred in my evidence to analogous
occurrences in brothels and among prostitutes. This testimony was
disputed by another physician, who stated that this “lathering” for the
purpose of inducing sexual excitement was “unknown” to him. It is,
however, a well-known phenomenon whose existence has been confirmed to
me by colleagues in Berlin, and more especially in Hamburg. According as
it is active or passive, it is respectively sadistic or masochistic.
Whether, in such cases, a defilement of the woman’s person is effected,
as in a case reported by von Krafft-Ebing, in which a man blackened his
mistress with charcoal, is indifferent. The larval sadism consists in
the =act of manipulation=, in the inunction or lathering.
As a last form of symbolic sadism may be mentioned =blasphemy= based on
=sexual motives=, the so-called “=satanism=,” which played a great part
more especially in the middle ages, and as the “black mass” constituted
a peculiar cult, in which the Christian Mass was profaned by sexual
practices, and was insulted to the uttermost. According to Schwaeblé,
these obscene masses are still celebrated at the present day in two
places in Paris. He gives a detailed description of such a black mass
which was celebrated in a house in the Rue de Vaugirard.[618]
=Passive algolagnia=, =masochism=, the desire to endure =pain= and
=degradation= and =abasement= of every kind, for the purpose of inducing
sexual excitement, is perhaps to-day more widely diffused even than its
converse.[619] The cause of this, which is to be found in the
conventionality of our time, is a matter to which I have previously more
than once alluded (_vide supra_, pp. 322-324, 467-469). This view is
supported also by the remarkable fact that, above all, =lawyers=,
leading State officials, and judges, constitute a disproportionately
large contingent of masochists--that is to say, persons whose
professional life gives them a certain unusual exercise of power, and
whose profession imposes on them a strict official demeanour. Precisely
these conditions, perhaps, arouse masochistic tendencies to activity, as
a kind of liberation from conventional pressure and the professional
mask.
The connexion between love, voluptuousness, and the suffering of pain,
has already been discussed. In masochism there also comes into play the
important element of abasement, a complete self-surrender of body and
soul, self-sacrifice. The union of these perceptions and their
voluptuous tinge has been beautifully described by Alfred de
Musset:[620]
“My passion for my mistress had become extremely unruly, and my whole
life had assumed a kind of monastic savagery. I will give only one
example of this: She had given me her miniature likeness in a
medallion. I wear it on my heart--many men do this. But one day in the
shop of a second-hand dealer I found an iron scourge on the end of
which was a small plate covered with little spines. I had the
medallion fastened on to the plate and wore it in this way. The
spines, which at every movement pierced the skin of my breast,
produced in me the most peculiar ecstasy, so that I sometimes pressed
my hand on the place in order to drive them deeper. I am well aware
that this was folly; but love makes us commit many such follies.”
In masochism physical pain plays an important part. The “mistresses”
have at their disposal an extensive instrumentarium for producing such
pain, for masochists often have the most peculiar ideas regarding the
mode in which their pain should be caused. Probably unique in their kind
are the two following authentic cases, which my colleague, Dr. D----, in
Hamburg, was so good as to report to me:
1. A rich Hamburg merchant, known among the prostitutes by the name of
“Nail William,” had sexual intercourse only with certain prostitutes,
who had to allow their nails to grow quite long and pointed. They had
to scratch him on the scrotal raphe and on the penis until the blood
flowed in streams. One day he consulted a physician on account of
extensive œdema of the scrotum and the penis.
2. Another man had his scrotum sewn to the sofa-cushion with thick
sail-maker’s needles. He sat for a while in this “fettered” condition,
after which the strings were cut!
All possible cutting and stabbing instruments and burning substances are
used for the gratification of the masochist’s lascivious love of pain;
they have themselves scratched, bitten, pinched, burned, their hair torn
out; they are trodden upon, whipped with switches or ox-whips; they have
themselves “put to the question” in every possible way in special
“=torture chambers=” or “punishment rooms.” Such a genuine torture
chamber, in the house of a Hamburg prostitute, was recently described by
the public prosecutor, Dr. Ertel, in Hamburg.[621] Of the dwelling of
this prostitute the following account is given in the testimony of the
examining judge:
To the side of the flat towards the bath-room is the door of entrance
to the so-called “black room.”
The walls of this room, lighted by one window only, were covered with
a coal-black material of the nature of calico, and the plaster of the
ceiling was similarly covered; to the middle of the ceiling,
proceeding from the centre of a black rosette, was attached a pulley,
consisting of the usual rollers and blocks, made in this instance of
metal, and furnished with a strong twisted cord.
In the dark corner between the window and the wall there stood a
peculiar scaffold, made of roughly hewn planks, consisting of two
similar parts placed side by side; the back of this scaffold was
placed against the wall beside the window.
The purpose of this scaffold was not immediately apparent. Seen
sideways, the form of this wooden structure was somewhat like that of
a heavy, coarsely-made armchair; the upper parts of the arms were
about the height of a man’s shoulders. To the framework along the
upper edge there were attached five fairly strong iron rings, which
were screwed into the wood. The framework ran on rollers, so that it
could be moved about.
On the wall was hung on a nail a leather girdle with buckles; there
was also a rope about the thickness of the finger, ending in a loop;
there were also two dog-collars, part of a sword-stick, leather reins,
and fetters for wrists and ankles, the former being heavy iron
handcuffs.
The window in the wall separating the “black room” from the bathroom,
the glass of which was frosted, was covered with special hangings. The
inner side of the door of the room was also hung with black.
In respect to this “black room” A. testified:
“Z. insisted that one room should be entirely draped with black, as
the ‘hall of judgment.’ He sent me pulleys from Cologne, by which he
was to be drawn up and hanged.[622] This excited him, his face got
quite blue, and it made him ‘ready’ for intercourse. I was afraid that
it might kill him, and I only allowed him to have it done once.
“To the wooden framework in the ‘black room,’ Z. was securely
fastened, so that he had the illusion that he was on the scaffold.”
In all large towns widely diffused =masochistic prostitution= subserves
the desires of male masochists, and frequently also those of female
masochists. These priestesses of _Venus flagellatrix_ hide themselves
commonly under the cloak of a “=masseuse=”[623] an “=educationalist=,”
or “=governess=,” adding to this professional title the expressive
adjective “=severe=” or “=energetic=.” “=Wanda=” is also a favourite
pseudonym, which corresponds to the masochistic nickname of “=Severin=”
(the principal character of Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus im Pelz”).
These women, the “mistresses,” treat their masochistic clients as
“slaves” or “dogs,” and maintain this fiction not only in personal
association, but also in correspondence--masochists are all passionate
correspondents. The relationship also of the “=lady=” to her “=page=” is
a favourite one (the so-called “=pagism=”). The nature of the
relationship is clearly shown in the following original letter of such a
masochist:
“BERLIN,
“_June 7, 1902_.
“GRACIOUS LADY,--
“First of all I must sincerely ask your pardon for daring, most
honoured lady, to write to you. I saw recently a lady with a glorious
figure and magnificent hips enter your house, and I suspect that you
are this lady. If you, gracious lady, desire a servant and a slave,
who will blindly obey all your commands, and upon your order, as a
slave, without any will but your own, will perform the basest and
dirtiest services, I should be happy if you would be so gracious as to
make me that slave, if I might visit you from time to time in order to
serve you, my strict mistress and commander. If at any time I should
fail to obey you absolutely, you can treat me most cruelly and
chastise me most severely.
“Will you, gracious lady, deign to answer me, your basest servant, and
to make use of the enclosed envelope to tell me if you, this evening,
will go for a walk, and how, and where, in what café you may chance to
spend the evening, and if you will be my strict mistress, and if I may
venture to be your slave. Perhaps, most honoured lady, you could be at
the Oranienburger Tor at eight o’clock precisely on =Friday= evening,
with a rose in your hand. Full of subjection and abasement, obedient
to your strict commands, and slavishly kissing your feet and hands, I
am your most abject servant and your basest slave.”
Such a slave luxuriates voluptuously in the lowest services, in the most
loathsome abasements, such as are indicated sufficiently in the names
“=coprolagnia=” and “=urolagnia=.” I have in my possession a series of
letters by masochists full of such things, described with the utmost
particularity, some even in a poetic form (!), which I cannot print on
account of their loathsome contents. A sufficient idea of the slavery of
the masochist is given in the above-mentioned report of the public
prosecutor, Dr. Ertel, in which a “mistress” states:
“When I took my meals he lay either under the table, or in a corner of
the room; I threw him bones, and gave him the remains of my own food.
He often barked, and usually had a dog-collar round his neck, with a
chain attached to it. He had given himself the name of Nero, so this
is what I called him. When anyone wished to come near me without
permission, he bit him in the leg; this was the first step in a
slave’s duty. He swept out my room, boiled potatoes, roasted meat for
me, and did other work of the house. He also wanted to be my horse; I
had to ride on him; he carried me in this way from one room to the
other.[624] When he disobeyed me in any way, I had to use the whip. He
related to me that formerly he had corresponded with a music-hall
comedian who played woman’s parts, and subsequently had associated
with him, but he got weary of this, and disappeared for a long time to
get free from the man. He told me also that he was accustomed to make
appointments in the Schaarhof (a street in Hamburg in which the
prostitutes visited by the lowest classes of the population live). On
Sunday evenings these women have many visitors, when the workmen have
got their week’s money.
“Often I had to shut him up in a wardrobe, with a chain round his
neck, fastened to the wall of the wardrobe, so short that he could
hardly move; the door of the wardrobe was shut upon him.
“In my flat I had to give him a slave’s dress to wear, in order that
he might feel himself to be fully a slave. I took away all his money,
all the keys of his house, of his office, and of his safe, and
returned them to him only after a night and two days. Z. only does
this occasionally, when he is utterly beside himself; often he is
quite reasonable. He does not associate with any decent people; the
society in which he feels happiest is that of whores and other obscure
persons; he has himself said this to me. Even the people who make use
of him avoid him in the street.
“He would also learn to dress hair, and how to paint the face, if I
ordered him. Painted faces stimulate him.
“Once he said to me that I might have another slave; this I did. First
of all I had to bind Z. hand and foot, and to wrap up his head in
cotton-wool, in order to give the new slave the idea that he had been
very badly treated, and had been sent to the hospital. When, later,
the new slave came, and I explained everything to him as Z. had told
me to, and led him in to see Z., the new man was very much surprised
to see Z. tied up in this way, became frightened, and soon went home.”
Another prostitute reports:
“I made the acquaintance of Z. in No. 8, Schwiegerstrasse. He has
three or four times had intercourse with me. He had himself whipped by
me. Z. once asked me to fetch a man, which I did. This man got into
bed with me, and satisfied himself manually, without having
intercourse with me. Z. on this occasion lay under the bed: he wished
to do so; I believe he had arranged this in order to obtain sexual
excitement in this way. Z. and the other man did not see one another.
“When the other man had gone away, Z. did the most disgusting things.
“When Z. had himself whipped, he first had his hands fastened with
iron handcuffs.”
It would be quite erroneous to assume that in the case of these
masochistic “slaves,” whose human worth has been lowered to the depths,
who seem completely to discard their humanity and to sink below the
level of animals, that we always have to do with effeminate, degenerated
weaklings. No; much more frequently they are =healthy, powerful men, of
an imposing appearance and distinguished demeanour=, who find pleasure
in playing such tragic rôles, and who obviously obtain sexual
gratification by this complete reversal of their nature. The “slave”
just described was “by nature tall and stately. His features were
=energetic= and sympathetic, and he had a large beard. His eyes were
=clear and bright. In actions and appearance he was a thoroughly
masculine being.=”[625] In Berlin there exist masochists in high
official positions, in appearance and in profession true manly
natures--“supermen”--who only become “slaves” in relation to their
“mistresses.” According to Sacher-Masoch, Germans and Russians
especially are inclined to masochism; but, as a matter of fact, this
tendency is also widely diffused in France and England. Zola describes
such a type in “Nana.”
The slave type is not always completely developed; more commonly
masochism manifests itself in a less marked degree. There are many and
various shades: sometimes there is only a spiritual abasement, exhibited
in apparently trifling procedures and practices (symbolic masochism). A
few authentic cases will serve to illustrate this--they sound
incredible, but are in fact true:
1. A handsome and fine-looking officer, married to a beautiful wife,
continually associates with an elderly, robust washerwoman, with whom
he also has sexual intercourse. Since he refuses to leave this woman,
his wife has separated from him.
2. A State official of high position, fifty years of age, visits a
prostitute from time to time, and puts on her clothing, with corset
and stockings, while she wears man’s clothing. Then for two hours they
play cards. At eleven o’clock he lays himself, still clothed, in her
bed, whilst she must lie down naked upon the bed covering. Nothing
else happens. He does not make the least attempt to touch her; and
after a time he goes away, first paying her fifty marks.
3. An active Minister of State (!), now deceased, used often to visit
a cocotte, who had to sit upon him, and then _in corpus totum ei
minxit_. This was sufficient to give him sexual gratification
(urolagnia).
4. An engineer meets a prostitute (who has been previously instructed
what to do) in the street, and asks her if he may go home with her for
twenty marks (shillings). Having reached the home of the girl, he
suddenly declares with tears that he has only five marks with him. The
prostitute overwhelms him with abuse, takes the five marks from him,
and then carefully searches his clothing, until somewhere or other she
finds a hundred-mark piece! The moment of the discovery of this piece
of money is precisely the moment when the man has the sexual orgasm.
In answer to his prayers and whining, to his pitiful request that she
shall at least give him back half the money, he only receives scornful
abuse. Finally, she presses one mark into his hand, and gives him his
_congé_. This procedure is repeated regularly every fortnight--an
expensive amusement for a man who is by no means wealthy. But he is
unable to give up this peculiar passion, which for him is the only way
of obtaining sexual gratification.
5. A man of the upper classes, thirty years of age, frequents only
prostitutes with artificial teeth. They must take these teeth out, and
he puts them in his mouth and sucks them. He then stretches himself
upon the covering of the bed, and the prostitute must lay one of her
dirty chemises upon his face, whilst he at the same time holds one of
her shoes in each hand. This is for him the critical moment. To the
girl herself during the whole procedure he does not direct a single
glance; for him there exist only the teeth, the chemise, and the
shoes. Thus we have to do with a case of masochism with mental
fetishistic associations. The previously described medieval “cure by
disgust” (the exhibition of a dirty chemise) would in this man have
had the opposite effect to that intended.
Masochism is much commoner in men than in women, because the latter have
more command over their sexual impulse, and are not so readily
subordinated and enslaved thereby as are men. The physiological
masochism of woman is of a more spiritual nature. Still, in women who
are very excitable sexually a similar “sexual obedience” may appear to
that which we encounter in men. Shakespeare, in the “Midsummer-Night’s
Dream,” when he makes Helena feel herself to be Demetrius’ little dog,
gives her definite masochistic characteristics.
Masochistically inclined, also, are women of good position who play the
part of prostitutes, either in brothels or in the streets, such as have
recently been described by d’Estoc in “Paris-Eros”; we may regard the
celebrated Messalina as their prototype. Similarly disposed are women of
good position who have enduring sexual relationships with men of the
lower classes, such as workmen, coachmen, etc., and who even seek sexual
enjoyment with any casual member of the rabble they may meet in the
streets--a practice of which Lombroso has collected examples. Passive
algolagnia also occurs in women, as is proved by the following letter of
a typical masochist:
“BERLIN,
“_November 9, 1902_.
“HONOURED LADY,--
“I allow myself to make the polite inquiry whether you will consent to
visit me once a week, in my dwelling in the Kurfurstendamm, after your
reception hour. I have a peculiar wish from time to time =to be
chastised in the most severe and energetic manner, until the blood
flows=. I am twenty-eight years of age, and widowed, and have a very
large and luxuriant figure. For the flagellation I would pay fifty
marks (shillings). If you accede to my wish, I beg you to describe how
you intend to carry out the chastisement. On what part of the body
will you whip me? In what way should this be clothed, if clothed at
all? What instrument will you use for the whipping? In what position
should I receive the whipping? How many blows should I receive the
first time?
“After the sixth blow my voluptuous sensations increase to such a
degree that my whole body trembles with sensuality. Are you yourself
inclined to sensuality, and do you carry out this chastisement from
purely voluptuous motives?”
We cannot determine whether in this case homosexuality plays any part.
In my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis” (vol.
ii., p. 183), I have printed a letter of another unquestionably
heterosexual masochist woman to an “energetic” man.
APPENDIX[626]
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (HISTORY OF
THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ALGOLAGNISTIC REVOLUTIONIST).
The author of the following sketch, the Russian anarchist N. K., was
arrested in Warsaw in the early months of 1906. Like all those who at
this time were considered to be members of the revolutionary party,
the intention of the authorities was to shoot him immediately, without
any elaborate inquiry, after a drum-head court-martial.
His demeanour during the shooting of his companions, who preceded him
to death, and also during the court-martial, showed that his psychical
individuality was so profoundly abnormal that the Colonel in command
of the firing-party suspected him to be a psychopath, and on his own
authority postponed his execution pending further examination in the
citadel. While imprisoned K. wrote his reminiscences, which are here
given word for word and without comment:
I.
My parents were opposite elements: my father, strong, coarse, brutal,
egotistic, material to excess; my mother, suffering, delicate,
sensitive, ethereal. From such a cross, a masochistic character =must=
necessarily be produced. My father brought me up with storms,
chastisements, and fear; my mother counteracted all this with
caresses, kisses, and tears.... I =trembled= with secret anxiety and
=exulted= inwardly at the same moment when my father stretched me
across his knees. As soon as the punishment was over, he immediately
proceeded to box someone’s ears--anyone’s, a footman’s, a maid’s,
anyone’s. I ran with a smarting posterior to my mother. By her first
my injuries were inspected, then I was cried over, embraced, kissed,
and finally laughed at and with. This scene repeated itself at
irregular intervals. To these years belong my first memory of the
masochistic principle of life. This was based upon the following
observations:
All my companions, boys and girls alike, endeavoured to play tricks on
one another; to tell tales of one another to their parents, tales true
and false; in every way to cause suffering, in order then, by
redoubled love, to make all right again. On the other hand, I noticed
that no child loved another unless it was tormented by that other.
Those who did not torment one another were mutually indifferent.
This mutual tormenting and =being= tormented must therefore, =in the
nature of things=, produce a certain charm, gives rise to a
=pleasure=. This pleasure consisted in increasing, mentally realizing,
=sympathizing= with, the pain of another. This is =not
sadism=--generally speaking, sadism does not exist--it is only
=refined masochism=; for we prepare pains in order to sympathize with
them--that is, in order that we may free =ourselves=.
I especially enjoyed teasing girls, destroying their toys, tearing
their dolls to pieces, dirtying their clothing, etc. When, thereupon,
they wept bitterly, I fought against their tears, until finally they
were consoled. Then I went close to them, embraced them, caressed
them, kissed them, and cried with sympathy. What pain and what
pleasure did I experience when they pushed me away, struck me, and
spat in my face! I bought them once more finer toys, and was =so
happy= when their tears gave place to laughter!
How often I told false tales of other children to their parents, in
order to be able to sympathize with the mental pain of an undeserved
chastisement! But I was no exception in this, because most of my
playmates were the same. I remember how a girl of eleven calumniated a
boy of twelve: she declared that he had put his hand on her private
parts when she was out walking! The happy, poor lad was frightfully
beaten at school and at home. All the children baited him, despised
him, and avoided him like the plague.... He became quite afraid of his
fellows.
What did I live through at that time?
Moody and spiteful, he lay under a tree; the girl who had told this
false tale about him softly drew near, stood by him, and with a
pleading voice called his name. Furiously he jumped to his feet, and
wished to run away; but she seized his hand, fell upon her knees, and
begged for his forgiveness. It was useless for him to abuse her, to
strike her, and to tread upon her toes. She threw her arms round him,
cried as if her heart was broken, and spoke tenderly to him for so
long a time, until at last he sat down beside her, and allowed himself
to be caressed. Thus they sat together for a long time, and wept and
laughed and wept. Suddenly she seized his hand and pressed it
violently between her thighs....
This contact formed the last link of a long logical chain....
These were the =facts= which first made me feel instinctively how,
like every fundamental thing--everything which is of a primeval
character: primeval force, primeval matter, primeval impulse,
etc.--all represent the union of two extremes; the primeval impulse
“love” can also be the coalescence of two opposites. These two
opposites in =this= case are pleasure and pain; as in the case of
electricity we have the union of the two opposites, positive and
negative electricity; in the case of magnetism, we have the union of
positive and negative magnetism; in the case of the atom, the positive
and negative ion; in the case of sex, man and woman, etc.
II.
My years of school and University life were spent at St. Petersburg.
Tempestuously I threw myself upon simple physical “love” (!), upon the
orgies, upon all the varieties, of physical love. Bodily-sexual
masochism, with all its artificial sensual charms, was a cup which I
drained to the dregs; but I was never able to explain to myself why
humanity was satisfied with so crude a definition of the idea of
“masochism.” Sexual masochism is indeed one of the most obvious facts
of life. But the same is true also of sexual love; and yet we do not
maintain that love is only sexual impulse.
I passed beyond this physical masochism; it was for me a necessary
phase of development. =The spiritual element within me began to sway
my existence.= At this time I learned to love a girl of a wonderful
character. She loved me to a similar degree of insanity.
Had I been a beggar or a tramp, she would have followed me through the
streets. She would have accompanied me to forced labour in Kara,
Kamtchatka, or Saghalien. For me she would also have mounted the
scaffold; to save me she would even have become a prostitute. It was a
blessedness to love her and to be loved by her.
How can we wonder that in conformity with this interminable love
accompanying sorrows should also extend into infinity, and ultimately
lead to a catastrophe?
Every night we slept together, although for months at a time we did
not have sexual intercourse; we embraced one another so closely and
slept =so gently=!...
To separate from one another only for a few hours was a torment. If I
went out alone, I must tell her the precise moment at which she might
expect me to return. If I remained away a quarter of an hour longer,
Mascha at once pictured to herself that I had been run over by a tram,
that I had fallen down in an epileptic fit, that I had suddenly become
insane and jumped into the Neva, or that some other disaster had
befallen to me. Thus she stood continually at the window, in order to
see what was passing in the street. If anyone came up to our floor,
she ran quickly to see who it was. If it was not I, then she felt
horrible anxiety. When at length I came, she stood waiting for me in
the doorway, laughing and crying at the same time. Then there followed
embraces and kisses as if I had returned from a journey to the North
Pole; but also reproaches, such as, “You do not love me at all; if you
did you would not torture me so! You know how anxious I always am
about you when you are away!”
Gradually I began to understand this condition, =as an inevitable
consequence of the masochistic principle of love=.
=This martyrdom of the soul, which lovers prepare for themselves in
the unceasing dread of losing one another, or of losing one another’s
love, is intimately connected with the very nature of love. Without
anxiety of this kind, love would be unthinkable. He who loves must
continually torment himself with this anxiety; and the stronger the
love, the greater is this torment. When the torment is increased by
the other’s participation in it, the mutual love is also increased
thereby.=
This necessity we also felt, and we resolved to procreate an
illegitimate child.
What this step meant to us--members of leading families--can readily
be understood; but we proudly resolved to defy society at large, in
order to consecrate our love by the sorrows which this would entail.
III.
As soon as Mascha became pregnant, I felt an irresistible impulse to
increase our mutual torments! To increase them!! To increase them!!!
For our love did not appear to me sufficiently great, nor yet
sufficiently worthy, nor yet sufficiently holy, for us to crystallize
ourselves in a new living being.
This idea racked me continually. In vain I sought to convince myself
that our love was a million times greater than the love of ordinary
mortals, that it was unique!... Again and again my conscience said to
me: “How can you use for =yourself= the measuring rule of ordinary
men, even if they are the leaders of men? You are the =conscious=
masochist! Your =ideals= must be suited to this fact! Is it anything
so much out of the common to have an illegitimate child? You must
increase your sorrows! Increase them!!”
(He proceeds to describe how in every possible way he tormented his
beloved.)
At length, in consequence of my continued vexation, Mascha became as
nervous as =I= was myself.... Now she really began to take everything
perversely.
“Leave me in peace! It is your fault! You are driving me quite out of
my mind!!”
On account of the most trifling matters we became furious with rage,
mutually making one another more wretched and more bitter. Ten, twenty
times a day, we stood facing one another, leaning forwards, shaking
with wrath, our mouths gaping with anger, our eyes sparkling, our
fingers widely separated, like tigers ready to spring; many times she
struck me in the face or spat at me!
“Oh, you wretch! How I hate you!!! I should like--I should like----!”
Then we said to one another calmly and quietly that we did not suit
one another; that we had been deceived; that everything was now at an
end; we begged one another for forgiveness, and separated.
Soon came the pangs of conscience, the question, “Who is to blame?”
Now the pains began: “What have I done? It is impossible that it =can=
be so; I will beg her forgiveness upon my knees. She must be =mine=
again--must be, must be!”
“Oh, love, love! How interminable is your pain!”
Now I began with nervous haste to say to myself, “Where will she be?
With Katja? Up! Go to her and ask her!”
“Has Mascha been here?”
“Yes--she has just gone away!”
“Did she not say where she was going?”
“No!... Have you quarrelled once more?”
“H’m!... A little, but it was my fault!... I must find her!...
Good-bye!”
At the house of A, B, C, and D she was not to be found. Is it possible
that in her pain----? No, no! Not =that=! Not =that=!!
This pulsed in my temples, whilst I ran up and down the stairs!
Six o’clock! now she will go out walking on the Newsky-Prospekt!!...
At last I reach the Newsky-Prospekt! I rush up and down looking for
her! Is that she? No! Or there? It is not she! That must be she?
No--yes--no--yes, yes!... It is she.... Now walk a little more
slowly.... Now she sees me.... She turns as if to pass by on the other
side.... She changes her mind and stays on this side....
“Have you been out walking long?”...
Mascha lies in my arms. We cry and laugh--cry and laugh.... Never,
never, never again!!... Forgive, forgive!!... We embrace one another,
press one another, kiss one another, as if we could be absorbed into
one another.... We abuse one another, pull one another’s hair, and
playfully box one another’s ears.... Then we rub our cheeks together,
and give one another the maddest pet names....
Oh, paradise of love! Why did I quarrel with my fate which imposed
upon me such unheard-of torments?... Nothing else could have brought
me such blessedness as this!!
Oh, fate! More, more, still more martyrdom!... In this way let my love
grow!
IV.
Our life together became continually more intolerable, and yet we
could not bear to be away from one another a single hour. A terrible
fate chained us together, and threw us into the maelstrom of this
furious impulse, irresistible in its elemental force. To tear
ourselves apart was rendered impossible by the fetters that chained us
together.
Continually more frightful, continually more insane, became our
scenes, and the love-eruptions which broke out from time to time.
(After mutual spiritual torments, becoming ever worse and worse, K.
begs his beloved to procure abortion!)
She wept quietly, then kissed me and went out....
The key grated in the lock....
“Mascha! Mascha! For God’s sake! Mascha! What are you going to do?...”
I shook the door like a madman.... It would not give way.... I tore
open the window.... “Help! Help!”... The door was burst open.... Break
open Mascha’s door!... It was quickly forced.... She lies there....
Dead.... Poison....
V.
Finally--after weeks--I was once more somewhat calmer, and was able to
think a little. I had so utterly lost all power that I was only able
to get from my bed to the sofa, or back again, with assistance. They
had been afraid that I should not get over it at all.... Week after
week to endure the most shattering, superhuman sorrows, to oscillate
between death and madness!...
But superhuman =love= had also been mine! The statue of Saïs had been
unveiled to me!... I had quaffed the cup of love to the =last=
dregs!... But he only will have had this experience who has first
drunk to the dregs the draught of =sorrow=!...
Oh, short-sighted world, which will call the murder of Mascha
“sadism”!... Had not her pains cut twice as deeply into =my own=
heart? Has not =my= soul been convulsed by her torment?... I wished
only to torture =myself=!... Am I to blame that it was only possible
to do so through her martyrdom?... Has not =she= shared also all my
superearthly blisses?... He who has experienced =this= does not
regret--even if he must pay =double= the price in sorrows!!
Is not that “=masochism=”?
Have you who wished to pass judgment on me learned that? No! Who will
set up to be a judge of a case of which he knows nothing?
Oh, crude psychology, which teaches that out of an =inhuman=
impulse--out of cruelty--we commit “crimes” on those nearest to us!
Only from a purely =human= impulse--from “love”--do we do to the
nearest to us what you call “crimes,” in order that he may share that
unnamable happiness which we ourselves feel. Thus the influences which
move us are purely =ethical=.
Do you believe that we only are masochists? Or do you believe that
those only are masochists who have themselves trodden on by a
prostitute, have had their ears boxed, have been whipped, befouled,
and have let the prostitute spit in their faces?
Oh, idiots! I say to you all love is masochistic, and all which leads
to it is associated with it, or results from it, bears the imprint
“pleasure and pain.”
Nature =never= fails. Who, then, believes that it was caprice, chance,
or irony, on Nature’s part, when she associated =love= with so much
=torment=?
Who does not think of all the tragedies of =unhappy= love, with its
murders and suicides, all its physical and spiritual martyrdom, which
every day brings to us?
Who does not think of the tragedy of sexual love which is offered to
us in the hospitals? all the hundreds of thousands who have to pay for
the licentiousness which results from sexual =lust=--all the tabetics,
syphilitics, general paralytics, etc.?
Who does not remember the torments which the sexually perverse have
brought on themselves and on humanity? All the =lust-murders=! And all
the punitive measures? The lust-murders which we commit--to prevent
lust-murders!...
Who does not think of the torments of pregnancy? its risks of life and
death?
Are all these mistakes of Nature? No! No!! The accompaniment of
pleasure by pain must have some definite purpose. This purpose is:
=That pleasure, without its opposite, pain, would not be perceptible,
would be unthinkable, would be inconceivable--just as cold could not
be apparent to our consciousness without heat, or light without
darkness. Thus pleasure, in the absence of pain, would not be
perceived as pleasure. Therefore, by increase of pain, pleasure
becomes of greater value, for the greater the contrast the more
readily do we perceive it.=
“=Masochism is thus a natural law.=”
=The more fully it is developed in any individual, the higher, the
more superhuman is that person.=
VI.
Through the recognition of the masochistic natural law, I passed into
a peculiar condition. Individual love and sorrow no longer made any
particular impression on me. I began to observe masochism in the life
and work of Nature, in the history of humanity, in social life, and in
civilization.
Is not the great developmental principle of Nature based upon
this--that the existence and progress of the species is dependent upon
pressure exercised on it by its environment? The more difficult the
conditions of existence, the harder the pressure of the environment,
the more =suffering= the species has to bear, the stronger must be the
reaction against these, the more strongly will the powers and
capacities of that species become active, and by this the species will
be elevated to a higher level.
“=Thus suffering is the driving force of Nature. Nature is therefore
masochistic!=”
Within the species itself the same law holds. Within the “human”
species have not those varieties developed to the highest which have
had to overcome the =hardest= environment? Those who by nature have
been troubled with the greatest difficulties in providing for their
food-supply? Those who have =suffered= most?
Is not the existence of the living being dependent upon the “struggle
for existence,” upon the mutual hostility of the species, striving for
one another’s annihilation?
It is a characteristic trait of human nature that all religions are
based upon the same fundamental principle: “Only by =suffering= canst
thou become happy!”
Is not this true =masochism=, when humanity, by means of modern
science, has also been robbed of the hope of a beyond, of the hope for
eternity and blessedness, and is offered =nothing= in its place? Look
at universal history!
Was not the birth of that great idea associated with frightful
sufferings, with the influence of fire and sword, blood and death? Has
not humanity crucified its greatest benefactors? Has it not rewarded
them with the gallows, the torture-chamber, the wheel, the stake, the
prison, and the asylum?
And all out of =love for humanity=!
All the persecutions of Christians and Jews, the inquisitions and
burnings of heretics, witch-trials, the religious sorrows of all
times--all were outflows of the =love for humanity=. Their aim was to
safeguard mankind from the robbery of its happiness by heresy!
The love of humanity begat our Neros, our Torquemadas, our Ivans the
Terrible, and Schdanows!
Why did these men torture other men?... In order =themselves= to
realize in imagination the others’ torments, to sympathize with them,
to feel with them. In order in their own spirit to endure these
martyrdoms; that is to say, to torture themselves with the
representation of the pain of another.... “=Thus in its motives sadism
is nothing else than masochism.=”
The =love of humanity= erected the cross of Christ, lighted the
faggots with which Huss and Bruno wore burned, tortured Thomas
Münzer, stabbed Marat, decapitated Hebert, and built the gallows of
Arad, St. Petersburg, Chicago, etc.!
The =love of humanity= built the Bastille, the Tower of London, the
Spielberg, Blackwell’s Island, and the Schlüsselburg, built the
torture-chambers of the Inquisition, constructed the medieval penal
system, and those of Montjuich, Alcalla del Valle, Borissoglebsk, and
many others.
Remarkable! That precisely your “love of humanity” was the most cruel
tormentor, the most inexorable executioner, the most bloodthirsty
butcher of men, and the greatest of all criminals.
=Do you not see in all this the wise rule of the masochistic
principle? That it was only persecution which diffused these ideas?=
All the progress which man makes in =civilization= must be paid for by
means of enormous sacrifice. The superhuman sorrows of millions of
slaves created the civilization of antiquity--the Phœnician, the
Babylonian, the Persian, the Assyrian, the Greek, and the Roman! (With
regard to this often disputed fact, see Mommsen: “In comparison with
the sufferings of the slaves of antiquity, all the sufferings of
modern negro slaves are simply a drop in the ocean!”)
=Indian= civilization is the product of the most horrible suppression
and plunder of the lower castes by the higher. The soil of the
Southern States of America was cultivated through being manured with
the sweat, blood, and bones of negro slaves.
The soil of Europe, again, was made fertile by the sufferings of
slaves and serfs, and so on!
Amid the most horrible birth-pangs, amid the slave rebellions, peasant
wars, and revolutions, in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries, mankind was enabled to throw off the shell of the feudal
system. Therewith capitalism was born. This newest form of
civilization, once more, is based upon horrible plundering,
oppression, and misery of millions and millions of proletarians.
What a devastation of humanity results from the acquirements of
civilization in respect of engineering and the practical arts!...
Every invention and discovery demands its victims!...
How often have chemists been destroyed by an explosion in the creation
of new compounds, or killed by the development of poisonous vapours!
Count the engineers who have been sacrificed to their profession, or
bacteriologists who have been killed through infection in the study of
zymotic diseases!
Count all the victims of professional diseases, of tuberculosis,
phosphorus necrosis, lead poisoning, mercurial poisoning, etc.!...
Count all those who have fallen from scaffoldings, all the sailors who
have been drowned, all the railway employees who have been run over,
all the factory hands who have been torn to pieces by machinery, all
those who have been destroyed in mines by explosions, etc.!
Think of the hunger and misery of the widows and children of these
victims of industry and science, of the loss of work and other social
injuries resulting from capitalism!
The rebellion of the victims of this system, again, gives rise to the
class war, with new tortures, new sufferings!... In order ultimately,
by the creation of a new social system in the future, to free mankind
from these sufferings!... People believe it! But that is =nonsense=!
The sufferings will only assume a new =form=, and will =increase=!!
Do you, then, believe that all the miseries of mankind at the present
time have been the result only of chance, not of =foresight=?
Oh, no! These sufferings were only the =stimulus= which drove mankind
forward to new construction, to greater progress, in order to avoid
suffering!... Progress brought new suffering, and so on.
“=Thus suffering is the civilizing factor of mankind! To free mankind
from suffering would mean to rob mankind of civilization.=”
Can we represent to ourselves a life of complete satisfaction?
No! Without suffering, the needs would be wanting which alone provide
the stimulus to progress!... Without suffering, we should also be
without enjoyment. For everything reaches our consciousness only by
means of its opposite.
“=To free us from torment means to rob us of pleasure.... But then we
should no longer have any interest in life!=”
“=Civilization is a union, a hermaphrodite structure, of pleasure and
pain--that is, masochism!!... The progress of mankind is only possible
by means of the masochistic principle.=”
=Oh, cruel-sweet philosophy of Golgotha!! Eternally shalt thou remain
the Moira and Kismet of humanity!!!=
VII.
“Always the more, always the better of your kind shall perish, for it
shall always be worse for you. So only--so only--does man grow
upwards” (Nietzsche, “Zarathustra,” ii., p. 126).
Magnificent Nietzsche!
Now first do I grasp your “superman”!... Now I share your hatred of
the every day and the average!
Away with the philistine cowardice which says, “Above all, do not go
too far!... Do everything with moderation and for a definite end!...
Never go too far, and never fall into extremes!”...
No!... Go forward with courage into the extreme!... Only slothfulness,
comfortableness, and cowardice are afraid of a Turkish bath, with the
subsequent cold douche!
But how the body softens under this _laisser faire et laisser passer_,
how it loses its power of resistance, accumulates substances which are
superfluous, and therefore harmful! In the same way that part of
humanity which follows this device will perish from the philistine
disease named “moderation”!
Let mankind get into its Turkish bath--and then get under the cold
douche! Thus it will be steeled, rejuvenated, and invigorated! Thus it
will be freed from superfluous matters!
“Let things be made continually worse and harder for mankind, then the
reaction will step in and drive them forward!”
According to this device I acted henceforward. To increase pain, in
order that pleasure might become greater!
An immeasurable love for humanity took possession of me now that I had
at length attained the point of view which so perfectly harmonized
with my individuality.... =I myself became equivalent to humanity=; I
felt the heart-beat of millions in myself. Their contradictory
feelings were united in my own person. I felt equally capitalist and
proletarian; equally orthodox Christian and Catholic, Jew and atheist;
equally man and woman.
All the sorrows and joys in humanity I felt in myself, and I plunged
myself in them to the depths.
I wished to experience them all in my own spirit.... I studied
universal history, but with what perception!... I did not confine
myself to facts, but I turned to the persons of those who were acting;
I represented to myself all the misery of the crowd and the thought of
the crowd.
What intolerable pain all these provided for me! How I began to love
glorious humanity which suffered all that!
Now the moment had come! Now was the time quickly to plunge into the
extreme of life!... To plunge into all the sorrows of the millions,
and to increase them tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold! To drink
the voluptuous sensation which all experience in the paroxysm of
frenzy, and thus to become thoroughly man!!
VIII.
From now onwards I threw myself with enthusiasm into the arms of the
most extreme section of the anarchist movement. I gave up the whole of
my property to the support of newspapers, to the publication of
pamphlets, to the support of agitators, and so on. But, at the same
time, I remained in touch with the “upper ten thousand.” I travelled
through the principal countries of Europe and America, everywhere
forming associations, everywhere developing amid the receptive element
of the movement my most radical tendencies--in most cases with good
result.
(He now describes in detail his propagandist destructive activity,
especially in Spain.)
IX.
Meanwhile, in my home in Eastern Europe the revolutionary tendency was
continually gaining force; anarchism also became more influential. I
felt that there was the proper field for my further activity.
Henceforward I lived partly in Paris and partly in Genf and Zürich, in
order from these places to guide the movement in my direction.
Among my own countrymen I soon found adherents to whom nothing seemed
too fantastic, nothing too radical.
Soon we were in possession of a small printing-office, with the aid of
which we issued leaflets, pamphlets, and newspapers.
These generally contained the same ideas: the working classes should
not bother themselves with political demands, such as “universal
suffrage,” “individual liberty,” and the like. For, even if all these
were to be gained, social oppression and exploitation would remain
unaltered: these are what they feel most deeply, and from these evils
all the others result. The working classes should rather aim at the
“social revolution,” they should undertake the “expropriation of the
expropriators.”
In the newspapers and pamphlets we proved in a scientific manner the
justice of all forms of individual expropriation--robbery with
violence, theft, extortion, etc.; we conducted an attack on property;
we demanded the destruction of wealth, whether in private hands or in
the hands of the State, in order that its possession might be more
easily gained.
When the war between Japan and Russia broke out, we all felt that the
time for increased activity had now arrived--most of us moved to
Poland, Lithuania, or Bessarabia. A few only remained in Switzerland,
in order to keep a grip upon the organization in these parts.
X.
For me there now began a period of frightful sufferings.... With
frenzied haste, I seized all the possible news from the seat of war;
greedily I consulted the reports of great battles lasting for entire
weeks; I read of the dreadful storming of Port Arthur. All the
horrible details passed plainly before my eyes.
All the frightful tortures of the masses I represented in my
imagination. I saw how they stood in battle day after day; how they
had lost consciousness in consequence of hunger and thirst and
fatigue, and so went on fighting as mere automata. Ultimately they
even =forgot= to take nourishment, to drink, and to rest--they
actually did not any longer understand that they could free themselves
from their torture of hunger and thirst, could save their lives, by
eating and drinking--so they went on in a frenzy until they fell.
I was no longer capable of doing anything else than, with a swimming
head, with temples pulsating with fever, studying war reports. Day and
night these pictures were before me. Oh, if I could only stand with
them in this hell!... How I loved them, these people who were capable
of such grand actions!... I wished to call out to them: “Be embraced,
O millions! Receive the kiss of the whole world!”... Yes, these are
the true civilized nations!... To what progress must these horrible
sufferings give rise? What a future for mankind! What joys to come!
XI.
Meanwhile the whole of my property had been used up in the
revolutionary movement. The little money that was still available,
that we were still able to scrape together here and there, was
necessarily used for party purposes. I therefore suffered the most
horrible poverty--now in Warsaw, now in Lodz, Bialystok, Kiew, or
Odessa. ... Most of our adherents were among the poor Jewish quarters
of these towns.
My earnings consisted of occasional work and occasional theft. When
there was nothing doing in either of these ways, I moved on with a few
of my own kind from one of our supporters to another.... These people
divided with us the little they had.
It was a voluptuous joy to me, finally, to plunge into the uttermost
depths of misery which it is possible to reach.
It was an enormous victory to be able to live in such surroundings.
What glorious torments I suffered, until I had overcome the disgust
and loathing which the whole environment produced in me! Everywhere we
were amidst horrible dirt.
Notwithstanding all the dirt and misery in which I saw these people
wallowing--or, precisely, because of these things--I began to love
them as hitherto I had loved no others.... When they told me of the
frightful persecutions which their people had endured as no other had
done, then I experienced an unnamable yearning to be one of them; then
I wondered at the enormous power with which, notwithstanding all
persecutions, amidst the most frightful misery which I saw around me,
yet they were able to be the most ardent revolutionists.
XII.
Everywhere now the revolution was in flood. We developed a feverish
activity in all our centres.... At first we had no very great
influence, but our emissaries were actively at work everywhere, in
order to convert our movement from a political one to a social one, or
at least to an economic one.
For this purpose we had provided a secret printing-press in Warsaw,
where we prepared the necessary leaflets. They were written by a
student, who was a genius in this speciality. No one understood as
well as he how to appeal to the instincts of the crowd. The moving
power of his style was incomparable.... He put the facts side by side,
illuminated them from the side that seemed to him most suitable, and
then drew his conclusions, which, in their simple convincing logic,
seemed irresistible. Then he turned to inflame fanaticism, reminded us
how, then and there, and there, and there, so many victims had been
sacrificed to the same idea; how, there and elsewhere, on the
barricades men had died for it, and had rather rotted in prison than
abandon their just demands. In this way he =always= succeeded in
moving the crowd.
It was very efficacious, also, to remind the people of all the little
tricks which had been played upon them by the manufacturers and by the
authorities; he drew their attention to the fact how they, who had
created everything, were actually not recognized as human beings, far
less as human beings with equal rights.... These proofs most readily
infuriated the proletarians to frenzy, and in some places, as in
Lagonsk, Tiflis, and Baku, we succeeded in turning the movement in the
economic direction. It was a great advantage that we had associates
everywhere, and we were quickly notified when the rain was likely to
begin, so that we could speedily move to another place.
In Tiflis the affair did not go as I wished; here the people were only
=too= practical.... They began neither to strike, nor to demolish, nor
to attack the soldiers.... No.... They simply said: “So much wages do
we want; then we shall work only for such a time; and no commodity
must rise in price.... Every one who will not take part with us we
shall shoot.”... All the inhabitants joined them.... After a short
time all this came to nothing.
Baku was more pleasing to me.... Here the petroleum-borers made their
demands, and as these were not agreed to within two days, they set
fire to 140 wells.... Then, to my great regret, the proprietors
agreed to everything which had been demanded. I had been so inhumanly
glad to see my life-ideal fulfilled. It seemed as if the situation was
going to be such as I had often imagined....
A long time already had the religious and racial hatred between the
Armenians and the Tartars been inflamed to the uttermost. In the whole
of the Caucasus there was a bubbling as if in a witch’s cauldron....
Naturally, I remained in Baku, in order to be ready for what I hoped
would happen there.
The whole population was at the uttermost point of tension; everything
seemed painfully uncertain; would the dance begin or not?... I felt
that it would only be necessary to throw a grain of sand into machine,
and in an instant it would lead to an avalanche.... I was possessed by
a frightful excitement; this mental tension was intolerable.... From
minute to minute the horrible anxiety of the undetermined increased in
me, and the hellish desire still burned within me; I longed that it
might start at this very minute, so that, at last, my nerve-destroying
tension might be relieved.
Then I became possessed with a demoniacal idea: one only needed to
give the slightest little push at the right place, and the storm would
break.
Inwardly I shuddered at the idea of the horrible consequences; and yet
something within me drove me forward with an irresistible
force--finally, to close the switch, and to allow the current to pass
which must give rise to the explosion.... “It is only a kind of
benevolent midwifery,” something seemed to whisper in my ear. “It must
happen, in any case!... The sooner the storm breaks, the better!”
Thus I was subjected to a conflict of perceptions, which made me quite
irresponsible. I was hurled to and fro by momentary feelings like a
football. A single word from the other side would have produced in me
such a suggestion that I should have blindly done anything I might
have been asked to do.
My state resembled that of those people of whom Blanqui says: “Paris
at any moment contains 50,000 men who are ready at a wave of the hand
to shed blood for any cause.” It is indifferent to them, he might have
added, if it is for the cause of freedom or for the cause of reaction.
This “destroy-everything mood,” which had so long been to me a
psychological riddle, I was now able to study in my own person, as the
result of an intensified masochistic predisposition.... At the
foundation of the whole hermaphroditic state, there lay nothing else
than the love of humanity.... An everyday humanity offers us no new
sensations.... We are only able to love when it is out of the
ordinary.... For this reason, we strive to see mankind in pain and
poverty--in order that we may love men more ardently; to love them for
that reason, because their misery provides for =us= intense pain.
For days I wandered about, fighting within myself a frightful
spiritual battle.... I felt that the only alternatives were either to
bring about a catastrophe or suicide. To wait any longer was beyond my
powers. A chance must decide....
A kind of trance state had taken possession of my organism.... I knew
nothing rightly: I did not know if everything around me was reality
or only a dream!... Yes, I even doubted my own existence!... At no
moment did I know where I was, how I had come there, what I had just
been doing, what I really was.... I remember only that suddenly I was
walking in the street in deep conversation with a man entirely unknown
to me.... Our conversation turned round the question, What was going
to happen?... Both of us were reserved, both on the watch; each seemed
to have the feeling--“He is seeing through me; I must not betray
myself!... Perhaps I shall be able to get something out of him!”...
Thus, we spoke with the most extreme caution about that which each of
us read in the soul of the other....
The passers-by stared at us; possibly we had been speaking rather too
loudly. It appeared to me that someone was following us in order to
listen to our conversation; we stopped, in order that this person
might be compelled to walk past us. It was an impudent lad, in the
years between boyhood and manhood; he stopped also, with his hands in
his trousers pockets, a few paces distant, and listened to us with
interest.... My companion was as much taken aback as I was myself, and
we both began to stammer. At the moment a crowd of gapers had
collected around us, hoping to hear something of interest. We both
became continually more confused; my head began to swim, and I began
to say something. It must have been nonsense that I spoke, for my
companion looked at me, half astonished and half alarmed, and several
persons in the crowd began to titter. This made me suddenly lose my
head more even than before, and I began to get angry. Suddenly I
shouted out to my companion: “That will have the most frightful
results; they have cut off the Tartar’s feet and hands, and now the
Tartars will massacre the whole town!”... All those around me began to
talk to one another at once. “Cut off feet and hands!”... I had turned
the switch and the current had passed....
I do not know how I got home.... My landlady rushed to me with the
news: “The Tartars are going to burn the town to ashes, and to murder
all the Armenians. Some of them have had their feet and hands cut off;
their noses have been slit, their eyes cut out; boiling oil has been
poured into their ears.... The people are all running away, or
barricading themselves in their houses!”
XIII.
I did not see the beginning of the drama, for immediately after my
return home I fell into a death-like slumber, which lasted more than
fifty hours. No one could have kept about after such a spiritual
storm.... When I awoke, I was so weak that only with labour could I
move a few paces; my whole body trembled unceasingly.... I had
absolutely no other desire but for repose.... After I had somewhat
recovered, I went to sleep again until the next morning.
Now I once more felt comparatively strong, although my arms and legs
still trembled. My hostess--a German woman, long ago deserted in this
town--gave me an account of the atrocities perpetrated by the Tartars.
As I went out, the town seemed to be dead. In the streets there still
lay numerous horrible, mutilated corpses; the shops were closed; here
and there houses were demolished. As far as I could learn, in =Tiflis=
the Tartars had done even worse.... Here in Baku they had fired the
boring-wells of the Armenians; from these the fire had spread to the
rest, so that the entire petroleum industry was ruined, and 10,000 men
were out of work.
All this, however, made no impression on me. A frightful relaxation
and apathy had taken possession of me; I felt neither pain, nor
pleasure, nor sympathy. It was the reaction following the previous
hypertension of the nerves.
I cared no longer to stay here, and I resolved to return to Kiew, and
later to Warsaw or to Lodz.
XIV.
After a short stay in Rostow, on the Don, I reached Kiew, and was
received by the group with much joy. They had believed that I had
fallen in the massacre at Baku or Tiflis.
Our successes in Tiflis and Baku in the economic province, by means of
the economic terror, were now utilized at every opportunity; they only
regretted that, owing to the racial conflict, everything had been once
more destroyed.
During my absence there had been many changes here. In Odessa, Kiew,
Warsaw, Lodz, and Bialystok, successful “expropriations” had been
effected. These “new tactics” had not only been strikingly successful
in almost every case, but they had also attracted towards us the
sympathies of those who had hitherto not taken in much earnest our
influence upon the revolution.
These “expropriations” were carried out in various ways. For example,
by one of our associates, who was an official in the postal service,
we were kept informed when, anywhere in the neighbourhood of the town,
the post-office coach was to pass an isolated place, carrying anything
of considerable value. We then attacked it and plundered it.
Or we sent out spies to learn when, in any great person’s house, or in
any bank, large sums of money would be on hand, and at what time the
fewest employees would be there. Armed to the teeth, we crowded in,
and demanded the surrender of the money, leaving in its place a
receipt with the dreaded imprint of our organization. It also
happened--as in Odessa--that a bomb was exploded in a business
locality. Every one ran up to see what had happened. Meanwhile, one of
our bands entered the place of business from behind and plundered the
safe.
What a quantity of intelligence, energy, perseverance, and knowledge
had to be employed, to render such enterprises possible! How we had to
watch for weeks, to form plans and reject them; how our arrangements
must be altered at the last moment, or the enterprise entirely
abandoned! Of this every one and no one can form an idea for himself.
Here, at any rate, I do =not= propose to give a detailed description
of these affairs, because my sketches do not aim at giving a
description of the revolution, or of those who participated in it, but
=simply and solely to represent the motives of my own activity=:
Therefore I describe my own =environment=, only in so far as it is
necessary to do so for the =understanding= of these =motives=.
These “expropriations” were, moreover, not an anarchist speciality,
for they were also undertaken by the other terrorist parties.
He, however, who believes that the revolutionaries employed this money
for their personal needs is grossly deceived. After, as before, they
remained in their miserable holes, eating rotten herrings and going
barefoot, in order not to destroy their union with the workmen, and
not to lose the latter’s confidence. The money was used solely for
revolutionary purposes--for providing weapons and printing-presses;
for the erection of laboratories for making bombs; for the expenses of
the journeys of smugglers and propagandists; for bribery; and for the
support of those who had been arrested, and of their families--also
the families of those who had been killed or wounded.
XV.
Soon after my return from Baku, I was transferred to Warsaw, in order
to take part in the May-day celebrations of 1905--these May-day
celebrations taking place according to the calendar of non-Russian
countries.
The war, the unceasing extensive strikes and disturbances, had
resulted everywhere in giving rise to horrible misery, which was
further increased by the political crisis and by the arrest of all
branches of industry.
All the misery of which I had always dreamed I now saw unceasingly
around me. It might be believed that at length my desires would have
obtained satisfaction! But this was not so. In the same degree as that
with which the poverty around me increased did my sensibility, too,
become blunted; I became accustomed to its appearance; I regarded it
as an everyday occurrence, as something easily comprehensible.
=Somewhat= more did I love and honour humanity on account of this
misery; but not to the extent of something beyond force, something
“superhuman,” which would have been necessary for my complete
satisfaction. Perhaps in Baku I should have experienced this
superhuman feeling, had it not been that at the decisive moment my
body gave way under the strain. Was that, perhaps, prearranged by
Nature? Has Nature imposed these limits upon an individual, in order
to prevent him from raising himself above the human standard?
Can it be that the state into which I fell at Baku resembled a
“syncope of the soul,” which ensued when my psychical state began to
verge upon the superhuman, in consequence of the torments around me,
just as bodily syncope renders us unconscious when physical pain
exceeds the limits of human capacity?
These questions now began to occupy me. I could only attain certainty
by means of experiment; and I must obtain certainty, even if the half
of humanity had to be sacrificed, as one sacrifices a rabbit in an
experiment.
Impatiently I awaited the first of May.... Perhaps that day would
bring me a solution of the riddle!... The workmen were still
undecided: should they demonstrate or not?... I began to urge them
=in favour of= the demonstration; =my= reason is easy to
understand....
It was unquestionably one of the largest demonstrations that Warsaw
had ever witnessed. In the narrow streets there was packed an
innumerable crowd. Suddenly from all sides the soldiers charged the
demonstration.... A frightful panic--such as I have never before
seen--seized the crowd. Resistance was not to be thought of--it was a
_sauve qui peut_!
In mad fear of death, every one began to scream, and to seek refuge in
the houses.... At the doors of the houses there ensued a frightful
pressure. Many were thrown to the ground; these were trodden to pulp.
On the ground-floor the windows were broken in, and people crawled
through them into the houses. Meanwhile, the Cossacks were raging up
and down, cutting people down with their sabres. There were deafening
screams of fear, and with these and with the groans of the wounded
there mingled the bestial “Süiy” of the Cossacks, so as to produce a
nerve-lacerating concert of hell. And around one could see the
unnaturally dilated pupils, the widely opened eyes, and the faces
distracted with anxiety, of those who were seeking safety in flight.
The same excitement had seized on me also; with a wildly beating
heart, and an unbearably distressing feeling of contracture in the
loins, which produced in my entire organism a kind of “anxious
ecstasy,” I began to hope.... But it would not come....
XVI.
In Odessa, which was exhausted by unceasing fights and strikes, the
strength of the reaction began to make itself felt, and there were
fears of a “pogrom” (an attack on the Jews). The forces of the
reaction in these pogroms always made use of the Lumpenproletariat
(the blackguardly element of the mob).
Since the most trustworthy of our Odessa associates were Jews, and
thus had no influence with the Lumpenproletariat, they urged me to go
to Odessa, and, as a non-Hebrew, to use my influence to prevent the
pogrom. It was not possible for me to refuse, although in secret I
rejoiced at the prospect of the pogrom.
In Kiew, where I had some business, I met by chance an acquaintance
belonging to my more prosperous past. This man knew nothing of my
revolutionary activities. He, for his part, was an arch anti-Semite.
In consequence of the disturbances, his business had been completely
ruined. He described the whole revolution as the work of the Jews, and
also abused the Government, which, in his opinion, was to blame for
the weakness which it exhibited in dealing with the revolutionary
forces.
“But,” he continued, with a wink, “if the Government does nothing, we
shall know how to help ourselves a little!” I pretended to be entirely
of his opinion, and he told me in confidence that there already
existed in Odessa a secret committee, which was to take the matter in
hand. He also was a member. A large sum of money had already been
collected, in order to pay certain persons who were to arrange the
entire “Hetze.” If I wished, I could be his guest, and he would make
me a member of the committee. I agreed.
The next day I was actually enrolled in the committee. Who the members
really were I did not learn. One characteristic was common to them
all--a frightful indolence.... Everything was ready. They would
arrange for patriotic demonstrations, and would then throw
proclamations amongst the people, to tell them that the Jews had sworn
an oath to combine with the Japanese for the destruction of Holy
Russia; that the revolution had been begun by the Jews in order that
the Little Father’s army must meet enemies on both sides at once.
Thus, for all the present misery the Jews only were to blame, etc....
Everything had been arranged already, and was in the hands of people
who were prepared to undertake the whole affair. The only thing now
wanting was the proclamation.
My acquaintances now began to praise my genius as an author, and they
all pressed me to begin immediately to compose the required leaflet.
The proposal suited me; I do not need to say why. With zeal I threw
myself upon the task, and the proclamation was a masterpiece of
demagogic art, and a crowning example of the “appeal to the beast in
man,” as it is ordinarily called.
The diffusion of this “document of civilization,” as it is called by
the revolutionists, took place in connexion with the planned
demonstration. The day passed without an outbreak, although the
imminence of the storm could, as one may say, be felt in the air. Not
until the evening were a few Jews beaten here and there.
On the second day our people arranged for a second demonstration. From
the other side they endeavoured to form a counter-demonstration, and
the two came in conflict. The Black Hundreds (drawn from the
Lumpenproletariat), who fought in the name of “patriotism,” dispersed
the counter-demonstrators, and began to demolish and to plunder in the
Jewish quarter of the town.
The breaking of the panes of glass, and the destruction of the goods
in the shop-windows and of the furniture in the houses, seemed to
inflame the crowd more and more; they must have experienced a sort of
voluptuous sensation in connexion with these activities. Finally, they
found some Jews who had hidden themselves. A horrible yell was now
raised. The Jews were dragged out into the street; they were struck
with everything available--with cudgels, hatchets, and knives--until
they were completely unrecognizable. The crowd found more and more of
them. Most of them threw themselves on their knees and begged for
life; it was most horrible to see them, beaten till their features
were no longer distinguishable, still pleading for mercy. Now the mob
really began to smell blood, and to display its whole true human
nature. Each began to murder according to his own individual fancy.
Here a man cut the breast from a nursing mother; there they tore the
clothes from some girls, and flogged them naked through the streets.
In another place they dragged a Jewess, naked, from her house into the
street, tied her hand and foot, and fastened her by the hair to the
axle of a cab; then they drove off at a gallop until she was battered
to death. Behind the cab there ran street-arabs, striking at her
body.... But to what purpose is it to describe these scenes, at which
one’s heart is convulsed in one’s body with sorrow, and simultaneously
one wishes to exult with joy and triumph?
Here I saw once more, in their proper environment, the 50,000 of whom
Blanqui speaks. A wave of the hand would have sufficed--although 99
per cent, of them unquestionably felt no hostility towards the
Jews--to produce in all of them the most infernal anti-Semitic
excesses. If the police would allow it, as they allow the pogrom,
another wave of the hand would direct the mob with no less ease to
make an attack on another human variety--for example, on the
capitalists.
What psychological factor drove them on?... Was it simply a tendency
to cruelty?... No!... A love of cruelty considered by itself, without
a nobler motive, is inhuman, inharmonious to human nature, and man
=cannot= escape his own nature. There must therefore be other motives
at the basis of such actions, motives of a nature more humanly
comprehensible.
But look at all those slaughterers! Regard their physiognomy! Not a
trace of cruelty--only suffering, =unheard-of= suffering, is reflected
on these faces!... The fear of death and the pain of their victims
prepares for =themselves= incredible torment!... Do you not believe
that these people will return to their houses, and will suffer intense
mental pain?... They will continually see, in imagination, the last
beseeching glance of their victim, full of complaint and reproach,
directed upon them!... What hatred, what contempt, will they feel for
the animal which has awakened within them! They will feel a longing to
spit in their own faces, to strike themselves, to strangle
themselves!... Before every one whom they meet they will lower their
eyes: “He knows that I have murdered people, amid the most cruel
tortures, against whom there was no hatred in my heart--murdered only
for this reason: because I had within me the instinctive demand for
spiritual torment; because by the situation in which I suddenly found
myself one pole of my hermaphrodite nature was suddenly discharged!”
“They are =masochists=, only they do not know it.”
Self-contempt suddenly seized me amidst this Satanic orgy of suffering
on the part of such =unconscious, instinctive masochists=. The
remembrance that all these persons were being led onwards by a blind
animal impulse, and that to-morrow they would fall on their knees
before their God and pray to Him for pardon, filled me with disgust. I
began to hate this stupid mass. I wanted to see them grovel in the
dust themselves, and howl for mercy.
For this purpose it was only necessary to organize the _Selbstschutz_
(a union for the prevention of persecution of the Jews). In order to
effect this, I tried to get into the Jewish quarter. I succeeded in
doing so by means of some side passages. Hardly had I reached this
quarter, when I came across masses of these “Self-Protectors.”
Finally, I found among them some acquaintances, and I joined them.
A heated contest now began to rage.... As the Black Hundreds were now
so energetically attacked, all their heroism was speedily at an end:
they took to flight. At this moment the soldiers appeared--not, as one
might have imagined, to attack the Black Hundreds, but to attack the
“Self-Protectors.”
My arm, which was stretched out in front of me, was traversed
longitudinally by a rifle-bullet in a peculiar manner. I sank to the
ground at first, but soon recovered sufficiently to get up and run
away.
That inexpressible sense of complete satisfaction by means of
suffering, for which I was continually searching--which, so to say, I
felt to slumber within me--once more appeared in actual experience. I
always had the impression that there was something wanting, that it
was necessary to awaken something within me which hitherto had existed
in my consciousness only in a dormant state.... At the same time, a
voice whispered to me that I was demanding something superhuman; that
the attainment of such a thing must logically overwhelm my purely
=human= powers, and that it would involve my annihilation.
Day and night these thoughts tormented me: “You =must= gain this
experience--even if it involves your destruction!... But what if, at
the last moment--as at Baku--a further incapacity, a ‘spiritual
syncope,’ ensues?”
One thing I knew--“When you reach it, it will only be by yourself; all
others will break to pieces =before= you!”
XVII.
I no longer had any interest in the development of revolutionary
affairs, since for =my own= purposes they were no longer serviceable.
The new questions which now arose--as, for example, the propaganda
among the Lumpenproletariat--left me cold.... In the pogrom we had
seen what an unawakened force--reputed as revolutionary, but in
reality =masochistic=--was slumbering in the Lumpenproletariat. That
this force could also be used in the service of reaction was ascribed
to the fact that all these thieves, criminals, and prostitutes, came
into contact only with the working classes. But since they earn from
the latter nothing but contempt, their sensibility was turned
=against= the working classes.
This unfortunate state of affairs it was proposed to counteract by
going among the criminals, just as in earlier years they had gone
among the working people. An endeavour was made to organize the
Lumpenproletariat, in order to win their sympathies.
The movement was in part successful, although it brought with it much
corruption. Thus it happened that the criminals endeavoured to turn
the matter to their own advantage, and began to pursue their
profession in the name of anarchism. For example, in Warsaw they
visited the house of an enormously rich Jewish banker, whose father
had recently died, and, under the mask of anarchism, demanded from him
10,000 roubles, with the threat that if he did not give the money,
they would dig up the corpse of his father and bury it in
unconsecrated ground. When we remember there is nothing more horrible
for an orthodox Jew than to rest in unconsecrated soil, we shall
understand that the banker gave the money; but this occurrence aroused
a great sensation, and people began to identify anarchists with common
criminals.
Now the anarchists had to endure the persecution, not only of the
Government, but also that of other revolutionary parties and of the
Lumpenproletariat--the latter for this reason: because they did not
wish their names to be associated with actions which were undertaken
for personal advantage, and not for revolutionary aims.
This campaign against the anarchists from three different sides must
soon bring about disaster.
During this time I was perpetually puzzling over the problem: “Will
the idea you have dreamed of be realized within you?... Will it lead
to your destruction?... Or will it overwhelm your powers, and lead
once more to spiritual syncope?”
By means of an experiment, the matter could be determined!...
Supposing one were to distribute broadcast plague bacilli!... If
entire towns were to suffer from this disease!... If the fear of death
was to seize the whole crowd of those who, in their cowardice at every
strike, every demonstration, every fight at the barricades, had hidden
behind the stove or crept under the bed!... If this fear of death were
to increase to a general panic, affecting entire towns, entire
countries, as happened in the middle ages!... If the people, in their
despair, should look for the disseminators of the trouble, and should
proceed to hew one another to pieces!... Would my relief come then?...
Will there be an =answer= for me?
I shudder to think of the suffering which this would entail for me! I
feel that I am not equal to this!... I suffer, on the other hand,
inexpressibly, because I have no answer, no recognition, no
satisfaction!... I will--and I cannot. To endure longer this
hermaphroditic state--this is death or lunacy!... What to do?... How
to free oneself from this horrible dilemma?
Oh, why am I not like others?... Why cannot I simply accept =that
which is=?... Why do I torment myself to climb the mountain, in order
to stand before a bottomless abyss?... Before an abyss whose secret
depths will be manifest to me only if I hurl myself into it!...
What to do?... What to do?... Shall I, or shall I not?... I =will=!...
I =must=!...
As I was about to do it, I was arrested! Chance or foresight?
Oh, fate, fate! =That= is too much of suffering!... Oh, mankind,
mankind, what have you done?... A single one wished to =see=. A single
one wished to tear a veil from the image--and you have hindered it!...
Eternally you will have darkness around you!... But why will you not
allow me to see the light?
Is it thus that you thank =me=, who have loved humanity as no other
has loved!
Yes; that is once over again the cruel, the pitiless philosophy of
Golgotha--
“=He who will love--must suffer!=”
[588] Havelock Ellis, “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” vol. iii.,
“Analysis of the Sexual Impulse.”
[589] A special account of this matter is found in an interesting work
by G. H. Schneider, “Joy and Sorrow of the Human Race: a Social and
Psychological Investigation of the Fundamental Problems of Ethics”
(Stuttgart, 1883).
[590] _Cf._ Eugen Dühren (Iwan Bloch), “Recent Researches regarding
the Marquis de Sade and his Time” (Berlin, 1904). I refer the reader
to this, my second, work on the Marquis de Sade, as a critical
description of the true de Sade based upon contemporary sources. My
former work upon this subject I now regard as inadequate, youthful,
and containing numerous errors.
[591] See the description of this in G. Hirth’s “Ways to Love,” p.
638.
[592] They are still more clearly to be observed in animals.
[593] Havelock Ellis, “Eroticism and Pain,” in his “Analysis of the
Sexual Impulse.”
[594] Friedrich S. Krauss, “Procreation in the Morals, the Customs,
and the Beliefs of the Southern Slavs,” published in _Kryptadia_, vol.
vii., pp. 208, 209 (Paris, 1899).
[595] A. Eulenburg, “Sadism and Masochism,” published in “Borderland
Questions of Nervous and Mental Life,” No. 19, pp. 9, 10 (published by
Loewenfeld and Kurella, Wiesbaden, 1902).
[596] Ch. Féré, “Sadism in the Bull-fight,” published in the _Revue de
Médecine_, 1900, No. 8.
[597] The sadistic element in lynch law has recently been most vividly
described by Feliz Baumann in his interesting book, “In Darkest
America: Manners and Customs in the United States.” (Dresden, 1902).
[598] Francisque Bouiller, _Du Plaisir et de la Douleur_, p. 72
(Paris, 1865).
[599] A. Horwicz, “Psychological Analysis on Psychological Grounds,”
p. 361 (Magdeburg, 1878).
[600] Michel Montaigne, “Essais,” p. 35 (Paris, 1886).
[601] Havelock Ellis, “Analysis of the Sexual Impulse.”
[602] J. J. Virey, “Woman,” p. 347.
[603] This point of view has been especially insisted on by Felix von
Luschan. _Cf._ _Politsch-anthropologische Revue_, 1902, No. 1 p. 71.
[604] K. von don Steinen, “The Savage Races of Central Brazil,” p. 332
(Berlin, 1894).
[605] S. R. Steinmetz, “Ethnological Studies regarding the First
Development of Punishment,” vol. i., p. 23 (Leiden and Leipzig, 1894).
[606] _Cf._ also Albert Eulenburg, “Sadism and Masochism,” pp. 57-68
(with a good bibliography; Wiesbaden, 1902); Iwan Bloch,
“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii.,
pp. 75-97; Pierre Guénolé, “L’étrange Passion. La Flagellation dans
les Mœurs d’Aujourd’hui. Études et Documents” (Paris, 1904); Don
Brennus Aléra, “La Flagellation Passionelle” (Paris, 1905); Lord
Drialys, “Les Délices du Fouet. Précédé d’un Essai sur la Flagellation
et le Masochisme par Jean de Villiot” (contains numerous interesting
details; Paris, 1907).
[607] Especially at the time when flogging as a judicial punishment
was still practised in Germany. The sadistic influence of this
punishment is described by W. Reinhard in his celebrated book “Lenchen
im Zuchthause” (“Lenchen in the Penitentiary”), reprinted 1901
(Karlsruhe, 1840). In Russia these conditions remain unaltered.
[608] P. Näcke, “Forensic, Psychiatrical, and Psychological Aspects of
the Trial of Dippold, especially in Connexion with Sadism,” published
in the _Archives for Criminal Anthropology_, 1903, vol. xiii., No. 4,
pp. 350-372.
[609] Regarding the English flagellation brothels, and regarding
Theresa Berkley, see my work, “The Sexual Life in England,” vol. ii.,
pp. 429-443.
[610] H. Lawes, “Die Weibliche Reize,” p. 180 (Leipzig, _circa_ 1877).
[611] Siegfried Türkel (“Sexual Pathological Cases,” published in the
_Archives for Criminal Anthropology_, vol. xi., pp. 219, 220) reports
the case of an actor, who, known under the name of “The Ravisher,”
induced prostitutes, whom he paid liberally, to resist him sometimes
for hours, and then apparently to yield to his superior force. He once
took a young girl into his dwelling, bound her suddenly, and violated
her in this state.
[612] In this case, according to von Krafft-Ebing, the life of his
victim depended on the fact whether ejaculation occurred soon or late.
[613] _Cf._ Santlus, “The Psychology of Human Impulses,” published in
the _Archives for Psychiatry_, 1864, vol. vi., p. 255.
[614] _Cf._ regarding sadistic arson my “Contributions to the Etiology
of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 116-118.
[615] G. Chr. Lichtenberg, “Miscellaneous Writings,” edited by L. Chr.
Lichtenberg and Friedrich Kries, vol. ii., p. 447 (Göttingen, 1801).
[616] To this category belongs also the peculiar case reported by
Siegfried Türkel (“Sexual Pathological Cases,” published in the
_Archives for Criminal Anthropology_, 1903, vol. xi., pp. 215-218) of
a historian who became sexually excited by the view of a woman
suffering from sexual deprivation, and of her mental trouble. Another
man (_ibid._, p. 222, 223) obtained sexual excitement and
gratification only by watching the anxiety of women--for example, of
such as he had himself falsely accused of theft!
[617] _Cf._ the reference to erotic dictionaries in my “Contributions
to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 104, 105.
Recently F. S. Krauss, in his “Anthropophyteia,” has devoted special
attention to this peculiar manifestation of the popular soul.
[618] R. Schwaeblé, “Les Détraquées de Paris,” pp. 3-10.
[619] The typical literary advocate of masochism, who in actual life
was a passionate worshipper of the whip, was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
(1836-1895). _Cf._ regarding him, his life, his sexual perversions,
and his writings, C. F. von Schlichtegroll, “Sacher-Masoch and
Masochism” (Dresden, 1901); Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, “Confessions of
my Life” (Berlin and Leipzig, 1906); C. F. von Schlichtegroll,
“‘Wanda’ without Fur and Mask. An Answer to ‘Wanda’ von
Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Confessions of My Life,’ with extracts from
Sacher-Masoch’s Diary” (Leipzig, 1906).
[620] A. de Musset, “Confessions of a Child of his Time.”
[621] Ertel, “A ‘Slave,’” published in the _Archives for Criminal
Anthropology_, issued by Hans Gross, vol. xxv., Nos. 1 and 2, p. 107
(Leipzig, 1906). Hamburg appears to be the chief centre of masochistic
prostitution. See also the report given by D. Hausen, “The Cane and
the Whip,” second edition, pp. 164, 165 (Dresden, 1902).
[622] Regarding the voluptuous sensations connected with hanging, see
my “Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii.,
p. 173, and more especially my “Sexual Life in England,” vol. iii.,
pp. 94-99 (Berlin, 1903); also Havelock Ellis, “Analysis of the Sexual
Impulse.”
[623] _Cf._ Castor and Pollux, “The Masseuse Improprieties of Berlin”
(Berlin, 1900).
[624] This is a favourite masochistic situation. Hans Baldung has
immortalized it in a picture, in which Phyllis rides upon Aristotle. I
owe to the kindness of my colleague Dr. Kantorowicz, in Hanover, the
knowledge that J. von Falke describes an ivory relief representing the
same scene. King Alexander looks on, and “rejoices at the scene--how
the bearded old man, controlled by the beauty, with the bit in his
mouth, is crawling about on all-fours, carrying the lady, armed with a
whip.” In Semrau-Lübke’s “Elements of the History of Art,” vol. iii.,
p. 532 (Stuttgart, 1903), a picture on glass, from the Rahn Collection
in Zurich, is described, which represents the same history.
[625] Ertel, _op. cit._, pp. 105, 106.
[626] The following extremely valuable contribution to the psychology
of the Russian revolution now in progress was sent in September, 1906,
from Russia to my colleague Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. He most kindly gave
me this extremely interesting sketch for publication in this place. It
throws a very clear light upon the nature of algolagnia. We have here
a unique psychological document, which deserves the attention of
politicians and sociologists no less than that of anthropologists and
psychologists.
CHAPTER XXII
SEXUAL FETICHISM
“_With respect to the evolution of physiological love, it is probable
that its germ is always to be sought and to be found in an individual
fetichistic charm which a person of one sex exercises upon a person of
the other sex._”--R. VON KRAFFT-EBING.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXII
Physiological foundation of sexual fetichism -- Definition -- “Partial
attraction” -- Theory of fetichism -- Psychological process by which
it originates -- Idealization and accentuation in love -- The ideal
isolation of certain parts -- “Lesser” and “greater” fetichism -- The
most frequent forms of sexual fetichism -- Racial fetichism --
Peculiar inclinations towards exotic individuals -- Hair fetichism --
Various forms of this -- The “plait-cutters” -- Trial of a
plait-cutter -- Hair fetichism in women -- Baldness fetichism --
Fetichism for other parts of the body -- Breast fetichism -- Genital
fetichism -- The phallus cult -- Cunnilinctus and fellatio -- A case
of genital fetichism -- A hermaphrodite fetichist -- Hand fetichism --
Buttock fetichism -- Smell fetichism -- Red hair and the odour of the
body -- A passage from d Annunzio’s “Lust” -- Axillary-odour fetichism
-- The odour of the entire body as a fetich -- Influence of specific
genital odours -- Skatological fetiches -- “Skatology” in folk-lore --
The “muse latrinal” -- The “renifleurs” and “épongeurs” -- Sexual
perfumes -- Influence of flowers and scents -- Sexual taste fetichism
-- Priapistic means of enjoyment -- Examples -- Fetichism for
horsewomen -- For bodily defects -- For old men -- Voice fetichism --
Object fetichism -- Shoe fetichism, or “retifism” -- Explanation of
these -- Peculiarities of shoe fetichism -- Corset, stocking, and
handkerchief fetichism -- Fabric and costume fetichism.
CHAPTER XXII
Like algolagnia, =sexual fetichism= rests upon a physiological basis,
and is merely a more or less abnormal increase of fetichistic ideas and
perceptions, which are rooted in the very nature of the sexual
attraction.
By fetichism (derived from the Portuguese _feitico_ Italian
_fetisso_--magic, charm) we understand the limitation of love, its
transference from the entire personality to a =portion= of this
personality, or, it may be, to some =lifeless= physical object =related=
to the personality.[627] This fascinating “portion” of the beloved
personality, or the “object” associated with this personality, is the
sexual “fetich.” Within physiological limits, the part concerned
exercises a particular attraction, and is especially exciting, but in
the ideas of the lover it remains associated with the entire personality
to which it belongs. Fetichism first becomes abnormal, or pathological,
when the partial representation becomes completely divorced from the
general representation of the personality, so that, for example, a plait
of hair or a pocket-handkerchief is loved alone and by itself,
disconnected from the person to whom it belongs.
The development of love can always be referred to fetichistic ideas, for
when we examine critically the first general impression which the
beloved makes upon the lover, we always find that there are certain
=parts= or =functions= which have made the =greatest= impression, and
have exercised a greater erotic influence than other portions. To the
former of these, therefore, the imagination and the sensibility more
especially =cleave=. In my “Contributions to the Etiology of
Psychopathia Sexualis” (vol. ii., p. 311), I defined sexual fetiches as
peculiar =symbols= of the =essence= of the beloved personality, with
which the idea of the entire type is most readily associated. M.
Hirschfeld later enunciated the same views.
As sexual fetiches we may have: (1) =Portions of the body=; (2)
=functions and emanations of the body=; and (3) =objects which have any
kind of relation to the body=.
Under (1) we may enumerate the hand, the foot, the nose, the ears, the
eyes, the hair of the head, the hair of the beard, the throat and the
back of the neck, the breasts, the hips, the genital organs, the
buttocks, the calves. All these parts may constitute sexual fetiches.
The same is true of all the influences enumerated under (2)--viz., gait,
movement, voice, glance, odour, complexion.
Under (3) we may enumerate the clothing as a =whole= (as costume) and in
its individual parts, upper-clothing and underclothing, hat, eyeglasses,
way of dressing the hair, necktie, bodice, corset, chemise, petticoat,
stockings, shoes or boots, apron, handkerchief, clothing materials (fur,
satin, silk), the colour of clothing (mourning, parti-coloured blouses,
white clothing, uniform), fashion (_cul de Paris_, _décolleté_ and
_retroussé_, _tricot_); indeed, clothing fetichism goes so far that a
particular shape of the heel of the shoe, a particular mode of
ornamentation of some particular part of the clothing, and, finally, any
striking part of the clothing, may become a sexual fetich.
This fetichistic influence is further increased by a peculiar
characteristic of human love. This is its tendency towards
=idealization=, =beautification=, and =enlargement= of those parts which
especially affect the senses. This beautification and idealization
extends from the body to the clothing, and to articles in general, used
by the beloved person, but normally remains associated with the entire
personality. It is first by means of the enlargement and accentuation of
a distinct part that this becomes separated from the general idea, and
thus its removal and conversion into a “fetich” is prepared for. In the
chapter on clothing we drew attention to this general anthropological
phenomenon of the enlargement and accentuation of many parts by means of
such measures as painting, articles of clothing, exposure, way of doing
the hair, etc.
Inasmuch as now, by the ideal and actual accentuation of the part under
consideration, it is projected as a more independent structure, and
separates itself from the personality as a whole, it is involuntarily
=isolated= in idea by the fetichist, and becomes =generalized= to
constitute an independent stimulus, which may now, temporarily or
permanently, completely take the place of the personality as a whole.
This physiological process embraces both the “lesser” and the “greater”
fetichism of Binet.
The lesser fetichism consists in this: that the lover, without going so
far as to lose sight completely of the entire person of his beloved,
still directs his attention to =individual= special charms, or is in
general first attracted to the beloved woman by means of =quite
distinct qualities=, such as the shape and smallness of the hand, the
colour and sparkling of the eyes, the abundance and softness of the
hair, the complexion, a distinct odour, a melodious voice, etc. In the
“lesser” fetichism the partial representation plays, indeed, a very
prominent part in the general picture, but does not entirely obliterate
this picture.
In the “greater” fetichism, on the other hand, a particular portion, or
function, or quality, or an article of clothing, or an object of
customary use belonging to the beloved person, is isolated from this
latter, and in a sense becomes transformed into the latter, and assumes
wholly and completely the character of a being capable by itself of
exercising a sexually exciting influence. This is genuine sexual
fetichism.
Binet and von Schrenck-Notzing have referred the genesis of fetichism,
as a rule, to some =chance occurrence= during childhood--to a
fetichistic impression which chanced to coincide with sexual excitement,
and thus obtained a permanently sexual coloration. The time of puberty
and the first sexual relationships are especially dangerous for the
formation of such associations of ideas. Von Schrenck-Notzing rightly
draws attention to the fact that this perverse associative connexion, as
a reaction to powerful external impressions, does not occur only, as
Binet assumes, in predisposed individuals, but is also =quite peculiarly
characteristic of the childish mental life at the time when the brain is
undergoing growth, as well as of the less-developed intellectual powers
of savage races=, among whom at the present time, in quite other
provinces than the sexual, fetichism is cultivated in the most excessive
manner; thus, fetichism is often manifested by persons with perfectly
normal brains. Such chance occurrences for the origination of sexual
fetichism occur in games, in reading, in solitary and mutual
masturbation. Nearly always, in connexion with the genesis of fetichism,
we can prove that there has been some such actual predisposing cause.
In numerous cases of the “greater” fetichism, especially in the category
of the hair fetichists (“plait-cutters”), shoe fetichists, and
handkerchief fetichists, there is also associated a more or less severe
psychopathic constitution, on the foundation of which the fetichistic
impulse has developed as a kind of “=coercive idea=” (obsession). These
are the cases which have the greatest forensic importance, and which
gain publicity.
We shall now proceed to give a brief account of the most important forms
of sexual fetichism, and those most frequently encountered.
First of all, =parts=, =functions=, and =qualities= of the body may
constitute sexual fetiches; the possibilities in this respect, extending
from head to foot, have been enumerated above. Moreover, odd as it may
sound, the =entire human being= may also become a sexual fetich, not as
a whole personality--that would be normal love--but as a =national= or
=racial= individual. In such a case we have the so-called “=racial
fetichism=.” The European newspapers are full of interesting reports of
the peculiar attractive force exercised by exotic individuals, female or
male, such as negroes, Arabs, Abyssinians, Moors, Indians, Japanese,
etc., upon European men and women respectively. Whenever members of such
races come to stay in any European capital, we hear of remarkable love
affairs between white girls and these strangers, of romantic abductions,
and other mad adventures. The novelty, peculiarity, piquancy of the
strange races has the effect of a fetich. The size, the figure, the
physiognomy, tint of skin, smell, tattooing, adornment, costume, speech,
dance, and song, of these savage men exercise a fascinating influence.
White men have from very early times had a peculiar weakness for negroes
and for mulatto women and girls. As early as the eighteenth century
there existed in Paris negro brothels; and somewhat later, after
Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, negroes and negresses came in large
numbers to Paris, and were utilized for the gratification of the lusts
of both sexes.
Notwithstanding the deeply-rooted racial hatred, even in America racial
fetichism gives rise to numerous connexions of this kind. The “coloured
girl” exercises a powerful attractive force upon the American man; and
even the proud American woman manifests, with an especial frequency in
Chicago, a certain preference for the male negro.[628] But much greater
is the alluring force exercised by the white upon the negro. More
especially among civilized negroes does the white woman play the part of
a fetich. This is the explanation of the frequent rape, or attempted
rape, of white girls on the part of negroes--one of the principal causes
of the Southern lynchings.
Among the parts of the body which act as fetiches, we have especially to
mention the hair of woman’s head. “=Hair fetichism=” is widely diffused,
both in the physiological “lesser” form and in the pathological
“greater” form. The abundance and the colour of the hair have an equal
influence in normal love also as a “fetich.” Hair, “of sweetest flesh,
the tenderest, Sweetest growth,” as Eduard Grisebach terms it in his
“Neue Tanhäuser,” has a profound sexual significance; with primitive
man, also, it probably played the same rôle of a sexually stimulating
“veil” which was later played by tattooing and clothing. The hair of the
head, and special modes of arranging that hair, play an important part
in sexual selection among the savage races. The odour of the hair also
has a sexually stimulating influence, and remains persistent in the
imagination. The softness also of the hair, the waving, curling movement
of woman’s loosened hair, and the rustling of the hair, excite the
imagination. But most important of all is the colour of the hair; and in
this respect =blonde= or reddish-blonde hair unquestionably takes the
first rank as a sexual fetich. Blonde hair exercised such an influence
in the days of the Roman Empire. The demi-monde of all times has
utilized this form of hair fetichism, felt by men, for its own purposes,
either by dyeing the hair a fair colour, or by the wearing of
fair-haired wigs. There exist, also, fetichistic impulses towards brown,
black, and red hair respectively. Jon Lehmann tells (_Breslauer
Zeitung_, August 24, 1906) of a great libertine who was happy with any
or all pretty girls, as long as they had not red hair and were not the
daughters of clergymen. Innumerable times had he made this assertion.
Many years later Lehmann found him as the happy husband of--a red-haired
clergyman’s daughter! “C’est l’amour qui a fait cela,” he answered
laconically to the astonished question why he had been so unfaithful to
the principles of his youth.
Hair fetichism manifests itself in various ways. Many people are,
properly speaking, rather smell fetichists than hair fetichists; they
content themselves simply with smelling the hair, and this constitutes
their only, or their principal, sexual gratification. Other hair
fetichists obtain sexual enjoyment by looking at the hair, or by passing
the fingers through it. The following case, reported by Archenholtz
(“England and Italy,” vol. i., p. 448; Leipzig, 1785), is typical:
“I was acquainted with an Englishman who was an honourable man; but he
had a very peculiar taste, which, as he frequently assured me, was
deeply rooted in his soul. His greatest pleasure, which alone could
intoxicate his senses, was to comb the hair of a beautiful woman. He
kept a very handsome mistress for this purpose only. =Love and woman
did not, in the ordinary sense, come under consideration; he had
nothing to do except with her hair.= In the hours that suited him, she
must take down her hair and let him pass his hands through it. This
operation produced in him the most intense degree of physical
voluptuousness.”
The most remarkable class of hair-fetichists are the so-called
“=plait-cutters=.” The transition to this morbid state depends upon the
custom, widely diffused in earlier times, of cutting off and preserving
locks of hair as erotic fetiches. This sexual reliquary cult flourished
especially in the eighteenth century, during the period of “sentiment.”
Friedrich S. Krauss reports (“Anthropophyteia,” vol. i., p. 163) that
among the Southern Slavs young men and women gave one another tufts of
pubic hair as sexual fetiches. The “wig-collectors” also belong to the
category of harmless hair fetichists. More serious are the genuine
“plait-cutters”--persons who are accustomed to cut plaits of hair from
the heads of girls, who are happy in the possession of these plaits, and
who obtain sexual gratification simply by looking at and touching them.
These plait-cutters are almost unquestionably pathological individuals,
who act under the influence of coercive impulses. Recently, in Berlin,
two such cases attracted public attention. The judicial proceedings
connected with the former of these cases elicited such interesting
details regarding the development, psychology, and activity of plait
fetichism that it is worth preserving, and is therefore given here at
length, quoted from a report in the _Berliner Tageblatt_, No. 118, of
March 6, 1906.
PERVERSITIES BEFORE THE LAW COURTS.
The plait-cutter whose arrest attracted so much attention appeared
yesterday in the Assessor’s Court, under the presidency of the
judicial assessor Förster. The accused, Robert S., was a student of
the Technical High School at Charlottenburg. The accused was
prosecuted and defended by counsel. He was born at Valparaiso in the
year 1883. The accusation was that, between the months of November and
January last, he had, in sixteen cases, in the public streets, cut
plaits of hair from the heads of young girls, taking also the ribbons
with which their hair was tied; this charge was one of theft. In
twelve cases also he was accused of bodily maltreatment and actual
injury. Two medical experts were present to advise the court. During
the inquiry the public was excluded from the court, but the
representatives of the Press were admitted.
The accused replied to the inquiries of the President, that he had
come to Germany in the year 1888, and that he had been at school in
Thorn, Bergedorf, and Hamburg. In Hamburg he had passed his final
examination, and had received a good report on leaving. He had always
had a special fondness for mathematics; he had studied for one term at
Munich. He had always worked very hard. He admitted that in sixteen
cases he had cut plaits of hair from the heads of girls in the streets
of Berlin. In his rooms =thirty-one plaits= had been
found.--_President_: Had you such tendencies in earlier
years?--_Accused_: Yes; at the age of sixteen years I secretly, one
evening, cut some hair from the head of my sister, thirteen years of
age, and kept it. I have always had a desire for beautiful long hair;
finally, this desire became so strong that I was unable to resist it
any longer. The first time that I cut some hair from the head of a
girl was the day of the entrance of the Crown Princess. I do not know
why I suddenly was unable to resist the impulse. It became more
powerful after I returned from a journey to South America, which I
made as a voluntary machinist. The voyage lasted five months. I had
worked very hard while on board. During the whole voyage I was in a
gloomy mood, and when I returned the impulse became continually
greater.--_President_: In what way did the impulse affect
you?--_Accused_: I frequently ran after little girls without being
able to gratify the desire to possess their hair. Then I succeeded,
amid the crowd at the entrance festivities Unter den Linden, to cut
some loose hair from the head of a girl with a pair of scissors,
without the girl becoming aware of it.--_President_: What did you do
with the hair?--_Accused_: Nothing at all.--_President_: What did you
think about while you where doing it?--_Accused_: Nothing. I simply
put the hair into my pocket.--_President_: And afterwards?--_Accused_:
Several times Unter den Linden I cut loose hair from girls’
heads.--_President_: When did you begin to cut off entire
plaits?--_Accused_: In November, at the entrance of the King of Spain.
Then, in the “Opernplatz,” I cut a plait from the head of a child; the
girl did not notice it, and I remained quiet. The plait was fastened
with ribbon.--_President_: What did you do with the plait?--_Accused_:
I took it home, combed it, and put it in a box on my writing-table, on
which was the inscription “Mementoes.” I afterwards frequently =took
the hair out and kissed it=. Often I laid it on my pillow and rested
my head on it.--_President_: Were you not fully aware that you were
doing something wrong, and that you were interfering profoundly with
the rights of another individual?--_Accused_: I did not think about
it.--_President_: If the proceedings were now to come to an end, and
if you were discharged, would you do the same thing again?--_Accused_:
I do not think that I should do it again, now that I have experienced
what the consequences are.--_President_: Can you give security that in
the future your will will be stronger than the impulse?--_Accused_: I
cannot give any guarantee.--_President_: Have you never read in the
papers that the citizens of Berlin were very much agitated by this
cutting off of girls’ hair?--_Accused_: I have read nothing of the
kind.--_President_: When were you arrested?--_Accused_: On January 27.
From a girl whose hair was plaited in two plaits I cut one plait; when
she came near me again, I wanted to cut off the other plait, and then
I was arrested.--_President_: Is it true that you put a ribbon round
each plait of hair, and marked it with the date you had cut it
off?--_Accused_: To some extent I did so.--_President_: Have you ever
had sexual relations with woman?--_Accused_: No, never. I have only
had a strong impulse to gain possession of beautiful long
hair.--_President_: Would not long beautiful men’s hair have satisfied
you as well?--_Accused_: Yes.--_Counsel for the Defence_: Did you not
have this morbid impulse in quite early youth? You told me that you
remembered the hair of many girls from the time that you were at
school in Thorn. At that time you were eight years old. You said to
me that you had thought no more about the persons to whom the hair
belonged, but only, and all the more, about their hair.--_Accused_:
That is correct. It is indifferent to me whether the person to whom
the hair belonged is young and beautiful or old and ugly: my only
interest is in the hair.--_President_: Have you the same interest in
white hair?--_Accused_: My attraction is only to fair hair.--In reply
to a further question on the part of the President, the accused
declared that he had been a very active member of the academic
gymnastic club, and that he belonged to a students’ purity
alliance.--_Counsel for the Defence_: The accused has stated that,
while he is at work, it often happens that suddenly plaits of hair
seem to appear before his eyes. He often has reveries in which it
seems to him that in all countries women and girls with beautiful hair
are at his disposal, and that he is able to rob them of their hair.
Among his colleagues the accused has always felt himself to be thrust
into the background. He had the feeling that he was =destined for
great things=, and that his comrades would not recognize this. The
accused, whose father is dead, had received assistance for his
studies; his brother is an officer at sea; one of his sisters is
mentally disordered.--Of the witnesses who had been summoned to
attend, three only were examined. Captain von W., whose daughter, when
walking in the Leipzigerstrasse, had been robbed of part of her hair
by the accused, gave evidence that the affair had had very
disagreeable consequences to his daughter. Since that time the child
had suffered from a terrible feeling of anxiety; she had experienced a
nervous shock, and frequently cried out anxiously in the middle of the
night, because she was dreaming of the plait-cutter.--The next
witness, Frau Gall, an old acquaintance of the family of the accused,
described his character as exceptionally good. All who knew him had
been astonished to hear of his actions; no one who knew him had ever
observed this passion for hair. Recently he had obviously been
overstrained mentally, and very distrait; generally speaking, he was
not high-spirited and happy, like other young fellows. According to
further evidence given by this witness, regarding the family history,
it appeared that the accused was affected with congenital
taint.--Undergraduate Schmeding, President of “the Alliance for the
Maintenance of Chastity,” had become intimately acquainted with the
accused, in consequence of their holding similar views. He described
him as having a good character, but as dreamy, melancholy, and
reserved, and unfamiliar with harmless cheerfulness and joy.--Dr.
Hoffmann, one of the medical advisers to the court, said: We have in
this case to do with a peculiar mode of activity of the sexual
impulse. Although such an impulse does not completely abrogate
responsibility, still, in this case, normal responsibility is greatly
limited from early youth onwards. The accused has an imaginative
belief that he is not sufficiently esteemed; he believes that he could
make himself invisible; he believes that he could build a great
castle, and furnish the rooms of this castle with innumerable plaits
of hair. Moreover, he is =hereditarily tainted with insanity=, and
bodily examination shows that he has =numerous stigmata of
degeneration=. § 51 of the Criminal Code should apply to this case.
Since the accused can hardly be supposed to have the power of
controlling his impulse, it would appear necessary that he should be
treated in a lunatic asylum.--Dr. Leppmann, the other medical adviser,
said: The case before us is one of extreme rarity. The accused
suffers from severe congenital taint, and exhibits a number of
stigmata of degeneration. At the time his offences were committed the
accused was certainly emotionally disturbed, and at the present time
is still ill. Von Krafft-Ebing reports only a few such cases, and the
same is true of Dr. Moll. The accused was incapable of free voluntary
determination; he is still unhealthy, and must be treated as a sick
man.--_Counsel for the Prosecution_: If the accused had been in
possession of normal mental health, it would have been necessary to
punish him with exceptional severity, for such offences as his
profoundly endangered public security; it would not be right for any
gaps to exist in our Criminal Code which made the punishment of such
an offence impossible. We may dispute in detail under which paragraph
the offence comes, but there can be no question but that it is a
punishable offence. The medical experts had, however, shown that the
accused was not fully sane, and he must be dealt with from this
standpoint.
The President summed up as follows: The public sense of justice
naturally demands severe punishment for such an offence. The accused,
however, is not criminally responsible. In view of the evidence given
by the medical experts, the accused must be discharged, on the
understanding that his family will immediately take steps to have him
confined in an asylum. It was possible that this decision would not
satisfy every one, but in view of the evidence before the court, no
other course was possible.
This case appears to have had a suggestive influence, for shortly
afterwards a cashier, Alfred L., was arrested, who had cut plaits of
hair from the heads of two young girls. In his home were found, in
addition, seventeen plaits of hair, which he had =bought=, among these
the queue of a Chinese! Already when a schoolboy L. had been affected
with this morbid impulse.
There exist also homosexual or pseudo-homosexual hair fetichists,
especially among women, to whom the hair of another woman’s head becomes
a fetich. Remarkable is the following passage in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s
romance “Lust” (pp. 210-212; Berlin, 1902):
“‘Do you remember,’ asked Donna Francesca (of her friend Donna Maria),
‘at school, how we all wished to comb your hair? how we used to fight
about it every day? Imagine, Andreas, that blood used actually to
flow! Ah, I shall never forget the scenes between Carlotta Fiordelise
and Gabriella Vanni. It was maniacal! To comb the hair of Maria
Bandinelli was the one ardent desire of all the girls, great and small
alike. The infection spread through the whole school. There followed
prohibitions, warnings, severe punishment; we were even threatened
with having our own hair cut off. Do you remember, Maria? All our
heads were bewitched by the black snake which hung from your head to
your heels. What passionate tears every evening! And when Gabriella
Vanni, from jealousy, made that treacherous cut with a pair of
scissors! Gabriella had really lost her wits. Do you remember?...’”
“Andreas remarked that none of his lady friends had had such a growth
of hair, so thick, so dark a forest, in which she could conceal
herself. The history of all these young girls, in love with a plait of
hair, filled with passion and jealousy, who burned to lay comb and
hands upon this living treasure, seemed to him a most stimulating and
poetic episode of cloistral life.”
There exists also a negative hair fetichism. Hirschfeld reports the case
of a prostitute who was a well-developed fetichist for baldness. Among
many races, removal of the hair is a means of sexual stimulation.
Nose, lips, mouth (_cf._ Belot’s novel, “La Bouche de Madame X.”), and
ears, can all become the objects of sexual fetichism, though in most
cases only of the lesser fetichism; the eyes also, which as fetichistic
charms play an important part, and are effective especially through
their colour. It is uncertain if, in this relationship, clear blue eyes
or sparkling black eyes have the greater importance. The female breast
is a natural physiological fetich for the male sex. But over and above
this there exists a remarkable variety of breast fetichists, who employ
the isolated breast, separated from the body, for the binding of books.
According to Witkowski (“Tetoniana,” p. 35; Paris, 1898), certain
bibliomaniacs and erotomaniacs have books bound with women’s skin taken
from the region of the breast, so that the nipple forms a characteristic
swelling on the cover! A further account of these human skin fetichists
is given by Dr. Picard in the _Gazette Médicale de Paris_, July 19,
1906.
Von Krafft-Ebing contests the existence of a special “=genital
fetichism=”; but the universal diffusion of the phallus-cult contradicts
his opinion; the phallus-cult is unquestionably connected with
fetichistic ideas, which are embodied in the symbols of the lingam and
the yoni. According to Weininger,[629] woman, speaking generally, is
=only= a phallus fetichist; man exists for her only as a sexual organ.
“I think people have been unwilling to see--or they have been
unwilling to say; they have hardly formed accurate idea for
themselves--what the copulatory organ of a man is for a woman, as
wife, even as virgin; what it psychologically signifies; how it
dominates to the uttermost the entire life of woman, although she
herself may be completely unconscious of the fact. I do not mean at
all that woman regards the male penis as beautiful, or even pretty.
She regards it as man regards the Gorgon’s head, as the bird regards
the snake--it exercises upon her a hypnotizing, magical, fascinating
influence.”
Goethe lays stress on the beauty which the male penis has in woman’s
eyes, when, in the paralipomena to the first part of “Faust” (Weimar
edition, vol. xiv., p. 307), he makes Satan say in his address to women:
“Für euch sind zwei Dinge
Von köstlichem Glanz,
Das leuchtende Gold
Und ein glänzender....”
Georg Hirth also (“Ways to Love,” pp. 566, 567) speaks of an instinctive
belief on the part of woman in the “beauty and the paradisaical force of
the phallus,” and he regrets “the unnatural depreciation and mendacious
concealment of this portion of the male body” by the conventional
morality discovered by the world of men.
The wide diffusion of the genital fetichistic tendencies in man and
woman is clearly manifested by the extremely frequent occurrence of
isolated adoration of the genital organs in the practices of
cunnilinctus and fellatio, which in numerous individuals completely
replace normal coitus.
Very rare is a case, which came under my own observation, of isolated
penis-foreskin fetichism in a heterosexual man. He is thirty years of
age, and a student of natural science, in whom at the age of four
years the first manifestation of sexual excitement occurred; later,
towards the age of puberty, sexual excitement became always associated
with the mental representation of a male penis, and more especially of
the foreskin of that organ, whilst he felt antipathy to the idea of
actual sexual intercourse with men, and felt attracted to women.
Still, from time to time the imaginative representation of the membrum
virile takes possession of his mind as a sort of coercive idea, and
when this happens the patient masturbates, at the same time often
making sketches of a penis.
A singular case of exclusively genital fetichism is reported by P.
Garnier (“Les Fetichistes,” pp. 170-174; Paris, 1896).
This case was that of a man, forty-eight years of age, who in normal
sexual intercourse was almost completely impotent, and who could
obtain sexual gratification only by the =observation of the genital
organs of human beings and animals=, and who, as in the case just
mentioned, was sexually excited by making sketches of genital organs.
This person exhibited obvious symptoms of nervous disorder.
We might regard it as hardly possible that cases should exist in
which the fetichism related to genital organs of a dubious
character--“hermaphrodite fetichism”; and yet a veritable case of such
hermaphrodite fetichism has come under my own observation.
The case is that of an officer, who is always searching for
hermaphroditic formations of the genital organs. He is pretty well
known in this respect among the prostitutes of Berlin, who make use of
his inclination for their own advantage, by a demonstration to him of
reputed hermaphrodites. He has had the good fortune to discover
several real hermaphrodites; but notwithstanding all his endeavours,
his affection has never been returned.
The hand, especially a woman’s hand, is not simply an object for
cheiromancy, but is also the occasion of a sexual fetichism by which the
hand is spiritualized. The beautiful, finely-formed hand is a powerful
love-charm. Binet reports the case of a young man in whom sexual
excitement was exclusively produced by a woman’s hand, and he was always
on the look-out for opportunities of touching the beautiful hands of
women. Isolated foot fetichism is rarer; it is generally associated with
the very common shoe fetichism (_vide infra_). The buttocks, the
kallipygian charms of women, have always been a sexual fetich for men.
Among flagellants this may become isolated as a fetich, and completely
divorced from the personality as a whole. For such individuals, in
sexual relationships, only the posteriora exist.
Among the bodily functions which are capable of acting as fetiches, the
=smell=, the emanation of the body, unquestionably takes the first
place. Smell fetichism is a very frequent phenomenon. Regarding the
intimate relationships between the sense of smell and the _vita
sexualis_, and regarding the existence of certain specific sexual
odours, I have already recorded the most important facts in the first
chapter of the present work (pp. 15-18). As sexual odours, the emanation
from the hair of the head, the emanation from the armpits, the smell of
the genital region, and the general emanation from the skin, come under
consideration.[630]
The fetichism for red hair is frequently no more than an apparent hair
fetichism; much more often it is really a smell fetichism, because since
early times red-haired individuals have been supposed to emit an
emanation having a powerful sexually exciting influence. In the Romance
countries, France and Italy, this belief is universally diffused. I
quote another passage from d’ Annunzio’s “Lust” (p. 66):
“‘Have you noticed the armpits of Madame Chlysoloras?’ The Duke of
Beffi indicated the dancer, upon whose alabaster forehead a firebrand
of red hair was shining, like that which we see in the priestesses of
Alma Tadema. Her bodice was fastened on the shoulders by very narrow
straps, and in the armpits one could see two luxuriant tufts of red
hair.
“Bomminaco begins to speak at large regarding the peculiar odour which
is diffused by red-haired women.”
Binet tells of a student of medicine who one day, when sitting on a
bench reading, suddenly had an erection of the penis, and on looking
round he saw sitting on the same bench a red-haired woman, whom he had
not before consciously observed, from whom a powerful odour emanated.
The =odour of the armpits= also appears in France to find fetichistic
lovers. The French cocotte commonly assumes during coitus a position in
which the man has his nose in one of her armpits, and sometimes
spontaneously offers this position. At the unrestrained dances in the
Parisian winter season, more especially at the very free _bal des quat’z
arts_, held in the spring, we frequently see the men sniffing at the
armpits of the girls.
It is unquestionable that the odour of the body at large may in certain
circumstances act as a sexual fetich. Many peculiar love relationships
prove this fact. From very early times among the common people the odour
of sweat has been regarded as a powerful aphrodisiac. I may allude to
the case, reported by von Krafft-Ebing, of King Henry III., who dried
his face with the chemise of Maria of Cleves, dripping with sweat, and
thereby was inspired with a passionate love for her. I may refer also to
the case of a peasant who, when dancing, was accustomed to dry the face
of his partner with his handkerchief, which he had carried in his own
armpit, and thus produced in her voluptuous excitement. An Indian king,
when choosing his beloved, did so simply by smelling the clothing
moistened by their perspiration, and selected the woman whose clothing
was most agreeable to his sense of smell.[631] Oscar A. H. Schmitz
informed me that an English traveller in India related to him that in
India lovers sometimes changed underclothing. Each wears the shirt
impregnated with the perspiration of the other. The love of Princess
Chimay for the gipsy Rigó is stated to have been a typical “smell-love”
of this kind. It is said that the odour of negresses and mulattresses
has an especially powerful exciting influence upon Frenchmen, of which
the poet Baudelaire is mentioned as an example; this writer declared
that smell was the third and highest degree of voluptuousness. Recently
Peter Altenberg, in “Prodromos,” has described the sexual importance of
the odour of the body at large. Such typical smell fetichists,
luxuriating in the general emanation of the feminine body, are mentioned
by Macé, the chief of the Parisian police. He describes very vividly
how, in the larger shops, such men move about among the feminine
customers, in order to intoxicate themselves with the odours proceeding
from them.
In opposition to these general bodily odours, the specific genital
odours play in the human species a subordinate part; they are for the
most part perceived as unpleasant. Falck[632] is of opinion that this
antipathy only becomes apparent after sexual intercourse, whilst before
such intercourse the odour of the genital organs has a slight erotic
stimulating influence. Many cases of cunnilinctus and fellatio are
certainly referable to olfactory impressions. The following case is
plainly indicative of the sexual influence of genital odours:
An Italian woman loved, after sexual intercourse, to retain on her
hands the odour of the genital secretions, and on such occasions,
although usually a scrupulously clean person, she avoided washing her
hands. She was especially fond of mingling this odour with that of
cigarette smoke. She was entirely free from stigmata of degeneration;
on the contrary, she was an extremely robust, well-developed person.
One of the most remarkable and monstrous phenomena in the domain of
sexual perversities is that by which the =processes and products of the
ultimate stages of metabolism= become associated with libido sexualis,
become true sexual fetiches, and can more especially give rise to a
formal speciality of smell fetichism. The position of the orifices of
the alimentary canal and of the urinary apparatus in the =immediate
neighbourhood= of the genital organs gives rise to a certain associative
conjunction between the functions of these parts, and this association
is rendered more intimate by various circumstances (_cf._ my
“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp.
224, 225). In addition, the idealizing influence of libido sexualis
plays a part here; the identification of the desired individual with the
lover’s own ego leads the disagreeable and disgusting character of those
processes and parts to disappear, and ultimately brings about a
comparison between the real æsthetic charm of the beloved person and the
coarsely material processes in question, which takes the form of a
sensually stimulating contrast. There is not in this case any quite
unusual association of ideas on the part of a completely degenerate
individual; we have rather to do with a =general anthropological and
ethnological phenomenon=. I was myself the first to give an elaborate
proof of this fact (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia
Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 223-240); and I illuminated more especially the
remarkable rôle of the so-called “=skatology=”--that is, the sexual
influence of the ultimate products of human metabolism, and of the
processes associated therewith--in =folk-lore=, in =mythology=, in
=superstition=, and in the =literature of all nations and times=. In
this way do we first arrive at an understanding of the possibility of an
erotic influence exercised by defæcation and micturition, which is so
often observed at the present day; above all, in the so-called “=muse
latrinale=”--in the widely diffused practice of scribbling obscene
inscriptions on the walls of public lavatories[633]--which finds
expression also in sexual “=copralagnia and urolagnia=.”
Compare, in this connexion, S. Soukhanoff, “Contribution à l’Étude des
Perversions Sexuelles,” published in _Annales Médico-Psycologiques_,
January and February, 1901--a case of urolagnia and copralagnia in a
habitual masturbator, twenty-seven years of age. A remarkable case of
sexual excitement produced by the odour of newly made hay, in a lawyer,
twenty-five years of age, is reported by Amrain (“Anthropophyteia,” vol.
iv., p. 237). This person took off all his clothes, and rolled as if
intoxicated in the hay, until ejaculation occurred. He called his
impulse a “vis major.”
It is clear that masochistic and sadistic elements play an important
part in many cases of urolagnia and copralagnia. But there are pure
forms of smell fetichism in this category, as we see in the case of
those persons who become sexually excited in consequence of the smell of
the urine and fæces of the beloved person; or, speaking generally, by
the smell of those excrements, the person from whom they are derived
being a matter of indifference. These are the _renifleurs_ and
_épongeurs_ of the French observers, who haunt public lavatories in
order to obtain sexual excitement from the smell of the excrements of
persons of the opposite sex. There even exist individuals who have the
acts of defæcation and micturition performed by others on to their own
bodies; in this case the masochistic element is associated with the
element of smell fetichism.
A greater rôle than that of the natural sexual odours is at the present
day played by =artificial perfumes=, which, as a fact, are frequently
employed as sexual fetiches. Their origin, and the cause of their use,
has been already explained (p. 17). From early times prostitution and
the demi-monde have made the most extensive use of these artificial
scents for the sexual allurement of men. Men are, in general, more
sensitive to sexual stimulation by means of perfumes than women are.
These perfumes are partly derived from plants; in fact, the simple odour
of certain flowers produces sexual excitement--a fact well known to many
peasant girls.[634] Other sexually stimulating scents are derived from
the animal kingdom, such as musk, civet, and ambergris. A French firm of
perfumers advertises a perfume--“charme secret”--the local employment of
which is clearly suggested in the advertisement. But in most cases only
a portion of the clothing or underclothing is perfumed. There exist
typical perfume fetichists, who can, as a rule, be sexually excited only
by means of some definite perfume, in the absence of which they are
impotent.
In comparison with smell, =taste= plays a very minor part. Still, a
primevally old popular custom, the use of “priapistic flavouring
agents,” rests upon fetichistic ideas of this kind. Cunnilinctus and
fellatio are perhaps also committed with the desire to taste the genital
organs; just as the same must be the case with those not very rare
practices in which flavouring agents or beverages are brought into
contact with the genital organs, are impregnated, as it were, with their
essence, and then swallowed. To this belongs also the following original
case:
A man obtains sexual gratification only in this way: by introducing a
cigar, small end first, into the female genital passage, leaving it
there a long time, and then smoking it, with the end thus impregnated
in his mouth.
There exist many other forms of fetichism. It is impossible to enumerate
all these varieties. I shall, for example, refer only to the not
uncommon fetichism of women for athletes and acrobats, or for singers
and actors; and to that of men for dancers, and especially for
horsewomen, whose appearance has quite a fascinating influence on many
men, more particularly when they are actually on horseback.
Analogous to the previously described hermaphrodite fetichism is
fetichism for other bodily defects, as for obese, lame, and hunchbacked
persons.
Von Krafft-Ebing reported the case of a man who loved only girls with
a limp, which I can parallel by an observation of my own. A merchant,
thirty-two years of age (with slight stigmata of
degeneration--Darwinian pointed ears, slight asymmetry of the
skull--but in other respects with a very powerful build of body, and
having performed his year’s service in the cavalry), who since ten
years of age has been addicted to excessive masturbation, =is potent
only in intercourse with a girl who limps=. He cannot state when this
perversion first manifested itself in him. In any case, it has
developed into a typical fetichism.
To this category belong, also, the abnormal love towards =elderly=
individuals, heterosexual “gerontophilia,” and the fetichistic influence
of certain peculiarities of character. Thus, it is an old experience
that a Don Juanesque, bold, and self-assertive appearance on the part of
men, and even depravity and sexual lawlessness, exercise a fascinating
influence upon many women. This is, as it were, homologous to the
previously described influence of prostitutes and fast women upon men.
A peculiar fetich is constituted also by the human =voice=. A
sympathetic voice has often been the cause of a violent love passion.
Singers, both men and women, know something of this powerful fetichistic
charm of the voice.
Finally, sexual fetichism can extend to objects in relationship with the
beloved person, or with any human individual (“=object fetichism=”), and
this is very readily accounted for by the =personification= and
=spiritualization= of these objects of human use, and especially of
clothing, which appears to be a =part of the personality= itself, and so
quite naturally becomes a sexual fetich. (See the detailed description
given on p. 140 _et seq._)
Among the various forms of clothing fetichism, by far the commonest is
=shoe fetichism=, or “=retifism=.” After the Marquis de Sade, who in his
writings described the most important sexual perversions, active
algolagnia has been termed “sadism”; and after Sacher-Masoch, passive
algolagnia has been termed “masochism.” I consider, therefore, that with
the same and even greater justification, as I have already suggested in
my work on Rétif de la Bretonne,[635] foot and shoe fetichism may be
denoted by the term “retifism,” for it is this sexual perversion which
manifests itself most markedly in Rétif’s life (1734-1806), and in him,
also, this perversion found its first literary interpreter and apostle,
in exactly the same manner as sadism was made known in wider circles by
de Sade and masochism by Sacher-Masoch. Rétif first described typical
foot fetichism and shoe fetichism, and also wrote the first history of
this subject. In him this tendency appeared at the early age of ten
years, as he relates (vol. i., pp. 90-93) in his celebrated
autobiography--a work greatly admired by Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and
other heroes of our classical literature. In this place, also, he gives
a very good explanation of the genesis of foot fetichism and shoe
fetichism:
“This fondness for beautiful feet, =which in me is so strong that it
unfailingly arouses my most powerful lust, and leads me to ignore any
ugliness in other respects=--does it arise from any physical or
emotional predisposition? In all those who have this peculiarity it is
very strong. Is it connected with any preference for an easy gait, for
a gracious, voluptuous, dancing movement? The peculiar attraction
which the foot-covering exercises is only the reflex of the preference
for beautiful feet, which stimulate even an animal. =Thus a man comes
to prize the covering almost as much as the thing itself.= The passion
which, since childhood, I have felt for such beautiful foot-coverings
was an acquired inclination, which, however, rested on a natural
preference. But the love for a small foot has a physical basis, which
finds expression in the Latin proverb, ‘Parvus pes, barathrum
grande.’”
Rétif was a typical shoe fetichist. He trembled with desire on viewing a
woman’s shoe; he blushed when he saw it, as if it were the girl herself.
As a true fetichist, he =collected= the slippers and shoes of his
mistresses; he kissed them, and smelled them, and sometimes masturbated
into them. Especially fascinating to him were the =high heels= of
women’s shoes, a sight of which sufficed to produce in him intense
sexual excitement.
Shoe-fetichism existed in ancient times, and long ago it was assumed
that there was a relationship between the foot and the _vita sexualis_.
References to this matter will be found in my earlier work,
“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp.
323-325. In modern shoe-fetichism masochistic ideas (ideas of being
trodden on, of placing the beloved’s foot on the back of the neck) or
sadistic ideas (ideas of treading upon the beloved’s feet, etc.) played
a part; also there were associated sensations of smell proceeding from
the leather; the colour of the shoes is likewise of importance. The
“foot-wooers”--thus are the shoe fetichists named in the speech of
prostitutes--have the most varied inclinations in respect of different
shapes and fashions of shoes. One loves ladies’ boots, another
riding-boots, a third dancing-shoes, a fourth slippers, a fifth actually
loves coarse wooden peasants’ shoes. Also, in respect of ornamentation,
colour, heels, etc., fancies vary. In one case known to me, a clergyman
was purely a heel fetichist. Hirschfeld records (“The Nature of Love,”
p. 148) the case of a man who was sexually excited only by means of the
ankle-wrinkles in boots; also the case of a woman who was fascinated by
the dusty boots of men, etc.[636]
Of other articles of clothing, the =corset=, =petticoat=, =chemise=,
=apron=, and, more especially, =stockings= and =handkerchiefs=, form
objects of sexual fetichism. Félicien Rops appears to have been at once
a corset fetichist and a stocking fetichist, for he frequently draws
feminine figures naked, except in respect of their wearing corset and
stockings. There are many men who are able to complete intercourse with
a woman only when she keeps on her stockings or shoes. Others are
excited only by the articles of clothing; for instance, they represent
in imagination corset shops, in order, by looking at the corsets, to
produce orgasm and ejaculation; or they collect or steal[637] feminine
underclothing, especially handkerchiefs, in order to obtain sexual
excitement from smelling or looking at these, or to masturbate with
them. Finally, there exist fetichists for particular materials, such as
fur (loved especially by masochists), satin, silk, or even entire
costumes, such as a woman’s riding-dress, tights, mourning, etc. D’Estoc
describes, under the name “la course des araignées” (“the spider race”),
the appearance of twenty women in a brothel, who were clothed only in
long black gloves reaching to the shoulders and long black stockings. In
the Berlin newspapers there recently appeared an account of the
fetichism of a prince for long “gants de suède” on slender women’s arms.
Unique in its kind would appear to be the case of the spectacle
fetichist, of which Hirschfeld gives an account (_op. cit._, pp. 145,
146).
[627] M. Hirschfeld has therefore suggested the apt name “partial
attraction” for fetichism; unfortunately, no adjective can be formed
from this term, so that for practical purposes the foreign word is
more applicable.
[628] _Cf._ Felix Baumann, “From Darkest America,” pp. 10, 41.
[629] “Sex and Character,” pp. 340, 341.
[630] In the second volume of “Anthropophyteia” (1905, pp. 445-447),
under the title, “The Sense of Smell in Relation to the Vita
Sexualis,” I have published a contribution to this interesting theme.
I addressed questions regarding the matter to various authorities; and
among the answers I obtained, I must mention more especially those of
Dr. Th. Petermann and Oscar A. H. Schmitz, to whom I owe valuable
accounts and observations, which are in part utilized in the present
chapter.
[631] Witmalett, “Man and Woman in Conjugal Union,” p. 48 (Leipzig and
Stuttgart); J. P. Frank, “System of a Complete Medicinal Polity,” vol.
ii., pp. 78, 79 (Frankenthal, 1791).
[632] N. D. Falck, “Treatise on Venereal Diseases.”
[633] Martial alludes (“Epigrams,” xii. 61, verses 7-10) to the
obscene “carmina quæ legunt cacantes.”
[634] Many women are sexually excited by the flowers of the garden
chestnut-tree, the smell of which resembles that of the semen of the
male. A correspondent has communicated to me several observations of
this nature from the Taunus district. G. d’Anunzio (“Lust,” p. 10)
also describes the awakening of libido sexualis in woman by the
smelling of a bouquet of flowers.
[635] Eugen Dühren (Iwan Bloch), “Rétif de la Bretonne: the Man, the
Author, and the Reformer” (Berlin, 1906).
[636] _Cf._, regarding shoe fetichism, also the work of P. Näcke, “Un
Cas de Fétichisme de Souliers, etc.,” published in the _Bulletin de la
Société de Médicine Mentale de Belgique_, 1894.
[637] The Berlin newspapers, a few years ago, were full of accounts of
such a thief, who stole underclothing (_cf._ _Berliner Tageblatt_, No.
465, September 13, 1903). He was the terror of all housewives in the
western suburbs of Berlin. Ultimately he was caught, and proved to be
a workman, K. W. by name. In his house the police found a varied
assortment of underclothing.
CHAPTER XXIII
ACTS OF FORNICATION WITH CHILDREN, INCEST, ACTS OF FORNICATION WITH
CORPSES AND ANIMALS (BESTIALITY), EXHIBITIONISM, AND OTHER SEXUAL
PERVERSITIES. APPENDIX: THE TREATMENT OF SEXUAL PERVERSITIES.
“_But what a source of devastation is a public or private teacher of
youth, when his heart is impure!_... _What a tragic example of
misleading is he who, himself in a position imposing upon him the duty
of leading others towards virtue, is animated by the most detestable
of all passions._”--JOHANN PETER FRANK.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXIII
Acts of fornication on the part of adults with children -- “Pædophilia
erotica” -- Superstitious motives -- Shunammitism -- As a popular
custom -- Opportunity as a cause of pædophilia -- Its frequency among
menservants and schoolmasters -- Acts of fornication with children
less than six years of age -- Examples -- With children between the
ages of six and fourteen years -- Alluring influence of _fruits verts_
upon debauchees -- Causes -- The mania for defloration -- Other causal
factors of acts of fornication with children -- Examples.
Early appearance of the sexual impulse in children -- Causes -- In the
country -- The _demi-vierge_ type -- Early puberty in girls --
Examples of sexual intercourse between children -- Child prostitution
-- Parisian flower-girls -- Match-selling girls and “music pupils” of
Berlin -- Blackmail -- Causes of child prostitution.
Incest -- Causes -- Incest in France -- Sexual relationship with a
third individual on the part of two persons closely related to one
another.
Acts of fornication with animals (zoophilia, bestiality) -- Genuine
zoophilia -- A remarkable case thereof -- Causes of bestiality -- Its
frequency in the country -- Report of cases -- Bestiality on the part
of a woman -- Reputed seduction of human beings by animals.
Acts of fornication with corpses (necrophilia) -- Motives -- Symbolic
necrophilia -- Love of statues -- Influence of museums on uncultured
individuals -- Sexual intercourse with statues -- Pygmalionism -- Acts
of fornication with objects resembling the human body -- “Dames et
hommes de voyage” -- Exhibitionism -- Morbid foundation of this --
Other motives -- Masturbation as a cause -- A remarkable case of
exhibitionism -- “Frotteurs” -- Example -- Voyeurs -- Secret sexual
clubs -- “Essayeurs” -- “Stercoraires platoniques” -- Pædication --
Opium, hashish, and ether employed for sexual purposes -- Use of these
drugs in Paris -- Sexual fantasies of the opium smoker.
_Appendix: The Treatment of Sexual Perversions._ -- Importance of
psychological factors in the treatment of sexual perversions --
Management of the primary trouble -- Psycho-therapeutics and
suggestive therapeutics -- Verbal suggestions -- Confidence in the
knowledge of the physician -- Sexual perversions as diseases of the
will -- Need for the education of the will -- Suggestion in the waking
state -- Suggestion by means of letters -- By means of hypnosis --
Special prescriptions.
CHAPTER XXIII
One of the most tragic, but unfortunately one of the most frequent, of
occurrences is =premature sexual intercourse on the part of
children=--partly resulting from =acts of fornication by adults with
children=, partly resulting from =premature awakening of the sexual
impulse in children, and premature sexual activity on their part=. These
two varieties of premature sexual intercourse in children must be
sharply distinguished each from the other.
The alleged increase of sexual offences in which children are concerned
is by von Krafft-Ebing wrongly associated with the more widely diffused
nervousness of recent generations. As a matter of fact, such offences
have occurred at all times and among all peoples, with no less frequency
than at the present day. “Erotic pædophilia” is a very widely diffused
phenomenon. It arises from superstitious[638] grounds; as, for example,
from the belief which prevails in many countries that venereal and
other diseases are cured by copulation with an intact child. The
primeval belief that intercourse with immature girls prolonged life,
that an emanation from them rejuvenated old men (the so-called
“=Shunammitism=”[639]), led in former times, and leads even at the
present day, to acts of fornication with children. Less commonly do
timidity and impotence on the part of adult men, rendering intercourse
with adult women difficult or impossible, give rise to the seduction or
rape of defenceless and unsuspicious children. The act of fornication
with children as a =popular custom= is a symptom of a primitive degree
of civilization, and is therefore met with, even at the present day,
among savage nations, a matter regarding which Ploss-Bartels gives
detailed accounts.
Passing to consider the cause of acts of fornication with children =at
the present day=, and the means by which such acts are effected,
unquestionably =opportunity= plays an important part in their
production. All those persons who by their occupation are brought into
prolonged diurnal and nocturnal association with children, and are
frequently alone with them, such as menservants, nursemaids,
governesses, housekeepers, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, the
directors and other officials of orphan asylums, etc., constitute a
disproportionately large contingent of those who commit offences under §
176^{3} and § 182 of the Criminal Code. This does not arise from
exceptional criminality on the part of these persons as compared with
those belonging to other professions, but simply and solely from the
fact that they are continually alone with children, and that any sexual
excitement which may arise is thus directed towards these, because no
adult is there. Sometimes a morbid neuropathic or psychopathic
constitution plays a part; but more commonly we have to do simply with
lasciviousness and sensuality, which avails itself of the opportunity
thus offered.
Rétif de la Bretonne warned parents regarding menservants and nursemaids
as seducers of children. These persons are apt to execute unchaste acts
with children =in the very first years of life=; in order to gratify
their own voluptuousness, they play with the genital organs of these
poor innocents, and thus prematurely awaken sexual sensibility, and
often give rise to premature onanistic habits. These acts of impropriety
carried on with small children--which must be sharply distinguished from
those with older children, the cases being classified as relating in the
first place to children under six years of age, and in the second place
to children between the ages of six and fourteen years--are far commoner
than is usually imagined, and perhaps even more dangerous in respect of
the bodily and mental development of the child, than the second variety
of unchaste acts, with older children. In most cases it is persons of
the female sex who misuse small children in this way, and often this
arises from the fear of impregnation resulting from intercourse with an
adult man. Generally we have to do with a lascivious disposition, as,
for example, in the following cases, which came under my own
observation:
In one of these cases a woman seduced a boy four years of age to the
performance of systematic improper acts; in the other case, a boy of
five years of age was taken (_horribile dictu_) by his own mother into
her bed, and taught to perform coitus with her, in so far as this was
possible, and also to perform manipulations with her genital organs.
The little boy repeated this practice with his sister, three years of
age, and, being caught in the act, he confessed the whole history.
A boy aged four played freely with his own genital organs, and also
made peculiar coitus-like movements in bed, and in contact with his
mother. When the latter, greatly alarmed, asked him how he had learned
to do this, he explained that a young woman twenty years of age,
living in the house, had performed these manipulations with him.
Magnan also reports (“Lectures on Mental Disorders,” Nos. 2 and 3, p.
41) the case of a lady, twenty-nine years of age, who performed sexual
acts with her nephew, aged five.
These cases rarely attain publicity, because they usually remain
undiscovered. Fornicatory acts with children, such as are frequently
alluded to in the newspapers, chiefly concern children between the ages
of six and fourteen years. In these cases the offences are most often
committed by schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, or by private tutors
and governesses. We further often find other women undertaking such
acts, displaying a sexual activity which they have no opportunity of
satisfying in intercourse with full-grown men. In the third place,
debauchees and exhausted _roués_ seek new and piquant excitement by
intercourse with such _fruits verts_. Of such Laurent writes:[640]
“They have used and misused woman; they have explored all the stages
of natural and unnatural love; they have visited Lesbos and Paphos;
and they have experienced every possible sexual artificiality. Their
sexual desires have become torpid, their manliness is on the decline,
and sexual death approaches. But the more exhausted they are, the less
willing are they patiently to acquiesce in their loss. It is with them
as with inebriates who are full to the throat and still continue to
drink. One day they notice a little girl in the street and feel
stimulated by her youthful charms. Thus their love begins.”
The =blameless=, the =natural=, and the =pure=, in the essence of the
child and of the intact virgin, has a stimulating influence upon such
perverted individuals: it acts as a =contrast= to their own sexual
shamelessness and artificiality. The contrast, in fact, has the effect
of a most powerful stimulus. Nor can we fail to recognize the existence
in such cases also of a =sadistic= element in the performance of coitus
with a defenceless child, and in the sanguinary act of defloration of an
immature individual. In the eighties there flourished in England such a
“=mania for defloration=,” the scandalous details of which were
illustrated in a lurid light by the revelations of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_.[641] With regard to this sadistic element in acts of
fornication with children, we must take into account the possibility
that in the corporal punishment of children by the teacher may have
originated the awakening of the latter’s sexual activities,[642] and
that in this we may find the cause of the beginning of sexual
relationships between teacher and pupil.
Other not infrequent causes of the sexual misuse of children are to be
found in =alcoholic intoxication= and in =senile dementia=. =Tramps=,
also, who have for a long time been deprived of the opportunity of
intercourse with women, are apt to gratify their long-repressed libido
on the body of the first child they meet. =Child labour in factories=
also offers opportunities for fornicatory acts with children.
A few especially striking instances of acts of fornication with children
are appended:
1. The son of a greengrocer, A., twenty years of age, living in the
Keibelstrasse, had for a long time immoral intercourse with the
eight-year-old daughter of the milkman W., in the same street. He had
not only violated her, but had committed other injuries. The young
fellow continued his immoral conduct after he had become infected with
venereal disease, and therefore naturally infected the girl. She
became so ill that she had to be confined to bed, and the doctor who
was called in diagnosed venereal infection. Notwithstanding this, the
little girl continued to lie about the matter, and only after a
whipping did she admit having had intercourse with A. The latter, a
man with a crippled foot, as soon as he saw that his misconduct had
been discovered, concealed himself in an outhouse, and was only
arrested by the police after a prolonged search. He is now in prison.
2. The model and friend of a painter, during the absence of the latter
from home, seduced his son, twelve years of age, after preliminary
repeated masturbation, to coitus and cunnilinctus.
3. A celebrated actress, now in advanced age, in the case of a boy who
sought a situation in her house, gave rise by various manipulations to
an erection of the penis, and seduced him to coitus; she invited him
repeatedly to visit her, and continued this scandalous practice with
him for eight years.
4. The governess Friederike B. was accused of improper conduct and
seduction of the little boy Szepsan, and was condemned to six months’
rigorous imprisonment. In April, 1900, Szepsan disappeared through her
connivance; she had him confined under false names in various
cloisters. The accused denied all blame, and declared that she was the
benefactress of Szepsan, whom she intended to bring up as a priest.
The evidence, however, sufficed for her conviction.
5. A very scandalous affair is reported by _Le Matin_. Some time ago
the Parisian police arrested a young fellow on account of an offence
against certain civil and natural laws. The accused thereupon
denounced an old Count W., and others of his friends, and also Baron
A., who daily waited the coming out of the boys from certain Parisian
schools, and then took them in his automobile to his own house or to
that of Count W. The police, having received information, kept under
observation the sons of certain distinguished families attending the
school in question, and ascertained that the statements were true. The
Count and his friends carried off the boys, among whom were three sons
of an engineer, the eldest thirteen years of age, to the Avenue
MacMahon or the Avenue Friedland. A., who is engaged to a young lady
belonging to the Parisian aristocracy, was arrested; Count W. has
escaped. The examination of their dwelling disclosed all kinds of
compromising materials.
In view of the wide diffusion of acts of fornication with children, we
must always keep one point clearly before our minds, on account of the
great forensic importance of the matter. That is the question whether
the initiative to the improper act proceeded in the first place =from
the child=, in consequence of a =premature awakening of the sexual
impulse=. [See, for example, Emil Schultze-Malkowsky, “The Sexual
Impulse in Childhood,” in the periodical _Sex and Society_, 1907, No. 7,
pp. 370-373. He reports five sexual scenes dating from the year 1864,
the heroine of which was a little girl seven years of age!]
In a certain proportion only of such cases have we to do with a
degenerative, morbid, inherited state; in many instances this sexual
perversity occurs in children who in other respects are perfectly
healthy,[643] and is evoked by seduction, bad education, and chance
causes, such as intestinal worms, etc. This is to be observed also in
children of savage races, among whom this phenomenon of sexual
prematurity is perhaps more frequent, in part owing to climatic
conditions. In the country the observation of sexual acts on the part of
animals, frequently occurring under their very eyes, makes children
early acquainted with the fact of sexual intercourse. In large towns
prostitution and overcrowded dwellings, in ways to which we have already
alluded in detail, give rise in many cases to a very early initiation of
children into a knowledge of the facts of sexual life.
Apart from the question of child prostitution, to which we shall allude
presently, we can observe such early mature types of children also in
every class of the population of large towns. Among the circles of the
middle classes, and among the “upper ten thousand,” we have the type of
the _demi-vierge_, which recently Hans von Kahlenberg has so admirably
described in his “Nixchen.” In the female sex this early sexual maturity
is much more clearly manifest. In an essay entitled “The Zoo as an
Educator,” in the weekly newspaper _Der Roland von Berlin_ (No. 27, July
5, 1906), we find a striking description of such a type:
“We find definite types of early-ripe girls, which we must regard as a
peculiar acquirement of the twentieth century. We distinguish without
difficulty the simple, hot-blooded, sensual variety from the
thoroughly developed perverse types. A short-legged, buxom type is the
most predominant. Such girls seem extraordinarily energetic, and
appear also to excel in mental powers their pale-cheeked and
half-alive male companions. Their dress is extremely conspicuous, and
they wear highly ornamented hats. Whilst, when we look at them from
behind, their whole figure suggests the age of fifteen or seventeen
years, the front view suggests that they are at least eight years
older. They prefer to lace very tightly, in order to display their
rounded hips, and to make their already strongly developed breasts all
the more imposing. But this development displays their mental and
physical corruption, especially when undeveloped shoulders and thin
arms show beyond question that they are really of a very tender age.
The sharply-cut features, with the sparkling black eyes, which at once
fascinate us, plainly indicate the lines which the passions are about
to engrave on their features; we discern, also, that by the age of
thirty they will already be old women.”
Sexual intercourse on the part of children with one another, or with
grown persons in cases in which the invitation has proceeded from the
child, are by no means rare occurrences. The following remarkable cases
may illustrate this:
1. Some years ago a schoolboy, K. J., thirteen years of age, was
accused in Berlin of several acts of sexual intercourse with girls of
from six to eight years. The guilt of the accused was fully proved. He
was sent to a reformatory.
2. A young man made the acquaintance of a girl sixteen years of age.
Although greatly impassioned, he did not dare to touch the girl,
because he was deceived by her sweet and blameless demeanour, and did
not wish to be her first seducer. Soon afterwards he learned that this
angel had had sexual intercourse for several years with a married man
forty years of age!
3. Legroux showed in 1890, at the weekly meeting of the physicians of
the Hospital St. Louis, a boy, eleven years of age, who, after three
months’ sexual intercourse with a syphilitic girl aged seven years,
had been infected in the ordinary manner, _per vias naturales_
(reference in _Unna’s Monatsheft für Dermatologie_, 1890, vol. x., p.
335).
4. In Paris, in December, 1906 (according to the _Vossische Zeitung_
of December 15, 1906, No. 558), a band of youthful street and shop
thieves, ten in number, of ages varying from eleven to fourteen years,
were arrested. Their leaders were a boy of twelve and a girl of
thirteen years, the latter, Eliza Cailles by name, known generally by
the nickname of “Beautiful Aliette.” This Aliette, a strikingly pretty
little person, in a long dress of extremely fashionable cut, with a
wonderful hat and most elegant gloves, ruled her band with the most
exemplary self-confidence. They were all smart fellows; =they were all
of them her lovers, and with these ten husbands she was the happiest
of wives=.
Acts of fornication with children also explain the melancholy phenomenon
of the existence of a widely diffused =child prostitution= in all large
towns of the old and new world, regarding which, in the previously
mentioned works on prostitution in these towns, detailed accounts will
be found.[644] The little flower-girls of Paris, the Berlin
match-sellers and wax-candle-sellers or “music pupils”--all these
provide a large contingent to child prostitution. To a great extent they
are associated with equally youthful criminals and _souteneurs_, and
avail themselves for blackmailing purposes of the existence of § 176^{3}
and § 186 of the Criminal Code. Among them there are even individuals
given to peculiar sexual “specialities,” who gratify perverse lusts in
various artificial ways. Social misery, bad example, and seduction are,
indeed, often to be blamed as causes of this early sexual depravity, but
it is precisely in respect of child prostitution that Lombroso’s
doctrine of the born prostitute has considerable justification.
* * * * *
In exceptional cases only does =incest=--sexual intercourse between
those nearly related by blood, either in the same generation, as between
brother and sister, or in the ascending and descending line--depend upon
pathological causes. The origin of the dread and horror inspired by
incest remains “a moot question of historical research.”[645] Within
historical times and among savage peoples incestuous intercourse was
permitted and widely diffused. Without doubt, racial hygienic experience
regarding the pernicious effects of this extreme form of incest gave
rise to the recognition of the fact that incest must be forbidden. At
the present day incest occurs almost exclusively as the result of chance
associations--as, for example, in alcoholic intoxication, in consequence
of close domestic intimacy in small dwellings, in the absence of other
opportunity for sexual intercourse. In such circumstances not
infrequently among the lower classes of the population we observe, as a
favouring factor, a complete absence of any conception of the immorality
of incest.
Remarkable is the tendency to incestuous unions in certain epochs--as,
for example, in the period of the French Rococo, when it was introduced
by suggestion on a large scale, and manifested itself with alarming
frequency. Numerous credible historical examples of this I have recorded
in my “Recent Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (pp. 165-168).
Mirabeau, and especially Rétif de la Bretonne (see my work on Rétif, pp.
381-382), luxuriated in horribly blasphemous incestuous ideas.[646]
According to Theodor Mundt, who speaks of these tendencies in his
sketches of “Paris during the Second Empire” (vol. i., pp. 141, 142;
Berlin, 1867), it appears that the French nature is not repelled to the
same degree as the German by the idea of sexual union between those
nearly related by blood. Eugene Sue relates, in his “Mysteries of
Paris,” that among the lowest strata of the population fathers often
have intercourse with their own daughters.
But such things also happen in Germany. In August, 1907, a manual
labourer, forty-seven years of age, was condemned to three years’
imprisonment because he had had incestuous intercourse with his
daughter, now twenty-seven years of age, during the previous fifteen
years (!), and had continued this incestuous relationship after he had
himself remarried. The girl had been for several years living in
intimate sexual relationship with her father, who watched jealously to
prevent his daughter having anything to do with another man. Among many
Indian tribes of Central America incest is said to be always practised
when the eldest daughter accompanies the father for a few days into the
mountains, in order to prepare his maize bread for him.
Relations somewhat analogous are those in which parent and child have
sexual intercourse with the same person--when, for example, mother and
daughter have the same lover. Other peculiar combinations are possible,
and are actually observed. Unique, however, would appear to be the case
reported by d’Estoc (“Paris-Eros,” p. 209), in which a young man had
sexual intercourse with a woman, with her two daughters, and also
utilized the father of this family as a passive pæderast! In a
manuscript novel, which I once saw, a man was made the lover of both
husband and wife.
One of the most remarkable of sexual aberrations, in the reality of
which, as Mirabeau[647] remarked, it is hardly possible to believe, is
=fornication with animals--zoophilia and bestiality=.[648]
We will first describe zoophilia, a sexual inclination towards animals
without actual sexual intercourse. Genuine zoophilia, or “=animal
fetichism=,” as a perversion =monopolizing= the human being’s circle of
sexual ideas, is very rare. Until recently, only a single case has been
published--that recorded by Dr. Hanc in 1887, in the _Wiener
Medizinische Blâtter_, and quoted also by von Krafft-Ebing. But I
myself, in the year 1905, observed a second case of genuine zoophilia,
and have recorded it elsewhere.[649] This extraordinarily rare case may
as well be once more detailed here:
The person concerned was a farmer, forty-two years of age, of a large
and imposing appearance, a healthy aspect, and normal conformation.
His family history did not show any points of importance throwing
light on the peculiar development of his _vita sexualis_. In the
family several unhappy marriages had occurred. The patient’s parents
had also lived in such an inharmonious marriage. His mother had a
masterful manner; he felt no love for her. He knew nothing of any
sexual abnormalities in his family. He lays especial stress upon the
fact that when an infant he was brought up on the bottle, and that in
this way he missed the first unconscious natural sexual stimulations
which, according to the theory propounded by S. Freud, proceed from
the suckling at the maternal breast. To this he mainly ascribes his
lack of sexual sensibility towards the female sex. When he was a boy
twelve years of age, the patient experienced sexual excitement for the
first time when riding on a fine horse. Since that time his sexual
sensibility as a whole has been closely connected with the idea of
fine horses, in this way, that merely to look at them produced
libidinous excitement, so that for years, once a week, while riding,
he had an ejaculation, accompanied by intense voluptuous sensations.
It is, however, remarkable that he never had any erotic dreams
connected with horses. As already stated, his sexual sensibility
regarding the human female, and also the human male, is non-existent.
His views regarding women are Schopenhauerian. The few attempts he had
made at intimate intercourse with women--in most cases these were
_puellæ publicæ_--were repulsive to him; he had on these occasions no
erection at all, or only a very slight one. The _vita sexualis_ of the
patient is, speaking generally, by no means an active one. He does not
experience nocturnal pollutions, and is completely satisfied sexually
by the weekly ejaculations and libidinous excitement which occurs when
riding on horseback. For several years the patient has suffered from
frequent insomnia, the cause of which he considered to be material
troubles combined with gloomy thoughts about his abnormal sexual
condition. Bromides, veronal, and other hypnotic drugs, are of little
use to him, for habituation soon sets in; on the other hand, cold
foot-baths have a better effect. The patient, who, as he himself says,
has a strong antipathy to normal sexual intercourse, which he regards
as a “bestial act,” believes that he might perhaps attain a normal
sexual condition if he could meet with a wife who would be
sympathetic, and would be in harmony with him mentally and physically.
He is, however, in this respect extremely sceptical, since he is well
aware of the rarity of that complete harmony which is the
indispensable prerequisite of a happy marriage. The patient exhibited
no symptoms whatever of “degeneration.” The genital organs were
normal, and nervous sleeplessness in a man forty-two years of age,
dependent upon material cares and emotional depression, cannot be
regarded as a symptom of degeneration, when we reflect how frequently
in persons who are otherwise quite healthy such nervous insomnia may
make its appearance, as a result of the struggle for life, at or near
the age of forty years.
True zoophilia is a typical sexual perversion, and appears to occur
principally in men. The use of animals (dogs) for purely onanistic
purposes, in the way of licking the female genital organs, cannot be
included in this connexion. In French novels and moral studies of recent
times such types of zoophilous women are, indeed, described; thus, for
example, in Octave Mirbeau’s “Badereise eines Neurasthenikers” (1902) we
find a description of Princess Karagnine as such a perverse woman,
endowed with a peculiar “passion for animals,” especially for stallions,
who caresses them with obvious signs of sexual excitement. And in the de
Goncourts’ “Diary” I find the following remark:
“Every time I visit the Zoological Gardens, I am struck by the number
of bizarre, remarkably eccentric, exotic, indefinable women we meet
here, to whom the contact with the animal world of this place appears
to constitute an adventure of physical love” (Edmond and Jules de
Goncourt, “Leaves from a Diary,” 1851 to 1895).
R. Schwaeblé also gives an interesting account of the zoophilous
tendencies of Frenchwomen (“Les Détraquées de Paris,” pp. 203-212).
Unquestionably, modern zoological gardens offer even more than country
life opportunities to women of zoophilous instincts, and can in this
respect become dangerous. I remember from my own schooldays in Hanover
remarkable scenes in the much-visited zoological gardens of that
town--scenes which at that time we naturally did not really understand,
but on which the above remarks and observations throw a clear light.
Thus we shall no longer be surprised by the following extremely
remarkable case of zoophilia in the female sex:
_Kleptomania in a Girl aged Thirteen._--A girl thirteen years of age,
who is incurably affected with kleptomania, and who at the same time
has a morbid inclination towards horses, is the most recent phenomenon
in the province of decadence. The unfortunate child is the daughter,
Frida, of a married couple living in the Höchstestrasse. She had
committed a number of thefts of vehicles, which might have been
attributed only to skilled professional thieves. The morbid tendency
compels the child to take the horse by the bridle and lead it away.
She does not appear to have any tendency to sell the animal, or to
steal anything from the carriage. Her love for horses led her in
earlier years to unusual acts. Thus she took the horse of a dairyman
in the Elbingerstrasse out of its stall, mounted it, and rode away.
The child has been under medical treatment for a long time on account
of her extremely unusual tendency, and we understand that the medical
evidence shows that she cannot be held legally responsible for the
offences she has committed (_Berliner Tageblatt_, No. 352, July 14,
1906).
Passing now to consider definite acts of fornication with animals
(_Sodomie_--see note ^{648} to p. 640, bestiality),[650] there is
hardly any animal which has not been in some way and at some time
utilized for the gratification of human lust; but naturally in most
cases the animals always available were employed, such as dogs, cats,
sheep, goats, hens, geese, ducks, horses. Martin Schurig, as early as
1730, in his “Gynæcologia” (pp. 380-387), recorded a large number of
cases of bestial aberrations in which, in addition to the animals above
mentioned, apes, bears, and even fishes were employed. In antiquity
snakes were often the objects of unnatural lust on the part of women,
playing the part of the modern lap-dog. Bestiality is very widely
diffused.[651] Countries especially celebrated for the frequency of this
practice are China and Italy; in the former country =geese=, in the
latter =goats=, are preferred for sexual malpractices. In India, and
also among the Southern Slavs, horses and donkeys play the principal
part as objects of bestial love.[652]
Acts of fornication with animals are due to various causes; in
exceptional cases only can they be referred to morbid predisposition. In
the lower classes of the population, and among many races--as, for
example, among the Southern Slavs and among the Persians--the
superstitious belief that venereal disease can be cured by intercourse
with animals occasionally gives rise to bestiality. More frequently the
=lack of opportunity for normal gratification= of the sexual impulse is
the cause of bestiality; and it is naturally of more frequent occurrence
in the country, for the reason that there human beings live in closer
association with animals than they do in the town. The herdsman alone
with his herd in a solitary place, the groom who in the stable suddenly
finds himself in a state of sexual excitement, the peasant whose wife is
perhaps ailing--all these indulge in bestiality simply from opportunity.
Friedrich S. Krauss learned from a trustworthy authority that in the
Austrian cavalry Slavonic soldiers frequently gratified their sexual
impulse upon mares. When they are caught doing this, they excuse
themselves by saying that they are too poor to pay a woman. Commonly
these fellows escape punishment. In brothels, also, bestial practices
are common; in some cases debauchees themselves take part in these
practices, in others prostitutes make a display of bestial intercourse.
Frequently, also, sadistic impulses, similar to those which find
expression in the torturing or slaughtering of animals during coitus,
play a part in bestial intercourse.
An eyewitness describes such a brothel scene, which took place in the
Via San Pietro all’ Orto at Milan. An old roué played the principal
part in this; he had become so depraved that he had sexual intercourse
with a duck, the throat of which was cut during the bestial act!
Some forty years ago, in the Karntnerstrasse in Vienna, a prostitute was
found in her room, murdered, and her chambermate and professional
companion was condemned to imprisonment as guilty of the murder. After
some years, however, the real murderer was discovered, and he was
detected by the fact that he was only able to have an erection of the
penis when he killed a =hen=. He was known among the prostitutes as “the
hen-man.”
Another case of sadistic bestiality was recently reported by the
veterinary surgeon Grundmann, at Marienburg in Saxony (the reference
will be found in the _Berliner Tierärztliche Wochenschrift_ for
September 14, 1906):
A man, thirty-eight years of age, of bad reputation, one night found
his way into a byre in order to gratify his sexual desires by
intercourse with a cow. First he introduced his penis into the vagina
of a heifer nine months old; then he tried the same thing on a cow,
which threw him off, and he fell to the ground. In a rage at this, he
seized a pitchfork and forcibly thrust one of the prongs, first into
the anus of the heifer, and then into that of the cow. The cow died
speedily, whilst the heifer had to be slaughtered next day. In the
cow, in addition to a laceration of the rectum about 1-1/2 inches in
length, there was found laceration of the capsules of the right and
left kidneys, perforation of the mesentery, of the colon, of the
liver, and of the diaphragm, also a laceration 1-1/2 inches long and
equally deep in the right lung. These extensive injuries showed that
the pitchfork must have been thrust in repeatedly. The appearances in
the body of the slaughtered heifer were similar to those found in the
cow. The accused was condemned to imprisonment for two years and three
months, part of this term being for the offence against morality and
part for the injury to property.
The following extremely rare case of bestiality on the part of a woman
was seen by Krauss (_op. cit._, p. 281):
“If I can venture to credit the reports I have so frequently heard
(and it is difficult to believe that they are pure inventions), among
the Southern Slavs intercourse between women and horses or asses is
comparatively common. How they go to work in this matter I do not know
from personal observation. I did, however, once see a Chrowot woman of
ideal beauty, who =stood= at night completely naked in front of a
lighted lamp, and in this position had intercourse with a tom cat. She
experienced so intense an orgasm that she did not notice me, although
I watched the scene barely two paces from the window.”
The part played by lap-dogs in the case of many ladies has been
previously mentioned.
Formerly the question was quite seriously discussed, whether a human
being could be seduced or violated by an animal, and Hufeland relates a
fantastic story of copulation between a dog and a sleeping little girl,
which I have criticized in another work;[653] but there are, as a matter
of fact, no proofs of such an occurrence, or of its possibility. In
brothels, certainly, dogs are from time to time _trained_ to have
intercourse with prostitutes.[654]
Much rarer than acts of fornication with animals are similar acts with
=corpses=, the so-called “=necrophilia=.” In the works of de Sade, we
find references to the algolagnistic factor of this rare sexual
aberration, to the sadistic or masochistic element in necrophilia,
inasmuch as in the case of the dead individual we have to do with a
completely helpless and defenceless being, who is totally unable to
resist the act; sadism is also manifested in the not uncommon mutilation
of the corpses;[655] and the sadistic impulse further obtains
gratification from the idea of decomposition, from the smell, the cold,
and the horror. In the case of necrophilia opportunity also plays a
part. Soldiers and monks who are occupied in watching the dead, and who
chance to be seized with sexual excitement, have gratified themselves
with female corpses.
Sexual acts with corpses are, indeed, not so rare as was formerly
assumed, but they belong to the class of sexual aberrations regarding
which we have but few authentic observations, most of these derived
from French authors. Remarkable is the following recent case, which
occurred in April, 1901:[656]
The following hardly credible case of necrophilia is reported from
Schonau: In the cemetery of that place Frau Maschke, thirty years of
age, was buried in the morning, but the grave was not completely
filled in. In the evening an inhabitant visited the grave of a
relative, which was close to that of Frau Maschke, and she noticed
with alarm that the top of the coffin in which the corpse of Frau
Maschke was lying was moving up and down. The discoverer of this
alarming occurrence hastened to the sexton, and reported the fact. The
sexton hurried to the cemetery with several workmen, and there, to
their horror, they surprised an inmate of the poorhouse named Wokatsch
as he was in the act of violating the woman’s corpse. The bestial
criminal was at once arrested. Soon afterwards a judicial
investigation took place, for which purpose the corpse was removed
from the grave and taken to the mortuary in order to determine how far
the criminal had actually proceeded in his attempt on the body.
In folk-lore, mythology, and belles-lettres, necrophilia plays a large
part, a matter to which I have referred at greater length in another
work (“Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol.
ii., pp. 288-296). The =idea= of intercourse with a dead body, and also
that of intercourse with an insensible human being, somewhat frequently
gives rise to peculiar forms of sexual aberration. First of all in this
connexion we have to consider =symbolic necrophilia=, in which the
person concerned contents himself with the simple appearance of death. A
prostitute or some other woman must clothe herself in a shroud, lie in a
coffin, or on the “bed of death,” or in a room draped as a “chamber of
death,” and during the whole time must pretend to be dead, whilst the
necrophilist satisfies himself sexually by various acts. Cases of such a
nature are reported by de Sade, Neri, Taxil, Tarnowsky, etc.
Closely allied to these necrophilist tendencies is the remarkable
“=Venus statuaria=,” =the love for and sexual intercourse with statues
and other representations of the human person=. Here also, apart from
certain =aesthetic= motives,[657] which may predominate in the case of
statues of exceptional artistic perfection, we have to do, for the most
part, with the same motives that give rise to necrophilia--sadistic,
masochistic, and fetichistic. In the case of individuals who are
sexually extremely excitable, a walk through a museum containing many
statues may suffice to give rise to libido. Of this we have examples.
Generally, however, we have to do with immature, youthful, and, above
all, =uncultured= individuals, who are devoid of all æsthetic
sensibility, and have grown up also in a state of prudery and horror of
the nude. It is of similar persons that the Catholic moral theologian
Bouvier speaks, when, in his “Manuel des Confesseurs” (Verviers, 1876),
he discusses the case of masturbation before a statue of the Holy
Virgin. We have previously given examples of the fact that direct sexual
intercourse with a statue occurs as part of a religious fetichism and
phallus cult (p. 101). In such cases the statue is taken for the
divinity, but in a profane statue-love it is taken for the living human
being, as in the celebrated case of the gardener who attempted coitus
with the statue of the Venus of Milo. The idea of the life of the statue
is even more distinctly manifest in the so-called “=pygmalionism=,” an
imitation of the ancient legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, and a
utilization of this legend for erotic ends. Naked living women, in such
cases, stand as “statues” upon suitable pedestals, and are watched by
the pygmalionist, whereupon they gradually come to life. The whole scene
induces sexual enjoyment in the pygmalionist, who is generally an old,
outworn debauchee. Canler has described such practices as going on in
Parisian brothels, on one occasion three prostitutes appearing
respectively as the goddesses Venus, Minerva, and Juno.[658]
In this connexion we may refer to fornicatory acts effected with
=artificial imitations= of the human body, or of individual parts of
that body. There exist true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic
technology, clever mechanics who, from rubber and other plastic
materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as _hommes_ or
_dames de voyage_, subserve fornicatory purposes. More especially are
the genital organs represented in a manner true to nature. Even the
secretion of Bartholin’s glands is imitated, by means of a “pneumatic
tube” filled with oil. Similarly, by means of fluid and suitable
apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial
human beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain
manufacturers of “Parisian rubber articles.” A more precise account of
these “fornicatory dolls” is given by Schwaeblé (“Les Détraquées de
Paris,” pp. 247-263). The most astonishing thing in this department is
an erotic romance (“La Femme Endormie,” by Madame B.; Paris, 1899), the
love heroine of which is such an artificial doll, which, as the author
in the introduction tells us, can be employed for all possible sexual
artificialities, without, like a living woman, resisting them in any
way. The book is an incredibly intricate and detailed exposition of this
idea.
A comparatively common sexual aberration is “=exhibitionism=,” first
described by Lasègue,[659] the exposure of the genital organs, or other
naked parts of the body, or the performance of sexual acts =in public
places=, either in order, by the public exposure, to produce sexual
excitement, or else as a result of the blind yielding to sexual impulse,
regardless of the fact of publicity. In these cases we have =almost
always= to do with a =morbid= phenomenon, dependent upon =epileptic= or
other mental disorders. Thus, Seiffer, among eighty-six exhibitionists,
found eighteen epileptics, seventeen dements, thirteen “degenerates,”
eight neurasthenics, eight alcoholics, eleven “habitual” exhibitionists,
and in ten cases =various= other morbid conditions. Of the eighty-six
cases, eleven concerned persons of the female sex.[660] Recently, Burgl,
in a careful and critical work upon exhibitionism,[661] has suggested
the terms “exhibition” and “exhibitionism,” the former to be employed to
denote an =isolated= act of exhibition, the latter to denote the
=repeated= or =customary= act of exposure of the genital organs _coram
publico_. This distinction is important, because exhibition occurs in
mentally healthy persons, as well as in those suffering from mental
disorder; exhibitionism, on the other hand, is, if we except extremely
rare instances in debauchees not suffering from mental disorder, met
with only in insane or mentally defective individuals.
In the case of these latter we have always to do with the actions of
weak-minded persons; or with impulsive actions in persons in a state of
epileptic or alcoholic confusion; or, finally, with coercive ideas in
neurasthenic or hysterical persons, in paranoia, in general paralysis of
the insane, or in some other form of insanity. But cases of exhibition
or exhibitionism may sometimes occur from other motives in more or less
healthy persons. Among the Slavonic peoples, exposure of the genital
organs or of the buttocks is frequently an expression of =contempt=
towards some one, or also an act of =superstition= (Krauss).
Exhibitionism as a =popular custom= occurred at medieval festivals, and
also in connexion with the “obscene gestures” of the ancients.[662] By
=habituation in early childhood= the tendency to exhibitionism can be
favoured, we learn from the case reported by von Schrenck-Notzing,[663]
in which the person concerned had as a boy taken part in childish games
in which the children passed by one another with bared genital organs.
In his monograph upon the anomalies of the sexual impulse, which abounds
in fine touches, Hoche (_op. cit._, p. 488) very rightly refers to the
manner in which the exhibitionist tendency is favoured by habitual
=masturbation=. Through the practice of masturbation the =sense of shame
in respect to one’s own body= is certainly destroyed, and thus, in the
case of an onanist, when some unusual impulse impells him, for example,
to expose his genital organs in the presence of a person of the other
sex, =certain powerful inhibitory impulses are lacking=, which, in
non-onanists, would immediately overcome this impulse.
Of the two following cases of exhibitionism, that of a homosexual
officer, twenty-five years of age, is certainly the most remarkable. In
youth this patient had also masturbated to great excess, and he gives
the following report of his exhibitionist tendencies:
“As a boy seven to ten years of age (that is, before I began to
masturbate), it was a pleasure to me to go barefoot, and to show
myself to others in this way. This impulse suddenly disappeared. But
at about the age of fifteen or sixteen years (the time when I began to
masturbate) this impulse reappeared, and has continued down to the
present time. Inasmuch as time and opportunity were generally wanting,
I could only satisfy these desires in my own home, when I went home on
furlough. Since in the neighbourhood of my home I was very well known,
I endeavoured by taking extremely long walks, or by little journeys to
neighbouring parts, to reach places where I might hope to remain
unrecognized. I was accustomed on these occasions to wear a shooting
jacket and knickerbockers; the knickerbockers were wide and loose, and
of as thin cloth as possible, so that I could easily roll them up in
order that my thighs might be bare (for if the thighs remained covered
the whole affair would have given me no pleasure). Further, on these
occasions I was accustomed to wear no ordinary underclothing, but only
a nightshirt. As soon as I reached the desired place, and had hidden
the jacket, stockings, and shoes in a suitable place, the nightshirt
was arranged as a blouse. Usually I had beforehand tried the
arrangement of the dress at home. Often I went up to people who were
engaged in field labours (I was especially fond of haymakers), and
begged them to allow me to help them, which they were usually willing
enough to do. I then took off my coat and bared my feet, and then,
although there seemed no apparent reason for that, I took off my
knickerbockers, until ultimately I was in the costume above described.
I must, however, as already said, =be seen=; common people or workmen
had usually to suffice me; but when people of education (for example,
visitors at health resorts) saw me, this was what I greatly preferred.
When once one gentleman said to another, ‘Look at his beautiful legs!
what lovely legs he has!’ and I heard this by chance, I was extremely
happy. I was then eighteen years of age, but even now I look back upon
that incident with great pleasure. I also =loved to show myself
entirely naked=; in such cases I always remained quite close to a pond
or a stream, in order, if necessary, to be able to make the excuse
that I had just been bathing. Frequently, however, I lay down close to
a railway in a suitable place quite naked in an artistic posture, and
enjoyed the pleasure of seeing the trains go by.
“I commonly did this only in warm, fine weather; but I also did it
sometimes in snowy weather. When going about like this in very little
clothing, or entirely naked, I had extremely agreeable sensations. The
affair usually ended in my masturbating until ejaculation occurred;
=after which I returned, as it were, to reality. Otherwise I believe I
should never have been able to bring myself to resume my normal
clothing. For in this state I was almost insensitive to hunger,
thirst, fatigue, heat, etc.; it was, in fact, a trance-like, extremely
happy state.=
“The desire to be photographed naked came later. I should have been
extremely delighted to play the part of a naked model. I tried with
great energy in various places (Vienna, Leipzig, and Hamburg) to get
such a photograph as I wanted; but I was always turned away with a
shrug of the shoulders or a shake of the head. Finally I succeeded in
Erfurt, at a small photographer’s, in having my wish fulfilled.” (The
patient sent a copy of this photograph.)
As the description clearly shows, we have here to do with exhibitionism
upon an epileptic or neurasthenic basis. The patient describes the
“confusional state,” out of which he awakens to “reality,” very vividly.
An objection, however, to the idea of epilepsy is to be found in his
very complete memory of these transactions.
Without doubt, in the following case, reported by von Schrenck-Notzing
(_op. cit._, p. 96), we have to do with a case of neurasthenic
exhibitionism:
The patient, a portrait-painter thirty-one years of age, was accused
in the law-courts of repeated acts of exhibitionism. The imagination
and sensuality of the accused have been abnormally excitable since
earliest youth. For the last twenty years he has masturbated to
excess almost every day, with imaginative representation, when
masturbating, of male and female genital organs. In coitus he obtained
no gratification. He preferred to expose his own genital organs to
persons of the female sex, in the belief that he would in this way
produce in them sexual excitement. This exhibitionism is a central
point in his sexual life, and has acquired the character of a coercive
impulse. He is profoundly neurasthenic, and exhibits extensive changes
of character, loss of energy, lachrymosity, ideas of suicide, etc.
Exhibits signs of mental weakness. Exhibitionism is to him a complete
equivalent to ordinary sexual enjoyment, and is performed owing to an
organic compulsion. Ethically, his personality is weakened. The
accused was discharged on account of greatly diminished criminal
responsibility.
As a sub-variety of exhibitionists, we must refer to the so-called
“=frotteurs=,” individuals who rub their genital organs, either bared or
covered, against persons of the opposite sex, and thus obtain sexual
gratification. In their case also we almost always have to do with
morbid conditions. The following case (_Vossische Zeitung_, No. 258,
June 6, 1906) was recently observed in Berlin:
The architect, Eduard P., was accused of offences committed in the
opera-house of Berlin. In February and March, 1906, he had repeatedly
soiled ladies’ clothing in a disgusting manner. At a time when the
ladies had their whole attention directed to the stage, the offender,
standing or sitting behind them, contaminated their clothing, and
disappeared in the next interval. The whole mode of procedure
suggested the activity of a man with an abnormal morbid
predisposition, who in this place yielded to certain perverse
impulses. Several complaints having been made, some detectives were
dispersed through the audience, until finally the accused was caught
in the act. During the second act of a performance of “Lohengrin,” the
detective Brumme observed the accused pressing up from behind against
a lady, and, in the semi-obscurity of the performance, acting in the
manner already mentioned. P. was arrested, and admitted that he had
repeatedly acted in this way. Before the judge the accused also
confessed that he had done the same thing on other occasions. How he
had been led to do it he could not say. Each time after committing the
offence he had suffered very bitter remorse.
The accused was acquitted of the criminal charge on the ground of mental
disorder.
The psychical element of exhibitionism also plays a part in the practice
of the so-called “=voyeurs=”[664] and “=voyeuses=,” that numerous group
of male and female individuals who are sexually excited by =regarding=
the sexual acts of other persons (active _voyeurs_), or who =allow
themselves to be watched= by others when themselves performing sexual
acts (passive _voyeurs_). In many brothels, apertures in the wall or
other arrangements have been made for these _voyeurs_ or _gagas_,
through which they watch sexual scenes. In fashionable dressmakers’
shops, men are also said to watch ladies trying on dresses--at least, so
I have been informed by a Parisian. Recently women also have been more
and more inclined to see such spectacles, so that Schwaeblé devotes a
special chapter to the _voyeuses_ in his book on the perverse women of
Paris. Messalina compelled her court ladies to prostitute themselves in
her presence. Not infrequently male and female _voyeurs_ unite to form
societies and =secret sexual clubs=, in which all the sexual acts are
performed in public.
Thus, in the end of September, 1906, in Graz, a “Secret Society for
Immoral Purposes” was discovered by the police. At the head of this
club was a merchant, thirty years of age, B----, jun. A number of
other persons of good position belonged to this sexual club. They met
in the great restaurant “Zum Königstiger.” Under the title of “An
Assembly of Beauty,” festivals were held in the magnificent garden of
this restaurant, which were concluded as orgies behind closed doors.
The beautiful gardens of the Schlossberg were also the scene of many
meetings of the club.[665]
A remarkable category of _voyeurs_ is constituted by the so-called
“=stercoraires platoniques=,”[666] individuals who obtain sexual
enjoyment by observing the acts of defæcation and micturition performed
by persons of the other sex, and seek opportunities for such
observations in brothels or public lavatories. In the closet of one of
the Berlin railway-stations such a _stercoraire_ recently made a small
artificial opening in the wall, through which he was able to watch other
persons when engaged in the act of defæcation!
Here also we may refer to =heterosexual pædication=, to _coitus analis_,
which, according to the reports of French authors (Tardieu, Martineau,
and Taxil), appears to be especially common in France, but which is by
no means rare also in other countries. It becomes comprehensible only in
view of the fact that the anus may itself be an erogenic zone. Details
regarding this matter are given by Freud.[667] Krauss, also, in the
second volume of his “Anthropophyteia” (p. 392 _et seq._), has given
numerous examples of pædication. Among others, he reports two cases
related to him by the ethnologist Friedrich Müller, in which men had
coitus with their wives only _per anum_.
Finally, we must refer to a practice which appears to be confined to
France, the =customary use of opium, hashish, and ether, for the purpose
of inducing sexual excitement=, regarding which Schwaeblé (_op. cit._,
pp. 19-36) and d’Estoc (_op. cit._, pp. 151-158) give very interesting
reports. There exist in Paris special opium-houses, hashish-houses, and
ether-houses, some for men and some for women. Three opium-houses are to
be found, for example, in the Avenue Hoche, the Avenue Jéna, and the Rue
Lauriston; there is an ether-restaurant in Neuilly; one for opium,
hashish, and ether in the Rue de Rivoli. All these means of enjoyment
evoke after a time sexual ideas and fantasies of an extremely peculiar
character, associated with actual voluptuous sensations. Opium gives
rise to “ardent, brilliant pictures of an excessively stimulated
imagination,”[668] frequently of a perverse character; hashish has a
similar but even stronger influence; and ether gives rise to a more
powerful stimulation of the sexual organs, to a “vibration of the flesh
and of the soul.” The interior of these unwholesome places of exotic
enjoyment, in which frequently homosexual acts also occur, is vividly
described by both the above-named French authors.[669]
APPENDIX
THE TREATMENT OF SEXUAL PERVERSIONS
In the treatment of sexual perversions and anomalies, always a matter of
great difficulty, knowledge of mankind, tact, and the finer
understanding of the physician for the psychological peculiarities of
each individual case, must play a greater part than any definite method
of medical treatment. An exact understanding of the true =nature= of the
sexually abnormal personality is the indispensable preliminary to our
exercising a favourable influence upon morbid impulses and practices.
Unquestionably, the physician must in the first place treat all =actual
diseases underlying the sexual abnormalities=, by means of the physical
and pharmacological therapeutical methods open to us in such abundance.
Bodily and mental =repose= is here often the first need we have to
satisfy; and for this purpose a change of environment, climatic cures,
and such drugs as bromide and camphor may be very useful. But the
principal matter must remain =psychical, suggestive= treatment. The mere
=discussion= of the matter with the physician, the possibility at length
of confiding in one capable of taking a thoroughly objective, calm,
comprehensive view of the matter, one who by his profession is
instructed in all secrets of the human spiritual and impulsive life, and
who is aware of all the bodily necessities--this by itself suffices to
restore to these unhappy beings, who are tortured by the evil demon of
their unhappy impulse, who are often in a state of spiritual despair and
hypochondria, to restore to them an inward confidence and a healing
repose. This is the great triumph of medical research in this hitherto
tabooed, and yet so enormously important, department, which only crass
ignorance or evil-minded hypocrisy could designate as “improper” or
“unworthy.” We have passed beyond the fruitless and dangerous method of
“moral preaching,” to attain a =scientific understanding= of sexual
anomalies; we have exposed the roots of these anomalies, lying deep in
the physical and psychical nature of humanity, and we have recognized
their connexion with so many other phenomena of the civilization of our
time. When I speak of a “treatment” of the common, widely diffused
sexual anomalies, it appears to me that that standpoint is the best
which regards them as pure =diseases of the will=, which have been
diffused in all times, but have never been more distinctly manifest, and
never have possessed more importance, than they do at the present day,
when will, energy, has become the most important weapon in the ever
more violent struggle for existence. As Napoleon III. said, it is not to
the apathetic man, but to the =energetic= man, that the future belongs,
to the man with the will of iron. But nothing paralyzes the will so much
as the dominance of blind and, above all, of =abnormal=, impulses.
Unquestionably they conceal within themselves, when frequently
gratified, feelings rather of pain than of pleasure, and become the
unconquerable source of hypochondria and self-contempt. The stronger the
impulse becomes, the longer the habit has lasted of yielding to that
impulse, the greater is the loss of will from which the individual
suffers. The first and most important task of the physician is,
therefore, to weaken the impulse by means of strengthening the will. He
must consistently and methodically =educate the will=, in order to
assist the patient to obtain the victory over his impulse. As Goethe
says in his “Epimenides”:
“Noch ist vieles zu erfüllen,
Noch ist manches nicht vorbei:
Doch wir alle, durch den =Willen=
Sind wir schon von Banden frei.”
[“Much there remains to fulfil,
Many things have yet to be endured:
Still, all of us, by the exercise of =will=
Can to a large extent free ourselves from our fetters.”]
The best way to attain this is to employ =personal influence= by means
of =suggestion=. We must recommend frequent =conversations= on the part
of the patient with the physician, which can be powerfully supplemented
by =epistolary communications= on the part of the physician, of which an
excellent example will be found in the “Psychotherapeutic Letters” by H.
Oppenheim (Berlin, 1906).[670] =Hypnosis= is also of value, although it
does not appear to do any more in these cases than is effected by
suggestion in the waking state.[671]
It is not so easy to transform a Hamlet into a man of action. We must
impose tasks upon the will, tasks both mental and physical; we must
regulate the mode of life; we must give to the individuality special
prescriptions adapted to the particular case, and we must call to our
assistance, whenever advisable, the friends and associates of our
patient. The great enemy of the will, alcohol, must be absolutely
prohibited; on the other hand, the taste for finer enjoyment and also
for easy sports and pastimes must be stimulated.[672] The _vita
sexualis_ needs repose in every case, and, above all, masturbation must
be energetically resisted. If we succeed in diminishing the intensity of
the impulse, and in increasing the power of the will, we have already
done much. In isolated cases, we must also always make the attempt to
conduct the libido and its activity very gradually into normal channels,
perhaps with the assistance of suggestive ideas _in coitu_, for which,
above all, the assistance of the sexual partner is indispensable. Only
an experienced physician can here hit the mark.
[638] The Public Prosecutor Amschl reports in the _Archives for
Criminal Anthropology_, 1904, vol. xvi., p. 173, a gross case of this
character, in which a peasant affected with venereal ulcers, having
been advised that a cure could only be obtained by intercourse with a
pure virgin, had sexual intercourse with his own daughter, and--was
cured!!
[639] See 1 Kings i. 1-4.
[640] E. Laurent, “Morbid Love: A Psycho-Pathological Study,” pp. 183,
184 (Leipzig, 1895). _Cf._ also P. Bernard, “Des Attendants à la
Pudeur sur les Petites Filles” (Paris, 1886).
[641] A detailed description of this affair is given in my “Sexual
Life in England,” vol. i., pp. 350-381 (Charlottenburg, 1901).
[642] Compare in this connexion more especially the apt remarks of J.
P. Frank, “System of a Medical Polity,” vol. vi., pp. 94, 95
(Frankenthal, 1792).
[643] _Cf._ Sollier’s remarks on this subject in Von
Schrenck-Notzing’s “Die Suggestions-Therapie,” p. 7.
[644] Regarding child prostitution in Berlin, numerous details are to
be found in the work, “Child Prostitution in Berlin: Unvarnished
Revelations and Moral Pictures by an Initiate” (Leipzig, 1895).
[645] G. Schmoller, “Elements of General Political Economy,” vol. i.,
p. 233 (Leipzig, 1901).
[646] Such relations can become actual, even at the present day, as we
learn from the case reported by the Public Prosecutor, Dr. Kersten, in
the _Archives for Criminal Anthropology_ (1904, vol. xvi., p. 330), of
a Moor, sixty-five years of age, who, in intercourse with his
step-daughter, procreated a daughter, and later with this daughter of
his own, when she was thirteen years of age, had sexual intercourse!
[647] G. Mirabeau, “Erotika Biblion,” p. 91 (Brussels, 1868).
[648] German authors use the word _Sodomie_ to denote sexual
relationships between human beings and animals. Mr. Havelock Ellis
informs me (in a private letter) “the German use of ‘sodomy’ to
include ‘bestiality’ is quite ancient, and no doubt had a theological
origin. I imagine the confusion was made with the idea of throwing on
to ‘bestiality’ the same reprobation as the Bible metes out to
‘sodomy.’” There is, of course, no mention of bestiality in connexion
with the destruction of Sodom. The sin for which the city was
destroyed was the desire for carnal knowledge of the two angels in the
house of Lot (Gen. xix. 5). The signification of the various terms
used to denote unnatural intercourse is thus defined by Mann, in his
work on “Forensic Medicine”: =Sodomy= means unnatural sexual
intercourse between two human beings, usually of the male sex....
=Tribadism=, the gratification of the sexual instinct between two
human beings of the female sex.... =Pederastia= is that form of sodomy
in which the passive rôle is played by a boy, the active agent being
man or boy. =Bestiality= means sexual intercourse between mankind and
the lower animals. Generally speaking, in this translation the terms
mentioned are used as above defined. If there is any variation from
that use, the context will manifest it. In any case, =Sodomy= has
never been employed in the translation as an equivalent of the German
_Sodomie_, the latter term having been invariably rendered by
=Bestiality=.--TRANSLATOR.
[649] Iwan Bloch, “A Remarkable Case of Sexual Perversion
(Zoophilia),” published in _Medizinische Klinik_, 1906, No. 2.
[650] Of the recent literature on this subject I may refer to G.
Dubois-Dessaulle, “Étude sur la Bestialité au Point de Vue Historique,
Médical, et Juridique” (Paris, 1905); F. Reichert, “The Significance
of Sexual Psychopathy in Human Beings, in Relation to Veterinary
Practice,” Inaugural Dissertation (Bern and Munich, 1902); Franz Hora,
“A Case of Unnatural Fornication with a Goose,” published in the
_Tierärztliches Zentralblatt_, 1903, No. 13, p. 197; R. Froehner,
“Sadistic Injuries to Animals,” published in the _Deutsche
Tierärztliche Wochenschrift_, No. 1, 1903, p. 153; same author in _Der
Preussische Kreistierarzt_, vol. i., pp. 487-491 (Berlin, 1904);
Grundmann, “A Case of Bestiality and Sadism,” published in the
_Deutsche Tierärztliche Wochenschrift_, 1905, No 45. A very
painstaking and critical study of unnatural fornication with animals
is published by Haberda in the _Vierteljahrsschrift für Gerichtliche
Medizin_, 1907, vol. xxxiii., supplementary number. It deals with 162
medico-legal cases. Among these, two only concern girls of sixteen and
twenty-nine years of age respectively, persons who have had improper
relations with dogs. Most of the male offenders were =persons whose
occupations brought them much into contact with domestic animals=;
about half of them were under twenty years of age. The animals
concerned were cattle, goats, horses, dogs, pigs, sheep, and hens. In
the majority of cases there were fornicatory acts--acts analogous to
sexual intercourse--less commonly other sexual contacts. The girl of
sixteen was caught in the act of intercourse with a dog. The majority
of male offenders made use of female animals. In two cases young men
allowed dogs to have intercourse with them _per anum_, the dogs having
been trained to do this, and in both of them were found lacerations of
the anus and rectum. Only in a few of the 172 cases of bestiality was
there any reason to doubt the mental integrity of the person
concerned. In those cases there was senile dementia, epilepsy, or
alcoholism. The principal causes for the practice of bestiality were
enhanced opportunities, the lack of possibility in the country for
conjugal or extra-conjugal normal sexual intercourse, or, finally,
superstition (belief in the possibility of curing of venereal disease
by intercourse with animals).
[651] Regarding the ethnology of bestiality, consult my “Etiology of
Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. ii., pp. 272-276.
[652] _Cf._ F. S. Krauss, “Bestial Aberrations,” published in
“Anthropophyteia,” vol. iii., pp. 265-322.
[653] Iwan Bloch, “The Origin of Syphilis,” part i., p. 22 (Jena,
1901).
[654] The following authentic case, which occurred in the year 1902,
appears to be unique. A man compelled his wife, who was amiable but
somewhat weak-minded, to have intercourse with a male pointer, which
he himself prepared for the act, and in course of time he made the
animal complete coitus with his wife five or six times whilst he
looked on (“A Horrible Case,” published in the _Archives for Criminal
Anthropology_, vol. xiii., pp. 320, 321). A case of bestiality with a
rabbit is reported by Boëteau (“Un Cas de Bestialité,” published in
_France Médicale_, 1891, vol. xxxviii., p. 593). Regarding passive
bestiality with dogs, _cf._ A. Montalti, “La pederastia tra il cane a
l’ uomo,” published in _Sperimentale_, 1887, vol. lx., p. 285;
Delastre et Linas, “Sodomie Bestiale” (_Societe de Médecine Lègale_,
1873-74, vol. cxi., p. 165); Brouardel, “Pédérastie d’un Chien à
l’Homme,” (published in the _Semaine Médicale_, 1887, vol. vii., p.
318); Féré, “Note sur un Cas de Bestialité chez la Femme” (published
in _Archives de Neurologie_, 1903, p. 90).
[655] The belief in vampires is in part dependent upon necrophilia. In
Southern Slavonic countries the corpses of young women and girls were
sometimes found which had been disinterred. The necrophilist had
misused them sexually, and had then cut off the breasts and torn out
the intestines (F. S. Krauss, “Anthropophyteia,” vol. ii., p. 391). In
the fifth decade of the nineteenth century the notorious necrophilist
Sergeant Bertrand performed similar acts.
[656] Reported by A. Eulenburg, “Sadism and Masochism,” p. 56. Another
case of necrophilia, with subsequent mutilation, occurred during the
night of December 21-22, 1901, in the mortuary at Weiher, on the
corpse of the wife of a day-labourer. The offender, who was arrested,
had, on account of intense sexual hyperæsthesia, committed other
sexual offences, among them bestiality (_cf._ “A Case of Necrophilia,”
published in the _Archives of Criminal Anthropology_, 104, vol. xvi.,
pp. 289-303).
[657] These æsthetic motives were predominant in the cases of
statue-love reported from antiquity.
[658] _Cf._ L. Fiaux “Les Maisons de Tolérance,” pp. 176, 177 (Paris,
1892). Moreover, the well-known tableaux vivants of the variety
theatre can be regarded as a lesser form of such pygmalionistic
spectacles.
[659] Ch. Lasègue, “Les Exhibitionistes,” published in _L’Union
Médicale_, 1877, No. 50.
[660] _Cf._ A. Hoche, “Elements of a General Forensic
Psycho-Pathology,” published in the “Handbook of Forensic Psychiatry,”
p. 502 (Berlin, 1901).
[661] G. Burgl, “Exhibitionists before the Law-Courts,” published in
the _Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie_, 1903, vol. lx., Nos. 1, 2, pp.
119-144.
[662] Regarding this custom of obscene gestures, which is extremely
remarkable from the point of view of the history of civilization, see
the second volume, now in course of preparation, of my work on “The
Origin of Syphilis.”
[663] Von Schrenck-Notzing, “Crimino-Psychological and
Psycho-Pathological Studies,” pp. 50-57 (Leipzig, 1902).
[664] Not to be confused with the “=essayeurs=,” a speciality of the
brothels of Paris. These are male individuals who are hired by the
owner of the brothel, in order, in the presence of clients, to carry
out indecent manipulations in association with the prostitutes, and
thus to induce sexual excitement in the guests, and stimulate them to
fornication (_cf._ L. Fiaux, “Lee Maisons de Tolérance,” p. 177).
[665] Regarding secret sexual clubs, see also my “Sexual Life in
England,” vol. i., pp. 400-415.
[666] _Cf._ L. Taxil, “La Corruption Fin de Siècle,” p. 226 (Paris,
1904).
[667] S. Freud, “Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory,” pp. 40-42.
[668] L. Lewin, the article “Opium,” in Eulenburg’s “Realenzyklopädie
der Heilkunde,” vol. xvii., p. 629 (Vienna, 1898).
[669] The following interesting reports, given by A. Wernichs
(“Geographico-Medical Studies,” pp. 48-50), elucidate very exactly the
nature of the sexual fantasies of the opium-smoker, which have the
character of an indeterminate and by no means coercive sexual desire:
“It is not necessary to proceed to gratification; one is almost
disinclined to bring the series of beautiful pictures to an end in
this way. All the joyful sexual experiences follow one another in a
peculiar and fanciful admixture. Alluring forms appear in the most
stimulating postures. Often one does not seem to take part in the
matter oneself. Beautiful women whom one has seen in any part of the
world, at the theatre, etc., move before one’s eyes, in the most
beloved games of our youth. Everything that memory and the half-dream
brings us is naked, shining, delicate, luxurious--and for us alone;
for me these groupings, these fountains with bathing forms, these
gestures, these embraces.” It is, therefore, not simply by chance that
the majority of Chinese brothels have arrangements for opium-smokers,
and that, contrariwise, many opium-dens provide opportunities for
sexual enjoyment. Indeed, prostitutes are said to prefer
opium-smokers, precisely because the latter, as long as the effect of
the opium persists, do not come to an end of their enjoyment.
[These sexual fantasies of the opium-smoker probably occur only in the
initial stages of indulgence in the drug. The =confirmed=
opium-smoker, like the man habituated to the hypodermic injection of
morphine, is probably, with rare exceptions, completely impotent.
Sexual appetite and power return, however, when the habit is
cured.--TRANSLATOR.]
[670] I refer more especially to the last letter, one directed to an
onanist (pp. 42-44), as instructive in this connexion.
[671] _Cf._ also Alfred Fuchs, “Therapeutics of the Abnormal Sexual
Life in Men” (Stuttgart, 1899).
[672] In such cases music, more especially the more emotional music of
Wagner, must be employed only with great care.
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE.--With regard to offences against morality, see the
comprehensive work by Mittermaier, “Crimes and Offences against
Morality” (Berlin, 1906) (gives a comparative description of the
legislation of various countries). See also J. Werthauer, “Offences
against Morality in Large Towns” (Berlin, 1907).
CHAPTER XXIV
OFFENCES AGAINST MORALITY FROM THE FORENSIC STANDPOINT.
“_In view of the peculiar character of sexually perverse acts, or
rather in view of the widely diffused interest in sexual questions and
of the hypocrisy which seems inseparable from their consideration, it
is easily comprehensible how to these acts there is commonly ascribed
a forensic importance greater than that which properly attaches to
them. And it is precisely this hypocrisy with which all questions
connected with sexuality are treated on the public platform, which
hinders a natural mode of regarding them, and renders so difficult an
unprejudiced judgment regarding all the relevant facts._”--J. SALGÓ.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXIV
Importance of sexual perversions to the State and to society --
Exaggerated views regarding their injurious influence -- One-sided
condemnation of them from the forensic-psychiatric standpoint -- Their
wide diffusion among healthy individuals -- Protection against real
injury to public and private interests from sexual offences -- Their
frequency among diseased persons -- The idea of degeneration --
Congenital taint and the stigmata of degeneration -- Significance of
these stigmata -- Social causes of degeneration -- Significance of
tattooing -- § 51 of the Criminal Code -- The idea of “diminished
responsibility” -- Characterization of sexual emotions -- Other
factors lessening responsibility (menstruation, etc.) -- Points of
view in the punishment of acts of fornication with persons under age
-- Value of the evidence of children in the law-courts -- The age of
consent -- The condemnation and punishment of sexual offences.
CHAPTER XXIV
It is the evident duty of the State to protect society from certain
manifestations of the sexual impulse, occurring publicly in the form of
“=offences against morality=,” and whenever these manifestations
=interfere= with the persons and the rights of citizens. The sexual
impulse has been compared with a powerful stream, which, when confined
to its natural bed, is a never-ending source of blessing to the
surrounding country; but which, as soon as with elemental force it
overflows its banks and gives rise to widespread floods, is the cause of
unspeakable misery among the entire population.[673] This comparison
would be just if the facts were as stated. But, as I have already
pointed out, =as a whole=, sexual perversions have played a far smaller
part in the decadence of fallen nations than has hitherto been assumed.
The biological and economical history of civilization has taught us to
recognize numerous other influences, which, in such a process of
national decay, play at least as great a part as sexual “degeneration,”
and in many cases a much greater part than this. Frequently, indeed,
sexual perversions and unnatural modes of gratification of the sexual
impulse are =in the first place a consequence of economic and social
abnormalities=, and are intimately connected with the so-called social
problem. The above-named stream, to pursue the image, only trickles over
its banks here and there, without giving rise to any widespread and
devastating flood. And so long as these destructive tendencies are
wanting, the State has no right to take measures against sexual
perversions, or at most can justly do so only by dealing with their
social causes. In view of the extensive diffusion of sexual anomalies
among persons who in other respects are perfectly healthy, we must ask
ourselves whether the importance of these anomalies, in respect of the
offences against morality to which in certain circumstances they may
give rise, has not been overestimated. This idea has recently been put
forward by J. Salgó, in his valuable monograph, “The Forensic Importance
of Sexual Perversities” (Halle, 1907). I am more especially pleased to
find that this author shares the view which I have myself advocated for
years, that sexual perversities in the majority of cases are not
indications of “degeneration,” as has been assumed both by psychiatrists
and neurologists, especially under the influence of the doctrine of
Möbius, who pushed this idea much too far. Moreover, the late Jolly, in
his lectures to practising physicians upon sexual aberrations, expressly
maintained the justice of my view of sexual anomalies as an
anthropological phenomenon. With regard to the nature of sexual
perversions, psychiatric science will have greatly to modify its general
views, in order to attain an objective consideration of their
significance.
“=Psychiatry=,” says Salgó (_op. cit._, pp. 37, 38), “=must not follow
the decoy-call of the law (which has wandered into a blind alley), by
endeavouring to cover with the mantle of specialist science the
serious legal errors in the matter of perverse sexuality. The
incontestable domain of psychiatric experience in forensic questions
is already sufficiently large, and it needs no artificial extension.
But it is an artificial extension to indicate as morbid all the
aberrations of sexual activity, or any single one of such aberrations,
in the absence of indubitable or demonstrable symptoms of physical
disturbance, and in the absence of a clearly recognizable and abnormal
course--simply because they contravene the existing criminal law.=”
The blind alley of psychiatry is the prison and the asylum. Because
psychiatry is principally concerned with those sexual perversities which
have criminal or psychiatric importance, with the =abnormalities= and
the =crimes= of the sexually perverse, psychiatric science failed to
recognize the extraordinarily wide diffusion of sexual perversions among
persons who are mentally and physically healthy. Among the healthy,
homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetichism, etc., may make their
appearance in more or less severe forms; just as other “vicious habits”
may occur in the healthy, just as passionate tobacco-smoking, or
intoxication with any sport, may become =an ineradicable habit=, or at
least a =habit extremely difficult to eradicate=. Neither jurisprudence
nor psychiatry can be spared the accusation of having misled “public
opinion,” this terrible monster so often hostile to civilization, in
respect of sexual perversities, regarding whose nature recent scientific
research, and above all, anthropological research, has diffused a light.
=I am acquainted with a number of persons whose bodily and mental health
is excellent, persons who are, indeed, imposing in respect of their
primeval German racial force, who have assured me that they suffer from
the most severe sexual perversions!= Recall the description given on p.
584 of a masochistic “slave” of the most extreme type. I do not go so
far as Salgó, who demands for sexual anomalies, in so far as they are
not criminal, the same “right of existence” (p. 7) as for the normal
sexual impulse; but I do assert that sexual anomalies exist in
individuals who are in other respects perfectly healthy, and that they
do not always injure the personal health or the bodily and moral
well-being of another, as is the case with sexual perversions arising
upon a morbid foundation and attaining forensic importance. Above all, I
must sharply condemn the fashion of =glorifying= sexual perversities,
which have been regarded as a peculiar privilege of the highest mental
development, and as corresponding to an especial refinement of
sensibility. This assertion may be refuted by reference to the fact,
often mentioned before, that the most incredible and most artificial
sexual malpractices occur among savage races, who in this respect could
give points to our modern decadents and epicurean æsthetes. In any case,
sexual perversions in themselves have neither a moral nor a forensic
importance, and must be regarded as more or less biological variations
of the normal impulse.
Where, on the other hand, the =public= or =individual= interest is
injured by these perversions, the State has unquestionably the right of
intervention and the right of prevention. In every case in which we have
to do with the production of a public nuisance, with the bodily or
mental injury of other human beings, with the employment of force, with
the misuse of the lessened or absent responsibility of children, of
unconscious persons, of those asleep, and of those mentally disordered,
society must intervene in its own interest, and must take suitable
measures to protect itself against such offences. Now, it is
certain--and to have established this is an honour to psychiatric
science--that it is precisely these latter sexual =offences= which in
the great majority of cases are committed by =diseased= persons and by
those who are more or less =irresponsible=. Therefore, we are thoroughly
justified in demanding that in every such criminal case, the bodily and
mental condition of the accused should be subjected to a medical
examination. A typical mental disorder, such as imbecility, epilepsy,
alcoholic insanity, general paralysis of the insane, paranoia, etc.,
will be detected without difficulty, and thereby responsibility will at
once be excluded. More difficult are the =transitional= stages between
health and disease, the so-called “=borderland cases=,” the cases of
“psychopathically deficient responsibility” and of “disequilibrium.” In
forensic medicine two ideas play a very great part in this connexion,
that of “=degeneration=” and that of “=diminished responsibility=.”
Every sexually perverse person must be examined for signs of severe
hereditary taint, as well as for the so-called “stigmata of
degeneration.” If we can prove that in his family there have been
=several= instances of =severe= mental disorder, of alcoholism,
syphilis, diabetes, and other diseases leading to degeneration, the
suspicion that there is a psychopathic foundation for the sexual offence
is justified. But we must insist that congenital taint does not make
itself felt in every case, and cannot, therefore, always be made
responsible as a causal influence in the production of a sexual
perversion.[674]
The so-called “stigmata of degeneration” have importance only when they
are =very markedly= developed, and when =several= of them are
simultaneously present. We distinguish physical and mental _stigmata
degenerationis_. To the former belong disturbances and inhibitions of
development, malformations, such as asymmetry of the skull, narrowness
of the palate, hare-lip, cleft palate, anomalies of the teeth and the
hair, difficulties of speech, tic convulsif, abnormal and morbid states
of the genital organs and genital functions, and more especially
malformations of the ear, such as Morel’s ear (the complete or partial
absence of the helix or antihelix), the Darwinian pointed ear, etc.[675]
The mental degenerative phenomena comprise all that are known as
“bizarre or abnormal” characters; those who possess such characters are
termed “eccentrics” and “originals,” or are known as persons
“psychopathically below par” (J. L. A. Koch), as “disequilibrated”
(Eschle), as “superior degenerates” (Magnan). These phenomena comprise
peculiar disturbances of the harmony of the spiritual life,
characterized by lack of balance between emotion and intellect, as well
as by an abnormal irritability and undue reaction to stimulation. We may
find complete absence of ethical perception, so-called “moral insanity,”
of which E. Kraepelin and his school have proved that it may arise
secondarily as a sequel to certain mental disorders. Striking in these
unbalanced persons is the disharmony of the entire conduct of life, the
internal lack of the _point d’appui_, the unsteadiness, the suddenness
of their actions, which often occur under the influence of coercive
ideas and abnormal impulses, the abnormally early appearance and the
extraordinary intensity of the sexual impulse, the tendency to cruelty
(O. Rosenbach). In judging the personality of the degenerate as a whole,
we must always take into account the =entire course of life=, to which
only too often the remark of Stifter applies: “In his life we saw only
beginnings without continuations, and continuations without beginnings.”
On the other hand, we must not forget that many of the bodily stigmata
of degeneration occur also in healthy persons, and that the existence of
such stigmata in mentally disordered persons and in criminals may also
be referred to social causes, to bad conditions of life and deficient
nutriment, to alcoholism, syphilis, or rickets. For this reason P.
Näcke[676] rightly insists =that many of the so-called stigmata of
degeneration are socially produced=, and will therefore disappear with
the employment of a purposive social hygiene; he gives as an example the
rachitic bandy legs of English factory labourers. Therefore, for the
proof of degeneration, we must lay more stress upon =mental= stigmata,
upon abnormality of the spiritual personality, abnormality of its
intellectual and emotional character, and from this proceed to infer the
irresistible character of a morbid impulsive manifestation.
In addition to the study of the stigmata of degeneration, the study of
=tattooing= is of forensic importance in the consideration of the sexual
offences; the character and the date of the tattooing give sometimes
interesting information regarding the nature of the personality.
Thus Lombroso[677] reports the case of an offender against morality,
fifty years of age, with prominent ears and scanty growth of hair.
This man ravished a girl of fifteen, whose mother was his mistress.
=At the early age of fifteen= he had had the most obscene pictures
tattooed upon his body; and upon inquiry he stated that he had begun
to masturbate at the age of thirteen years, and had begun to have
intercourse with women at the age of fifteen years. He denied the
accusation of rape, and maintained that he had enjoyed the girl
without using force. =His tattooing, however, gave evidence= of his
capacity to commit sexual crime. The pictures served as a =certain and
important proof of this=.
This appeared even more clearly in the case of the ravisher Francesco
Spiteri, published by Dr. F. Santangelo in 1892, =whose utterly
immoral and sexually perverse mode of life was most wonderfully
displayed and recorded by means of the tattooings by which his entire
body was covered=. It will suffice here to allude to the drawing of a
fish and of seven points upon his membrum. This indicated that his
penis (Italian, _pesce_ = fish) since his youth had pædicated seven
boys (= seven points)!
In the case of sexual offences we have to consider, in addition to the
question of degeneration, that of =diminished= or =entirely absent
responsibility=. In cases of unmistakable mental disorder,
responsibility does not exist, nor in epileptic confusional states, nor
in profound alcoholic intoxication.[678] Between complete
irresponsibility and complete responsibility there are numerous
transitional stages, which are all classified under the idea of
=diminished responsibility=. This fact is not recognized by § 51 of the
Criminal Code, which runs as follows:
“A punishable offence has not been committed when the accused at the
time the action was performed was in a state of unconsciousness, or in
a state or morbid disturbance of mental activity, by means of which
his freedom of will was excluded.”
In this we find the idea of “morbid disturbance of mental activity,”
which is definitely wider than the idea of mental disease, in so far as
it embraces transient mental disorders in persons who are not suffering
from definite mental disease; but it does not take into consideration
the even more important notion of diminished responsibility, which is
applicable to all the above described borderland states and transitional
conditions lying between mental health and mental disease. Häussler
(_op. cit._, p. 39) as long as eighty years ago demanded the recognition
of the idea of diminished responsibility--that is, of a condition “in
which responsibility for the action was =diminished= by an imperfectly
developed intelligence, without the disturbance of intellectual activity
being sufficiently great completely to abolish free voluntary
determination” (Aschaffenburg). Since that time, by the address given
on September 16, 1887, to the Association of German Alienists at
Frankfort on “diminished responsibility,” Jolly opened a discussion upon
this question. In this discussion the majority of German psychiatrists
recommended the legislative recognition of such an idea, among these
Wollenberg, Hoche, Cramer, Kirn, Aschaffenburg, von Schrenck-Notzing,
etc.[679]
In connexion with diminished responsibility we must distinguish between
=individuals= and =actions=. Among the individuals recognized above as
persons “psychopathically below par,” responsibility may be diminished
permanently and for a number of different actions; but in other cases
healthy normal individuals may exhibit diminished responsibility in
respect of =isolated actions=, when, for example, an =excessively strong
emotion=, or a state of =acute intoxication=, has for a certain time and
in relation to a particular action abrogated responsibility. In this
connexion, in addition to acute alcoholic intoxication, certain =sexual=
processes have especially to be considered. Häussler recognized the
influence of the sexual impulse upon responsibility, and considered that
certain actions performed under the influence of that impulse were
performed without complete responsibility, and he declared that the
voluptuary was a person whose mental health was imperfect.[680]
Forel[681] also regarded the “slaves of the sexual impulse” as mentally
abnormal, as individuals whose responsibility was diminished. I consider
it indisputable that sexual emotions, especially when they arise
suddenly, diminish responsibility, and limit, to some extent at least,
the freedom of voluntary determination. Regarding certain processes of
the _vita sexualis_, such as the epoch of =puberty= in both sexes,
regarding =menstruation=, =pregnancy=, and the =climacteric in women=,
this fact has been already generally recognized. It ought, however, to
be admitted regarding the sexual impulse in general, more especially
when the whole character of the action proves that it has been the
consequence of a suddenly arising powerful emotion. Von Krafft-Ebing
also is of this opinion.[682] It is, moreover, in most cases possible to
determine whether the offence was caused =only by a powerful sexual
emotion=, by means of which the intelligence and the freedom of the will
of a person, in other respects normally responsible, were temporarily
limited or completely arrested; or whether other motives intervened, so
that the action must be regarded as the result of conscious choice.
In conclusion, another point must be considered, which is related to the
question of sexual offences committed with children, and which possesses
forensic importance. This is the circumstance that in many such cases
there is no question of the “seduction” of children, but that, on the
contrary, the incitation =first= proceeded from the children themselves.
In the previous chapter we discussed the early appearance of sexual
activity in children. Moreover, in such cases we could distinguish
between a nobler and a grosser, more sensual love.
As an example of the former, I may allude to the ardent, affectionate
love of a girl of twelve for a thoroughly honourable man of forty
years of age, who certainly had no idea of sexual intimacy with the
child, and who was unable to free himself from her passionate
caresses. We often observe such intimate inclinations on the part of
young girls towards mature men, and we must be careful in such cases
to avoid immediately thinking of pædophilic unchastity.
In another case a mother complained that her daughter, seven years of
age, was in continual pursuit of a boy of fourteen, and could not be
cured of the affection.
Maria Lischnewska reports (“Mutterschutz,” 1905, p. 155) the case of a
boy, not yet six years of age, who drew up the nightgown of his
foster-mother, and endeavoured to have intercourse with her.
The sexual offences committed by clergymen and tutors upon the girls
taught by them are apt to be seen in a different light when we subject
the youthful accuser to a strict cross-examination, and, in addition, to
a physical examination, whereby in many cases we bring to light the fact
that, long =before= the recent offence, they have been accustomed =of
their own free will= to have sexual relations with =other= men. Casper
long ago drew attention to these circumstances. Very often =from the
pupil herself proceed actual advances= of the worst kind, which have
proved ruinous to many a young teacher whose morals were previously
above reproach.
Finally, there is an important point which must not be forgotten: the
untrustworthy character of childish evidence, a matter which has
recently been discussed by the specialist Adolf Baginsky.[683] This
writer, whose knowledge of childish psychology is so profound, remarks:
“The evidence given by children in the law-courts appears to those who
are really familiar with the child mind to be =absolutely worthless=
and =utterly devoid of importance=, and this is the more the case the
more frequently the child repeats its statement, and the more firmly
it sticks to its evidence.”
He alludes to the law of Sweden, according to which the child is not
competent to give evidence in a law-court before the completion of its
fifteenth year.
All these circumstances must be considered in relation to the question
of the so-called “=age of consent=.” M. Hirschfeld justly remarks that
the natural age of consent is equivalent to that at which a child is
competent to make a choice (“The Nature of Love,” p. 284). I consider
that the decision of the Italian Criminal Code is the best; by this Code
the age of consent for =both= sexes is placed at the conclusion of the
sixteenth year.
The majority of crimes committed from purely sexual motives belong to
the crimes of passion, in the sense of Ferris, and indeed to crimes
committed under the coercion of the most powerful of organic impulses. I
doubt whether the existing punishments are the most suitable for the
purpose for which they are designed. In any case, gentleness is here
above all demanded, and we should invoke the saying, “Judge not, that ye
be not judged!” Indeed, an evangelical minister[684] speaks truly when
he says:
“=The enormous majority of men and women, who constitute themselves
the judges of offences against morality, whilst they themselves take
every opportunity of infringing the moral laws they profess to
uphold--lie day after day, throughout their whole life--their position
is built upon hypocrisy and lies.=”
It very rarely happens that a judge who condemns a thief or a murderer
has himself been guilty of this crime, but without doubt it frequently
happens that a judge condemns other men on account of sexual offences
which he has himself committed. In the case of =sexual crimes= we almost
always have to do with individuals to whom more good could be done by
=medical influence= than by imprisonment; we must entrust the physician
with the duty of protecting society against such offenders. “=In this
province, physicians will become the judges of the future=,” says M.
Hirschfeld most justly.[685] Until this end is attained, let us remind
German judges of an anecdote which I found in an old French
encyclopædia:[686]
“A courtesan in Madrid killed her lover, on account of his
unfaithfulness; she was condemned and brought before the king, from
whom she hid nothing. The king said to her: ‘Thou hast loved =too
much= to be a reasonable being.’”
[673] E. Weisbrod, “Offences against Morality before the Law Courts,”
p. 5 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1891). _Cf._, regarding offences against
morality, in addition to the above-mentioned work of Tardieu, the
interesting “Notes et Observations de Médecine Légale: Attentats aux
Mœurs,” by H. Legludic (Paris, 1896); also P. Viazzi, “Sur Reati
Sessuali” (Turin, 1896); L. Thoinot, “Attentats aux Mœurs et
Perversions du Sens Génital” (Paris, 1898); Toulouse, “Les Délits
Sexuels,” published in “Les Conflicts Intersexuels et Sociaux,” pp.
318-326 (Paris, 1904). Regarding offences against morality from the
forensic standpoint, see also the comprehensive work of Mittermaier,
“Crimes and Offences against Morality” (Berlin, 1906), which contains
a comparative account of the legislative enactments of the principal
countries of Europe. In addition, consult J. Werthauer, “Offences
against Morality in Large Towns” (Berlin, 1907).
[674] _Cf._ Th. Ziehen, “Degeneratives Irresein,” in Eulenburg’s
“Realenzyklopädie,” vol. v., p. 448 (Vienna, 1895); A. Hoche,
“Handbook of Forensic Psychiatry,” p. 413.
[675] _Cf._, in this connexion, P. Näcke, “The Value of the So-called
Stigmata of Degeneration” (_Archives of Criminal Psychology_, May,
1904), and “The Great Value of Certain Signs of Degeneration”
(_Archives of Criminal Anthropology_, 1904, vol. xvi., pp. 181, 182).
The most important, according to him, are stigmata of the head and of
the genital system, on account of the relationships to the brain and
to the reproductive organs. Disturbances of development of the auricle
are not so important as those of the globe of the eye (absence of the
iris, nystagmus, opacities of the lens, coloboma iridis, ptosis,
microphthalmus, anophthalmus, colour-blindness, etc.). Penta has
recently drawn attention to the importance and frequency of anomalies
of the sexual organs in stuprators and in the sexually perverse (_cf._
_Archives of Criminal Anthropology_, 1904, vol. xvi., p. 343; _cf._
also the observations of Matthaes, quoted in note ^{490}, p. 477).
[676] Paul Näcke, “Criminality and Insanity in Women,” pp. 154-156
(Vienna and Leipzig, 1894).
[677] C. Lombroso, “Recent Advances in the Study of Criminality,” pp.
177, 178.
[678] _Cf._ G. Aschaffenburg, “Responsibility in Mental Disease,”
published in Hoche’s “Handbook of Forensic Psychiatry,” pp. 13-47.
[On the question of “Responsibility in Mental Disease,” English
readers will naturally refer to Maudsley’s classical work bearing this
title, published in the International Scientific Series.--TRANSLATOR.]
[679] _Cf._ A. von Schrenck-Notzing, “The Question of Diminished
Responsibility, etc.,” published in “Crimino-Psychological and
Psychopathological Studies,” pp. 76-101 (Leipzig, 1902).
[680] Häussler, _op. cit._, p. 39.
[681] A. Forel, “The Responsibility of Normal Human Beings,” p. 21
(Munich, 1901).
[682] Von Krafft-Ebing, “Psychopathia Sexualis,” p. 331.
[683] Adolf Baginsky, “The Impressionability of Children under the
Influence of their Environment,” published in _Medizinische Reform_,
edited by Rudolf Lennhoff, 1906, Nos. 43, 44 (especially pp. 533,
534).
[684] “Another Conventional Lie: Studies concerning Love, Marriage,
and Morality,” by an Evangelical Clergyman, p. 7 (Leipzig).
[685] Kraepelin (“The Question of Diminished Responsibility,”
published in the _Monatschrijt für Kriminal-Psychiatrie_, 1904, No. 8)
pleads that the necessity for imprisonment should be determined, not
by judges, but by medical “crimino-pedagogues,” and he demands “places
of secure restraint” (“Sicherungsanstalten”), differing in character
from ordinary prisons, for the detention of criminals whose
responsibility is diminished. Similarly, P. Näcke (“The So-called
Moral Insanity,” p. 60; Wiesbaden, 1902), considers that the prison
should be transformed into a kind of “hospital and educational
institution.”
[686] “Encyclopediana ou Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Ana,” p. 59
(Paris, 1701).
CHAPTER XXV
THE QUESTION OF SEXUAL ABSTINENCE (DIE ENTHALTSAMKEITSFRAGE)
“_O heiliger Büsser, folg’ ich dir,_
_Folge ich dir, Frau Minne?_”
EDUARD GRISEBACH.
[“_Holy Penitence, art thou my aim,_
_Or is it thou whom I pursue, lovely woman?_”]
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXV
Great variation in the views held regarding sexual abstinence -- Five
groups -- The apostles of absolute asceticism -- Criticism of their
views -- View of duplex sexual morality -- Its refutation -- The
unfounded doubt in the possibility of abstinence -- Recommendation of
relative temporary abstinence from the medical and moral standpoint --
Relative abstinence as an ideal of civilization -- Recognition of this
ideal among the ancient Israelites -- Wise prescriptions and
utterances in the Bible and the Talmud -- Misrepresentation of this
idea by the notion of absolute asceticism -- Reaction against the
latter -- Rules regarding the frequency of intercourse -- Self-command
as a principle of enjoyment -- Abstinence before the first sexual
intercourse -- Sexual maturity and physical maturity -- Sexual tension
of the third decade of life -- Erb’s experiences regarding the harmful
consequences of abstinence -- Lowenfeld’s reports -- Comparison with
the dangers of extra-conjugal sexual intercourse -- Value of
abstinence later in life -- Influence upon intellectual activity --
Higher civilizing value of the idea of abstinence.
CHAPTER XXV
There is no disputed question in respect of which the divergent views
are so sharply opposed as they are regarding the importance, the value,
and the consequences of =sexual abstinence=.
[The question has been recently discussed by O. Schreiber, in a paper
entitled “Sexual Abstinence,” published in _Medizinische Blätter_, 1907,
Nos. 25-27.]
I distinguish =five= groups of opinion:
1. The apostles of =absolute asceticism= during the whole of life
(Tolstoi, Weininger, Norbert Grabowsky, Kurnig, etc.).
2. The _medical_ advocates of =relative temporary continence=, until it
becomes possible to enjoy permanent hygienic intercourse, free from all
objections.
3. The advocates of “=duplex sexual morality=,” who demand from _woman_
sexual abstinence until she marries, but who regard this as impossible
in the case of _man_.
4. The “=Vera=”[687] =enthusiasts=, who on =moral= grounds demand
abstinence for =both= sexes until marriage.
5. Those who =doubt= the possibility of abstinence of =any= kind for
either sex, whether absolute =or= relative.
Regarding those mentioned under the first heading, who demand absolute,
life-long sexual abstinence, it is hardly necessary to say a word. It is
nonsense, a pious superstition, a Utopia contrary alike to nature and to
civilization, born of the belief in the “sinfulness” of sexual
intercourse.
The normal sexual impulse is a =natural= phenomenon; it is pure and
thoroughly ethical; and it is only in an insane confusion and in a
morally reprehensible falsification of his own nature that man has come
to regard it as a “sin,” as an “evil.” Man has a natural, inborn right
to the gratification of the sexual impulse. Absolute asceticism must be
rejected as a thoroughly =immoral= doctrine.
The same is true of the duplex sexual morality, alluded to under the
third heading, by which that is justified to man which is denied to
woman. This “=morality=” (_lucus a non lucendo_) presupposes for man a
natural impulse, and demands for him a right to gratify it, whilst the
existence of such an impulse and of such a right is denied to woman. We
have shown that this view is an inevitable consequence of coercive
marriage morality.[688]
The standpoint of the sceptics alluded to under § 5 is one which denies
the possibility of =any= abstinence, even merely temporary abstinence;
but this view is equally to be rejected. Man is a natural being; his
sexual impulse is a natural instinct, and as such one whose existence is
justified; but at the same time man is a =civilized being=. Civilization
is an elevation, an ennoblement, a transfiguration of nature, whose
unduly powerful impulses and powers must be tamed and harmonized by
civilization. The right to sexual gratification is therefore opposed by
the =duty= to set bounds to the sexual impulse, to conduct it into such
paths that no harm can result from its exercise, either to the
individual or to society; and in order that, like all other impulses, it
may subserve the purposes of the evolution of civilization. To this end,
however, a =relative abstinence= is of great importance (this is a
matter which has not hitherto been sufficiently recognized); but this
course it is only possible to follow when, at the same time, we
emphatically =affirm the rightness of sexuality=, and when it is our
desire to utilize it as a =civilizing factor of the first rank=. The
“individualization” of the sexual impulse has been described in detail
in an earlier chapter of this work, to which I may refer the reader. If
we fail to recognize the value of =temporary abstinence=, and the
importance of the storing up of sexual energy which is thereby effected,
and the transformation of this energy into other energies of a spiritual
nature, such an individualization becomes impossible.
Alike the medical advocates (§ 2) and the moral advocates (§ 4) of a
relative temporary abstinence for both sexes have, from their respective
standpoints, made a just demand. This is, in fact, in both cases an
“ideal standpoint,” to use the phrase of F. A. Lange; but it is also an
ideal most desirable to set before youth, and more especially before our
German youth. We cannot repeat too often, or insist with too much
emphasis, what an endless blessing results from the endeavour towards,
and from the realization of, temporary sexual abstinence, more
especially in the years of =preparation= for life, but also in the years
of =independent creative work=.
The importance of =relative= sexual abstinence was first recognized by
the ancient Israelites. Numerous wise prescriptions and utterances prove
this. Julius Preuss, the most celebrated student of ancient Jewish
medicine, has recently, in an interesting study of “Sexual Matters in
the Bible and the Talmud” (_Allgemeine Medizinische Central-Zeitung_,
1906, No. 30 _et seq._), collected the following facts bearing on the
matter:
“Chastity was a self-evident demand for the unmarried. It is true
that, in view of the early occurrence of puberty, they married very
young--at the age of eighteen or twenty; and Rabbi Huna is of opinion
that anyone who at the age of twenty is still unmarried passes his
days in sin or--which he regards as even worse--in sinful thoughts.
There are three whom God praises every day: an unmarried man who lives
in a large town and does not sin; a poor man who finds an object of
value and returns it to the owner, and a rich man who gives his tithe
secretly. Once when this doctrine was read out in the presence of
Rabbi Safra, who as a young man lived in a large town, his face
lighted up with joy. But Raba said to him: ‘It is not meant such a one
as thou art, but such a one as Rabbi Chanina and Rabbi Oschaja, who
live in the street of the prostitutes, and make shoes for them, to
whom, therefore, the prostitutes come, and look upon them, but who,
notwithstanding this, do not raise their eyes to look upon the
prostitutes.’”
After marriage also they endeavoured by valuable prescriptions to
enforce the great civilizing idea of temporary sexual abstinence. Thus,
intercourse during menstruation was strictly forbidden, and was regarded
as a deadly sin; the same was the case as regards intercourse when there
was any other hæmorrhage from the genital organs; but in this case the
abstinence must last even longer. It is remarkable that the Catholic
theologians allowed sexual intercourse without limit when such morbid
hæmorrhage was present, and allowed it also, with certain restrictions,
during menstruation. Further, among the ancient Hebrews intercourse was
forbidden during the week of mourning for parents or brothers or
sisters; it was forbidden also during the festival of atonement. Guests
in an inn when travelling were also forbidden sexual intercourse,
doubtless on grounds of decency. Intercourse was likewise forbidden in
times of famine, in order to spare the bodily forces.
Golden sayings recognize the value of moderation and of relative
abstinence.
According to an ancient Israelitish popular saying, sexual intercourse
is one of eight things =which are beautiful when enjoyed in strict
moderation, but harmful when enjoyed very freely=. The others are
walking, possessions, work, wine, sleep, warm water (for bathing and
for drinking), and venesection.
Rabbi Jochanan said: “Man possesses a little limb: he who satisfies it
hungers; he who allows it to hunger is satisfied.”
Rabbi Ilai said: “When man observes that his evil impulse is more
powerful than he is himself, let him go to a place where people do not
know him, let him put on dark clothes, let him wear a dark turban, and
let him do that which his heart desires; but let him not publicly
profane the name of God.” This can only mean that in general he only
controls the desire who has already tasted the fruit--that is to say,
that abstinence is the safest means against lust; but he who,
notwithstanding this, finds that the impulse threatens to become too
violent, still has the duty to fight against it, and in any case not
to yield immediately.
This ancient notion of relative asceticism was, unfortunately, falsified
and thrust into the background by the Utopian and contra-natural idea of
absolute asceticism; its great value was completely obscured by the
inevitable reaction against the principle of absolute chastity. This
reaction led actually to the formation of rules regarding the frequency
of intercourse, such as that attributed to Luther--“Twice a week does
harm neither to her nor to me”; =although it is precisely in this
department of life that no rules can be given, and that the greatest
individual variations occur=, so that “twice a week” may for many
constitute by far too much, and can only be regarded as permissible to
robust constitutions. =Daily= indulgence in sexual intercourse,
continued for a =long period= of time, would be deleterious even to a
Hercules, =and in all circumstances would be harmful to both parties=.
Nature herself, by exhibiting a certain periodicity in sexual excitement
(which periodicity is admittedly far more distinct in women than it is
in men, who can “always” love), has facilitated temporary abstinence.
This is, in fact, a natural demand even of the most extreme ethical
materialism; for, as Friedrich Albert Lange[689] rightly points out,
“even though the individual sensual pleasure, as with Aristippos or
Lamettrie, is raised to a principle, =self-control= still remains a
requirement of philosophy, if only in order to assure the permanence of
the capacity for enjoyment.” So also the poet of the “New Tanhäuser”
sings:
“Selig, der da ewig schmachtet,
Sei gepriesen, Tantalus,
Hätt’ er je, wonach er trachtet,
Würd’ es auch schon Ueberdruss:
Gib mir immer =Eine= Beere,
Aus der vollen Traube nur,
Und ich schmachte gern, Cythere,
Lebenslang auf deiner Spur!”
[“Happy is he who eternally desires.
A happy man art thou, Tantalus!
If he ever attained that for which he longs,
He would instantly taste satiety:
Let me have but a =single= grape
From the full cluster,
Gladly, Cytherea, will I live,
Ever desiring, in thy courts!”]
The question of abstinence is an entirely different one, according as it
relates to the time =before= or =after= the first experience of sexual
intercourse. Experience shows that in the former case abstinence is far
easier than it is when the forbidden fruit has once been tasted. If,
with the author of this book, relative asceticism is regarded as the
most desirable ideal, we shall endeavour in =youth= to realize that
ideal for as long a time as possible, =without= any interruption by
sexual intercourse; whereas in the later period of the fully-developed
sexual life we shall practise sexual abstinence only from time to time.
With regard to the former point, it would be the greatest good fortune
for every man if he could remain sexually abstinent until the complete
maturity of body and mind--that is, until the age of twenty-five.[690]
But this is in most cases an impossibility. Yet it =is possible= for
=every= healthy man--and it is an imperative demand of individual and
social hygiene--=to abstain completely from sexual intercourse at least
until the age of twenty=. That is possible without any harm resulting,
and it is carried out by innumerable persons of both sexes. It is,
indeed, a fact that in civilized countries the physical and mental
maturity of girls and boys by no means coincides with their sexual
maturity, but, on the contrary, occurs from three to five years later.
First between the ages of twenty and twenty-two does man attain complete
development.[691] If the sexual impulse is not artificially awakened and
stimulated during these years of adolescence, it may remain very
moderate, without masturbation and without pollutions, and can be easily
controlled. Relations with the other sex have not yet become necessary
for the development of the individual personality. The human being has
still enough to do in isolation. First with the commencement of the
third decade of life do the conditions alter, and sexual tension becomes
so great as to demand the adequate and natural discharge given by the
normal sexual act. If this is impossible, pollutions form the natural,
or masturbation forms the unnatural, outlet; and when abstinence is
continued for a long time after attaining this age, the vital freshness
and the spiritual and emotional condition are more or less impaired. To
have emphasized this fact, in opposition to those authors[692] who
declared that total sexual abstinence is absolutely harmless to mature
men, was the great service of Wilhelm Erb,[693] the celebrated, widely
experienced Heidelberg neurologist.
“It is a well-known fact,” he writes, “that healthy young men with a
powerful sexual impulse suffer not a little from abstinence, that from
time to time they are ‘as if possessed’ by the impulse, that erotic
ideas press in upon them from all sides, disturb their work and their
nocturnal repose, and imperiously demand relief. I always remember the
remark of a friend of my youth, a young artist, who, when speaking of
these things, was accustomed to say with intense meaning: ‘Wer nie die
kummervollen Nächte in seinem Bette weinend sass....’ And the same man
could not sufficiently extol the relaxing, disburdening, and
positively refreshing influence of an occasional gratification; and
the same thing has been said to me innumerable times by earnest and
thoroughly moderate men.”
Women also gave him similar assurances.[694] In numerous cases Erb
observed physical and mental harm to result from abstinence--sometimes
in healthy individuals, but more especially in the neuropathic.
Important also are the investigations of L. Löwenfeld[695] regarding the
influence of abstinence. He found that in men under the age of
twenty-four any troubles worth mentioning as a result of sexual
abstinence were comparatively rare, as compared with the case of men
between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-six years, the years of
complete manly power and sexual capacity; and he found that whereas in
healthy persons these disturbances were indeed of a trifling character
(general excitability, sexual hyperæsthesia, hypochondriacal ideas,
disinclination for work, slight attacks of giddiness), in neuropathic
persons, on the contrary, there would occur coercive ideas, melancholy,
feelings of anxiety, and even hallucinations. Females, according to
Löwenfeld, bear abstinence--even absolute abstinence--much better than
men, but in them also hysterical and neurasthenic conditions may develop
as a result of sexual abstinence.
All these harmful consequences of abstinence are, however, neither in
man nor in woman, of such a nature that, where an opportunity for sexual
intercourse at once hygienic and free from ethical objections is
wanting, the gratification of the sexual impulse need be advised by the
physician as a “therapeutic measure.” No; Erb himself insists that, on
the contrary, the dangers threatened by venereal diseases =altogether
outweigh= the comparatively rare and trifling injuries to health
resulting from abstinence. “Extra-conjugal” sexual intercourse involves
the dangers of syphilitic or gonorrhœal infection, or of illegitimate
pregnancy, which latter to-day must, unfortunately, be regarded as a
kind of severe disease. In contrast with these evils, any harmful
consequences of abstinence fade away to nothing.
Later in life, when the possibility of a permanent pure love exists, the
value of temporary abstinence is to be found especially in the spiritual
sphere. Precisely for the “erotocrat,” as Georg Hirth terms one endowed
with a powerful and healthy sexual impulse, is this temporary abstinence
of a certain importance, because the stored-up quantum of sexual tension
re-enforces the inward spiritual productivity. A number of men, at once
endowed with strong sexual needs and with a noble mental capacity, have
assured me that, in consequence of abstinence, they have temporarily
experienced a peculiar deepening and concentration of their mental
capacity, by means of which they were undeniably enabled to increase
their mental output. This point in the hygiene of intellectual activity,
which seems not to have been unknown to Goethe, has been as yet too
little studied.
In any case, it is definitely established that from the standpoint of
civilization the idea of sexual abstinence is justified, if for this
reason alone: because in it we find a great means for increasing and
strengthening of the =will=; but, in the second place, because in it we
have a valuable protection against the dangers of wild love; and,
finally, because sexual abstinence emphasizes the fact that life
contains other things worth striving for besides matters of sex, that
the content of life is far from being exhausted by the sexual, even
though the sexual impulse, in addition to the impulse of
self-preservation, will always remain the most powerful of all vital
activities.
[687] “Vera” is the heroine of a novel (“Eine für Viele: Aus dem
Tagebuche eines Mädchens”) which attracted considerable attention in
Germany. She demanded from men entering on marriage the same virgin
intactitude which men are accustomed to expect in their wives. English
readers will be reminded of Evadne, in Sarah Grand’s “The Heavenly
Twins.” Evadne, it will be remembered, left her husband at the church
door, owing to information she received regarding his preconjugal
career. In England we might speak of “Evadne” enthusiasts, instead of
“Vera” enthusiasts.--TRANSLATOR.
[688] P. Näcke also (“A Contribution to the Woman’s Question and to
the Question of Sexual Abstinence,” _op. cit._, p. 49) strongly
condemns this duplex morality, which he regards as “obviously unjust.”
_Cf._ also Max Thal, “Sexual Morality: an Attempt to solve the Problem
of Sexual, and more Particularly of the so-called Duplex Morality”
(Breslau, 1904).
[689] Friedrich Albert Lange, “History of Materialism,” vol. iii., p.
302, English edition.
[690] “My dear young men,” thus wrote Ernst Moritz Arndt, at the age
of eighty-nine, to the Burschenschaft (Students’ Association) of Jena,
“I can wish nothing better for you than that you should arrange your
course of life in Jena, and pass through it, as I heretofore passed
through it, making a courageous, vigorous, and earnest fight against
the lusty, overbearing impulses of youth, which in the best case are
so easily carried to excess.... In these your most valuable years,
between eighteen and twenty, you must, with redoubled manliness,
courage, and chastity, strive to deserve the praise given by Caius
Julius Cæsar to the young men of Germany.”
[691] _Cf._, in this connexion, the remarks of A. Herzen, “Science and
Morality,” pp. 11, 12 (Berlin, 1901). The same age for human maturity
was fixed on also by J. C. G. Ackermann (“The Diseases of the
Learned,” p. 268; Nürnberg, 1777).
[692] I need mention only Seved Ribbing, Acton, Rubner, Paget, Hegar,
Beale, Herzen, A. Eulenburg, V. Cnyrim, and Fürbringer.
[693] Wilhelm Erb, “Remarks on the Consequences of Sexual Abstinence,”
published in the _Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_,
1903, vol. ii., No. I., pp. 1-18.
[694] Theodor Mundt, in his “Madonna” (pp. 240, 241; Leipzig, 1835),
has very vividly described the beneficial and refreshing influence of
coitus upon women.
[695] L. Löwenfeld, “The Sexual Life and Nervous Troubles,” pp. 62-69,
fourth edition.
CHAPTER XXVI
SEXUAL EDUCATION
“_Better a year too early than an hour too late._”--OKER BLOM.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXVI
Science and practice have hitherto, for the most part, ignored the
sexual -- The danger of blind chance in the sexual province --
Necessity for the enlightenment of the coming generation -- Sexual
education as a part of general pedagogy -- The right to the knowledge
of one’s own body -- Sexual enlightenment of young people -- The
dispute regarding the when and the how -- Distinction between the
youth of the country and the youth of the town -- Points of
association -- A passage from Gutzkow’s autobiography -- Disastrous
sources of early sexual enlightenment -- Character of the pedagogic
enlightenment -- Importance of this -- Suggestions regarding the
methods of sexual enlightenment (Sigmund, Lischnewska, F. W. Förster)
-- My own views -- Education of the character and of the will --
Principal rules of sexual pedagogy -- Education to manhood.
CHAPTER XXVI
The manner in which up to the present day humanity has, properly
speaking, completely ignored the fact of sexuality is at once remarkable
and difficult to understand. Until recently people went so far as to
regard scientific research into sexual matters by =adult persons= as
improper! The mystical idea of the sinfulness, of the radically evil
character, of the sexual, was a dogma which even natural science
appeared to admit. Our attitude towards the sexual was as if it were at
once Sphinx and Gorgon’s head, as if it were the veiled statue of Sais.
We stood helpless, in the face of this mysterious and malignant power,
against the =blind hazard of chance which plays= so momentous a part,
more especially in sexual affairs. As everywhere in life, so here also,
the dominion of chance could be overcome only by means of knowledge. The
solution of the sexual problem demands, in the first place, =openness=,
=clearness=, =learning= in the department of the sexual, knowledge of
cause and effect, and the =transmission= of this knowledge to the =next
generation=, so that this latter may without harm become wise. =Sexual
education= is an important chapter in general pedagogy.[696]
Regarding animals, plants, and stones the youthful human being of to-day
acquires the most exact information, but we have hitherto =refused= him
the right to understand his own body, and to acquire a knowledge of
certain important vital functions of that body. There can be no doubt
about the fact that the modern human being, who has learned to so large
an extent to regard himself as a =social= being, has a sacred natural
right to this knowledge.
Celebrated pedagogues of a hundred years ago, such as Rousseau,
Salzmann, Basedow, Jean Paul, etc., expressed themselves in favour of
the early sexual enlightenment of youth, and gave the most valuable
advice regarding the methods to be employed;[697] but their views
remained for the most part devoid of practical effect, and it is only in
recent years, in connexion with the question of the protection of
motherhood, with the campaign against prostitution, and with the attempt
to suppress venereal diseases, that interest in this matter has been
reawakened; and there now exists in this department an extensive
literature, belonging chiefly to the last few years, proceeding from the
pens of physicians, pedagogues, hygienists, and advocates of woman’s
rights.[698] It is, in truth, the burning question of our time, the
solution of which is here attempted. Correct sexual education forms the
foundation for the ennoblement and resanation of our entire sexual life.
Only =knowledge= and =will= can here effect a cure. Thus, sexual
pedagogy naturally falls into two parts--=sexual enlightenment= and the
=education of the will=.
The need for sexual enlightenment is now recognized by all far-seeing
social hygienists and pedagogues. The only difference of opinion
concerns the =when= and the =how=. Some plead for enlightenment as early
as possible, in the first years of school life; others wish to defer
enlightenment until puberty, or even later. I am of opinion that the
circumstances in this respect are entirely different, according as we
have to do with small towns and the open country, where more careful
watching of children is possible, and where the dangers of premature
sexual development and of seduction are not so great, or as we have to
do with large towns, where, in my view, the children =cannot be
enlightened too early=, since town life brings the children of all
classes, and social misery brings more especially the children of the
lowest classes of the population, so early into contact with sexual
matters that a purposive enlightenment becomes absolutely indispensable.
Children living in large towns should, from ten years onwards, be
gradually and carefully made acquainted with the principal facts of the
sexual life. We find here =more points of association= than is usually
imagined. Gutzkow, in his admirable autobiography, “From the Days of My
Boyhood” (Frankfort-a.-M., 1852, pp. 263, 264), has beautifully
described this:
“The first appearances of love in the heart of the child occur as
secretly as the fall of the dew upon flowers. Playing and jesting,
innocence gropes its way through the darkness. Words, perceptions,
ideas, which to the adult appear to be full of dangerous barbs, the
child grasps with careless security, and takes the duplex sexual life
of humanity to be a primeval fact which came into the world with man
as a matter of course, and one which requires no explanation. Born
from the mother’s womb, to the child the mother is the secure bridge
by which it is conducted past all the riddles of womanhood. The child
imitates the love of the father for the mother, plays the game of the
family, plays father and mother, plays at being himself, a child. From
the rustling autumn leaves, from abandoned bundles of straw, huts and
nests are built, and for half an hour at a time a completely blameless
boy can lie down besides his girl playmate, quietly, and as if
magnetized by the intimation of love. Danger is in truth not far
distant from such a practice of childish naïveté; it lurks in the
background, and seeks only an opportunity to lead astray. But a child
never understands the significance of the severe punishment which it
so often receives for its imitative imaginary family life. The amatory
life of the adult first breaks upon the imagination of the child and
upon his quiet play like the opening of a door into a house. People
take so little care of what they do before the innocent; they exhibit
passionate affection for one another; they caress when the children
are by. The child sees, ponders, and listens. Certain hieroglyphics
alarm it; tales are laughed at--tales which suddenly throw a strange
and wonderful light upon quite familiar human beings. The boy will
notice that his elder sister has a joy or a sorrow, the nature of
which he cannot completely grasp. He sees an elder brother filled with
the joy of life, with the lust of youth, with the love of adventure,
and no attempt is made to conceal these passions from the child....
Such and similar experiences succeed one another without cessation,
and tales which the child hears are listened to with eagerness. The
red threads of love and of the charm of beautiful women are not to be
grasped by the hand of a child, and yet they have upon the child a
certain secret influence.”
The child hears and sees much that is erotic, even immoral, but does not
stop to think about it, does not understand it. After a while its
ignorance becomes a puzzle; soon lascivious thoughts arise. Maria
Lischnewska describes very vividly this psychological process in the
soul of the child, in part according to her observations as a teacher.
She justly criticizes the “stork stories,” to which the child listens
without believing them, in order subsequently to be enlightened in an
extremely disagreeable manner by older ill-conditioned comrades.[699]
These children, ten or twelve years of age, often learn about sexual
matters from the lowest side, =without= obtaining a =true knowledge=.
They frequently acquire the most astounding verbal treasury of lewd
expressions, and even sing obscene songs, of which Maria Lischnewska
gives a remarkable example on the part of a girl twelve years of age.
No, there can be no question that the child at school, from the tenth
year onwards, should, without fear of disastrous consequences, be
enlightened regarding sexual matters by parents and teachers, in order
to avoid the dangers which we have just described. But this instruction
must be divested of any individual relationship, of any personal
character, and must be communicated in thoroughly general terms, as
=natural scientific knowledge=, as a medical doctrine, belonging to the
province of philosophical and pathological science. In this way will be
avoided any undesirable accessory effect related to subjective
perceptions. When Matthisson esteems youth as happy on this account,
because the =book of possibilities= is not yet open to its gaze, this
certainly does =not= hold as regards sexual enlightenment. Here, to a
certain degree, this book of possibilities must be disclosed, if we do
not wish all the poetry and all the ideal view of life to be utterly
destroyed by contact with rude reality. Precisely in this case do we
understand the wonderful remark of Goethe, that we receive the veil of
poetry from the hand of =truth=. This first renders possible a truly
earnest and profound conception of sexual relationships; this creates a
consciousness of responsibility which cannot be awakened sufficiently
early. The true danger is, as Freud[700] also points out, the
intermixture of “lasciviousness and prudery” with which humanity is
accustomed to regard the sexual problem, just because people have not
learned sufficiently to understand the connexion between cause and
effect in this department of human activity.
Various methods have been recommended for sexual enlightenment. I shall
discuss more particularly the suggestions of the Austrian _Realschul_
professor, Sigmund, of the _Volkschul_ teacher, Maria Lischnewska, and
of the University professor, F. W. Förster.
Sigmund (quoted by Ullmann, _op. cit._, p. 7) considers that in the
_Volkschüler_ (primary schools), in the case of children up to the age
of eleven years, there should be no systematic explanation of sexual
matters, and that this should be begun first in the Gymnasium (higher
school). His scheme of instruction is as follows:
1. The enlightenment of the pupils at the Gymnasium is to be effected
in five stages (Classes I., II., V., VI., VII.)
2. The enlightenment in the lower classes is limited to the processes
of sexual reproduction. In the first class, the origin and birth of
the mammalian young and the origin of insects’ eggs are explained. In
the second class, the origin and birth of reptiles’ and birds’ eggs,
the fertilization of the eggs of fishes and batrachians, the ova of
the sea-urchin, and those of the jellyfish, are described. =The act of
sexual intercourse will not be alluded to in the first two
classes--that is, it will not be mentioned to children before the age
of thirteen years.=
3. The completion of the idea of “sexual life” is effected by means of
botanical and zoological instruction in the upper school in a
synthetic manner, wherein no important detail is omitted, but the
copulatory act is kept in the background.
4. All sexual matters expressly concerning human beings, and all the
pathological relations of the sexual life, should be left to the
hygienic instruction, which is given during one hour weekly to the
seventh class as a part of general instruction in somatology.
5. The natural history taught to the sixth class will embrace zoology
only; the natural system will be considered in an ascending series
(excluding human somatology, which in a logical manner is deferred
until the study of zoology is completed, and it will thus be dealt
with in the seventh class, as a preparation to the instruction in
hygiene).
6. In conferences with parents, the parents can be kept informed
regarding the nature of the instruction which is being given to their
children, and can at the same time be led to work in unison with the
school in this matter.
Maria Lischnewska advises beginning already in the third class of
primary schools--that is, when the child is only eight years old--to
give instruction in the elements of natural science, more especially
utilizing, as the first means of sexual enlightenment, the examples of
vegetable fertilization, as well as the reproduction of fishes and
birds. Even to the question “Whence do little children come?” an answer
should be given, more or less in the following terms:
“The child lies in the body of the mother: when she breathes, then the
child breathes; when she eats and drinks, the child also obtains his
food. It lies there warm and safe. Gradually it becomes larger and
begins to move. It has to lie somewhat curled up, because there is so
little room for it. But the mother feels that it is alive; she is full
of joy, and makes ready the child’s clothing and its bed. Finally it
is fully grown. The mother’s body opens, and the child comes to the
light. Then the mother takes it into her arms with joy and nourishes
it with her milk.” Then the teacher would pause, and continue after a
while: “Now, would you like to see the child?” Then there would
naturally be a many-voiced “Yes, yes!” and the teacher would show to
the class a picture such as our anatomical atlases exhibit now in
beautiful form. The abdominal walls of the mother are turned back, and
the child is seen slumbering. Then the teacher would say: “Thus you
also slept within the body of your mother. You belong to her as to no
other human being in the whole world. For this reason you should
always love and honour her.”
Thus is the child’s urgent demand for knowledge satisfied. He is freed
from all prying into nooks and corners. He experiences a feeling of
honourable respect towards the primary source of life.
In the fourth school year further examples of the reproduction of
plants, fishes, and birds should be given; in the fifth and sixth years
the first demonstration of the process of sexual union among the
mammals, with some account of embryology; and the process of birth
should also be described. Then there should follow (at about the age of
thirteen or fourteen) enlightenment regarding the development of the
sexual life and regarding venereal diseases--information, that is to
say, concerning hygiene and concerning the protection of one’s own body.
Physicians such as Oker Blom and Dr. Agnes Hacker definitely demand that
elucidation regarding this latter point should =not= be deferred until
the time of puberty.
F. W. Förster proposes to postpone the whole process of enlightenment
=until the twelfth or thirteenth year=; and if at an earlier age a child
expresses any natural doubt regarding the stork fables, the following
answer should be given (_op. cit._, p. 606):
“Where small children come from is a matter which you cannot yet
understand. We grown-up persons even understand very little about it.
I promise you that I will explain to you what we know of the matter on
your twelfth birthday, but only if you promise me something in return.
Do you know that there are boys and girls so bumptious that they
behave as if they already knew all about it, because they have
somewhere picked up a word or two without really understanding it?
Promise me that you will never listen when such as these begin to talk
about the matter; for you may be certain that the true secrets are
matters of which they are ignorant, for this reason--they would not
speak about it. He who really knows holds it as a sacred matter; he is
silent about it, and does not call it out at the street comers.”
Förster strongly advises =against= associating sexual enlightenment with
a knowledge of the reproductive process in plants and animals, for this
reason: that if this is done “the human being is brought too near to the
vegetable and animal life,” and the “sacred thought” of the elevation of
humanity above the animal is obscured. He then gives very beautiful
examples and modes of instruction for such sexual enlightenment of
children twelve years of age.
I myself am of opinion that, without in any way making light of the
difference between man and animal, the earlier elucidation at about the
age of ten years should be associated with the general instruction in
natural history regarding the reproductive process of animals and
plants; and then very gradually, up to the age of fourteen, all
important points in this department can be explained, including,
finally, an account of the venereal diseases. It is obvious that after
this time, more especially in the dangerous years of puberty, systematic
enlightenment must be continued. That which is good and useful in this
department of knowledge cannot be too often repeated.
But all enlightenment will be useless unless hand in hand with it there
proceeds =a process of education of the character and the will=. Our
school youth thinks and dreams too much, and does too little. Up to the
present time it has been believed that it is sufficient to teach
children, and to continue to teach them, to care for their health, to
see that they have good food and sound sleep, without also taking into
consideration the necessity for awakening the =individuality= and the
=energy= slumbering in each one of them. The “gymnasium” must concern
itself with the =gymnastics=, not only of the body, but also of the
mind, and must thus restore that harmony between body and mind which
appears to have been quite lost at the present day. Bodily education by
games and sports is only one of the means for this purpose. The
principal aim is to strengthen the character, to induce the habit of
self-command and self-denial by a profound and intimate grasp of sexual
problems. Nowhere does fantastic dreaming take revenge more thoroughly
than in sexual relationships, for which reason also the so-called “only
children” are especially endangered;[701] nowhere do clear knowledge,
objective acquirements, and a firm will celebrate finer triumphs over
blind impulses than they do here. The principal rule of sexual pedagogy
runs as follows: Avoid the =first opportunity= and the =first contact=;
keep the child and the young man and the young woman at a distance from
all the stimulating pleasures and enjoyments of the adult. The
production of manliness, as it has recently been described by
Mosso,[702] Güssfeldt,[703] Georg Sticker,[704] and Ludwig Gurlitt,[705]
has the greatest importance, more especially as regards the sexual life.
This has been insisted on, above all, by Hans Wegener[706] and F. W.
Förster (_op. cit._). Moral statistics have incontrovertibly proved that
progress in civilization and morals does not depend upon punishment or
upon prophylactic measures against errors and excesses of passion, but
only upon the =subjective= improvement and strengthening of the single
individual. Guizot declared: “C’est de l’état _intérieur_ de l’homme que
dépend l’état visible de la société.” Drobisch,[707] in his “Moral
Statistics,” has established this fact yet more firmly. Energy is the
magic word for all vital activities of the present day, both spiritual
and physical. Discipline, work, abstinence, bodily hygiene, are the
means for educating the character, and these also play the principal
part in sexual pedagogy.[708]
[696] For this reason, Fr. W. Förster, in his admirable “Jugendlehre”
(Berlin, 1906), devotes a special section to the subject of “sexual
pedagogy” (pp. 602-652).
[697] Maria Lischnewska, in her admirable work upon “The Sexual
Instruction of Children,” published in _Mutterschutz_, 1905, vol. i.,
pp. 137-150, quotes the principal passages relating to this subject
from the works of the writers just mentioned.
[698] In addition to the two admirable works already mentioned, by F.
W. Förster and M. Lischnewska, I may allude also to the following:
Richard Flachs, “Sexual Enlightenment as a Part of the Education of
our Young People,” with a full bibliography (Dresden and Leipzig,
1906); Carl Kopp, “Sexual Affairs in the Education of Youth” (Leipzig,
1904); Max Marcuse, “Sexual Enlightenment in Youth” (Leipzig, 1905);
“Sexual Hygiene and Sexual Enlightenment in the School” (a Discussion
at the First International Congress for School Hygiene, held at
Nürnberg, 1904), published in the “Reports of the German Society for
the Suppression of Venereal Diseases,” 1904, vol. ii., pp. 63-71; Karl
Ullmann, “The Sexual Enlightenment of School-Children,” published in
the _Monatsschrift für Gesundheitspflege_, 1906, No. 1; M. Flesch,
“Enlightenment in the School,” published in _Blätter für
Volksgesundheitspflege_, vol. iv., p. 164; Emma Eckstein, “The Sexual
Question in the Education of the Child” (Leipzig, 1904); Adelheid von
Bennigsen, “Sexual Pedagogy in the House and the School” (Berlin,
1903); Alfred Fournier, “Pour nos Fils quand ils auront Dix-huit Ans”
(Paris, 1905); M. Oker Blom, “Beim Onkel Doktor auf dem Lande”: a Book
for Parents, second edition (Vienna, 1906); Friedrich Siebert, “A Book
for Parents” (Munich, 1905); same author, “What shall I say to my
Child?” (Munich, 1904); Mary Wood-Allen, “When the Boy becomes Man”
(Zurich, 1904); same author, “Tell me the Truth, dear Mother”; W.
Busch, “No more Stork Stories: a Practical Introduction, showing how
Children should be taught the Truth, and how the Family should be
Safeguarded from Moral Contamination” (Leipzig, 1904); E. von den
Steinen, “The Human Sexual Life: a Lecture to those leaving School”
(Düsseldorf, 1906); _cf._ also, by the same author, “An Address to
those leaving School concerning Sexual Love,” published in the
_Journal for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases_, 1900, vol. v., pp.
259, 260; F. Siebert, “Our Sons: their Enlightenment regarding the
Dangers of the Sexual Life” (Straubing, 1907); F. Siebert, “The Sexual
Problem in Childhood,” published in “The Book of the Child,” edited by
Adele Schreiber (Leipzig and Berlin, 1907), vol. i., pp. 106-117; L.
Bergfeld, “Take the Bandage from your Eyes, dear Sister: an Open
Letter to Adolescent Girls” (Munich, 1907).
[699] In some cases the child will criticize the grown-up’s fables
with a sharp-sighted logic, as the following story proves: Pepito, a
child seven years of age, asks his mother, “Tell me, mamma, how do
children come?” “People buy them.” “I don’t believe that people buy
them!” “Why not?” “Because poor people have the most!”
[700] S. Freud, “Collection of Minor Writings upon the Doctrine of
Neurosis,” p. 216 (Leipzig and Vienna, 1906).
[701] _Cf._ Eugen Neter, “The Only Child and its Education” (Munich,
1906).
[702] Angelo Mosso, “Physical Culture in Youth” (Hamburg and Leipzig,
1894).
[703] Paul Güssfeldt, “The Education of German Youth” (Berlin, 1890).
[704] Georg Sticker, “Health and Education,” second edition (Giessen,
1903).
[705] Ludwig Gurlitt, “Education in Manliness” (Berlin, 1907).
[706] Hans Wegener, “We Young Men: the Sexual Problem of the Cultured
Young Man before Marriage: Purity, Strength, and the Love of Woman”
(Düsseldorf and Leipzig, 1906).
[707] M. W. Drobisch, “Moral Statistics and the Freedom of the Human
Will,” pp. 96-101 (Leipzig, 1867). Valuable works regarding the
education of the character and the social education of the child are
found in the first volume (second edition) of the monumental work
edited by Adele Schreiber, “The Book of the Child” (Leipzig and
Berlin, 1907), from the pens of Laura Frost (pp. 42-63), F. A. Schmidt
(pp. 168-179), Lüngen (pp. 192-201), G. Kerschensteiner (pp. 202-207),
R. Penzig (pp. 215-222), and Adele Schreiber (pp. 223-231). Important
in relation to sexual enlightenment is also the question (one actively
discussed at the present moment) of the =education of the sexes in
common=--the so-called =co-education=. It has been proved by
experience that co-education has a good effect in sexual relationships
(_cf._ Gertrud Bäumer, “Co-education,” _op. cit._, vol. ii., pp.
44-48).
[708] The question of sexual education and enlightenment occupies at
the moment a place in the foreground of public interest, and rightly
so; for upon this depends principally the further reform and the
resanation of all the sexual relationships of civilized peoples. For
this reason the Discussions, now in the press, of the Third Congress
of the Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases
(“Sexualpädagogik”), Leipzig, 1907, were occupied exclusively with
this subject, which was considered in elaborate debates from four
points of view:
1. Sexual instruction in the house and the school.
2. Sexual enlightenment of young persons at puberty.
3. Sexual instruction of teachers and parents.
4. Sexual dietetics and education.
The present position of sexual pedagogy in all these respects is
exactly defined in this comprehensive volume; and, in addition, at the
conclusion of the book we find a compend of the recent literature of
the subject. Much of value regarding sexual regimen is to be found in
the work of H. Mann, “Art and the Sexual Conduct of Life”
(Oranienburg, 1907), and in that of A. Eulenburg, “Sexual Regimen,”
published in _Mutterschutz_, July and August, 1907. As an opponent of
early sexual enlightenment, we must mention G. Leubuscher (“School
Medicine and School Hygiene,” pp. 65-70; Leipzig, 1907). He considers
that such enlightenment should only be given at the time of leaving
school. His reasons, however, are not convincing, and, above all, do
not apply to large towns.
CHAPTER XXVII
NEO-MALTHUSIANISM, THE PREVENTION OF CONCEPTION, ARTIFICIAL STERILITY
AND ARTIFICIAL ABORTION
“_Formerly the use of such devices was regarded as immoral and
punishable, and was actually punished; it was condemned as an
interference with the Divine plan. But such views and measures are
extreme. Here, as everywhere, human foresight and methodical
interference are permissible._”--GUSTAV SCHMOLLER.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXVII
Importance of the problem of population -- Malthus and hie doctrine --
Its fallacies -- Temporary validity -- “Moral restraint” --
Neo-malthusianism -- The foundation of the Malthusian League -- Great
antiquity of malthusian practices -- Disharmony of the family instinct
-- The mica operation of the Australian indigens -- Artificial
abortion among primitive races -- Methods of preventing pregnancy in
ancient times -- In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries --
Relative justification of the use of preventive measures -- Views of
recent physicians on this subject -- Summary of the principal methods
of preventing conception -- Limitation of coitus to particular times
-- Advice of Soranos and Capellmann -- Feskstitow’s “conception-curve”
-- Influence of particular seasons of the year -- Prolongation of the
period of lactation -- Buttenstedt’s “Happiness in Marriage” and
Funcke’s “New Revelation” -- Criticism of these fantasies --
Divergences from the normal method of coitus -- Passive demeanour of
the woman -- _Coitus interruptus_ -- Exaggerated views of its
injurious influence -- _Coitus interruptus_ and anxiety-neurosis --
Trifling effect in healthy individuals -- Repeated interruptions of
coitus -- Mechanical means of preventing conception -- Compression --
Muscular action -- Mensinga’s “occlusive pessary” -- Holweg’s
“obturator” -- The condom -- Chemico-physical preventive measures --
Douches -- The “Lady’s Friend” -- Antiseptic powders and security
sponges -- Combination of chemical and mechanical means -- The “Venus
apparatus” -- The duplex occlusive pessary -- Inflammatory affections
after the use of chemical preventive measures -- Herpes progenitalis
-- Artificial sterility -- Operative methods of inducing it --
Vaporization and castration -- The “ovariées” -- Wide diffusion of
artificial abortion -- Critical remarks regarding the punishment of
abortion in Germany -- The right of the unborn child -- Rape and
abortion -- The methods of expelling the ovum -- Internal means --
Mechanical means -- Danger and consequences of both -- Social means
for limiting abortion.
CHAPTER XXVII
Whereas in former times opinions on social questions were determined
principally by =economic= considerations, to-day we are to a great
extent influenced also by the aims and endeavours of individual and
social =hygiene=; for this reason the so-called =problem of population=
has come to occupy the consciousness of civilized mankind to a far
greater extent than before it has passed from the stage of theory into
that of practice. Serious critical political economists, such as, for
example, B. G. Schmoller,[709] have recognized this. The increasing
understanding of the conditions of social life, knowledge of the
connexion between economic conditions and the number and quality of the
population, must of itself lead to the discussion of the question
whether the regulation of the number of children born is not one of the
principal duties of modern civilization. The Englishman Robert Malthus
was the first who, stimulated by an idea of Benjamin Franklin, in the
year 1798, in his “Essay on the Principles of Population,” discussed
this serious, and even alarming, question of the natural =consequences=
of unrestricted sexual intercourse, and answered it in an extremely
pessimistic sense. For, according to him, whereas human beings tend to
increase in number according to a geometrical progression--that is, in
the ratio 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and so on--the means of subsistence increase
only in arithmetical progression--that is, in the ratio of 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, and so on. Hence it follows that the numbers of the population can be
kept within bounds, so as to remain proportional to the nutritive
possibilities, only by means of decimating influences, such as vice,
poverty, disease, the entire “struggle for existence,” by preventive
measures, and by the so-called “moral restraint” in and before marriage.
Although this celebrated theory, which filled with alarm, not only all
those already living in Europe, but also all those who wished to
=produce= new life, has to-day been generally recognized as false,[710]
since it failed to take into account technical advances in the
preparation of the soil[711] and other ways in which it will become
possible to increase the means of subsistence; and he equally ignored
the possibility of a better division of property. None the less does his
theory remain apposite in respect of many of the social relationships of
more recent times; the doctrine has, in fact, temporary validity for
certain periods of civilization, such as our own. Malthus recommended,
as the principal means of preventing over-population, =abstinence= from
sexual intercourse (moral restraint) before marriage, and the
=postponement= of marriage; thus he was an apostle of the “relative
asceticism” recommended in the twenty-fifth chapter of the present work.
In England this early view found utterance among the political
economists and sociologists, such as Chalmers, Ricardo, John Stuart
Mill, Say, Thornton, etc. It was also actively discussed in wide circles
of the population, so that as early as the year 1825 the “disciples of
Malthus” were a typical phenomenon of English life.
A further development of malthusianism in the practical direction was
represented by the so-called “neo-malthusianism”--that is, an actual
diffusion of instruction in the means for the prevention of pregnancy
and for the limitation of the number of children. Such a procedure was
first publicly recommended by Francis Place, in the year 1822; but no
widespread teaching of practical malthusianism occurred till a
considerably later date, notably after the foundation of the Malthusian
League, on July 17, 1877. The principal advocates of neo-malthusianism
in England were John Stuart Mill, Charles Drysdale, Charles Bradlaugh,
and Mrs. Besant.
Malthusian practice is, however, much older than the theory.
Metchnikoff[712] declares the endeavour to diminish the number of
children to be a very widely diffused “disharmony of the family
instinct,” which in itself is much more recent, and is much less widely
diffused in the animal kingdom than the sexual instinct. Animals, at any
rate, know nothing of the prevention of conception; that is a
“privilege” of the human species. By primitive races such preventive
measures are very widely employed. Among these measures one of the best
known is the “mica” operation of the Australian natives--the slitting up
of the urethra of the male along the lower surface of the penis, so that
the semen flows out just in front of the scrotum, and is ejaculated
outside the vagina.[713] Regarding the wide diffusion of artificial
abortion among savage races, Ploss-Bartels gives detailed reports. The
pursuit of material enjoyments, characteristic of civilized peoples, is
not here (as recent authors have erroneously assumed) the determining
influence; we have, in fact, to do with a widely diffused disharmony of
the family instinct,[714] for which in certain =definite= conditions
some justification must be admitted. The period for the unconditional
rejection of malthusianism by pietists and absolute moralists has passed
away definitely. Not only physicians, but also professional political
economists, recognize the relative justification and admissibility of
the use of preventive measures in certain circumstances for the
limitation of the procreation of children. It has rightly been pointed
out[715] that in =every= marriage a time must eventually arrive when
preventive measures in sexual intercourse are employed, and necessarily
must be employed, because, in respect of the state of health of the
wife, and also in view of economic conditions, their use is urgently
demanded. These relationships have been discussed with great insight by
A. Hegar,[716] and he has proved the justification of practical
neo-malthusianism in every ordinary marriage, as well as for the
population at large. By means of a “regulation of reproduction,” an
immoderate increase of the population is prevented; by diminishing the
quantity we improve the quality of the offspring. Late marriages, long
pauses between the separate deliveries, and the greatest possible sexual
abstinence, subserve this purpose.
Like Hegar, the Munich hygienist Max Gruber[717] also recognizes the
necessity for setting bounds to the number of children to be brought
into the world, since the capacity of the human species to increase is
far greater than its power to increase the means of subsistence. He
describes very vividly the physical and moral misery of the parents and
the children when the latter are too numerous; he also shows that from
the birth of the fourth child onwards the inborn force and health of the
children diminish more and more. Naturally, also, diseases affecting the
parents, and the pressing danger of the inheritance of these diseases,
renders necessary the use of sexual preventive measures, or else of
moral restraint. Gruber enunciates the thoroughly neo-malthusian
proposition:
“The procreation of children must be kept within bounds, if mankind
wishes to free itself from the cruel condition by which, in irrational
nature, the balance is maintained--death in the mass side by side with
procreation in the mass!”
L. Löwenfeld[718] also sees in the recommendation of such measures for
the prevention of pregnancy “nothing either improper or immoral”; he
sees in these measures “means for diminishing the poverty of the lower
classes, and for abolishing, to a great extent, the high infantile
mortality of these classes, although neo-malthusianism is in no way a
panacea for all the social evils of our time”; and he writes very
strongly against the condemnation of preventive measures by a “perverse
medical zealotry”; in fact, he assigns to preventive measures an immense
hygienic importance. Many other physicians also, such as Mensinga[719]
(the discoverer of the occlusive pessary, the first medical man in
Germany to assert with energy the justification of employing means for
the prevention of pregnancy, and the first to establish with precision
the indications for the use of these measures, especially in relation to
the disadvantageous consequences to women’s health of bearing a large
number of children), Fürbringer,[720] Spener,[721] and others, have
drawn attention to the eminent hygienic and social importance of
measures for the prevention of pregnancy; whereas, on the other hand, in
France, in view of the alarming decline in the population of that
country, scientific medicine has adopted a more hostile attitude; no
longer, however, so bitterly hostile as in the work (now somewhat out of
date, but nevertheless containing interesting details) of Bergeret.[722]
A layman also, Hans Ferdy (A. Meyerhof),[723] has published a number of
interesting works on practical neo-malthusianism.
We shall now proceed to give a brief account of the means commonly
employed for the prevention of pregnancy.
l. =The Restriction of Intercourse to Particular Periods.=--It is clear
that by means of relative asceticism, and by restriction of the number
of individual acts of sexual intercourse, the possibilities of
fertilization can be limited to a considerable extent. Thus, Capellmann,
in a work published in 1883, entitled “Facultative Sterility, without
Offence to Moral Laws,” recommended abstinence from intercourse for
fourteen days =after= the cessation of menstruation and for three or
four days =before= the commencement of the flow, in the belief that
fertilization occurs principally during the days immediately before and
after menstruation. Capellmann thus revived the prescription of Soranos,
a gynecologist of the days of antiquity. According to the researches of
the physiologist Victor Hensen, it is true that the greatest number of
fertilizations take place during the =first= few days after the
menstrual period; but conception =may= also occur on any other day of
the menstrual cycle, although the probability of conception at other
periods than those named is a diminishing one. Feskstitow has based upon
statistical data an interesting “conception curve,” according to which
the frequency of fertilization on the last day of menstruation, on the
first, ninth, eleventh, and twenty-third days after the end of the flow,
varies respectively according to the ratios 48, 62, 13, 9, 1; between
these points the course of the curve is almost straight. On the
twenty-third day after menstruation the probability of conception is
thus one-sixty-second of the maximum. Thus, though the probability of
fertilization following intercourse on the twenty-third day after the
cessation of the flow is much =less= than the probability of
fertilization as a result of intercourse shortly after menstruation,
still, the possibility of conception in the former case cannot be
absolutely excluded.
It has also been recommended that in certain =seasons of the year=, to
which a peculiar influence upon fertility has been ascribed, more
especially the months of May and June, abstinence from intercourse
should be observed. But this is naturally =quite untrustworthy=, since
the same mother can conceive in all months of the year, as is
sufficiently proved by the ordinary variations in the birthdays of
children.
Somewhat more trustworthy, but still =not= absolutely to be depended
upon, is the practice, after the birth of a child, of =artificially
prolonging the period of lactation=, since it is well known that during
lactation the menstrual periods often fail to occur, and that
fertilization is exceptional. Upon the recognition of this causal
sequence, notwithstanding the fact that it does not possess any absolute
validity, there has recently been founded a very remarkable method of
practical malthusianism, which the two discoverers, Karl
Buttenstedt[724] and Richard E. Funcke,[725] have announced to their
astonished contemporaries as a “new revelation,” and as the realization
of “happiness in marriage.” These remarkable apostles have combined
another observation with the one mentioned above of the relative
infertility of women during lactation, the new observation being that
sometimes by the mammary glands of women who are not pregnant, and even
by those of virgins, milk is secreted, especially during menstruation.
This fact was known to earlier gynecologists, as, for example, to
Dietrich Wilhelm Busch.[726]
Buttenstedt, to whom the “priority” of the new doctrine of happiness
unquestionably belongs, an advocate of the extremely optimistic theory
of the possibility of an everlasting life for humanity and of the
cessation of death (!), also conceived the idea of evoking lactation
artificially in =all= women by means of the sucking of their breasts by
men! In this way he believed that artificial sterility and amenorrhœa
might be produced.
Naturally, also, woman’s milk is regarded as an elixir of life for old
men, a true panacea for the elongation of life _ad infinitum_; and this
“happy marriage” in itself is to be a means by which all the possible
ills of degenerate humanity are to be cured. In this pæan he is joined
by Funcke, who regards woman’s milk as “the best, most natural, and most
valuable drug,” and on p. 70 of his book preaches to girls and women the
“new categorical imperative” (_sic_).
“Thou shalt not leave thy vital force unutilized; thou shalt not
menstruate unless thou hast the firm will and desire to become
pregnant; thou shalt allow thy vital force in the form of milk to flow
from thy breasts for the benefit and enjoyment of other human beings.”
Buttenstedt, who possesses some historical knowledge, wishes also to
make the breasts of men lactiferous (p. 24), so that the sexes can
exchange their “blood through the breasts,” thus become more and more
alike one another, and ultimately become urnings!
This beautiful lactation idyll or, more correctly, mammalian idyll, will
not bear the test of scientific criticism. In the first place, the
effect of the proposed manipulations is exceedingly =dubious=, and would
only produce the desired result in exceptional cases; in the second
place, such an artificial lactation, continued for a long period, would
be extremely =harmful=, just as an excessive protraction of lactation
after normal delivery is known to be deleterious; and in the third
place, last, not least, the reputed anticonceptional effect would, in
the majority of cases, =fail to occur=. At any rate, there appears to be
no reason why pregnancy should not ensue, since the condition of the
genital organs would apparently permit this, and would certainly differ
from that which obtains in women who give suck in a normal manner after
giving birth to a child.
2. =Divergences from the Normal Mode of Coitus.=--Attempts have been
made to prevent fertilization by means of various modifications of the
sexual act. Thus, starting from the old belief that active participation
in the sexual act on the part of the woman, as well as libido and the
sexual orgasm on her part, are indispensable prerequisites of the
occurrence of impregnation, a more passive demeanour of the woman has
been recommended--a distraction of the mind and the senses from the
sexual act, after the manner of the _cong-fou_ of the Chinese, who
frequently employ this trick during intercourse. This opinion is
deceptive, for, in the absence of all activity and orgasm on the part of
the woman, in the most diverse conditions possible, conception may
ensue.[727] Thus, in this case also we have to do with a quite
untrustworthy method.
=Trustworthy=, on the other hand, and therefore extremely widely
diffused, is the so-called =coitus interruptus=--interrupted
intercourse, in which the penis is withdrawn from the vagina shortly
before the ejaculation of the semen (so-called “withdrawal,”
“Zuruckziehen,” “Sichinachtnehmen,” “fraudieren,” “congressus
reservatus, onanismus conjugalis”). The views regarding the harmfulness
of this method, by which pregnancy can certainly be prevented, have in
recent years undergone considerable change, in so far as the
disadvantages are to-day considered less serious than they formerly
were. More especially, Dr. Alfred Damm, in his work “Neura,”
overestimated the harmful effects of _coitus interruptus_, inasmuch as
he attributed to it the entire degeneration of a race. These extreme
views, supported by no facts whatever, of the degeneration fanatic Damm
are briefly described in a little book by E. Peters, “The Sexual Life
and Nervous Energy” (Cologne, 1906).[728]
It cannot be denied--and has, in fact, been maintained by other
physicians such as Gaillard Thomas, Goodell, Valenta, Bergeret,
Mantegazza, Payer, Mensinga, Beard, Hirt, Eulenburg, Freud, von Tschich,
Gattel, and others--that the “ineffective” excitement occurring during
_coitus interruptus_, the absence of the natural discharge of sexual
tension, the voluntary postponement of ejaculation, the strain put upon
the will during the sexual act, may have a transient harmful influence
upon the nervous system; but, according to recent researches, it is only
in those who are =already= neuropathic that permanent troubles result,
in the form of “=anxiety-neurosis=” (which, as Freud[729] has proved, is
actually dependent upon _coitus interruptus_), or in the form of other
neurasthenic and hysterical troubles, and also sometimes of local
irritative conditions. The harmful influence of frustrated sexual
excitement is shown also by the frequency of nervous troubles during the
period of engagement, which, as a witty colleague of mine remarked, must
be regarded as a single, long-drawn-out _coitus interruptus_. But it has
not been proved that in healthy individuals _coitus interruptus_, even
when the practice is continued for a long time, gives rise to serious
and permanent injuries to health. According to the experience of
Fürbringer, Oppenheim, von Krafft-Ebing, Rohleder, Spener, and, above
all, of L. Löwenfeld, who has instituted exceptionally exact researches
into the matter, such consequences are quite exceptional. This is also
true of the disorders which _coitus interruptus_ is reputed to cause in
women.
Another method for the prevention of pregnancy, which, according to
Barrucco, is practised especially in Italy, is the prolongation of
sexual enjoyment by means of =repeated= interruptions of the act,
followed by =renewed= erections. This, naturally, is extremely harmful.
Fürbringer, however, reports the case of certain frigid men who were
able to extend the act of conjugal intercourse for long periods, without
any disastrous effect upon their health. One of these men was able to
find time during the act for smoking and reading!
3. =Mechanical Means for the Prevention of Conception.=--According to
Kisch, in Transylvania and in France a method is in use according to
which, during the sexual act, the woman, at the commencement of
ejaculation in the male, presses her finger forcibly upon the root of
his penis just in front of the prostate gland. In this way the passage
through the urethra is temporarily occluded, and ejaculation of the
semen is prevented: it regurgitates into the bladder, and is
subsequently evacuated with the urine. Unquestionably this manipulation
would be likely to prove exceedingly injurious to health.
In Italy and in New Guinea many women expel the semen from the vagina,
as soon as coitus is completed, by means of muscular action, by vigorous
movements of the perineum.
A mechanical apparatus for the prevention of conception which is
unquestionably carefully thought out is the so-called =occlusive
pessary= of Dr. Mensinga--a hemisphere of rubber surrounded by a steel
ring, introduced into the vagina before coitus, and even left _in situ_
for prolonged periods, so that the os uteri is occluded. When accurately
applied, it does, in fact, definitely prevent fertilization. Various
considerations, however, render its use undesirable: (1) the difficulty
of the introduction, which most women are unable to master; (2)
liability to displacement of the pessary during the act; (3) the
occurrence of irritative conditions of various kinds (discharges,
diseases of the uterine annexa, etc.), if, as often happens, the pessary
is allowed to remain in the vagina for a long time. Recently a pessary
has been constructed of waterproof cambric, which is said not to
produce any such irritative reaction. Moreover, Mensinga himself, and
Earlet, have made other improvements upon the occlusive pessary. Easier
to introduce is Gall’s “balloon occlusive pessary.” In this instrument,
by means of a compressible rubber ball and tubing, air is blown into the
interior of a thin-walled rubber ring which surrounds a soft elastic
rubber disc. A =dangerous= article, and =one to be avoided=, is
Hollweg’s “obturator.” The ideal mechanical means for the prevention of
pregnancy is, once more, the =condom=, regarding the application and
qualities of which we have already said all that is necessary (_vide
supra_, pp. 378, 379). Simple in its mode of application, it is, when of
good quality, certain in its effect, and is relatively the =most
harmless= of all preventive measures. When it is used, coitus runs a
perfectly normal course, with the sole exception of the sensation during
ejaculation. We must reject as harmful the use of the so-called
“stimulant condom,” which bears a ring of spines or points, in order to
increase libido in the woman.
4. =Chemical Physical Preventive Measures.=--To these belong, above all,
=douching= of the vagina immediately after sexual intercourse, for which
purpose cold water, solutions of alum (1 per cent.), copper sulphate
(1/2 to 1 per cent.), sulphate of quinine (1 : 400), etc., may be used.
The douching must be effected when the woman is in the recumbent
posture, and the vaginal tube must be introduced deeply. This method,
however, is very =untrustworthy=.[730]
The same is true of attempts to destroy the spermatozoa by the
insufflation of chemically active =powders=; or by the insertion of
antiseptic “=security sponges=,” which Rohleder has rightly named
“insecurity sponges”; untrustworthy also is the combination of these
with mechanical apparatus.
The number of articles belonging to this category is legion. I need
mention a few only: “Security ovals,” containing boric acid, quinine,
or citric acid; “little vaginal plugs”; “salus ovula”; Kamp’s
anticonceptional cotton-wool plugs; Hüter’s vaginal insufflator “for
the malthusian”; Noffke’s tampon-speculum; “spermathanaton”;[731]
Weissl’s preservative (a combination of speculum and rubber disc with
a steel spring and a cotton-wool plug impregnated with a drug); the
“Venus apparatus” (a double rubber ball, the smaller ball filled with
“Venus powder” (_sic_) being introduced within the vagina, whilst the
woman herself, at the moment of ejaculation, presses the larger ball
lying near to her thighs, whereupon the powder is expelled from the
smaller ball into the vagina); the “duplex occlusive pessary” (an
occlusive pessary with double walls, perforated with round apertures,
containing in its interior boric acid tablets for the purpose of
killing the spermatozoa).
It may be that now and again, by some of the means just mentioned,
conception may be prevented. But on the whole they are very uncertain;
and, on the other hand, it is doubtful if the chemical substances
introduced in this way are harmless. It is possible that many peculiar
inflammatory conditions of the male and female genital organs may be
referred to their use. For example, Blumreich[732] reports the case of a
man who, after coitus in which a means of this kind had been used, had
an extremely obstinate inflammatory eruption upon the penis.
I take this opportunity of pointing out that the so-called =herpes
progenitalis=, a peculiar vesicular eruption of the genital organs,
occurring chiefly in males, which alarms a great many patients,
because they regard it as the result of syphilitic infection, is, in
the great majority of cases, a perfectly harmless affection caused by
some transient irritation.[733]
Besides the above-mentioned methods for the prevention of pregnancy, we
have also to consider two radical means of practical malthusianism which
belong to the =purely medical= province, and can =only= be employed when
life and death are involved, when pregnancy and parturition would entail
upon the woman severe illness or certain death. These two means are the
operative induction of =artificial sterility= and =artificial abortion=.
Artificial sterility can be produced by various measures, as by the
intentionally effected =malposition= of the uterus, such as is practised
among the indigens of the Malay Archipelago; by =section of the
Fallopian tubes=, as recommended by Kehrer; by the so-called _castratio
uterina_ by means of =vaporization= (the application of superheated
steam by the method of Pincus, whereby menstruation is suspended and the
uterine cavity is obliterated); and finally by =castration= proper, the
=extirpation of the ovaries=[734] (=oöphorectomy=, spaying, Battey’s
operation), which was carried out in ancient times by quite savage
races, in order to prevent reproduction.[735] In France, theoretically
anti-malthusian, but practically through and through malthusian, in the
country from which the song originates--
“Ah! l’amour, l’amour!
C’est le plaisir d’un jour
Pour le regret d’ neuf mois.”
[“Ah! love, love!
’Tis the pleasure of a day
For the regret of nine months”]
--it appears, according to recent descriptions,[736] that oöphorectomy
is greatly prized by distinguished ladies as a means for the prevention
of pregnancy. It is said that there even exist “specialists” for the
production of these child-hating “_ovariées_,” men who undertake this
operation at a high fee. In Germany, happily, this radical measure for
the prevention of conception is not employed in healthy persons; the
operation is performed only in women who are seriously ill, and strictly
for therapeutic purposes.
The preventive measures previously mentioned, if we except _coitus
interruptus_ and the condom, are all very untrustworthy, as we learn
from the extreme frequency of deliberate, artificial abortion in all
countries, and among all classes of the population.[737] Artificial
abortion is, as is well known, a criminal offence, punishable by a long
term of imprisonment for all those concerned, the pregnant woman herself
and her accomplices. In the Orient and among savage races, however,
abortion is not punishable. Among the civilized nations of Europe
artificial abortion is punished; in Germany the mere =attempt= at
abortion is punishable, even though only an imaginary pregnancy is
present. That the State must take steps to prevent abortion, as an
immoral and unnatural action, is obvious, and this is necessary above
all because intentional abortion in so many cases endangers the life and
health of women. But in order that such punishment should be
reasonable, it is essential that society should work to this end, that
the =social conditions= upon which the frequency of the practice depends
should be abolished; =society should abandon the artificial defamation
of illegitimate motherhood=, and should in every possible way work for
the improvement of the possibilities of motherhood--should found homes
for mothers and for pregnant women, should provide for the insurance of
mothers, etc. It is a remarkable contradiction, to which Gisela von
Streitberg[738] draws attention, that illegitimate pregnancy is regarded
as sinful and shameful: simultaneously the life of the child =about to
be born= is regarded as sacred; whilst this same child, =as soon as it
is born=, is once more regarded as infamous. In fact, to the
illegitimate child, in the social morality of our time, which is at once
ridiculous and profoundly perverted, there inevitably attaches something
despicable and dishonourable. It is right that those who make the
procuring of abortion a =professional occupation= should be severely
punished; but, on the other hand, it is doubtful whether it is right to
punish mothers, and more particularly the mothers of illegitimate
infants, against whom the Criminal Code is especially directed, for
artificially inducing abortion. It is, in fact, open to question whether
the punishment is even legal. It is well known that according to § 1 of
the Civil Code the rights of a human being are said to begin only with
the completion of birth,[739] and it is certainly open to question
whether the as yet undeveloped human fœtus has any personal rights at
all. Without doubt we have to do with a being which has not yet begun to
exist, but which is only in process of becoming. Thus, juristically, and
from the standpoint of the philosophy of law, the foundation for the
punishment for abortion is a very unstable one. Consider, for example,
impregnation resulting from =rape=. Should not the woman concerned have
the right to employ any and all means available to her to destroy at the
very outset the child thus =forced upon her=?
The means for the induction of abortion[740] prior to the twenty-eighth
or thirtieth week of pregnancy are very various, and may be considered
under the two categories of =internal= and =mechanical= means
respectively. Infallible internal abortifacients =do not exist=; and
almost all abortifacients are =dangerous= owing to their toxic effects.
Those most commonly employed are ergot, ethereal oil of savin
(_Juniperus sabina_), varieties of thuja, yew (_Taxus baccata_),
turpentine, oleum succini, tansy, rue, camphor, cantharides, aloes,
phosphorus, etc. Mechanically, abortion may be effected by blows, by
violent movements (for example, during coitus), massage, perforation of
the membranes, hot injections, steam, manipulations with the finger at
the os uteri, the introduction of sounds and other objects through the
os uteri, venesection, application of the electric current, etc. With
all these practices there is involved great danger of injury, poisoning,
infection, rupture and perforation of the uterus, the entry of air into
the uterine veins, scalding of the internal genital organs, etc. It is,
therefore, not to be wondered at that death so frequently ensues, and
that almost always severe illnesses result from the use of these
abortifacients.
The State would in this way best put a stop to artificial abortion if,
in addition to the above-mentioned removal of the disgrace attached to
illegitimate motherhood, it diffused widely among all classes of society
a knowledge of the =permissible= means for the prevention of pregnancy.
The fact that neo-malthusian methods are chiefly employed =in large
towns=, indicates their dependence upon economical considerations, and
upon the struggle for existence, which is especially severe in large
towns. Hope for the future rests upon the removal of moral and legal
coercion in marriage, in which Gutzkow (“Säkularbilder,” i. 174, 175)
saw the principal causes of social and sexual misery; and upon the
rational regulation of methods for the prevention of pregnancy, which
must be regarded as in no way identical with the hostility to
“fruitfulness” in the sense of Weininger. On the contrary, the yearning
for children, and the joy in their possession, will then, for the first
time, obtain their natural satisfaction.
[709] _Cf._ his classical essay, “Population: its Natural Subdivision
and Movement,” published in “Elements of General Political Economy,”
vol. i., pp. 158-187 (Leipzig, 1901).
[710] _Cf._ Franz Oppenheimer, “The Law of Population of T. R.
Malthus, and the more Recent Political Economists: a Demonstration and
a Criticism” (Bern, 1900). See also the interesting demonstration and
criticism of the malthusian doctrine in the work of Henry George,
“Progress and Poverty.”
[711] A notable example of such advances is found in the recently
discovered method of =inoculating the soil with nitrifying organisms=,
whereby barren lands are made fertile at trifling cost.-TRANSLATOR.
[712] Eli Metchnikoff, “The Nature of Man.”--English translation by
Chalmers Mitchell, pp. 101-107; Heinemann, London, 1903.
[713] A more detailed account of this interesting
“politico-economical” operation will be found in the work of Max
Bartels, “Medicine among Savage Races,” pp. 297, 298 (Leipzig, 1893).
[714] The ancients were also familiar with preventive methods of
intercourse and with abortion. Widely renowned is the passage of the
historian Polybius (XXXVII. ix. 5) in which we read: “In my time the
whole of Greece suffered from =an insufficiency of children=--speaking
generally, from =a lack of men=; for men had become so much accustomed
to good living, to the greed for money, and to every comfort, that
=they no longer wished to marry, or, at any rate, they wished to have
only a few children=. Not the sword of the enemy was it that
depopulated the ancient States, but the lack of offspring.” In Spain
also, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in consequence of
the wealth acquired in the New World, there resulted an overwhelming
dread of marriage and child-bearing, so that the population became
reduced to nine millions, and the bringing up of four children was
rewarded with a title of nobility (_cf._ J. Unold, “Duties and Aims of
Human Life,” p. 110; Leipzig, 1904).
[715] _Cf._ E. H. Kisch, “Artificial Sterility,” published in
Eulenburg’s “Real-Enzyklopädie,” third edition, 1900, vol. xxiii., p.
372. See also the elaborate discussion of artificial sterility and
means for the prevention of conception in Kisch’s work, “The Sexual
Life of Woman,” English translation by M. Eden Paul (Rebman Limited,
London, 1908).
[716] A. Hegar, “The Sexual Impulse,” pp. 58, 59, 104, 105 (Stuttgart,
1894).
[717] M. Gruber, “Hygiene of the Sexual Life,” pp. 60-62 (Stuttgart,
1905).
[718] L. Löwenfeld, “The Sexual Life and Nervous Disorders,” pp.
154-156.
[719] C. Hasse (Mensinga), “Facultative Sterility,” fourth edition
(Berlin and Neuwied, 1885); same author, “How is the Life of Married
Women best Safeguarded?” (Berlin and Neuwied, 1895); same author,
“Prognosis of Married Life for Women” (Berlin and Neuwied, 1892); same
author, “Vom Sichinachtnehmen” [_Coitus interruptus_, see p. 702]
(Neuwied, 1905).
[720] P. Fürbringer, “Sexual Hygiene in Married Life,” published in
Senator and Kaminer’s, “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and
the Married State,” p. 209 (London, Rebman Limited, 1906).
[721] Spener, the article “Artificial Sterility,” published in
Eulenburg’s _Encyclopedic Annual of the Medical Sciences_, vol. i.,
pp. 456-459 (Berlin and Vienna, 1903).
[722] L. Bergeret, “Des Fraudes dans l’Accomplissment des Fonctions
Génératrices,” fourteenth edition (Paris, 1893). See also Toulouse,
“Les Conflits Intersexuels,” pp. 41-58 (Paris, 1904).
[723] H. Ferdy, “Means for the Prevention of Conception,” eighth
edition, two parts (Leipzig, 1907); same author, “Moral
Self-restraint: the Reflections of a Malthusian” (Hildesheim, 1904).
[724] Karl Buttenstedt, “Happiness in Marriage (Revelation in Woman):
a Nature Study,” third edition (Friedrichshagen, 1904).
[725] Richard E. Funcke, “A New Revelation of Nature: a Secret of the
Sexual Life. No more Prostitution” (Hanover, 1906).
[726] Dietrich Wilhelm Busch, “The Sexual Life of Woman in
Physiological, Pathological, and Therapeutical Relations,” vol. ii.,
p. 94 (Leipzig, 1840): “The gradual swelling of the breasts, and the
presence of milk in these organs, arouses to a high degree the
suspicion of pregnancy, but gives no certain proof of the existence of
this condition. These organs often swell very gradually in certain
pathological states, and in virgins, unimpregnated wives, widows, old
women, and even in men, milk has been found in the breasts.”
[727] Mensinga, in a most readable short study, “A Contribution to the
Mechanism of Conception” (Berlin and Neuwied, 1891), has considered
this question in detail.
[728] To propagate Damm’s idea, the German Society for Regeneration
was founded, whose first president was the above-named Peters; the
organ of the society is the newspaper _Volkskraft_.
[729] S. Freud, “Collection of Minor Writings upon the Doctrine of
Neurosis,” pp. 70, 71 (1906).
[730] The most convenient and complete apparatus for vaginal douching
is the American irrigating syringe known as the “Lady’s Friend.” The
technique of vaginal douching is very thoroughly described by L.
Volkmann, “Solution of the Social Problem by Means of Woman,” pp.
29-31 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1891).
[731] R. Braun recently reported (“Experiments made with
Spermathanaton Pastilles,” _Medizin. Woch._, 1906, No. 13) successful
results with this means. But, in general, this, like all chemical
means, cannot be absolutely depended upon to prevent pregnancy.
[732] L. Blumreich, “Diseases of Women, including Sterility,” in
Senator-Kaminer, “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the
Married State,” p. 769 _et seq._ (London, Rebman Limited, 1906).
[733] _Cf._ the account of herpes progenitalis given in Iwan Bloch’s
“Origin of Syphilis,” part ii., pp. 385-388.
[734] A detailed account of “Operative Sterility” will be found in
Kisch’s “The Sexual Life of Woman,” English translation by M. Eden
Paul (Rebman Limited, 1908).
[735] _Cf._ the accounts of this operation among the Australians given
by Max Bartels, “Medicine among Savage Races,” pp. 306, 307 (Leipzig,
1895).
[736] _Cf._ R. Schwaeblé, the chapter “Ovariées” in “Les Detraquées de
Paris,” pp. 255-258. [This aspect of the operation of oöphorectomy is
the foundation of some of the most striking incidents in Zola’s novel
“Fécondité.”--TRANSLATOR.]
[737] _Cf._ H. Ploss, “The History of Abortion” (Leipzig, 1883);
Galliot, “Recherches Historiques sur l’Avortement Criminel” (Paris,
1884).
[738] Countess Gisela von Streitberg, “The Right to Destroy the
Germinating Life: § 218 of the Criminal Code, from a New Point of
View” (Oranienburg, 1904).
[739] In a work recently published, which I have not yet been able to
obtain, entitled “Nasciturus: Life before Birth, and the Legal Rights
of the Being about to be Born,” the gynæcologist F. Ahlfeld discusses
this question very thoroughly.
[740] _Cf._ Lewin and Brenning, “Abortion induced by Means of Poisons”
(Berlin, 1899); E. von Hoffmann’s “Textbook of Forensic Medicine,”
edited by A. Kolisko, ninth edition, pp. 220-258 (Berlin and Vienna,
1903).
CHAPTER XXVIII
SEXUAL HYGIENE
“_Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his
horse, cattle, and dogs, before he matches them; but when he comes to
his own marriage, he rarely, or never, takes such care. Yet he might
by selection do something, not only for the bodily constitution and
frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral
qualities._”--CHARLES DARWIN.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXVIII
Sexual hygiene as social hygiene -- Its foundation by Darwin -- Recent
works -- “Reproductive hygiene” -- Degeneration and regeneration
(hereditary taint and hereditary enfranchisement) -- Possibility of
the disappearance of morbid tendencies -- “Eugenics” (Galton) --
Love’s choice and sexual selection -- Principles -- Darwin’s
prescriptions regarding sexual selection -- Prohibition of marriage --
Inheritance of morbid tendencies and morbid constitutions -- Danger of
alcoholism for the offspring -- Families of drinkers -- Direct
influence of alcohol upon the germ-plasm -- Observations on this
subject -- Syphilis as a cause of racial degeneration -- Syphilis and
the duration of life -- Degenerative effects of tuberculosis -- Direct
infection -- Inheritance of the tubercular habit of body -- Mental
disorders, diatheses, and malignant tumours -- Nervous disorders --
Inheritable atrophy of the female mammary glands -- Recent works on
this subject -- Effect of excessive youth or excessive age of the
married pair -- Influence of blood-relationship -- Significance of
breeding in-and-in in relation to the evolution of the race -- The
dangers of too close blood-relationship -- Importance of spiritual
qualities in relation to love’s choice -- The breeding of talent --
Importance of this in relation to the woman’s question -- In relation
to the improvement of the race -- Greater resisting powers possessed
by women towards degenerative influences -- A quotation from Carl Vogt
-- Unfavourable influence of coercive marriage morality and of
mammonism -- Importance of racial hygiene and of the sexual sense of
responsibility.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Sexual hygiene in individual relationships has already been discussed in
previous chapters, and more especially in those upon the prophylaxis and
suppression of venereal diseases, upon the question of sexual
abstinence, upon sexual education, and upon the use of methods for the
prevention of pregnancy. Here we merely propose to deal shortly with the
=social= relationships of the hygiene of the sexual life. After Darwin,
more particularly in his work on the “Descent of Man,” had published
fundamental observations regarding the social importance of sexual
hygiene, other writers, influenced by recent anthropological and
ethnological research, occupied themselves with these problems, more
especially Hegar,[741] A. Ploetz,[742] and R. Kossmann;[743] the
subjects considered by these writers have been aptly comprised under the
name “=reproductive hygiene=,” which constitutes a part of general
racial biology.
Unfortunately, racial biology, as Max Gruber[744] justly remarks, has
formed exaggerated estimates of the ideas of “degeneration” and
“hereditary taint”; and, on the other hand, the complementary ideas of
“regeneration” and “hereditary enfranchisement” have been unduly
neglected. And yet it is certain that these latter influences are
continually in active operation in the direction of the resanation and
invigoration of the race: that the introduction of =new and healthy
blood= is competent to bring about reanimation and regeneration, even in
degenerate families. Gruber says with justice (“Hygiene of the Sexual
Life,” p. 55, 1905):
“Completely normal, and entirely free from hereditary taint, no single
human being can be; and, on the other hand, experience teaches us,
that just as morbid tendencies make their appearance in certain
families, so also =they may disappear= from these families. Many of
these tendencies can be rendered ineffective by a suitably chosen mode
of life for the individual; and by means of repeated crossing with
stems which are free from these particular taints, the morbid tendency
can be led to disappear, unless the degenerative impulse is too
powerful.”
The recognition of this fact does not in the least diminish the great
importance of purposive choice in love and marriage; nor does it
diminish the sense of sexual responsibility in relation to the great
fact of =heredity=. But the recognition of the fortunate fact of
hereditary enfranchisement supports, on the other hand, all our
endeavours in the direction of rational “eugenics” (Galton),[745] in
accordance with which we must, as Nietzsche says, not merely reproduce,
but produce in an upward direction (“_nicht bloss fort-, sondern auch
=hinaufpflanzen= sollen_”).
The central problem of reproductive hygiene is that of =love’s choice=,
of sexual selection. It is a most difficult task, one which is rarely
fulfilled to the utmost, for the right man to find the right woman, so
that their individualities may in every respect correspond to and
complement one another. In most cases it is necessary to be contented
with relative harmony, and with sufficient =health= on both sides. The
laws of a refined, differentiated marriage choice have not yet been
discovered. Havelock Ellis[746] has instituted exhaustive researches on
this subject, without, however, attaining any positive result. He was
only able to establish the general proposition, that in love’s choice
=identity of race= and of =individual= characters (homogamy), and at the
same time =unlikeness in the secondary sexual= characters (heterogamy),
are to be preferred. In other respects, however, very various and
complicated influences are determinative in sexual selection. Havelock
Ellis also detected a natural disinclination towards love between
blood-relatives, which, however, he regards as merely due to the
customary life in close association from childhood onwards.
Darwin propounded the principle for sexual selection, that both sexes
should avoid marriage when in any pronounced degree they were defective,
either physically or mentally. Upon this idea rests the old and widely
diffused custom of killing or exposure of sickly children, as well as
the more recent prohibitions of marriage in certain States of the
American Union--for example, Michigan, in which the marriage (also
sexual union for procreative purposes?) is forbidden on the part of
those mentally diseased and of those who are infected with tubercle or
syphilis.[747]
The most important fundamental principle, however, of rational
reproductive hygiene is, without doubt, that only =healthy= individuals
should pair, or, at any rate, those only whose abnormalities or
diseases, if any, would not injure their offspring, physically or
mentally. Not in disease itself, but in the =inheritance= of disease,
lies the great danger for the deterioration of the family and the race.
It is for this reason that the study of the inheritance of morbid
predispositions and morbid constitutions is of such enormous importance
in racial biology.
With regard to illnesses to which attention must especially be paid in
connexion with sexual selection, we have here, in the first place, to
consider the “three scourges” of humanity: =alcoholism=, =syphilis=, and
=tuberculosis=.
Apart from the fact that alcoholism leads in the drinker himself to
nervous weakness, to mental disturbances of all kinds (delirium tremens,
imbecility, mania, peripheral neuritis, etc.), it also exercises a very
serious influence upon the offspring, who are, unfortunately, in many
cases very numerous,[748] as the study of “drinker families” shows
(_cf._ Jörger, “The Family Zero,” published in the _Archives for Racial
Biology_, 1905, vol. ii., pp. 494-559). Only a very small fraction of
the offspring of such families are physically and mentally normal (about
7 to 17 %); the majority display a =rapidly progressive degeneration=,
which manifests itself physically more especially by the tendency to
tuberculosis and epilepsy, and mentally by the tendency to drunkenness,
crime, and imbecility. Alcohol is a direct poison to the germ cells, so
much so that, according to the degree of drunkenness, it is almost
possible to estimate beforehand the degree of hereditary taint.
Moreover, an =otherwise healthy= father, in a single severe acute
alcoholic intoxication, may procreate a child either quite incompetent
to live, or weakly, or completely degenerate. On the other hand, it has
been observed that a person given to chronic alcoholism is competent,
during a temporary =diminution= in his consumption of alcohol, to
procreate a comparatively vigorous child. From this it follows that
marriage, or sexual union in general for reproductive purposes, with a
man or woman addicted to alcohol, and no less the act of procreation in
a state of intoxication, are absolutely to be condemned.
The danger of alcoholism to the offspring is illustrated by the
experience that about one-eighth of the surviving children of drunken
parents become affected with epilepsy, and that more than one-half of
idiotic children are born of drunken parents (Kraepelin, “The
Psychiatric Duties of the State,” p. 3; Jena, 1900).
In an earlier chapter (pp. 361-363) attention was drawn to the fact that
syphilis rivals alcohol in its potency as a cause of racial
degeneration.[749] Thanks to the researches of Alfred Fournier and of
Tarnowsky, the sinister influence of syphilis in this respect is now
widely recognized. E. Heddaeus rightly[750] asserts that since at the
present day the whole world is contaminated with congenital or acquired
syphilis, the eradication of syphilis is the most important task of
reproductive hygiene. The previously mentioned etiological and
prophylactic-therapeutic researches, among which may be included the
quite recent discovery of syphilitic antibodies in the system of those
who have formerly suffered from syphilis,[751] open to us a prospect of
the realization of this magnificent idea. The weakening and degeneration
of the individual by acquired and inherited syphilis, is also shown by
the recent researches into the influence of syphilis upon the duration
of life, among which I may mention the works of A. Blaschko[752] and
Hans Tilesius.[753] Regarding the disastrous influence of syphilis
continued into the second and third generations, see the monograph of B.
Tarnowsky, “La Famille Syphilitique et sa Descendence” [Clermont (Oise),
1904]. (See note ^{325} to p. 363.)
The third disease leading to degeneration is tuberculosis, which may be
inherited either by direct infection of the germ, or (more frequently)
by the transmission of a predisposition to the offspring. This simple
predisposition, recognized by the so-called “tubercular physique” (long,
thin individuals, with a flattened chest, poorly developed muscles, and
a pale countenance), does not offer any absolute ground for prohibiting
reproductive activity, since the health of the other party to the
marriage may diminish or entirely remove the danger of inheritance. But,
on the other hand, manifest tuberculosis or scrofula is a
contra-indication to marriage.
The same is true of actual =mental disorders=, of severe diatheses, such
as gout, obesity, or diabetes; and of cancer and other malignant
tumours; whereas the bulk of “nervous” affections and other bodily
diseases only exclude marriage in certain special circumstances.[754]
Very unfavourable to the offspring is the atrophy of the female breasts,
and the consequent incapacity for lactation, a matter to which
Mensinga,[755] G. von Bunge,[756] G. Hirth,[757] Emil Abderhalden,[758]
A. Hegar,[759] and others, have referred, and which exercises a very
unfavourable influence upon the offspring, since natural lactation
cannot be adequately replaced by artificial feeding. According to Bunge,
alcoholism, tuberculosis, syphilis, and mental disorders of the ancestry
are the principal causes of atrophy of the mammary glands. Whether
atrophy of the mammary glands is really on the increase, and whether it
is hereditary, are matters demanding, as Abderhalden insists, more
careful critical investigation.
Marriage at an age =too youthful= (below twenty on the part of the
woman, below twenty-four on the part of the man) and at =too advanced=
an age (above forty on the part of the woman, above fifty on the part of
the man) is also disadvantageous to the offspring, as manifested by
higher mortality of the infants, by the more frequent occurrence of
malformations, idiotcy, rickets, etc. Equally disadvantageous is =too
close relationship by blood=,[760] since in this way any unfavourable
tendencies are greatly strengthened. Upon a certain degree of
inbreeding, or, rather, upon an approximation to inbreeding, depends the
formation of every race. The “racial problem” in this sense is a kind of
exaltation of the inbreeding principle, for the very idea of =race=
implies a more or less close relationship between all the members of a
definite stock. Thus the entire absence of fresh blood does not
necessarily give rise to any degeneration; but it is certain that
=long-continued close in-and-in breeding= on the part of near
blood-relatives in the same family results in a =progressive tendency to
degeneration=, because, among those who unite in marriage, the same
morbid tendencies are present, and accumulate in consequence of the
inbreeding. This is shown very clearly by some statistics collected by
Morris (published by Gruber, _op. cit._, p. 32). Marriage between uncle
and niece, or between aunt and nephew, and the, unfortunately, far too
frequent marriages between first cousins, are therefore to be condemned.
The greatest value is to be placed, in love’s choice, upon
=intellectual= qualities. Intelligent persons, and those full of
character, are to be preferred. Precisely in relation to the breeding of
talents, Nietzsche recommended (“Posthumous Works,” vol. xii., p. 188;
Leipzig, 1901) polygamy for men or women of predominant intellectual
capacity, so that they might have the opportunity of reproducing their
kind in intercourse with several persons of the opposite sex, and in
this way, since the later children of the same women are not so powerful
nor of such striking capacity as the first-born, they might have the
possibility of being the parents of several talented and distinguished
individuals. In relation to the woman’s question, the breeding of women
well endowed with talent is a matter of especial interest. Charles
Darwin[761] writes:
“In order that woman should reach the same standard as man, she ought,
when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and perseverance, and to
have her reason and imagination exercised to the highest point; then
she would probably transmit these qualities chiefly to her adult
daughters. All women, however, could not be thus raised, unless
during many generations those who excelled in the above robust virtues
were married, and produced offspring in larger numbers than other
women.”
In a valuable work W. Schallmayer[762] has recently discussed the great
importance of the offspring of talented persons in the improvement of
the race, and has considered the details of psychical inheritance.
As in the entire animal world, so also in the human race, the feminine
nature has a more conservative character, one more disinclined to
variations, whether favourable or unfavourable, as contrasted with the
more variable nature of the male, which is also more prone to submit to
degenerative influences. For this reason, in declining races, we meet
many more women free from degeneration than men. Carl Vogt, in a passage
which appears to be very little known, writes on this subject in the
following terms:[763]
“It is the women, my friend, who maintain the race, who for the
longest time safeguard the type of the people in body and spirit, and
for this reason they form the mirror at once of the future and of the
past which are allotted to that people. You will no doubt have noticed
how, in many races, there exists a disharmony between men and women,
so that in one race the male and in another the female stands behind
the other in physical beauty and in mental development. This
relationship between the two sexes is precisely that from which we are
able to learn the past and the future of the nation. Good and bad,
advance and retrogression, are first undertaken by the man, and by him
passed to the woman, whose conservative nature much more gradually
yields to strange influences. But since the stages of mental culture
through which a race passes are not only reflected in its bodily
development, but actually depend upon this development, it is easy to
understand that in a nature which is striving upwards, which we see in
the process of advance towards better things, the men possess the
advantage in the matter of beauty and of intellectual capacity;
whereas when the race is a declining one, the advantages in these
respects will lie with woman. If you find a race in which the women
are beautiful, but as a rule the men are ugly and badly formed, you
can with certainty conclude that this race has long since passed its
culminating point in development, and has long been undergoing a
process of decline.”
For racial biology it is at least equally important, if not even more
important, that healthy, vigorous, and talented men should reproduce
their kind, rather than that in love’s choice the corresponding
qualities in women should be regarded as determinative. Racial biology,
if it really wishes to obtain success in the breeding of humanity, is
compelled to demand the abolition of the present evil coercive marriage
morality, and, according to the suggestions of Nietzsche, von Ehrenfels,
and others, will not hesitate, =in certain cases=, to regard polygamy as
desirable, if only from this standpoint--that coercive marriage is the
sole cause of the domination of “mammonism” in the sexual life, to the
deleterious influence of which we have before alluded.[764]
Mammonism is dangerous if for this alone, because it involves =the
annihilation of the sense of sexual responsibility=, and in consequence
of this, natural love is rejected on one side, and all considerations of
a racial hygienic nature are cast away on the other. The lack of both is
the cause of degeneration.
[741] A. Hegar, “The Sexual Impulse” (Stuttgart, 1894).
[742] A. Ploetz, “Outlines of Racial Hygiene” (Berlin, 1895).
[743] R. Kossmann, “Breeding--Politics” (Schmargendorf--Berlin, 1905).
[744] Max Gruber, “Does Hygiene lead to Racial Degeneration?”
published in the _Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift_, October 6 and
13, 1903.
[745] Francis Galton, “Eugenics: its Definition, Scope, and Aims”
(Sociological Society Papers, vols. i. and ii.), 1905; comments on
this work by A. Ploetz, published in the _Archives for Racial and
Social Biology_, 1905, vol. ii., pp. 812-829; also W. Schallmayer,
“Marriage, Inheritance, and the Ethics of Reproduction,” published in
“The Book of the Child,” edited by Adele Schreiber, vol. i., pp. ix-xx
(Leipzig and Berlin, 1907); Alfred Grotjahn, “Social Hygiene and the
Problem of Degeneration” (Jena, 1904).
[746] Havelock Ellis, “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” vol. iv.:
“Selection in Man.”
[747] Regarding marriage prohibitions, cf. P. Näcke, “Marriage
Prohibitions,” published in the _Archives for Criminal Anthropology_,
1906, vol. xxii.; M. Marcuse, “Legislative Marriage Prohibitions for
Persons who are Diseased or Deficient Mentally or Physically,”
published in _Sociale Medizin und Hygiene_, 1907, Nos. 2 and 3. It is
said that in Dakota medical examination of those who wish to marry is
legally prescribed (_Archives for Criminal Anthropology_, 1903, vol.
xi., pp. 266, 267).
[748] See especially the excellent treatise of A. Leppmann,
“Alcoholism, Morphinism, and Marriage,” published in Senator-Kaminer,
“Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married State,” p.
1057 _et seq._ (London, Rebman Limited, 1906). See also, regarding
alcohol as a “Racial Destroyer,” the fundamental study by Alfred
Ploetz, “The Significance of Alcohol in Relation to the Life and
Development of the Race,” published in the _Archives for Racial and
Social Biology_, 1904, vol. i., pp. 229-253. [English readers should
consult the works of Archdall Reid, “The Present Evolution of Man,”
“Alcoholism, a Study in Heredity,” and “The Principles of
Heredity.”--TRANSLATOR.]
[749] See also R. Ledermann, “Syphilis and Marriage,” published in
Senator-Kaminer, “Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the
Married State,” p. 561 (London, Rebman Limited); Alfred Fournier,
“Syphilis and Marriage.”
[750] E. Heddaeus, “The Breeding of Healthy Human Beings,” published
in the _Allgemeine Medizinische Zentral-Zeitung_, 1901, No. 6.
[751] A. Wassermann and F. Plaut, “The Occurrence of Syphilitic
Antibodies in the Cerebrospinal Fluid of General Paralytics,”
published in the _Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift_, 1906, No. 44.
[752] A. Blaschko, “The Influence of Syphilis upon the Duration of
Life,” published in the “Transactions of the Fourth International
Congress of Medical Examiners in Life Insurance,” pp. 95-149 (Berlin,
1906).
[753] Hans Tilesius, “Syphilis in Relation to Life Insurance,” _op.
cit._, pp. 201-213.
[754] In the great work of Senator-Kaminer (“Health and Disease in
Relation to Marriage and the Married State,” London, Rebman Limited,
1906) we find a detailed account of the circumstances and
possibilities which have here to be considered.
[755] Mensinga, “Incapacity for Lactation, and its Cure” (Berlin and
Neuwied, 1888).
[756] G. von Bunge, “The Increasing Incapacity of Women to Suckle
their Children” (Munich, 1903).
[757] G. Hirth, “The Maternal Breast: its Indispensability and its
Education for the Restoration of its Primitive Forces,” published in
“Ways to Love,” pp. 1-57.
[758] Emil Abderhalden, “The Question of the Incapacity of Mothers to
Suckle their Children,” published in _Medizinische Klinik_, 1906, No.
45.
[759] A. Hegar, “Atrophy of the Mammary Glands and the Incapacity for
Lactation,” published in the _Archives for Racial and Social Hygiene_,
1905, vol. ii., pp. 830-844.
[760] _Cf._ F. Kraus, “Blood-Relationship in Marriage and its
Consequences to the Offspring,” published in Senator-Kaminer, “Health
and Disease in Relation to Marriage and the Married State,” p. 79
(London, Rebman Limited, 1906).
[761] Charles Darwin, “The Descent of Man,” vol. ii., pp. 354, 355
(London, 1898).
[762] W. Schallmayer, “The Sociological Importance of the Offspring of
Talented Persons, and Psychical Inheritance,” published in the
_Archives of Racial and Social Biology_, 1905, vol. ii., pp. 36-75.
_Cf._ also S. R. Steinmetz, “The Offspring of Talented Persons,”
published in the _Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft_, 1904, No. 1.
[763] Carl Vogt, “The Ocean and the Mediterranean: Letters of Travel,”
vol. ii., pp. 203, 204 (Frankfurt-on-the-Main, 1848).
[764] Alexander von Humboldt (“Journey in Tropical Regions,” vol. ii.,
p. 17) remarks that in Europe a greatly deformed or hideous girl, if
only she possesses property, can marry, and that the children
frequently inherit the malformations of the mother; whereas among
savage races there exists a natural disinclination to such
marriages--a disinclination which money is not able to overcome.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE SEXUAL LIFE IN ITS PUBLIC RELATIONSHIPS (SEXUAL QUACKERY,
ADVERTISEMENTS, AND SCANDALS)
“_One of the principal reasons which makes the eradication of quackery
for ever impossible is to be found in the fact which finds incisive
expression in the proverb ‘Die Dummen werden nicht alle.’_”
[“_Stupidity is a hardy perennial._”]--WILHELM EBSTEIN.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXIX
Greater publicity of the sexual life in the age of commerce -- Three
forms of this publicity -- Sexual quackery -- The relations of
quackery to the sexual life -- Recent examples -- The trade in sexual
nostrums and other articles of immoral use -- Public puffing of sexual
nostrums -- Quack advertisements.
Newspaper advertisements for sexual purposes -- Matrimonial
advertisements -- Their history -- The two oldest matrimonial
advertisements -- Mercenary marriages and marriages for position --
Nominal marriages -- Immoral advertisements -- Loan advertisements --
Acquaintance advertisements -- Friendship advertisements -- Employment
advertisements -- Heterosexual and homosexual advertisements --
Advertisements regarding correspondence -- Advertisements of rooms for
sexual purposes -- Advertisements regarding instruction -- Rendezvous
and _postillon d’amour_ advertisements -- _Poste restante_
correspondence -- Private inquiries -- Advertisements for the purpose
of sexual perversions -- Street handbills -- Brothel guides.
Public scandals of a sexual character -- Murders and suicides from
love -- Seductions, duels, procuress trials -- Orgies and the life of
swindlers.
CHAPTER XXIX
In this age of commerce, of telegraphs, and of the press, the rôle which
the sexual life plays =before the public eye= is notably greater than it
used to be. From very early times, indeed, sexual matters formed the
principal constituent of the _chronique scandaleuse_, but it was not
then possible to disseminate such scandals by means of daily newspapers,
as it is now so easy to do. In three forms at the present day the sexual
life attains publicity: in the form of an unscrupulous =quackery=; in
the form of =newspaper advertisements= relating to the sexual life; and
in the form of =sexual scandals= diffused by means of the press. We
propose to refer briefly to the principal aspects of all three, and we
shall find that they are, for the most part, of an unpleasant character.
According to the well-known saying that hunger and love rule the world,
quackery has from its very earliest beginnings concerned itself by
preference with the provinces of disorders of digestion and of sexual
troubles; and especially in respect of the latter have its developments
been so astounding--in fact, there appears to be nothing else which
gives such instructive information regarding the possibilities of human
folly, depravity, and superstition. When we regard the history of
quackery and medical charlatanry of all times,[765] we discern beyond
question the justice of the assertion that “=quackery is identical with
the diffusion of sexual vice and of fornication=.” These relationships
of quackery to the sexual life and to sexual crime have recently had a
vivid light thrown upon them by C. Reissig[766] and C. Alexander.[767]
Reissig deals more especially with the “immoral practices of many
magnetizers, lay hypnotizers, and similar individuals, who, under the
pretence of giving help to the sick, seek and find opportunity for the
gratification of =all kinds of immoral lusts=”; and he gives
characteristic examples of these practices. Police reports have shown
that numerous _masseuses_ and male quacks, who commonly appear under
the high-sounding names of “professor,” “director,” “hygienologist,”
“magnetopath,” etc., and who profess to treat “secret diseases” or
“diseases of women,” are in reality concerned with =abortion
mongering, the production of artificial sexual excitement, and the
provision of human material for the gratification of perverse lusts=.
Who does not know the ominous words, “_Rat und Hilfe!_” (“Advice and
help!”)? Under the mantle of quackery the worst kinds of immorality
are practised. Thus, Alexander (_op. cit._, p. 48) speaks of an “ear
specialist” who, paving the way by gigantic advertisements in the
local papers, travelled from place to place, nominally in order to
relieve “defects of hearing,” but who in reality utilized his
opportunities in order to make immoral attempts upon young girls
(Glatz Assizes, July 10, 1896). The “magnetizer” M---- hypnotized
young girls, and then violated them; another examined the genital
organs when professing to treat ear troubles, and carried out improper
manipulations. In an article, “Serene Highness’s Quackery,” in the
_Aerztliche Vereinsblatt_, No. 418, August, 1900, Dr. Reissig reports
that “to Her Serene Highness the Princess Maria von Rohan in Salzburg”
it appears to be a sacred duty to bear witness to the joiner (!)
Kuhne, in Leipzig, under date November 9, 1889, that his sexual
friction baths (!) “had proved to be of inestimable value, and had had
a wonderful effect,” and she felt impelled “to recommend to physicians
the most careful examination and trial of this new method of cure.”
The treatment of “secret diseases,”[768] in the hands of quacks, does
incredible harm; and the same is true of the uncleanly and dangerous
practices of “masseuses” and of professional abortion-mongers. Closely
connected with quackery is the =trade in sexual nostrums and in other
articles of immoral use=.[769] This trade is occupied in the manufacture
and public recommendation of “sexual articles” of every kind:
aphrodisiacs; “protective articles”; various celebrated measures for the
relief of “sexual weakness,” infertility, pollutions, lack of voluptuous
sensation, etc. The artificial sterilization, not of women, but of men,
by means of Roentgen rays is recommended.[770] The newspapers overflow
with advertisements recommending all these articles. Beneath the aliases
of “chiromancy” and “astrology,” sexual quackery also lies concealed. It
allures its clients chiefly by means of newspaper advertisements.
Newspaper advertisements for sexual purposes are not more than 200 years
old. Their oldest and most harmless form was that of matrimonial
advertisements, the first two of which appeared on July 19, 1695, in the
_Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade_, published by
Houghton, the father of English advertising.[771] These two remarkable
and historical advertisements run as follows:
A gentleman, thirty years of age, who says that he has considerable
property, would be glad to marry a young lady with property amounting
to about £3,000. He will make a suitable settlement.
A young man, twenty-five years of age, with a good business, and whose
father is prepared to give him £1,000, would be glad to make a
suitable marriage. He has been brought up by his parents as a
dissenter, and is a sober man.
We see that from the very outset matrimonial advertisements did not
forget the _punctum saliens_, which I need not specify.[772] All, down
to those of the present day, are alike. The only difference is that, in
addition to these “money marriages,” advertisements of “nominal
marriages” and also of “marriages for position” appear freely in the
papers. The majority of matrimonial advertisements are inserted for
mercenary or interested purposes, and really belong to the category of
“=immoral advertisements=,” which conceal themselves under all possible
titles. I give a short classification of some of the commonest immoral
advertisements, and append some actual advertisements of each kind taken
from leading German and Austrian newspapers.
1. =Loan Advertisements.=--In most cases a “young,” “smart” lady begs an
older gentleman for a loan, or _vice versa_, a young man directs the
same request to a “lady belonging to the best circles.” Frequently also
it is a “lady living alone,” “a young widow,” or a “recently married
woman,” who, “without the knowledge of her husband,” and “in temporary
want of money,” seeks a “helper.” Almost invariably the need and the
marriage are fictitious. These are in most cases the advertisements of
secret prostitutes, of a similar character to the advertisements of
_masseuses_. The following advertisement must otherwise be interpreted:
What noble-minded lady would be willing to lend, to a young,
widely-travelled engineer, the sum of 12,000 marks [£600], for six
months, on good security?
2. =Acquaintanceship Advertisements, Friendship Advertisements, and
Employment Advertisements.=--These may be divided into the two classes
of heterosexual and homosexual advertisements. Examples of the former
are the following:
A young widow, twenty-seven years of age, desires friendly intercourse
with a man of position, who will assist her with word and deed.
A young stranger desires acquaintanceship (!) to relieve her of a
temporary difficulty.
A merchant, a man of middle age, desires the acquaintanceship of a
good-looking lady (a slender figure preferred), for the purpose of
friendly intercourse.
The following advertisements have a more or less definite homosexual
note:
A well-placed young lady, nearing the age of thirty, desires an
honourable, trustworthy lady friend.
A cultured lady of middle age desires a ladies’ club.
A well-placed elderly gentleman desires friendly intercourse with a
young man.
A young merchant, between twenty and thirty years of age, desires
friendly intercourse with a young man of good family.
A young lady, a stranger to the town, desires a lady friend; apply by
letter to “Lesbos” at the office of this paper.[773]
A newspaper, now defunct, which formerly appeared in Munich,
characterized by homosexual “psychologico-erosophical” tendencies,
entitled _Der Seelenforscher_ (edited by August Fleischmann), appears to
have laid itself open to such advertisements. In No. 11 of the second
year of issue, November, 1903, I find the following distinctive
advertisements:
A young vigorous (!) man, a Swiss, twenty-four years of age, well
recommended, desires a situation with a gentleman living alone.
A young man, twenty years of age, of agreeable appearance, with an
honourable and ideal mind, desires a position as correspondent or
companion in the house of a well-to-do, even if elderly, gentleman.
A wealthy, talented uranian young man desires the patronage of a noble
well-to-do urning.
A good, affectionate, and bright young man, who at the present time is
in an official position, desires to find a =well-to-do, kind-hearted,
and lonely gentleman=, to whom he could be a true life-companion, and
to whom, until the end of his life, he would give true affection. He
would faithfully fulfil all his duties.[774]
The numerous advertisements, also, in which young girls and women, or
widows, desire “positions” as housekeepers, companions, etc., in the
houses of “well-to-do” gentlemen “living alone” have, as a rule, an
immoral basis.
3. =Advertisements regarding Correspondence.=--These also form a
permanent constituent of the advertisements of the daily papers, and
serve in part the aims of prostitution or of assignations for sexual
intercourse, but in part really aim at an exchange of more or less
erotic letters, as is obviously the case in respect of the following
advertisements:
Young cultured man desires a stimulating (!) correspondence with a
young lady.
Young lady desires to enter into correspondence with a lady of good
position, with similar ideas.
4. =Advertisements of Rooms.=--Among these advertisements, we find that
of the “convenient room” or the room “with a separate entrance”--the
“storm-free diggings” of the student. Such rooms are usually offered to
men; women must seek them for themselves, as in the following
advertisement:
A lady artist desires a well-furnished convenient room, with bath-room
and piano, as an only tenant.
The advertisements regarding rooms to be let “during the day” mostly
refer to opportunities for fornication (“houses of accommodation”).
5. =Pseudo-Educational Advertisements.=--Here also there is a form of
advertisement which enables us without difficulty to recognize their
true purpose--for example:
A young Englishwoman gives stimulating instruction.
=Jeune= Française, =gaie= (!), bien recomm. qui enseigne de méthode
facile et rapide, donne des léçons.
Very frequent are announcements of sadistic or masochistic
“instruction,” in which the “energy” or “imposing appearance” of the
instructor or instructress is emphasized, or in which the word
“discipline” is displayed in a significance which cannot be
misunderstood.
6. =Rendezvous and Postilion d’Amour Advertisements.=--These subserve
the appointment of lovers, often adulterous lovers; but also the opening
up of acquaintanceship. Examples:
Veronika.
To-day unfortunately prevented, therefore 21st.
=“Wireless Telegraphy.”=
Best thanks for dear letter. Drive to-day. A thousand kisses.--L.
=“Good Report.”=
A letter will be found addressed to “Sophie G.,” post restante,
Vienna, I/1, principal post-office.
=M.S.A.=
To-day, 4. Please bring news. Most intimate.--K. D. D.
=A. 15.=
Je n’oublie pas et j’espère.
Very frequent also are requests from male advertisers, addressed to
ladies they have chanced to meet in the railway, electric tram, etc.,
asking where the latter may live. These advertisements give a
description of the appearance, costume, time, and place of the first
meeting, and beg the lady to give her address “in confidence,” or to
come to some specified place of meeting. A very large number of =letters
addressed post restante= are of an erotic nature, and belong to this
category.
7. =Private Inquiries.=--Under this heading persons advertise in the
newspapers that for an honorarium (usually a very high one) they will
undertake to watch secretly any desired person--and almost invariably
such watching relates to the sexual life and activity of the person
under observation; when employed, they use all the methods of the most
unscrupulous detective. These individuals play a principal part in
divorce proceedings, and in conjugal quarrel based upon jealousy; they
are a cancer of our time[775] which cannot be too energetically
suppressed. A detective advertisement of this character is the
following:
=Private Inquiry.=
Confidential! Enlightening! Unfailing! Truthful! Universal!
Extraordinarily satisfactory conjugal inquiries; mode of life, family
relationships, liaisons, peculiarities of character, occupations,
present condition, past misconduct, future prospects, state of
property, secret intercourse, etc., etc.
8. =Advertisements relating to Sexual Perversions.=--We have already
referred to homosexual advertisements. An even more important part is
played by =sadistic= and =masochistic= advertisements, which usually
appear under the cloak of “massage,” “instruction,” or of an
“energetic” person. Examples:
=Masoch.= Who is interested in this matter? Address “Kismet,” office
of this paper.
Widow of noble birth, middle-aged, =energetic=, desires position in
the house of a gentleman of standing, as reader, or in some other
capacity.
Cabinet de massage, par dame diplômée, hydrothérapie. Mme. D., 82, Rue
Blanche.
Massage suédois, par dame diplômée, tous les jours de 10 à 8 heures.
Madame Martinet, leçons de maintien....
Monsieur dés. gouvernante gr. et forte, 40 a. =sévère= pour educ.
enfant diffic. A. B. p.r. Amiens.
=Energetic= distinguished lady, in temporary need, wishes to receive a
considerable loan, but will meet only the actual lender.
Severin is seeking his Wanda!
A young man begs 30 marks from a lady. “Sacher Masoch,” Post Office,
Köpenickerstrasse.
Even fetichistic advertisements sometimes appear, such as the following,
from a shoe fetichist:
A young man of means buys for his private collection elegant shoes,
which have been worn by leading actresses, or by ladies of high rank.
9. =Handbills.=--In large towns these are distributed by persons
standing at the street corners, and usually relate to restaurants with
women attendants. One example will suffice:
=The Restaurant of the Good-Natured Saxon Girl.=
The attendants at this restaurant are young and pretty girls from
Saxony; Miss Elly waits at the bar. Piano-playing and singing. Your
kind patronage is requested by =The Young Hostess=.
“Chiromantists,” magnetopaths, and other charlatans, advertise
themselves by means of street handbills. In the Latin countries, and
more especially in Paris, true “=brothel guides=” stand at the street
corners, and conduct the passers-by to improper dramatic
representations, or provide for them children for fornicatory purpose,
or invite them to homosexual intercourse, etc.
The third form under which the sexual life makes a public appearance is
that of the great scandals and sensational occurrences with a sexual
background, which are discussed by the press. I allude here, without
attempting completeness, to =murders= and =suicides= arising from
jealousy, from rejected love, or from love unsuccessful for some other
reason--occurrences which afford sufficient proof that individual
=falling in love= in our own time is just as violent and passionate as
it was formerly; further, to =abduction= and =seduction=; to =divorce
scandals= and =divorce proceedings=; in general, to all =law-court
proceedings relating to sexual offences=; to =duels= dependent upon
erotic motives; to =family tragedies= upon a similar basis; to the great
=procuress trials=; to the discovery of =secret sexual clubs= and of
=erotic orgies=; to =revelations from nunneries and from secular
institutions=; to the exploits of =swindlers=, who very frequently make
use of sexual passion in others to assist them in their pursuit of
plunder, etc. Examples of all these varieties of scandals and
sensational occurrences are found day by day in the newspapers. Very
frequently, on account of the very nature of sexual psychology, they
exercise a suggestive influence, so that we often hear of similar
occurrences at brief intervals. If we assume the existence of psychical
contagion, there is no doubt that these sensational newspaper reports
play a far greater part therein than the =whole= of the so-called erotic
literature.
[765] _Cf._ the valuable historical and critical monograph of
Professor Wilhelm Ebstein, “Charlatanry and Quackery in the German
Empire” (Stuttgart, 1905).
[766] C. Reissig, “Medical Science and Quackery,” p. 114 _et seq._
(Leipzig, 1900).
[767] C. Alexander, “The True and the False Healing Art,” pp. 46-49
(Berlin, 1899).
[768] _Cf._ C. Alexander, “Venereal Diseases and Quackery,” published
in the “Reports of the German Society for the Suppression of Venereal
Diseases,” 1902-1903, vol. i., Nos. 6 and 7; Hennig, “Venereal
Diseases and Quackery,” _op. cit._, No. 7; “Petition of the German
Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases to the German
Imperial Chancellor, regarding the Injury done to Venereal Patients by
Quacks,” _op. cit._, No. 7.
[769] _Cf._ the work of H. Beta, which is still of value in relation
to present conditions, “The Trade in Sexual Nostrums and Other
Articles of Immoral Use, as advertised in the Daily Press” (Berlin,
1872), at which early date we find mention of the “hygienologist,”
Jakobi, the Nestor of the Berlin quacks.
[770] _Cf._ W. Ebstein, _op. cit._, p. 46.
[771] _Cf._ the complete history of matrimonial advertisements which
is given in my “Sexual Life in England,” vol. i., pp. 140-159
(Charlottenburg, 1901).
[772] “Proputty, proputty, proputty--that’s what I ’ears ’em
saäy.”--TRANSLATOR.
[773] _Cf._ Paul Näcke, “Newspaper Advertisements by Female
Homosexuals,” published in the _Archives for Criminal Anthropology_,
edited by Hans Gross, 1902, vol. x., pp. 225-229 (taken from Munich
newspapers).
[774] _Cf._ Paul Näcke, “Supply of and Demand for Homosexuals in the
Newspapers,” published in the _Archives for Criminal Anthropology_,
1902, vol. viii., pp. 319-350.
[775] _Cf._ also the account of these detectives given in the essay
“The Love-Market,” published in “Roland von Berlin,” No. 45, of
November 8, 1906. In this case, a jealous young woman offered 1,500
marks (£75) in order to have her husband “watched” by such a
detective.
CHAPTER XXX
PORNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE AND ART
“_Wer will das Höchste aus Wollust machen, der krönt ein Schwein in
wüster Lache._” [“_He who devotes his talents to the glorification of
lust is like one who crowns a pig in the midst of a dismal
swamp._”]--HANS BURGKMAIR.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXX
Distinction between pornography and eroticism -- An old medical thesis
concerning obscene books, dating from the year 1688 -- Definition of
obscenity in this thesis -- Modern definition of an obscene book --
Treatment of purely sexual relationships from the artistic and
scientific standpoints respectively -- Summary of the general tendency
-- Morality-fanaticism and medical authorship -- The artistic
treatment of sexual matters -- Humorous mode of treatment -- The
erotic in caricature -- The mystic-satanic conception of the sexual --
The importance of the individuality and the age of the reader or
onlooker -- Danger of Bible-reading for children -- A remark of John
Milton upon this subject -- Importance of the standard of the time,
and of contemporary moral ideas, in our judgment of an erotic work --
Example of the works of Nicolas Chorier and of the Marquis de Sade --
Observation regarding the recent German translations of pornographic
works -- Comparison of obscene books with natural poisons -- Recent
obscene literature -- Remarkable fondness of great artists and poets
for the pornographic-erotic element -- French celebrities as
pornographists (Voltaire, Mirabeau, de Musset, Gautier, Droz, etc.) --
Goethe and Schopenhauer as erotic writers -- Schiller’s and Goethe’s
fondness for French erotic writings -- Occupation of women with
pornographic literature -- Obscene pictures by great painters, from
Lucas Cranach to the present time -- Pornographic garbage literature
and garbage art -- Origin of these -- Dangers of hawkers’ literature
-- Futility of the efforts of Purity Societies -- Historical examples
of this -- The true means to render pornography harmless.
CHAPTER XXX
What is an obscene, pornographic book or picture? In order to obtain an
accurate and objective definition of this idea, we must always keep
clearly before our minds the distinction between “=pornography=” and
“=eroticism=.” The confusion between these two ideas explains the great
conflict of opinion on the part of expert witnesses in connexion with
the question whether any specified book or picture is to be regarded as
“immoral” or “indecent.”
The obscene differs _toto cœlo_ from the erotic. In my own possession is
a rare work which is probably the first monograph regarding obscene
books. It dates from the year 1688, and is the thesis of a Leipzig
doctor.[776] At that time it was still possible to compose =academic=
essays upon such topics. To-day this would only be possible in the legal
faculty and from the criminal standpoint. In respect of the unprejudiced
scientific and historical consideration of pornography, we have
experienced a notable retrogression, and at the present day a certain
degree of courage is needed to make these things an object of scientific
study, to consider in an unprejudiced and objective manner these
peculiar outgrowths of the human soul.
In the above-mentioned essay the learned writer gives, on p. 5, a
definition of the obscene, which shows that he had not thoroughly
differentiated it from the erotic, but confused the two ideas under the
same term. In his view, obscene writings are “all such writings whose
authors use distinctly improper language, and speak plainly about the
sexual organs, or describe the shameless acts of voluptuous and impure
human beings, in such words that chaste and tender ears would shudder to
hear them.”
But such improper descriptions might occur in a work without its being
possible to designate this as obscene. =A book can justly be called
obscene only when it has been composed simply, solely, and exclusively
for the purpose of producing sexual excitement=--when its contents aim
at inducing in its readers a condition of coarse and brutish sensuality.
This definition clearly excludes all those literary products which,
notwithstanding the existence of isolated erotic, or even obscene,
passages, =are yet composed for purposes radically different from that
above described=--it excludes, for example, artistic, religious, and
scientific works (the history of civilization, poetry, belles-lettres,
medicine, folk-lore, etc.).
The question, namely, whether =simple sexual relationships= can properly
be made the object of =artistic= or =scientific= representation, may be
answered with an unconditional affirmative, if we presuppose a purely
artistic or scientific critical representation and consideration of
erotic objects; that is to say, in the work of art, or the scientific
work, as the case may be, the purely sexual must completely disappear
behind the higher artistic or scientific conception. This is possible
only when that which is represented is =completely devoid of actuality=;
when time and place are entirely ignored, so that the object is regarded
rather from its =general human= aspect; and when, further, in the
artistic representation of the purely sexual we find expression also, on
the part of the artist, of a conception enlightening and to a degree
=overcoming= the purely physical; or when, finally, on the part of the
man of science, we recognize a critical point of view, by means of which
the =causal= relationships of the sexual find expression.
The =general tendency= is determinative, not the shocking individual
detail. I need not waste any more words upon the importance of medical,
ethnological, psychological, and historical works upon the sexual
life.[777] This fact is, fortunately, now fully recognized even by the
greatest morality fanatics, and it would hardly now be possible in
Germany that a law-court--as recently in Belgium[778]--should witness
proceedings against a medical undertaking on account of pornographic (!)
illustrations.[779]
The same is true of the artistic consideration of sexual matters. For
example, how readily everything sexual lends itself to the =humorous=
point of view! How short here is the step from the sublime to the
ridiculous! In a copy which lies before me of Fr. Th. Vischers’ first
work, “The Sublime and the Ridiculous” (Stuttgart, 1837), which was once
in the possession of a friend of Goethe, the Driburg physician, Anton
Theobald Brück, we find on p. 203, in his handwriting, the apt marginal
note: “Wit gilds the nickel of the obscene.” Sexual matters actually
provoke humour. This fact was enunciated by Schopenhauer, and was
ascribed by him to the profound earnestness which underlies the sexual
(“Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” i., 330). For this reason, as Eduard
Fuchs[780] rightly insists, the majority of all erotic creations are of
the nature of caricatures. The most brilliant advocate of this humorous
view of sexual matters is the brilliant English artist Thomas
Rowlandson, whose works, both in England and in Germany, have long been
kept under lock and key.
The =mystic-satanic= element in the sexual also stimulates artistic
representations, and in the works of Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly,
Félicien Rops, Aubrey Beardsley, Toulouse Lautrec, etc., we see that the
“perverse” also is thoroughly capable of erotic representation. But even
pure obscenity, without any underlying idea--as, for example, we see it
to-day in the obscene drawings of Carracci--may have the effect of a
simple artistic product, if the taste of the onlooker is so far matured
that the purely sexual can recede completely behind the artistic
conception. We must, generally speaking, not fail to take into account
the individuality and the age of the spectator or reader. For =children=
and =immature= persons, even works that are obviously =not obscene=,
such as artistic, religious, and scientific literature, may, in certain
circumstances, be dangerous--works which adults regard and judge in the
spirit of their own time, as, for example, the =Bible= and the writings
of the =Fathers of the Church=. John Milton, who was certainly not
lacking in piety, wrote: “The Bible often relates =blasphemies= in no
very delicate manner; it describes the =fleshly lusts of vicious men=
not without elegance.”[781] =Books which are to be read by children=
cannot be chosen too carefully, for a very large proportion also of the
literature which is not, properly speaking, obscene, but which deals
with sexual matters, has =upon the childish imagination= an effect
equivalent to that of true pornography upon the adult.
In passing judgment on an erotic work, we must, finally, take into
consideration the =standard of the epoch= to which the work belongs; we
must bear in mind the nature of the =contemporary moral ideas=. Much
which to us to-day appears obscene was not so in the middle ages. On
the other hand, we must not excuse everything on this plea, for our
forefathers were also familiar with pornographic and utterly obscene
books. Works such as those of the Marquis de Sade or of Nicolas Chorier
(“Gespräche der Aloysia Sigaea”) have not only an importance in the
history of civilization: they also have an interest for anthropologists
and medical men. They constitute remarkable documents of the nature and
mode of manifestation of sexual perversities in earlier times. Moreover,
all pornographic writings afford us valuable assistance in our study of
the genesis of sexual perversions. But while we admit the importance of
such writings--for example, those of de Sade--to learned men and
bibliophiles, we cannot condemn in sufficiently strong terms the insane
undertaking of translating de Sade’s books in our own day. This is
simply pornology; for all those who, as medical men, psychologists, or
historians of civilization, are occupied with pornographic literature,
are--or, at any rate, should be--competent to read these authors in the
original tongue.[782] I feel therefore that the mass of recently
published German translations of the pornographic writings of John
Cleland, Mirabeau, Nerciat, de Sade, of the “Antijustine” of Rétif de la
Bretonne, of the “Portier des Chartreux,” of Alfred de Musset’s
“Gamiani,” etc., can only be described as pornography, although I must
admit that the original editions are often inaccessible to the
scientific student interested in the matter, who in such cases must,
_faute de mieux_, content himself with translations.
These obscene writings may be compared with =natural poisons, which must
also be carefully studied=, but which can be entrusted =only to those=
who are fully acquainted with their dangerous effects, who know how to
control and counteract these effects, and who regard them as an object
of natural research by means of which they will be enabled to obtain an
understanding of other phenomena.
The pornographic element of literature and art[783] has an ancient
history. In Greece, Rome, and Egypt, but more especially in India,
Japan, and China, there existed an extensive obscene literature. In
Europe the =French=, =Italian=, and =English= obscene literature
occupies the first place as regards comprehensiveness and wide
diffusion. Exceptionally dangerous in their effect are French
pornographic writings, because their mode of expression is so elegant,
whereas the English obscene books, with the single exception of
Cleland’s “Fanny Hill,” are positively deterrent, on account of the
coarse phraseology employed in them. The German writings in this
department are not much better than the English, and consist to a large
extent of bad translations of foreign pornographic works--if we except a
few older writings, which are repeatedly reissued, such as the
“Denkwürdigkeiten des Herrn von H.,” by Schilling, or the “Memoiren
einer Sängerin,” the first part of which is ascribed to the celebrated
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient. Speaking generally, it is a remarkable
phenomenon (and one which is in flat contradiction to the assertion so
frequently made that pornography and true art cannot possibly be
associated) that so many spirits of the first rank, great artists either
in literature or plastic art, have enriched pornography themselves by
works of their own, or, failing this, have at least been notorious
lovers of pornography. This fact was clearly manifested at the time of
the Italian renascence, but it can be traced down to the present day.
Men like Voltaire (“La Pucelle d’Orléans”), Mirabeau (“L’Éducation de
Laure,” “Ma Conversion,” etc.), Alfred de Musset (“Gamiani”), Guy de
Maupassant (“Les Cousines de la Colonelle”), Théophile Gautier (“Lettre
à la Présidente”), and Gustave Droz (“Un Été à la Campagne”), have
written indubitably pornographic books. But the heroes of our own German
literature have not been free from such tendencies. Goethe not only
wrote the “Tagebuch,” but composed other (=still completely unknown=)
erotica, which, by command of the Grand Duchess Sophie, were sealed and
hidden away.[784] Schopenhauer,[785] who said to Frauenstädt that a
philosopher must be active, “not only with his head, but also with his
genital organs,” was a lover of pornography, even of a skatological
character, and was fond of telling “bawdy stories which will not bear
repetition”--for example, he would enumerate the different kinds of
kissing, describe the varieties of the sexual impulse, etc.[786]
Schiller and Goethe enjoyed reading Diderot’s “The Nun” (“La
Religieuse”) and his “Bijoux Indiscrets,” Rétif’s “Monsieur Nicolas,”
and the “Liaisons Dangereuses” of Choderlos de Laclos, books which would
nowadays be suppressed as “immoral.” Lichtenberg also was a very zealous
reader, and a connoisseur, not only of erotic, but also of pornographic
literature. In his letters he alludes to reading such pornographic works
as Cleland’s “Woman of Pleasure” (“Letters,” edition Leitzmann and
Schüddekopf, vol. ii., p. 187) and “Lyndamine,” etc. Talented women of
that period also read pornographic works. Pauline Wiesel, the beloved of
Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, greatly admired Mirabeau’s obscene
writings, as we learn from a letter of Friedrich Gentz, in which the
latter decries them as “cold libertinage,” and recommends to his friend
similar products of Voltaire, Crébillon, and Grécourt.[787]
These facts do not excuse pornography, but they refute the assertion
that pornography and true artistic perception are incompatible. As
Schopenhauer truly says, many contrasts can exist side by side in the
same human being. This is even more clearly manifest in pictorial art.
Anyone who turns over the leaves of Eduard Fuchs’ book upon the erotic
element in caricature will learn that the greatest painters have
occasionally painted deliberately =improper, obscene= pictures. I need
mention only the names of Lucas Cranach, Annibale Carracci, H. S. Beham,
Rembrandt, G. Aldegrever, Adrian van Ostade, Watteau, Boucher,
Fragonard, Vivan-Denon, Gillray, Lawrence, Rowlandson, Heinrich Ramberg,
Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Schadow, Otto Greiner, Willette, Kubin, Julius
Pascin,[788] Beardsley, etc.[789]
Side by side with these higher pornographic works there exists also a
lower kind--obscene garbage writings and pornographic pictures of the
worst possible kind, such as picture postcards, “act-photographs,” etc.,
in which all possible sexual perversities are represented, either in
printed matter or by pictures (masturbation, _poses lubriques_,
representations of nude portions of the body, copralagnistic and
urolagnistic acts, bestiality, sadism, masochism, pæderasty, incest,
fornicatory acts with children, orgies, obscene paraphrases of proverbs,
rape, etc.). Kemmer (_op. cit._, pp. 31-45) gives a detailed account of
the sale of these obscenities, and of the way in which they are
advertised in catalogues, etc. They are manufactured in France, Germany,
Belgium, and Spain (especially in Barcelona). The dangerous character of
these articles is indisputable; they have a suggestive influence, and
stimulate those who look at them to imitative acts. They may thus
directly give rise to sexual perversities.[790] But they are not so
dangerous as the true =hawkers’ literature=[791] and =popular garbage
writings= about “secret sins.” These inflame the imagination, and thus
lead to crime and sexual infamies. This is an old experience. In the
year 1901, at the trial of the boy murderers Thärigen and Kroft
(_Vossische Zeitung_, No. 161, April 5, 1901), the two murderers
confessed that they had been incited to the commission of crime by
backstairs romances, and by tales of Indians and robbers. The same cause
was alleged, in December, 1906, in Kottbus, by a boy fourteen years of
age, who was accused of murder.
How are we to counteract the moral harm done by such literature? I
consider all the efforts of societies for the suppression of immorality
to be illusory and two-edged, for they =always fail= to attain their
end; and in addition, unfortunately--a matter of which there is no
doubt--they endanger the freedom of art and science.[792] All measures
calculated to keep away from children and immature persons books which
might serve to give rise to sexual stimulation are worthy of support;
and it must be remembered that =for children and immature persons
scientific books, religious writings--as, for example, the unexpurgated
Bible--and also illustrated comic papers, etc., may be dangerous=. But,
for the most part, all prohibitions, and the whole campaign against
immorality, =serve only to favour pornography=. The stricter the
measures taken against it, =the wider becomes its diffusion=. This is a
=very old experience=, an incontrovertible fact. Tacitus (“Ann.,” XIV.,
c. 50) rightly explained this peculiar phenomenon: “_Libros exuri
jussit_, =conquisitos lectitatosque, donec cum periculo parabantur=:
_mox licentia habendi oblivionem attulit_” (“He issued a decree that the
books were to be burned; =but as long as it was dangerous to publish
them they were in great request, and were eagerly read=: whereas as soon
as people were permitted to possess them they passed into oblivion”).
The pornographic books which during the last five hundred years have
been burned by the public executioner, which have been confiscated, and
which have been repeatedly destroyed to the last copy, the obscene
engravings of which the plates have been destroyed--have all these
disappeared from the surface of the earth, have all these confiscations
and condemnations[793] of _livres défendus_ been of any use whatever?
No. All the pornographic writings, confiscated and destroyed a thousand
times over, =reappear again and again=; indeed, they become more
numerous the more the attempt is made to suppress them. The campaign
against them has always been a campaign against a hydra, a labour of the
Danaïdes, which has no object, and only entails the disadvantage that,
in the general zeal to put an end to immoral literature, scientific and
artistic interests are most seriously endangered. Happily, this campaign
is to-day less vigorous than it was of yore. In proportion to the
population, immoral literature in Germany was before 1870 far more
widely diffused than it is at the present day. During the sixth and
seventh decades of the nineteenth century it flourished more
luxuriantly; even during the time of the war of liberation numerous
original obscene books were printed in Germany. To-day the interest in
social, scientific, technical, and philosophic questions, and in sport,
has become so great, and the interest in sexual questions has become so
much =more profound=, that an overgrowth of pornography is no longer to
be feared. From these facts we recognize at once =the only way=, and
=the right way=, which we must follow in order to paralyze the evil
influences of pornography. This is to take a proper care for =genuine
popular culture, to increase educational opportunities=, and to =reduce
the price of books=. A single undertaking such as that of A. Reimann,
who, in his _Deutsche Bücherei_, publishes for threepence a volume a
collection of choice literature, containing not only the best fiction,
but also popularly written scientific works from the pens of leading men
of science and essayists--such an enterprise is far more effective in
the suppression of garbage literature than all the Unions for the
Promotion of Morality.
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER XXX.--In connexion with the questions
discussed in this chapter, the reader may profitably consult the
recently published book of Willy Schindler (written, however, from an
unduly subjective standpoint), “The Erotic Element in Literature and
Art” (Berlin, 1907).
[English readers interested in the question of the dangers of
pornographic literature and art in relation to that “liberty of
unlicensed printing” which is so essential to the welfare of the
modern social democratic State, should read the thoughtful and
luminous discussion of the topic by H. G. Wells, in one of the later
chapters of his admirable “Mankind in the Making.”--TRANSLATOR.]
[776] Johannes David Schreber (of Meissen), “De libris obscoenis”
(Leipzig, 1688, quarto).
[777] _Cf._ Iwan Bloch, “The Lex Heinze and Medical Authorship,”
published in _Die Medizinsche Woche_, No. 9, March 12, 1900.
[778] _Cf._, regarding this matter, the _Aerztlicher
Zentral-Anzeiger_, No. 24, June 10, 1901.
[779] Unfortunately, I was mistaken in this optimistic assumption. In
the _Journal of the German Book Trade_, No. 77, April 3, 1906, I find
among the list of confiscated works “Means for the Prevention of
Conception”--a separate impression of the _Deutsche Medizinische
Presse_, Berlin, No. 7, April 5, 1899. By the decision of one of the
Berlin courts the further issue of this work, and the further use of
the stereotype forms from which it was printed, were forbidden.
[780] Eduard Fuchs, “The Erotic Element in Caricature,” p. 10 (Berlin,
1904), _Cf._ also Paul Leppin, “The Ludicrous in the Erotic,”
published in _Das Blaubuch_, edited by Ilgenstein and Kalthoff, No 4,
February 1, 1906, pp. 149-155.
[781] John Milton’s “Areopagitica.”
[782] An exception must be made of the work of Aretino, which in the
Italian original is extremely difficult to understand. I, therefore,
regard the masterly translation published by the Insel-Verlag as a
justifiable undertaking.
[783] To those desirous of obtaining information regarding modern
pornography, I can recommend, above all, the work of Ludwig Kemmer,
based upon official material, “Die graphische Reklame der
Prostitution,” Munich, 1906. _Cf._ also Heinrich Stümcke, “The Immoral
Literature of the Present Day,” published in “_Zwischen den Garben_,”
pp. 100-107 (Leipzig, 1899); same author, “Literary Sins and Affairs
of the Heart,” pp. 30-34 (Berlin, 1894); Sebastian Brant,
“Prostitution as displayed in the Great Art Exhibition of Berlin,
1895” (second edition, Berlin, 1895). Consult also the chapter
concerning erotic literature and art in my “Recent Researches
regarding the Marquis de Sade,” 1904 (pp. 237-272), and my “Sexual
Life in England,” vol. iii., pp. 235-473.
[784] _Cf._ G. Hirth, “Ways to Love,” p. 352. This fact has been
confirmed to me by Herr F. von Biedermann. When Frauenstädt once said
to Schopenhauer that Goethe, when away from the Court, gladly made use
of coarse expressions, Schopenhauer replied: “Yes, many contrasts can
exist side by side in the same human being,” and he confirmed the fact
from his own experience that Goethe was fond of gross phrases. _Cf._
Sohopenhauer’s “Gespräche und Selbstgespräche,” edited by E.
Grisebach, p. 40 (Berlin, 1902). Certain “Secret Epigrams of Goethe”
have recently been privately printed (forty copies only were issued).
Many similar erotic poems of Goethe’s are still carefully preserved in
Goethe-Archives, and withheld from publication.
[785] “Arthur Schopenhauer,” by E. O. Lindner, and “Memorabilia,
Letters, and Posthumous Pieces,” edited by Julius Frauenstädt, p. 270
(Berlin, 1862).
[786] Schopenhauer’s “Gespräche und Selbstgespräche,” pp. 42, 53, 106.
[787] Rudolf von Gottschall, “The German National Literature of the
Nineteenth Century,” vol. i., p. 255 (fifth edition, Breslau, 1881).
[788] Julius Pascin. Regarding this painter of the perverse, who has
recently become more widely known, see Max Ludwig, “Erregungen und
Beruhigungen,” published in _Welt am Montag_, December, 21, 1906.
[789] The name of Hokusai may well be added to this list. There exists
a series of outline drawings by this great Japanese artist, in which
the beauty of the draughtmanship is only equalled by the ingenuity
with which sexual perversions are depicted.--TRANSLATOR.
[790] _Cf._, regarding this matter, my “Contributions to the Etiology
of Psychopathia Sexualis,” vol. i., pp. 194-200.
[791] _Cf._ Paul Dehn, “Modern Hawkers’ Literature” (Stuttgart, 1894);
“The Repression of Garbage Literature,” published in the
_Nationalzeitung_, No. 683, December 11, 1906; Johannes Liebert, “Das
Indianerbuch und die Backfischerzählung,” published in _Der
Zeitgeist_, No. 51, of December 17, 1906.
[792] The literature dealing with the campaign against pornography is
very extensive. I may mention: Francisque Sarcey, “La Presse
Pornographique,” published in _Le Livre: Bibliographie Moderne_,
November, 1880, pp. 287-289 (Paris, 1880); Hermann Roeren, “Public
Immorality and its Repression” (Cologne, 1903); F. S. Schultze,
“Immorality and the Christian Family” (Leipzig, 1892); Jacques
Jolowicz, “The Campaign against Immorality” (Leipzig, 1904). Works of
an opposite tendency: Karl Frenzel, “Art and the Criminal Law”
(Berlin, 1885); rejoinder to this by Max Heinemann, “The Graef Trial
and German Art” (Berlin, 1885); “The Moral Salvation Army in Berlin: a
Union of Men for the Repression of Public Immorality. A Contemporary
Picture by * * *” (Berlin, 1889); “Against Prudery and Lying” (Munich,
1892), contains, _inter alia_; “The Campaign against Immorality on the
Part of the Pietists, and Free Literature,” by Dr. Oskar Panizza;
Georg Keben, “The Pons Asinorum of Morality” (Berlin, 1900); Heinrich
Schneegans, “Prudery and Science,” published in the _Frankfurter
Zeitung_, No. 123, May 5, 1906; “Punishment and Morality,” published
in the _Vossische Zeitung_, No. 447, September 24, 1903 (condemning
the confiscation of Hans von Kahlenberg’s “Nixchen”).
[793] With regard to the extent of this campaign against pornography,
consult: “Catalogue des Ecrits, Gravures et Dessins condamnés depuis
1814 jusqu’au 1^{er} Janvier, 1850, suivi de la Liste des Individus
condamnés pour délits de Presse” (Paris, 1850); “Catalogue des
Ouvrages condamnés comme contraire à la Morale publique et aux bonnes
Mœurs du 1^{er} Janvier, 1814, au 31 Decembre, 1873” (Paris, 1874);
Fernand Drujon, “Catalogue des Ouvrages, écrits et Dessins de toute
Nature poursuivis, supprimés ou condamnés depuis le 21 Octobre, 1814,
jusqu’au 31 Juillet, 1877, etc.” (Paris, 1878); Index Librorum
Prohibitorum Sanctissimi Domini, Pii IX. Pont. Max. Jussu editus.
Editio novissima in qua libri omnes ab Apostolica Sede usque ad annum
1786, proscripti suis locis recensentur (Rom, 1876); Catalogue des
Livres défendus par la Commission Impériale et Royale jusqu’à l’année
1786 (Brüssel, 1788); O. Delepierre, “Des Livres condamnés au Feu en
Angleterre.” For Germany, see the recorded reports regarding forbidden
and confiscated matter contained in the _Journal of the German
Book-Trade_.
CHAPTER XXXI
LOVE IN POLITE (BELLETRISTIC) LITERATURE
“_The question arises whether it is not absolutely_ =necessary= _that
art should represent this erotic element forbidden by the culture of
our time, because it corresponds to a profound subjective human need,
to a yearning for the completion of man’s imperfect
existence_.”--KONRAD LANGE.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXXI
Love the nucleus of belletristic literature -- Necessity for the
erotic element in polite literature -- Remarks of the æsthetic Konrad
Lange on this subject -- Sexual topics in belles-lettres are
principally problem-literature -- As a mirror of the times --
Description of puberty in our poems -- The _demi-vierge_ type -- The
“Vera” books -- Misogyny and ascetic romances, and rejoinders -- The
“intimacy” and free love in literature -- Irregular sexual intercourse
in literature -- Marriage in literature -- Novels of divorce -- The
emancipated woman in belletristic literature -- Novels dealing with
“fallen woman” -- Precursors and imitations of the “Diary of a Lost
Woman” -- Belletristic descriptions of brothel life, and of the life
of prostitution -- Alcoholism and syphilis in literature -- Sexual
perversities in belletristic literature -- Larocque’s “Voluptueuses,”
etc. -- Homosexuality and bisexuality in belles-lettres -- Masochism
and sadism -- Psychological love romances -- More earnest and more
profound grasp of sexual questions displayed in modern belletristic
literature.
CHAPTER XXXI
It is a familiar fact that from the very earliest uprising of
belletristic literature its nucleus has always been the passion of love.
There are, indeed, very few recent romances or dramas in which love does
not play a part. It is a fable to say that sexual matters have =to-day
for the first time= been freely discussed in belletristic literature, to
assert that the predominance of erotic literature (which is to be
distinguished from pornographic literature by its artistic intention and
form) is especially characteristic of modern civilization. A glance at
the catalogue of the library of the poet and bibliophile Eduard
Grisebach,[794] which contains the erotic literature of the world,
teaches us that such literature has existed at all times and among all
civilized nations. The erotic in belles-lettres has not merely a
permissive existence, but by necessity forms a part of it--a fact very
justly recognized by the æsthetic Konrad Lange.[795] Who that knows
human nature can doubt the fact? Lange remarks:
“Art which represents the nude, because an opportunity exists for it
to delight in the representation of the flesh, because it regards
humanity as the crown of creation, and because it admires the
purposive anatomical structure of the human body--such an art is
=within its own rights=, and does what it =may= and =must=.
“If we regard the representation of the nude in painting and sculpture
as not repulsive, although it does not suit us in ordinary life to go
naked, =so also in the poesy of the erotic we must sometimes allow a
form to which in ordinary life a justification is refused=. Indeed,
the question arises whether it is not absolutely =essential= that art
should represent the erotic, although this is forbidden by the
civilization of our time; for this corresponds to a profound
subjective human need, a yearning for the completion of man’s
imperfect existence.
“Next to hunger and thirst, love is the strongest human emotion; next
to death, its enjoyment is the most important human experience. It is
not to be wondered at that art is especially fond of depicting it. Art
which wishes to represent life in general cannot leave unconsidered an
instinct which plays so important a part in the life of the majority
of human beings, and from which such a number of conflicts proceed.
With regard to the degree and the kind of representation, =the
decision depends not upon moral, but exclusively upon æsthetic,
considerations=. The task of the poet is no more than this: to
describe transgressions of the moral code in such a manner that they
appear to arise by an inner necessity out of the whole course of
activity, out of the characters, out of the objective relationships.
Then the immoral content comes to the help of the illusion.”
It is naturally impossible, within the narrow compass of this work, to
give an exhaustive account of the sexual element in modern belletristic
literature. I shall only refer to a few well-known phenomena which all
exhibit a common feature. Love and sexual topics in belles-lettres are
principally =problem= literature. The earnest and profound social
perception with which sexual problems are to-day considered and
explained is reflected also in the literature of our time. The adult
will long ago in these matters have risen above the level of shallow
story-telling and schoolgirl morality, and demands an earnest and honest
representation of sexual problems. Frey[796] justly observes that it is
a general and a healthy tendency of the time, not a tendency to perverse
lust, which impels the choice of erotic material. In the economically
determined forced labour of persons of average ability, in the monotony
and the poverty of adventure of our civilized life, it is only by
eroticism that into many a life any individual colouring is brought.
In the following brief sketch of the sexual problems treated in recent
belletristic literature, I hope to give some idea of the =very numerous=
and interesting topics which the various phenomena of the sexual life
now offer to the poet.
The very =first= sexual activities of the child have been subjected to
poetic treatment, as in Frank Wedekind’s drama, “Frühlingserwachen”
(“The Awakening of Spring”); and the sexual note of the time of puberty
is treated in Bonnetain’s celebrated onanistic novel, “Charlot s’Amuse,”
in Walter Bloem’s novel, “Der krasse Fuchs,” in Max von Münchhausen’s
“Eckhart von Jeperen,” and very strikingly in the novel “Lothar oder
Untergang einer Kindheit” (“Lothar, or the Ruin of Childhood”), by Oscar
A. H. Schmitz. In connexion with the consideration of the time of
puberty in belletristic literature, the following works may also be
mentioned: “Unterm Rad,” by Hermann Hesse; “Freund Hein,” by Emil
Strauss; “Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless,” by Robert Musil; “Was
zur Sonne Will,” by Hans Hart; “Eine Gymnasiastentragödie,” a drama in
four acts, by Robert Sandeks. Consult also Gustav Zieler’s review of
“Frühlingserwachen,” published in _Das Literarische Echo_ of August 15,
1907.
The type of girl who ripens to a premature sexuality, and who, though
physically still intact, is spiritually corrupt, has been made widely
known by Marcel Prévost’s “Demivierge.” A companion novel to this is
“Nixchen,” by Hans von Kahlenberg. Nobler types of girls playing with
this vice are described by Clara Eysell-Kilburger in “Dilettanten des
Lasters.”
Diametrically opposed to these are the “Vera” characters, so called
after the book by Vera, “Eine für Viele. Aus dem Tagebuche eines
Mädchens” (“One for Many. From the Diary of a Girl”), which demands from
the man before marriage the same purity and chastity that man himself
demands from his future wife. Svava, in Björnsen’s drama “Der
Handschuh,” is a similar type. Regarding this problem an entire
literature has sprung into being, which associated itself with Vera’s
above-mentioned book, such as “Eine für sich Selbst” (“One for
Herself”), by “Auch Jemand” (“Somebody Else”); “Einer für Viele” (“One
Man for Many”); “Eine für Vera. Aus dem Tagebuche einer jungen Frau”
(“One for Vera. From the Diary of a Young Wife”)--these in favour of
Vera’s demand--and Christine Thaler’s “Eine Mutter für Viele” (“One
Mother for Many”); by Verus, “Einer für Viele” (“One Man for Many”), and
“Kranke Seelen. Von einem Arzte” (“Morbid Souls. By a Physician”)--these
in opposition to Vera’s demand--for masculine abstinence from sexual
intercourse before marriage.[797]
Next we may mention certain novels glorifying =misogyny=, such as
Strindberg’s “Beichte eines Toren” (“Confessions of a Fool”) and
“Vergangenheit eines Toren” (“The Past of a Fool”); and Tolstoi’s “The
Kreutzer Sonata,” in which absolute asceticism is demanded. These ideas,
which in Weininger found a pseudo-scientific apologist, have been
contested in an interesting autobiography in the form of a romance, “Das
Weib vom Manne erschaffen: Bekenntnisse einer Frau” (“Woman created from
Man: Confessions of a Woman”), translated from the Norwegian by Tyra
Bentsen. Zola’s magnificent hymn in favour of fruitfulness in
“Fécondité” is also a refutation of this extreme ascetic-malthusian
standpoint.
The “intimacy” and “free love” are to-day the subject of innumerable
romances and novels. Tovote discusses the problem in “Im Liebesrausch”
(“In the Intoxication of Love”), and in other novels, more superficially
from the grossly sensual side; the ideal free love, ending indeed in
marriage, is described in Peter Nansen’s “Maria.”[798] Similarly,
Frenssen, in “Hilligenlei,” deals with the preconjugal sexual
intercourse so common in country districts, and he reproves in powerful
words the repression of natural impulses by conventional morality.[799]
In “Martin Birks Jugend,” Hjalmar Söderberg has described the great
difficulties of ideal-minded young men who are not in a position to
marry, and who are repelled by the idea of intercourse with common
prostitutes.
In contrast to this, Camille Lemonnier, in “Die Liebe im Menschen,”
describes the great danger of an =overgrowth= of the sexual; and Arthur
Schnitzler, in his admirable “Reigen,” describes the utter misery of
=irregular sexual intercourse=, of true “wild love,” and displays
vividly before our eyes the results of sexual promiscuity.
The social contempt and the other disastrous consequences which to-day
follow free love, in the form of =illegitimate motherhood=, have been
described in dramas, such as Sudermann’s “Heimat” and Gerhart
Hauptmann’s “Rose Bernd,” and in romances such as Gabriele Reuter’s “Aus
guter Familie,” Johann Bojer’s “Eine Pilgerfahrt,” and Ernst
Eberhardt’s “Das Kind.” The manifold conflicts resulting from free love
and illegitimate motherhood are also described by Marcelle Tinayre in
“La Rebelle.”
In belles-lettres we also find numerous accounts of the burning question
of our day--that of =coercive marriage=. Above all, Ibsen, in “Ghosts,”
“A Doll’s House,” “The Lady from the Sea,” “Hedda Gabler,” and “Little
Eyolf,” has exposed the manifold injuries resulting from modern
conventional marriage, and has propounded the ideal of a new marriage,
based upon a deeply subjective conception of love and upon life’s work
in common. The influence of Ibsen is further shown in numerous dramas
and romances dealing with the marriage problem. Of these, it will
suffice to mention a few of the most successful, such as “Die Sklavin,”
by Ludwig Fulda; “Fanny Roth: eine Jungfrauengeschichte,” by Grete
Meisel-Hess; and “Was siehst du aber den Splitter,” by Karl Larsen.
The important question of differences in class and social position in
married life is considered by Ernst von Wildenbruch in his drama, “Die
Haubenlerche.”
The classical novels of adultery are, and will remain, Erneste Feydeau’s
delightful “Fanny,” and Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” In French
literature in general, in dramas as well as romances, adultery is a
favourite motive.[800]
Isolated but especially characteristic phenomena of the sexual life have
also found expression in poetry. Thus Ernst von Wolzogen, in “Das Dritte
Geschlect,” describes the various types of =emancipated women=; the same
question forms the theme of “Die Neue Eva,” by Maria Janitschek. Anna
Mahr, also, in Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Einsame Menschen,” is such a type.
In all of these the conflict between woman and personality is described;
and this is done with exceptional force and clearness in “Das Neue
Weib,” by M. Janitschek.[801]
The contrast to the woman who wishes to become a personality is to be
found in the woman who has never possessed a personality, or who has
lost it, the woman who has become only a chattel, an object of enjoyment
for man--=the prostitute=. I alluded before (p. 315) to the fact that
Margarete Böhme, in her sensational “Diary of a Lost Woman,” was not the
first to describe the life of a prostitute. Already from the sixteenth
century there date such romances as, for example, the celebrated “Lozana
Andaluza” of Francisco Delgado; also Defoe’s “History of Moll Flanders,”
and Abbé Prévost’s “Manon Lescaut” (both belonging to the eighteenth
century). Besides the “Memoirs of a Hamburg Prostitute” (_vide supra_,
p. 315), there exist still other precursors, belonging to the nineteenth
century, of the “Diary of a Lost Woman,” such as E. de Goncourt’s “Fille
Elisa,” Leon Leipsiger’s “Ballhaus-Anna,” etc. The “Diary of a Lost
Woman” naturally soon found imitations, such as Hedwig Hard’s
“Confessions of a Fallen Woman,” the “Diary of Another Lost Woman”; and
the purely pornographic “History of Josephine Mutzenbecher, a Viennese
Prostitute,” Daudet’s “Sapho,” Zola’s “Nana,” Cristian Krogh’s
“Albertine,” and George Moore’s “Esther Waters,” belong to the same
class.[802]
=Brothel life= and the =life of prostitution=, in all their
relationships to modern civilization, and in their influence upon human
character, are described by Frank Wedekind in “Die Büchse der Pandora”
(“Pandora’s Box”) and in his “Hidalla”; and with exceptional vividness
by Oscar Metenier, in his romance cycle, extending to seven volumes,
“Tartufes et Satyres.”
The rôle of =alcohol= and of =syphilis= in the sexual life have also
been discussed in belletristic literature. In Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Vor
Sonnenaufgang” (“Before Sunrise”), Loth abandons his beloved Helne as
soon as he learns that she springs from a degenerate family of
drunkards. The disastrous consequences of syphilis are described by
Ibsen in “Ghosts,” and recently most vividly by Brieux in “Les
Avariés.”[803]
Extraordinarily comprehensive, especially in France, is the belletristic
literature of =sexual perversities=. After the manner of the
“Rougon-Macquart” series by Zola, Jean Larocque has written a romance
cycle of eleven volumes, under the general title of “Les Voluptueuses”
(the separate titles are: “Isey,” “Viviane,” “Odile,” “Fausta,”
“Daphne,” “Phœbe,” “Fusette,” “La Naïade,” “Louvette,” “Lucine,” and
“Hémine”; in the last volume we find even a discussion of copralagnistic
details!). Some volumes of this series--for example, “Phœbe”--have even
been translated into English. The works also of Baudelaire, Verlaine,
and Guy de Maupassant, offer a rich material for the study of
psychopathia sexualis. In this connexion I may also mention the poetic
collections “La Légende des Sexes,” by Edmond Haraucourt; “Rimes de
Joie,” by Théodore Hannon; and also the “Chants de Maldoror.” Octave
Mirbeau also, in his “Journal d’une Femme de Chambre,” provides us with
a review of the entire register of sexual perversities.[804] He, and
also the talented Rachilde (who in her romances “Monsieur Venus,” “Les
Hors Nature,” and “Madame Adonis,” considers the question of
homosexuality), never fail to exhibit the artistic spirit in their
descriptions of these delicate topics--and, indeed, _l’art pour l’art_
doctrine seems to have been created especially in relation to this
department of thought.
=Homosexuality= and =bisexuality= have been considered in such a large
number of works that it is quite impossible to mention them all here. A
fairly complete bibliography of these will be found in the volumes of
the _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_.[805] I can allude here only
to a few especially well-known and artistically important homosexual
romances and poems. Jouy, in his admirable “Galerie des Femmes” (Paris,
1799), devotes to the “Lesbiennes” a special chapter; Théophile Gautier,
in “Mademoiselle de Maupin,” discusses the interesting problem of
bisexuality; Zola, in “Nana,” represents the Lesbian relationship; Paul
Verlaine in 1867 published tribadistic poetry under the title of “Les
Amis.”[806] Since that time Englishmen, Germans, Belgians, and Italians
have published belletristic descriptions of homosexual relationships. I
may allude to Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Grey,” Georges Eekhoud’s
“Escal-Vigor,” Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” Prime-Stevenson’s
“Irenæus,” Louis d’Herdy’s “L’Homme-Sirene,” F. G. Pernauhm’s “Ercole
Tomei,” “Die Infamen,” and “Der junge Kurt”; also the sensational
“Idylle Sapphique” of the demi-mondaine Liane de Pougy, the epic
“Ganymedes” of C. W. Geissler, and the drama “Jasminblüte” of Dilsner.
Masochism found its introduction to belles-lettres by the writer from
whom the very name is derived, L. von Sacher-Masoch, more especially in
“Vermächtnis Kains.” Of his novels, the best known is “Venus im Pelz”;
others are “Galizischen Geschichten,” “Messalinen Wiens,” “Die schwarze
Zarin,” and “Wiener Hofgeschichten.” He still remains the only writer
who has treated this peculiar perversity in an artistic manner. The more
recent masochistic and sadistic novels belong to the worst kind of
hawker’s literature. Lou Andreas-Salomé only, in “Eine Ausschweifung,”
has artistically described the spiritual masochism of a woman with the
fine psychological characterization peculiar to her work.
Quite recently there has actually appeared a masochistic monthly
magazine, entitled _Geissel und Rute: Archiv für Erziehung_ [_sic!_]
_Erwachsener_ (_Whip and Rod: Archives for the Education_ [_sic!_] _of
Adults_), edited by C. vom Stein, Buda-Pesth. The first number appeared
on February 1, 1907. It contains masochistic stories, correspondence,
historical sketches, and advertisements.
Sadistic love is the theme of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” and of the
“Diaboliques” of Barbey d’Aurevilly. The satanic element is dealt with
in Huysmans’ “La Bas,” and in various novels by St. Przybyszewski.
Herbert Eulenburg’s drama “Ritter Blaubart” also represents a sadistic
type.
In conclusion, I may allude to some authors who represent to us the
whole psychology of modern love, and, above all, the depths of the love
of reflection, its spiritual refinement, all the manifold moods,
illusions, and dreams of the modern eros. J. P. Jakobsen’s “Niels
Lyhne,” Hans Jäger’s “Christiania-Bohême,” Oskar Mysing’s “Grosse
Leidenschaft,” Heinrich Mann’s “Jagd nach Liebe,” Gabriele d’Annunzio’s
“Il Piacere,” “Trionfo della Morte,” and “Fuoco,” represent aspects of
love. With the profoundest art, Lou Andreas-Salomé, in her
stories--which in this respect I regard as among the most valuable
products of modern literature--“Ruth,” “Fenitschka,” “Ma,” and
“Menschenkinder,” represents the finer spiritual relationships between
man and woman. This writer appears to possess the most intimate
knowledge of the soul of the modern woman. Elisabeth Dauthendey, also
(“Vom neuen Weibe und seiner Liebe”), Gabriele Reuter (“Liselotte von
Reckling,” “Ellen von der Weiden”), and Rosa Mayreder (“Idole”), give
most powerful descriptions of complicated feminine characters.[807] An
important and interesting topic is discussed by Yvette Guilbert in “Les
Demivieilles”--the psychology of the woman beginning to grow old, who
cannot yet renounce love and yet is forced to do so by rude reality.
The writings to which I have referred in this chapter--the number of
which could easily be increased tenfold without exhausting the abundance
of recent belletristic literature occupied in the discussion of the
sexual problem--should suffice to give some idea of how great is the
interest in the important problems of the sexual life, how detailed and
complicated the problems of that life have become under the influence of
modern civilization, and with what earnestness they are treated in the
belles-lettres of the day. The light and frivolous mood of Wieland and
Clauren is no longer found to-day. In its place we have grandiose moral
description, a more =dramatic= treatment of sexual problems, an
unsparing exposure of the gloomier aspects of amatory life, and a
psychological penetration into all the activities of the loving soul.
Regarded =as a whole=, love in modern belletristic literature is treated
from far worthier and higher standpoints than formerly. =There is no
ground whatever for regarding the widespread discussion of sexual
problems in modern literature as a stigma of degeneration.= In this
respect our literature is merely a mirror of our time; and its
tendencies indicate very clearly the emergence of a new, earnest, and
more profound conception of the sexual relations between man and
woman.
[794] Eduard Grisebach, “Catalogue of World Literature, with Literary
and Bibliographical Annotations” (second edition, Berlin, 1905).
[795] K. Lange, “The Nature of Art,” vol. ii., pp. 161-177 (Berlin,
1901).
[796] Philipp Frey, “The Battle of the Sexes,” pp. 33, 34 (Vienna,
1904).
[797] Reference has previously been made (p. 673) to an English novel
similar in character to Vera’s book--viz., “The Heavenly Twins,” by
Sarah Grand. But the classical English example of a novel devoted to
the consideration of the differing standards by which preconjugal
sexual intercourse is judged in man and in woman respectively is “Tess
of the D’Urbervilles,” by Thomas Hardy.
[798] In “The Woman who Did,” by Grant Allen, we have an English novel
advocating free love; like “Eine für Viele,” this evoked a number of
novels with allied titles, such as “The Woman who Didn’t,” “The Woman
who Wouldn’t,” and the like. A far profounder study of a free union
between a man whose wife refused to divorce him (on “moral” grounds)
and another woman is George Meredith’s “One of Our Conquerors.” In
“Jude the Obscure,” by Thomas Hardy, we have another detailed
consideration of the difficulties attendant on a free union in a
society under the dominion of Philistine morality. A recent novel in
which freer sexual relationships are discussed from a somewhat ideal
standpoint is “In the Days of the Comet,” by H. G. Wells. (In the
character of Sue Bridehead, in “Jude the Obscure,” we have a
remarkable study of the “frigid” type of woman. I have before alluded,
in a note to p. 435, to a recent novel by Hubert Wales, “Mr. and Mrs.
Villiers,” devoted to the question of sexual frigidity in
woman.)--TRANSLATOR.
[799] “Bourgeois morality is the arch-murderer, which murders your
youth and the youth of many of your sisters. If we lived in natural
conditions, you would always, from the days of your childhood, be
surrounded by young persons of the other sex. One of these would have
contracted a friendship for you; another would have honoured you from
a distance; with a third you would have played joyfully. But from your
twentieth year onwards, three or four or more of them would have
ardently wooed you, because you are strong and beautiful and chaste.
And so with tears, and passion, and suffering, with games and kisses,
you would have gladly become a woman; thus it is even yet among the
children of manual labourers. A beautiful, chaste, diligent workman’s
child has wooers enough. But among the so-called cultured people,
morality has distorted and destroyed all the beauty of nature....
Where the middle-class youth goes to and fro, there goes also, like an
old youth-hating aunt, morality, and destroys for each poor girl the
best time of her life; and many never come to marriage, and many come
too late.”
[800] In “Divorçons,” a comedy by V. Sardou and E. de Najac, we have
an exceedingly witty, though trivial, treatment of the idea of a
terminable marriage contract.--TRANSLATOR.
[801] An early example of the “emancipated woman” in English
literature is to be found in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora
Leigh.” This conception of feminine character aroused the usual
hostility in minds working along the older grooves, so that Edward
Fitzgerald, when Mrs. Browning died, is said to have exclaimed: “Thank
God! No more ‘Aurora Leighs’!”--TRANSLATOR.
[802] George Gissing’s “The Unclassed” is a powerful study of the life
of a London prostitute.--TRANSLATOR.
[803] Bayet, “À propos des ‘Avariés’” (Brussels, 1902).
[804] We may include in this category Willy’s “La Môme Picrate,” and
also the “Claudine” novels by the same author (“Claudine à l’École,”
“Claudine à Paris,” etc.).
[805] Consult also the work “Lieblingsminne und Freundesliebe in der
Weltliteratur,” by Elisar von Kupffer.
[806] And at a later date Verlaine wrote other homosexual poems, “Les
Hommes,” which for the most part are still unpublished.
[807] A work of similar character to these is the notable novel
recently published (February, 1907) “Die Stimme,” by Grete Meisel-Hess
(Berlin, 1907).
CHAPTER XXXII
THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE OF THE SEXUAL LIFE
“_Stress has been laid upon the harm which can be done by the
publication of works dealing with sexual problems. Undoubtedly the
pornographic interest of the laity, and also of men of science, does
play a part here!_ =But the benefits which the unreserved scientific
elucidation of the sexual problem is able to diffuse throughout the
widest circles of the population are so extensive that this
consideration of any possible harm that may ensue becomes
infinitesimal in comparison.=”--A. VON SCHRENCK-NOTZING.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXXII
Indispensable need for the scientific investigation of sexual problems
-- Insignificance and ludicrous character of the objections made to
such investigation -- The diffusion of sexual perversities was just as
extensive before their scientific study was first undertaken -- de
Sade’s system of psychopathia sexualis -- Recent additions to the
scientific literature of the subject -- Works upon homosexuality --
Upon erotic symbolism -- General investigations regarding the sexual
impulse -- General works upon the sexual problem -- Periodical
literature relating to the sexual life.
CHAPTER XXXII
Truth is always a good thing, even truth regarding the sexual life.
Neither prudery nor moral hypocrisy can controvert this proposition. He
who recognizes the immense importance of sexuality in relationship to
civilization at large--he who, like the author of the present work, has
been occupied for many years in the study of the subject from the points
of view of medicine, anthropology, ethnology, literature, and the
history of civilization--is not only entitled, but will also consider it
his duty, to publish his investigations, to make publicly known his
views and his opinions, and to take a definite and clear position in
relation to the burning questions of the day in this province of
thought.
Such men as Ploss-Bartels, who, in their celebrated and purely
scientific work, “Woman in Natural History and Folklore,” could not
avoid collecting numerous piquant and even obscene details, and who, for
example, have described in a special chapter the various postures
assumed during sexual intercourse; such a man as von Krafft-Ebing, whose
“Psychopathia Sexualis”[808] contains a number of detailed
autobiographies and clinical histories of sexually perverse
individuals--such men as these have been blamed because their books have
been diffused in numerous editions, extending to many thousands of
copies, and because these books have been read more by laymen than by
medical men. Apart from the fact that in earlier times much more
dangerous books--such, for example, as the works of Virey, Flittner, G.
F. Most, and Rozier, characterized by a lascivious style, or such a book
as the dictionary “Eros”--obtained the widest possible circulation;
apart, also from the fact that even in works conceived and executed in a
strictly scientific spirit--such as the numerous monographs of Martin
Schurig, or the work of Frenzel (belonging to the nineteenth century)
concerning impotence (see, for example, Frenzel, _op. cit._, pp. 155,
156, 161)--obscene passages and incredibly depraved stories occur; and
apart, finally, from the incredible mass of pornographic writings, in
comparison with which the scientific literature of the sexual life is
almost infinitesimally small--putting on one side all these
considerations, it is merely necessary to refer to the =established
fact= that all possible sexual perversities were known to exist before
the publication of von Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis,” and that
they made their appearance spontaneously at all times and in all places.
In the eighteenth century the Marquis de Sade, in his romance “The One
Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom,” was able to found a system of
psychopathia sexualis which not only contained =all= the perverse types
described by von Krafft-Ebing, but was even more varied in its contents,
and exhibited yet more numerous categories of sexual anomalies than the
book of the Viennese alienist.[809] This work is a document of enormous
importance to civilization,[810] because it provides a complete
refutation to the fable of modern degeneration, and because it gives us
a proof that =quite shortly= before the powerful upheaval of the French
nation and the heroic campaigns of the Napoleonic epoch, in this nation
there were diffused the most frightful perversities, regarding the
reality of which there can, according to recent experience, be no doubt
whatever.
Scientific authorship--even popular scientific works[811]--dealing with
the province of the sexual life cannot therefore be made responsible, in
any respect, for the diffusion of sexual perversities. The founder of
modern sexual science, A. von Schrenck-Notzing,[812] insisted on this
fact; and recently it has been once more emphasized by S. Freud, who has
probably gone further than any other writer in biologico-physiological
derivation of sexual perversions.
Havelock Ellis’s “Analysis of the Sexual Impulse” (vol. iii. of this
writer’s “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” published by the F. A.
Davis Co., Philadelphia)--a book in which we find an admirable analysis
of the development and variations of the sexual impulse, including an
account of sadism and masochism, enriched by numerous examples--has
recently appeared in a German translation (Würzburg, 1903). The
translator, Dr. H. Kurella, in his preface to this work, says (pp. ix,
x), in my opinion with perfect justice:
“Daily experience among my patients suffering from nervous
diseases--patients who were for the most part women and girls--has
shown me how extremely important is enlightenment regarding the sexual
life for women suffering from nervous disorders. =For this reason, I
hope the book will have the widest possible circulation among the
mothers of daughters about to grow up.= If they will employ in a
proper manner the knowledge which they will be able to obtain from its
contents, in this way an immeasurable quantity of sorrow and misery
can be prevented. This use of its teaching will, by itself, suffice to
compensate the author and the translator for the scruples they must
always feel in giving to the world a book which is likely to be valued
by some simply as providing prurient reading matter, and which by such
persons will perhaps be circulated for this purpose--a fate to which
every book dealing with erotic subjects is exposed, however earnest
its style and tendency may be.”
The lively scientific activity which now animates the department of
sexual problems is a matter for rejoicing, since it indicates the
advance of knowledge in one of the most important of all vital problems.
Whereas earlier none but alienists and neurologists concerned themselves
with sexual questions, an interest in these questions is now very
generally displayed by the circles of other medical men, of
anthropologists, folk-lorists, psychologists, æsthetics, and historians
of civilization. One good result of this wide diffusion of interest is,
as I have already remarked (pp. 455 _et seq._), that a one-sided
consideration of the problems under investigation will thereby be
prevented. Every earnest investigator, to whatever discipline he may
personally belong, can here contribute something =new=, something which
will advance knowledge; but most helpful, unquestionably, can the
=physician= be who, as von Schrenck-Notzing[813] declared, is competent
to consider the question in relation to various other departments--those
of biology, anthropology, history, belles-lettres, psychology, and
forensic medicine.
It would subserve no useful purpose to enumerate once more in this place
the works of all the recent authors who have dealt with the subject of
the sexual life. In the text of the present book they have for the most
part received sufficient mention.[814]
Of larger monographs upon homosexuality, there still remain to be
mentioned those of Havelock Ellis and J. A. Symonds,[815] A. Moll,[816]
J. Chevalier,[817] and Laupts.[818] In these works we find extensive
reports of cases; and more especially in the two first mentioned do we
find a record of all the historical and critical data of homosexuality
up to the time of the first publication of the “Annual for Sexual
Intermediate Stages” (1899 _et seq._).
A new work by Havelock Ellis[819] recently reached me, the fifth volume
of the American edition of his “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,”[820]
giving an account of “Erotic Symbolism” (fetichism, exhibitionism,
etc.), the “Mechanism of Detumescence,” and the “Psychical Condition
during Pregnancy,” with an appendix giving an analysis of the sexual
development of various individuals. This book, full of interesting
details, will doubtless, like the earlier volumes of his “Studies,” soon
appear in a German translation.
The fundamental work of A. Marro on “Puberty in Man and Woman” also
deserves especial mention. It can most usefully be consulted in the
French edition, “La Puberté chez l’Homme et chez la Femme. Etudiée dans
ses Rapports avec l’Anthropologie, la Psychiatrie, la Pedagogie, et la
Sociologie” (Paris, 1902; 536 pp.).
Special studies on the subject of the sexual impulse have been published
by Moll[821] and Féré.[822] In Moll’s work, of which hitherto the first
part only has appeared, the sexual impulse is divided into two
components, the “detumescence impulse”--that is, the impulse towards the
evacuation of the reproductive products--and the “contrectation
impulse”--that is, the impulse towards the other individual; and from
these two components the various manifestations of sexuality are
explained. Féré, more especially, has made an exhaustive study of the
instinctive element of the sexual impulse; and, apart from this, he
appears to be the most extreme advocate of the atavistic theory of
sexual perversions.
An interesting study of sexual psychology, based upon the doctrine of
Freud, has been published by Otto Rank.[823] The tendency of this work
also is in opposition to the degeneration-phobia.
The work of the Italian psychiatrist Pasquale Penta, “I pervertimenti
sessuali nell’ uomo e Vincenzo Verzeni strangolatore di donne” (“The
Sexual Perversions observed in Vincenzo Verzeni, the Strangler of
Women”), Naples, 1893, contains numerous interesting details. In the
first chapter the author gives contributions to a history of
psychopathia sexualis; the second chapter contains a detailed report of
Verzeni and an account of his lust-murders; in the third chapter Penta
discusses the similarities and differences between the sexual impulse in
man and in the lower animals; in the fourth chapter he deals with the
biological foundations of lust-murder; in the fifth chapter he reviews
the different sexual perversions; in the sixth chapter he considers
rape; and in the seventh and last chapter he discusses the forensic
importance of rape and of sexual perversions.
The recently published work on “Sexual Biology,” by Robert Müller
(Berlin, 1907), is written from the standpoint of veterinary medicine,
and the sub-title of the book, “Comparative and Evolutionary Studies in
the Sexual Life of Man and the Higher Mammals,” indicates the author’s
intention to elucidate the general biological roots of sexual phenomena.
This =comparative= consideration of the sexual life of man and of the
higher mammals throws a new light on many matters, and enables us to
understand a number of phenomena of the sexual life which have hitherto
seemed obscure.
A comprehensive, general, popular work upon the sexual life is now in
course of publication--“Man and Woman.” It is issued by R. Kossmann and
J. Weiss, with the collaboration of a number of leading specialists
(Stuttgart, 1907). A number of illustrated sections have already been
issued.
Finally, two other works must be mentioned which consider the sexual
life as a whole, a larger work and a smaller one. Forel’s[824]
comprehensive book is distinguished from beginning to end by an
=original, subjective= grasp of the question, and by an =optimistic view
of the future=, as I have pointed out in my review of this book in the
_Deutsche Aerztezeitung_. As such a subjective programme of a future
solution of sexual problems, it will ever retain a value; and we can
always follow with pleasure the demonstrations of the talented and
sympathetic author, although the book is perhaps somewhat monotonous in
character. Its merits, moreover, are counterbalanced by the almost
complete neglect of the numerous recent researches in almost every
department of the sexual life. More particularly the chapter upon
syphilis and venereal diseases, the chapter upon homosexuality and
sexual perversions, and the chapter upon marriage betray this fault. The
chapter on marriage is a mere extract from Westermarck. The author is
fully conscious of these defects, and freely admits them; and in spite
of them the book must not be ignored, because its value really lies in
its subjectivity, and because we find in it so profound a conviction of
the great importance of =social= activity for the higher development of
love. A shorter consideration of sexual problems, but one abounding in
paradoxes, is to be found in a book by Leo Berg.[825]
In conclusion, I may give a brief survey of the reviews and other
periodical publications which are occupied with sexual questions. A
great periodical devoted to the =entire province= of sexual research
does not exist. Such periodicals as we have deal with separate
departments of the sexual life. A rather insignificant periodical, _Vita
Sexualis_, which appeared for the first time in 1899, seems to have
become extinct a few years later. An exceedingly valuable publication,
especially occupied with the problems of homosexuality, bisexuality, and
sexual intermediate stages, is the one edited by Magnus Hirschfeld, and
entitled _Annual for Sexual Intermediate Stages_ (of this eight volumes
have hitherto appeared). Purely popular and belletristic aims are
subserved by the homosexual monthly magazine _Der Eigene_ (edited by
Adolf Brand). Another annual, not less valuable than the one previously
mentioned, is that edited by Friedrich S. Krauss, entitled
_Anthropophyteia_. This treats more especially of folk-lorist research
in sexual matters, and is a true treasure-house of new facts and
observations.[826] The periodicals for the study of venereal diseases,
such as the _Archives of Dermatology and Syphilis_, edited by F. J. Pick
(hitherto eighty-two volumes), the _Monthly Magazine of Practical
Dermatology_, edited by Unna and Tanzer (hitherto forty-four volumes),
the _Monthly Magazine for Diseases of the Urinary Organs and Sexual
Hygiene_, edited by W. Hammer, in succession to K. Ries (hitherto four
volumes), and the other German and foreign dermato-urological
periodicals, also contain much material regarding venereal diseases and
sexual perversions. Interesting contributions to all sexual problems, as
well as an extensive case-literature and bibliography, are to be found
in the _Archives for Criminal Anthropology and Criminology_, edited by
Hans Gross (hitherto twenty-seven volumes), proceeding largely from the
pen of the learned and most original alienist Paul Näcke; also in the
_Monthly Magazine for Criminal Psychology and Criminal Law Reform_,
edited by Gustav Aschaffenburg; in the monthly magazine _The Protection
of Motherhood; a Magazine for the Reform of Sexual Ethics_, edited by
Helene Stöcker (_vide supra_, pp. 270 and 273); in the monthly magazine
_Sex and Society_, edited by Karl Vanselow (hitherto two volumes); and
in the illustrated magazine, under the same editorship, _Beauty_
(hitherto four volumes). Finally, we have to mention certain periodicals
concerned chiefly with the aims of racial hygiene, and containing
valuable material--the _Politico-Anthropological Review_, edited by
Ludwig Woltmann (hitherto five years of issue), and the _Archives for
Racial and Social Biology_, edited by Alfred Ploetz (hitherto three
years of issue).
[808] R. von Krafft-Ebing, “Psychopathia Sexualis.” Only Authorized
Translation from the Twelfth revised German Edition (Rebman Limited,
London, 1906).
[809] _Cf._ my “New Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade,” pp.
437-450 (Berlin, 1904).
[810] Recently A. Moll (_Enzyklopädische Jahrbücher der gesamten
Heilkunde_, 1906, vol. xiii., pp. 238, 239) has expressed the
“opinion,” =without offering the slightest proof in support of his
views=, that “The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom” is a forgery.
But I myself, in my French edition of this work, have given all the
historical and critical details regarding its origin; moreover, the
original manuscript, as has been shown by the examination of all the
experts, (1) =dates from the eighteenth century=; (2) =is throughout
in de Sade’s original handwriting=; (3) =is written in his
characteristic style=; and, finally, the forgery of this manuscript, a
roll 12 metres 12 centimetres in length, written on both sides in
letters of microscopic smallness, would be an absolute impossibility.
If anything is genuine and authentic, this work is such. Dr. Albert
Eulenburg, without doubt one of the most experienced, if not the most
experienced, student of de Sade, assured me that this work
unquestionably came from de Sade’s pen. I must, therefore, reject
Moll’s opinion, which was formed independently of any proof, and
without any examination of the original manuscript, as =unscientific
and utterly futile=.
[811] In popular writings dealing with the sexual life, I have myself
found many interesting remarks, and even many new ideas. Naturally,
when I say “popular,” I mean truly popular writings, not hawkers’
literature or garbage literature.
[812] A. von Schrenck-Notzing, “Suggestive Therapeutics in Cases of
Morbid Manifestations of Sexual Sensibility,” preface, p. ix
(Stuttgart, 1892).
[813] Von Schrenck-Notzing, “Bibliography of the Psychology and
Psychopathology of the Vita Sexualis,” published in the _Zeitschrift
für Hypnotismus_, vol. vii., Nos. 1 and 2, p. 121.
[814] In order to give an idea of the great interest in sexual science
exhibited by the most diverse circles of cultured men of the present
day, I shall merely mention in this note a few names, without
pretending to give an exhaustive list: R. von Krafft-Ebing,
Mantegazza, Ploss-Bartels, A. Eulenburg, von Schrenck-Notzing, Fr. S.
Krauss, Tarnowsky, L. Löwenfeld, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, S.
Freud, Georg Hirth, H. Kurella, H. Swoboda, Laurent, A. Hoche, C.
Lombroso, P. Fürbringer, E. Carpenter, Rohleder, Alfred Fournier, A.
Binet, Marro, J. J. Bachofen, J. Kohler, E. Westermarck, Max Dessoir,
Alfred Blaschko, Albert Neisser, Eli Metchnikoff, Fritz Schaudinn,
Ducrey, Unna, Oskar Schultze, Wilhelm Waldeyer, V. von Gyurkovechky,
Louis Fiaux, Léon Taxil, Wilhelm Fliess, Willy Hellpach, P. J. Möbius,
Heinrich Schurtz, B. Friedländer, Eduard von Meyer, Hans Ostwald, R.
Kossmann, Otto Adler, W. Hammond, Beard, Wilhelm Erb, Paul Näcke, J.
Salgó, H. T. Finck, F. Neugebauer, C. Wagner, H. Ferdy, Rosa Mayreder,
Ellen Key, Helene Stöcker, Anna Pappritz, Maria Lischnewska, Lily
Braun, and many others.
[815] Havelock Ellis and J. A. Symonds, “Contrary Sexual Sensibility.”
[816] Albert Moll, “Contrary Sexual Sensibility,” third edition
(Berlin, 1899).
[817] J. Chevalier, “L’Inversion Sexuelle,” with a preface by A.
Lacassagne (Lyons and Paris, 1893).
[818] Laupts, “Perversion et Perversité Sexuelles,” preface by Émile
Zola (Paris, 1896). (Containing interesting critical, literary, and
medical studies upon the subject of homosexuality.)
[819] Havelock Ellis, “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” vol. v.:
“Erotic Symbolism, etc.” (Philadelphia, 1906).
[820] Apart from “Man and Woman” (fourth edition, 1904, revised and
enlarged), all Havelock Ellis’s writings on sexual questions are
included in the “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” 5 vols. (sixth
concluding volume not yet completed), published by the F. A. Davis
Company, of Philadelphia, U.S.A.--TRANSLATOR.
[821] A. Moll, “Investigations regarding the Libido Sexualis,” Part I.
(Berlin, 1897).
[822] Charles Féré, “L’Instinct Sexuel, Évolution et Dissolution”
(Paris, 1899).
[823] Otto Rank, “The Artist: Contributions to Sexual Psychology”
(Vienna and Leipzig, 1907).
[824] August Forel, “The Sexual Question” (Rebman, 1908).
[825] Leo Berg, “Geschlechter” (Berlin, 1906).
[826] Prior to the issue of the first edition of the present work,
three volumes of _Anthropophyteia_ had appeared, and references to
many of the most important papers in these volumes have already been
given in the appropriate chapters. While the sixth edition of “The
Sexual Life of Our Time” was in the press, in October, 1907, the
fourth volume of _Anthropophyteia_ was issued, and constitutes an
especially weighty section of this work. Among the contributions are
the following: A. Mitrović, “Temporary Marriages in Northern
Dalmatia”; Fr. S. Krauss, “Selective Marriages in Bosnia”; H. E.
Luedecke, “Erotic Tattooing”; W. von Bülow, “The Sexual Life of the
Samoans”; F. Wernert, “Tales of the German Peasantry” (of an erotic
character); A. Mitrović, “A Visit to a Sorceress in Northern
Dalmatia”; Krauss, Mitrović, and Wernert, “The Sense of Smell in the
Sexual Life”; B. Laufer, “A Japanese Spring Picture”; O. Knapp, “The
‘ολισβος’ of the Hellenes”; A. Kind, “Coitus and the Sexual Instinct”;
K. Amrain, “The Increase of Virile Potency”; H. E. Luedecke,
“Eroticism and Numismatics”; V. S. Karadžić, “Erotic and Skatological
Proverbs and Locutions of the Servians”; Luedecke, “Elements of
Skatology”; Fr. S. Krauss, “Slavonic Popular Traditions regarding
Sexual Intercourse.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE OUTLOOK
“_A happy man is he who in his individuality possesses an instrument
upon which the world can play with all its wealth of powers. To him
the sexual will be a means by which he will be enabled to grasp the
innermost of life, to understand its most painful sorrows and its most
intoxicating delights, to plumb its most frightful abysses and to
scale its most shining summits._”--ROSA MAYREDER.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XXXIII
The future of human love -- Indications of progress and of a happier
configuration of the sexual life -- Relationship of sexuality to
intimate individual love -- The categorical imperative of the sexual
life -- The association of love with the work of life -- Love and
personality.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Looking backwards over the long road which lies behind us, and which has
conducted us past all the heights and deeps of the human amatory and
sexual life, we may now endeavour to give a brief answer to the
difficult question, What is the =future= of human love? Are we able to
recognize the existence of progress towards better things? Are there any
indications of a new, nobler, happier configuration of the sexual life?
The answer is a confident and joyful “=Yes!=”
=Never= before throughout the history of mankind has love evoked so
earnest and so profound an interest as to-day; never has it been
considered from so eminently =social= a standpoint as now. As I remarked
at the first public meeting of the Association for the Protection of
Motherhood, the idea of a reform, ennoblement, and more natural
configuration of the sexual life harmonizes perfectly with the general
tendency of our time, which has in view a resanation of all the
relationships of life. It is continually more clearly and widely
recognized that in the human sexual life, as in all other departments of
human activity, modifications may be effected by means of =conscious=
endeavour in the direction of a progressive evolution; that the
relationship between man and woman, alike in its individual and in its
social aspects, is influenced by the changes and advances of human
evolution; and that this relationship cannot be artificially confined by
main force within limits which may have been suitable to it one hundred
or two hundred years ago.
Our love is of this earth, afflicted with all earthly defects and
sorrows. Notwithstanding this, we =affirm= it joyfully, in the confident
hope that it can be saved from all hostile and destructive influences,
and that it can be elevated above the transient and the casual, and
manifest itself in its finest form as =intimate, individual= love. In
the sphinx of the individual, the greatest riddle of all unquestionably
lies in the alarming and elemental qualities of the sexual impulse. But
the way to liberation is obvious and open. Let us fight courageously
with all the hostile forces described in this book, which poison the
amatory life of our time; let us destroy all the germs of degeneration,
and let us imprint upon our sexual conscience three words--=health=,
=purity=, =responsibility=.
One thing more. Why does love at the present day so often threaten to
perish amid the general fragmentation of life? Why do the leading
spirits and the greatest artists in love complain of the fragile
character of all love? Because love is isolated, because it is not
associated with the =work of life=, with the battle for =freedom= which
every man has to fight; because love is not conceived as a union between
the lovers for the common =conquest of existence=, as a partnership for
the purposes of =inward spiritual growth=. Far too often the man of the
future is opposed to the woman of the past, or the woman of the future
to the man of the past; each is to the other a =sexual= being, and
nothing beyond. And yet individual love is only possible when, passing
beyond the aims of mere sexual gratification, and beyond the purposes of
reproduction, it subserves the general objects of life, and assists in
the performance of all the tasks of the civilization of our time. The
most wonderful dreams of the heart cannot suffice to take the place of
the positive work which life demands from love. =Without free activity
there is no love!= That is the great saying of a great thinker. And I
add to this saying, that without free activity there is no =right= to
love. Such a right is possessed only by the =personality=, the poetic,
striving, willing human being, be it man or be it woman. How often the
man seeks love from the woman and cannot find it, and yet might have
found it so easily!
“... doch wenn ich suchend drücke
Die Fänge meines Geistes in ihr Hirn,
Dünkt mich, dass hinter dieser hohen Stirn
Ein Etwas liegt, das einst =gefehlt= dem Glücke.”
[“But when searchingly I press
The talons of my spirit into her brain,
It seems to me that behind this lofty forehead
Something lies which has just missed happiness.”]
In this beautiful verse of Ada Christen’s the secret of all love reveals
itself. We must not seek that which is lower in the other sex, in the
beloved person; we must seek the =highest=, her spiritual essence, her
will, her developmental possibilities. Before the eyes of the modern
human being, the individual love of two free personalities appears as an
ideal, as is poetically expressed by Dingelstedt in the words:
“Und Liebe blüht nur in dem =Doppel-Leben=
Verwandter Seelen, die nach oben streben.”
[“And Love blossoms only in the =duplex-life=
Of two allied souls, which together strive upwards.”]
INDEX OF NAMES
Abderhalden, Emil, 715
Abelard, 94
Achelis, Thomas, 192
Ackermann, J. C. G., 678
Acton, W., 317, 678
Adam, Madame, 32
Adler, Otto, 49, 50, 68, 83, 418, 433, 435, 439, 758
Adonis, 107
Agathe, 173
Ahlfeld, F., 707
Albert, Charles, 87, 91, 249, 250, 251, 472
Alcibiades, 460
Aldegrever, 736
Aléra, Don Brennus, 569
Alexander, C., 721, 722
Alexander the Great, 460, 583
Allan, 72
Allen, Charles W., 437
Allen, Grant, 746
Almquist, C. J. L., 243, 244
Alsberg, 60
Altenberg, Peter, 624
Altmann-Gottheiner, Elizabeth, 81
Altmüller, 540
Alton, 574
Amrain, K., 625, 761
Amschl, 633
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 750
Andrian, F. von, 90
Angelo. See Michael Angelo
d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 292, 619, 622, 626, 750
Antiochus, 436
Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, 75
Apelles, 105
Aphrodite, 105
Aphrodite Porne, 105
Aquinas, Thomas, 122
Archenholtz, 615
Arduin, 529
Aretino, Pietro, 308, 734
Aristippus, 676
Aristophanes, 413, 460
Aristotle, 94, 436, 460, 583
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 476, 677
Arnobius, 102
Aschaffenburg, G., 294, 417, 424, 666, 667, 761
Ashbee, Henry Spencer, 515
Assing, Ludmilla, 242
Astarte, 123
Astruc, Jean, 354
Atkinson, 368
“Auch Jemand,” 745
Augagneur, V., 317
August, Karl, 502
August von Gotha, Duke, 506
Augustine, Saint, 102, 109, 115, 122
d’Aurevilly, Barbey, 175, 474, 733, 750
Avebury, Lord (Sir John Lubbock), 25, 189
Avenarius, Ferdinand, 524
Avicenna, 436
d’Azimont, Helène, 173
Baal-Peor, 101, 107
Bab, Edwin, 485
Bachofen, J. J., 10, 102, 104, 189, 194, 195, 758
Bacon, 477
Bacon, Francis (Lord Verulam), 134
Bade, Thomas, 343
Baer, 298
Baginsky, Adolf, 668
Bahr, Hermann, 141, 144, 474
Bain, Alexander, 562, 565
Balbi, Gasparo, 101
Baldung, Hans, 583
Balzac, Honoré de, 174
Bar, von, 382, 383
Barbosa, Duarte, 101
Bärenbach, 78
Barrault, 242
Barrucco, Nicolo, 440, 703
Bartels, Max, 697, 706
Bartels, Paul, 63
Barth, 139
Barthélémy, 363
Bartholini, 16
Basedow, Hans von, 524, 683
Bashkirtzeff, Marie, 182
Bastian, 107, 189, 192, 467
Bataille, Henri, 219
Batley, 706
Batut, 135, 136
Baudelaire, 175, 474, 624, 733, 749, 750
Bauer, Friedrich, 270
Bauer, Leopold, 145
Baumann, Felix, 338, 563, 614
Bäumer, Gertrud, 690
Baumès, 362
Baumgarten, Anton, 335
Bayet, 748
Beale, 678
Beard, G. M., 428, 702, 758
Beardsley, Aubrey, 733, 736
Beate, 172
Beatrice, 162
Bebel, 251
Beck, H., 109
Beck, Karl, 559
Becker, Hans von, 566
Beham, H. S., 736
Behrend, F. J., 314
Behrmann, S., 380
Bélot, 620
Bendix, Ludwig, 395
Benedict XIV., Pope, 122
Bennigsen, Adelheid von, 684
Bentsen, Tyra, 754
Benzi, 122
Béraud, 312
Berg, Leo, 760
Berger, H., 397, 418
Bergeret, L., 699, 702
Bergfeld, L., 684
Bergh, Rudolf, 23, 50, 135
Berkley, Theresa, 573
Bernard, Gentil, 286
Bernard, P., 635
Bernhard, Georg, 382
Bernhardi, 421
Bernhardt, Paul, 440
Bernhöff, 192
Bernini, 110
Bernstein, 395
Bertrand, 646
Besant, Annie, 696
Beta, H., 721
Bettmann, S., 398
Beulwitz, Rudolf von, 523
Beyle, Henry (Stendhal), 286, 287
Beza, Theodor, 507
Bickel, Andreas, 574
Bie, Oskar, 180
Biedermann, F. von, 735
Biedermann, Woldemar von, 524
Bilharz, Alfons, 53, 56, 68, 77
Billroth, Theodor, 98
Binet, A., 464, 612, 613, 622, 758
Binz, C., 354
Bischoff, 60, 62, 63
Björnsen, Björnstjerne, 257, 745
Blanc, Louis, 320
Blanqui, 599
Blaschko, Alfred, xii, 237, 238, 255, 267, 314, 318, 319, 322, 329,
333, 334, 336, 358, 374, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 399, 400,
714, 758
Bleibtreu, Carl, 460
Bleuler, E., 85
Bloch, Iwan (see also Dühren, E.), 43, 94, 116, 121, 192, 267, 270,
271, 308, 319, 354, 357, 385, 387, 388, 412, 420, 450, 558, 569, 628,
641, 646, 705, 732
Block, Felix, 375, 401, 417
Bloem, Walter, 744
Blokusewski, 378
Blom, Oker, 681, 684, 688
Blougram, Bishop, 132
Blumreich, L., 551, 705
Boas, Franz, 192
Bock, Emil, vi, 31, 440
Boeck, G., 363
Boëteau, 646
Böhme, Jakob, 59
Böhme, Margarete, 315, 748
Böhmert, 271
Boileau, 113
Bois-Reymond, Emil du, 166
Bojer, Johann, 746, 747
Bölsche, Wilhelm, 8, 18, 21, 23, 30, 32, 38, 41, 42, 44, 125, 179
Bonaparte. See Napoleon the Great
Bonheur, Rosa, 528
Bonhoeffer, 294
Bonnard, de, 208
Bonneau, Alcide, 308
Bonnetain, 744
Borgia, Cæsar, 566
Borgius, W., 267, 274
Börne, 78
Böttger, Hugo, 267
Boucher, 736
Bouillier, Francisque, 564
Boureau, E., 375
Bourget, Paul, 286
Bouvier, 648
Bovary, Madame, 140
Bradlaugh, Charles, 696
Brand, Adolf, 485, 761
Brandt, Wilhelm, 271
Brant, Sebastian, 734
Braun, Lily, 267, 270, 274, 275, 758
Braun, R., 704
Bré, Ruth, 197, 267, 270
Breitenstein, 376
Brenning, 707
Bretonne, Rétif de la, 205, 242, 290, 309, 427, 628, 634, 639, 734,
736
Bridehead, Sue, 746
Brieux, 748
Bright, 443
Brinvilliers, 575
Broca, 54, 64
Broicher, Charlotte, 240
Bronson, 43, 44
Brooks, 56
Brosses, President de, 110
Brouardel, 545
Brown, John, 459
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 747
Browning, Robert, 132, 221
Brück, Anton Theobald, 732
Bruck, Martin, 402
Bücher, Karl, 80
Büchner, Alexander, 242
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 79, 213
Buddha, 20, 29, 103
Budin, 13
Buffenoir, H., 166
Buffon, 92
Bülow, Frieda von, 216
Bülow, W. von, 761
Bulthaupt, Heinrich, 506, 524
Bulwer (Lytton), 243
Bunge, G. von, 715
Buonarroti. See Michael Angelo
Burchard, Bishop of Worms, 412
Burchard, E., 492
Burdach, 20, 31, 47, 77
Bürger, 278
Burgkmair, Hans, 729
Burgl, G., 649
Burne-Jones, Edward, 182
Burwinkel, 358
Busch, Dietrich Wilhelm, 700
Busch, W., 47, 49, 684
Bussy, Charles de, 115
Butler, Josephine, 318
Buttenstedt, Karl, 700, 701
Buttler, Eva von, 97
Byron, 32, 78, 166, 168, 216, 507
Cabral, A., 90
Cæsar Borgia, 566
Cæsar, Caius Julius, 193, 677
Cailles, Eliza, 638
Caitanya, 107
Caligula, 566
Calvin, John, 507
Campagnolle, R. de, 378, 380
Campbell, Harry, 83
Campe, J. H., 426
Cangiamila, 122
Canitz, von, 421
Canler, 648
Capellmann, 122, 699
Capponi, Gino, 243
Carpenter, Edward, 37, 45, 96, 249, 251, 252, 253, 758
Carracci, Annibale, 733, 736
Casanova, 174, 287
Casper, Leopold, 441, 475, 668
Castor and Pollux, 582
Catherine de Medici, 566
Catherine, St., of Siena, 110
Cazenave, 368
Challemel-Lacour, 116
Chalmers, 696
Chambers, 163
Charles IV., King of Spain, 277
Charles VIII., King of Spain, 355
Charpentier, Armand, 249
Chateaubriand, 214, 243
Chatelet, du, 165
Cheadle, 363
Chesterfield, Lord, 287
Chevalier, J., 758
Chimay, Princess, 623
Chorier, Nicolas, 734
Chotzen, 395
Christen, Ada, 766
Clara, Abraham a Santa, 483
Claret, Antonio Maria, 122
“Claudine,” 749
Clauren, 751
Clausmann, 398
Cleland, John, 734, 735, 736
Cleopatra, 165
Cleves, Maria of, 623
Cnyrim, V., 678
Coe, 415, 416
Cohn, Hermann, 424
Colles, 362
Collins, 428
Columbus, 355
Commenge, O., 317
Comte, Auguste, 97
Conrad, M. G., 267
Constantine, Emperor of Rome, 102, 103
Conton, 378
Cordelia, 165
Coulon, Henri, 219
Courty, 434
Coutts, 363
Cowper, 439
Cramer, 667
Cranach, Lucas, 736
Crébillon, 736
Crédé, 367, 524
Crohns, Hjalmar, 437
Cronquist, 380
Cruz, Ignacio dos Santos, 312
Cullen, William, 459
Cunningham, 64
Curie, Madame, 74
Curschmann, 422, 437
Curtius, Quintus, 102
Cuvier, 5
Dahlen, Georg, 347
Damaschke, A., 267
Damian, Wilhelm, 575
Damm, A., 421, 702
Dana, 418
Danner, Countess, 324
Dante, 162
Darwin, Charles, 4, 20, 23, 25, 26, 35, 40, 56, 72, 77, 162, 179, 467,
664, 709, 711, 712, 716
Daudet, Alphonse, 748
Daumer, 486
Dauthendey, Elizabeth, 750
Dea Perfica, 101
Dea Pertunda, 101
Debreyne, 122
Deffand, du, 165
Defoe, 748
Dehn, Paul, 737
Delastre, 646
Delaunay, 68, 73
Delepierre, O., 738
Delgado, Francisco, 308, 748
Delicado, Francesco, 308, 748
Delvincourt, G. L. N., 457
Demetrius, 586
Démeunier, 101
Demosthenes, 460
Dempwolf, 468
Dennewitz, Bülow von, 267
Dens, 122
Desdemona, 165
Deslandes, 47, 418, 440
Dessoir, Max, 532, 758
Diday, 402
Diderot, 736
Dieterich, Albert, 109
Dilsner, 749
Dingelstedt, 175, 472, 766
Diodorus Siculus, 190
Diotima, 162
Dippold, 571, 572
Dixon, 109
Dohm, Hedwig, 267
Dohrn, 368
Domitian, 566
Donath, Julius, 373
Don Juan, 208, 216, 236, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290
Dowden, Edward, 240
Drago, 135
Drialys, 569
Drobisch, 213, 690
Droste-Hulshoff, Annette von, 79, 180
Droz, Gustave, 735
Drudo, Hilarius, 286
Drujon, Ferdinand, 738
Drysdale, Charles, 696
Dubois-Desaulle, G., 643
Duchesne, E. A., 313
Ducrey, Max, 357, 758
Duensing, Frieda, 267, 277
Dühren, Eugen (see also Bloch, Iwan), 319, 558, 628
Dühring, Eugen, 217, 233, 251
Dulaure, J. A., 101
Dumas, Alexandre (Fils), 345, 346
Dupuy, 444
Duquesnoy, Jérôme, 506
Düring, E. von, 319, 329, 402
Dürkheim, 137
Duse, Eleonore, 182
Dyer, Alfred G., 336
Earlet, 704
Eberhardt, Ernst, 747
Eberstadt, Rudolph, 200, 201
Eberstaller, 64
Ebstein, Erich, xii
Ebstein, Wilhelm, 449, 719, 721, 722
Eckhard, Meister, 176
Eckstein, Emma, 684
Edwards, Milne. See Milne-Edwards
Eekhoud, Georges, 506, 749
Effertz, O., 433, 434
Egerton, George, 182
Eggers-Smidt, 403
Ehrenberg, Christian Gottfried, 458, 459
Ehrenfels, Chr. von, 267, 323, 718
Ella Rose, 173
Ellis, Havelock, 8, 14, 18, 24, 26, 32, 35, 56, 60, 64, 68, 72, 73,
74, 77, 81, 84, 122, 123, 128, 129, 135, 138, 157, 404, 407, 409, 411,
415, 416, 417, 420, 424, 426, 428, 466, 471, 557, 558, 559, 566, 582,
640, 712, 756, 758
Ellis, William, 137
Emberg, 343
Emerson, 181
l’Enclos, Ninon de, 165
Endymion, 183
Enfantin, 242, 243
d’Enjoy, 33
Ense, Rahel von, 242
d’Eon, Chevalier de, 545
Epictetus, 75
Erasistratus, 436
Erb, Wilhelm, 267, 361, 394, 421, 422, 678, 679, 758
Erkelenz, A., 267
Eros, 111, 162, 171, 179
Ersch, 505
Ertel, 581, 583
Eschle, 664
d’Estoc, Martial, 475, 519, 529, 580, 586, 629, 640, 654
Ettlinger, Karl, 286
Eugénie, Empress, 516
Eulenberg, Herbert, 750
Eulenburg, Albert, xii, 83, 86, 192, 267, 410, 418, 419, 421, 428,
432, 438, 439, 441, 444, 450, 451, 524, 547, 555, 560, 569, 578, 647,
654, 664, 678, 691, 697, 702, 756, 758
Eulenburg-Hertefeld, Prince Philipp zu, 548
Euripides, 460, 481
Eusebius, 102
Evadne, 673
Eyck, Jan van, 57, 147
Eye, A. von, 152
Eysell-Kilburger, Clara, 745
Fabry, J., 397, 402
Falb, 462
Falck, N. D., 624
Falke, J. von, 583
Falke, Jacob, 164
Fallopius, 378
Faust, 183
Faust, Bernhard Christian, 426
Faustine, 208
Federn, Karl, 249
Ferdy, Hans, 378, 699, 758
Féré, Charles, 477, 508, 563, 564, 565, 646, 759
Ferguson, A., 471
Ferrero, G., 68, 72, 83, 130, 318, 577
Ferri, 669
Feskstitow, 699
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 98, 110
Feydeau, Erneste, 747
Fiaux, L., 296, 318, 319, 340, 399, 648, 652, 758
Filliucius, 122
Finck, H. T., 159, 161, 482, 758
Finger, Ernest, 365, 388, 442
Finkelstein, 270, 271
Finsch, Otto, 467, 470
Fischer, Kuno, 162, 171, 177, 242, 561
Fitzgerald, Edward, 747
Flachs, Richard, 684
Flanders, Moll, 748
Flaubert, Gustave, 140, 747
Flechsig, 267
Fleischmann, August, 724
Flesch, Max, 267, 271, 395, 684
Fliess, Wilhelm, 16, 20, 26, 539, 758
Flittner, 755
Foerster, Fr. W., 683, 684, 687, 688, 689, 690
Forel, A., 267, 667, 760
Forster, Edmund, 44, 415, 416, 559
Fouqué, de la Motte, 169
Fourier, Charles, 242
Fournier, Alfred, 349, 358, 361, 362, 363, 364, 378, 384, 386, 388,
395, 684, 714, 758
Fournier, Edmond, 363
Fragonard, 736
Francillon, 77
Francke, E., 267
Franckenau, Georg Franck von, 309
François de Sales, St., 111
Frank, J., 119
Frank, J. P., 623, 631, 635
Fränkel, C., 383
Franklin, Benjamin, 695
Frassette, 64
Frauenstädt, J., 93, 245, 246, 735, 736
Fraxi, Pisanus (Henry Spencer Ashbee), 515, 519
Fred, W., 152
Frederick the Great, 507
Frederike, S., 553
Freimark, Hans, 534
Frenssen, 746
Frenzel, J. S. T., 441, 446, 755
Frenzel, Karl, 173, 737
Freud, S., 38, 46, 47, 271, 413, 414, 428, 456, 464, 465, 476, 641,
653, 687, 702, 756, 758, 759
Frey, Ludwig, 506, 520
Frey, Philipp, 94, 190, 744
Friedenthal, H., 554
Friedjung, 272
Friedländer, Benedict, 40, 482, 485, 486, 548, 758
Fritsch, Gustav, 60, 411
Froehner, R., 643
Fronsac, Duke of, 573
Frost, Laura, 690
Fryer, John, 101
Fuchs, Alfred, 656
Fuchs, Eduard, 733, 736
Fulda, Ludwig, 747
Funcke, Richard E., 700
Fürbringer, P., 410, 417, 421, 422, 427, 428, 437, 441, 442, 444, 448,
449, 678, 698, 703, 758
Fürth, Henriette, 267, 274, 402
Gaedertz, Theodor, 524
Galen, 49, 448
Galewsky, 358
Gall, 416, 704
Gall, Louise von, 180
Galli, 270
Galliot, 706
Galton, Francis, 712
Gans, Eduard, 197
Garland, Hamlin, 420
Garnier, P., 415, 621
Garré, 552
Garré-Simon, 551
Gassen, 449
Gattel, 428, 712
Gautier, Théophile, 79, 175, 545, 735, 749
Gay, Delphine, 243
Gegenbaur, 22
Geigel, A., 354
Geissler, C. W., 749
Gentz, Friedrich, 736
George, Henry, 695
George Sand, 174, 243, 254, 277
Gerland, 81
Giacomo, Salvatore di, 308
Gillray, 736
Girardin, Delphine de, 79
Giraud-Teulon, 189
Girtanner, Christoph, 354
Gissing, George, 244, 748
Giuffrida-Ruggieri, 64
Giulietta, 139, 446
Gleiss, O., 239
Glossy, 540
Gobineau, Count Arthur, 548
Godwin, William, 239
Goebeler, Dorothee, 214
Goethe, August, 240
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xi, 31, 78, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 181,
183, 205, 209, 240, 242, 320, 502, 548, 550, 560, 621, 628, 656, 680,
735, 736
Gogol, 424
Goncourt, E. and J. de, 100, 150, 209, 309, 430, 444, 642, 748
Gönner, 577
Goodell, 702
Gordon, Bernhard von, 436
Görres, Franz, 524
Götter, Luise, 183
Gottfried, 575
Gottschall, Rudolf von, 123, 242, 524, 736
Grabowsky, Norbert, 673
Graef, 737
Grand, Sarah, 673, 745
Grand-Carteret, J., 574
Grazie, Marie Eugenie delle, 271
Greaves, 135
Grécourt, 736
Greiner, 736
Gretchen, 171
Gretchen, patient, 182
Griesinger, 94
Grillparzer, Franz, 175, 292, 446, 474, 507, 540
Grimm, brothers, 578
Grimmen, Stefan, 324
Grisebach, Eduard, 5, 176, 205, 244, 246, 312, 424, 484, 561, 614,
671, 735, 743
Groddeck, 486
Groos, 129
Gross, Hans, 188, 509, 581, 724, 761
Gross-Hoffinger, Anton J., 221, 226, 227, 316, 332
Grotjahn, Alfred, 712
Gruber, Max, 505, 698, 711, 716
Grundmann, 643, 645
Gruyo, 574
Gualino, 31
Guénolé, Pierre, 569, 573
Guilbert, Yvette, 136, 750
Guislain, Joseph, 473
Guizot, 690
Gumplowicz, Ladislaus, 251
Gurlitt, Ludwig, 690
Gury, 122
Güssfeldt, Paul, 690
Guttstadt, A., 394
Guttzeit, 433
Gutzkow, Karl, 155, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175, 207, 252, 277, 325, 329,
481, 540, 548, 685, 708
Guyau, 180
Guyon, Abbé, 101
Guyot, Yves, 318
Gyurkovechky, V. von, 441, 448, 758
Haberda, A., 643
Hacker, Agnes, 267, 270, 688
Haeckel, Ernst, 4, 7, 8, 9, 15, 23, 242
Hagel, Christine, 207
Hahn-Hahn, Ida, 208
Haig, 414
Hall, Marshall, 47
Hammer, Friedrich, 326, 398
Hammer, W., 314, 529, 761
Hammond, W. A., 419, 441, 545, 546, 758
Hamsun, Knut, 33, 207
Hanc, 641
Hannon, Théodore, 474, 749
Hansen, D., 581
Hanslick, 98
Haraucourt, Edmond, 474, 749
Hard, Hedwig, 748
Hardy, E., 103, 108, 114
Hardy, Thomas, 238, 746
Harlowe, Clarissa, 288
Harnack, Adolf, 114
Hart, Hans, 744
Hartleben, O. E., 524
Hartmann, Eduard von, 5, 41, 70, 183, 204, 209
Hasse, C., 698
Hauptmann, Carl, 472
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 524, 746, 747, 748
Häussler, Joseph, 455, 577, 666, 667
Havelburg, W., 59
Heape, 26
Hebert, 594
Heddaeus, 714
Hegar, A., 267, 678, 697, 711, 715
Hegel, 95, 197
Heine, Heinrich, 166, 168, 172, 174, 176, 182, 373, 561
Heinemann, Max, 737
Heinse, Wilhelm, xi, 38, 40, 171
Helbig, 23
Helena, 171, 586
Helene, 173
Heliogabalus, 509, 566
Hellmann, Roderich, 301
Hellpach, Willy, 267, 279, 283, 285, 293, 297, 335, 758
Hellwald, Friedrich von, 189, 461
Héloïse, 165
Helvetius, 565
Hennig, 721
Henry III., King of France, 506, 623
Hensen, Victor, 699
Herder, 20, 34, 163
d’Herdy, Louis, 749
Hering, Ewald, 14
Hermann, 386
Herodotus, 102, 103, 105, 190
Herondas, 413
Herrmann, Anton, 192
Herrmann, Emanuel, 133
Herz, Henriette, 242
Herzen, A., 678
Hesiod, 481
Hesse, Hermann, 744
Hessen, Robert, 286, 376
Hesychios, 578
Hippel, von, 79
Hippocrates, 440
Hirn, Yrjö, 133, 134, 137
Hirsch, William, 356, 462
Hirschberg, Clara, 267, 268
Hirschberg, Leopold, 459
Hirschfeld, Magnus, xii, 30, 40, 43, 181, 293, 296, 487, 490, 492,
497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 503, 504, 506, 507, 509, 510, 514, 517, 521,
522, 530, 531, 539, 541, 545, 548, 551, 553, 587, 611, 629, 669, 758,
760
Hirth, Georg, x, xii, 3, 67, 71, 86, 93, 117, 144, 146, 161, 204, 208,
240, 267, 268, 289, 443, 444, 449, 460, 461, 462, 463, 485, 559, 621,
679, 702, 715, 735, 758
Hoche, A., 133, 464, 649, 650, 664, 666, 667, 758
Hoensbroech, Graf von, 118, 122, 268
Höffding, Harald, 166
Hoffman, Dr., 618
Hoffmann, Erich, 357
Hoffmann, V., 481
Hofmann, E. von, 707
Hogarth, 573
Hohenau, 525
Hokusai, 736
Hollweg, 704
Holstein, Franz von, 506
Holtzendorff, 120
Holtzendorff-Kohler, 193
Holtzinger, 119, 120
Hoppe, A., 294
Hora, Franz, 643
Horace, 282
Horand, 368
Horos, 123
Horwicz, A., 564
Höss, Crescentia, 110
Hössli, Heinrich, 506
Houghton, 722
Hübner, B. A. H., 294, 382
Hübner, Hans, 357
Hufeland, 646
Hügel, 207, 317
Hugo, Victor, 515
Humboldt, Alexander von, 138, 465, 718
Hunter, John, 77, 355
Hutchins, 238
Hutchinson, Jonathan (senior), 362, 363, 376
Hüter, 704
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 68, 81
Huysman, 750
Ibsen, 173, 176, 301, 747, 748
Icard, 77
Idaline, 172
Ilai, R., 676
Ilgenstein, 733
Immermann, 459
Imogen, 165
Isidora, 551
Israel, Bianca, 268, 525
Ivan the Terrible, 593
Iwaya, Suyewo, 505
Jack the Ripper, 574
Jacobi, A., 423
Jacobowski, L., 28
Jacquemart, 444
Jacques, 263
Jadassohn, J., 357
Jadassohn, S., 524
Jäger, Hans, 750
Jakobi, 721
Jakobsen, J. P., 323, 324, 750
Jalin, Olivier de, 345
James, 565
Janitschek, Maria, 747
Janssen, Lina, 272
Jastrow, 68, 72
Jean, Paul. See Richter
Jeannel, J., 317
Jegado, 575
Joachimsen-Böhm, Margarethe, 270
Jochanan, R., 676
Joël, Karl, 170
Joest, 133, 134
Jolly, 662, 667
Jolowicz, Jacques, 737
Jones, Edward Burne, 182
Jörger, 713
Joseph, Max, 182, 375, 380
Jouy, 749
Joze, Victor, 347
Juan, Don, 208, 216, 236, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290
Julie, 165, 166, 169
Juliet, 169
Juliette, 484
Julius Cæsar, 193
Jung, G., 479
Juvenal, 107, 142, 430
Kaan, Heinrich, 455
Kahlenberg, Hans von, 540, 637, 738, 745
Kaliske, A.,
Kalthoff, 733
Kaminer, S., 59, 200, 215, 551, 705, 713, 714, 715, 716
Kamp, 704
Kampffmeyer, Paul, 329, 335, 403
Kant, Immanuel, 20, 27, 28
Kantorowicz, 583
Kapp, Ernst, 142, 152
Karadžić V. S., 761
Karagnine, Princess, 642
Karl August, 502
Karlfeldt, 256
Karsch, F., 504, 505, 506, 507, 530
Kast, 368
Katte, Max, 498, 534
Kaufmann, R., 386
Kaulbach, Hermann, 524
Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 736
Keben, Georg, 123, 329, 738
Kehler, 193
Kehrer, F., 442
Kemény, Julius, 336
Kemmer, Ludwig, 734, 737
Kerschensteiner, G., 690
Kersten, 640
Kertbeny, M., 503
Key, Ellen, x, 243, 244, 251, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261,
262, 263, 264, 266, 267, 270, 316, 758
Kiefer, O., 548
Kielmeyer, 5
Kierkegaard, 175, 204, 287, 289, 446, 474
Kiernan, 576
Kind, A., 761
Kirchner, Martin, 374, 395
Kirn, 667
Kisch, E. Heinrich, 83, 85, 697, 703, 706
Kjölenson, Hjalmar, 286
Klaatsch, 134
Klein, Gustav, 16
Klein, Hugo, 145, 271
Kleist, 32
Knapp, O., 761
Kobelt, 47, 49
Koblanck, 451
Koch, J. L. A., 156, 664
Kohler, Joseph, 268, 758
Kohn, Albert, 270, 391
Kolisko, 707
Königsmark, 347
Kopp, Arthur, 163, 684
Kopp, Carl, 684
Kossmann, R., 414, 711, 760
Kowalewska, Sonja, 182
Kowalewski, 476
Krafft-Ebing, von, 146, 180, 428, 455, 463, 475, 490, 496, 503, 518,
525, 531, 541, 574, 579, 609, 619, 620, 623, 627, 633, 641, 667, 703,
755, 756, 758
Kräpelin E., 294, 336, 665, 669, 714
Kraus, Karl, 141
Krause, 30
Krauss, Friedrich S., xii, 16, 17, 34, 50, 136, 189, 191, 192, 453,
466, 469, 559, 578, 616, 644, 645, 646, 650, 653, 716, 758, 761
Krehl, L., 428, 533
Kries, Friedrich, 577
Krishna, 103
Kroft, 737
Krogh, Christian, 748
Kromayer, Ernst, 402, 403
Kröner, Eugen, 8, 15
Krupp, 525
Kubary, J., 470
Kubin, 736
Kuhne, 722
Kulischer, 104
Kupffer, Elisar von, 207, 749
Kurella, H., 135, 136, 327, 525, 560, 757, 758
Kurnig, 673
Kürschner, Joseph, 525
Kuttler, 368
Lacassagne, A., 135, 758
Laclos, Choderlos de, 290, 736
Lacroix, Paul, 515, 519
Lactantius, 102
Ladenberg, von, 314
Laehr, Heinrich, 215
Lafitte, Paul, 74
Laker, Carl, 434
Lallemand, M., 421, 437, 439
Lamettrie, 676
Lamprecht, Karl, 550
Landmann, 268
Landois, 47
Landsberg, Hans, 270
Lang, E., 375
Lang, Joseph, 364
Lang, Otto, 293
Lange, C., 75
Lange, E. von, 60
Lange, Friedrich Albert, 674, 676
Lange, Konrad, 64, 135, 181, 741, 743
Lankester, E. Ray, 306, 461
Laquer, B., 293
Laroche, Sophie, 207
Larocque, Jean, 474, 748
Larsen, Karl, 747
Lasègue, Ch., 649
Lassar, 401, 403
Laube, Heinrich, 172, 174, 175, 176, 207, 375, 548
Laufer, B., 761
Lauff, Josef, 558
Laupts, 523, 758
Laura, 217
Laurent, E., 17, 476, 635
Laurentius, 421, 758
Lautrec, Toulouse, 733
Lawes, H., 533
Lawrence, 736
Lazarus, 104
Leca, von, 291
Lecky, W. H., 202, 203, 303
Lecour, 402
Ledermann, R., 391, 714
Lee, James, 221
Legludic, H., 661
Legroux, 638
Lehmann, Jon, 615
Leigh, Aurora, 747
Leipziger, Leon, 748
Leistikow, Walter, 525
Leitner, Hermann, 421
Leitzmann, 736
Lelia, 174, 243
Lemer, Julien, 209
Lemonnier, Camille, 764
Lennhoff, Rudolf, 391, 668
Leonide, 207
Leopardi, 79, 104
Leppin, Paul, 733
Leppmann, A. W. F., 525, 618, 713
Lermontoff, 183
Leroy-Beaulieu, 109
Lescaut, Manon, 165, 748
Lespinasse, 165
Lesser, Edmond, 374
Lessing, 457
Lestmann, 342
Letourneau, Charles, 27, 138, 252
Leubuscher, G., 691
Leupoldt, Johann Michael, 70
Leuss, Hans, 268
Levin, Rahel, 242
Levy-Rathenau, Josephine, 81
Lewin, L., 654, 707
Librowicz, J., 32
Lichtenberg, 736
Lichtenberg, G. Chr., 577
Lichtenberg, L. Chr., 577
Liebermann, Max, 525
Liebermeister, von, 354
Liebert, Johannes, 737
Liebig, G. von, 525
Liguori, 122
Liliencron, Detlev von, 525
Linas, 646
Linder, E. O., 735
Lindwurm, Arnold, 3
Linschoten, Jan Huygen van, 101
Lippert, G. H. C., 314, 315, 327, 332, 457
Lischnewska, Maria, 267, 268, 270, 271, 274, 277, 668, 683, 684, 686,
687, 688, 758
Liszt, Franz von, 382, 383, 522, 525
Liszt, R. von, 268
Litzmann, Berthold, 525
Loeb, Heinrich, 380, 396
Loebisch, 444
Loeffler, Anna Charlotte, 182
Lohmann, 138
Lohsing, 188
Lombroso, C., 51, 56, 68, 72, 83, 130, 135, 318, 325, 326, 328, 329,
401, 429, 476, 490, 545, 577, 586, 639, 665, 758
Lomer, G., 33, 201
Lot, 641
Lotmar, Ph., 525
Lotte, 166
Lotze, H., 140
Louis Ferdinand, Prince, 242, 736
Louis Philippe, 519
Louis XIV., 165
Louis XV., 165
Louys, Pierre, 219
Lovelace, 288
Löwenfeld, L., 418, 419, 423, 425, 428, 429, 430, 438, 439, 449, 560,
679, 698, 703, 758
Löwenstein, H. J., 455
Lubbock, Sir John (Lord Avebury), 28, 189
Lucas, 268
Lucianus, 141, 143
Lucinde, 169, 170, 175, 240, 242
Lucretius, 14, 559
Ludwig, Max, 736
Ludwig, Philipp,
Luedecke, H. E., 761
Lully, 565
Lüngen, 690
Luschan, Felix von, 566
Luther, Martin, 245, 676
Lyhne, Niels, 323
Lytton, Bulwer, 243
Mab, Queen, 239
Macbeth, 443
MacDonald, 476
Macé, 624
Mackay, John Henry, 525
M’Lennan, 98, 189
Madelon, 171
Maeterlinck, 219
Magendie, 38, 47, 49, 83
Magnan, 635, 664
Magnaud, 219
Mahr, Anna, 747
Maisonneuve, Paul, 381
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 695, 696
Mann, H., 691
Mann, Heinrich, 750
Mann, J. Dixon, 641
Manouvrier, 64
Manso, J. C. F., 286
Mantegazza, 13, 30, 51, 71, 93, 164, 191, 466, 702, 758
Marat, 594
Marchand, 60
Marcion, 115
Marco Polo, 191
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 75
Marcuse, Max, 238, 267, 268, 270, 271, 277, 403, 684, 713
Marholm, Laura, 182
Maria of Cleves, 623
Maria Theresa, 23
Marilaun, Kerner von, 10
Maro, Francis, 253
Marquardt, 133
Marro, 135, 565, 758
Marshall, 194
Martial, 625
Martin, R., 10
Martineau, L., 317, 547, 653
Martius, K. Fr. Ph. von, 104, 119
Marx, K. F., 371, 373
Maschke, Frau, 647
Mason, 80
Matthaes, 477, 664
Matthisson, 686
Maudsley, Henry, 666
Maupassant, Guy de, 207, 474, 735, 749
Maupin, Mademoiselle de, 545
Mauregard, Lena de, 472
Mayer, Eduard von, 40, 99, 100, 195, 485, 758
Mayer, Louis, 417
Mayet, 271
Mayreder, Rosa, xii, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77, 83, 271, 288, 289, 750,
758, 763
Mazzini, 243
Medici, Catherine de, 566
Meier, 505
Meinken, Metta, 268
Meisel-Hess, Grete, 117, 747, 750
Meisner, J. E., 498, 506, 507
Melanie, 173
Melnikow, 190, 191
Memling, Hans, 57, 147
Mendel, 167, 418, 450, 525
Mendès, Catulle, 286, 529
Mendoza, Suarez de, 375
Menesclou, 574
Menge, 145
Mensinga, 698, 702, 703, 704, 715
Mercier, Sebastian, 248
Merckel, Friedrich, 168
Meredith, George, 202, 746
Méritens, H. Allard de, 243
Méritens, Napoléon de, 243
Merkel, 60
Mérode, Cléo de, 151
Merzbach, G., 503, 509
Mesnil, 264
Messalina, 430, 431, 586, 653
Metchnikoff, Eli, x, 8, 12, 13, 27, 112, 211, 247, 357, 380, 381, 410,
418, 449, 460, 461, 462, 696, 758
Méténier, Oscar, 517, 748
Metternich, Melanie, 207
Metzger, 33
Meyer, Bruno, 268, 270
Meyer, Elard Hugo, 25, 212, 268
Meyer-Benfey, H., 170
Meyerhof, A., 378, 699
Meynert, 90
Michael Angelo, 506
Michelangelo, 506
Michelet, J., 118, 120, 483
Miklucho-Maclay, von, 135, 467, 470
Mill, John Stuart, 257, 696
Miller, 168
Milne-Edwards, Henri, 56
Milton, John, 733
Minot, 68, 73
Mirabeau, G., 75, 183, 412, 460, 639, 640, 734, 735, 736
Miranda, 165
Mirbeau, Octave, 219, 642, 749
Mireur, 309, 402
Mitchell, P. Chalmers, 461, 696
Mitrovic, 761
Mittermaier, 657, 661
Möbius, P. J., 35, 40, 92, 461, 485, 662, 758
Mocquet, Jean, 101
Moesta, 268
Mohemann, B., 421
Mohnike, 32, 33
Moja, 122
Molinos, 122
Moll, A., 268, 619, 756, 758, 759
Möller, Magnus, 395
Mommsen, 594
Montaigne, Michel, 565
Montalti, A., 646
Montejo, 354
Montez, Lola, 347
Moore, George, 748
Moraglia, 85
Moreau, 20, 36
Moreau de Tours, 455
Morel, 664
Morgan, 189
Morhardt, Paul Emile, 399
Moritz, Friedrich, 525
Morris, 716
Moseley, 137
Moses, 139
Mosso, Angelo, 75, 690
Most, G. F., 755
Moullet, 122
Muche, Klara, 268
Muff, Christian, 457
Mulji, Karsandas, 103
Müller, 268
Müller, Chancellor von, 550
Müller, Friedrich, 189, 654
Müller, Johannes von, 47, 506
Müller, Robert, 759
Münchhausen, Max von, 744
Mundt, Theodor, 68, 78, 171, 172, 174, 175, 640, 678
Münsterberg, 72
Münzer, Thomas, 593
Murger, Henri, 248, 324
Musil, R., 744
Musset, Alfred de, 150, 174, 446, 580, 734, 735
Mutunus Tutunus, 101
Mutzenberger, Josephine, 748
Mylitta, 102, 103
Mysing, Oscar, 750
Näcke, Paul, vi, vii, 31, 51, 188, 236, 237, 457, 464, 485, 490, 509,
511, 512, 517, 518, 525, 530, 539, 548, 571, 629, 664, 665, 670, 674,
713, 724, 758, 761
Najac, E. de, 747
Nana, 585
Nansen, Peter, 747
Napoleon the Great, 460, 614
Napoleon III., 516, 656
Natorp, Paul, 525
Naumann, Friedrich, 268, 274, 275
Naumann, Gustav, 181
Nefzawi, Sheik, 20, 31, 51
Neisser, Albert, vi, vii, 268, 357, 365, 374, 380, 381, 383, 388, 391,
395, 397, 525, 758
Nerciat, 734
Neri, 647
Nero, 566, 593
Nerrlich, Paul, 550
Neter, Eugen, 690
Neuberger, 375
Neugebauer, Franz, 375, 553, 758
Neumann, Hugo, 277
Neumann, Isidor, 364
Neustätter, Otto, 376, 382
Nevinny, 451
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 79, 95, 111, 168, 170, 180, 209, 273, 274, 409,
461, 485, 558, 562, 595, 712, 716, 718
Nippold, Friedrich, 120
“Nobody,” 553
Noeggerath, 367
Noffke, 704
Nora, 214
Nordau, Max, 203, 205, 236, 525
Nordlund, 575
Nötzel, Karl, 402
Novalis, 170, 548
Numantius, Numa (Ulrichs), 505
Nyström, Anton, 264, 265
Obst, Bernhard, 192
Ocrisia, 102
Oechelhäuser, A. von, 525
Ofner, 272
Olberg, Oda, 329
Olga, 173
Olivier, Jacques, 483
Olympia, 551
Oncken, 120
Ophelia, 165
Oppenheim, A. von, 417, 525, 703
Oppenheim, H., 656
Oppenheimer, Franz, 268, 383, 695
Oschaja, R., 675
Osler, William, 362, 363
Ostade, Adrian van, 736
Ostwald, Hans, 277, 342, 400, 401, 758
Ottfried, 173
Otto, Christian, 550
Ovid, 78, 149, 286, 435
Pacini, 30
Pagel, J., 436, 525, 678
Pagenstecher, 31
Paget, Sir James, 422
Panizza, Oskar, 738
Pappenheim, Berta, 337
Pappritz, Anna, 329, 330, 332, 398, 402, 758
Paracelsus, 56
Parent-Duchatelet, A. J. B., 307, 309, 311, 313, 317, 319, 326, 327,
373, 540
Parr, Thomas, 449
Parrot, 363
Pascal, 562
Pascin, Julius, 736
Passet, 63
Paul, C. Kegan, 239
Paul, Jean. See Richter, Jean Paul
Paul, M. Eden, 697, 706
Pauline, 173
Payer, 702
Pearl, Cora, 324
Pearson, 64
Pearson, Karl, 251, 404
Péladan, Joseph, 568
Pellacani, 75
Pelman, 268, 525
Penta, Pasquale, 759
Penzig, R., 525, 690
Peor, Baal, 101, 107
Pereira, 120
Pericles, 460
Pernauhm, F. G., 749
Perrier, Charles, 546
Petermann, 31, 622
Peters, E., 702
Petrarca, 162, 217
Petronius, 570
Peyer, Alexander, 451
Pfeiffer, 329, 335
Pfitzner, 60, 62
Phidias, 460
Philipp, 428
Phyllis, 583
Picard, 620
Pick, F. J., 761
Pick, Ludwig, 551
Pietsch, Ludwig, 324
Piger, F. P., 110
Pincus, 705
Pisanus Fraxi, 519
Pitré, Giuseppe, 192
Pius IX., 738
Place, Francis, 696
Placzek, 525
Plant, F., 714
Platen, 78, 506, 517
Plato, 59, 75, 92, 162, 506, 548
Plehn, 567
Ploetz, Alfred, 268, 711, 712, 713, 761
Ploss, H., 706
Ploss-Bartels, 51, 72, 91, 104, 106, 108, 134, 191, 466, 633, 697,
755, 758
Pohl-Pincus, J., 459
Poincaré, 219
Polo, Marco, 191
Polybius, 697
Poppenberg, Felix, 170, 525
Porosz, Moriz, 451
Posner, C., 411, 451
Post, 104, 189, 191
Potthoff, Heinrich, 268
Potton, A., 313
Pougy, Liane de, 749
Prätorius, Numa, 506, 520, 522, 535, 548
Praxiteles, 105
Preuss, Julius, 675
Prévost, Abbé, 165
Prévost, Marcel, 219, 745, 748
Priapus, 102
Prime-Stevenson, 749
Prinz-Flohr, Wilhelmine Ruth, 265
Probst, 117
Profeta, 362
Proksch, J. K., 375
Przybyszewski, St., 750
Pudor, Heinrich, 146, 147, 150, 151
Puschmann, 102
Quensel, H., 57, 486
Quetelet, 60
Quinault, 165
Quintus Curtius, 102
Rabinowitsch, Lydia, 268
Rabinowitsch, Sera, 337
Rachilde, 537, 749
Rahel, 242
Rahmer, Alfred, 265
Rahmer, Wilhelmine Ruth, 265
Rake, 265
Ramberg, Heinrich, 736
Rank, Otto, 759
Ranke, Johannes, 60, 61
Ratzel, Friedrich, 54, 59, 90
Rau, Hans, 507
Ray-Lankester, E., 306
Rebentisch, 60
Rée, Paul, 8, 14
Régla, Paul de, 471
Rehfues, 125
Reibmayr, Albert, 384
Reich, Eduard, 277, 419, 432
Reichert, F., 643
Reid, Archdall, 356, 383, 713
Reimann, A., 739
Reinhard, W., 570
Reinl, Carl, 26
Reissig, C., 721, 722
Rembrandt, 736
Rémusat, Abel, 103
Renan, 75
René, 166
Retau, 421
Réti, S., 445
Rétif de la Bretonne, 205, 242, 290, 309, 427, 628, 634, 639, 734, 736
Retzius, G., 54, 64
Reuter, Gabriele, 198, 267, 268, 746, 750
Rey, 319
Rheinhard, W., 20, 28
Rhyn, Otto Henne am, 336
Ribbing, Seved, 678
Ricardo, 696
Richardson, 166, 288
Richet, 130
Richter, Eduard, 380
Richter, Jean Paul, 170, 207, 550, 551, 683
Richter, Z., 522
Ricord, Philipp, 354, 356
Riehl, Regine, 336
Riehl, W. H., 57, 58, 59
Ries, Karl, 157, 268, 358, 383, 761
Rigó, 623
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 525
Ring, Max, 548
Ritter, B., 144
Robinsohn, Isak, 136, 192
“Roda-Roda,” 265
Rodriguez, 122
Roe, 101
Roeren, Hermann, 737
Rohan, Princess Maria von, 722
Rohleder, 418, 424, 428, 703, 704, 758
Röhrmann, Carl, 314
Romanes, 306, 461
Römer, L. S. A. M. von, 504, 506, 533, 539
Rops, Félicien, 175, 629, 733
Roscher, W. H., 105, 467
Rosenack, 377
Rosenbach, O., 145, 525, 665
Rosenbaum, Julius, 308, 505
Rosenfeld, G., 293, 294
Rosenthal, Oscar, 293, 342
Rosinski, 368
Rossetti, 182
Rottmann, 104
Roubaud, F., 38, 47, 419, 441
Rousseau, J. J., 26, 78, 139, 165, 166, 168, 169, 208, 420, 435, 446,
487, 460, 570, 683
Rousselot, 122
Roux, Wilhelm, 525
Rowlandson, Thomas, 733, 736
Rozier, 436
Ruben, Regina, 274
Rubner, Max, 525, 678
Rüdinger, 54, 63
Ruedebusch, Emil F., 272
Rüling, Anna, 529
Rûmi, 557
Runge, Max, 275
Ruskin, John, 240
Rutgers, J., 337, 402
Rüttenauer, Benno, 525
Ryan, Michael, 150, 312
Ryle, Charles W., 286
Sa, 122
Saalfeld, 391
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 150, 558, 580, 582, 585, 627, 628, 749
Sacher-Masoch, Wanda von, 150, 580
Sade, Marquis de, 95, 117, 175, 336, 470, 483, 484, 558, 564, 627,
628, 639, 646, 647, 734, 756
Sadler-Grün, Willibald von, 500
Saettler, J. C., 122
Safra, R., 675
Saint-Preux, 166
St. Augustine, 102, 109, 115, 122
St. Catherine of Siena, 110
St. François de Sales, 111
Saint-Simon, 242
St. Theresa, 110
Saint-Yves, G., 135
Sainte-Beuve, 243
Salen, 551
Sales, St. François de, 111
Salgo, J., 659, 662, 663, 758
Salillas, 135
Salomon, Alice, 81
Salzman, 683
Sanchez, Thomas, 122
Sand, George, 174, 243, 254, 277
Sanger, William M., 317
Santangelo, F., 666
Santayana, G., 181
Santlus, 92, 186, 577
Santos Cruz, Ignacio dos, 312
Sarcey, Francisque, 757
Sardou, Victorien, 747
Sarmiento, 484
Saudek, R., 744
Sauer, 540
Savill, 428
Say, 696
Scävola, Emerentius, 207
Schadow, 736
Schallmayer, W., 442, 712, 717
Schaudinn, Fritz, 357, 758
Schauta, 271
Schdanow, 593
Scheel, Alfred, 270
Scheffel, 32
Schelling, 31, 92
Schenk, von, 525
Scherer, Wilhelm, 181
Scherr, Johannes, 163
Schiller, Fr. von, 28, 34, 91, 216, 322, 334, 387, 403, 628, 736
Schilling, 735
Schindler, W. M., 739
Schlaf, Johannes, 525
Schlegel, A. W., 242
Schlegel, Caroline, 183, 208, 242, 277
Schlegel, Dorothea, 242
Schlegel, Friedrich, 123, 169, 240, 550
Schleich, 380
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 95, 155, 156, 169, 208
Schlichtegroll, C. F. von, 580
Schmidt, Erich, 166
Schmidt, F. A., 690
Schmidtlein, 577
Schmitz, Oscar A. H., 287, 288, 289, 622, 623, 744
Schmölder, R., 382, 383, 397, 398
Schmoller, Gustav, 68, 82, 211, 213, 639, 693, 695
Schneegans, Heinrich, 738
Schneider, G. H., 558, 560
Schnitzler, Arthur, 525, 746
Schönfliess, 270
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 4, 5, 6, 25, 75, 93, 94, 99, 116, 142, 147,
148, 175, 180, 192, 205, 244, 245, 246, 247, 253, 282, 312, 354, 385,
440, 481, 483, 484, 485, 486, 558, 561, 733, 735, 736
Schouten, H. J., 507
Schrank, Josef, 316, 319, 320, 328, 466
Schreber, Johannes David, 731
Schreiber, Adele, 82, 267, 268, 270, 271, 277, 684, 690, 712
Schreiber, O., 673
Schrenck-Notzing, A. von, 419, 426, 448, 464, 525, 546, 557, 613, 637,
650, 651, 667, 753, 756, 757, 758
Schröder-Devrient, Wilhelmine, 208, 735
Schroeer, Samuel, 122
Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich von, 118
Schubert, W., 481
Schücking, Lewin, 180
Schüddekopf, 736
Schultze, F. S., 737
Schultze, W., 101
Schultze, Oskar, 55, 60, 63, 64, 758
Schultze-Malkowsky, Emil, 637
Schultze-Naumburg, Paul, 154
Schulz, Alwin, 525
Schurig, Martin, 644, 755
Schurtz, Heinrich, 13, 59, 138, 188, 189, 193, 194, 195, 212, 320,
325, 481, 485, 548, 758
Schwaeblé, René, 136, 471, 580, 642, 649, 653, 654, 706
Schwalb, Moritz, 525
Schwalbe, 60, 63
Schwartz, W., 103
Schweinfurth, Georg, 525
Séché, Léon, 243
Seiffer, 649
Sello, 270
Sellon, Edward, 105, 108
Selma, 173
Semrau-Lübke, 583
Senator, 59, 200, 215, 551, 705, 713, 714, 715, 716
Seneca, 142
Seraphine, 172, 207
Sergi, 130
Severserenus, 275
Seyffert, Hermann, 342
Shakespeare, 164, 173, 443, 586
Shaw, 72, 85
Shelley, 239, 240
Shortt, 106
Siculus, Diodorus, 190
Sidonie, 173
Siebert, Friedrich, 684
Siemens, Werner von, 459
Sigmund, 687
Silvestre, Armand, 286
Simmel, Georg, 128, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155
Simon, Ferdinand, 39
Simon, Walter, 552. See also Garré-Simon
Simonides, 481
Simonson, 395
Siva, 108
Skiers, 122
Skram, Amalie, 182
Socrates, 217, 460
Söderberg, Hjalmar, 746
Sohnrey, Heinrich, 268
Soldan, W. G., 119
Sollier, 637
Sombart, Werner, 143, 152, 153, 267, 268, 285
Sonnenthal, Adolf von, 525
Sophie, Grand Duchess, 735
Soranos, 699
Soto, 122
Soukhanoff, S., 625
Spann, Ottomar, 271, 277
Spencer, Herbert, 64, 55, 56, 64, 134, 565
Spener, 698, 703
Sperk, 402
Spiteri, Francesco, 666
Spitzka, 418, 574
Splingard, Alexis, 336
Stachow, 402
Stadion, Count Emmerich von, 506
Starke, 104
Starling, E. H., 414, 533
Staudinger, 467
Steffens, Heinrich, 8, 15
Stein, Charlotte von, 240
Stein, Ludwig, 134, 185, 194, 197, 212, 213
Stein, C. vom, 750
Steinbacher, J., 441
Steinen, E. von den, 684
Steinen, Karl von den, 61, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 139, 192, 567
Steinmetz, S. R., 565, 568, 717
Steinthal, 104
Stella, 167, 181, 205, 560
Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 286, 287
Stern, 391
Sternberg, Alexander von, 318, 507
Sterne, 166
Stevens, Vaughan, 467
Stevenson, W. B., 277
Sticker, Georg, 690
Stiedenroth, 205
Stieglitz, Charlotte, 78
Stifter, 665
Stöcker, Helene, xii, 170, 267, 268, 270, 271, 273, 274, 485, 758, 761
Stockham, Alice, 214
Strabo, 102
Stratonica, 436
Stratz, C. H., 60, 65, 128, 132, 133, 139, 143
Strauss, Emil, 744
Streitberg, Gisela von, 707
Strindberg, August, 6, 40, 118, 481, 482, 484, 485, 486, 745
Stritt, Marie, 268
Ströhmberg, 318
Strümpell, 295
Stülpnagel, von, 332
Stümcke, Heinrich, 176, 734
Suarez, 122
Sudermann, Hermann, 746
Sue, Eugène, 640
Sulzer, J. G., 5
Swedenborg, 183
Swediane, 440
Swieten, van, 23
Swoboda, Hermann, 20, 26, 107, 499, 758
Symonds, J. A., 471, 758
Tacitus, 78, 738
Taine, 288
Tait, Lawson, 418
Tait, William, 312
Tamburini, 122
Tanaquil, 102, 104
Tanzer, 761
Tarbel, Jean, 207
Tardieu, Ambroise, 426, 516, 518, 520, 653, 661
Tarnowsky, 318, 363, 471, 476, 647, 714, 758
Tasso, 171
Taube, 277
Taxil, Léon, 340, 546, 647, 653, 758
Tepper-Laski, K. von, 525
Thal, Max, 674
Thaler, Christina, 745
Thärigen, 737
Theile, F. W., 516
Theopold, 38, 47, 49
Theresa, Saint, 110
Thoinot, L., 661
Thomalla, R., 416
Thomas, Gaillard, 702
Thomasius, 245
Thompson, Helen Bradford, 68, 72, 77
Thornton, 696
Tiberius, 566
Tiech, 548
Tilesius, Hans, 714
Tinayre, Marcel, 747
Tissot, 418, 420
Titian, 147, 150
Tobler, L., 104
Tolstoi, Lyof, 6, 116, 117, 292, 532, 673, 745
Tomei, Ercole, 749
Topinard, 60, 61
Topp, Rudolf, 96
Torquemada, 593
Toulouse, 661, 699
Tovote, 745
Trélat, 430, 432
Trinius, A., 278
Troll-Borostyani, Irma von, 268
Tronow, 135
Tschaikowsky, Peter, 506
Tschich, von, 702
Türkel, Siegfried, 573, 78
Tylor, Edward B., 98, 134, 352
Ullmann, Karl, 684, 687
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich (“Numa Numantius”) 505, 507, 531
Ultzmann, 427
Unna, P. G., 354, 357, 638, 758, 761
Unold, J., 697
Unverricht, H., 525
Unzer, 577
Ursinus, 575
Usener, 108
Vacano, Emil Mario, 506
Valenta, 702
Vallabha, 103
Vanselow, Karl, 273, 761
Varro, 142
Vator, 30
Vātsyāyana, 51, 578
Vaucanson, 648
Vaudère, J. de, 547
Velde, van de, 26
Veniero, Lorenzo, 308
Venus, 105, 107
“Vera,” 673, 745
Verlaine, 474, 749
“Verus,” 745
Verworn, Max, 525
Verzeni, 574, 759
Viazzi, P., 661
Vierkandt, A., 525
Vierordt, 60, 61
Villiot, Jean de, 569
Virchow, Rudolf, 354, 356, 386
Virey, J. J., 20, 29, 93, 138, 326, 448, 566, 755
Virginia, 165
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 140, 144, 147, 152, 732
Vitalius, 115
Vivaldi, 122
Vivan-Denon, 736
Vogt, C. 72, 717
Volkelt, Johannes, 34, 179, 180
Volkmann, L., 704
Voltaire, 20, 33, 94, 324, 421, 735, 736
Voss, Richard, 525
Vulpius, Christine, 240
Wachenhusen, Hans, 525
Wachenroder, 548
Wagner, C., 84, 468, 758
Wagner, Major D., 337
Wagner, Ernst, 551
Wagner, Richard, 289, 657
Waitz, G., 104, 138, 183
Waldeyer, Wilhelm, 54, 55, 60, 63, 64, 148, 758
Waldvogel, 358
Wales, Hubert, 435, 746
Wally, 172, 174
Walser, Karl, 164
Wardlaw, Ralph, 312
Warens, de, 435
Warneck, 105
Wassermann, A., 714
Watteau, 136, 736
Weber, Max, 268
Wedde, 486
Wedekind, Frank, 744, 748
Wegener, Hans, 690
Wehl, Theodor, 172
Weill, Alexander, 351, 428
Weingartner, Felix, 525
Weininger, Otto, 6, 38, 39, 40, 69, 70, 95, 113, 116, 117, 118, 179,
481, 482, 484, 486, 539, 620, 673, 708, 745
Weisbrod, E., 661
Weismann, 4, 94
Weiss, Julius, 760
Weissenberg, 467
Weissl, 704
Welcker, 60, 62, 550
Wells, H. G., 82, 93, 94, 306, 739, 746
Werner, 173
Wernert, 761
Wernichs, A., 241, 654
Werthauer, Johannes, 657, 661
Werther, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 288, 460
Wesendonk, 289
West, J. P., 417
Westermarck, 133, 138, 139, 188, 189, 194, 198, 758, 760
Whitman, Walt, 749
Wichmann, R., 438
Wicksell, Knut, 264
Widbeck, Lara, 244
Wiedersheim, R., 19, 22, 60
Wieland, 207, 628, 751
Wienberg, 163, 174
Wiesel, Pauline, 242, 736
Wigand, O., 122, 144
Wigandt, 122
Wilbrandt, Adolf, 525
Wilcken, 189
Wild, A., 411
Wilde, Oscar, 749, 750
Wildenbruch, Ernst von, 525, 747
Wille, Bruno, 268
Willette, 736
Willy, 749
Wilser, L., 268
Winckelmann, 78, 507, 548
Winkel, F. von, 525
Wirz, Caspar, 523
Withowski, 620
Witmalett, 623
Wolff, 402
Wollenberg, 667
Wollenmann, A. G., 477
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 147, 239
Woltmann, Ludwig, 268, 761
Wolzogen, Ernst von, 13, 525, 747
Wood-Allen, Mary, 684
Worbe, 577
Zeisig, J., 315
Zeiss, Max, 95
Zeissl, M. von, 368
Zenardi, 122
Zeppelin, von, 265
Zero, 713
Ziegler, Ernst, 525
Ziegler, Theobald, 525
Ziehen, Th., 664
Zieler, Gustav, 744
Zimmermann, O., 561
Zimmern, Helen, 239
Zingerle, H., 577
Zinsser, F., 402
Zola, Émile, 176, 523, 585, 706, 745, 748, 749, 758
Zolling, Theophil, 525
Zwaardemaker, 16
Zweifel, Paul, 358, 366, 367
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
A
Abortion, artificial, 706-708
Abstinence, sexual, 113, 255, 448, 671-680
Accentuation of certain parts of the body by means of clothing, 139
_et seq._
Accommodation, houses of, 344
Accompaniments of coitus, physiological, 50, 51
Act, sexual. See Coitus
Acts of fornication with animals. See Bestiality
Adornment: its sexual significance, 133
Advertisements, sexual, 723-728
Æsthetics, sexual element in, 34-36, 200 _et seq._
Age of consent, 669
of nubility, 210
in relation to the manifestation of sexual perversions, 469-470
Ages: difference between husband and wife. See Difference between the
ages of husband and wife
Agoraphobia, 451
Alcohol: its relations to the sexual life, 292-296, 377, 667
its relations to prostitution, 336
its relations to impotence, 443, 444
its relations to homosexual acts, 546
its relations to acts of fornication with children, 636
its effects upon the offspring, 713, 714
its rôle in the sexual life discussed in belletristic literature,
748
Algolagnia, 555-607
See also Sadism and Masochism
Altar of monogamy, human sacrifices on the, 244
Amativeness, excessive, 436-437
Ampallang, the, 470
Anæsthesia, sexual, 86, 432-436, 470
See also Frigidity
Anal masturbators, 546
Angina syphilitica, 360
Animals, acts of fornication with. See Bestiality
“Animierkneipen,” 341, 342
Antagonism between capitalism and love, 250
Anthropological aspect of the sexual life, 98
view of psychopathia sexualis, 453-475, 662
Antipathy of the sexes, 79
Antiseptic washes, 381
Anus: its relations to the sexual life, 42
Anxiety-neurosis, 702
Aperture-problem, 41, 42
Aperture, sexual. See Reproductive aperture
Apoplectic stroke in syphilis, 361
Arctic clothing, 139
Armpits, odour of, 623
_Ars amandi_, 286-290
Arsenic in the treatment of syphilis, 388
Arson from sexual motives, 577
Art of love, the, 286-290
Art, the sexual, as affording objects for artistic representation, 732
_et seq._
Artistic emotional element of love, 169, 170
element, the, in modern love, 177-183
endowments, sexual differences in, 76, 77
representation of sexual matters, 732 _et seq._
Asceticism, sexual, 111-118
absolute, 673
relative, 251, 252, 674-680
Asexuality, 95
Association for the Protection of Mothers, 267-278
for sexual reform, 273
Auto-erotism, 409-415. See also Masturbation and Onanism
Axillary odour, 623
Azoospermia, 442
B
Babylonian Mylitta-cult, 102, 103
Bachelorhood and incontinence, 236
Balanitis, 376
Baldness, fetichism for, 620
Ballrooms, 342-343
Barmaids and prostitution (in Germany), 341, 342, 396
Battey’s operation, 705-706
Beard: its small importance as a sexual lure, 24
Beauty and love, 35
Beauty, sense of, a function of love, 34-36
sexual differences in, 64, 65
modern ideas of, 182, 183
masculine, 182-183, 550
Belletristic literature, love in, 741-751
Berkley-horse, the, 573
Bestiality, 426, 643-646
causes of, 644
definition of, 641
sadistic, 645
Biological law of Herbert Spencer, 55, 56, 64
Bisexuality, 39, 40, 70, 71, 504, 539-541, 549-551
Biting kiss, the. See Kiss, the biting
Blackmail, 520 _et seq._
Blindness due to syphilis, 361
Blood and sexuality, 51
Blood corpuscles, red: their number in men and women respectively, 62
Blood-relationship and marriage, 716
Boarding-houses, 344
Boards for the care of children, 261
Bodily injury, sadistic, 574
Body-weight, sexual differences in, 61, 62
Bohemian life, 175, 248
love, 175, 248
Bond, the marriage, and its results. See Coercive marriage
Borderland cases, 664
Born prostitute, the, 318, 325-326
Boys, love of, 547
Braguettes, 149
Brain: the distinctive differential characteristic between human and
animal sexuality, 21, 22
sexual differences in, 63, 64
Breast fetichism, 620
Breasts. See Mammary glands
Breeches, wearing of, in relation to masturbation, 426-427
Breeches-flap, 149
Breeding in-and-in, 716
Briar-rose morality, 244
Brothels, 318, 337, 339, 340, 398, 399, 401-403, 614
abolition of, 318, 398, 399, 401-403
and flagellation, 573
Brothel-guides, 727
jargon, 340
slang, 340
streets, 402
Bubo, syphilitic, 359
painful (from soft chancre), 364
Buggery. See Pæderasty, Pædication, and Pædophilia
Buttock fetichism, 622
C
Cabarets, 343-344
Calcification of the arteries, 361
Capital: its relations to the sexual life, 250
Capitalism antagonistic to love, 250
Capryl odours, sexual characters of, 16
Capture, marriage by, 195
Casanova type of seducer, the, contrasted with the Don Juan type,
286-289
Castratio uterina, 705-706
Castration, 441-442
of women. See Oöphorectomy
Casuistry, sexual, literature of, 121 _et seq._
Celibacy, compulsory, 274-275, 276
Cells, reproductive. See Reproductive cells
Ceremonial uncleanness, 130
Certificate of health before marriage, 256
Chance occurrences: their influence on the sexual life, 613, 644
Chancre, hard, 356, 359
soft, 356, 364
Chantage, 520 _et seq._
Character, education of the, 689
Characteristic pictures of the married state, 227-231
Characters, sexual, secondary, 17, 18, 59 _et seq._
Charlatans. See Quackery
Charms, kallipygian. See Kallipygian charms
Checks, preventive. See Preventive measures; also Malthusian theory
and practice, and Neo-Malthusianism
Chemotropism, erotic, 15
Child-prostitution, 638-639
Children: sexual activity in, 12, 13, 637-639, 668
their protection in cases in which the parents are divorced, 219,
220
duties of parents to, 256
rights of, 259
protection of, 261
care for, compulsory, 263
illegitimate, 268 _et seq._, 277
child-labour and prostitution, 330
and seduction, 636
mortality of, from congenital syphilis, 362
masturbation in, 417-418
sexual suggestibility of, 464
homosexual, 497
danger of whipping, 570
sexual fetichism originating in, 613 _et seq._
seduction of, 634-637
worthlessness of their evidence, 669
age of consent, 669
sexual education of, 681, 691
co-education of, 690
books read by, 733
Chiromancy, 722, 727
Christianity, sexual mysticism in, 108, 124
characteristics of Christian asceticism, 115-116
and misogyny, 482-483
Circumcision in the prophylaxis of venereal disease, 376
Civil marriage, 198, 199
Civilization: and degeneration, 459
its relations to prostitution, 322-325
its relations to auto-erotism, 410
its relations to psychopathia sexualis, 455 _et seq._, 471-475
Clap. See Gonorrhœa
Clitoris, diminution in its size in the human female, 22, 23
excitability of, 22, 23
the rudiment of a primitive penis, 42, 43
Cloaca love, 42
Cloistral life, the, 115 _et seq._
Clothing, 130-155
arctic, 139
effect of certain fabrics upon the skin, 149, 150
distinction between ancient and modern, 142
nature of, 140, 141
reform. See Reformed dress
relation to hairy covering of the body, 23, 24
sexual differentiation of, 148, 149
tropical, 139
upper clothing and under clothing, 142
Clothing fetichism, 627-629
Clubs, secret sexual, 653, 728
Cocotte, 347
Co-education, 690
Coercive ideas, 451
Coercive marriage, 236, 316, 747
attacked by Eugen Dühring, 251
growing hostility to, 254, 255
views of Shelley regarding, 239, 240
morality, 237, 316, 747
Coffee: its deleterious influence on sexual potency, 444
Coitus, 47-51, 699, 700, 701, 702
postures during, 51
_Coitus interruptus_, 702-703
Collectivism and free love, 249-251
“Collier de Venus,” 360
Colour, love of, and the sexual impulse, 51, 135, 137, 615
Colour red. See Red, the colour
Committee, Scientific and Humanitarian, the, 521
Communism and free love, 249-251
Concealment of charms as a sexual stimulus, 138, 139
Conception, prevention of. See Preventive measures
relation of its occurrence to the menstrual cycle, 699
Concubinage, 203, 245
Condom, the, 378-379, 704
Condylomata, 360
Conference, National and International, for the Suppression of the
Traffic in Girls, 337
International, for the Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases, 373 _et
seq._
Congenital syphilis, 362
Conjugal rights, 214
Conscience, marriage of. See Free marriage
Contact, sexual significance of, 45, 753
Continence. See Abstinence
Convalescent homes, 391
Convenience, marriage of, 204
Conventional lies of our civilization, 203, 204, 236
Conventional marriage. See Coercive marriage
Conventionalism of the age of chivalry, 164
Conventionality of the present day, 472-473
Coprolagnia, 583, 625-626
Copulation. See Coitus
Coquetry, 129, 568
_Corona Veneris_, 300
Corpora cavernosa, 46
Correspondence, erotic, 420
treatment by means of, 656
Corset, 143-146
discipline, 574
fetichism, 629
Costume, 151-152
Council of divorce, 263
Country, sexual aberrations in, 468-469, 644-645
Cries during sexual intercourse, 51
Criminality and prostitution, 400-401
Criminologists, 699
Crimino-pedagogues, 669
Crinoline, 147, 148
Cruelty: its relations to voluptuousness, 51, 559-567
Cunnilinctus (the act), 529, 621, 624, 626
Cunnilingus, cunnilingi (the agent), 467
Cures by disgust, 436-437
Custom. See Habituation
D
_Dames de voyage_, 468-649. See also _Hommes de voyage_
Dancing saloons, 342-343
Day-dreams, sexual, 420
Deceased husband’s brother, compulsory marriage of, 196
Defects, bodily, fetichistic attractive force of, 627
Defloration, religious, 101 _et seq._
mania for, 635
_Pall Mall Gazette_ scandals, 655
Degeneration in prostitutes, 328
in consequence of syphilis, 361-363
among homosexuals, 492, 493
social causes of, 665
the result of alcoholism, 713-714
the result of syphilis, 714
the result of tuberculosis, 715
the result of mental disorders, 715
the result of diatheses, 715
Degeneration, stigmata of. See Stigmata of degeneration
Degenerative theory of sexual anomalies, 455, 459, 490, 661-662, 711
Deities, sexual, 100-104
Demand for prostitutes in large towns does not correspond to the
supply, 321 _et seq._
Dementia, paralytic, as a sequel of syphilis, 361
as a cause of sexual perversions, 476
senile, 476
Demi-monde, the, 345-348
relations to fashion (the mode), 153
utilization of hair-fetichism, by dyeing the hair, 615
Depilation as a sexual stimulus, 620
_Descensus testiculorum_, 42
_Deutsche Bücherei_, 739
Development, inward spiritual, love regarded as, 248
Devil’s mistresses, witches as, 119, 120
Difference between the ages of husband and wife, 211, 715, 716
Differentiation, sexual, 9-13
its importance to civilization, 14, 57
its relation to phylogenetic development, 55
nature of human, 64
physical, 53-65
psychical, 67-82
a source of sexual perversions, 466, 567
“Dippoldism,” 571-573
Disclosure, partial, of certain regions of the body, 139 _et seq._
Disease and marriage, 215
Diseases, secret, 722
Diseases of women, 367
Disequilibrated, the, 664 _et seq._
Disgust, cures by, 436-437
Disharmonies, sexual, 112, 410, 411, 696, 697
Disinclination to marriage, 213
Disorders, mental. See Mental disorders
Distance-love, 18, 44, 45
Divorce, 199 _et seq._, 217-221, 241, 257-260, 262-264
increase of, in recent years, 217-218
care of children after, 219, 220
repeated, 218, 219
followed by remarriage, 242
council of, 263
scandals, 728
Dogs, fornicatory acts with, 643, 646
Dolls, fornicatory, 648-649. See also _Godemichés_
Don Juan type of seducer, the, contrasted with the Casanova type,
286-289
Double love, 206-208
Douching, vaginal, 704
Duplex sexual morality, 199-200, 244, 248, 249, 673-674
E
Eccentrics, 664
Economic independence of women, 251
reform the only way to the higher love, 50
Education, sexual, 681-692
of the character and the will, 689
Effeminate urnings, 498-501
Ejaculation, 46, 47, 48
Emancipation of women, 58, 59, 79 _et seq._, 529, 747
Embrace: its relation to the sexual act, 42
Emissions, seminal, 437-441
Emotivity of woman, 75, 76
Enfranchisement, hereditary, 462, 463, 711-712
Enlightenment requisite regarding homosexuality, 523, 524
regarding the sexual life in general, 684-691
Ennoblement of our amatory life, 179
Epicureanism, modern, characterized, 282 _et seq._
Epididymitis, 366, 442
Epilepsy: as a cause of sexual hyperæsthesia, 429
as a cause of sexual perversions, 476
as a cause of sexual bestiality, 643
as a cause of sexual exhibitionism, 649 _et seq._
Epistolary masochism, 579
sadism, 579
treatment of sexual perversions, 656
_Épongeurs_, 625
Equivalents, sexual, 92-94, 409, 446
of menstruation, in men, 499
Erection, 50, 442-443
morning, 443
Erector, Gassen’s, 449
Ergophilia, 564-565
Erogenic areas of the skin, 31, 46
zone, the eye as an, 31
Erotic element in polite literature: its justification, 743-744
distinction from pornography, 731-734
genius, the, 289
the masterful, 288
sense of shame, 125-157, 650
Erotocrat, 679
Erotographomania, 420
Erotomania, 436-437
Erythrocytes: their number in men and women respectively, 62
Es-geht-an idea, the, 244
_Essayeurs_, 652
Ether intoxication, 654
Eugenics, 712
Exchange of wives, 194
Exhibitionism, 649-652
neurasthenic, 651
verbal, 578-579
Extirpation of the ovaries, 705-706
Extra-conjugal sexual intercourse, 238, 280-302
Eye, the, as an erogenic zone, 31
Eyes, the, as objects of sexual fetichism, 620
F
Face, the: its sexual relationship to the clothing, 150, 151
Factory women, condition of, 330-333
Fallopian tubes, section of, 705
Family, the, 195
Farthingale, 147, 148
Fashion, 133
theory of, 152-154
Fat, deposit of, in men and women respectively, 62
Father-right. See Patriarchy
Feeling-tones, sexual, 91
Fellatio, 621, 624, 626
Festivals, religio-erotic, 107 _et seq._
phallic, 135
sexual, 190-191
Fetichism, racial, 614-615
sexual, 541, 609-629
Fetters, sadistic use of, 573, 576
_Figuræ Veneris_, 51
Finery, love of, 334
Flagellantism. See Flagellomania
Flagellation. See Flagellomania
Flagellomania, 568-574
Flavouring agents, 626
Flirt, 568. See also Coquetry
_Fluor albus_, 146, 425
Foot fetichism, 622
Foot-wooers, 629
Formative impulse, 92
Fornication with animals. See Bestiality
Fornication with corpses. See Necrophilia
Fornicatory dolls, 648-649. See also _Godemichés_
Free love, 198, 233-278, 316. See also Free marriage
distinguished from wild love, 198, 221, 236-238
this distinction recognized by Shelley, 240
already sanctioned by States which permit repeated divorces by the
same person, 218, 219
in the Isle of Portland, 237, 238
from the communistic standpoint, 249, 250
and collectivism, 251
compatible with the preservation of private property, 251
and the economic independence of women, 251 _et seq._
Free marriage, 264-266, 361. See also Free love
“Free wife,” the, 242
Freedom, sexual, 301
sense of, in erotic relationships, 182
relations to erotic æstheticism, 182
loss of. See Loss of freedom
Freedom to love, 284, 766
the cause of constancy, and _vice versa_, 220, 221
Frenzy, tropical, 566-567
Friendship between men, 548
Frigidity, sexual, 86, 432-436, 470
_Frotteurs_, 652
Function impulse, 92, 180
Fur, sexually stimulating influence of, 150
“Venus im Pelz” (Venus in a fur-coat), 150
Fusion-love, 18
Future of human love, the, 763-766
G
Gait of effeminate urnings, 499-500
Gallantry, 163-165
“Gamahucheurs,” 467
Garbage literature, 737
Gastric disorder in sexual neurasthenia, 451
Geese, fornicatory acts with, 644
General paralysis of the insane. See Dementia, paralytic
Genital fetichism, 620-621
Genital organs. See also Reproductive organs
variations in female, 23
nerve-terminal apparatus of, 144
concealment of, 137-138
malformation of, as a cause of impotence, 441-442
malformation of, as a cause of perversions, 477
odour of, plays a subordinate part in the human sexual life, 624
Genius, the erotic, 289
Germany, young. See Young Germany
Gerontophilia, 508, 627
Girl-stabbers, 575
Girls, traffic in, 336-338
Glans penis, hyperæsthesia of, 448
Goats, fornicatory acts with, 644
_Godemichés_, 412
Gonorrhœa, 364-367
Greek love of boys, 547
Grisette, 298
Group-marriage, 193-195
Guide-books for the world of pleasure, 290 _et seq._
Guides, brothel, 727
Gumma, 361
Gynecocracy, 59
Gymnastics, 689-690
H
Habit. See Habituation
Habituation in love:
its dangers, 209
its significance in the genesis of sexual perversions, 456, 650, 662
Hair, falling out of, in consequence of syphilis, 360
luxuriant growth in homosexual men, 499
fetichism, 614-620
human, gradual loss of, 23, 24
Hair-stealers. See Plait-cutters
Half-clothing (_retroussé_), 139 _et seq._
“Half-world,” the, 345-348
its relations to fashion (the mode), 153
its utilization of hair-fetichism, by dyeing the hair, 615
Hand fetichism, 622
Handbills, 727
Handbooks for the world of pleasure, 290 _et seq._
Handkerchief fetichism, 629
Hanging, voluptuous excitement in connexion with, 582
“Happiness in marriage,” 700
Hard chancre, 356, 359
Hashish intoxication, 654
Hawkers’ literature, 737
Head, sexual differences in, 62, 63
Health, certificate of, before marriage, 256
“Health and Disease in relation to Marriage and the Married State”
(Senator Kaminer’s work referred to), 215
Hearing in relation to the _vita sexualis_, 35, 36
Heel fetichism, 629
Hellenic love of boys, 547
Hemispheres, testicular, 92
Henpecked husband, 567
Hereditary enfranchisement, 462, 463, 711-712
Hermaphrodite fetichism, 621-622
Hermaphroditism, 551-554
vestiges of, in normal human beings, 11, 12, 39, 40
primeval history of, 59
philosophical idea of, 70
Herpes progenitalis, 705
Hetairism, 346
Heterogamy, 712
Heterosexual pædication, 653-654
Heterosexuality, 12, 14
Hierodules, 105
_Hommes de voyage_, 648-649
Homogamy, 712
Homosexual physicians, 492
Homosexuality, 487-535
homosexual tattooing, 136
venereal diseases in the homosexual, 368-369
meeting-places of homosexuals, 514 _et seq._
balls and other entertainments among homosexuals, 517-519
need for the enlightenment of the general public regarding, 523, 524
riddle of, 487-535
theory of, 530-535
temporary, 547
in belletristic literature, 749
Homosexuals (male), effeminate, 498-501
virile, 501
Hormone, 414, 533. See also Sexual toxins
Horses, fornicatory acts with, 644
Household duties, simplification of, 82
Houses of accommodation, 344
Housing conditions, improper, in relation to prostitution, 335-336
Human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy, 244
Humanity, ideal type of, 56, 57
Humorous aspect of the sexual life, 732 _et seq._
Husband, henpecked. See Henpecked husband
Hutchinson’s teeth, 365
Hygiene, reproductive, 711
sexual, 709-718
Hymen, significance and function of, 12
Hyperæsthesia, 429-432, 477
Hypnosis, 655-656
Hypochondria, sexual, 451
I
Ideal type of humanity, 56, 57
Idealization of the senses, 161-162
of parts of the body, 612
of bodily functions, 624, 625
Ideas, coercive, 451
Illegitimate children: their maintenance, 275, 276
Illusion, erotic, need for, 181
Imitation in the _vita sexualis_, 465
_Immissio penis in anum._ See Pædication
Immoral advertisements, 723-728
Immunity to disease, acquired racial, 356
Impotence, 441-451
functional, 443
nervous, 444, 447
paralytic, 447
senile, 448-449
temporary, 445-446
treatment of, 449-451
Impulse, formative, reproductive, sexual, etc. See Formative impulse,
Reproductive impulse, Sexual impulse, etc.
Impulse, reproductive, 96
In-and-in breeding, 716
Incest, 639-640
Incontinence, bachelorhood and, 230
Independence of women, economic, 251
Individual, importance of love to, 3, 4, 28, 29, 96, 253, 254
Individualization of love, 95, 96, 124, 159-176
Indolent bubo, 359
Inefficiency, psychopathic, 664
Infantilism, psychosexual, 432
Infection, venereal, 298, 299, 353, 358, 359, 364, 374-383
Inflammatory bubo, 364
Inheritance of diseases, 713
of syphilis, 362
Injury, sadistic bodily, 574
Insanity. See Mental disorders
Insanity, moral, 665
Instinct, sexual. See Sexual impulse
Instrumentarium, auto-erotic, 411-413
Insurance of motherhood, 269, 271
Intellect, in man and woman respectively, 73-75
Intellectual activity and potency, 446
and sexual abstinence, 679-680
Intercourse, sexual. See Coitus
Intermediate stages, sexual, 499, 531
“Intimacy,” the, 296-302
a great focus of venereal infection, 299
Inunction for the prophylaxis of venereal infection, 380-381
as a perverse sexual manifestation, 579
Iodide of potassium in the treatment of syphilis, 387
Iritis, syphilitic, 361
Irritable hunger, sexual, 463
“Island custom,” the, of Portland, 237, 238
Itching, tickling, and sexual sensibility, 43, 44
J
Junores, 541-544
_Jus primæ noctis_, religious, 102
K
Kaften, 337
Kallipygian charms, 146, 147, 570, 622
Kin, near, marriage of, 716
Kiss, erotic significance of, 31, 32
the biting, 32, 33, 42, 50
origin of, 32, 33
Kleptomania, 577, 643
Knickerbockers, wearing of, in relation to masturbation, 426-427
Krankenkassen, 390-391
L
Lactation period, its artificial prolongation in order to prevent
conception, 700-702
Lady’s friend, 704
Larynx, sexual differences in, 62
Late syphilis, 363
Lathering, 579
Law, Spencer’s. See Spencer’s law
Lawyers: their inclination to masochism, 580
Lending of wives, 194
Lesbian love. See Tribadism
Letter. See Condom; also Correspondence
Leucoderma syphiliticum, 360
Leucorrhœa (_fluor albus_), 146, 425
Leviratsehe, 196
Levitical law: marriage of deceased husband’s brother in accordance
with, 196
Liaison. See “Intimacy”
Liberty. See Freedom
Libido-problem, 43-47
Lie of marriage, the, 203, 204
Lies, conventional. See Conventional lies
Life, sensual, the. See Sensual life
Lingam, the, 101
Lips, their relation to the genital organs, 33
Literature, belletristic, love in, 741-751
polite, love in, 741-751
scientific, of the sexual life, 753-761
Locomotor ataxy. See Tabes
Loss of freedom consequent on legal marriage, 217
Love, a part of the general science of mankind, ix
significance and aims of, 3, 91, 92
origin of, 27, 28
purposes of the individual and of the species in relation to, 3, 4
developmental possibilities of, 5, 6
elementary phenomena of, 10, 18
secondary phenomena of (brain and senses), 21-35, 37-51
appearance of spiritual elements in, 25, 27, 90 _et seq._
significance of sensory stimuli in, 29-35
beauty and love, 35, 36
significance of personality in relation thereto, 82, 95, 173, 174,
182, 183, 766
individualization of, 95, 96, 124, 159-176
romantic, 162, 168-171
platonic, 162, 550
nature sense, the, and, 165-167
sentimental, 166, 167
Weltschmerz and, 167 _et seq._
classical, 170-172
self-analysis in, 174-175
satanic-diabolic element in, 175, 289
artistic element in, 170, 175, 177-183
simultaneous for two or more persons (double love), 206-208
wild, 279-302, 476
Love, Bohemian, 175, 248
Love and capitalism, mutually antagonistic, 250
Love and marriage, 216, 217
“Love and marriage,” by Ellen Key, 253-267
Love as a disease (erotomania), 436-437
Love in belletristic literature, 741-751
Love, free, 176, 233-278
Love, free, in belletristic literature, 745, 746
Love of boys, 547-549
Love of finery, 334
Love regarded as inward spiritual development, 248
“Love’s coming of age,” 249
Love’s choice. See Sexual selection
Lues venerea. See Syphilis
Lust-murder, 574-575
Lynch law, sadism and, 563
M
Magazines. See Periodicals
Magical power of sex, 78
Maidservants, as recruits to the ranks of prostitution, 315, 316, 317,
333, 334
as seducers of children to sexual malpractices, 634
Maintenance of “illegitimate” children, 275, 276
_Maisons de passe_, 344
Malposition of the uterus, artificial, 705
Malthusian theory and practice, 693-708
Mammary glands, human:
reduction in their number, 22
atrophy of, 145-146, 715
condition in homosexual males, 500-501
sucking of, by men, 700-701
Mammonism, 213, 718
annihilates the sense of sexual responsibility, 718
influence of, in the sexual life. See Mercenary marriage
Mariolatry, 110, 111
Marriage, 185-231, 239 _et seq._, 272-273
average age at, 211-212
coercive. See Coercive marriage
disinclination to, 213
“morganatic,” 203
premature, 210 _et seq._
the lie of, 203, 204
Marriage and disease, 215
Marriage bond, the, and its results. See Coercive marriage
Marriage by capture, 195
Marriage of conscience. See Free marriage
Marriage impulse, the, 213
Marriage of near kin, 716
Marriage prohibitions, 712-713
Marriage reform:
author’s views, 264 _et seq._, 301, 302
Edward Carpenter on, 252
Ellen Key’s proposals, 260-264
in Austria, 231
in France, 219-221
in various countries, 248, 249
Marriage reform unattainable without preliminary economic reforms, 250
Marriages of convenience, 204
Marriages, one hundred typical, 221-227
Married state, characteristic pictures of, 227-231
Masculine beauty, 182-183, 550
Masochism, 580-607
biological sources of, 51, 537 _et seq._
religious, 103
of the days of chivalry, 164
relations to prostitution, 322-325
epistolary, 579
in art, 583
in women, 586-587
in belletristic literature, 750
Mass, the black, 579
Massage, 344, 569
Massage-institutes, 344-345
_Masseuses_, 582
Masterful erotic, the, 288
Masturbation (see also Onanism), 410-428
a cause of sexual anæsthesia, 86, 433
psychical, 419-420
distinguished from onanism (_Onanismus_), 422
a cause of sexual hyperæsthesia, 429
a cause of exhibitionism, 650
Masturbator’s heart, 424
Masturbators, anal, 546
Masturbatory insanity, 425
Matriarchy, 189, 196, 197-198
Means for the prevention of conception. See Preventive measures
Medical facts and problems from a theological point of view (pastoral
medicine), 121
Member-problem, 42, 43
Memory, weakness of, in syphilis, 630
Men, emancipation of, 485
friendship between, 548
Men-women, 545
Menstrual equivalents in men, 499
Menstruation, 26, 27, 77, 425, 451, 667
Mental disorders:
as a sequel of masturbation, 424, 425
as a cause of sexual hyperæsthesia, 429
as a cause of sexual perversions, 475-476
as a cause of degeneration, 715
Mercenary marriages, 195, 212-213, 718
Mercury the specific for syphilis, 368-388
_Metamorphosis sexualis paranoica_, 544
Mica-operation, the, 696-697
Mind, diseases of. See Mental disorders
Minne, 163, 164
Misogyny, 117, 118, 165, 264, 479-486, 745
Mistresses of the devil, 119, 120
Mistress rule, 567, 568
Monandry, 201
Monasticism, 115 _et seq._
Monism, erotic, 4, 254
Monogamic marriage, 196 _et seq._, 256
Monogamic society, George Meredith on, 202
Monogamy, human sacrifices on the altar of, 244
_Montgolfière_, 147, 148
Moonshine-reverie, 169
Moral insanity, 665
Moral restraint (as advocated by Malthus), 696
Moral statistics, 690
Morality, coercive marriage. See Coercive marriage morality
sexual, duplex. See Duplex sexual morality
Morality, offences against, 477, 659-670
“Morganatic” marriages, 203
Morning erection, 443
Morphinism and impotence, 654
Motherhood, insurance of, 269, 271
right to, 256, 257
Mother-right. See Matriarchy
Mothers, Association for the Protection of, 267-278
Movements and gait of effeminate urnings, 499-500
Muiracithin, 451
Mujerados, 426, 544-545
Murders by poison, 575
Muscular system, sexual differences in, 62
_Muse latrinale_, the, 625
Music in relation to the _vita sexualis_, 35, 36
Music-halls, 343-344
Mylitta-cult of the Babylonians, 103
Mysticism, sexual, 107 _et seq._, 123-124, 733
N
Nakedness: its relations to the sense of shame, 130 _et seq._, 154-157
Nationality in relation to sexual anomalies, 468-469
Nature-sense, the, in relation to love, 166
Nautch, the, 105, 106
Nautch-girls, 105, 106
Necrophilia, 646-647
symbolic, 647
Need for enlightenment, regarding homosexuality, 523-524
regarding the sexual life in general, 684-691
Need for sexual variety. See Variety, sexual
Negroes, 614
Neo-malthusianism, 693-708
Neurasthenia, masturbation and, 417
as a phenomenon of adaptation, 460
and homosexuality, 490, 492
of young wives, 451
sexual, 428-451
Neuro-chemical theory of sexual tension, 414
Neuro-mechanical theory of sexual tension, 414
Neuroses, sexual: their cause, 47
Newspapers. See Periodicals
Nocturnal life of great towns, 284, 292
Nose, the, in relation to genital system, 16
Nostrums, sexual, 722
Nubility, age of, 210
Nudity. See Nakedness
Nutritive impulse, the, and sexuality, 32, 33, 34
Nymphomania, 429
O
Object fetichism, 627 _et seq._
Obscene tattooing, 135-136
words and phrases, 578
Obscenity, 794 _et seq._
Obsession. See Ideas, coercive
Occlusive pessary, 703
Odour. See also Smell
axillary, 623
Offences against morality, 477, 659-670
Offences against property from sadistic motives, 576-577
Olfactory kiss. See Smell-kiss
_Onanie_ and _Onanismus_, 422
Onanism. See also Masturbation
a cause of sexual anæsthesia, 86, 433
a cause of sexual exhibitionism,
psychical, 419-420
_Onanismus_, 422
Oöphorectomy, 705-706
Opium intoxication, 654
Opium-smoking and impotence, 654
Opportunity and its influence in the sexual misleading of children,
633 _et seq._
Opportunity, lack of, for normal intercourse, leading to
pseudo-homosexuality, 54
leading to bestiality, 644
Opportunity for bestial intercourse more frequent in the country than
in towns, 644
Opportunity, first, and first contact, their avoidance the prime rule
of sexual pedagogy, 690
Organs, genital. See Reproductive organs
reproductive. See Reproductive organs
Organs of sexual congress. See Reproductive organs
Orgasm, sexual, 49, 50
Ornament, pubic, 137, 138
Orthobiosis, 461
Outlook, the, 763-766
Ovariotomy. See Oöphorectomy
Overcrowded dwellings and prostitution, 335-336
P
Pæderasty, 509, 547
definition of, 641
Pædication, 477, 509
definition of, 509
heterosexual, 653-654
Pædophilia, 508, 633
Pagism, 582
Pain, relation of, to the voluptuous sensation, 43-44, 415, 557-560.
See also Algolagnia
relief of, by masturbation, 415-416
Palæolithic man: his erotic life, 25, 26, 134
_Pall Mall Gazette_ scandals, 635
Paralytic dementia. See Dementia, paralytic
Parasyphilitic diseases, 361
Partial disclosure (_retroussé_), 139 _et seq._
Pastoral medicine, 121
Patriarchy, 194, 196
Pedagogy, sexual. See Education, sexual
Pederastia. See Pæderasty
Pelvis, sexual differences in, 60
Penal laws against homosexual intercourse, 520-525
Penis:
free mobility of this organ in the _genus homo_, 42
artificial, 101-102, 412-413
malformations of, 441, 442
abnormal smallness of, 442
fetichism, 620-621
Penis-bone, 42
“Pensionate,” 344
Perfumes, erotic, 17
Periodicals (newspapers, magazines, and reviews) devoted to the study
of the sexual life, 760-761
Periodicity, sexual, 26, 27, 55, 56
Perversions, sexual:
masturbation as a cause of, 425-426
in relation to impotence, 445
acquirement and artificial production of, 465
congenital, 466
racial diffusion of, 466-468
due to disease, 475-477
the riddle of homosexuality, 487-535
pseudo-homosexuality, 537-554
algolagnia (sadism and masochism), 555-607
sexual fetichism, 609-629
fornication with children, incest, necrophilia, bestiality,
exhibitionism, etc., 631-654
treatment of, 655-657
in belletristic literature, 748-750
Perversity, sexual, characterization of modern, 474-475
Pessary, occlusive, 703
Pessimism in love, 176
pleasurable, 561
Phallus, the, cult of (Phallus fetichism), 101, 620-621. See also
Penis, artificial
Philosophy, sexual. See Sexual philosophy
Phimosis, 477
Photographs, obscene, 731
Physicians, homosexual, 492
Physiological accompaniments. See Accompaniments, physiological
Pictures of the married state, characteristic, 227-231
Pigtail-cutters. See Plait-cutters
Plait-cutters, 616-619
Platonism, 162
Poietic, definition of, 93
Poisoning, 575
Polite literature, love in, 741-751
Pollutions, the term defined, 437. See also Seminal emissions
Polyandry, 193, 194
Polyclinics for prostitutes, 313, 404
for venereal patients in general, 391
Polygamy, 196, 244, 245, 716
facultative, 196
Polygyny, 196, 254-255. See also Polygamy
Popular culture, 739
Population, problem of, 695 _et seq._
Pornography, 312, 729-739
“Portland custom,” 237, 238
Posture, upright, in relation to the sexual life, 34, 51
Postures during coitus (_figuræ Veneris_), 51
Powders lethal to the spermatozoa, 704, 705
Pox. See Syphilis
Pregnancy, prevention of. See Preventive measures
Prelibido, 46
Premature marriage. See Marriage
Prematurity, sexual, 285, 417-418, 637-638, 668
Pre-Raphaelites, English:
their preference for the infantile asexual physique, 182
their ideas on love and marriage, 240
Preventive measures (means for the prevention of pregnancy), 696-706
Priapism, 429-430, 447
Priests: their sexual prescriptive rights, 102 _et seq._
Primary sexual phenomena, 18
Primitive man. See Palæolithic man
Prisons, homosexual acts in, 546
Problem of population, 695 _et seq._
Procreation, spiritual, 252
Procurement, 336
Prohibition of marriage, reasons for, 712-713
Promiscuity, sexual, 188-197, 257
Promiscuity, sexual, distinction of free love from, 198, 221, 236-238,
240
Property, offences against, from sadistic motives, 576-577
Prophylaxis, treatment, and suppression of venereal diseases, 371-406
Prophylaxis of venereal infection, personal, 375-383
Prostatorrhœa, 425, 439
Prostitute-quarters, 402
Prostitutes, congenital, 318, 325-326. See also “Half-world”
humanization and ennoblement of, 404-406
international, 348
“late,” 294
mental and physical characters of, 325-329
in belletristic literature, 747-748
pseudo-homosexuality of, 546-547
Prostitution, 201-202, 237, 303-348, 395-402
causes of, 314-315, 318, 322, 329-339, 434-435
crime and, 400-401
definition of, 319-321
growing hostility to, 254, 255
history and literature of, 307-319
“Kasernierung” of (prostitute-quarters), 402
male, 313-314, 518-519
masochistic, 582-583
regulation of, 309, 318, 319
religious, 100-106, 321
public, 339 _et seq._
secret, 317, 340 _et seq._
supply and demand, 321 _et seq._
Protection of mothers, association for, 267-278
“Protectrices,” 529
Prudery, 155-157
Pseudo-Don Juan, 290
Pseudo-hermaphroditism, 552-554
Pseudo-homosexuality, 426, 489, 496, 537-554
Psoriasis syphilitica, 360
Psychical elements in love, Chapters VI., VII., and VIII., pp. 94-176
Psychical onanism, 419-420
Psychopathia sexualis, 489 _et seq._ See also Perversions and
Perversities
Psychopathic inefficiency, 664
Psycho-therapeutics, 427-428, 450, 655-657
Puberty, 414, 497, 667
Pubic ornament. See Ornament, pubic
Public-houses with women attendants (“Animierkneipen”), 341-342
Public relationships of the sexual life, 719-728
Punishment-rooms, 581-582
Purchase, marriage by, 195
Pygmalionism, 648
Pyromania, 577
Q
Quackery, sexual, 721-722, 727
Queue. See Plait
R
Race: its significance in relation to sexual anomalies, 468, 469
Racial fetichism, 614-615
Rape (= Marriage by capture), 195
(= Violation), 707
Rational dress. See Reformed dress
Red, the colour, in relation to sexuality, 51
to “see red,” 51
Red-hair fetichism, 615, 622, 623
Reflective love, 174, 446, 750
Reform, economic, prerequisite to marriage reform, 250
Reform of marriage. See Marriage reform
Reform of our amatory life, 179
Reform, Sexual, Association for, 273
Reformed dress, 154
Regeneration, 462, 463, 711-712. See also Enfranchisement, hereditary
“Regiment of Women,” 59
Regulated prostitution, abolition of, 318, 398, 399, 400, 401-403
Regulation of prostitution, 309, 318, 397-401
Relationships, sexual, need for variety in, 133, 192, 205, 463 _et
seq._
Religion and sexuality, 87-124
Religious imagination, the, straying in sexual by-paths, 120
Remarriage subsequent to divorce, 242
Remedies, secret, 722
_Renifleurs_, 467, 625
Reproduction, sexual. See Sexual reproduction
Reproductive aperture, 41, 42
Reproductive cells:
conjugation of, 9, 10
differences in respect of mode of energy in two sexes, 71, 72
representative of respective spiritual natures of man and woman, 72
Reproductive hygiene, 711
Reproductive impulse, 96
Reproductive organs:
aperture-problem, 41, 42
member-problem, 42, 43
libido-problem, 43-47
origin and purpose, 39-41
differentiation, 39, 40
Responsibility, conjugal, 220
sense of, in free unions, 239
sexual, 220, 239, 274, 765
diminished (in borderland states of mental disorder), 664, 666-668
annihilated by mammonism, 718
Retifism (shoe fetichism), 627 _et seq._
Retrogressive development of sexual characters, 22-25
_Retroussé_, 139 _et seq._
Revaluation Society (“Umwertungsgesellschaft”--for the reform of
amatory life) of the U.S.A., 272 _et seq._
Reviews. See Periodicals
Revolutionary movements, part played by algolagnia in connexion
therewith, 563, 587-607
Rhythmotropism, 179
Riddle of homosexuality, the, 487-535
Right to motherhood, 256, 257, 275
Rights, conjugal. See Conjugal rights
“Rings, stimulating,” 467, 704
Romantic-individual love, 162
Romantic love, 168-171
Roseola syphilitica, 360
“Rummel,” 344
S
Sacrifice, sexual, 103
Sacrifices, human, on the altar of monogamy, 244
Saddle-nose, syphilitic, 361
Sadism, 568-580
biological sources of, 50, 51, 537 _et seq._
in belletristic literature, 750
religious, 103, 579-580
symbolic, 577-580
verbal, 51, 578
Sadistic bodily injury, 574-576
bestiality, 644-645
Saloons, dancing. See Dancing saloons
Sapphism, 529
Satanism, 175, 289, 563, 579, 733
Satyriasis, 429
Scandals, _Pall Mall Gazette_, 635
sexual, 721, 728
Scents, erotic, 17
Schoolmaster’s sadism, 571-573
Scientific literature of the sexual life, the, 753-761
Secondary sexual characters, 18, 59 _et seq._
Secondary sexual phenomena, 18
Secret diseases, 722
Secret remedies, 722
Section of the Fallopian tubes, 705
Sects, sexual religious, 107-111, 114, 114-115
Security sponges, 704
Seducer types, 286-290
Seduction, 264, 281-302, 416
definition of the term, 281
“Seeing red,” 51
Selection, natural. See Natural selection sexual. See Sexual selection
Self-abuse. See Masturbation and also Onanism
Self-control, sexual, 252, 675-677
Seminal emissions, 437-441
Sensations, sexual differences in, 73
Sense of shame, sexual, 125-157, 650
Sense, sexual. See Sexual sense
Sensibility, sexual, in woman, 83-86
Sensory stimuli, erotic, 29-36
Sensual life, the, 281-286, 290-297
Sensuality, spiritualized, 253
Sentimentality, 166
Sex: its significance in the etiology of psychopathia sexualis,
470-471
third, the, 13
fourth, the, 481
Sexual abstinence. See Abstinence, sexual
Sexual act. See Coitus
Sexual advertisements, 723-728
Sexual anæsthesia. See Anæsthesia, sexual
Sexual anomalies. See Perversions, and also Perversity
Sexual antipathy. See Antipathy of the sexes
Sexual aperture. See Reproductive aperture
Sexual biology, 759
Sexual cells, 43
Sexual characters, secondary. See Secondary sexual characters
Sexual chemistry, literature of, 121 _et seq._
Sexual clubs, secret, 653
Sexual desire, 46
Sexual day-dreams, 420
Sexual differentiation. See Differentiation, sexual (and see also
under separate organs)
Sexual education, 691-692
Sexual enlightenment, need for general, 684-691
Sexual equivalents. See Equivalents, sexual
Sexual fetichism, 541, 609-629
Sexual freedom, 301
Sexual gratification, 46
Sexual hygiene, 709-718
Sexual hyperæsthesia, 429
Sexual impulse, 45, 46
its increase by natural selection, 14
its relations to civilization, 14, 15
periodicity of, 26
components of, 46
Sexual intercourse. See Coitus
Sexual intermediate stages, 499, 531
Sexual irritable hunger, 463
Sexual life, the, in its public relationships, 719-728
Sexual links, 499, 531
Sexual literature:
belletristic, 741-751
pornographic, 729-739
scientific, 753-761
Sexual morality, duplex. See Duplex sexual morality
Sexual mysticism. See Mysticism, sexual
Sexual nostrums, 722
Sexual organs. See Reproductive organs
Sexual orgasm. See Orgasm, sexual
Sexual perversions. See Perversions, sexual
Sexual philosophy, 94, 95
Sexual prematurity, 285, 417-418, 637-638, 668
Sexual promiscuity. See Promiscuity, sexual; also Wild love, and
Extra-conjugal sexual intercourse
Sexual quackery. See Quackery, sexual
Sexual Reform, Association for, 273
Sexual reproduction, 10, 11
Sexual responsibility, 274
Sexual scandals, 721-728
Sexual science, literature of, 753-761
Sexual selection, 35-36, 712
Sexual sense, 43
Sexual sense of shame, 125-157, 650
Sexual sensibility in woman, 83-86
Sexual sphere. See Sphere, sexual
Sexual tension. See Tension, sexual; and also Prelibido
Sexual toxins, 47, 414, 532-533
Sexual vampirism. See Vampirism
Sexual variety. See Variety, sexual
Sexual visions, 115
Sexuality and religion, 87-124
Shame, sense of, sexual, 125-157, 650
Shoe fetichism, 627-629
Shunammitism, 633
Sight in relation to the _vita sexualis_, 34, 35
Silver salts in the prophylaxis of gonorrhoea, 379-380
Simplification of household tastes, 82
Simultaneous love for two or more persons, 206
Skatological fetichism, 625
Skatology in folklore, 625
Skin, the, its relations to sexuality, 30, 31, 43, 44, 45
Skull, sexual difference in, 63
Slave of love, the, 163
Slave-trade, the white, 336-338
Slavery, sexual (masochistic), 163, 568, 582-585
Smell, atrophy of organs of, 22
connexion between the nose and the genital organs, 16
erotic significance of smell declines with advancing civilization,
17
fetichism, 622-626
of the body at large, 623, 624
of the genital organs, 624
of fur, 150
odoriferous glands, sexual, 16
sexual odours, distinctive, 16
sexual perfumes, 17, 626
relation of hairy covering to sense of, 24, 615, 622-623
sense of, the psychical elementary phenomenon of love, 15
Smell-kiss, the, 33
Social intercourse, the erotic element in, 181
Socialism and free love, 249-251
Society for the Suppression of Venereal Diseases, German, 374
“Sodomie”: German use of this term defined and explained, 640, 641
Sodomy. See Pæderasty, Pædication, and Pædophilia
definition of the term, 641
Soft chancre, 356, 364
Soldiers, homosexual, 501
public-houses for uranian soldiers, 518
Sore throat, syphilitic, 360
Soutenage, 400
Spasm, vaginal. See Vaginismus
Spaying, 706
Speech: its relations to love, 90
Spencer’s law, 55, 56, 64
Spermatorrhœa, 425, 439
Spermatozoa, 9, 10, 71, 72, 554, 705
Sphere, sexual, in women, 84
Spirit, the way of, in love, Chapters VI., VII., and VIII., pp. 94-176
Spiritual development, inward, love regarded as, 248
Spiritual procreation, 252
Spiritualized sensuality, 253
_Spirochaete pallida_, 357
Sponges, security, 704
Stages, sexual, intermediate, 499, 531
“Stallions,” 313
Statues, fornicatory acts with, 647-649
Stature, sexual differences in, 61
Stays. See Corset
_Stercoraires platoniques_, 653
Sterility, in women, 146, 365
in men, 365, 442
artificial, 705 _et seq._ See also Preventive measures
facultative, 699
Stigmata of degeneration, 455, 664-665
“Stimulating rings” and similar apparatus, 467, 704
Stimuli, sensory. See Sensory stimuli
Street-arabs, Parisian, effeminate, 601
Street-prostitution, 339
Stroke, apoplectic, in syphilis, 361
Succubi, 119, 120
Suggestibility, comparative, of men and women, 74
Suggestion: its significance in the _vita sexualis_, 416, 465, 655-656
Suicide, 727
Sulphur-baths in the “after-treatment” of syphilis, 387-388
Superstition, sexual, 103, 633, 643, 650
Supply of prostitutes in large towns in excess of the demand, 321 _et
seq._
Sweets, fondness for, in relation to sexuality, 34
Swindlers, 728
Synæsthetic stimuli, 464
Synthetic human being, 71
Syphilis, as a cause of sexual perversions, 476
congenital, 362
hereditaria tarda, 363
in apes, 357
in belletristic literature, 748
innocentium, 353
late, 363
origin of, 351-356
protozoal cause of, 357
treatment, 383-388
Syphilitic psoriasis, 360
T
Tabes as a sequel of syphilis, 361, 476
Talent, the breeding of, 716-717
Taste in relation to the _vita sexualis_, 33, 34
Tattooing, from erotic motives, 133-137
forensic significance of, 665, 666
Teeth, the, in congenital syphilis, 365
Temple prostitution, 104, 105
Temporary marriage, 241, 242
Tension, sexual, 46, 48, 414, 679. See also Prelibido
Tension, sexual, relief of, 47
Testicles, in relation to the brain, 92
Tetragamy, Schopenhauer’s essay on, 246-248
Theatres, variety, 343-344
“Theologiens mammillaires,” 122
“Third sex.” See Sex, third, the
Throat, sore. See Sore throat
Tickling and sexual sensibility, 43, 44, 45
Tight-lacing, results of, 157, 158
“Tingel-tangel,” 343-344
Tobacco: its use an occasional cause of impotence, 444
Tom-cat, fornicatory act with, 645
Torture chambers, 581-582
Totem, 193, 194
Touch. See also Contact, sexual importance of, 30-33, 45
Town-life in relation to prostitution, 321
Toxins, sexual, 47, 414, 532-533
Trade in articles of immoral use, 722
Trade, the white slave, 336-338
Traders in girls, 337
Traffic in girls, 336-338
Tress-cutters. See Plait-cutters
Trials, scandalous, 728
Tribadism, 489, 524-530 definition of, 641
Tropical clothing, 139
Tropical frenzy, 566-567
Trousers, wearing of, in relation to masturbation, 426-427
Tuberculosis: its relation to the sexual life, 476
Type, ideal, of humanity, 56, 57
Typical marriages, one hundred, 221-227
U
Ugliness, sexual passion and, 183
Uncleanliness, ceremonial, 130
Underclothing, fetichism, 629
_Unio mystica_, 109-110
Union, free. See Free love and Free marriage
Uranism, 489
Urminde, 525
Urning, 498
Urnings’ balls, 518 _et seq._
Urolagnia, 583, 625-626
Urinary organs: their relation to the reproductive organs, 41, 42
V
Vaginal douching, 704
Vaginal muscles, 433
Vaginal spasm. See Vaginismus
Vaginismus, 433, 434
Vampirism, 575, 640
Vaporization, 705
Variability, sexual, 56, 64, 77
Variety, sexual, need for, 133, 192, 205, 463 _et seq._
Variety theatres, 343-344
Venereal diseases, 306-307, 349-370
prophylaxis of, 371-383
treatment of, 383-392
statistics of, 392-396
Venereal ulcer, 356, 364
“Venus apparatus,” the, 705
“Venus im Pelz,” 150
Venus statuaria, 647-648
Vera-enthusiasm, 673
Verbal sadism. See Sadism, verbal
_Vertugale_, 147, 148
Vestige of primitive civilization, mercenary marriage a, 212
Violation, 707
Virginity, disesteem for, in primitive races, 104, 191
Virile urnings, 501
Visions, sexual, 115
Vitalizing influence of eroticism, 182
Vitriol-throwing, 575
_Vocabularia erotica_, 578
Voice, the: its sexual significance, 35-36
of urnings, 500
Voice fetichism, 627
Voluptuousness, 43-45
_Voyeurs_, 652-653
_Voyeuses_, 652-653
W
Washes, antiseptic, 381
Way of the spirit in love, Chapters VI., VII., and VIII., pp. 94-176
Weak-mindedness of women, physiological, 40
Weight of body. See Body-weight
Weltschmerz, erotic, the different varieties of, 167-168, 561
Whipping of children, dangers of, 570
Whites, the. See _Fluor albus_
White slave trade, the, 336-338
“Wife, the free,” 242
Wife-lending and wife-exchange, 194
Wig-collectors, 616
Wild love, 281-302
distinguished from free love, 198, 221, 236-238, 281
Will, education of the, 655-657, 680, 689-691
diseases of the, 423, 655
Witchcraft, sexual element in belief therein, 118-121, 483
Woman, hair of, 24
demeanour during coitus, 49, 50
primitive character and comparative simplicity of feminine nature,
56
greater suggestibility of, 74
emotivity of, 75, 76
magical and mysterious nature of, 78, 119
sexual sensibility in, 83-86
tattooing of, 136-137
change of type with progressive civilization, 157 _et seq._
types of beauty, modern, 181-183
masturbation in, 418
nymphomania in, 429-432
frigidity in, 433-435
pollutions in, 439-440
sexual neurasthenia in, 451
flagellantism in, 573
masochism in, 586
poisoning by, 575
bestiality in, 645
power of resistance to degeneration, 717
“Woman and Socialism,” 251
Woman’s question, the, 58, 59, 79 _et seq._, 529, 747
Women, economic independence of, 251
diseases of, 367
Women-men, 545
Y
Yohimbin, 450
Young Germany, the love-problems of, 172-175
Z
Zoophilia, 640-643. See also Bestiality
_Rebman Limited, 129, Shaftesbury Avenue, W. C._
PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. REBMAN LIMITED
129 SHAFTESBURY AVENUE LONDON, W.C.
THE SEXUAL QUESTION
A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic and Sociological Study for the
Cultured Classes. By AUGUST FOREL, M.D., PH.D., LL.D., Formerly
Professor of Psychiatry at and Director of the Insane Asylum in Zürich
(Switzerland). English Adaptation by C. F. MARSHALL, M.D., F.R.C.S.,
Late Assistant-Surgeon to the Hospital for Diseases of the Skin,
London. Royal 8vo. With 23 Illustrations, 17 of which are printed in
colours. Cloth, 550 pages, price 21s. net.
EXTRACT FROM AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST GERMAN EDITION.
This book is the fruit of long experience and reflection. It has two
fundamental ideas--the study of nature, and the study of the psychology
of man in health and in disease.
To harmonize the aspirations of human nature and the data of the
sociology of the different human races and the different epochs of
history, with the results of natural science and the laws of mental and
sexual evolution which these have revealed to us, is a task which has
become more and more necessary at the present day. It is our duty to our
descendants to contribute as far as is in our power to its
accomplishment. In recognition of the immense progress of education
which we owe to the sweat, the blood, and often to the martyrdom of our
predecessors, it behoves us to prepare for our children a life more
happy than ours.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.
Professor Forel is well known to English readers through the medium of
English translations of his other works on Psychiatry and kindred
subjects. The present work has already been translated into several
European languages. Whether we agree with all Professor Forel’s
conclusions or not, we must admit that he has dealt with a difficult and
delicate subject in a masterly and scientific manner.
CONTENTS: I. -- The Reproduction of Living Beings -- History of the
Germ -- Cell-Division -- Parthenogenesis -- Conjugation -- Mneme --
Embryonic Development -- Differences of Sexes -- Castration --
Hermaphrodism -- Heredity -- Blastophthoria. II. -- The Evolution or
Descent of Living Beings. III. -- Natural Conditions of Mechanism of
Human Coitus -- Pregnancy -- Correlative Sexual Characters. IV. -- The
Sexual Appetite in Man and Woman -- Flirtation. V. -- Love and other
Irradiations of the Sexual Appetite in the Human Mind -- Psychic
Irradiations of Love in Man: Procreative Instinct, Jealousy, Sexual
Braggardism, Pornographic Spirit, Sexual Hypocrisy, Prudery and
Modesty, Old Bachelors -- Psychic Irradiations of Love in Woman: Old
Maids, Passiveness and Desire, Abandon and Exaltation, Desire for
Domination, Petticoat Government, Desire of Maternity and Maternal
Love, Routine and Infatuation, Jealousy, Dissimulation, Coquetry,
Prudery and Modesty -- Fetichism and Anti-Fetichism -- Psychological
Relations of Love to Religion. VI. -- Ethnology and History of the
Sexual Life of Man and of Marriage -- Origin of Marriage -- Antiquity
of Matrimonial Institutions -- Criticism of the Doctrine of
Promiscuity -- Marriage and Celibacy -- Sexual Advances and Demands of
Marriage -- Methods of Attraction -- Liberty of Choice -- Sexual
Selection -- Law of Resemblance -- Hybrids -- Prohibition of
Consanguineous Marriages -- Rôle of Sentiment and Calculation in
Sexual Selection -- Marriage by Purchase -- Decadence of Marriage by
Purchase -- Dowry -- Nuptial Ceremonies -- Forms of Marriage --
Duration of Marriage -- History of Extra-Nuptial Sexual Intercourse.
VII. -- Sexual Evolution -- Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Sexual Life.
VIII. -- Sexual Pathology -- Pathology of the Sexual Organs --
Venereal Disease -- Sexual Psychology -- Reflex Anomalies -- Psychic
Impotence -- Sexual Paradoxy -- Sexual Anæsthesia -- Sexual
Hyperæsthesia -- Masturbation and Onanism -- Perversions of the Sexual
Appetite: Sadism, Masochism, Fetichism, Exhibitionism, Homosexual
Love, Sexual Inversion, Pederosis, Sodomy -- Sexual Anomalies in the
Insane and Psychopathic -- Effects of Alcohol on the Sexual Appetite
-- Sexual Anomalies by Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion -- Sexual
Perversions due to Habit. IX. -- The Rôle of Suggestion in Sexual Life
-- Amorous Intoxication. X. -- The Relations of the Sexual Question to
Money and Property -- Prostitution, Proxenetism and Venal Concubinage.
XI. -- The Influence of Environment on Sexual Life -- Influence of
Climate -- Town and Country Life -- Vagabondage -- Americanism --
Saloons and Alcohol -- Riches and Poverty -- Rank and Social Position
-- Individual Life -- Boarding Schools. XII. -- Religion and Sexual
Life. XIII. -- Rights in Sexual Life -- Civil Law -- Penal Law -- A
Medico-Legal Case. XIV. -- Medicine and Sexual Life -- Prostitution --
Sexual Hygiene -- Extra-Nuptial Intercourse -- Medical Advice -- Means
of Regulating or Preventing Conception -- Hygiene of Marriage --
Hygiene of Pregnancy -- Medical Advice as to Marriage -- Medical
Secrecy -- Artificial Abortion -- Treatment of Sexual Disorders. XV.
-- Sexual Morality. XVI. -- The Sexual Question in Politics and in
Political Economy. XVII. -- The Sexual Question in Pedagogy. XVIII. --
The Sexual Question in Art. XIX. -- Conclusions -- Utopian Ideas on
the Ideal Marriage of the Future -- Bibliographical Remarks.
MARRIAGE AND DISEASE
Being an Abridged Edition of “Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage and the Married State.” Edited by Prof. H. SENATOR and Dr. S.
KAMINER. Translated from the German by J. DULBERG, M.D., J.P. (of
Manchester). Demy 8vo., 452 pages. Cloth, price 10s. 6d. net.
A quarter of a century has elapsed since Francis Galton, in his
“Inquiries into Human Faculty,” drew attention to the urgent need for
the foundation of a science and practice of “Eugenics,” that is, the
improvement of the human stock. “Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage and the Married State,” edited by Senator and Kaminer,
undoubtedly occupies a very high place among recent works devoted to the
elucidation of certain aspects of this important topic, and in the
abridged edition an adaptation has been prepared for the enlightenment
of the thinking portion of the public on pathological questions in
relation to marriage and the married state, and from which all purely
technical and professional matter has been excluded.
At a time when such questions as the decline of the birth-rate, the
sterilization of the degenerate, the restriction of indiscriminate
marriages, the voluntary limitation of families, and so forth, form
subjects of daily debate and newspaper articles, it is of the greatest
advantage that every man and woman who either contemplates or has
embarked on matrimony should be as well acquainted, as the limits of our
conventionality permit, with the medical or hygienic aspect of
marriage.
To give some idea of the scope of this absorbingly interesting work, we
append the chapter headings. These apply to the unabridged as well as to
the abridged edition at present under review.
I. -- Introduction. II. -- The Hygiene of Marriage. III. -- Congenital
and Inherited Diseases and Predispositions to Disease. IV. --
Consanguinity and Marriage. V. -- Climate, Race, and Nationality in
Relation to Marriage. VI. -- Sexual Hygiene. VII. -- Menstruation,
Pregnancy, Child-bed and Lactation. VIII. -- Constitutional
(Metabolic) Diseases. IX. -- Diseases of the Blood. X. -- Diseases of
the Vascular System. XI. -- Diseases of the Respiratory Organs. XII.
-- Diseases of the Organs of Digestion. XIII. -- Diseases of the
Kidneys. XIV. -- Gonorrhœal Diseases. XV. -- (_a_) Syphilis. XVI. --
(_b_) Diseases of the Skin. XVII. -- Diseases of the Organs of
Locomotion. XVIII. -- Diseases of the Eyes in Relation to Marriage,
with special regard to Heredity. XIX. -- Diseases of the Lower
Uro-Genital Organs and Physical Impotence. XX. -- Diseases of Women,
including Sterility. XXI. -- Diseases of the Nervous System. XXII. --
Insanity. XXIII. -- Perverse Sexual Sensations and Psychical
Impotence. XXIV. -- Alcoholism and Morphinism. XXV. -- Occupational
Injuries. XXVI. -- Medico-Professional Secrecy. XXVII. -- The Economic
Importance of Sanitary Conditions.
Brief as is this sketch of the abridged edition, it will suffice, in
conjunction with the following extracts from a few of the many highly
laudatory reviews, to show how valuable the work will be to parents and
guardians, family advisers, whether lawyers or clergymen, schoolmasters
and schoolmistresses, as well as to those who are already married, and
to those who are contemplating marriage.
_THE LANCET_ says: “The progress of sociological investigation in
modern times has caused increased attention to be paid to questions of
health in relation to marriage and the propagation of the human race,
and anything which helps to spread abroad an intelligent appreciation
of the dangers incurred, not only by individuals who enter on the
married state, but also by their offspring, from the existence of many
forms of disease must be regarded as a public benefit. The present
book is an attempt to make available for general consumption the gist
of the larger work from which it is taken.... The material contained
in the book is most valuable, and a study of it should be useful to
those capable of appreciating it....”
_PUBLIC HEALTH_ says: “It is cleanly, even when dealing with most
difficult subjects, and it is a storehouse of information on points on
which hygienists are expected to be well informed.”
_THE SCOTTISH MEDICAL JOURNAL_ says: “As a guide for the general
public many of the articles are well adapted to fulfil their object.”
_THE DAILY DISPATCH_ says: “... every work that helps to enlightenment
is to be welcomed so long as it comes with credentials as to its
honesty and guarantees that it is not merely a device for making money
out of ignorance. ‘Marriage and Disease’ has all the essential claims
to consideration. Dr. Dulberg has very ably condensed the larger
manual into one of 450 pages, containing 27 chapters. The volume is of
absorbing interest, not only for its arguments and conclusions, but
also, and perhaps mainly, for the wealth of information it contains on
matrimonial and sex questions in all countries and climes.”
_From the Twelfth German Edition._
PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS
With Special Reference to Antipathic Sexual Instinct. A
Medico-Forensic Study by the late Dr. R. VON KRAFFT-EBING, Professor
of Psychiatry and Neurology, University of Vienna. Only authorized
Translation. (This is the last edition revised by the late author
himself.) This book is =sold only to the Members of the Medical, Legal
and Clerical Professions=. Royal 8vo., with Portrait of Author,
containing 583 pages. Cloth, price 21s. net.
This _new_ translation contains much new matter and a great many new
cases not referred to in former editions.
The book will be found to be an _invaluable aid_ to the medical
practitioner in properly diagnosing certain cases which may be puzzling
under ordinary circumstances; whilst in the law courts it will often
assist in properly discriminating between crime and insanity or hidden
neuropathic affections, thus saving the accused from miscarriage of
justice and the court from committing a judicial crime.
_In the Press._
THE SEXUAL LIFE OF WOMAN
A Physiological, Pathological, and Hygienic Study. By Dr. E. HEINRICH
KISCH, Professor at the German Faculty of the University of Prague,
etc. Only authorized Translation by M. EDEN PAUL, M.D. Brux.,
M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. Super Royal 8vo., about 700 pages, with 97
Illustrations. Cloth, price about 21s. net.
=The Pasteurisation and Sterilisation of Milk.= By ALBERT E. BELL,
F.I.C., F.C.S., District Analyst for Dorset, Lecturer on Chemistry at
Westminster College, London. Crown 8vo., 50 pp. Price 1s. 6d. net.
In writing this little book, the author has been actuated by a desire
to bring home to those interested in dairy work the vital importance
of sterilising milk, and to set before them those methods by which
this may be most cheaply and effectively accomplished.
The author has also endeavoured to avoid the use of such technical
terms as would be likely to be unintelligible to the average reader.
“... The book will be read by the lay reader with advantage, since it
points out the dangers arising from infected milk and the advantages
of sterilised milk.”--_Lancet._
“... The author has produced a handbook that will be found
intelligible even to those having only an elementary knowledge of
dairying....”--_Dairy World._
=Introduction to Infectious and Parasitic Diseases.= Including their
Cause and Manner of Transmission. By MILLARD LANGFELD, A.B., M.B. (Johns
Hopkins University), Bacteriologist to the Omaha City Board of Health,
etc. Just Published. 12mo., 276 pp. With 33 Illustrations. Cloth. Price
5s. 6d. net.
A clear description of the fundamental principles of the causation and
manner of transmission of Infectious Disease, written for that large
and increasing number of persons who are directly or indirectly
interested in this important subject. It includes chapters on
Bacteriology, Animal Parasites, and Disinfectants and Disinfection.
Effort has been made to avoid speculation and to adhere only to
accepted doctrines. The author has carefully abstained from the use of
terms and the discussion of questions unintelligible to the general
reader.
=Tuberculosis as a Disease of the Masses, and How to Combat It.= Prize
Essay by S. A. KNOPF, M.D., of New York. Adapted for use in England by
J. M. BARBOUR, M.B., M.O.H., Isle of Man. Demy 8vo., 76 pp. Paper
Covers. Illustrated. Price 1s. 1d. net (inclusive of postage).
The International Congress to Combat Tuberculosis as a Disease of the
Masses, which was convened at Berlin, May 24th to 27th, 1899, awarded
the International Prize to this work.
“Worthy of an extensive circulation.”--_British Medical Journal._
“An excellent treatise.”--_Nature._
=The Hygiene of the Lung.= By Prof. Dr. L. VON SCHRÖTTER, Director of
the Third Medical Clinic in the University of Vienna. Translated by H.
W. ARMIT, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. This little work is intended to lay before
the uninitiated reader (and also before the practitioner) the anatomical
and physiological characteristics of the organs of respiration, and the
best methods of protecting these organs. It deals with the more common
ailments, and with the rational treatments not only of the affected
parts but also of the causal agents, thus combining an elementary
prophylaxis. In the most readable manner possible this little book tells
a useful story of the healthy and diseased lungs, _a story which the
practitioner who reads it will not despise, and which he will find of
great value to give to his patient to read_. Crown 8vo., 136 pp. With 16
Illustrations, cloth, price 2s. net.
=Lateral Curvature of the Spine and Round Shoulders.= A Book for those
interested in Physical Culture, Correction of Bodily Deformity, etc. By
ROBERT W. LOVETT, M.D. Boston. Demy 8vo., 188 pp. With 154
Illustrations, cloth, price 7s. 6d. net.
=Hypnotism; or, Suggestion and Psychotherapy.= A Study of the
Psychological, Psycho-Physiological and Therapeutic Aspects of
Hypnotism. By Dr. AUGUST FOREL, formerly Professor of Psychiatry and
Director of the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, Zürich. Translated from the
Fifth German Edition by H. W. ARMIT, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. The importance
of studying the functional aspects of thought and other psychical
exercises is becoming more evident every year. Large Crown 8vo., 382
pp., cloth, price 7s. 6d. net.
=The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men.= By Major CHAS. E. E.
WOODRUFF, M.A., M.D., Surgeon, United States Army. This work had its
origin in the theory of von Schmaedel, that skin pigmentation of man was
evolved for the purpose of excluding the dangerous actinic or short rays
of light which destroy living protoplasm. It is a step in the Conquest
of the Tropics. Demy 8vo., 358 pp., cloth, price 10s. 6d. net.
=Vitality, Fasting, and Nutrition.= A Physiological Study of the
curative power of fasting, together with a new theory of the relation of
food to human vitality. By HEREWARD CARRINGTON, Member of the Society
for Psychical Research, London, etc. With an Introduction by A.
RABAGLIATI, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.S. Royal 8vo., 700 pp., cloth, price 21s.
net.
=Food and Hygiene.= A Scientific Book written in simple language. By
WILLIAM TIBBLES, M.D., LL.D., L.R.C.P., M.R.C.S., L.S.A., Medical
Officer of Health, Fellow of the Royal Institute of Public Health, etc.
Large Crown 8vo., 684 pp., cloth, price 8s. net.
=Agricultural Bacteriology.= Including a Study of Bacteria as Relating
to Agriculture, with Special Reference to the Bacteria in Soil, in the
Dairy, in Food Products, in Domestic Animals, and in Sewage. By H. W.
CONN, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, Wesleyan University, Middletown,
Conn. 12mo., 412 pp. Illustrated, cloth, price 11s. net.
=Bacteria in Milk and its Products.= Designed for the use of Students in
Dairying, and for all others concerned in the Handling of Milk, Butter,
or Cheese. By H. W. CONN, Ph.D., Author of “Agricultural Bacteriology,”
etc., etc. 12mo., 306 pp., with 43 Illustrations, cloth, price 6s. net.
=A Dictionary of Medicine and the Allied Sciences.= Comprising the
Pronunciation, Derivation, and full Explanation of Medical,
Pharmaceutical, Dental and Veterinary Terms; together with much
collateral descriptive matter, numerous tables, etc. By ALEXANDER DUANE,
M.D., Reviser of Medical Terms for Webster’s International Dictionary.
Fourth Edition, with an Appendix, completely revised. Buckram, original
price 14s. net, now reduced to 9s. net.
=Entomology.= With Special References to its Biological and Economic
Aspects. By JUSTUS WATSON FOLSOM, D.Sc. (Harv.), Instructor in
Entomology at the University of Illinois. 300 Illustrations, 485 pp.,
cloth, price 14s. net. A Book for every Library.
=Biographic Clinics:= The Origin of the Ill-Health of De Quincey,
Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, and Browning (Vol. 1.); The Origin of the
Ill-Health of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Wagner, Parkman, Jane
Welch, Carlyle, Spencer, Whittier, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and Nietzsche
(Vol. II.); and Vols. III., IV., and V.--Visual Function and Health.
Essays concerning the Influence of Visual Function, Pathologic and
Physiologic. By GEORGE M. GOULD, M.A., M.D. Five crown 8vo. volumes
(sold separately). Price per volume, bound in cloth, 4s. each net.
=The Theory of Ions.= A Consideration of its place in Biology and
Therapeutics. By WILLIAM TIBBLES, M.D., LL.D., L.R.C.P., Author of “Food
and Hygiene.” Just Ready. Crown 8vo., 150 pp., cloth, price 2s. 6d. net.
_To be Issued in October, 1908._
=The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal: Its Legends and Symbolism.=
Considered in their Affinity with certain Mysteries of Initiation and
other Traces of a Secret Tradition in Christian Times. By ARTHUR EDWARD
WAITE.
Orders received by the Publishers in advance of publication, and
accompanied by a remittance, will be executed until further notice at
12s. 6d. net. The Publishers reserve to themselves the right to
increase the price on or before publication. (Orders may be given
through any bookseller.)
The work is now passing through the press and will be issued in
October, 1908. Copies will be sent to subscribers immediately on
publication.
=Monism?= An Antidote to Prof. Haeckel’s “The Riddle of the Universe.”
By S. PH. MARCUS, M.D., of Pyrmont. Translated by R. W. FELKIN, M.D.,
etc. Crown 8vo., 144 pp., paper covers, price 1s. net; by post, 1s. 2d.
NOVELS FROM MESSRS. REBMAN’S LIST
=A DAUGHTER OF BELIAL.= A Sensational Novel. By BASIL TOZER. 6s.
“... It has, in fact, kept us from work longer than we
like.”--_Times._
=THE WIFE.= A Story of Smart Suburban and Homely Aristocratic Life. By
HORACE W. C. NEWTE, Author of “The Master Beast.” 6s.
“It leaves an impression... and there is a good deal of clever satire
and humour to be found in it.”--_Times._
=MORAG THE SEAL.= A Fascinating West Highland Romance. By J. W. BRODIE
INNES. 6s.
“A weird, well-handled romance.”--_Times._
=THE MASTER BEAST.= A.D. 1888-2020 A Peep into the Future. By HORACE W.
C. NEWTE. 3s. 6d. net.
“A veritable triumph.”--_Western Morning News._
=THE IRONY OF MARRIAGE.= A Cynical Indictment of Modern Marriage and its
“Methods.” By BASIL TOZER. With an Introductory Note by Dr. C. W.
SALEEBY, F.R.S. Edin. 1s. net, by post 1s. 2d.
_Complete Catalogue and Descriptive Circulars sent post free on
request._
LONDON: REBMAN LTD., 129 SHAFTESBURY AVENUE, W.C.
Transcriber’s Notes
The original language has been retained,. including inconsistent
spelling and hyphenation, except as listed below. Accents and
diacriticals in French or German words and names have not been
corrected, unless listed below.
Depending on the hard- and software used to read this text and their
settings, not all elements may display as intended.
Footnotes numbers 305/306 and 321/322 are each referenced twice on the
same page in the source document.
Index of names: there are no pages xi or xii. Several entries have
been moved to be in alphabetical order.
Page 337, footnote 300, pp. 531-355: as printed; should possibly be
351-355 or 531-535.
Page 515, Rue des Veuves: possibly an error for Allée des Veuves as
elsewhere.
Page 575, professional female prisoners: possibly an error for
professional female poisoners.
Page 771, entry Kaliske: possibly an error for Kolisko.
Page 773, entry Ludwig, Philipp, there is no page number in the source
document; this entry is possibly a reference to Louis Philippe.
Page 783, entry Letter: the reason for the referral to Condom is not
clear.
Page 785, entry Onanism, a cause of sexual exhibitionism: no page
numbers listed. Entry Obscenity: there is no page 794; the concept is
defined and discussed in Chapter XXX (page 729 et seq.).
Page 787, entry Queue: there is no entry Plait, the link goes to
Plait-cutters.
Page 788, entry Selection, natural: there is no entry Natural
selection.
Changes made
Footnotes have been moved to the end of the chapter to which they
belong, and have been numbered sequntially. References to footnotes
have been re-numbered according to the footnote numbering in this
text.
Minor obvious typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected
silently. Vossiche and Vossische Zeitung have been standardised to
Vossische Zeitung.
The Errata have already been included in the text.
Page 3 and 4: Schopenhaur changed to Schopenhauer (3x)
Page 32:Säkkingen changed to Säckingen
Page 110: Kaufeuren changed to Kaufbeuren
Page 151: Cléo de Merode changed to Cléo de Mérode
Page 188, footnote 155: Die Umschan changed to Die Umschau
Page 220: opening quote mark added before Divorce is not ...
Page 268: Sohney changed to Sohnrey
Page 292, footnote 237: opening bracket added before woman
Page 330: Oda Oldberg changed to Oda Olberg (2x)
Page 411: Prosner changed to Posner
Page 430: Trelat changed to Trélat
Page 436, closing bracket added after Lyons, 1550
Page 443, closing bracket added after glans penis
Page 467, footnote 473: Natur und Volkerkunde changed to Natur- und
Volkerkunde
Page 477, footnote 462: Elberfield changed to Elberfeld
Page 480: Friedlander changed to Friedländer
Page 533: Krehls changed to Krehl
Page 584: Another prostitute reports: considered part of the body
text, not of the surrounding quotes
Page 646, footnote 654: opening bracket added after à l’Homme
Page 654: closing quote mark inserted after ... stimulated imagination
Page 677: schmachet changed to schmachtet
Page 767: page number 863 changed to 683 (entry von Basedow)
Page 779: page number 889 changed to 689 (entry Character, education
of the)
Indexes: some spelling has been standardised (either in the text or in
the index).
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Sexual Life of our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization - Translated from the Sixth German Edition" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.