Chapter 1

II) contains an episode involving the charm of the foot and the kissing of the beloved's shoe.

[16] Schinz, "Philosophie des Conventions Sociales," _Revue Philosophique_, June, 1903, p. 626. Mirabeau mentions in his _Erotika Biblion_ that modern Greek women sometimes use their feet to provoke orgasm in their lovers. I may add that simultaneous mutual masturbation by means of the feet is not unknown to-day, and I have been told by an English shoe-fetichist that he at one time was accustomed to practice this with a married lady (Brazilian)--she with slippers on and he without--who derived gratification equal to his own.

[17] Jacoby (loc. cit. pp. 796-7) gives a large number of references to Ovid's works bearing on this point. "In reading him," he remarks, "one is inclined to say that the psychology of the Romans was closely allied to that of the Chinese."

[18] R. Kleinpaul, _Sprache ohne Worte_, p. 308. See also Moll, _Konträre Sexualempfindung_, third edition, pp. 306-308. Bloch brings together many interesting references bearing on the ancient sexual and religious symbolism of the shoe, _Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil II, p. 324.

[19] Jacoby (loc. cit. p. 797) appears to regard shoe-fetichism as a true atavism: "The sexual adoration of feminine foot-gear," he concludes, "perhaps the most enigmatic and certainly the most singular of degenerative insanities, is thus merely a form of atavism, the return of the degenerate to the very ancient and primitive psychology which we no longer understand and are no longer capable of feeling."

[20] Moll has reported in detail (_Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, Teil II, pp. 320-324) a case which both he and Krafft-Ebing regard as illustrative of the connection between boot-fetichism and masochism. It is essentially a case of masochism, though manifesting itself almost exclusively in the desire to perform humiliating acts in connection with the attractive person's boots.

[21] Krafft-Ebing goes so far as to assert (_Psychopathia Sexualis_, English translation of tenth edition, p. 174) that "when in cases of shoe-fetichism the female shoe appears alone as the excitant of sexual desire one is justified in presuming that masochistic motives have remained latent.... Latent masochism may always be assumed as the unconscious motive." In this way he hopelessly misinterprets some of his own cases.

[22] Krafft-Ebing goes so far as to assert (_Psychopathia Sexualis_, English translation, pp. 159 and 174). Yet some of the cases he brings forward (e.g., Coxe's as quoted by Hammond) show no sign of masochism, since, according to Krafft-Ebing's own definition (p. 116), the idea of subjugation by the opposite sex is of the essence of masochism.

[23] Her actions suggest that there is often a latent sexual consciousness in regard to the feet in women, atavistic or pseudo-atavistic, and corresponding to the sexual attraction which the feet formerly aroused, almost normally, in men. This is also suggested by the case, referred to by Shufeldt, of an unmarried woman, belonging to a family exhibiting in a high degree both erotic and neurotic traits, who had "a certain uncontrollable fascination for shoes. She delights in new shoes, and changes her shoes all day long at regular intervals of three hours each. She keeps this row of shoes out in plain sight in her apartment." (R.W. Shufeldt, "On a Case of Female Impotency," 1896, p. 10.)

III.

Scatalogic Symbolism--Urolagnia--Coprolagnia--The Ascetic Attitude Towards the Flesh--Normal basis of Scatalogic Symbolism--Scatalogic Conceptions Among Primitive Peoples--Urine as a Primitive Holy Water--Sacredness of Animal Excreta--Scatalogy in Folk-lore--The Obscene as Derived from the Mythological--The Immature Sexual Impulse Tends to Manifest Itself in Scatalogic Forms--The basis of Physiological Connection Between the Urinary and Genital Spheres--Urinary Fetichism Sometimes Normal in Animals--The Urolagnia of Masochists--The Scatalogy of Saints--Urolagnia More Often a Symbolism of Act Than a Symbolism of Object--Only Occasionally an Olfactory Fetichism--Comparative Rarity of Coprolagnia--Influence of Nates Fetichism as a Transition to Coprolagnia--Ideal Coprolagnia--Olfactory Coprolagnia--Urolagnia and Coprolagnia as Symbols of Coitus.

We meet with another group of erotic symbolisms--alike symbolisms of object and of act--in connection with the two functions adjoining the anatomical sexual focus: the urinary and alvine excretory functions. These are sometimes termed the scatalogical group, with the two subdivisions of urolagnia and Coprolagnia.[24] _Inter fæces et urinam nascimur_ is an ancient text which has served the ascetic preachers of old for many discourses on the littleness of man and the meanness of that reproductive power which plays so large a part in man's life. "The stupid bungle of Nature," a correspondent writes, "whereby the generative organs serve as a means of relieving the bladder, is doubtless responsible for much of the disgust which those organs excite in some minds."

At the same time, it is necessary to point out, such reflex influence may act not in one direction only, but also in the reverse direction. From the standpoint of ascetic contemplation eager to belittle humanity, the excretory centers may cast dishonor upon the genital center which they adjoin. From the more ecstatic standpoint of the impassioned lover, eager to magnify the charm of the woman he worships, it is not impossible for the excretory centers to take on some charm from the irradiating center of sex which they enclose.

Even normally such a process is traceable. The normal lover may not idealize the excretory functions of his mistress, but the fact that he finds no repulsion in the most intimate contacts and feels no disgust at the proximity of the excretory orifices or the existence of their functions, indicates that the idealization of love has exerted at all events a neutralizing influence; indeed, the presence of an acute sensibility to the disturbing influence of this proximity of the excretory orifices and their functions must be considered abnormal; Swift's "Strephon and Chloe"--with the conviction underlying it that it is an easy matter for the excretory functions to drown the possibilities of love--could only have proceeded from a morbidly sensitive brain.[25]

A more than mere neutralizing influence, a positively idealizing influence of the sexual focus on the excretory processes adjoining it, may take place in the lover's mind without the normal variations of sexual attraction being over-passed, and even without the creation of an excretory fetichism.

Reflections of this attitude may be found in the poets. In the _Song of Songs_ the lover says of his mistress, "Thy navel is like a round goblet, wherein no mingled wine is wanting;" in his lyric "To Dianeme," Herrick says with clear reference to the mons veneris:--

"Show me that hill where smiling love doth sit, Having a living fountain under it;"

and in the very numerous poems in various languages which have more or less obscurely dealt with the rose as the emblem of the feminine pudenda there are occasional references to the stream which guards or presides over the rose. It may, indeed, be recalled that even in the name _nymphæ_ anatomists commonly apply to the _labia minora_ there is generally believed to be a poetic allusion to the Nymphs who presided over streams, since the _labia minora_ exert an influence on the direction of the urinary stream.

In _Wilhelm Meister_ (Part I, Chapter XV), Goethe, on the basis of his own personal experiences, describes his hero's emotions in the humble surroundings of Marianne's little room as compared with the stateliness and order of his own home. "It seemed to him when he had here to remove her stays in order to reach the harpsichord, there to lay her skirt on the bed before he could seat himself, when she herself with unembarrassed frankness would make no attempt to conceal from him many natural acts which people are accustomed to hide from others out of decency--it seemed to him, I say, that he became bound to her by invisible bands." We are told of Wordsworth (Findlay's _Recollections of De Quincey_, p. 36) that he read _Wilhelm Meister_ till "he came to the scene where the hero, in his mistress's bedroom, becomes sentimental over her dirty towels, etc., which struck him with such disgust that he flung the book out of his hand, would never look at it again, and declared that surely no English lady would ever read such a work." I have, however, heard a woman of high intellectual distinction refer to the peculiar truth and beauty of this very passage.

In one of his latest novels, _Les Rencontres de M. de Bréot_, Henri de Régnier, one of the most notable of recent French novelists, narrates an episode bearing on the matter before us. A personage of the story is sitting for a moment in a dark grotto during a night fête in a nobleman's park, when two ladies enter and laughingly proceed to raise their garments and accomplish a natural necessity. The man in the background, suddenly overcome by a sexual impulse, starts forward; one lady runs away, the other, whom he detains, offers little resistance to his advances. To M. de Bréot, whom he shortly after encounters, he exclaims, abashed at his own actions: "Why did I not flee? But could I imagine that the spectacle of so disgusting a function would have any other effect than to give me a humble opinion of human nature?" M. de Bréot, however, in proceeding to reproach his interlocutor for his inconsiderate temerity, observes: "What you tell me, sir, does not entirely surprise me. Nature has placed very various instincts within us, and the impulse that led you to what you have just now done is not so peculiar as you think. One may be a very estimable man and yet love women even in what is lowliest in their bodies." In harmony with this passage from Régnier's novel are the remarks of a correspondent who writes to me of the function of urination that it "appeals sexually to most normal individuals. My own observations and inquiries prove this. Women themselves instinctively feel it. The secrecy surrounding the matter lends, too, I think, a sexual interest."

The fact that scatalogic processes may in some degree exert an attraction even in normal love has been especially emphasized by Bloch (_Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil II, pp. 222, et seq.): "The man whose intellect and æsthetic sense has been 'clouded by the sexual impulse' sees these things in an entirely different light from him who has not been overcome by the intoxication of love. For him they are idealized (sit venia verbo) since they are a part of the beloved person, and in consequence associated with love." Bloch quotes the _Memoiren einer Sängerin_ (a book which is said to be, though this seems doubtful, genuinely autobiographical) in the same sense: "A man who falls in love with a girl is not dragged out of his poetic sphere by the thought that his beloved must relieve certain natural necessities every day. It seems, indeed, to him to be just the opposite. If one loves a person one finds nothing obscene or disgusting in the object that pleases me." The opposite attitude is probably in extreme cases due to the influence of a neurotic or morbidly sensitive temperament. Swift possessed such a temperament. The possession of a similar temperament is doubtless responsible for the little prose poem, "L'Extase," in which Huysmans in his first book, _Le Drageloir á Epices_, has written an attenuated version of "Strephon and Chloe" to express the disillusionment of love; the lover lies in a wood clasping the hand of the beloved with rapturous emotion; "suddenly she rose, disengaged her hand, disappeared in the bushes, and I heard as it were the rustling of rain on the leaves." His dream has fled.

In estimating the significance of the lover's attitude in this matter, it is important to realize the position which scatologic conceptions took in primitive belief. At certain stages of early culture, when all the emanations of the body are liable to possess mysterious magic properties and become apt for sacred uses, the excretions, and especially the urine, are found to form part of religious ritual and ceremonial function. Even among savages the excreta are frequently regarded as disgusting, but under the influence of these conceptions such disgust is inhibited, and those emanations of the body which are usually least honored become religious symbols.

Urine has been regarded as the original holy water, and many customs which still survive in Italy and various parts of Europe, involving the use of a fluid which must often be yellow and sometimes salt, possibly indicate the earlier use of urine. (The Greek water of aspersion, according to Theocritus, was mixed with salt, as is sometimes the modern Italian holy water. J.J. Blunt, _Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs_, p. 173.) Among the Hottentots, as Kolbein and others have recorded, the medicine man urinated alternately on bride and bridegroom, and a successful young warrior was sprinkled in the same way. Mungo Park mentions that in Africa on one occasion a bride sent a bowl of her urine which was thrown over him as a special mark of honor to a distinguished guest. Pennant remarked that the Highlanders sprinkled their cattle with urine, as a kind of holy water, on the first Monday in every quarter. (Bourke, _Scatalogic Rites_, pp. 228, 239; Brand, _Popular Antiquities_, "Bride-Ales.")

Even the excreta of animals have sometimes been counted sacred. This is notably so in the case of the cow, of all animals the most venerated by primitive peoples, and especially in India. Jules Bois (_Visions de l'Inde_, p. 86) describes the spectacle presented in the temple of the cows at Benares: "I put my head into the opening of the holy stables. It was the largest of temples, a splendor of precious stones and marble, where the venerated heifers passed backwards and forwards. A whole people adored them. They take no notice, plunged in their divine and obscure unconsciousness. And they fulfil with serenity their animal functions; they chew the offerings, drink water from copper vessels, and when they are filled they relieve themselves. Then a stercoraceous and religious insanity overcomes these starry-faced women and venerable men; they fall on their knees, prostrate themselves, eat the droppings, greedily drink the liquid, which for them is miraculous and sacred." (Cf. Bourke, _Scatalogic Rites_, Chapter XVII.)

Among the Chevsurs of the Caucasus, perhaps an Iranian people, a woman after her confinement, for which she lives apart, purifies herself by washing in the urine of a cow and then returns home. This mode of purification is recommended in the Avesta, and is said to be used by the few remaining followers of this creed.

We have not only to take into account the frequency with which among primitive peoples the excretions possess a religious significance. It is further to be noted that in the folk-lore of modern Europe we everywhere find plentiful evidence of the earlier prevalence of legends and practices of a scatalogical character. It is significant that in the majority of cases it is easy to see a sexual reference in these stories and customs. The legends have lost their earlier and often mythical significance, and frequently take on a suggestion of obscenity, while the scatalogical practices have become the magical devices of lovelorn maidens or forsaken wives practiced in secrecy. It has happened to scatalogical rites to be regarded as we may gather from the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes, that the sacred leathern phallus borne by the women in the Bacchanalia was becoming in his time, an object to arouse the amusement of little boys.

Among many primitive peoples throughout the world, and among the lower social classes of civilized peoples, urine possesses magic properties, more especially, it would seem, the urine of women and that of people who stand, or wish to stand, in sexual relationship to each other. In a legend of the Indians of the northwest coast of America, recorded by Boas, a woman gives her lover some of her urine and says: "You can wake the dead if you drop some of my urine in their ears and nose." (_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1894, Heft IV, p. 293.) Among the same Indians there is a legend of a woman with a beautiful white skin who found on bathing every morning in the river that the fish were attracted to her skin and could not be driven off even by magical solutions. At last she said to herself: "I will make water on them and then they will leave me alone." She did so, and henceforth the fish left her. But shortly after fire came from Heaven and killed her. (Ib., 1891, Heft V, p. 640.) Among both Christians and Mohammedans a wife can attach an unfaithful husband by privately putting some of her urine in his drink. (B. Stern, _Medizin in der Türkei_, vol. ii, p. 11.) This practice is world-wide; thus among the aborigines of Brazil, according to Martius, the urine and other excretions and secretions are potent for aphrodisiacal objects. (Bourke's _Scatalogic Rites of All Nations_ contains many references to the folk-lore practices in this matter; a study of popular beliefs in the magic power of urine, published in Bombay by Professor Eugen Wilhelm in 1889, I have not seen.)

The legends which narrate scatalogic exploits are numerous in the literature of all countries. Among primitive peoples they often have a purely theological character, for in the popular mythologies of all countries (even, as we learn from Aristophanes, among the Greeks) natural phenomena such as the rain, are apt to be regarded as divine excretions, but in course of time the legends take on a more erotic or a more obscene character. In the Irish _Book of Leinster_ (written down somewhere about the twelfth century, but containing material of very much older date) we are told how a number of princesses in Emain Macha, the seat of the Ulster Kings, resolved to find out which of them could by urinating on it melt a snow pillar which the men had made, the woman who succeeded to be regarded as the best among them. None of them succeeded, and they sent for Derbforgaill, who was in love with Cuchullain, and she was able to melt the pillar; whereupon the other women, jealous of the superiority she had thus shown, tore out her eyes. (Zimmer, "Keltische Beiträge," _Zeitschrift für Deutsche Alterthum_, vol. xxxii, Heft II, pp. 216-219.) Rhys considers that Derbforgaill was really a goddess of dawn and dusk, "the drop glistening in the sun's rays," as indicated by her name, which means a drop or tear. (J. Rhys, _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom_, p. 466.) It is interesting to compare the legend of Derbforgaill with a somewhat more modern Picardy folk-lore _conte_ which is clearly analogous but no longer seems to show any mythologic element, "La Princesse qui pisse par dessus les Meules." This princess had a habit of urinating over hay-cocks; the king, her father, in order to break her of the habit, offered her in marriage to anyone who could make a hay-cock so high that she could not urinate over it. The young men came, but the princess would merely laugh and at once achieve the task. At last there came a young man who argued with himself that she would not be able to perform this feat after she had lost her virginity. He therefore seduced her first and she then failed ignobly, merely wetting her stockings. Accordingly, she became his bride. (Kryptadia, vol. i. p. 333.) Such legends, which have lost any mythologic elements they may originally have possessed and have become merely _contes_, are not uncommon in the folk-lore of many countries. But in their earlier more religious forms and in their later more obscene forms, they alike bear witness to the large place which scatalogic conceptions play in the primitive mind.

It is a notable fact in evidence of the close and seemingly normal association with the sexual impulse of the scatalogic processes, that an interest in them, arising naturally and spontaneously, is one of the most frequent channels by which the sexual impulse first manifests itself in young boys and girls.

Stanley Hall, who has made special inquiries into the matter, remarks that in childhood the products of excretion by bladder and bowels are often objects of interest hardly less intense for a time than eating and drinking. ("Early Sense of Self," _American Journal of Psychology_, April, 1898, p. 361.) "Micturitional obscenities," the same writer observes again, "which our returns show to be so common before adolescence, culminate at 10 or 12, and seem to retreat into the background as sex phenomena appear." They are, he remarks, of two classes: "Fouling persons or things, secretly from adults, but openly with each other," and less often "ceremonial acts connected with the act or the product that almost suggest the scatalogical rites of savages, unfit for description here, but of great interest and importance." (G. Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 116.) The nature of such scatalogical phenomena in childhood--which are often clearly the instinctive manifestations of an erotic symbolism--and their wide prevalence among both boys and girls, are very well illustrated in a narrative which I include in Appendix B, History II.

In boys as they approach the age of puberty, this attraction to the scatalogic, when it exists, tends to die out, giving place to more normal sexual conceptions, or at all events it takes a subordinate and less serious place in the mind. In girls, on the other hand, it often tends to persist. Edmond de Goncourt, a minute observer of the feminine mind, refers in _Chérie_ to "those innocent and triumphant gaieties which scatalogic stories have the privilege of arousing in women who have remained still children, even the most distinguished women." The extent to which innocent young women, who would frequently be uninterested or repelled in presence of the sexually obscene are sometimes attracted by the scatalogically obscene, becomes intelligible, however, if we realize that a symbolism comes here into play. In women the more specifically sexual knowledge and experience of life frequently develop much later than in men or even remains in abeyance, and the specifically sexual phenomena cannot therefore easily lend themselves to wit, or humor, or imagination. But the scatalogic sphere, by the very fact that in women it is a specially intimate and secret region which is yet always liable to be unexpectedly protruded into consciousness, furnishes an inexhaustible field for situations which have the same character as those furnished by the sexually obscene. It thus happens that the sexually obscene which in men tends to overshadow the scatalogically obscene, in women--partly from inexperience and partly, it is probable, from their almost physiological modesty--plays a part subordinate to the scatalogical. In a somewhat analogous way scatalogical wit and humor play a considerable part in the work of various eminent authors who were clergymen or priests.

In addition to the anatomical and psychological associations which contribute to furnish a basis on which erotic symbolisms may spring up, there are also physiological connections between the genital and urinary spheres which directly favor such symbolisms. In discussing the analysis of the sexual impulse in a previous volume of these _Studies_, I have pointed out the remarkable relationship--sometimes of transference, sometimes of compensation--which exists between genital tension and vesical tension, both in men and women. In the histories of normal sexual development brought together at the end of that and subsequent volumes the relationship may frequently be traced, as also in the case of C.P. in the present study (p. 37). Vesical power is also commonly believed to be in relation with sexual potency, and the inability to project the urinary stream in a normal manner is one of the accepted signs of sexual impotency.[26] Féré, again, has recorded the history of a man with periodic crises of sexual desire, and subsequently sexual obsession without desire, which were always accompanied by the impulse to urinate and by increased urination.[27] In the case, recorded by Pitres and Régis, of a young girl who, having once at the sight of a young man she liked in a theater been overcome by sexual feeling accompanied by a strong desire to urinate, was afterward tormented by a groundless fear of experiencing an irresistible desire to urinate at inconvenient times,[28] we have an example of what may be called a physiological scatalogic symbolism of sex, an emotion which was primarily erotic becoming transferred to the bladder and then remaining persistent. From such a physiological symbolism it is but a step to the psychological symbolisms of scatalogic fetichism.

It is worthy of note, as an indication that such phenomena are scarcely abnormal, that a urinary symbolism, and even a strictly sexual fetichism, are normal among many animals.

The most familiar example of this kind is furnished by the dog, who is sexually excited in this manner by traces of the bitch and himself takes every opportunity of making his own path recognizable. "This custom," Espinas remarks (_Des Sociétés Animales_, p. 228), "has no other aim than to spread along the road recognizable traces of their presence for the benefit of individuals of the other sex, the odor of these traces doubtless causing excitement."

It is noteworthy, also, that in animals as well as in man, sexual excitement may manifest itself in the bladder. Thus Daumas states (_Chevaux de Sahara_, p. 49) that if the mare urinates when she hears the stallion neigh it is a sign that she is ready for connection.

It is in masochism, or passive algolagnia, that we may most frequently find scatalogic symbolism in its fully developed form. The man whose predominant impulse is to subjugate himself to his mistress and to receive at her hands the utmost humiliation, frequently finds the climax of his gratification in being urinated on by her, whether in actual fact or only in imagination.

In many such cases, however, it is evident that we have a mixed phenomenon; the symbolism is double. The act becomes desirable because it is the outward and visible sign of an inwardly experienced abject slavery to an adored person. But it is also desirable because of intimately sexual associations in the act itself, as a symbolical detumescence, a simulacrum of the sexual act, and one which proceeds from the sexual focus itself.

Krafft-Ebing records various cases of masochism in which the emission of urine on to the body or into the mouth formed the climax of sexual gratification, as, for instance (_Psychopathia Sexualis_, English translation, p. 183) in the case of a Russian official who as a boy had fancies of being bound between the thighs of a woman, compelled to sleep beneath her nates and to drink her urine, and in later life experienced the greatest excitement when practicing the last part of this early imagination.

In another case, recorded by Krafft-Ebing and by him termed "ideal masochism" (_Op. cit._, pp. 127-130), the subject from childhood indulged in voluptuous day-dreams in which he was the slave of a beautiful mistress who would compel him to obey all her caprices, stand over him with one foot on his breast, sit on his face and body, make him wait on her in her bath, or when she urinated, and sometimes insist on doing this on his face; though a highly intellectual man, he was always too timid to attempt to carry any of his ideas into execution; he had been troubled by nocturnal enuresis up to the age of 20.

Neri, again (_Archivio delle Psicopatie Sessuali_, vol. i, fasc. 7 and 8, 1896), records the case of an Italian masochist who experienced the greatest pleasure when both urination and defecation were practiced in this manner by the woman he was attached to.

In a previous volume of these _Studies_ ("Sexual Inversion," History XXVI) I have recorded the masochistic day-dreams of a boy whose impulses were at the same time inverted; in his reveries "the central fact," he states, "became the discharge of urine from my lover over my body and limbs, or, if I were very fond of him, I let it be in my face." In actual life the act of urination casually witnessed in childhood became the symbol, even the reality, of the central secret of sex: "I stood rooted and flushing with downcast eyes till the act was over, and was conscious for a considerable time of stammering speech and bewildered faculties.... I was overwhelmed with emotion and could barely drag my feet from the spot or my eyes from the damp herbage where he had deposited the waters of secrecy. Even to-day I cannot dissociate myself from the shuddering charm that moment had for me."

It is not only the urine and the fæces which may thus acquire a symbolic fascination and attractiveness under the influence of masochistic deviations of sexual idealization. In some cases extreme rapture has been experienced in licking sweating feet. There is, indeed, no excretion or product of the body which has not been a source of ecstasy: the sweat from every part of the body, the saliva and menstrual fluid, even the wax from the ears.

Krafft-Ebing very truly points out (_Psychopathia Sexualis_, English translation, p. 178) that this sexual scatalogic symbolism is precisely paralleled by a religious scatalogic symbolism. In the excesses of devout enthusiasm the ascetic performs exactly the same acts as are performed in these excesses of erotic enthusiasm. To mix excreta with the food, to lick up excrement, to suck festering sores--all these and the like are acts which holy and venerated women have performed.

Not only the saint, but also the prophet and medicine-man have been frequently eaters of human excrement; it is only necessary to refer to the instance of the prophet Ezekiel, who declared that he was commanded to bake his bread with human dung, and to the practices of medicine-men at Torres Straits, in whose training the eating of human excrement takes a recognized part. (Deities, notably Baal-Phegor, were sometimes supposed to eat excrement, so that it was natural that their messengers and representatives among men should do so. As regards Baal-Phegor, see Dulaure, _Des Divinités Génératrices_, Chapter IV, and J.G. Bourke, _Scatalogic Rites of All Nations_, p. 241. See also Ezekiel, Chapter IV, v. 12, and _Reports Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, p. 321.)

It must be added, however, that while the masochist is overcome by sexual rapture, so that he sees nothing disgusting in his act, the medicine-man and the ascetic are not so invariably overcome by religious rapture, and several ascetic writers have referred to the horror and disgust they experienced, at all events at first, in accomplishing such acts, while the medicine-men when novices sometimes find the ordeal too severe and have to abandon their career. Brénier de Montmorand, while remarking, not without some exaggeration, that "the Christian ascetics are almost all eaters of excrement" ("Ascétisme et Mysticisme," _Revue Philosophique_, March, 1904, p. 245), quotes the testimonies of Marguerite-Marie and Madame Guyon as to the extreme repugnance which they had to overcome. They were impelled by a merely intellectual symbolism of self-mortification rather than by the profoundly felt emotional symbolism which moves the masochist.

Coprophagic acts, whether under the influences of religious exaltation or of sexual rapture, inevitably excite our disgust. We regard them as almost insane, fortified in that belief by the undoubted fact that coprophagia is not uncommon among the insane. It may, therefore, be proper to point out that it is not so very long since the ingestion of human excrement was carried out by our own forefathers in the most sane and deliberate manner. It was administered by medical practitioners for a great number of ailments, apparently with entirely satisfactory results. Less than two centuries ago, Schurig, who so admirably gathered together and arranged the medical lore of his own and the immediately preceding ages, wrote a very long and detailed chapter, "De Stercoris Humani Usu Medico" (_Chylologia_, 1725, cap. XIII; in the Paris _Journal de Médecine_ for February 19, 1905, there appeared an article, which I have not seen, entitled "Médicaments oubliées: l'urine et la fiente humaine.") The classes of cases in which the drug was found beneficial would seem to have been extremely various. It must not be supposed that it was usually ingested in the crude form. A common method was to take the fæces of boys, dry them, mix them with the best honey, and administer an electuary. (At an earlier period such drugs appear to have met with some opposition from the Church, which seems to have seen in them only an application of magic; thus I note that in Burchard's remarkable Penitential of the fourteenth century, as reproduced by Wasserschleben, 40 days' penance is prescribed for the use of human urine or excrement as a medicine. Wasserschleben _Die Bussordnungen der Abendländlichen Kirche_, p. 651.)

The urolagnia of masochism is not a simple phenomenon; it embodies a double symbolism: on the one hand a symbolism of self-abnegation, such as the ascetic feels, on the other hand a symbolism of transferred sexual emotion. Krafft-Ebing was disposed to regard all cases in which a scatalogical sexual attraction existed as due to "latent masochism." Such a point of view is quite untenable. Certainly the connection is common, but in the majority of cases of slightly marked scatalogical fetichism no masochism is evident. And when we bear in mind the various considerations, already brought forward, which show how widespread and clearly realized is the natural and normal basis furnished for such symbolism, it becomes quite unnecessary to invoke any aid from masochism. There is ample evidence to show that, either as a habitual or more usually an occasional act, the impulse to bestow a symbolic value on the act of urination in a beloved person, is not extremely uncommon; it has been noted of men of high intellectual distinction; it occurs in women as well as men; when existing in only a slight degree, it must be regarded as within the normal limits of variation of sexual emotion.

The occasional cases in which the urine is drunk may possibly suggest that the motive lies in the properties of the fluid acting on the system. Support for this supposition might be found in the fact that urine actually does possess, apart altogether from its magic virtues embodied in folk-lore, the properties of a general stimulant. In composition (as Masterman first pointed out) "beef-tea differs little from healthy urine," containing exactly the same constituents, except that in beef-tea there is less urea and uric acid. Fresh urine--more especially that of children and young women--is taken as a medicine in nearly all parts of the world for various disorders, such as epistaxis, malaria and hysteria, with benefit, this benefit being almost certainly due to its qualities as a general stimulant and restorative. William Salmon's _Dispensatory_, 1678 (quoted in _British Medical Journal_, April 21, 1900, p. 974), shows that in the seventeenth century urine still occupied an important place as a medicine, and it frequently entered largely into the composition of Aqua Divina.

Its use has been known even in England in the nineteenth century. (Masterman, _Lancet_, October 2, 1880; R. Neale, "Urine as a Medicine," _Practitioner_, November, 1881; Bourke brings together a great deal of evidence as to the therapeutic uses of urine in his _Scatalogic Rites_, especially pp. 331-335; Lusini has shown that normal urine invariably increases the frequency of the heart beats, _Archivio di Farmacologia_, fascs. 19-21, 1893.)

But it is an error to suppose that these facts account for the urolagnic drinking of urine. As in the gratification of a normal sexual impulse, the intense excitement of gratifying a scatalogic sexual impulse itself produces a degree of emotional stimulation far greater than the ingestion of a small amount of animal extractives would be adequate to effect. In such cases, as much as in normal sexuality, the stimulation is clearly psychic.

When, as is most commonly the case, it is the process of urination and not the urine itself which is attractive, we are clearly concerned with a symbolism of act and not with the fetichistic attraction of an excretion. When the excretion, apart from the act, provides the attraction, we seem usually to be in the presence of an olfactory fetichism. These fetichisms connected with the excreta appear to be experienced chiefly by individuals who are somewhat weak-minded, which is not necessarily the case in regard to those persons for whom the act, rather than its product apart from the beloved person, is the attractive symbol.

The sexually symbolic nature of the act of urination for many people is indicated by the existence, according to Bloch, who enumerates various kinds of indecent photographs, of a group which he terms "the notorious _pisseuses_." It is further indicated by several of the reproductions in Fuch's _Erotsiche Element in der Karikatur_, such as Delorme's "La Necessitê n'a point de Loi." (It should be added that such a scene by no means necessarily possesses any erotic symbolism, as we may see in Rembrandt's etching commonly called "Le Femme qui Pisse," in which the reflected lights on the partly shadowed stream furnish an artistic motive which is obviously free from any trace of obscenity.) In the case which Krafft-Ebing quotes from Maschka of a young man who would induce young girls to dance naked in his room, to leap, and to urinate in his presence, whereupon seminal ejaculation would take place, we have a typical example of urolagnic symbolism in a form adequate to produce complete gratification. A case in which the urolagnic form of scatalogic symbolism reached its fullest development as a sexual perversion has been described in Russia by Sukhanoff (summarized in _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, November, 1900, and _Annales Medico-psychologiques_, February, 1901), that of a young man of 27, of neuropathic temperament, who when he once chanced to witness a woman urinating experienced voluptuous sensations. From that moment he sought close contact with women urinating, the maximum of gratification being reached when he could place himself in such a position that a woman, in all innocence, would urinate into his mouth. All his amorous adventures were concerned with the search for opportunities for procuring this difficult gratification. Closets in which he was able to hide, winter weather and dull days he found most favorable to success. (A somewhat similar case is recorded in the _Archives de Neurologie_, 1902, p. 462.)

In the case of a robust man of neuropathic heredity recorded by Pelanda some light is shed on the psychic attitude in these manifestations; there was masturbation up to the age of 16, when he abandoned the practice, and up to the age of 30 found complete satisfaction in drinking the still hot urine of women. When a lady or girl in the house went to her room to satisfy a need of this kind, she had hardly left it but he hastened in, overcome by extreme excitement, culminating in spontaneous ejaculation. The younger the woman the greater the transport he experienced. It is noteworthy that in this, as possibly in all similar cases, there was no sensory perversion and no morbid attraction of taste or smell; he stated that the action of his senses was suspended by his excitement, and that he was quite unable to perceive the odor or taste of the fluid. (Pelanda, "Pornopatice," _Archivio di Psichiatria_, facs. iii-iv, 1889, p. 356.) It is in the emotional symbolism that the fascination lies and not in any sensory perversion.

Magnan records the spontaneous development of this sexual symbolism in a girl of 11, of good intellectual development but alcoholic heredity, who seduced a boy younger than herself to mutual masturbation, and on one occasion, lying on the ground and raising her clothes, asked him to urinate on her. (_International Congress of Criminal Anthropology_, 1889.) This case (except for the early age of the subject) illustrates sporadically occurring urolagnic symbolism in a woman, to whom such symbolism is fairly obvious on account of the close resemblance between the emission of urine and the ejaculation of semen in the man, and the fact that the same conduit serves for both fluids. (A urolagnic day-dream of this kind is recorded in the history of a lady contained in the third volume of these _Studies_, Appendix B, History VIII.) The natural and inevitable character of this symbolism is shown by the fact that among primitive peoples urine is sometimes supposed to possess the fertilizing virtues of semen. J.G. Frazer in his edition of Pausanias (vol. iv, p. 139) brings together various stories of women impregnated by urine. Hartland also (_Legend of Perseus_, vol. i, pp. 76, 92) records legends of women who were impregnated by accidentally or intentionally drinking urine.

The symbolic sexual significance of urolagnia has hitherto usually been confused with the fetichistic and mainly olfactory perversion by which the excretion itself becomes a source of sexual excitement. Long since Tardieu referred, under the name of "renifleurs," to persons who were said to haunt the neighborhood of quiet passages, more especially in the neighborhood of theatres, and who when they perceived a woman emerge after urination, would hasten to excite themselves by the odor of the excretion. Possibly a fetichism of this kind existed in a case recorded by Belletrud and Mercier (_Annales d'Hygiène Publique_, June, 1904, p. 48). A weak-minded, timid youth, who was very sexual but not attractive to women, would watch for women who were about to urinate and immediately they had passed on would go and lick the spot they had moistened, at the same time masturbating. Such a fetichistic perversion is strictly analogous to the fetichism by which women's handkerchiefs, aprons or underlinen become capable of affording sexual gratification. A very complete case of such urolagnic fetichism--complete because separated from association with the person accomplishing the act of urination--has been recorded by Moraglia in a woman. It is the case of a beautiful and attractive young woman of 18, with thick black hair, and expressive vivacious eyes, but sallow complexion. Married a year previously, but childless, she experienced a certain amount of pleasure in coitus, but she preferred masturbation, and frankly acknowledged that she was highly excited by the odor of fermented urine. So strong was this fetichism that when, for instance, she passed a street urinal she was often obliged to go aside and masturbate; once she went for this purpose into the urinal itself and was almost discovered in the act, and on another occasion into a church. Her perversion caused her much worry because of the fear of detection. She preferred, when she could, to obtain a bottle of urine--which must be stale and a man's (this, she said, she could detect by the smell)--and to shut herself up in her own room, holding the bottle in one hand and repeatedly masturbating with the other. (Moraglia, "Psicopatie Sessuali," _Archivio di Psichiatria_, vol. xiii, fasc. 6, p. 267, 1892.) This case is of especial interest because of the great rarity of fully developed fetichism in women. In a slight and germinal degree I believe that cases of fetichism are not uncommon in women, but they are certainly rare in a well-marked form, and Krafft-Ebing declared, even in the late editions of his _Psychopathia Sexualis_, that he knew of no cases in women.

So far we have been concerned with the urolagnic rather than the coprolagnic variety of scatalogical symbolism. Although the two are sometimes associated there is no necessary connection, and most usually there is no tendency for the one to involve the other. Urolagnia is certainly much the more frequently found; the act of urination is far more apt to suggest erotically symbolical ideas than the idea of defecation. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. The act of urination lends itself more easily to sexual symbolism; it is more intimately associated with the genital function; its repetition is necessary at more frequent intervals so that it is more in evidence; moreover, its product, unlike that of the act of defecation, is not offensive to the senses. Still coprolagnia occurs and not so very infrequently. Burton remarked that even the normal lover is affected by this feeling: "immo nec ipsum amicæ stercus foctet."[29]

Of Caligula who, however, was scarcely sane, it was said "et quidem stercus uxoris degustavit."[30] In Parisian brothels (according to Taxil and others) provision is made for those who are sexually excited by the spectacle of the act of defecation (without reference to contact or odor) by means of a "tabouret de verre," from under the glass floor of which the spectacle of the defecating women may be closely observed. It may be added that the erotic nature of such a spectacle is referred to in the Marquis de Sade's novels.

There is one motive for the existence of coprolagnia which must not be passed over, because it has doubtless frequently served as a mode of transition to what, taken by itself, may well seem the least æsthetically attractive of erotic symbols. I refer to the tendency of the nates to become a sexual fetich. The nates have in all ages and in all parts of the world been frequently regarded as one of the most æsthetically beautiful parts of the feminine body.[31] It is probable that on the basis of this entirely normal attraction more than one form of erotic symbolism is at all events in part supported. Dühren and others have considered that the æsthetic charm of the nates is one of the motives which prompt the desire to inflict flagellation on women. In the same way--certainly in some and probably in many cases--the sexual charm of the nates progressively extends to the anal region, to the act of defecation, and finally to the feces.

In a case of Krafft-Ebing's (_Op. cit._, p. 183) the subject, when a child of 6, accidentally placed his hand in contact with the nates of the little girl who sat next to him in school, and experienced so great a pleasure in this contact that he frequently repeated it; when he was 10 a nursery governess, to gratify her own desires, placed his finger in her vagina; in adult life he developed urolagnic tendencies.

In a case of Moll's the development of a youthful admiration for the nates in a coprolagnic direction may be clearly traced. In this case a young man, a merchant, in a good position, sought to come in contact with women defecating; and with this object would seek to conceal himself in closets; the excretal odor was pleasurable to him, but was not essential to gratification, and the sight of the nates was also exciting and at the same time not essential to gratification; the act of defecation appears, however, to have been regarded as essential. He never sought to witness prostitutes in this situation; he was only attracted to young, pretty and innocent women. The coprolagnia here, however, had its source in a childish impression of admiration for the nates. When 5 or 6 years old he crawled under the clothes of a servant girl, his face coming in contact with her nates, an impression that remained associated in his mind with pleasure. Three or four years later he used to experience much pleasure when a young girl cousin sat on his face; thus was strengthened an association which developed naturally into coprolagnia. (Moll, _Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, p. 837.)

It is scarcely necessary to remark that an admiration for the nates, even when reaching a fetichistic degree, by no means necessarily involves, even after many years, any attraction to the excreta. A correspondent for whom the nates have constituted a fetich for many years writes: "I find my craving for women with profuse pelvic or posterior development is growing and I wish to copulate from behind; but I would feel a sickening feeling if any part of my person came in contact with the female anus. It is more pleasing to me to see the nates than the mons, yet I loathe everything associated with the anal region."

Moll has recorded in detail a case of what may be described as "ideal coprolagnia"--that is to say, where the symbolism, though fully developed in imagination, was not carried into real life--which is of great interest because it shows how, in a very intelligent subject, the deviated symbolism may become highly developed and irradiate all the views of life in the same way as the normal impulse. (The subject's desires were also inverted, but from the present point of view the psychological interest of the case is not thereby impaired.) Moll's case was one of symbolism of act, the excreta offering no attraction apart from the process of defecation. In a case which has been communicated to me there was, on the other hand, an olfactory fetichistic attraction to the excreta even in the absence of the person.

In Moll's case, the patient, X., 23 years of age, belongs to a family which he himself describes as nervous. His mother, who is anæmic, has long suffered from almost periodical attacks of excitement, weakness, syncope and palpitation. A brother of the mother died in a lunatic asylum, and several other brothers complain much of their nerves. The mother's sisters are very good-natured, but liable to break out in furious passions; this they inherit from their father. There appears to be no nervous disease on the patient's father's side. X.'s sisters are also healthy.

X. himself is of powerful undersized build and enjoys good health, injured by no excesses. He considers himself nervous. He worked hard at school and was always the first in his class; he adds, however, that this is due less to his own abilities than the laziness of his school-fellows. He is, as he remarks, very religious and prays frequently, but seldom goes to church.

In regard to his psychic characters he says that he has no specially prominent talent, but is much interested in languages, mathematics, physics and philosophy, in fact, in abstract subjects generally. "While I take a lively interest in every kind of intellectual work," he says, "it is only recently that I have been attracted to real life and its requirements. I have never had much skill in physical exercises. For external things until recently I have only had contempt. I have a delicately constituted nature, loving solitude, and only associating with a few select persons. I have a decided taste for fiction, poetry and music; my temperament is idealistic and religious, with strict conceptions of duty and morality, and aspirations towards the good and beautiful. I detest all that is common and coarse, and yet I can think and act in the way you will learn from the following pages."

Regarding his sexual life, X. made the following communication: "During the last two years I have become convinced of the perversion of my sexual instinct. I had often previously thought that in me the impulse was not quite normal, but it is only lately that I have become convinced of my complete perversion. I have never read or heard of any case in which the sexual feelings were of the same kind. Although I can feel a lively inclination towards superior representatives of the female sex, and have twice felt something like love, the sight or the recollection even of a beautiful woman have never caused sexual excitement." In the two exceptional instances mentioned it appears that X. had an inclination to kiss the women in question, but that the thought of coitus had no attraction. "In my voluptuous dreams, connected with the emission of semen, women in seductive situations have never appeared. I have never had any desire to visit a _puella publica_. The love-stories of my fellow-students seemed very silly, dances and balls were a horror to me, and only on very rare occasions could I be persuaded to go into society. It will be easy to guess the diagnosis in my case: I suffer from the sexual attraction of my own sex, I am a lover of boys.

"You cannot imagine what a world of thoughts, wishes, feelings and impulses the words 'knabe,' 'pais,' 'garcon,' 'boy,' 'ragazzo' have for me; one of these words, even in an unmeaning clause of a translation-book, calls before me the whole sum of associations which in course of time have become bound up with this idea, and it is only with an effort that I can scare away the wild band. This group of thoughts shows a wonderful mixture of warm sensuality and ideal love, it unites my lowest and highest impulses, the strength and the weakness of my nature, my curse and my blessing. My inclination is especially towards boys of the age of 12 to 15; though they may be rather younger or older. That I should prefer beautiful and intelligent boys is comprehensible. I do not want a prostitute, but a friend or a son, whose soul I love, whom I can help to become a more perfect man, such as I myself would willingly be.

"When I myself belonged to that happy age (i.e., below 15) I had no dearer wish than to possess a friend of similar tastes. I have sought, hoped, waited, grieved, and been at last disillusioned, overcome by desire and despair, and have not found that friend. Even later the hope often reappeared, but always in vain, and I cannot boast of that sure recognition which one reads of in the autobiographies of Urnings. I do not know personally a single fellow-sufferer. It is also doubtful whether such an acquaintanceship would greatly help me, for I have a very peculiar conception of homosexuality. As you will see, I have little more in common with what are called pæderasts than sexual indifference to the female sex, and I often ask myself: 'Does any other man in the whole world feel like you? Are you alone in the earth with your morbid desires? Are you a pariah of pariahs, or is there, perhaps, another soul with similar longings living near you? How often in summer have I gone to the lakes and streams outside cities to seek boys bathing; but I always came back unsatisfied, whether I found any or not. And in winter I have been irresistibly impelled to return to the same spots, as if it were sanctified by the boys, but my darlings had vanished and cold winds blew over the icy floods, so that I would return feeling as though I had buried all my happiness.

"It must be borne in mind, therefore, that what I have to say regarding my sexual impulses only refers to fancies and never to their practical realization. My sensual impulses are not connected with the sexual organs; all my voluptuous ideas are not in the least connected with these parts. For this reason I have never practiced onanism and _immissio membri in anum_ is as repulsive to me as to a normal man. Even every imitation of coitus is, for me, without attraction. In a boy's body two things specially excite me: _his belly and his nates_, the first as containing the digestive tract, the second as holding the opening of the bowels. Of the vegetable processes of life in the boy none interest me nearly so much as the progress of his digestion and the process of defecation. It is incredible to what an extent this part of physiology has occupied me from youth. If as a boy I wanted to read something of a piquantly exciting character I sought in my father's encyclopædia for articles like: Obstruction, Constipation, Hæmorrhoids, Fæces, etc. No function of the body seemed to be so significant as this, and I regarded its disturbances as the most important in the whole mechanism of life. The description of other disorders I could read in cold blood, but intussusception of the bowels makes me ill even to-day. I am always extremely pleased to hear that the digestion of the people around me is in good condition. A man who did not sufficiently watch over his digestion aroused distrust in me, and I imagined that wicked men must be horribly indifferent regarding this weighty matter. Even more than in ordinary persons was I interested in the digestion of more mysterious beings, like magicians in legends, or men of other nations. I would willingly have made an anthropological study of my favorite subject, only to my annoyance books nearly always pass over the matter in silence. In history and fiction I regretted the absence of information concerning the state of my heroes' digestion when they languished in prison or in some unaccustomed or unhealthy spot. For this reason I held no book more precious than one which describes how a young man after being shipwrecked lived for a long time in a narrow snow-hut, and it was conscientiously stated that he became aware of digestive disturbances. No immorality angers me more than the foolish practice of ladies who in society neglect the satisfaction of their natural needs from misplaced motives of modesty. On a railway journey I suffer horribly from the thought that one of my fellow-travelers may be prevented from fulfilling some imperative natural necessity.

"I naturally devote the greatest attention to my own digestion. With painful conscientiousness I go to stool every day at the same hour; if the operation does not come off to my satisfaction I feel not so much physical as mental discomfort. To this quite useful hygienic interest became associated at puberty a sensual interest. Since my fourteenth year I have had no greater enjoyment than to defecate undressed (I do not do so now) after having first carefully examined the distension of my abdomen. In summer I would go into the woods, undress myself in a secluded spot and indulge in the voluptuous pleasures of defecation. I would sometimes combine with this a bath in a stream. I would exhaust my imagination in the effort to invent specially enjoyable variations, longed for a desert island where I could go about naked, fill my body with much nourishing food, hold in the excrement as long as possible and then discharge it in some subtly-thought-out spot. These practices and ideas often caused erections and later on emissions, but the genitals played no part in my conceptions; their movements were uncomfortable and gave no pleasure.

"I soon longed to be associated in these orgies with some boy of the same age, but I wanted not only a companion in my passion, but also a real friend. Since there could be no question of masturbation or pæderasty, our love would have been limited to kisses, embraces, and--as a compensation for coitus--defecation together. That would have been perfect bliss to me. I will spare you the unæsthetic contents of my voluptuous dreams. But I remained without a companion, and, therefore, without real enjoyment. [He has, however, on various occasions experienced erections, and even emissions, on seeing, by chance, men or boys defecate.] Hinc illæ lacrimæ; the excitement over my own defecation only took place _faute de mieux_.

"I knew very well that my thoughts and practices were impure and contemptible. Ah! how often, when the intoxication was over, have I thrown myself remorsefully on my knees, praying to God for pardon! For some weeks I repressed my longing; but at last it was too strong for me, I tried to justify myself and fell into my vice anew. That I was guilty of licentiousness and loved boys sexually first became clear to me later on, when I knew the significance of erection as a sign of sexual excitement.

"No one can imagine with what demoniacal joy I am possessed at the thought of a beautiful naked boy whose abdomen is filled as the result of long abstinence from stool. The thought powerfully excites me, a flood of passion goes through my blood and my limbs tremble. I would never grow tired of feeling that belly and looking at it. My passion would express itself in tempestuous caresses, and the boy would have to assume various positions in order to show off the beauty of his form, i.e., to bring the parts in question into better view. To observe defecation would still further increase this peculiar enjoyment. If the boy's bowels were not sufficiently filled I would feed him with all sorts of food which produces much excrement, such as potatoes, coarse bread, etc. If possible I would seek to delay defecation for two or three days, so that it might be as copious as possible. When at last it occurred it would be an unspeakable joy for me to watch the fæces--which would have to be fairly firm--emerging from the anus."

X. would like to be a teacher and thinks he could exert a beneficial influence on boys. In spite of the pain he has suffered he does not think he would like to be cured of his perverse inclinations, for they have given him joy as well as pain, and the pain has chiefly been owing to the fact that he could not gratify his inclinations. X. smokes and drinks in moderation, and has no feminine habits. (The foregoing is a condensed summary of the case which is fully reported by Moll, _Konträre Sexualempfindung_, third edition, pp. 295-305.)

The case of coprolagnia communicated to me is that of a married man, normal in all other respects, intellectually brilliant and filling successfully a very responsible position. When a child the women of his household were always indifferent as to his presence in their bedrooms, and would satisfy all natural calls without reserve before him. He would dream of this with erections. His sexual interests became slowly centered in the act of defecation, and this fetich throughout life never appealed to him so powerfully as when associated with the particular type of household furniture which was used for this purpose in his own house. The act of defecation in the opposite sex or anything pertaining to or suggesting the same caused uncontrollable sexual excitement; the nates also exerted a great attraction. The alvine excreta exerted this influence even in the absence of the woman; it was, however, necessary that she should be a sexually desirable person. The perversion in this case was not complete; that is to say, that the excitement produced by the act of defecation or the excretion itself was not actually preferred to coitus; the sexual idea was normal coitus in the normal manner, but preceded by the visual and olfactory enjoyment of the exciting fetich. When coitus was not possible the enjoyment of the fetich was accompanied by masturbation (as in the analogous case of urolagnia in a woman summarized on p. 62.) On one occasion he was discovered by a friend in a bedroom belonging to a woman, engaged in the act of masturbation over a vessel containing the desired fetich. In an agony of shame he begged the mercy of silence concerning this episode, at the same time revealing his life-history. He has constantly been haunted by the dread of detection, as well as by remorse and the consciousness of degradation, also by the fear that his unconquerable obsession may lead him to the asylum.

The scatalogic groups of sexual perversions, urolagnia and coprolagnia, as may be sufficiently seen in this brief summary, are not merely olfactory fetiches. They are, in a larger proportion of cases, dynamic symbols, a preoccupation with physiological acts which, by associations of contiguity and still more of resemblance, have gained the virtue of stimulating in slight cases, and replacing in more extreme cases, the normal preoccupation with the central physiological act itself. We have seen that there are various considerations which amply suffice to furnish a basis for such associations. And when we reflect that in the popular mind, and to some extent in actual fact, the sexual act itself is, like urination and defecation, an excretory act, we can understand that the true excretory acts may easily become symbols of the pseudo-excretory act. It is, indeed, in the muscular release of accumulated pressures and tensions, involved by the act of liberating the stored-up excretion, that we have the closest simulacrum of the tumescence and detumescence of the sexual process.[32]

In this way the erotic symbolism of urolagnia and coprolagnia is completely analogous with that dynamic symbolism of the clinging and swinging garments which Herrick has so accurately described, with the complex symbolism of flagellation and its play of the rod against the blushing and trembling nates, with the symbols of sexual strain and stress which are embodied in the foot and the act of treading.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Fuchs (_Das Erotische Element In der Karikatur_, p. 26), distinguishing sharply between the "erotic" and the "obscene," reserves the latter term exclusively for the representation of excretory organs and acts. He considers that this is etymologically the most exact usage. However that may be, it seems to me that, in any case, "obscene" has become so vague a term that it is now impracticable to give it a restricted and precise sense.

[25] In this connection we may profitably contemplate the hand and recall the vast gamut of functions, sacred and profane, which that organ exercises. Many savages strictly reserve the left hand to the lowlier purposes of life; but in civilization that is not considered necessary, and it may be wholesome for some of us to meditate on the more humble uses of the same hand which is raised in the supreme gesture of benediction and which men have often counted it a privilege to kiss.

[26] See, e.g., Morselli, _Una Causa di Nullità del Matrimonio_, 1902, p. 39.

[27] Féré, _Comptes-Rendus Société de Biologie_, July 23, 1904.

[28] Transactions of the International Medical Congress, Moscow, vol. iv, p. 19. A similar symbolism may be traced in many of the cases in which the focus of modesty becomes in modest women centered in the excretory sphere and sometimes exaggerated to the extent of obsession. It must not be supposed, however, that every obsession in this sphere has a symbolical value of an erotic kind. In the case, for instance, which has been recorded by Raymond and Janet (_Les Obsessions_, vol. ii, p. 306) of a woman who spent much of her time in the endeavor to urinate perfectly, always feeling that she failed in some respect, the obsession seems to have risen fortuitously on a somewhat neurotic basis without reference to the sexual life.

[29] _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part III, Section II, Mem. III, Subs. I.

[30] It may be remarked here that while the eating of excrement (apart from its former use as a magic charm and as a therapeutic agent) is in civilization now confined to sexual perverts and the insane, among some animals it is normal as a measure of hygiene in relation to their young. Thus, as, e.g., the Rev. Arthur East writes, the mistle thrush swallows the droppings of its young. (_Knowledge_, June 1, 1899, p. 133.) In the dog I have observed that the bitch licks her puppies shortly after birth as they urinate, absorbing the fluid.

[31] See, e.g., the previous volume of these _Studies_, "Sexual Selection in Man," pp. 165 et seq., and Dühren, _Geschlechtsleben in England_, bd. ii, pp. 258, et seq.

[32] In the study of _Love and Pain_ in a previous volume (p. 130) I have quoted the remarks of a lady who refers to the analogy between sexual tension and vesical tension--"Cette volupté que ressentent les bords de la mer, d'être toujours pleins sans jamais déborder"--and its erotic significance.

IV.

Animals as Sources of Erotic Symbolism--Mixoscopic Zoophilia--The Stuff-fetichisms--Hair-fetichism--The Stuff-fetichisms Mainly on a Tactile Base--Erotic Zoophilia--Zooerastia--Bestiality--The Conditions that Favor Bestiality--Its Wide Prevalence Among Primitive Peoples and Among Peasants--The Primitive Conception of Animals--The Goat--The Influence of Familiarity with Animals--Congress Between Women and Animals--The Social Reaction Against Bestiality.

The erotic symbols with which we have so far been concerned have in every case been portions of the body, or its physiological processes, or at least the garments which it has endowed with life. The association on which the symbol has arisen has in every case been in large measure, although not entirely, an association of contiguity. It is now necessary to touch on a group of sexual symbols in which the association of contiguity with the human body is absent: the various methods by which animals or animal products or the sight of animal copulation may arouse sexual desire in human persons. Here we encounter a symbolism mainly founded on association by resemblance; the animal sexual act recalls the human sexual act; the animal becomes the symbol of the human being.

The group of phenomena we are here concerned with includes several subdivisions. There is first the more or less sexual pleasure sometimes experienced, especially by young persons, in the sight of copulating animals. This I would propose to call Mixoscopic Zoophilia; it falls within the range of normal variation. Then we have the cases in which the contact of animals, stroking, etc., produces sexual excitement or gratification; this is a sexual fetichism in the narrow sense, and is by Krafft-Ebing termed _Zoophilia Erotica_. We have, further, the class of cases in which a real or simulated sexual intercourse with animals is desired. Such cases are not regarded as fetichism by Krafft-Ebing,[33] but they come within the phenomena of erotic symbolism as here understood. This class falls into two divisions: one in which the individual is fairly normal, but belongs to a low grade of culture; the other in which he may belong to a more refined social class, but is affected by a deep degree of degeneration. In the first case we may properly apply the term bestiality; in the second case it may perhaps be better to use the term _zooerastia_, proposed by Krafft-Ebing.[34]

Among children, both boys and girls, it is common to find that the copulation of animals is a mysteriously fascinating spectacle. It is inevitable that this should be so, for the spectacle is more or less clearly felt to be the revelation of a secret which has been concealed from them. It is, moreover, a secret of which they feel intimate reverberations within themselves, and even in perfectly innocent and ignorant children the sight may produce an obscure sexual excitement.[35] It would seem that this occurs more frequently in girls than in boys. Even in adult age, it may be added, women are liable to experience the same kind of emotion in the presence of such spectacles. One lady recalls, as a girl, that on several occasions an element of physical excitement entered into the feelings with which she watched the coquetry of cats. Another lady mentions that at the age of about 25, and when still quite ignorant of sexual matters, she saw from a window some boys tickling a dog and inducing sexual excitement in the animal; she vaguely divined what they were doing, and though feeling disgust at their conduct she at the same time experienced in a strong degree what she now knows was sexual excitement. The coupling of the larger animals is often an impressive and splendid spectacle which is far, indeed, from being obscene, and has commended itself to persons of intellectual distinction;[36] but in young or ill-balanced minds such sights tend to become both prurient and morbid. I have already referred to the curious case of a sexually hyperæsthetic nun who was always powerfully excited by the sight or even the recollection of flies in sexual connection, so that she was compelled to masturbate; this dated from childhood. After becoming a nun she recorded having had this experience, followed by masturbation, more than four hundred times.[37] Animal spectacles sometimes produce a sexual effect on children even when not specifically sexual; thus a correspondent, a clergyman, informs me that when a young and impressionable boy, he was much affected by seeing a veterinary surgeon insert his hand and arm into a horse's rectum, and dreamed of this several times afterward with emissions.

While the contemplation of animal coitus is an easily intelligible and in early life, perhaps, an almost normal symbol of sexual emotion, there is another subdivision of this group of animal fetichisms which forms a more natural transition from the fetichisms which have their center in the human body: the stuff-fetichisms, or the sexual attraction exerted by various tissues, perhaps always of animal origin. Here we are in the presence of a somewhat complicated phenomenon. In part we have, in a considerable number of such cases, the sexual attraction of feminine garments, for all such tissues are liable to enter into the dress. In part, also, we have a sexual perversion of tactile sensibility, for in a considerable proportion of these cases it is the touch sensations which are potent in arousing the erotic sensations. But in part, also, it would seem, we have here the conscious or subconscious presence of an animal fetich, and it is notable that perhaps all these stuffs, and especially fur, which is by far the commonest of the groups, are distinctively animal products. We may perhaps regard the fetich of feminine hair--a much more important and common fetich, indeed, than any of the stuff fetichisms--as a link of transition. Hair is at once an animal and a human product, while it may be separated from the body and possesses the qualities of a stuff. Krafft-Ebing remarks that the senses of touch, smell, and hearing, as well as sight, seem to enter into the attraction exerted by hair.

The natural fascination of hair, on which hair-fetichism is founded, begins at a very early age. "The hair is a special object of interest with infants," Stanley Hall concludes, "which begins often in the latter part of the first year.... The hair, no doubt, gives quite unique tactile sensations, both in its own roots and to hands, and is plastic and yielding to the motor sense, so that the earliest interest may be akin to that in fur, which is a marked object in infant experience. Some children develop an almost fetichistic propensity to pull or later to stroke the hair or beard of every one with whom they come in contact." (G. Stanley Hall, "The Early Sense of Self," _American Journal of Psychology_, April, 1898, p. 359.)

It should be added that the fascination of hair for the infantile and childish mind is not necessarily one of attraction, but may be of repulsion. It happens here, as in the case of so many characteristics which are of sexual significance, that we are in the presence of an object which may exert a dynamic emotional force, a force which is capable of repelling with the same energy that it attracts. Féré records the instructive case of a child of 3, of psychopathic heredity, who when he could not sleep was sometimes taken by his mother into her bed. One night his hand came in contact with a hairy portion of his mother's body, and this, arousing the idea of an animal, caused him to leap out of the bed in terror. He became curious as to the cause of his terror and in time was able to observe "the animal," but the train of feelings which had been set up led to a life-long indifference to women and a tendency to homosexuality. It is noteworthy that he was attracted to men in whom the hair and other secondary sexual characters were well developed. (Féré, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, second edition, pp. 262-267.)

As a sexual fetich hair strictly belongs to the group of parts of the body; but since it can be removed from the body and is sexually effective as a fetich in the absence of the person to whom it belongs, it is on a level with the garments which may serve in a similar way, with shoes or handkerchiefs or gloves. Psychologically, hair-fetichism presents no special problem, but the wide attraction of hair--it is sexually the most generally noted part of the feminine body after the eyes--and the peculiar facility with which when plaited it may be removed, render hair-fetichism a sexual perversion of specially great medico-legal interest.

The frequency of hair-fetichism, as well as of the natural admiration on which it rests, is indicated by a case recorded by Laurent. "A few years ago," he states, "one constantly saw at the Bal Bullier, in Paris, a tall girl whose face was lean and bony, but whose black hair was of truly remarkable length. She wore it flowing down her shoulders and loins. Men often followed her in the street to touch or kiss the hair. Others would accompany her home and pay her for the mere pleasure of touching and kissing the long black tresses. One, in consideration of a relatively considerable sum, desired to pollute the silky hair. She was obliged to be always on her guard, and to take all sorts of precautions to prevent any one cutting off this ornament, which constituted her only beauty as well as her livelihood." (E. Laurent, _L'Amour Morbide_, 1891, p. 164; also the same author's _Fétichistes et Erotomanes_, p. 23.)

The hair despoiler (_Coupeur des Nattes_ or _Zopfabschneider_) may be found in any civilized country, though the most carefully studied cases have occurred in Paris. (Several medico-legal histories of hair-despoilers are summarized by Krafft-Ebing, _Op. cit._, pp. 329-334). Such persons are usually of nervous temperament and bad heredity; the attraction to hair occasionally develops in early life; sometimes the morbid impulse only appears in later life after fever. The fetich may be either flowing hair or braided hair, but is usually one or the other, and not both. Sexual excitement and ejaculation may be produced in the act of touching or cutting off the hair, which is subsequently, in many cases, used for masturbation. As a rule the hair-despoiler is a pure fetichist, no element of sadistic pleasure entering into his feelings. In the case of a "capillary kleptomaniac" in Chicago--a highly intelligent and athletic married young man of good family--the impulse to cut off girls' braids appeared after recovery from a severe fever. He would gaze admiringly at the long tresses and then clip them off with great rapidity; he did this in some fifty cases before he was caught and imprisoned. He usually threw the braids away before he reached home. (_Alienist and Neurologist_, April, 1889, p. 325.) In this case there is no history of sexual excitement, probably because no proper medico-legal examination was made. (It may be added that hair-despoilers have been specially studied by Motet, "Les Coupeurs de Nattes," _Annales d'Hygiène_, 1890.)

The stuff-fetiches are most usually fur and velvet; feathers, silk, and leathers also sometimes exert this influence; they are all, it will be noted, animal substances.[38] The most interesting is probably fur, the attraction of which is not uncommon in association with passive algolagnia. As Stanley Hall has shown, the fear of fur, as well as the love of it, is by no means uncommon in childhood; it may appear even in infancy and in children who have never come in contact with animals.[39] It is noteworthy that in most cases of uncomplicated stuff-fetichism the attraction apparently arises on a congenital basis, as it appears in persons of nervous or sensitive temperament at an early age and without being attached to any definite causative incident. The sexual excitation is nearly always produced by the touch rather than by the sight. As we found, when dealing with the sense of touch in the previous volume, the specific sexual sensations may be regarded as a special modification of ticklishness. The erotic symbolism in the case of these stuff-fetichisms would seem to be a more or less congenital perversion of ticklishness in relation to specific animal contacts.

A further degree of perversion in this direction is reached in a case of erotic _zoophilia_, recorded by Krafft-Ebing.[40] In this case a congenital neuropath, of good intelligence but delicate and anæmic, with feeble sexual powers, had a great love of domestic animals, especially dogs and cats, from an early age; when petting them he experienced sexual emotions, although he was innocent in sexual matters. At puberty he realized the nature of his feelings and tried to break himself of his habits. He succeeded, but then began erotic dreams accompanied by images of animals, and these led to masturbation associated with ideas of a similar kind. At the same time he had no wish for any sort of sexual intercourse with animals, and was indifferent as to the sex of the animals which attracted him; his sexual ideals were normal. Such a case seems to be fundamentally one of fetichism on a tactile basis, and thus forms a transition between the stuff-fetichisms and the complete perversions of sexual attraction toward animals.

In some cases sexually hyperæsthetic women have informed me that sexual feeling has been produced by casual contact with pet dogs and cats. In such cases there is usually no real perversion, but it seems probable that we may here have an occasional foundation for the somewhat morbid but scarcely vicious excesses of affection which women are apt to display towards their pet dogs or cats. In most cases of this affection there is certainly no sexual element; in the case of childless women, it may rather be regarded as a maternal than as an erotic symbolism. (The excesses of this non-erotic zoophilia have been discussed by Féré, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, second edition, pp. 166-171.)

Krafft-Ebing considers that complete perversion of sexual attraction toward animals is radically distinct from erotic _zoophilia_. This view cannot be accepted. Bestiality and _zooerastia_ merely present in a more marked and profoundly perverted form a further degree of the same phenomenon which we meet with in erotic _zoophilia_; the difference is that they occur either in more insensitive or in more markedly degenerate persons.

A fairly typical case of _zooerastia_ has been recorded in America by Howard, of Baltimore. This was the case of a boy of 16, precociously mature and fairly bright. He was, however, indifferent to the opposite sex, though he had ample opportunity for gratifying normal passions. His parents lived in the city, but the youth had an inordinate desire for the country and was therefore sent to school in a village. On the second day after his arrival at school a farmer missed a sow which was found secreted in an outhouse on the school grounds. This was the first of many similar incidents in which a sow always took part. So strong was his passion that on one occasion force had to be used to take him away from the sow he was caressing. He did not masturbate, and even when restrained from approaching sows he had no sexual inclination for other animals. His nocturnal pollutions, which were frequent, were always accompanied by images of wallowing swine. Notwithstanding careful treatment no cure was effected; mental and physical vigor failed, and he died at the age of 23.[41]

It is, however, somewhat doubtful whether we can always or even usually distinguish between zooerastia and bestiality. Dr. G.F. Lydston, of Chicago, has communicated to me a case (in which he was consulted) which seems fairly typical and is instructive in this respect. The subject was a young man of 21, a farmer's son, not very bright intellectually, but very healthy and strong, of great assistance on the farm, very capable and industrious, such a good farm hand that his father was unwilling to send him away and to lose his services. There was no history of insanity or neurosis in the family, and no injury or illness in his own history. He had spells of moroseness and irritability, however, and had also been a masturbator. Women had no attraction for him, but he would copulate with the mares upon his father's farm, and this without regard to time, place, or spectators. Such a case would seem to stand midway between ordinary bestiality and pathological zooerastia as defined by Krafft-Ebing, yet it seems probable that in most cases of ordinary bestiality some slight traces of mental anomaly might be found, if such cases always were, as they should be, properly investigated.[42]

We have here reached the grossest and most frequent perversion in this group; bestiality, or the impulse to attain sexual gratification by intercourse, or other close contact, with animals. In seeking to comprehend this perversion it is necessary to divest ourselves of the attitude toward animals which is the inevitable outcome of refined civilization and urban life. Most sexual perversions, if not in large measure the actual outcome of civilized life, easily adjust themselves to it. Bestiality (except in one form to be noted later) is, on the other hand, the sexual perversion of dull, insensitive and unfastidious persons. It flourishes among primitive peoples and among peasants. It is the vice of the clodhopper, unattractive to women or inapt to court them.

Three conditions have favored the extreme prevalence of bestiality: (1) primitive conceptions of life which built up no great barrier between man and the other animals; (2) the extreme familiarity which necessarily exists between the peasant and his beasts, often combined with separation from women; (3) various folk-lore beliefs such as the efficacy of intercourse with animals as a cure for venereal disease, etc.[43]

The beliefs and customs of primitive peoples, as well as their mythology and legends, bring before us a community of man and animals altogether unlike anything we know in civilization. Men may become animals and animals may become men; animals and men may communicate with each other and live on terms of equality; animals may be the ancestors of human tribes; the sacred totems of savages are most usually animals. There is no shame or degradation in the notion of a sexual relationship between men and animals, because in primitive conceptions animals are not inferior beings separated from man by a great gulf. They are much more like men in disguise, and in some respects possess powers which make them superior to men. This is recognized in those plays, festivals, and religious dances, so common among primitive peoples, in which animal disguises are worn.[44] When men admire and emulate the qualities of animals and are proud to believe that they descend from them, it is not surprising that they should sometimes see nothing derogatory in sexual intercourse with them.[45]

A significant relic of primitive conceptions in this matter may perhaps be found in the religious rites connected with the sacred goat of Mendes described by Herodotus. After telling how the Mendesians reverence the goat, especially the he-goat, out of their veneration for Pan, whom they represent as a goat ("the real motive which they assign for this custom I do not choose to relate"), he adds: "It happened in this country, and within my remembrance, and was indeed universally notorious, that a goat had indecent and public communication with a woman."[46] The meaning of the passage evidently is that in the ordinary intercourse of women with the sacred goat, connection was only simulated or incomplete on account of the natural indifference of the goat to the human female, but that in rare cases the goat proved sexually excitable with the woman and capable of connection.[47] The goat has always been a kind of sacred emblem of lust. In the middle ages it became associated with the Devil as one of the favorite forms he assumed. It is significant of a primitively religious sexual association between men and animals, that witches constantly confessed, or were made to confess, that they had had intercourse with the Devil in the shape of an animal, very frequently a dog. The figures of human beings and animals in conjunction carved on temples in India, also seem to indicate the religious significance which this phenomenon sometimes presents. There is, indeed, no need to go beyond Europe even in her moments of highest culture to find a religious sanction for sexual union between human beings, or gods in human shape, and animals. The legends of Io and the bull, of Leda and the swan, are among the most familiar in Greek mythology, and in a later pictorial form they constitute some of the most cherished works of the painters of the Renaissance.

As regards the prevalence of occasional sexual intercourse between men or women and animals among primitive peoples at the present time, it is possible to find many scattered references by travelers in all parts of the world. Such references by no means indicate that such practices are, as a rule, common, but they usually show that they are accepted with a good-humored indifference.[48]

Bestiality is very rarely found in towns. In the country this vice of the clodhopper is far from infrequent. For the peasant, whose sensibilities are uncultivated and who makes but the most elementary demands from a woman, the difference between an animal and a human being in this respect scarcely seems to be very great. "My wife was away too long," a German peasant explained to the magistrate, "and so I went with my sow." It is certainly an explanation that to the uncultivated peasant, ignorant of theological and juridical conceptions, must often seem natural and sufficient.

Bestiality thus resembles masturbation and other abnormal manifestations of the sexual impulse which may be practiced merely _faute de mieux_ and not as, in the strict sense, perversions of the impulse. Even necrophily may be thus practiced. A young man who when assisting the grave-digger conceived and carried out the idea of digging up the bodies of young girls to satisfy his passions with, and whose case has been recorded by Belletrud and Mercier, said: "I could find no young girl who would agree to yield to my desires; that is why I have done this. I should have preferred to have relations with living persons. I found it quite natural to do what I did: I saw no harm in it, and I did not think that any one else could. As living women felt nothing but repulsion for me, it was quite natural I should turn to the dead, who have never repulsed me. I used to say tender things to them like 'my beautiful, my love, I love you.'" (Belletrud and Mercier "Perversion de l'Instinct Genésique," _Annales d'Hygiène Publique_, June, 1903.) But when so highly abnormal an act is felt as natural we are dealing with a person who is congenitally defective so far as the finer developments of intelligence are concerned. It was so in this case of necrophily; he was the son of a weak-minded woman of unrestrainable sexual inclinations, and was himself somewhat feeble-minded; he was also, it is instructive to observe, anosmic.

But it is by no means only their dulled sensibility or the absence of women, which accounts for the frequency of bestiality among peasants. A highly important factor is their constant familiarity with animals. The peasant lives with animals, tends them, learns to know all their individual characters; he understands them far better than he understands men and women; they are his constant companions, his friends. He knows, moreover, the details of their sexual lives, he witnesses the often highly impressive spectacle of their coupling. It is scarcely surprising that peasants should sometimes regard animals as being not only as near to them as their fellow human beings, but even nearer.

The significance of the factor of familiarity is indicated by the great frequency of bestiality among shepherds, goatherds, and others whose occupation is exclusively the care of animals. Mirabeau, in the eighteenth century, stated, on the evidence of Basque priests, that all the shepherds in the Pyrenees practice bestiality. It is apparently much the same in Italy.[49] In South Italy and Sicily, especially, bestiality among goatherds and peasants is said to be almost a national custom.[50] In the extreme north of Europe, it is reported, the reindeer, in this respect, takes the place of the goat.

The importance of the same factor is also shown by the fact that when among women in civilization animal perversions appear, the animal is nearly always a pet dog. Usually in these cases the animal is taught to give gratification by _cunnilinctus_. In some cases, however, there is really sexual intercourse between the animal and the woman.

Moll mentions that in a case of _cunnilinctus_ by a dog in Germany there was a difficulty as to whether the matter should be considered an unnatural offence or simply an offence against decency; the lower court considered it in the former light, while the higher court took the more merciful view. (Moll, _Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, p. 697.) In a case reported by Pfaff and mentioned by Moll, a country girl was accused of having sexual intercourse with a large dog. On examination Pfaff found in the girl's thick pubic hair a loose hair which under the microscope proved to belong to the dog. (_Loc. cit._, p. 698.) In such a case it must be noted that while this evidence may be held to show sexual contact with the dog, it scarcely suffices to show sexual intercourse. This has, however, undoubtedly occurred from time to time, even more or less openly. Bloch (_Op. cit._, pp. 277 and 282) remarks that this is not an infrequent exhibition given by prostitutes in certain brothels. Maschka has referred to such an exhibition between a woman and a bull-dog, which was given to select circles in Paris. Rosse refers to a case in which a young unmarried woman in Washington was surprised during intercourse with a large English mastiff, who in his efforts to get loose caused such severe injuries that the woman died from hæmorrhage in about an hour. Rosse also mentions that some years ago a performance of this kind between a prostitute and a Newfoundland dog could be witnessed in San Francisco by paying a small sum; the woman declared that a woman who had once copulated with a dog would ever afterwards prefer this animal to a man. Rosse adds that he was acquainted with a similar performance between a woman and a donkey, which used to take place in Europe (Irving Rosse, "Sexual Hypochondriasis and Perversion of the Genesic Instinct," _Virginia Medical Monthly_, October, 1892, p. 379). Juvenal mentions such relations between the donkey and woman (vi, 332). Krauss (quoted by Bloch, _Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil II, p. 276) states that in Bosnia women sometimes carry on these practices with dogs and also--as he would not have believed had he not on one occasion observed it--with cats. "It seems to me," writes Dr. Kiernan, of Chicago, (private letter) "that what Rosse says of the animal exhibitions in San Francisco is true of all great cities. The animal employed in such exhibitions here has usually been a donkey, and in one instance death occurred from the animal trampling the girl partner. The practice described occurs in country regions quite frequently. Thus in a case reported in the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska, a sixteen-year-old boy engaged in rectal coitus with a large dog. In attempting to extricate his swollen penis from the boy's rectum the dog tore through the _sphincter ani_ an inch into the gluteus muscles. (_Omaha Clinic_, March, 1893.) In a Missouri case, which I verified, a smart, pretty, well-educated country girl was found with a profuse offensive vaginal discharge which had been present for about a week, coming on suddenly. After washing the external genitals and opening the labia three rents were discovered, one through the fourchette and two through the left nymphæ. The vagina was excessively congested and covered with points bleeding on the slightest irritation. The patient confessed that one day while playing with the genitals of a large dog she became excited and thought she would have slight coitus. After the dog had made an entrance she was unable to free herself from him, as he clasped her so firmly with his fore legs. The penis became so swollen that the dog could not free himself, although for more than an hour she made persistent efforts to do so. (_Medical Standard_, June, 1903, p. 184). In an Indiana case, concerning which I was consulted, the girl was a hebephreniac who had resorted to this procedure with a Newfoundland dog at the instance of another girl, seemingly normal as regards mentality, and had been badly injured; a discharge resulted which resembled gonorrhoea, but contained no gonococci. These cases are probably more frequent than is usually assumed."

Women are known to have had intercourse with various other animals, occasionally or habitually, in various parts of the world. Monkeys have been mentioned in this connection. Moll remarks that it seems to be an indication of an abnormal interest in monkeys that some women are observed by the attendants in the monkey-house of zoölogical gardens to be very frequent visitors. Near the Amazon the traveler Castelnau saw an enormous Coati monkey belonging to an Indian woman and tried to purchase it; though he offered a large sum, the woman only laughed. "Your efforts are useless," remarked an Indian in the same cabin, "he is her husband." (So far as the early literature of this subject is concerned, a number of facts and fables regarding the congress of women with dogs, goats and other animals was brought together at the beginning of the eighteenth century by Schurig in his _Gynæcologia_, Section II, cap. VII; I have not drawn on this collection.)

In some cases women, and also men, find gratification in the sexual manipulation of animals without any kind of congress. This may be illustrated by an observation communicated to me by a correspondent, a clergyman. "In Ireland, my father's house adjoined the residence of an archdeacon of the established church. I was then about 20 and was still kept in religious awe of evil ways. The archdeacon had two daughters, both of whom he brought up in great strictness, resolved that they should grow up examples of virtue and piety. Our stables adjoined, and were separated only by a thin wall in which was a doorway closed up by some boards, as the two stables had formerly been one. One night I had occasion to go to our stable to search for a garden tool I had missed, and I heard a door open on the other side, and saw a light glimmer through the cracks of the boards. I looked through to ascertain who could be there at that late hour, and soon recognized the stately figure of one of the daughters, F.F. was tall, dark and handsome, but had never made any advances to me, nor had I to her. She was making love to her father's mare after a singular fashion. Stripping her right arm, she formed her fingers into a cone, and pressed on the mare's vulva. I was astonished to see the beast stretching her hind legs as if to accommodate the hand of her mistress, which she pushed in gradually and with seeming ease to the elbow. At the same time she seemed to experience the most voluptuous sensation, crisis after crisis arriving." My correspondent adds that, being exceedingly curious in the matter, he tried a somewhat similar experiment himself with one of his father's mares and experienced what he describes as "a most powerful sexual battery" which produced very exciting and exhausting effects. Näcke (_Psychiatrische en Neurologische Bladen_, 1899, No. 2) refers to an idiot who thus manipulated the vulva of mares in his charge. The case has been recorded by Guillereau (_Journal de Médicine Véterinaire et de Zootechnie_, January, 1899) of a youth who was accustomed to introduce his hand into the vulva of cows in order to obtain sexual excitement.

The possibility of sexual excitement between women and animals involves a certain degree of sexual excitability in animals from contact with women. Darwin stated that there could be no doubt that various quadrumanous animals could distinguish women from men--in the first place probably by smell and secondarily by sight--and be thus liable to sexual excitement. He quotes the opinions on this point of Youatt, Brehm, Sir Andrew Smith and Cuvier (_Descent of Man_, second edition, p. 8). Moll quotes the opinion of an experienced observer to the same effect (_Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, Bd. i, p. 429). Hufeland reported the case of a little girl of three who was playing, seated on a stool, with a dog placed between her thighs and locked against her. Seemingly excited by this contact the animal attempted a sort of copulation, causing the genital parts of the child to become inflamed. Bloch (_Op. cit._, p. 280, _et seq._) discusses the same point; he does not consider that animals will of their own motion sexually cohabit with women, but that they may be easily trained to it. There can be no doubt that dogs at all events are sometimes sexually excited by the presence of women, perhaps especially during menstruation, and many women are able to bear testimony to the embarrassing attentions they have sometimes received from strange dogs. There can be no difficulty in believing that, so far as _cunnilinctus_ is concerned dogs would require no training. In a case recorded by Moll (_Konträre Sexualempfindung_, third edition, p. 560) a lady states that this was done to her when a child, as also to other children, by dogs who, she said, showed signs of sexual excitement. In this case there was also sexual excitement thus produced in the child, and after puberty mutual _cunnilinctus_ was practiced with girl friends. Guttceit (_Dreissig Jahre Praxis_, Theil I, p. 310) remarks that some Russian officers who were in the Turkish campaign of 1828 told him that from fear of veneral infection in Wallachia they refrained from women and often used female asses which appeared to show signs of sexual pleasure.

A very large number of animals have been recorded as having been employed in the gratification of sexual desire at some period or in some country, by men and sometimes by women. Domestic animals are naturally those which most frequently come into question, and there are few if any of these which can altogether be excepted. The sow is one of the animals most frequently abused in this manner.[51] Cases in which mares, cows, and donkeys figure constantly occur, as well as goats and sheep. Dogs, cats, and rabbits are heard of from time to time. Hens, ducks, and, especially in China, geese, are not uncommonly employed. The Roman ladies were said to have had an abnormal affection for snakes. The bear and even the crocodile are also mentioned.[52]

The social and legal attitude toward bestiality has reflected in part the frequency with which it has been practiced, and in part the disgust mixed with mystical and sacrilegious horror which it has aroused. It has sometimes been met merely by a fine, and sometimes the offender and his innocent partner have been burnt together. In the middle ages and later its frequency is attested by the fact that it formed a favorite topic with preachers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is significant that in the Penitentials,--which were criminal codes, half secular and half spiritual, in use before the thirteenth century, when penance was relegated to the judgment of the confessor,--it was thought necessary to fix the periods of penance which should be undergone respectively by bishops, priests and deacons who should be guilty of bestiality.

In Egbert's Penitential, a document of the ninth and tenth centuries, we read (V. 22): "Item Episcopus cum quadrupede fornicans VII annos, consuetudinem X, presbyter V, diaconus III, clerus II." There was a great range in the penances for bestiality, from ten years to (in the case of boys) one hundred days. The mare is specially mentioned (Haddon and Stubbs, _Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents_, vol. iii, p. 422). In Theodore's Penitential, another Anglo-Saxon document of about the same age, those who habitually fornicate with animals are adjudged ten years of penance. It would appear from the _Penitentiale Pseudo-Romanum_ (which is earlier than the eleventh century) that one year's penance was adequate for fornication with a mare when committed by a layman (exactly the same as for simple fornication with a widow or virgin), and this was mercifully reduced to half a year if he had no wife. (Wasserschleben, _Die Bussordnungen der Abendländlichen Kirche_, p. 366). The _Penitentiale Hubertense_ (emanating from the monastery of St. Hubert in the Ardennes) fixes ten years' penance for sodomy, while Fulbert's Penitential (about the eleventh century) fixes seven years for either sodomy or bestiality. Burchard's Penitential, which is always detailed and precise, specially mentions the mare, the cow and the ass, and assigns forty days bread and water and seven years penance, raised to ten years in the case of married men. A woman having intercourse with a horse is assigned seven years penance in Burchard's Penitential. (Wasserschleben, ib. pp. 651, 659.)

The extreme severity which was frequently exercised toward those guilty of this offense, was doubtless in large measure due to the fact that bestiality was regarded as a kind of sodomy, an offense which was frequently viewed with a mystical horror apart altogether from any actual social or personal injury it caused. The Jews seem to have felt this horror; it was ordered that the sinner and his victim should both be put to death (Exodus, Ch. 22, v. 19; Leviticus, Ch. 20, v. 15). In the middle ages, especially in France, the same rule often prevailed. Men and sows, men and cows, men and donkeys were burnt together. At Toulouse a woman was burnt for having intercourse with a dog. Even in the seventeenth century a learned French lawyer, Claude Lebrun de la Rochette, justified such sentences.[53] It seems probable that even to-day, in the social and legal attitude toward bestiality, sufficient regard is not paid to the fact that this offense is usually committed either by persons who are morbidly abnormal or who are of so low a degree of intelligence that they border on feeble-mindedness. To what extent, and on what grounds, it ought to be punished is a question calling for serious reconsideration.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] For Krafft-Ebing's discussion of the subject see _Op. cit._, pp. 530-539.

[34] In England it is not uncommon to use the term "unnatural offence;" this is an awkward and possibly misleading practice which should not be followed. In Germany a similar confusion is caused by applying the term "sodomy" to these cases as well as to pederasty. Krafft-Ebing considers that this error is due to the jurists, while the theologians have always distinguished correctly. In this matter, he adds, science must be _ancilla theologiæ_ and return to the correct usage of words.

[35] This childish interest, with later abnormal developments, may be seen in History I of the Appendix to this volume.

[36] The Countess of Pembroke, Sir Philip Sidney's sister, appears to have found sexual enjoyment in the contemplation of the sexual prowess of stallions. Aubrey writes that she "was very salacious and she had a contrivance that in the spring of the year ... the stallions ... were to be brought before such a part of the house where she had a vidette to look on them." (_Short Lives_, 1898, vol. i, p. 311.) Although the modern editor's modesty has caused the disappearance of several lines from this passage, the general sense is clear. In the same century Burchard, the faithful secretary of Pope Alexander VI, describes in his invaluable diary how four race horses were brought to two mares in a court of the Vatican, the horses clamorously fighting for the possession of the mares and eventually mounting them, while the Pope and his daughter Lucrezia looked on from a window "cum magno risu et delectatione." (_Diarium_, ed Thuasne, vol. III, p. 169.)

[37] _Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1902, fasc. ii-iii, p. 338. In the case of pathological sexuality in a boy of 15, reported by A. MacDonald, and already summarized, the sight of copulating flies is also mentioned among many other causes of sexual excitation.

[38] Krafft-Ebing presents or quotes typical cases of all these fetiches, _Op. cit._, pp. 255-266.

[39] G. Stanley Hall, "A study of Fears," _American Journal of Psychology_, 1897, pp. 213-215.

[40] _Op. cit._, p. 268.

[41] W. Howard, "Sexual Perversion," _Alienist and Neurologist_, January, 1896. Krafft-Ebing (op. cit., p. 532) quotes from Boeteau the somewhat similar case of a gardener's boy of 16--an illegitimate child of neuropathic heredity and markedly degenerate--who had a passion, of irresistible and impulsive character, for rabbits. He was declared irresponsible. Moll (_Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, pp. 431-433) presents the case of a neurotic man who from the age of 15 had been sexually excited by the sight of animals or by contact with them. He had repeatedly had connection with cows and mares; he was also sexually excited by sheep, donkeys, and dogs, whether female or male; the normal sexual instinct was weak and he experienced very slight attraction to women.

[42] Moll also remarks ("Perverse Sexualempfindung," in Senator's and Kaminer's _Krankheiten und Ehe_) that in this matter it is often hardly possible to draw a sharp line between vice and disease.

[43] Instances of this widespread belief--found among the Tamils of Ceylon as well as in Europe--are quoted from various authors by Bloch, _Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil II, p. 278, and Moll, _Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, p. 700. On the frequency of bestiality, from one cause or another, in the East, see, e.g., Stern, _Medizin und Geschlechtsleben in der Türkei_, bd. ii, p. 219.

[44] Sometimes (as among the Aleuts) the animal pantomime dances of savages may represent the transformation of a captive bird into a lovely woman who falls exhausted into the arms of the hunter. (H.H. Bancroft, _Native Races of the Pacific_, vol. i, p. 93.) A system of beliefs which accepts the possibility that a human being may be latent in an animal obviously favors the practice of bestiality.

[45] For an example of the primitive confusion between the intercourse of women with animals and with men see, e.g., Boas, "Sagen aus British-Columbia," _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, heft V, p. 558.

[46] Herodotus, Book II, Chapter 46.

[47] Dulare (_Des Divinités Génératrices_, Chapter II) brings together the evidence showing that in Egypt women had connection with the sacred goat, apparently in order to secure fertility.

[48] Various facts and references bearing on this subject are brought together by Blumenbach, _Anthropological Memoirs_, translated by Bendyshe, p. 80; Block, _Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil II, pp. 276-283; also Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_, seventh edition, p. 520.

[49] Mantegazza mentions (_Gli Amori degli Uomini_, cap V) that at Rimini a young goatherd of the Apennines, troubled with dyspepsia and nervous symptoms, told him this was due to excesses with the goats in his care. A finely executed marble group of a satyr having connection with a goat, found at Herculaneum and now in the Naples Museum (reproduced in Fuchs's _Erotische Element in der Karikatur_), perhaps symbolizes a traditional and primitive practice of the goatherd.

[50] Bayle (_Dictionary_, Art, Bathyllus) quotes various authorities concerning the Italian auxiliaries in the south of France in the sixteenth century and their custom of bringing and using goats for this purpose. Warton in the eighteenth century was informed that in Sicily priests in confession habitually inquired of herdsmen if they had anything to do with their sows. In Normandy priests are advised to ask similar questions.

[51] It is worth noting that in Greek the work choiros means both a sow and a woman's pudenda; in the _Acharnians_ Aristophanes plays on this association at some length. The Romans also (as may be gathered from Varro's _De Re Rustica_) called the feminine pudenda _porcus_.

[52] Schurig, _Gynæcologia_, pp. 280-387; Bloch, op. cit., 270-277. The Arabs, according to Kocher, chiefly practice bestiality with goats, sheep and mares. The Annamites, according to Mondière, commonly employ sows and (more especially the young women) dogs. Among the Tamils of Ceylon bestiality with goats and cows is said to be very prevalent.

[53] Mantegazza (_Gli Amori degli Uomini_, cap. V) brings together some facts bearing on this matter.

V.

Exhibitionism--Illustrative Cases--A Symbolic Perversion of Courtship--The Impulse to Defile--The Exhibitionist's Psychic Attitude--The Sexual Organs as Fetichs--Phallus Worship--Adolescent Pride in Sexual Development--Exhibitionism of the Nates--The Classification of the Forms of Exhibitionism--Nature of the Relationship of Exhibitionism to Epilepsy.

There is a remarkable form of erotic symbolism--very definite and standing clearly apart from all other forms--in which sexual gratification is experienced in the simple act of exhibiting the sexual organ to persons of the opposite sex, usually by preference to young and presumably innocent persons, very often children. This is termed exhibitionism.[54] It would appear to be a not very infrequent phenomenon, and most women, once or more in their lives, especially when young, have encountered a man who has thus deliberately exposed himself before them.

The exhibitionist, though often a young and apparently vigorous man, is always satisfied with the mere act of self-exhibition and the emotional reaction which that act produces; he makes no demands on the woman to whom he exposes himself; he seldom speaks, he makes no effort to approach her; as a rule, he fails even to display the signs of sexual excitation. His desires are completely gratified by the act of exhibition and by the emotional reaction it arouses in the woman. He departs satisfied and relieved.

A case recorded by Schrenck-Notzing very well represents both the nature of the impulse felt by the exhibitionist and the way in which it may originate. It is the case of a business man of 49, of neurotic heredity, an affectionate husband and father of a family, who, to his own grief and shame, is compelled from time to time to exhibit his sexual organs to women in the street. As a boy of 10 a girl of 12 tried to induce him to coitus; both had their sexual parts exposed. From that time sexual contacts, as of his own naked nates against those of a girl, became attractive, as well as games in which the boys and girls in turn marched before each other with their sexual parts exposed, and also imitation of the copulation of animals. Coitus was first practiced about the age of 20, but sight and touch of the woman's sexual parts were always necessary to produce sexual excitement. It was also necessary--and this consideration is highly important as regards the development of the tendency to exhibition--that the woman should be excited by the sight of his organs. Even when he saw or touched a woman's parts orgasm often occurred. It was the naked sexual organs in an otherwise clothed body which chiefly excited him. He was not possessed of a high degree of potency. Girls between the ages of 10 and 17 chiefly excited him, and especially if he felt that they were quite ignorant of sexual matters. His self-exhibition was a sort of psychic defloration, and it was accompanied by the idea that other people felt as he did about the sexual effects of the naked organs, that he was shocking but at the same time sexually exciting a young girl. He was thus gratifying himself through the belief that he was causing sexual gratification to an innocent girl. This man was convicted several times, and was finally declared to be suffering from impulsive insanity. (Schrenck-Notzing, _Kriminal-psychologische und Psycho-pathologische Studien_, 1902, pp. 50-57.) In another case of Schrenck-Notzing's, an actor and portrait painter, aged 31, in youth masturbated and was fond of contemplating the images of the sexual organs of both sexes, finding little pleasure in coitus. At the age of 24, at a bathing establishment, he happened to occupy a compartment next to that occupied by a lady, and when naked he became aware that his neighbor was watching him through a chink in the partition. This caused him powerful excitement and he was obliged to masturbate. Ever since he has had an impulse to exhibit his organs and to masturbate in the presence of women. He believes that the sight of his organs excites the woman (Ib., pp. 57-68). The presence of masturbation in this case renders it untypical as a case of exhibitionism. Moll at one time went so far as to assert that when masturbation takes place we are not entitled to admit exhibitionism, (_Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, p. 661), but now accepts exhibitionism with masturbation ("Perverse Sexualempfindung," _Krankheiten und Ehe_). The act of exhibition itself gratifies the sexual impulse, and usually it suffices to replace both tumescence and detumescence.

A fairly typical case, recorded by Krafft-Ebing, is that of a German factory worker of 37, a good, sober and intelligent workman. His parents were healthy, but one of his mother's and also one of his father's sisters were insane; some of his relatives are eccentric in religion. He has a languishing expression and a smile of self-complacency. He never had any severe illness, but has always been eccentric and imaginative, much absorbed in romances (such as Dumas's novels) and fond of identifying himself with their heroes. No signs of epilepsy. In youth moderate masturbation, later moderate coitus. He lives a retired life, but is fond of elegant dress and of ornament. Though not a drinker, he sometimes makes himself a kind of punch which has a sexually exciting effect on him. The impulse to exhibitionism has only developed in recent years. When the impulse is upon him he becomes hot, his heart beats violently, the blood rushes to his head, and he is oblivious of everything around him that is not connected with his own act. Afterwards he regards himself as a fool and makes vain resolutions never to repeat the act. In exhibition the penis is only half erect and ejaculation never occurs. (He is only capable of coitus with a woman who shows great attraction to him.) He is satisfied with self-exhibition, and believes that he thus gives pleasure to the woman, since he himself receives pleasure in contemplating a woman's sexual parts. His erotic dreams are of self-exhibition to young and voluptuous women. He had been previously punished for an offense of this kind; medico-legal opinion now recognized the incriminated man's psychopathic condition. (Krafft-Ebing, _Op. cit._, pp. 492-494.)

Trochon has reported the case of a married man of 33, a worker in a factory, who for several years had exhibited himself at intervals to shop-girls, etc., in a state of erection, but without speaking or making other advances. He was a hard-working, honest, sober man of quiet habits, a good father to his family and happy at home. He showed not the slightest sign of insanity. But he was taciturn, melancholic and nervous; a sister was an idiot. He was arrested, but on the report of the experts that he committed these acts from a morbid impulse he could not control he was released. (Trochon, _Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle_, 1888, p. 256.)

In a case of Freyer's (_Zeitschrift für Medizinalbeamte_, third year, No. 8) the occasional connection of exhibitionism with epilepsy is well illustrated by a barber's assistant, aged 35, whose father suffered from chronic alcoholism and was also said to have committed the same kind of offense as his son. The mother and a sister suffered nervously. From ages of 7 to 18 the subject had epileptic convulsions. From 16 to 21 he indulged in normal sexual intercourse. At about that time he had often to pass a playground and at times would urinate there; it happened that the children watched him with curiosity. He noticed that when thus watched sexual excitement was caused, inducing erection and even ejaculation. He gradually found pleasure in this kind of sexual gratification; finally he became indifferent to coitus. His erotic dreams, though still usually about normal coitus, were now sometimes concerned with exhibition before little girls. When overcome by the impulse he could see and hear nothing around him, though he did not lose consciousness. After the act was over he was troubled by his deed. In all other respects he was entirely reasonable. He was imprisoned many times for exhibiting himself to young schoolgirls, sometimes vaunting the beauty of his organs and inviting inspection. On one occasion he underwent mental examination, but was considered to be mentally sound. He was finally held to be a hereditarily tainted individual with neuropathic constitution. The head was abnormally broad, penis small, patellar reflex absent, and there were many signs of neurasthenia. (Krafft-Ebing, _Op. cit._, pp. 490-492.)

The prevalence of epilepsy among exhibitionists is shown by the observations of Pelanda in Verona. He has recorded six cases of this perversion, all of which eventually reached the asylum and were either epileptics or with epileptic relations. One had a brother who was also an exhibitionist. In some cases the penis was abnormally large, in others abnormally small. Several had very weak sexual impulse; one, at the age of 62, had never effected coitus, and was proud of the fact that he was still a virgin, considering, he would say, the epoch of demoralization in which we live. (Pelanda, "Pornopatici," _Archivio di Psichiatria_, fasc. ii-iv, 1889.)

In a very typical case of exhibitionism which Garnier has recorded, a certain X., a gentleman engaged in business in Paris, had a predilection for exhibiting himself in churches, more especially in Saint-Roch. He was arrested several times for exposing his sexual organs here before ladies in prayer. In this way he finally ruined his commercial position in Paris and was obliged to establish himself in a small provincial town. Here again he soon exposed himself in a church and was again sent to prison, but on his liberation immediately performed the same act in the same church in what was described as a most imperturbable manner. Compelled to leave the town, he returned to Paris, and in a few weeks' time was again arrested for repeating his old offense in Saint Roch. When examined by Garnier, the information he supplied was vague and incomplete, and he was very embarrassed in the attempt to explain himself. He was unable to say why he chose a church, but he felt that it was to a church that he must go. He had, however, no thought of profanation and no wish to give offense. "Quite the contrary!" he declared. He had the sad and tired air of a man who is dominated by a force stronger than his will. "I know," he added, "what repulsion my conduct must inspire. Why am I made thus? Who will cure me?" (P. Garnier, "Perversions Sexuelles," _Comptes Rendus_, International Congress of Medicine at Paris in 1900, _Section de Psychiatrie_, pp. 433-435.)

In some cases, it would appear, the impulse to exhibitionism may be overcome or may pass away. This result is the more likely to come about in those cases in which exhibitionism has been largely conditioned by chronic alcoholism or other influences tending to destroy the inhibiting and restraining action of the higher centers, which may be overcome by hygiene and treatment. In this connection I may bring forward a case which has been communicated to me by a medical correspondent in London. It is that of an actor, of high standing in his profession and extremely intelligent, 49 years of age, married and father of a large family. He is sexually vigorous and of erotic temperament. His general health has always been good, but he is a high-strung, neurotic man, with quick mental reactions. His habits had for a long time been decidedly alcoholic, but two years ago, a small quantity of albumen being found in the urine, he was persuaded to leave off alcohol, and has since been a teetotaller. Though ordinarily very reticent about sexual matters, he began four or five years ago to commit acts of exhibitionism, exposing himself to servants in the house and occasionally to women in the country. This continued after the alcohol had been abandoned and lasted for several years, though the attention of the police was never attracted to the matter, and so far as possible he was quietly supervised by his friends. Nine months after, the acts of exhibitionism ceased, apparently in a spontaneous manner, and there has so far been no relapse.

Exhibitionism is an act which, on the face of it, seems nonsensical and meaningless, and as such, as an inexplicable act of madness, it has frequently been treated both by writers on insanity and on sexual perversion. "These acts are so lacking in common sense and intelligent reflection that no other reason than insanity can be offered for the patient," Ball concluded.[55] Moll, also, who defines exhibitionism somewhat too narrowly as a condition in which "the charm of the exhibition lies for the subject in the display itself," not sufficiently taking into consideration the imagined effect on the spectator, concludes that "the psychological basis of exhibitionism is at present by no means cleared up."[56]

We may probably best approach exhibitionism by regarding it as fundamentally a symbolic act based on a perversion of courtship. The exhibitionist displays the organ of sex to a feminine witness, and in the shock of modest sexual shame by which she reacts to that spectacle, he finds a gratifying similitude of the normal emotions of coitus.[57] He feels that he has effected a psychic defloration.

Exhibitionism is thus analogous, and, indeed, related, to the impulse felt by many persons to perform indecorous acts or tell indecent stories before young and innocent persons of the opposite sex. This is a kind of psychic exhibitionism, the gratification it causes lying exactly, as in physical exhibitionism, in the emotional confusion which it is felt to arouse. The two kinds of exhibitionism may be combined in the same person: Thus, in a case reported by Hoche (p. 97), the exhibitionist an intellectual and highly educated man, with a doctor's degree, also found pleasure in sending indecent poems and pictures to women, whom, however, he made no attempt to seduce; he was content with the thought of the emotions he aroused or believed that he aroused.

It is possible that within this group should come the agent in the following incident which was lately observed by a lady, a friend of my own. An elderly man in an overcoat was seen standing outside a large and well-known draper's shop in the outskirts of London; when able to attract the attention of any of the shop-girls or of any girl in the street he would fling back his coat and reveal that he was wearing over his own clothes a woman's chemise (or possibly bodice) and a woman's drawers; there was no exposure. The only intelligible explanation of this action would seem to be that pleasure was experienced in the mild shock of interested surprise and injured modesty which this vision was imagined to cause to a young girl. It would thus be a comparatively innocent form of psychic defloration.

It is of interest to point out that the sexual symbolism of active flagellation is very closely analogous to this symbolism of exhibitionism. The flagellant approaches a woman with the rod (itself a symbol of the penis and in some countries bearing names which are also applied to that organ) and inflicts on an intimate part of her body the signs of blushing and the spasmodic movements which are associated with sexual excitement, while at the same time she feels, or the flagellant imagines that she feels, the corresponding emotions of delicious shame.[58] This is an even closer mimicry of the sexual act than the exhibitionist attains, for the latter fails to secure the consent of the woman nor does he enjoy any intimate contact with her naked body. The difference is connected with the fact that the active flagellant is usually a more virile and normal person than the exhibitionist. In the majority of cases the exhibitionist's sexual impulse is very feeble, and as a rule he is either to some degree a degenerate, or else a person who is suffering from an early stage of general paralysis, dementia, or some other highly enfeebling cause of mental disorganization, such as chronic alcoholism. Sexual feebleness is further indicated by the fact that the individuals selected as witnesses are frequently mere children.

It seems probable that a form of erotic symbolism somewhat similar to exhibitionism is to be found in the rare cases in which sexual gratification is derived from throwing ink, acid or other defiling liquids on women's dresses. Thoinot has recorded a case of this kind (_Attentats aux Moeurs_, 1898, pp. 484, _et seq._). An instructive case has been presented by Moll. In this case a young man of somewhat neuropathic heredity had as a youth of 16 or 17, when romping with his young sister's playfellows, experienced sexual sensations on chancing to see their white underlinen. From that time white underlinen and white dresses became to him a fetich and he was only attracted to women so attired. One day, at the age of 25, when crossing the street in wet weather with a young lady in a white dress, a passing vehicle splashed the dress with mud. This incident caused him strong sexual excitement, and from that time he had the impulse to throw ink, perchloride of iron, etc., on to ladies' white dresses, and sometimes to cut and tear them, sexual excitement and ejaculation taking place every time he effected this. (Moll, "Gutachten über einem Sexual Perversen [Besudelungstrieb]," _Zeitschrift für Medizinalbeamte_, Heft XIII, 1900). Such a case is of considerable psychological interest. Thoinot considers that in these cases the fleck is a fetich. That is an incorrect account of the matter. In this case the white garments constituted the primary fetich, but that fetich becomes more acutely realized, and at the same time both parties are thrown into an emotional state which to the fetichist becomes a mimicry of coitus, by the act of defilement. We may perhaps connect with this phenomenon the attraction which muddy shoes often exert over the shoe-fetichist, and the curious way in which, as we have seen (p. 18), Restif de la Bretonne associates his love of neatness in women with his attraction to the feet, the part, he remarks, least easy to keep clean.

Garnier applied the term _sadi-fetichism_ to active flagellation and many similar manifestations such as we are here concerned with, on the grounds that they are hybrids which combine the morbid adoration for a definite object with the impulse to exercise a more or less degree of violence. From the standpoint of the conception of erotic symbolism I have adopted there is no need for this term. There is here no hybrid combination of two unlike mental states. We are simply concerned with states of erotic symbolism, more or less complete, more or less complex.

The conception of exhibitionism as a process of erotic symbolism, involves a conscious or unconscious attitude of attention in the exhibitionist's mind to the psychic reaction of the woman toward whom his display is directed. He seeks to cause an emotion which, probably in most cases, he desires should be pleasurable. But from one cause or another his finer sensibilities are always inhibited or in abeyance, and he is unable to estimate accurately either the impression he is likely to produce or the general results of his action, or else he is moved by a strong impulsive obsession which overpowers his judgment. In many cases he has good reason for believing that his act will be pleasurable, and frequently he finds complacent witnesses among the low-class servant girls, etc.

It may be pointed out here that we are quite justified in speaking of a penis-fetichism and also of a vulva-fetichism. This might be questioned. We are obviously justified in recognizing a fetichism which attaches itself to the pubic hair, or, as in a case with which I am acquainted, to the clitoris, but it may seem that we cannot regard the central sexual organs as symbols of sex, symbols, as it were, of themselves. Properly regarded, however, it is the sexual act rather than the sexual organ which is craved in normal sexual desire; the organ is regarded merely as the means and not as the end. Regarded as a means the organ is indeed an object of desire, but it only becomes a fetich when it arrests and fixes the attention. An attention thus pleasurably fixed, a vulva-fetichism or a penis-fetichism, is within the normal range of sexual emotion (this point has been mentioned in the previous volume when discussing the part played by the primary sexual organs in sexual selection), and in coarse-grained natures of either sex it is a normal allurement in its generalized shape, apart from any attraction to the person to whom the organs belong. In some morbid cases, however, this penis-fetichism may become a fully developed sexual perversion. A typical case of this kind has been recorded by Howard in the United States. Mrs. W., aged 39, was married at 20 to a strong, healthy man, but derived no pleasure from coitus, though she received great pleasure from masturbation practiced immediately after coitus, and nine years after marriage she ceased actual coitus, compelling her husband to adopt mutual masturbation. She would introduce men into the house at all times of the day or night, and after persuading them to expose their persons would retire to her room to masturbate. The same man never aroused desire more than once. This desire became so violent and persistent that she would seek out men in all sorts of public places and, having induced them to expose themselves, rapidly retreat to the nearest convenient spot for self-gratification. She once abstracted a pair of trousers she had seen a man wear and after fondling them experienced the orgasm. Her husband finally left her, after vainly attempting to have her confined in an asylum. She was often arrested for her actions, but through the intervention of friends set free again. She was a highly intelligent woman, and apart from this perversion entirely normal. (W.L. Howard, "Sexual Perversion," _Alienist and Neurologist_, January, 1896.) It is on the existence of a more or less developed penis-fetichism of this kind that the exhibitionist, mostly by an ignorant instinct, relies for the effects he desires to produce.

The exhibitionist is not usually content to produce a mere titillated amusement; he seeks to produce a more powerful effect which must be emotional whether or not it is pleasurable. A professional man in Strassburg (in a case reported by Hoche[59]) would walk about in the evening in a long cloak, and when he met ladies would suddenly throw his cloak back under a street lamp, or igniting a red-fire match, and thus exhibit his organs. There was an evident effort--on the part of a weak, vain, and effeminate man--to produce a maximum of emotional effect. The attempt to heighten the emotional shock is also seen in the fact that the exhibitionist frequently chooses a church as the scene of his exploits, not during service, for he always avoids a concourse of people, but perhaps toward evening when there are only a few kneeling women scattered through the edifice. The church is chosen, often instinctively rather than deliberately, from no impulse to commit a sacrilegious outrage--which, as a rule, the exhibitionist does not feel his act to be--but because it really presents the conditions most favorable to the act and the effects desired. The exhibitionist's attitude of mind is well illustrated by one of Garnier's patients who declared that he never wished to be seen by more than two women at once, "just what is necessary," he added, "for an exchange of impressions." After each exhibition he would ask himself anxiously: "Did they see me? What are they thinking? What do they say to each other about me? Oh! how I should like to know!" Another patient of Garnier's, who haunted churches for this purpose, made this very significant statement: "Why do I like going to churches? I can scarcely say. _But I know that it is only there that my act has its full importance_. The woman is in a devout frame of mind, and she must see that such an act in such a place is not a joke in bad taste or a disgusting obscenity; _that if I go there it is not to amuse myself; it is more serious than that!_ I watch the effect produced on the faces of the ladies to whom I show my organs. I wish to see them express a profound joy. I wish, in fact, that they may be forced to say to themselves: _How impressive Nature is when thus seen!_"

Here we trace the presence of a feeling which recalls the phenomena of the ancient and world-wide phallic worship, still liable to reappear sporadically. Women sometimes took part in these rites, and the osculation of the male sexual organ or its emblematic representation by women is easily traceable in the phallic rites of India and many other lands, not excluding Europe even in comparatively recent times. (Dulaure in his _Divinités Génératices_ brings together much bearing on these points; cf.: Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_, vol. i, Chapter XVII, and Bloch, _Beiträge zur Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil I, pp. 115-117. Colin Scott has some interesting remarks on phallic worship and the part it has played in aiding human evolution, "Sex and Art," _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. vii, No. 2, pp. 191-197. Irving Rosse describes some modern phallic rites in which both men and women took part, similar to those practiced in vaudouism, "Sexual Hypochondriasis," _Virginia Medical Monthly_, October, 1892.)

Putting aside any question of phallic worship, a certain pride and more or less private feeling of ostentation in the new expansion and development of the organs of virility seems to be almost normal at adolescence. "We have much reason to assume," Stanley Hall remarks, "that in a state of nature there is a certain instinctive pride and ostentation that accompanies the new local development. I think it will be found that exhibitionists are usually those who have excessive growth here, and that much that modern society stigmatizes as obscene is at bottom more or less spontaneous and perhaps in some cases not abnormal. Dr. Seerley tells me he has never examined a young man largely developed who had the usual strong instinctive tendency of modesty to cover himself with his hands, but he finds this instinct general with those whose development is less than the average." (G. Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 97.) This instinct of ostentation, however, so far as it is normal, is held in check by other considerations, and is not, in the strict sense, exhibitionism. I have observed a full-grown telegraph boy walking across Hampstead Heath with his sexual organs exposed, but immediately he realized that he was seen he concealed them. The solemnity of exhibitionism at this age finds expression in the climax of the sonnet, "Oraison du Soir," written at 16 by Rimbaud, whose verse generally is a splendid and insolent manifestation of rank adolescence:--

"Doux comme le Seigneur du cèdre et des hysopes, Je pisse vers les cieux bruns très haut et très loin, Avec l'assentiment des grands héliotropes."

(J.A. Rimbaud, _Oeuvres_, p. 68.)

In women, also, there would appear to be traceable a somewhat similar ostentation, though in them it is complicated and largely inhibited by modesty, and at the same time diffused over the body owing to the absence of external sexual organs. "Primitive woman," remarks Madame Renooz, "proud of her womanhood, for a long time defended her nakedness which ancient art has always represented. And in the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when by a secret atavism she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority, and cannot understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if nakedness should or should not affright her. A sort of confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of that human epoch." (Céline Renooz, _Psychologie Comparée de l'Homme et de la Femme_, p. 85.) It may be added that among primitive peoples, and even among some remote European populations to-day, the exhibition of feminine nudity has sometimes been regarded as a spectacle with religious or magic operation. (Ploss, _Das Weib_, seventh edition, vol. ii, pp. 663-680; Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, p. 304.) It is stated by Gopcevic that in the long struggle between the Albanians and the Montenegrians the women of the former people would stand in the front rank and expose themselves by raising their skirts, believing that they would thus insure victory. As, however, they were shot down, and as, moreover, victory usually fell to the Montenegrians, this custom became discredited. (Quoted by Bloch, _Op. cit._, Teil II, p. 307.)

With regard to the association, suggested by Stanley Hall, between exhibitionism and an unusual degree of development of the sexual organs, it must be remarked that both extremes--a very large and a very small penis--are specially common in exhibitionists. The prevalence of the small organ is due to an association of exhibitionism with sexual feebleness. The prevalence of the large organ may be due to the cause suggested by Hall. Among Mahommedans the sexual organs are sometimes habitually exposed by religious penitents, and I note that Bernhard Stern, in his book on the medical and sexual aspects of life in Turkey, referring to a penitent of this sort whom he saw on the Stamboul bridge at Constantinople, remarks that the organ was very largely developed. It may well be in such a case that the penitent's religious attitude is reinforced by some lingering relic of a more fleshly ostentation.

It is by a pseudo-atavism that this phallicism is evoked in the exhibitionist. There is no true emergence of an ancestrally inherited instinct, but by the paralysis or inhibition of the finer and higher feelings current in civilization, the exhibitionist is placed on the same mental level as the man of a more primitive age, and he thus presents the basis on which the impulses belonging to a higher culture may naturally take root and develop.

Reference may here be made to a form of primitive exhibitionism, almost confined to women, which, although certainly symbolic, is absolutely non-sexual, and must not, therefore, be confused with the phenomena we are here occupied with. I refer to the exhibition of the buttocks as a mark of contempt. In its most primitive form, no doubt, this exhibitionism is a kind of exorcism, a method of putting evil spirits, primarily, and secondarily evil-disposed persons, to flight. It is the most effective way for a woman to display sexual centers, and it shares in the magical virtues which all unveiling of the sexual centers is believed by primitive peoples to possess. It is recorded that the women of some peoples in the Balkan peninsula formerly used this gesture against enemies in battle. In the sixteenth century so distinguished a theologian as Luther when assailed by the Evil One at night was able to put the adversary to flight by protruding his uncovered buttocks from the bed. But the spiritual significance of this attitude is lost with the decay of primitive beliefs. It survives, but merely as a gesture of insult. The symbolism comes to have reference to the nates as the excretory focus, the seat of the anus. In any case it ignores any sexual attractiveness in this part of the body. Exhibitionism of this kind, therefore, can scarcely arise in persons of any sensitiveness or æsthetic perception, even putting aside the question of modesty, and there seems to be little trace of it in classic antiquity when the nates were regarded as objects of beauty. Among the Egyptians, however, we gather from Herodotus (Bk. II, Chapter LX) that at a certain popular religious festival men and women would go in boats on the Nile, singing and playing, and when they approached a town the women on the boats would insult the women of the town by injurious language and by exposing themselves. Among the Arabs, however, the specific gesture we are concerned with is noted, and a man to whom vengeance is forbidden would express his feelings by exposing his posterior and strewing earth on his head (Wellhausen, _Rests Arabischen Heidentums_, 1897, p. 195). It is in Europe and in mediæval and later times that this emphatic gesture seems to have flourished as a violent method of expressing contempt. It was by no means confined to the lower classes, and Kleinpaul, in discussing this form of "speech without words," quotes examples of various noble persons, even princesses, who are recorded thus to have expressed their feelings. (Kleinpaul, _Sprache ohne Worte_, pp. 271-273.) In more recent times the gesture has become merely a rare and extreme expression of unrestrained feeling in coarse-grained peasants. Zola, in the figure of Mouquette in _Germinal_, may be said to have given a kind of classic expression to the gesture. In the more remote parts of Europe it appears to be still not altogether uncommon. This seems to be notably the case among the South Slavs, and Krauss states that "when a South Slav woman wishes to express her deepest contempt for anyone she bends forward, with left hand raising her skirts, and with the right slapping her posterior, at the same time exclaiming: 'This for you!'" (Kryptadia, vol. vi, p. 200.)

A verbal survival of this gesture, consisting in the contemptuous invitation to kiss this region, still exists among us in remote parts of the country, especially as an insult offered by an angry woman who forgets herself. It is said to be commonly used in Wales. ("Welsh Ædoelogy," Kryptadia, vol. ii, pp. 358, et seq.) In Cornwall, when addressed by a woman to a man it is sometimes regarded as a deadly insult, even if the woman is young and attractive, and may cause a life-long enmity between related families. From this point of view the nates are a symbol of contempt, and any sexual significance is excluded. (The distinction is brought out by Diderot in _Le Neveu de Rameau:_ "_Lui:_--Il y a d'autres jours ou il ne m'en coûterait rien pour être vil tant qu'on voudrait; ces jours-là, pour un liard, je baiserais le cul à la petite Hus. _Moi:_--Eh! mais, l'ami, elle est blanche, jolie, douce, potelée, et c'est un acte d'humilité auquel un plus delicat que vous pourrait quelquefois s'abaisser. _Lui:_--Entendons-nous; c'est qu'il y a baiser le cul au simple, et baiser le cul au figuré.")

It must be added that a sexual form of exhibitionism of the nates must still be recognized. It occurs in masochism and expresses the desire for passive flagellation. Rousseau, whose emotional life was profoundly affected by the castigations which as a child he received from Mlle Lambercier, has in his _Confessions_ told us how, when a youth, he would sometimes expose himself in this way in the presence of young women. Such masochistic exhibitionism seems, however, to be rare.

While the manifestations of exhibitionism are substantially the same in all cases, there are many degrees and varieties of the condition. We may find among exhibitionists, as Garnier remarks, dementia, states of unconsciousness, epilepsy, general paralysis, alcoholism, but the most typical cases, he adds, if not indeed the cases to which the term properly belongs, are those in which it is an impulsive obsession. Krafft-Ebing[60] divides exhibitionists into four clinical groups: (1) acquired states of mental weakness, with cerebral or spinal disease clouding consciousness and at the same time causing impotence; (2) epileptics, in whom the act is an abnormal organic impulse performed in a state of imperfect consciousness; (3) a somewhat allied group of neurasthenic cases; (4) periodical impulsive cases with deep hereditary taint. This classification is not altogether satisfactory. Garnier's classification, placing the group of obsessional cases in the foreground and leaving the other more vaguely defined groups in the background, is probably better. I am inclined to consider that most of the cases fall into one or other of two mixed groups. The first class includes cases in which there is more or less congenital abnormality, but otherwise a fair or even complete degree of mental integrity; they are usually young adults, they are more or less precisely conscious of the end they wish to attain, and it is often only with a severe struggle that they yield to their impulses. In the second class the beginnings of mental or nervous disease have diminished the sensibility of the higher centers; the subjects are usually old men whose lives have been absolutely correct; they are often only vaguely aware of the nature of the satisfaction they are seeking, and frequently no struggle precedes the manifestation; such was the case of the overworked clergyman described by Hughes,[61] who, after much study, became morose and absent-minded, and committed acts of exhibitionism which he could not explain but made no attempt to deny; with rest and restorative treatment his health improved and the acts ceased. It is in the first class of cases alone that there is a developed sexual perversion. In the cases of the second class there is a more or less definite sexual intention, but it is only just conscious, and the emergence of the impulse is due not to its strength but to the weakness, temporary or permanent, of the higher inhibiting centers.

Epileptic cases, with loss of consciousness during the act, can only be regarded as presenting a pseudo-exhibitionism. They should be excluded altogether. It is undoubtedly true that many cases of real or apparent exhibitionism occur in epileptics.[62] We must not, however, too hastily conclude that because these acts occur in epileptics they are necessarily unconscious acts. Epilepsy frequently occurs on a basis of hereditary degeneration, and the exhibitionism may be, and not infrequently is, a stigma of the degeneracy and not an indication of the occurrence of a minor epileptic fit. When the act of pseudo-exhibitionism is truly epileptic, it will usually have no psychic sexual content, and it will certainly be liable to occur under all sorts of circumstances, when the patient is alone or in a miscellaneous concourse of people. It will be on a level with the acts of the highly respectable young woman who, at the conclusion of an attack of _petit mal_, consisting chiefly of a sudden desire to pass urine, on one occasion lifted up her clothes and urinated at a public entertainment, so that it was with difficulty her friends prevented her from being handed over to the police.[63] Such an act is automatic, unconscious, and involuntary; the spectators are not even perceived; it cannot be an act of exhibitionism. Whenever, on the other hand, the place and the time are evidently chosen deliberately,--a quiet spot, the presence of only one or two young women or children,--it is difficult to admit that we are in the presence of a fit of epileptic unconsciousness, even when the subject is known to be epileptic.

Even, however, when we exclude those epileptic pseudo-exhibitionists who, from the legal point of view, are clearly irresponsible, it must still be remembered that in every case of exhibitionism there is a high degree of either mental abnormality on a neuropathic basis, or else of actual disease. This is true to a greater extent in exhibitionism than in almost any other form of sexual perversion. No subject of exhibitionism should be sent to prison without expert medical examination.

FOOTNOTES:

[54] Lasège first drew attention to this sexual perversion and gave it its generally accepted name, "Les Exhibitionistes," _L'Union Médicale_, May, 1877. Magnan, on various occasions (for example, "Les Exhibitionistes," _Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle_, vol. v, 1890, p. 456), has given further development and precision to the clinical picture of the exhibitionist.

[55] B. Ball. _La Folie Erotique_, p. 86.

[56] Moll, _Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, p. 661.

[57] "Exhibitionism in its most typical form is," Garnier truly says, "a _systematic act_, manifesting itself as the _strange equivalent of a sexual connection_, or its _substitution_." The brief account of exhibitionism (pp. 433-437) in Garnier's discussion of "Perversions Sexuelles" at the International Medical Congress at Paris in 1900 (_Section de Psychiatrie: Comptes-Rendus_) is the most satisfactory statement of the psychological aspects of this perversion with which I am acquainted. Garnier's unrivalled clinical knowledge of these manifestations, due to his position during many years as physician at the Depôt of the Prefecture of Police in Paris, adds great weight to his conclusions.

[58] The symbolism of coitus involved in flagellation has been touched on by Eulenburg (_Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 121), and is more fully developed by Dühren (_Geschlechtsleben in England_, bd. ii, pp. 366, _et seq._).

[59] A. Hoche, _Neurologische Centralblatt_, 1896, No. 2.

[60] _Op. cit._, pp. 478, et seq.

[61] C.H. Hughes, "Morbid Exhibitionism," _Alienist and Neurologist_, August, 1904. Another somewhat similar American case, also preceded by overwork, and eventually adjudged insane by the courts, is recorded by D.S. Booth, _Alienist and Neurologist_, February, 1905.

[62] Exhibitionism in epilepsy is briefly discussed by Féré, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, second edition, pp. 194-195.

[63] W.S. Colman, "Post-Epileptic Unconscious Automatic Actions," _Lancet_, July 5, 1890.

VI.

The Forms of Erotic Symbolism are Simulacra of Coitus--Wide Extension of Erotic Symbolism--Fetichism Not Covering the Whole Ground of Sexual Selection--It is Based on the Individual Factor in Selection--Crystallization--The Lover and the Artist--The Key to Erotic Symbolism to be Found in the Emotional Sphere--The Passage to Pathological Extremes.

We have now examined several very various and yet very typical manifestations in all of which it is not difficult to see how, in some strange and eccentric form--on a basis of association through resemblance or contiguity or both combined--there arises a definite mimicry of the normal sexual act together with the normal emotions which accompany that act. It has become clear in what sense we are justified in recognizing erotic symbolism.

The symbolic and, as it were, abstracted nature of these manifestations is shown by the remarkable way in which they are sometimes capable of transference from the object to the subject. That is to say that the fetichist may show a tendency to cultivate his fetich in his own person. A foot-fetichist may like to go barefoot himself; a man who admired lame women liked to halt himself; a man who was attracted by small waists in women found sexual gratification in tight-lacing himself; a man who was fascinated by fine white skin and wished to cut it found satisfaction in cutting his own skin; Moll's coprolagnic fetichist found a voluptuous pleasure in his own acts of defecation. (See, e.g., Krafft-Ebing, _Op. cit._, p. 221, 224, 226; Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_, p. 74; cf. _ante_, p. 68.) Such symbolic transference seems to have a profoundly natural basis, for we may see a somewhat similar phenomenon in the well-known tendency of cows to mount a cow in heat. This would appear to be, not so much a homosexual impulse, as the dynamic psychic action of an olfactory sexual symbol in a transformed form.

We seem to have here a psychic process which is a curious reversal of that process of _Einfühlung_--the projection of one's own activities into the object contemplated--which Lipps has so fruitfully developed as the essence of every æsthetic condition. (T. Lipps, _Æsthetik_, Teil I, 1903.) By _Einfühlung_ our own interior activity becomes the activity of the object perceived, a thing being beautiful in proportion as it lends itself to our _Einfühlung_. But by this action of erotic symbolism, on the other hand, we transfer the activity of the object into ourselves.

When the idea of erotic symbolism as manifested in such definite and typical forms becomes realized, it further becomes clear that the vaguer manifestations of such symbolism are exceedingly widespread. When in a previous volume we were discussing and drawing together the various threads which unite "Love and Pain," it will now be understood that we were standing throughout on the threshold of erotic symbolism. Pain itself, in the sense in which we slowly learned to define it in this relationship--as a state of intense emotional excitement--may, under a great variety of special circumstances, become an erotic symbol and afford the same relief as the emotions normally accompanying the sexual act. Active algolagnia or sadism is thus a form of erotic symbolism; passive algolagnia or masochism is (in a man) an inverted form of erotic symbolism. Active flagellation or passive flagellation are, in exactly the same way, manifestations of erotic symbolism, the imaginative mimicry of coitus.

Binet and also Krafft-Ebing[64] have argued in effect that the whole of sexual selection is a matter of fetichism, that is to say, of erotic symbolism of object. "Normal love," Binet states, "appears as the result of a complicated fetichism." Tarde also seems to have regarded love as normally a kind of fetichism. "We are a long time before we fall in love with a woman," he remarks; "we must wait to see the detail which strikes and delights us, and causes us to overlook what displeases us. Only in normal love the details are many and always changing. Constancy in love is rarely anything else but a voyage around the beloved person, a voyage of exploration and ever new discoveries. The most faithful lover does not love the same woman in the same way for two days in succession."[65]

From that point of view normal sexual love is the sway of a fetich--more or less arbitrary, more or less (as Binet terms it) polytheistic--and it can have little objective basis. But, as we saw when considering "Sexual Selection in Man" in the previous volume, more especially when analyzing the notion of beauty, we are justified in believing that beauty has to a large extent an objective basis, and that love by no means depends simply on the capricious selection of some individual fetich. The individual factor, as we saw, is but one of many factors which constitute beauty. In the study of sexual selection that individual factor was passed over very lightly. We now see that it is often a factor of great importance, for in it are rooted all these outgrowths--normal in their germs, highly abnormal in their more extreme developments--which make up erotic symbolism.

Erotic symbolism is therefore concerned with all that is least generic, least specific, all that is most intimately personal and individual, in sexual selection. It is the final point in which the decreasing circle of sexual attractiveness is fixed. In the widest and most abstract form sexual selection in man is merely human, and we are attracted to that which bears most fully the marks of humanity; in a less abstract form it is sexual, and we are attracted to that which most vigorously presents the secondary sexual characteristics; still narrowing, it is the type of our own nation and people that appeals most strongly to us in matters of love; and still further concentrating we are affected by the ideal--in civilization most often the somewhat exotic ideal--of our own day, the fashion of our own city. But the individual factor still remains, and amid the infinite possibilities of erotic symbolism the individual may evolve an ideal which is often, as far as he knows and perhaps in actuality, an absolutely unique event in the history of the human soul.

Erotic symbolism works in its finer manifestations by means of the idealizing aptitudes; it is the field of sexual psychology in which that faculty of crystallization, on which Stendhal loved to dwell, achieves its most brilliant results. In the solitary passage in which we seem to see a smile on the face of the austere poet of the _De Rerum Naturâ_, Lucretius tells us how every lover, however he may be amused by the amorous extravagances of other men, is himself blinded by passion: if his mistress is black she is a fascinating brunette, if she squints she is the rival of Pallas, if too tall she is majestic, if too short she is one of the Graces, _tota merum sal_; if too lean it is her delicate refinement, if too fat then a Ceres, dirty and she disdains adornment, a chatterer and brilliantly vivacious, silent and it is her exquisite modesty.[66] Sixteen hundred years later Robert Burton, when describing the symptoms of love, made out a long and appalling list of the physical defects which the lover is prepared to admire.[67]

Yet we must not be too certain that the lover is wrong in this matter. We too hastily assume that the casual and hasty judgment of the world is necessarily more reliable, more conformed to what we call "truth," than the judgment of the lover which is founded on absorbed and patient study. In some cases where there is lack of intelligence in the lover and dissimulation in the object of his love, it may be so. But even a poem or a picture will often not reveal its beauty except by the expenditure of time and study. It is foolish to expect that the secret beauty of a human person will reveal itself more easily. The lover is an artist, an artist who constructs an image, it is true, but only by patient and concentrated attention to nature; he knows the defects of his image, probably better than anyone, but he knows also that art lies, not in the avoidance of defects, but in the realization of those traits which swallow up defects and so render them non-existent. A great artist, Rodin, after a life spent in the study of Nature, has declared that for art there is no ugliness in Nature. "I have arrived at this belief by the study of Nature," he said; "I can only grasp the beauty of the soul by the beauty of the body, but some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and will declare how the whole earth is beautiful, and all human beings beautiful. I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I wish and as I feel it affirmed within me. For poets Beauty has always been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be all women, all landscapes. A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters. There is no ugliness. When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could not undertake a woman's bust unless I thought her pretty, according to my particular idea of beauty; to-day I should do the bust of any woman, and it would be just as beautiful. And however ugly a woman may look, when she is with her lover she becomes beautiful; there is beauty in her character, in her passions, and beauty exists as soon as character or passion becomes visible, for the body is a casting on which passions are imprinted. And even without that, there is always the blood that flows in the veins and the air that fills the lungs."[68]

The saint, also, is here at one with the lover and the artist. The man who has so profoundly realized the worth of his fellow men that he is ready even to die in order to save them, feels that he has discovered a great secret. Cyples traces the "secret delights" that have thus risen in the hearts of holy men to the same source as the feelings generated between lovers, friends, parents, and children. "A few have at intervals walked in the world," he remarks, "who have, each in his own original way, found out this marvel.... Straightway man in general has become to them so sweet a thing that the infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a celestial madness. Beggars' rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for kissing, because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any menial acts, but only welcome services.... Remember by how much man is the subtlest circumstance in the world; at how many points he can attach relationships; how manifold and perennial he is in his results. All other things are dull, meager, tame beside him."[69]

It may be added that even if we still believe that lover and artist and saint are drawing the main elements of their conceptions from the depths of their own consciousness, there is a sense in which they are coming nearer to the truth of things than those for whom their conceptions are mere illusions. The aptitude for realizing beauty has involved an adjustment of the nerves and the associated brain centers through countless ages that began before man was. When the vision of supreme beauty is slowly or suddenly realized by anyone, with a reverberation that extends throughout his organism, he has attained to something which for his species, and for far more than his species, is truth, and can only be illusion to one who has artificially placed himself outside the stream of life.

In an essay on "The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life," Edward Carpenter, though in somewhat Platonic phraseology, thus well states the matter: "The youth sees the girl; it may be a chance face, a chance outline, amid the most banal surroundings. But it gives the cue. There is a memory, a confused reminiscence. The mortal figure without penetrates to the immortal figure within, and there rises into consciousness a shining form, glorious, not belonging to this world, but vibrating with the agelong life of humanity, and the memory of a thousand love-dreams. The waking of this vision intoxicates the man; it glows and burns within him; a goddess (it may be Venus herself) stands in the sacred place of his temple; a sense of awe-struck splendor fills him, and the world is changed." "He sees something" (the same writer continues in a subsequent essay, "Beauty and Duty") "which, in a sense, is more real than the figures in the street, for he sees something that has lived and moved for hundreds of years in the heart of the race; something which has been one of the great formative influences of his own life, and which has done as much to create those very figures in the street as qualities in the circulation of the blood may do to form a finger or other limb. He comes into touch with a very real Presence or Power--one of those organic centers of growth in the life of humanity--and feels this larger life within himself, subjective, if you like, and yet intensely objective. And more. For is it not also evident that the woman, the mortal woman who excites his Vision, _has_ some closest relation to it, and is, indeed, far more than a mere mask or empty formula which reminds him of it? For she indeed has within her, just as much as the man has, deep subconscious Powers working; and the ideal which has dawned so entrancingly on the man is in all probability closely related to that which has been working most powerfully in the heredity of the woman, and which has most contributed to mold _her_ form and outline. No wonder, then, that her form should remind him of it. Indeed, when he looks into her eyes he sees _through_ to a far deeper life even than she herself may be aware of, and yet which is truly hers--a life perennial and wonderful. The more than mortal in him beholds the more than mortal in her; and the gods descend to meet." (Edward Carpenter, _The Art of Creation_, pp. 137, 186.)

It is this mighty force which lies behind and beneath the aberrations we have been concerned with, a great reservoir from which they draw the life-blood that vivifies even their most fantastic shapes. Fetichism and the other forms of erotic symbolism are but the development and the isolation of the crystallizations which normally arise on the basis of sexual selection. Normal in their basis, in their extreme forms they present the utmost pathological aberrations of the sexual instinct which can be attained or conceived. In the intermediate space all degrees are possible. In the slightest degree the symbol is merely a specially fascinating and beloved feature in a person who is, in all other respects, felt to be lovable; as such its recognition is a legitimate part of courtship, an effective aid to tumescence. In a further degree the symbol is the one arresting and attracting character of a person who must, however, still be felt as a sexually attractive individual. In a still further degree of perversion the symbol is effective, even though the person with whom it is associated is altogether unattractive. In the final stage the person and even all association with a person disappear altogether from the field of sexual consciousness; the abstract symbol rules supreme.

Long, however, before the symbol has reached that final climax of morbid intensity we may be said to have passed beyond the sphere of sexual love. A person, not an abstracted quality, must be the goal of love. So long as the fetich is subordinated to the person it serves to heighten love. But love must be based on a complexus of attractive qualities, or it has no stability.[70] As soon as the fetich becomes isolated and omnipotent, so that the person sinks into the background as an unimportant appendage of the fetich, all stability is lost. The fetichist now follows an impersonal and abstract symbol withersoever it may lead him.

It has been seen that there are an extraordinary number of forms in which erotic symbolism may be felt. It must be remembered, and it cannot be too distinctly emphasized, that the links that bind together the forms of erotic symbolism are not to be found in objects or even in acts, but in the underlying emotion. A feeling is the first condition of the symbol, a feeling which recalls, by a subtle and unconscious automatic association of resemblance or of contiguity, some former feeling. It is the similarity of emotion, instinctively apprehended, which links on a symbol only partially sexual, or even apparently not sexual at all, to the great central focus of sexual emotion, the great dominating force which brings the symbol its life-blood.[71]

The cases of sexual hyperæsthesia, quoted at the beginning of this study, do but present in a morbidly comprehensive and sensitive form those possibilities of erotic symbolism which, in some degree, or at some period, are latent in most persons. They are genuinely instinctive and automatic, and have nothing in common with that fanciful and deliberate play of the intelligence around sexual imagery--not infrequently seen in abnormal and insane persons--which has no significance for sexual psychology.

It is to the extreme individualization involved by the developments of erotic symbolism that the fetichist owes his morbid and perilous isolation. The lover who is influenced by all the elements of sexual selection is always supported by the fellow-feeling of a larger body of other human beings; he has behind him his species, his sex, his nation, or at the very least a fashion. Even the inverted lover in most cases is soon able to create around him an atmosphere constituted by persons whose ideals resemble his own. But it is not so with the erotic symbolist. He is nearly always alone. He is predisposed to isolation from the outset, for it would seem to be on a basis of excessive shyness and timidity that the manifestations of erotic symbolism are most likely to develop. When at length the symbolist realizes his own aspirations--which seem to him for the most part an altogether new phenomenon in the world--and at the same time realizes the wide degree in which they deviate from those of the rest of mankind, his natural secretiveness is still further reinforced. He stands alone. His most sacred ideals are for all those around him a childish absurdity, or a disgusting obscenity, possibly a matter calling for the intervention of the policeman. We have forgotten that all these impulses which to us seem so unnatural--this adoration of the foot and other despised parts of the body, this reverence for the excretory acts and products, the acceptance of congress with animals, the solemnity of self-exhibition--were all beliefs and practices which, to our remote forefathers, were bound up with the highest conceptions of life and the deepest ardors of religion.

A man cannot, however, deviate at once so widely and so spontaneously in his impulses from the rest of the world in which he himself lives without possessing an aboriginally abnormal temperament. At the very least he exhibits a neuropathic sensitiveness to abnormal impressions. Not infrequently there is more than this, the distinct stigmata of degeneration, sometimes a certain degree of congenital feeble-mindedness or a tendency to insanity.

Yet, regarded as a whole, and notwithstanding the frequency with which they witness to congenital morbidity, the phenomena of erotic symbolism can scarcely fail to be profoundly impressive to the patient and impartial student of the human soul. They often seem absurd, sometimes disgusting, occasionally criminal; they are always, when carried to an extreme degree, abnormal. But of all the manifestations of sexual psychology, normal and abnormal, they are the most specifically human. More than any others they involve the potently plastic force of the imagination. They bring before us the individual man, not only apart from his fellows, but in opposition, himself creating his own paradise. They constitute the supreme triumph of human idealism.

FOOTNOTES:

[64] Binet, _Etudes de Psychologie Expérimentale_, esp., p. 84; Krafft-Ebing, _Op. cit._, p. 18.

[65] G. Tarde, "L'Amour Morbide," _Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle_, 1890, p. 585.

[66] Lucretius, Lib. IV, vv. 1150-1163.

[67] Burton, _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part III, Section II, Mem. III, Subs. I.

[68] Judith Cladel, _Auguste Rodin Pris sur la Vie_, 1903, pp. 103-104. Some slight modifications have been made in the translation of this passage on account of the conversational form of the original.

[69] W. Cyples, _The Process of Human Experience_, p. 462. Even if (as we have already seen, _ante_, p. 58) the saint cannot always feel actual physical pleasure in the intimate contact of humanity, the ardor of devoted service which his vision of humanity arouses remains unaffected.

[70] "To love," as Stendhal defined it (_De l'Amour_, Chapter II), "is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, and feeling by all the senses, and as near as possible, a beloved object by whom one is oneself loved."

[71] Pillon's study of "La Mémoire Affective" (_Revue Philosophique_, February, 1901) helps to explain the psychic mechanism of the process.

THE MECHANISM OF DETUMESCENCE.

I.

The Psychological Significance of Detumescence--The Testis and the Ovary--Sperm Cell and Germ Cell--Development of the Embryo--The External Sexual Organs--Their Wide Range of Variation--Their Nervous Supply--The Penis--Its Racial Variations--The Influence of Exercise--The Scrotum and Testicles--The Mons Veneris--The Vulva--The Labia Majora and their Varieties--The Pubic Hair and Its Characters--The Clitoris and Its Functions--The Anus as an Erogenous Zone--The Nymphæ and their Function--The Vagina--The Hymen--Virginity--The Biological Significance of the Hymen.

In analyzing the sexual impulse we have seen that the process whereby the conjunction of the sexes is achieved falls naturally into two phases: the first phase, of tumescence, during which force is generated in the organism, and the second phase, of detumescence, in which that force is discharged during conjugation.[72] Hitherto we have been occupied mainly with the first phase, that of tumescence, and with its associated psychic phenomena. It was inevitable that this should be so, for it is during the slow process of tumescence that sexual selection is decided, the crystallizations of love elaborated, and, to a large extent, the individual erotic symbols determined. But we can by no means altogether pass over the final phase of detumescence. Its consideration, it is true, brings us directly into the field of anatomy and physiology; while tumescence is largely under control of the will, when the moment of detumescence arrives the reins slip from the control of the will; the more fundamental and uncontrollable impulses of the organism gallop on unchecked; the chariot of Phaëthon dashes blindly down into a sea of emotion.

Yet detumescence is the end and climax of the whole drama; it is an anatomico-physiological process, certainly, but one that inevitably touches psychology at every point.[73] It is, indeed, the very key to the process of tumescence, and unless we understand and realize very precisely what it is that happens during detumescence, our psychological analysis of the sexual impulse must remain vague and inadequate.

From the point of view we now occupy, a man and a woman are no longer two highly sensitive organisms vibrating, voluptuously it may indeed be, but vaguely and indefinitely, to all kinds of influences and with fluctuating impulses capable of being directed into any channel, even in the highest degree divergent from the proper ends of procreation. They are now two genital organisms who exist to propagate the race, and whatever else they may be, they must be adequately constituted to effect the act by which the future of the race is ensured. We have to consider what are the material conditions which ensure the most satisfactory and complete fulfillment of this act, and how those conditions may be correlated with other circumstances in the organism. In thus approaching the subject we shall find that we have not really abandoned the study of the psychic aspects of sex.

The two most primary sexual organs are the testis and the ovary; it is the object of conjugation to bring into contact the sperm from the testis with the germ from the ovary. There is no reason to suppose that the germ-cell and the sperm-cell are essentially different from each other. Sexual conjugation thus remains a process which is radically the same as the non-sexual mode of propagation which preceded it. The fusion of the nuclei of the two cells was regarded by Van Beneden, who in 1875 first accurately described it, as a process of conjugation comparable to that of the protozoa and the protophyta. Boveri, who has further extended our knowledge of the process, considers that the spermatozoon removes an inhibitory influence preventing the commencement of development in the ovum; the spermatozoon replaces a portion of the ovum which has already undergone degeneration, so that the object of conjugation is chiefly to effect the union of the properties of two cells in one, sexual fertilization achieving a division of labor with reciprocal inhibition; the two cells have renounced their original faculty of separate development in order to attain a fusion of qualities and thus render possible that production of new forms and qualities which has involved the progress of the organized world.[74]

While in fishes this conjugation of the male and female elements is usually ensured by the female casting her spawn into an artificial nest outside the body, on to which the male sheds his milt, in all animals (and, to some extent, birds, who occupy an intermediate position) there is an organic nest, or incubation chamber as Bland Sutton terms it, the womb, in the female body, wherein the fertilized egg may develop to a high degree of maturity sheltered from those manifold risks of the external world which make it necessary for the spawn of fishes to be so enormous in amount. Since, however, men and women have descended from remote ancestors who, in the manner of aquatic creatures, exercised functions of sperm-extrusion and germ-extrusion that were exactly analogous in the two sexes, without any specialized female uterine organization, the early stages of human male and female foetal development still display the comparatively undifferentiated sexual organization of those remote ancestors, and during the first months of foetal life it is practically impossible to tell by the inspection of the genital regions whether the embryo would have developed into a man or into a woman. If we examine the embryo at an early stage of development we see that the hind end is the body stalk, this stalk in later stages becoming part of the umbilical cord. The urogenital region, formed by the rapid extension of the hind end beyond its original limit, which corresponds to what is later the umbilicus, develops mainly by the gradual differentiation of structures (the Wolffian and Müllerian bodies) which originally exist identically in both sexes. This process of sexual differentiation is highly complex, so that it cannot yet be said that there is complete agreement among investigators as to its details. When some irregularity or arrest of development occurs in the process we have one or other of the numerous malformations which may affect this region. If the arrest occurs at a very early stage we may even find a condition of things which seems to approximate to that which normally exists in the adult reptilia.[75] Owing to the fact that both male and female organs develop from more primitive structures which were sexually undifferentiated, a fundamental analogy in the sexual organs of the sexes always remains; the developed organs of one sex exist as rudiments in the other sex; the testicles correspond to the ovaries; the female clitoris is the homologue of the male penis; the scrotum of one sex is the labia majora in the other sex, and so throughout, although it is not always possible at present to be quite certain in regard to these homologics.

Since the object to be attained by the sexual organs in the human species is identical with that which they subserve in their pre-human ancestors, it is not surprising to find that these structures have a clear resemblance to the corresponding structures in the apes, although on the whole there would appear to be in man a higher degree of sexual differentiation. Thus the uterus of various species of _semnopithecus_ seems to show a noteworthy correspondence with the same organ in woman.[76] The somewhat less degree of sexual differentiation is well shown in the gorilla; in the male the external organs are in the passive state covered by the wrinkled skin of the abdomen, while in the female, on the contrary, they are very apparent, and in sexual excitement the large clitoris and nymphæ become markedly prominent. The penis of the gorilla, however, more nearly resembles that of man, according to Hartmann, than does that of the other anthropoid apes, which diverge from the human type in this respect more than do the cynocephalic apes and some species of baboon.

From the psychological point of view we are less interested in the internal sexual organs, which are most fundamentally concerned with the production and reception of the sexual elements, than with the more external parts of the genital apparatus which serve as the instruments of sexual excitation, and the channels for the intromission and passage of the seminal fluid. It is these only which can play any part at all in sexual selection; they are the only part of the sexual apparatus which can enter into the formation of either normal or abnormal erotic conceptions; they are the organs most prominently concerned with detumescence; they alone enter normally into the conscious process of sex at any time. It seems desirable, therefore, to discuss them briefly at this point.

Our knowledge of the individual and racial variations of the external sexual organs is still extremely imperfect. A few monographs and collections of data on isolated points may be found in more or less inaccessible publications. As regards women, Ploss and Bartels have devoted a chapter to the sexual organs of women which extends to a hundred pages, but remains scanty and fragmentary. (_Das Weib_, vol. i, Chapter VI.) The most systematic series of observations have been made in the case of the various kinds of degenerates--idiots, the insane, criminals, etc.--but it would be obviously unsafe to rely too absolutely on such investigations for our knowledge of the sexual organs of the ordinary population.

There can be no doubt, however, that the external sexual organs in normal men and women exhibit a peculiarly wide range of variation. This is indicated not only by the unsystematic results attained by experienced observers, but also by more systematic studies. Thus Herman has shown by detailed measurements that there are great normal variations in the conformation of the parts that form the floor of the female pelvis. He found that the projection of the pelvic floor varied from nothing to as much as two inches, and that in healthy women who had borne no children the distance between the coccyx and anus, the length of the perineum, the distance between the fourchette and the symphysis pubis, and the length of the vagina are subject to wide variations. (_Lancet_, October 12, 1889.) Even the female urethral opening varies very greatly, as has been shown by Bergh, who investigated it in nearly 700 women and reproduces the various shapes found; while most usually (in about a third of the cases observed), a longitudinal slit, it may be cross-shaped, star-shaped, crescentic, etc.; and while sometimes very small, in about 6 per cent. of the cases it admitted the tip of the little finger. (Bergh, _Monatsheft für Praktische Dermatologie_, 15 Sept., 1897.)

As regards both sexes, Stanley Hall states that "Dr. F.N. Seerley, who has examined over 2000 normal young men as well as many young women, tells me that in his opinion individual variations in these parts are much greater even than those of face and form, and that the range of adult and apparently normal size and proportion, as well as function, and of both the age and order of development, not only of each of the several parts themselves, but of all their immediate annexes, and in females as well as males, is far greater than has been recognized by any writer. This fact is the basis of the anxieties and fears of morphological abnormality so frequent during adolescence." (G.S. Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 414).

In accordance with the supreme importance of the part they play, and the intimately psychic nature of that part, the sexual organs, both internal and external, are very richly supplied with nerves. While the internal organs are very abundantly furnished with sympathetic nerves and ganglia, the external organs show the highest possible degree of specialization of the various peripheral nervous devices which the organism has developed for receiving, accumulating, and transmitting stimuli to the brain.[77]

"The number of conducting cords which attach the genitals to the nervous centers is simply enormous," writes Bryan Robinson; "the pudic nerve is composed of nearly all the third sacral and branches from the second and fourth sacral. As one examines this nerve he is forced to the conclusion that it is an enormous supply for a small organ. The periphery of the pudic nerve spreads itself like a fan over the genitals." The lesser sciatic nerve supplies only one muscle--the gluteus maximus--and then sends the large pudendal branch to the side of the penis, and hence the friction of coitus induces active contraction of the gluteus maximus, "the main muscle of coition." The large pudic and the pudendal constitute the main supply of the external genitals. In women the pudic nerve is equally large, but the pudendal much smaller, possibly, Bryan Robinson suggests, because women take a less active part in coitus. The nerve supply of the clitoris, however, is three or four times as large as that of the penis in proportion to size. (F.B. Robinson, "The Intimate Nervous Connection of the Genito-Urinary Organs With the Cerebro-Spinal and Sympathetic Systems," _New York Medical Journal_, March 11, 1893; id., _The Abdominal Brain_, 1899.)

Of all the sexual organs the penis is without doubt that which has most powerfully impressed the human imagination. It is the very emblem of generation, and everywhere men have contemplated it with a mixture of reverence and shuddering awe that has sometimes, even among civilized peoples, amounted to horror and disgust. Its image is worn as an amulet to ward off evil and invoked as a charm to call forth blessing. The sexual organs were once the most sacred object on which a man could place his hands to swear an inviolate oath, just as now he takes up the Testament. Even in the traditions of the great classic civilization which we inherit the penis is _fascinus_, the symbol of all fascination. In the history of human culture it has had far more than a merely human significance; it has been the symbol of all the generative force of Nature, the embodiment of creative energy in the animal and vegetable worlds alike, an image to be held aloft for worship, the sign of all unconscious ecstasy. As a symbol, the sacred phallus, it has been woven in and out of all the highest and deepest human conceptions, so intimately that it is possible to see it everywhere, that it is possible to fail to see it anywhere.

In correspondence with the importance of the penis is the large number of names which men have everywhere bestowed upon it. In French literature many hundred synonyms may be found. They were also numerous in Latin. In English the literary terms for the penis seem to be comparatively few, but a large number of non-literary synonyms exist in colloquial and perhaps merely local usage. The Latin term penis, which has established itself among us as the most correct designation, is generally considered to be associated with _pendere_ and to be connected therefore with the usually pendent position of the organ. In the middle ages the general literary term throughout Europe was _coles_ (or _colis_) from _caulis_, a stalk, and _virga_, a rod. The only serious English literary term, yard (exactly equivalent to _virga_), as used by Chaucer--almost the last great English writer whose vocabulary was adequate to the central facts of life--has now fallen out of literary and even colloquial usage.

Pierer and Chaulant, in their anatomical and physiological _Real-Lexicon_ (vol. vi, p. 134), give nearly a hundred synonyms for the penis. Hyrtl (_Topographisches Anatomie_, seventh edition, vol. ii, pp. 67-69), adds others. Schurig, in his _Spermatologia_ (1720, pp. 89-91), also presents a number of names for the penis; in Chapter III (pp. 189-192) of the same book he discusses the penis generally with more fullness than most authors. Louis de Landes, in his _Glossaire Erotique_ of the French language (pp. 239-242), enumerates several hundred literary synonyms for the penis, though many of them probably only occur once.

There is no thorough and comprehensive modern study of the penis on an anthropological basis (though I should mention a valuable and fully illustrated study of anthropological and pathological variations of the penis in a series of articles by Marandon de Montyel, "Des Anomalies des Organs Génitaux Externes Chez les Aliénées," etc., _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, 1895), and it would be out of place here to attempt to collect the scattered notices regarding racial and other variations. It may suffice to note some of the evidence showing that such variations seem to be numerous and important. The Arab penis (according to Kocher) is slender and long (a third longer than the average European penis) and with a club-shaped glans. It undergoes little change when it enters the erect state. The clothes leaves it quite free, and the Arab practices manual excitement at an early age to favor its development.

Among the Fuegians, also, according to Hyades and Deniker (_Cap Horn_, vol. vii, p. 153), the average length of the penis is 77 millimeters, which is longer than in Europeans.

In men of black race, also, the penis is decidedly large. Thus Sir H.H. Johnston (_British Central Africa_, p. 399) states this to be a universal rule. Among the Wankenda of Northern Nyassa, for instance, he remarks that, while the body is of medium size, the penis is generally large. He gives the usual length as about six inches, reaching nine or ten in erection. The prepuce, it is added, is often very long, and circumcision is practiced by many tribes.

Among the American negroes Hrdlicka has found, also (_Proceedings American Association for the Advancement of Science_, vol. xlvii, p. 475), that the penis in black boys is larger than in white boys.

The passages cited above suggest the question whether the penis becomes larger by exercise of its generative functions. Most old authors assert that frequent erection makes the penis large and long (Schurig, _Spermatologia_, p. 107). Galen noted that in singers and athletes, who were chaste in order to preserve their strength, the sexual parts were small and rugrose, like those of old men, and that exercise of the organs from youth develops them; Roubaud, quoting this observation (_Traité de l'Impuissance_, p. 373), agrees with the statement. It seems probable that there is an element of truth in this ancient belief. At the same time it must be remembered that the penis is only to small extent a muscular organ, and that the increase of size produced by frequent congestion of erectile tissues cannot be either rapid or pronounced. Variations in the size of the sexual organs are probably on the whole mainly inherited, though it is impossible to speak decisively on this point until more systematic observations become customary.

The scrotum has usually, in the human imagination, been regarded merely as an appendage of the penis, of secondary importance, although it is the garment of the primary and essential organs of sex, and the fact that it is not the seat of any voluptuous sensation has doubtless helped to confirm this position. Even the name is merely a mediæval perversion of _scortum_, skin or hide. In classic times it was usually called the pouch or purse. The importance of the testicles has not, however, been altogether ignored, as the very word _testis_ itself shows, for the _testis_ is simply the _witness_ of virility.[78]

It is easy to understand why the penis should occupy this special place in man's thoughts as the supreme sexual organ. It is the one conspicuous and prominent portion of the sexual apparatus, while its aptitude for swelling and erecting itself involuntarily, under the influence of sexual emotion, gives it a peculiar and almost unique position in the body. At the same time it is the point at which, in the male body, all voluptuous sensation is concentrated, the only normal masculine center of sex.[79]

It is not easy to find any correspondingly conspicuous symbol of sex in the sexual region of women. In the normal position nothing is visible but the peculiarly human cushion of fat picturesquely termed the Mons Veneris (because, as Palfyn said, all those who enroll themselves under the banner of Venus must necessarily scale it), and even that is veiled from view in the adult by the more or less bushy plantation of hair which grows upon it. A triangle of varyingly precise definition is thus formed at the lower apex of the trunk, and this would sometimes appear to have been regarded as a feminine symbol.[80] But the more usual and typical symbol of femininity is the idealized ring (by some savages drawn as a lozenge) of the vulvar opening--the _yoni_ corresponding to the masculine _lingam_--which is normally closed from view by the larger lips arising from beneath the shadow of the _mons_. It is a symbol that, like the masculine phallus, has a double meaning among primitive peoples and is sometimes used to call down a blessing and sometimes to invoke a curse.[81]

This external opening of the feminine genital passage with its two enclosing lips is now generally called the vulva. It would appear that originally (as by Celsus and Pliny) this term included the womb, also, but when the term "uterus" came into use "vulva" was confined (as its sense of folding doors suggests that it should be) to the external entrance. The classic term _cunnus_ for the external genitals was chiefly used by the poets; it has been the etymological source of various European names for this region, such as the old French _con_, which has now, however, disappeared from literature while even in popular usage it has given place to _lapin_ and similar terms. But there is always a tendency, marked in most parts of the world, for the names of the external female parts to become indecorous. Even in classic antiquity this part was the _pudendum_, the part to be ashamed of, and among ourselves the mass of the population, still preserving the traditions of primitive times, continue to cherish the same notion.

The anatomy, anthropology, folk-lore, and terminology of the external and to some extent the internal feminine sexual region may be studied in the following publications, among others: Ploss, _Das Weib_, vol. i, Chapter VI; Hyrtl, _Topographisches Anatomie_, vol. ii, and other publications by the same scholarly anatomist; W.J. Stewart Mackay, _History of Ancient Gynæcology_, especially pp. 244-250; R. Bergh, "Symbolæ ad Cognitionem Genitalium Externorum Foeminearum" (in Danish), _Hospitalstidende_, August, 1894; and also in _Monatshefte für Praktische Dermatologie_, 1897. D.S. Lamb, "The Female External Genital Organs," _New York Journal of Gynæcology_, August, 1894; R.L. Dickinson, "Hypertrophies of the Labia Minora and Their Significance," _American Gynecology_, September, 1902; Kryptadia (in various languages), vol. viii, pp. 3-11, 11-13, and many other passages. Several of Schurig's works (especially _Gynæcologia_, _Muliebria_, and _Parthenologia_) contain full summaries of the statements of the early writers.

The external or larger lips, like the mons veneris, are specifically human in their full development, for in the anthropoid apes they are small as is the mons, and in the lower apes absent altogether; they are, moreover, larger in the white than in the other human races. Thus in the negro, and to a less degree in the Japanese (Wernich) and the Javanese (Scherzer) they are less developed than in women of white race. The greater lips develop in the foetus later than the lesser lips, which are thus at first uncovered; this condition thus constitutes an infantile state which occasionally (in less than 2 per cent. of cases, according to Bergh) persists in the adult. Their generally accepted name, labia majora, is comparatively modern.[82]

The outer sides of the labia majora are covered with hair, and on the inner sides, which are smooth and moist, but are not true mucous membrane, there are a few sweat glands and numerous large sebaceous glands. Bergh considers that there is little or no hair on the inner sides of the labia majora, but Lamb states that careful examination shows that from one- to two-thirds of the inner surface in adult women show hairs like those of the external surface. In brunettes and women of dark races this surface is pigmented; in dark races it is usually a slate gray. From an examination of 2200 young Danish prostitutes Bergh has found that there are two main varieties in the shape of the labia majora, with transitional forms. In the first and most frequent form the labia tend to be less marked and more effaced and separated at the upper and anterior part, often being lost in the sides of the mons and presenting a fissure which is broader in its upper part and showing the inner lips more or less bare. In the second form the labia are thicker and more outstanding and the inner edges lie in contact throughout their whole length, showing the _rima pudendi_ as a long narrow fissure. Whatever the form, the labia close more tightly together in virgins and in young individuals generally than in the deflowered and the elderly. In children, as Martineau pointed out, the vulva appears to look directly forward and the clitoris and urinary meatus easily appear, while in adult women, and especially after attempts at coitus have been made, the vulva appears directed more below and behind, and the clitoris and meatus more covered by the labia majora; so that the child urinates forward, while the adult woman is usually able to urinate almost directly downwards in the erect position, though in some cases (as may occasionally be observed in the street) she can only do so when bending slightly forwards. This difference in the direction of the stream formerly furnished one of the methods of diagnosing virginity, an uncertain one, since the difference is largely due to age and individual variation. The main factor in the position and aspect of the vulva is pelvic inclination. (See Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, p. 64; Stratz, _Die Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers_, Chapter XII.) In the European woman, according to Stratz, a considerable degree of pelvic inclination is essential to beauty, concealing all but the anterior third of the vulva. In negresses and other women of lower race the vulva, however, usually lies further back, being more conspicuous from behind than in European women; in this respect lower races resemble the apes. Those women of dark race, therefore, whose modesty is focused behind rather than in front thus have sound anatomical considerations on their side.

As Ploss and Bartels remark, a very common variation among European women consists in an unusually posterior position of the vulva and vaginal entrance, so that unless a cushion is placed under the buttocks it is difficult for the man to effect coitus in the usual position without giving much pain to the woman. They add that another anomaly, less easy to remedy, consists in an abnormally anterior position of the vaginal entrance close beneath the pelvic bone, so that, although intromission is easy, the spasmodic contraction of the vagina at the culmination of orgasm presses the penis against the bone and causes intolerable pain to the man.

The mons veneris and the labia majora are, after the age of puberty, always normally covered by a more or less profuse growth of hair. It is notable that the apes, notwithstanding their general tendency to hairiness, show no such special development of hair in this region. We thus see that all the external and more conspicuous portions of the sexual sphere in woman--the mons veneris, the labia majora, and the hair--represent not so much an animal inheritance, such as we commonly misrepresent them to be, but a higher and genuinely human development. As none of these structures subserve any clear practical use, it would appear that they must have developed by sexual selection to satisfy the æsthetic demands of the eye.[83]

The character and arrangement of the pubic hair, investigated by Eschricht and Voigt more than half a century ago, have been more recently studied by Bergh. As these observers have pointed out, there are various converging hair streams from above and below, the clitoris seeming to be the center towards which they are directed. The hair-covering thus formed is usually ample and, as a rule, is more so in brunettes than in blondes. It is nearly always bent, curly and more or less spirally twisted.[84] There are frequently one or two curls at the commencement of the fissure, rolled outwards, and occasionally a well marked tuft in the middle line. In abundance the pubic hair corresponds with the axillary hair; when one region is defective in hair the other is usually so also. Strong eyebrows also usually indicate a strong development of pubic hair. But the hair of the head usually varies independently, and Bergh found that of 154 women with spare pubic hair 72 had good and often profuse hair on the head. Complete or almost complete absence of pubic hair is in Bergh's experience only found in about 3 per cent. of women; these were all young and blonde.

Rothe, in his investigation of the pubic hair of 1000 Berlin women, found that no two women were really alike in this respect, but there was a tendency to two main types of arrangement, with minor subdivisions, according as the hair tended to grow chiefly in the middle line extending laterally from that line, or to grow equally over the whole extent of the pubic region; these two groups included half the cases investigated.

In men the pubic hair normally ascends anteriorly in a faint line up to the navel, with tendency to form a triangle with the apex above, and posteriorly extends backwards to the anus. In women these anterior and posterior extensions are comparatively rare, or at all events are only represented by a few stray hairs. Rothe found this variation in 4 per cent. of North German women, though a triangle of hair was only found in 2 per cent.; Lombroso found it in 5 per cent, of Italian women; Bergh found it in only 1.6 per cent. among 1000 Danish prostitutes, all sixteen of whom with three exceptions were brunettes. In Vienna, among 600 women, Coe found only 1 per cent, with this distribution of hair, and states that they were women of decidedly masculine type, though Ploss and Bartels, as well as Rothe, find, however, that heterogeny, as they term the masculine distribution, is more common in blondes. The anterior extension of hair is usually accompanied by the posterior extension around the anus, usually very slight, but occasionally as pronounce as in men. (According to Rothe, however, anterior heterogeny comparatively rare.) These masculine variations in the extension of the pubic hair appear to be not uncommonly associated with other physical and psychic anomalies; it is on this account that they have sometimes been regarded as indications of a vicious or a criminal temperament; they are, however, found in quite normal women.

The pubic hair of women is usually shorter than that of men, but thick, and the individual hairs stronger and larger in diameter than those of men, as Pfaff first showed; dark hair is usually stronger than light. In both length and size the individual variations are considerable. The usual length is about 2 inches, or 3-5 centimeters, occasionally reaching about 4 inches, or 9-10 centimeters, in the larger curls. In a series of 100 women attended during confinement in London and the north of England I have only once (in a rather blonde Lancashire woman) found the hair on labia reaching a conspicuous length of several inches and forming an obstruction to the manipulations involved in delivery. But Jahn delivered a woman whose pubic hair was longer than that of her head, reaching below her knee; Paulini also knew a woman whose pubic hair nearly reached her knees and was sold to make wigs; Bartholin mentions a soldier's wife who plaited her pubic hair behind her back; while Brantôme has several references to abnormally long hair in ladies of the French court during the sixteenth century. In 8 cases out of 2200 Bergh found the pubic hair forming a large curly wig extending to the iliac spines. The individual hairs have occasionally been found so stiff and brush-like as to render coitus difficult.

In color the pubic hair, while generally approximating to that of the head, is sometimes (according to Rothe, in Germany, in one-third cases) lighter, and sometimes somewhat darker, as is found to be the case by Coe, especially in brunettes, and also by Bergh, in Denmark. Bergh remarks that it is generally intermediate in color between the eyebrows and the axillary hair, the latter being more or less decolorized by sweat, and that, owing to the influence of the urine and vaginal discharges, the labial hair is paler than that on the mons; blondes with dark eyebrows usually have dark hair on the mons. The hair on this spot, as Aristotle observed, is usually the last to turn gray.

The key to the genital apparatus in women from the psychic point of view, and, indeed, to some extent, its anatomical center, is to be found in the clitoris. Anatomically and developmentally the clitoris is the rudimentary analogue of the masculine penis. Functionally, however, its scope is very much smaller. While the penis both receives and imparts specific voluptuous sensations, and is at the same time both the intromittent organ for the semen and the conduit for the urine, the sole function of the clitoris is to enter into erection under the stress of sexual emotion and receive and transmit the stimulatory voluptuous sensations imparted to it by friction with the masculine genital apparatus. It is so insignificant an organ that it is only within recent times that its homology with the penis has been realized. In 1844 Kobelt wrote in his important book, _Die Mannlichen und Weiblichen Wollust-Organe_, that in his attempt to show that the female organs are exactly analogous to the male the reader will probably be unable to follow him, while even Johannes Müller, the father of scientific physiology, declared at about the same period that the clitoris is essentially different from the penis. It is indeed but three centuries since the clitoris was so little known that (in 1593) Realdus Columbus actually claimed the honor of discovering it. Columbus was not its discoverer, for Fallopius speedily showed that Avicenna and Albucasis had referred to it.[85] The Arabs appear to have been very familiar with it, and, from the various names they gave it, clearly understood the important part it plays in generating voluptuous emotion.[86] But it was known in classic antiquity; the Greeks called it myrton, the myrtle-berry; Galen and Soranus called it nymphê because it is covered as a bride is veiled, while the old Latin name was _tentigo_, from its power of entering into erection, and _columella_, the little pillar, from its shape. The modern term, which is Greek and refers to the sensitiveness of the part to voluptuous titillation, is said to have originated with Suidas and Pollux.[87] It was mentioned, though not adopted, by Rufus.

"The clitoris," declared Haller, "is a part extremely sensible and wonderfully prurient." It is certainly the chief though by no means the only point through which the immediate call to detumescence is conveyed to the female organism. It is, indeed, as Bryan Robinson remarks, "a veritable electrical bell button which, being pressed or irritated, rings up the whole nervous system."

The nervous supply of this little organ is very large, and the dorsal nerve of the clitoris is relatively three or four times larger than that of the penis. Yet the sensitive point of this organ is only 5 to 7 millimeters in extent. The length of the clitoris is usually rather over 2 centimeters (or about an inch) and 3 centimeters when erect; a length of 4 centimeters or more was regarded by Martineau as within the normal range of variation. It is not usual to find the clitoris longer than this in Europe (for among some races like the negro the clitoris is generally large), but all degrees of magnitude may be found as rare exceptions. (See, e.g., Sir J.Y. Simpson, "Hermaphrodites," _Obstetric Memoirs and Contributions_, vol. ii, pp. 217-226; also Dickinson, loc. cit.) It was formerly thought that the clitoris is easily enlarged by masturbation, and Martineau believed that in this way it might be doubled in length. It is probable that slight enlargement of the clitoris may be caused by very frequent masturbation, but only to an insignificant extent, and it is impossible to diagnose masturbation from the size of the clitoris. Among the women of Lake Nyassa, as well as in the Caroline Islands, special methods are practiced for elongating the clitoris, but in Europe, at all events, it is probable that the variations in the size of the organ are mainly congenital. It may well be that a congenitally large clitoris is associated with an abnormally developed excitability of the sexual apparatus. Tilt stated (_On Uterine and Ovarian Inflammation_, p. 37) that in his experience there was a frequent though not invariable connection between a large clitoris and sexual proclivity. (Schurig referred to a case of intense and life-long sexual obsession associated with an extremely large clitoris, _Gynæcologia_, pp. 16-17.) Of recent years considerable importance has been attached by some gynecologists (e.g., R.T. Morris, "Is Evolution Trying to Do Away With the Clitoris?" _Transactions American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists_, vol. v, 1893) to preputial adhesions around the clitoris as a source of nervous disturbance and invalidism in young women.

While the clitoris is anatomically analogous to the penis, its actual mechanism under the stress of sexual excitement is somewhat different. As Liétaud long since pointed out, it cannot rise freely in erection as the penis can; it is apparently bound down by its prepuce and its frenulum. Waldeyer, in his book on the pelvis, states more precisely that, unlike the penis, when erect it retains its angle, only this becomes somewhat rounded so that the organ is to some slight extent lifted and protruded. Waldeyer considered that the clitoris was thus perfectly fitted to fulfill its part as the recipient of erotic stimulation from friction by the penis. Adler, however, has pointed out with considerable justice, that this is not altogether the case. The clitoris was developed in mammals who practiced the posterior mode of coitus; in this position the clitoris was beneath the penis, which was thus easily able in coitus to press it against the pubic bone close beneath which it is situated, and thus impart the compression and friction which the feminine organ craves. But in the human anterior mode of coitus it is not necessarily brought into close contact with the penis during the act of coitus, and thus fails to receive powerful stimulation. Its restricted position, which is an advantage in posterior coitus, is a disadvantage in anterior coitus. Adler observes that it thus comes about that the human method of coitus, while by bringing breast to breast and face to face it has added a new dignity and refinement, a fresh source of enjoyment, to the embrace of the sexes, has not been an unmixed advantage to woman, for while man has lost nothing by the change, woman has now to contend with an increased difficulty in attaining an adequate amount of pressure on that "electric button" which normally sets the whole mechanism in operation.[88]

We may well bring into connection with the changed conditions brought about by anterior coitus the interesting fact that while the clitoris remains the most exquisitely sensitive of the sexual centers in woman, voluptuous sensitivity is much more widely diffused in woman than in man. Over the whole body, indeed, it is apt to be more distinctly marked than is usually the case in man. But even if we confine ourselves to the genital region, while in man that portion of the penis which enters the vagina, and especially the glans, is normally the only portion which, even during turgescence, is sensitive to voluptuous contacts, in woman the whole of the region comprised within the larger lips, including even the anus and internally the vagina and the vaginal portion of the womb,[89] become sensitive to voluptuous contacts. Deprived of the penis the ability of a man to experience specifically sexual sensations becomes very limited indeed. But the loss of the clitoris or of any other structure involves no correspondingly serious disability on women. Ablation of the clitoris for sexual hyperæsthesia has for this reason been abandoned, except under special circumstances. The members of the Russian Skoptzy sect habitually amputate the clitoris, nymphæ, and breasts, yet many young Skoptzy women told the Russian physician, Guttceit, that they were perfectly well able to enjoy coitus.

Freud believes that in very young girls the clitoris is the exclusive seat of sexual sensation, masturbation at this age being directed to the clitoris alone, and spontaneous sexual excitement being confined to twitchings and erection of this organ, so that young girls are able, from their own experience, to recognize without instruction the signs of sexual excitement in boys. At a later age sexual excitability spreads from the clitoris to other regions--just as the easy inflammability of wood sets light to coal--though in the male the penis remains from first to last normally the almost exclusive seat of specific excitability. (S. Freud, _Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_, p. 62.)

The anus would, however, seem to be sometimes an erogenous zone even at an early age. Titillation of the anus appears to be frequently pleasurable in women; and this is not surprising considering the high degree of erotic sensitivity which is easily developed at the body orifices where skin meets mucous membrane. (Thus the meatus of the urethra is a highly erogenous zone, as is sufficiently shown by the frequency with which hair-pins and other articles used in masturbation find their way into the bladder.) It is in this germinal sensitivity, undoubtedly, that we find a chief key to the practice of _pedicatio_. Freud attaches great importance to the anus as a sexually erogenous zone at a very early age, and considers that it very frequently makes its influence felt in this respect. He believes that intestinal catarrhs in very early life and hæmorrhoids later tend to develop sensibility in the anus. He finds an indication that the anus has become a sexually erogenous zone when children wish to allow the contents of the rectum to accumulate so that defecation may by its increased difficulty involve voluptuous sensations, and adds that masturbatory excitation of the anus with the fingers is by no means rare in older children. (S. Freud, _Op. cit._, pp. 40-42.) A medical correspondent in India tells me of a European lady who derived, she said, "quite as much, indeed more," pleasure from digitally titillating her rectum as from vulvo-vaginal titillation; she had several times submitted to _pedicatio_ and enjoyed it, though it was painful during penetration. The anus may retain this erogenous irritability even in old age, and Routh mentions the case of a lady of over 70, the reverse of lustful, who was so excited by the act of defecation that she was invariably compelled to masturbate, although this state of things was a source of great mental misery to her. (C.H.F. Routh, _British Gynæcological Journal_, February, 1887, p. 48.)

Bölsche has sought the explanation of the erogenous nature of the anus, and the key to _pedicatio_, in an atavistic return to the very remote amphibian days when the anus was combined with the sexual parts in a common cloaca. But it is unnecessary to invoke any vestigial inheritance from a vastly remote past when we bear in mind that the innervation of these two adjoining regions is inevitably very closely related. The presence of a body exit with its marked and special sensitivity at a point where it can scarcely fail to receive the nervous overflow from an immensely active center of nervous energy quite adequately accounts for the phenomenon in question.

The inner lips, the nymphæ or labia minora, running parallel with the greater lips which enclose them, embrace the clitoris anteriorly and extend backward, enclosing the urethral exit between them as well as the vaginal entrance. They form little wings whence their old Latin name, _alæ_, and from their resemblance to the cock's comb were by Spigelius termed crista galli. The red and (especially in brunettes) dark appearance of the nymphæ suggests that they are mucous membrane and not integumentary; it is, however, now considered that even on the inner surface they are covered by skin and separated from the mucous membrane by a line.[90] In structure, as described by Waldeyer, they consist of fine connective tissue rich in elastic fibers as well as some muscular tissue, and full of large veins, so that they are capable of a considerable degree of turgescence resembling erection during sexual excitement, while Ballantyne finds that the nymphæ are supplied to a notable extent with nervous end-organs.

More than any other part of the sexual apparatus in either sex, the lesser lips, on account of their shape, their position, and their structure, are capable of acquired modifications, more especially hypertrophy and elongation. By stretching, it is stated, a labium can be doubled in its dimensions. The "Hottentot apron," or elongated nymphæ, commonly found among some peoples in South Africa, has long been a familiar phenomenon. In such cases a length or transverse diameter of 3 to 5 centimeters is commonly found. But such elongated nymphæ are by no means confined to one part of the world or to one race; they are quite common among women of European race, and reach a size equal to most of the more reliably recorded Hottentot cases. Dickinson, who has very carefully studied this question in New York, finds that in 1000 consecutive gynæcological cases the labia showed some form of hypertrophy in 36 per cent., or more than 1 in 3; while among 150 of these cases who were neurasthenic, the proportion reached 56 per cent., even when minor or doubtful enlargements were disregarded. Bergh, in about 16 per cent. cases, found very enlarged nymphæ, the height reached in about 5 per cent. of the cases of enlargement being nearly six centimeters. Ploss and Bartels, in a full discussion: of the "Hottentot apron," come to the conclusion that this condition is perhaps in most cases artificially produced. It is known that among the Basutos it is the custom for the elder girls to manipulate the nymphæ of younger children, when alone with them, almost from birth, and on account of the elastic nature of these structures such manipulation quite adequately accounts for the elongation. It is not necessary to suppose that the custom is practiced for the sake of producing sexual stimulation--though this may frequently occur--since there are numerous similar primitive customs involving deformation of the sexual organs without the production of sexual excitement. Dickinson has come to a similar conclusion as regards the corresponding elongation of the nymphæ in civilized European women. In 361 out of 1000 women of good social class he found elongation or thickening, often with a notable degree of wrinkling and pigmentation, and believes that this is always the result of frequently repeated masturbation practiced with the separation of the nymphæ; in 30 per cent. of the cases admission of masturbation was made.[91] While this conclusion is probably correct in the main, it requires some qualification. To assert that whenever in women who have not been pregnant the marked protrusion of the inner lips beyond the outer lips means that at some period manipulation has been practiced with or without the production of sexual excitement is to make too absolute a statement. It is highly probable that the nymphæ, like the clitoris, are congenitally more prominent in some of the lower human races, as they are also in the apes; among the Fuegians, for instance, according to Hyades and Deniker, the labia minora descend lower than in Europeans, although there is not the slightest reason to suppose that these women practice any manipulations. Among European women, again, the nymphæ sometimes protrude very prominently beyond the labia majora in women who are organically of somewhat infantile type; this occurs in cases in which we may be convinced that no manipulations have ever been practiced.[92]

It is difficult to speak very decisively as to the function of the labia minora. They doubtless exert some amount of protective influence over the entrance to the vagina, and in this way correspond to the lips of the mouth after which they are called. They fulfill, however, one very definite though not obviously important function which is indicated by the mythologic name they have received. There is, indeed, some obscurity in the origin of this term, nymphæ, which has not, I believe, been satisfactorily cleared up. It has been stated that the Greek name nymphê has been transferred from the clitoris to the labia minora. Any such transfer could only have taken place when the meaning of the word had been forgotten, and nymphê had become the totally different word _nymphæ_, the goddesses who presided over streams. The old anatomists were much exercised in their minds as to the meaning of the name, but on the whole were inclined to believe that it referred to the action of the labia minora in directing the urinary stream. The term nymphæ was first applied in the modern sense, according to Bergh, in 1599, by Pinæus, mainly from the influence of these structures on the urinary stream, and he dilated in his _De Virginitate_ on the suitability of the term to designate so poetic a spot.[93] In more modern times Luschka and Sir Charles Bell considered that it is one of the uses of the nymphæ to direct the stream of urine, and Lamb from his own observation thinks the same conclusion probable. In reality there cannot be the slightest doubt about the function of the nymphæ, as, in Hyrtl's phrase, "the naiads of the urinary source," and it can be demonstrated by the simplest experiment.[94]

The nymphæ form the intermediate portal of the vagina, as the canal which conducts to the womb was in anatomy first termed (according to Hyrtl) by De Graaf.[95] It is a secreting, erectile, more or less sensitive canal lined by what is usually considered mucous membrane, though some have regarded it as integument of the same character as that of the external genitals; it certainly resembles such integument more than, for instance, the mucous membrane of the rectum. In the woman who has never had sexual intercourse and has been subjected to no manipulations or accidents affecting this region, the vagina is closed by a last and final gate of delicate membrane--scarcely admitting more than a slender finger--called the hymen.

The poets called the hymen "fios virginitatis," the flower of virginity, whence the medico-legal term _defloratio_. Notwithstanding the great significance which has long been attached to the phenomena connected with it, the hymen was not accurately known until Vesalius, Fallopius, and Spigelius described and named it. It was, however, recognized by the Arab authors, Avicenna and Averroes. The early literature concerning it is summarized by Schurig, _Muliebria_, 1729, Section II, cap. V. The same author's _Parthenologia_ is devoted to the various ancient problems connected with the question of virginity.

To say that this delicate piece of membrane is from the non-physical point of view a more important structure than any other part of the body is to convey but a feeble idea of the immense importance of the hymen in the eyes of the men of many past ages and even of our own times and among our own people.[96] For the uses of the feminine body, or for its beauty, there is no part which is more absolutely insignificant. But in human estimation it has acquired a spiritual value which has made it far more than a part of the body. It has taken the place of the soul, that whose presence gives all her worth and dignity, even her name, to the unmarried woman, her purity, her sexual desirability, her market value. Without it--though in all physical and mental respects she might remain the same person--she has sometimes been a mark for contempt, a worthless outcast.[97]

So fragile a membrane scarcely possesses the reliability which should be possessed by a structure whose presence or absence has often meant so much. Its absence by no means necessarily signifies that a woman has had intercourse with a man. Its presence by no means signifies that she has never had such intercourse.

There are many ways in which the hymen may be destroyed apart from coitus. Among the Chinese (and also, it would appear, in India and some other parts of the East) the female parts are from infancy kept so scrupulously clean by daily washing, the finger being introduced into the vagina, that the hymen rapidly disappears, and its existence is unknown even to Chinese doctors. Among some Brazilian Indians a similar practice exists among mothers as regards their young children, less, however, for the sake of cleanliness than in order to facilitate sexual intercourse in future years. (Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_, vol. i, Chapter VI.) The manipulations of vaginal masturbation will, of course, similarly destroy the hymen. It is also quite possible for the hymen to be ruptured by falls and other accidents. (See, e.g., a lengthy study by Nina-Rodrigues, "Des Ruptures de l'Hymen dans les Chutes," _Annales d'Hygiène Publique_, September, 1903.)

On the other hand, integrity of the hymen is no proof of virginity, apart from the obvious fact that there may be intercourse without penetration. (The case has even been recorded of a prostitute with syphilitic condylomata, a somewhat masculine type of pubic arch, and vulva rather posteriorly placed, whose hymen had never been penetrated.) The hymen may be of a yielding or folding type, so that complete penetration may take place and yet the hymen be afterwards found unruptured. It occasionally happens that the hymen is found intact at the end of pregnancy. In some, though not all, of these cases there has been conception without intromission of the penis. This has occurred even when the entrance was very minute. The possibility of such conception has long been recognized, and Schurig (_Syllepsilogia_, 1731, Section I, cap. VIII, p. 2) quotes ancient authors who have recorded cases. For some typical modern cases see Guérard (_Centralblatt für Gynäkologie_, No. 15, 1895), in one of whose cases the hymen of the pregnant woman scarcely admitted a hair; also Braun (ib., No. 23, 1895).

The hymen has played a very definite and pronounced part in the social and moral life of humanity. Until recently it has been more difficult to decide what precise biological function it has exercised to ensure its development and preservation. Sexual selection, no doubt, has worked in its favor, but that influence has been very limited and comparatively very recent. Virginity is not usually of any value among peoples who are entirely primitive. Indeed, even in the classic civilization which we inherit, it is easy to show that the virgin and the admiration for virginity are of late growth; the virgin goddesses were not originally virgins in our modern sense. Diana was the many-breasted patroness of childbirth before she became the chaste and solitary huntress, for the earliest distinction would appear to have been simply between the woman who was attached to a man and the woman who followed an earlier rule of freedom and independence; it was a later notion to suppose that the latter woman was debarred from sexual intercourse. We certainly must not seek the origin of the hymen in sexual selection; we must find it in natural selection. And here it might seem at first sight that we come upon a contradiction in Nature, for Nature is always devising contrivances to secure the maximum amount of fertilization. "Increase and multiply" is so obviously the command of Nature that the Hebrews, with their usual insight, unhesitatingly dared to place it in the mouth of Jehovah. But the hymen is a barrier to fertilization. It has, however, always to be remembered that as we rise in the zoölogical scale, and as the period of gestation lengthens and the possible number of offspring is fewer, it becomes constantly more essential that fertilization shall be effective rather than easy; the fewer the progeny the more necessary it is that they shall be vigorous enough to survive. There can be little doubt that, as one or two writers have already suggested, the hymen owes its development to the fact that its influence is on the side of effective fertilization. It is an obstacle to the impregnation of the young female by immature, aged, or feeble males. The hymen is thus an anatomical expression of that admiration of force which marks the female in her choice of a mate. So regarded, it is an interesting example of the intimate manner in which sexual selection is really based on natural selection. Sexual selection is but the translation into psychic terms of a process which has already found expression in the physical texture of the body.

It may be added that this interpretation of the biological function of the hymen is supported by the facts of its evolution. It is unknown among the lower mammals, with whom fertilization is easy, gestation short and offspring numerous. It only begins to appear among the higher mammals in whom reproduction is already beginning to take on the characters which become fully developed in man. Various authors have found traces of a rudimentary hymen, not only in apes, but in elephants, horses, donkeys, bitches, bears, pigs, hyenas, and giraffes. (Hyrtl, _Op. cit._, vol. ii, p. 189; G. Gellhoen, "Anatomy and Development of the Hymen," _American Journal Obstetrics_, August, 1904.) It is in the human species that the tendency to limitation of offspring is most marked, combined at the same time with a greater aptitude for impregnation than exists among any lower mammals. It is here, therefore, that a physical check is of most value, and accordingly we find that in woman alone, of all animals, is the hymen fully developed.

FOOTNOTES:

[72] "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," in vol. iii of these _Studies_.

[73] "The accomplishment of no other function," Hyrtl remarks, "is so intimately connected with the mind and yet so independent of it."

[74] The process is still, however, but imperfectly understood; see Art. "Fécondation," by Ed. Retterer, in Richet's _Dictionnaire de Physiologie_, vol. vi, 1905.

[75] Thus a male foetus showing reptilian characters in sexual ducts was exhibited by Shattock at the Pathological Society of London, February 19, 1895.

[76] J. Kohlbrugge, "Die Umgestaltung des Uterus der Affen nach den Geburt," _Zeitschrift für Morphologie_, bd. iv, p. 1, 1901.

[77] There are, however, no special nerve endings (Krause corpuscles), as was formerly supposed. The nerve endings in the genital region are the same as elsewhere. The difference lies in the abundance of superposed arboreal ramifications. See, e.g., Ed. Retterer, Art. "Ejaculation," Richet's _Dictionnaire de Physiologie_, vol. v.

[78] Hyrtl, _Op. cit._, vol. ii, p. 39.

[79] Sensations of pleasure without those of touch appear to be normal at the tip of the penis, as pointed out by Scripture, quoted in _Alienist and Neurologist_, January, 1898.

[80] See the previous volume of these _Studies_, "Sexual Selection in Man," p. 161.

[81] See, e.g., Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_, vol. i, beginning of