Chapter 9 THE MECHANISM OF LOVE

1. Copulation: vertebrates.-Its very numerous varieties and its specific fixity.-The apparent immorality of Nature.-Sexual ethnography.-Human mechanism.-Cavalage.-The form and duration of coupling in divers mammifers.-Aberrations of sexual surgery, the ampallang.-Pain as a bridle on sex.-Maidenhead.-The mole.-Passivity of the female.-The ovule, psychological figure of the female.-Mania of attributing human virtues to animals.-The modesty of elephants.-Coupling mechanism in whales, seals, tortoises.-In certain ophidians and in certain fish.

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1. COPULATION: VERTEBRATES.-Forberg's "Figur? Veneris" exhausts in forty-eight illustrations the manners of coupling accessible to the human species; the erotic manuals of India imagine certain further variants and voluptuous perfectionings, but many of these juxtapositions are unfavourable to fecundation, and a majority of them have only been invented in order to escape too logical and too material a result. Animals surely, the most liberated as well as the most stupid, are ignorant of all modes of conjugal fraud; needless to say no dissociation can be made in their rudimentary minds between the sexual sensation and the maternal, between sexual and paternal sensation, much less. The ingenuity of each specie is small, but the universal ingenuity of total fauna is immense, and there are few human imaginings among those which we term perverse and even monstrous which are not the right and the norm in one or another region of animal empire. Practices very analogous to (although very different in aim from) divers onanist practices, to spermatophagia, even to sadism are imposed on innocent beasts and represent for them familial virtue and chastity. A physician, who has not obtained much glory thereby, invented or proposed artificial fecundation: he was imitating spiders and dragon-flies; M. de Sade liked to imagine ruttings where blood and sperm flowed simultaneously; mere kindergarten manual (Berquinade) if one contemplate, not without bewilderment, the habits of an ingenious orthopter, the praying mantis, the insect which prays to God, la prego-Diou as the Proven?als call her, the prophetess as the Greek said! Baudelaire's verses ridiculing those who wish

"aux choses de l'amour mêler l'honnêteté"

Mix seemliness into affairs of Love

have a value not only moral but scientific. In love everything is just, everything is noble, as soon as, among the maddest animals, it is a play moved by the desire of creating. It is more difficult doubtless to justify fantasies which are merely for the purpose of avoiding trouble, especially if one allow oneself to be blinded by the idea of specific finality; one may however affirm, and one will say nothing more about the matter, that animals are not ignorant either of sodomy or of onanism and that they cede to them by necessity, in the absence of females. Sénancour has written wise and bold pages upon these practices among humans.

Sexual ethnography hardly exists. The scattered data on this subject, though extremely important, have not been co-ordinated. That would be a small matter. They have not even been verified. One knows nothing of coital practices save what life teaches one, questions of this sort being difficult to ask, and answers being always equivocal. There is here an entire science which has been corrupted by Christian prudery. An order was issued long ago and is still obeyed; one has concealed all that unites, sexually, man and animal, everything that proves the unity of origin for all that lives and feels. Physicians who have studied this question have known only the abnormal, the malady: it would be imprudent to base conclusions on general practices from their observations. The best source, at least for Europeans, is still the casuist writings. From the enumeration of sins against chastity gathered by professional confessors, one could, after some study, deduce the secret sexual habits of civilized humanity. But one must take care not to retain either the old idea of sin, or the idea of the same under modern cloak, of fault, crime or error. Practices common to an entire ethnic group can not be judged to be other than normal, it matters little whether they have been stigmatized by the apologists of right living. What is good is what is and what will continue to be. It is known that bimanes and quadrumanes are very libertine, and that this is in accord with their physical suppleness and their intelligence. It is a fact undeniable and insurmountable, even if annoying. The human couple has drawn from this tendency a thousand erotic fantasies, which, in being disciplined have ended in the creation of a veritable sexual method, be it disinterested pleasure, be it preservation against fecundity; is this of no importance? How can one lecture about depopulation if one lose sight of this primordial fact? What can normal or patriotic reasoning do against an instinct which has become or rebecome an intelligent and conscious practice, bound to what is deepest in human sensibility? It is very difficult, especially when dealing with man, to distinguish between normal and abnormal. What is the normal; what the natural? Nature ignores this adjective, and one has dragged out of her bosom many illusions, perhaps in irony, perhaps in ignorance.

It is not perhaps very useful to describe human cavalage, which is not strictly a cavalage, as the woman is attacked from the front. Veritable cavalage has been, as one knows, praised by Lucretius, although, it has, and this detracts nothing from its merits, an air frankly animal; it is the form of love called by the theologians more bestiarum and by Lucretius more ferarum which is the same thing:

Et quibus ipsa modis tractetur blanda voluptas,

Quoque permagni refert; nam more ferarum,

Quadrupedumque magis ritu, plerumque putantur

Concipere uxores, quia sic loca sumere possunt,

Pectoribus positis, sublatis semina lumbis.

This mode, considered by Lucretius as the more favourable to fecundation, is that of most mammifers, of nearly all insects and of many animal families. Apes great and small know no other. The architecture of their bodies would make face to face copulation very difficult. One must not forget that their upright position is never more than momentary, even in orangs and chimpanzees; they are not much better equilibrated than bears, much less so than kangaroos, marmosets[1] and squirrels; even when they stand up one feels that they have four feet. Love among them is not free from the seasons, and although they are libidinous all the year, they do not seem fit for generation save through the weeks of their rutting time: then their genital organs acquire a permanent rigidity; the udders of the females, ordinarily as small as those of the males, only swell during this period. There is, therefore, a vast difference, from the sexual standpoint, between man and the great apes, his anatomic neighbours. Man even in the humblest species has mastered love and made it his daily slave, at the same time that he has varied the accomplishments of his desire and made possible its renewal after brief interval. This domestication of love is an intellectual work, due to the richness and power of our nervous system, which is as capable of long silences as of long physiological discourses, of action and of reflection. The brain of man is an ingenious master which has managed, without possessing any very evident superiority, to get out of the other organs work of the most complicated sorts, and most finely-sharpened pleasures; its (the brain's) mastery is very feeble in quadrumanes and other animals; it is very strong in insects as will be explained in a following chapter.

One need not wait for a minute description of the exterior love mechanism of all animal species. It would be long, difficult and boresome. A few characteristic examples will be enough. The duration of the coition is extremely variable, even in superior mammals. Very slow for dogs, coupling is but a thunderclap for the bull, the ram's is called the "lutte" (strife). The bull merely enters and leaves, and it is a spectacle for philosophers, for one understands immediately that what drives the fiery beast at his female is not the lure of a pleasure too swift to be deeply felt, but a force exterior to the individual although included in his organism. By its long grievous duration the coition of dogs leads to analogous reflections

In triviis quum s?pe canes discedere aventes

Diversi cupidine summis ex viribus tendunt.

-LUCRETIUS.

This is because the dog's penis contains a hollow bone giving passage to the urethra. Around this bone are gathered the erectile tissues whereof one, the node of the prong, swells disproportionately during coition and prevents the separation of the two animals after the act is accomplished. They remain a long time uncomfortable, not managing to free themselves until long after their desire has turned to disgust, grotesque and lamentable symbol of many a human liaison.

Our other familiar animal, the cat, is not more happy in his affections. His penis is indeed furnished with thorns, with homy papilla toward the tip, and the intromission as well as the separation is only accomplished with groans. What one hears at night are not cries of voluptuousness but of suffering, the bowlings of a beast whom nature has caught in the trap. This does not prevent the female from being very enterprising; responding to the cries of the pursuing male she excites him in a hundred ways, biting at neck and belly with an insistence which has, they say, provided a metaphor in the erotic vocabulary. Biting the neck is much more curious, as it is of a much less direct intention. Bitches also bite the neck of the dog in prelude. For near the neck is situated the bulb, original knot of nerves governing the secret parts and the genital region.

The pain which accompanies sexual acts ought to be differentiated, with precision, from passive suffering. It is very possible (women can testify to the fact) that sighs and even cries emitted at such time are the expression of a mixed sensation, wherein joy has almost as great a part as suffering. We must not judge feline exclamations from the shrillness of timbre; tortured by the male prong the she-cats howl, but they await the supreme benediction. The rigour of the first approaches is perhaps but the promise of deeper delights: at any rate some women have thought so.

One knows that a cat's tongue is rough: so is the tongue and all the mucous surfaces of negroes. This roughness of surface notably augments the genital pleasure, as men who have known negresses testify. It has been perfected. The Dyaks of Borneo pierce the extremity of the penis, through the navicular channel and fit into it a pin to both ends of which are attached tufts of stiff hair in the form of a brush. Before surrender the women by certain tricks and certain traditional gestures indicate the length of the brush desired. In Java one replaces this apparatus known as the ampallang, by a sheath of goat skin, more or less thick. In other countries there are incrustations of little pebbles, which give the gland the shape of an embossed mace; and these pebbles are sometimes replaced by tiny bells, so that the men make in running a sound like mules, and attentive women can judge their value according to the intensity of their sexual music. These customs, noted by de Paw among certain aborigines of America, have not been recently observed, doubtless because the Christian modesty of modern travellers has obliterated their eyes and ears at convenient moments. No custom is abolished save in the face of some other custom more useful to sensuality, and the imagination seems rather to advance than to recede in these matters. It is true that the inventors hide themselves, even in savage countries, sexual morality tending toward uniformity.

These artifices, which appear curious to us, have certainly been created at the instigation of women, since theirs is the profit of them. Males have submitted to them, happy no doubt to be delivered at the price of passing pain from the terrible lasciviousness of their females. Racked and flayed by such instruments the women ought, at least for a few days, to flee the male and brood in silence upon their luxurious memories. Chinese and Japs, whose women are likewise lascivious, are familiar with analogous means; to dominate their companions they have also invented ingenious onanist methods which give them time to attend to their own affairs, while peace reigns over their hearthstones. In the strange dissemblance between human races the Aryans have, for the same purpose, made use of the religious check-rein, of prayer, of the idea of sin, and finally of liberty, that is to say of the pleasure of vanity which bewilders the woman, and invites her to please someone else before satisfying herself.

Woman is not the only mammal for whom, apart from the peculiar form of the penis, the first approaches are painful; but there is perhaps no female who has better reason than the mole for fearing the male. Her vulva, exteriorly unperforated, is covered by hide, downy as that of the rest of her body; she must, to be fecundated, undergo a veritable surgical operation. One knows how these beasts live, burrowing in search of food, in long subterranean galleries, of which the wastage, pushed up here and there forms the mole-ridge. In rutting time, forgetting his hunting, the male starts in quest of a female; as soon as he divines her, he starts digging in her direction, furiously excavating the hostile earth. Feeling herself hunted, the female flees. Hereditary instinct makes her tremble before the tool which shall open her belly, before the redoubtable gimlet-armed penis which has perforated her mother and all her female ancestors. She flees, digs, as the male advances, cross-hatching tunnels in which her persecutor may end by losing his way; but the male also is educated by heredity: he does not follow the female but circles round her, heads her off, ends by catching her in an impasse, and while she is still ramming her blind muzzle into the earth, he grips, operates, fecundates. Charming emblem of modesty, this small, soft, black-pelted beast. What human virgin would show such constancy in the defence of her virtue? Who, alone in the night, in a subterranean palace, would use her hands to open the walls, all her strength to flee from her suitor? Philosophers have believed that sexual modesty was an artificial sentiment, fruit of civilizations: they did not know the mole's story, or any of the true stories in nature, for nearly all females are timorous, nearly all react, at the appearance of the male, in fear or in flight. Our virtues are never more than psychological tendencies, and the finest of them are those whose explanation we are forbidden to seek. Why is the she-bat violent, the she-mole timorous? Without doubt the she-mole observes the rule, even in exaggerating its severity, but why the rule? There is no rule, there are nothing but facts which we group in modes perceptible to our intelligence, facts which are always provisory, and which a change of perspective can denaturize. The notion of a rule, the notion of a law, confession of our impotence to pursue a fact into the logical origins of its genealogy. The law is a fashion of speaking, an abbreviation, a point of rest. The law is half the facts plus one. Every law is at the mercy of an accident, an unexpected encounter; and yet, without the idea of law all would be mere night in our consciousness.

"The male," says Aristotle, in his Treatise on Generation, "represents the specific form, the female, the matter. She is passive, in so much as she is female; the male is active."

Sexual modesty is a fact of sexual passivity. The moment will come for the female to be in her turn active and strong, when she has been fecundated, and when she must give birth and food to the posterity of her race. The male then becomes inert; equable sharing of the expense of forces, just division of labour. This passivity of the female element is found again in the very figuration of animality, formed by the egg and the spermatozoide. One sees the play under the microscope: the egg waits, solid as a fortress or as a woman whom many men look on and covet; the little animals begin their attack, they besiege the enclosure, they butt it with their heads; one of them breaks the wall, he enters, and as soon as his tad-pole tail passes the breach, the wound recloses. The entire activity of this embryonic female reduces itself to this gesture; the greater part of her great sisters know no other. Their free-will nearly always consists in this: they receive one among the arrivals, without one's being able to know very well whether the choice is psychological or mechanical.

The female waits, or flees, which is but another way of waiting, the active way; for not only se cupit ante videnti but she desires to be taken, she wishes to fulfill her destiny. It is doubtless for this reason that, in species where the male is feeble or timid, the female resigns herself to an aggression demanded by care for future generations. In short, two forces are present, the magnet and the needle. Usually the female is the magnet, sometimes she is the needle. These are details of mechanism which do not modify the general march of the machine to its goal. At the origin of all feeling there is a fact irreducible and incomprehensible in itself. Common reasoning starts from the feeling to explain the fact; this gives the absurd result of making thought run in a set track, like a horse in a circus. Kantian ignorantism is the masterpiece of these training exercises, where, starting from the categoric stable the learned quadruped necessarily thither returns, having jumped through all the paper disks of scholastic reasoning. Observers of animal habits fall regularly into the prejudice of attributing, regularly, to beasts directive principles which only a long philosophic education and especially Christianity have rammed into restive human docility. Toussenel and Romanes are rarely superior to the possessors of a prodigious dog or miraculous cat: one must reject as apocryphal the anecdotes of animals' intelligence, and especially those boasting their sensibility, or celebrating their virtues; not that these are of necessity, inexact, but because the manner of interpreting them has vitiated, in principle, the manner of observation. One sole observer appears to me trustworthy in these matters, namely J. H. Fabre, the man who, since Réaumur, has penetrated furthest into the intimacy of insects, and whose work is veritably the creator, perhaps without his having suspected it, of a general psychology of animals.

The madness of attributing to beasts the intuitive knowledge of our moral catechism has created the legend of the elephant's sexual modesty. These chaste monsters hide, they say, to make love; animated by a wholly romantic sensibility, they can not give way to their feelings save in the mystery of the jungle, in the labyrinth of the virgin forests: that is why they have never been known to breed in captivity. Nothing is more idiotic; the elephant in the public garden or the circus is ready enough to make love, although with less enthusiasm than in his native forest, as is the case with nearly all beasts newly captive. He breeds under man's eye with perfect indifference, and no showman can prevent the she-elephant, who is very lecherous, from manifesting with full voice her shameless desires. As her vulva opens not between her legs but toward the middle of her abdomen, Buffon believed that she had to lie on her back to receive the male. This is not so, but she has to make a particular gesture: she kneels.

Whales who are by far the greatest mammals, obey a special rite, imposed by their lack of members and the element in which they live; the two colossi heave over on their sides like sprung ships, and join obliquely, belly to belly. The male organ is enormous, even in the state of rest, six or eight feet long and fifteen or sixteen inches in circumference. The vulva of the female is longitudinal; near it is found the udder which projects greatly when she gives suck. This udder has ejectory power, the whale cub hooks on by his lips, and the milk is sent to him as from a pump, marvellous accommodation of organs to the necessities of the milieu.

Anatomy forces female seals and walruses to turn over to receive the male. In the specie commonly called the sea-lion, she seems according to observations perhaps too sketchy, to make the advances. The male being stretched out at rest she rolls before him, plagues him, while he grumbles. She succeeds in moving him, and they go to play in the water. On return the female lies on her back, the male who is much thicker and longer covers her, propping himself on his arms. The coupling lasts seven or eight minutes. The posture of female seals is also that of hedgehogs, and truly the cavalage here must be particularly thorny. Despite his roof the male tortoise climbs onto the female and installs himself there, clinging to her shell with the nails of his forefeet; there he stays fifteen days having slowly introduced into her patient organs his long round prong, ending in a sort of pointed ball, pressing with all his strength the enormous clitoris of the female. We find ourselves far from mammifers and from the excitability of the bull; this coupling which lasts a whole season leads us toward the voluptuous laziness of disgusting and marvellous gasteropodes. According to tales which are, perhaps, not contradictory, crocodiles couple in the water, according to some, and on land according to others; in water laterally; on land, the female on her back. It is said to be the male who puts her on her back, and who, coition completed, helps her to right herself; charming spectacle, which I can not guarantee to be so, but which would improve our idea of the gallantry of these ancient divinities.

I don't know whether anyone has ever remarked that the caduceus of Mercury represents two serpents coupled. To describe the caduceus is to describe the love mechanism of ophidians. The bifurcated penis penetrates the vagina, the bodies interlace fold on fold while the two heads rise over the stiffened coils and look fixedly at each other, for a long time, eye gazing into eye.

Certain fish have penial organs; they can then realize true copulation; thus dog-fish, bounce, sharks, sea-hinds (biches). The males grip the females and hold them with hooks often formed at the expense of the abdominal fin, by cartilaginous pieces which penetrate the female orifice and serve as slide to the penis. The male skate seizes the female, turns her over, clamps himself to her, belly to belly, holds her with his penial tentacles and finishes the coupling, releasing his seed which flows into the cloaca. The operation is repeated several times; separated by the emission of skatelets who are born alive, it continues until the female has discharged the greater part of her eggs.

[1] Here R. de G. uses the term marmotte; up to this the word I have translated marmoset has been ouistiti.

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