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._
1. COPULATION: VERTEBRATES.--Forberg's "Figuræ 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 Provençals 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 sæpe 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.