THE QUESTION OF ABERRATIONS
_Two sorts of sexual aberration.--Sexual
aberrations of animals.--Those of men.--Crossing
of species.--Chastity.--Modesty.--Varieties and
localizations of sexual bashfulness.--Artificial
creation of modesty.--Sort of modesty natural to all
females.--Cruelty.--Picture of carnage.--The cricket
eaten alive.--Habits of carabes.--Every living
creature is a prey.--Necessity to kill or to be
killed._
Sexual aberrations are of two sorts. The cause of the error is
internal, or external. The flower of the arum muscivorum (fly-catching
arum) by its cadaverous odour attracts flies in search of rotting flesh
in which to lay their eggs. Schopenhauer has supported by this, or
analogous, fact a theory just, but somewhat summary, of aberration from
external cause. Aberration from internal cause is sometimes explained
by the statement that the same arteries irrigate and the same nerves
animate the region of the sacrum, anterior and posterior; the excretal
canals being always near each other, and sometimes common, at least for
part of their length. One has spoken seriously of the drake's sodomy,
but anatomy refuses to understand it. Whether a drake frequents another
drake or a duck, he addresses himself in both cases to the single
door of a vestibule into which all excretions are poured. Doubtless
the drake is aberrated, and his accomplice still more so, but nature
deserves part of the blame. In general, animal aberrations require very
simple explanations. There is a keen desire, and very urgent need,
which if unsatisfied produces an inquietude, which may augment until
a sort of momentary madness takes hold of the animal, and throws it
blindly upon all sorts of illusions. This may go, doubtless, to the
point of hallucination. There is also a need, purely muscular, of at
least sketching in the sexual act, either passive or active; one sees,
by singular inversion, cows in heat mounting each other, perhaps with
the idea of exciting the male, or perhaps the visual representation
which they make themselves of the desired act, forces them to try an
imitation: it is a marvellous example, because it is absurd, of the
motor force of images.
There are two parts in the sexual act; that of the specie, and that
of the individual; but that of the specie is only given it by means
of the individual. In relation to the male in rut, it is a question
of a very simple natural need. He must empty his spermatic canals:
lacking females they say the stag rubs his prong on trees to provoke
ejaculation. Bitches in heat rub their vulva on the ground. Such are
the rudiments of onanism, suddenly carried by primates to such a
high degree of perfection. One has seen male cantharides, themselves
ridden, riding other males; the argule, a small crustacean parasite
of fresh-water fish, is so ardent that he often addresses himself to
other males, or to gravid or even dead females. From the microscopic
beasts to man, aberration is everywhere; but one should, rather, call
it, at least among animals, impatience. Animals are by no means mere
machines, they, as well as men, are capable of imaginations, they
dream, they have illusions, they are subject to desires whose source
is in the interior movement of their organism. The sight or odour of
a female over-excites the male; but far from any female, the logic of
the vital movement suffices perfectly to put them in a state of rut; it
is absolutely the same with females. If the state of rut, and if the
sensibilization of the genital parts is established far from necessary
sex, we have here a natural cause of aberration, for it is this special
sensibility which must be used: the first simulacrum, or even the first
propitious obstacle will be the adversary against which the exasperated
animal exercises the energy by which he is tormented.
One may apply the general principles of this psychology to man, but on
condition that we do not forget that man's genital sensibility is apt
to be awakened at any moment, and that for him the causes of aberration
are multiplied ad infinitum. There would be extremely few aberrated
men and women if moral customs permitted a quite simple satisfaction
of sexual needs, if it were possible for the two sexes to meet always
at the opportune moment. There would remain aberrations of anatomical
order; they would be less frequent and less tyrannic, if our customs,
instead of contriving ways to make sexual relations very difficult,
should favour them. But this easiness is only possible, in promiscuity,
which is possibly a worse ill than aberration. Thus all questions are
insoluble, and one can only improve nature by disorganizing her. Human
order is often a disorder worse than spontaneous disorder, because it
is a forced and premature finality, an inopportune turning of the vital
river out of its course.
Sexual selection is probably not a source of variation (i. e., of
type); its rôle is, on the contrary, to keep the specie in statu quo.
The causes of variation are probably changes of climate, the nature of
the soil, the general milieu, and also disease, the troubles of blood
and nerve circulation--perhaps certain sexual aberrations. I say,
"perhaps," for the cross-breeding between individuals of different
species, living in liberty, seems difficult, as soon as the species
is really something different from a variety in evolution, a form
still seeking itself. At that stage anything is possible; but one is
speaking of species (i.e., set species). Mules, bardots, leporides
are artificial products; one has never found them in free nature. It
is very difficult to obtain the copulation of a hare and she-rabbit;
the she-rabbit is refractory and the hare lacking enthusiasm. The mare
very often refuses the ass; if she turns her head at the moment of
his mounting, one has to bandage her eyes to overcome her disgust; it
is the same with the she-ass whom one offers a stallion for producing
the bardot. As for the product of bull and mare, the celebrated
jumart is a chimæra: comparison of the meagre prong of the bull to
the massive one of the stallion is enough to convince one that such
dissimilar instruments can not replace each other. Nevertheless it
would be imprudent wholly to rule out this form of sexual aberration
from the causes of variability of species. That is perhaps one of its
justifications.
Of all sexual aberrations perhaps the most curious is chastity. Not
that it is anti-natural, nothing is anti-natural, but because of
the pretexts it obeys. Bees, ants, termites, present examples of
perfect chastity, but of chastity that is utilized, social chastity.
Involuntary, congenital, the neuter state among insects is a state
de facto, equivalent to the sexual state, and the origin of a
characterized activity. In humans it is a state, often only apparent or
transitory, obtained voluntarily or demanded by necessity, a precarious
condition, so difficult to maintain that people have heaped up about
it all sorts of moral and religious walls, and even real walls made of
stones and mortar. Permanent and voluntary chastity is nearly always
a religious practice. Men, in all ages, have been persuaded that
perfection of being was only obtainable by such renunciation. This
seems absurd; it is, on the contrary, very direct logic. The only means
of not being an animal is to abstain from the act to which all animals
without exception deliver themselves. It is the same motive that has
made people imagine abstinence, fasting; but as one can not live
without eating, and as one can live without making love, this second
method of perfectionment has remained in the state of outline.
It is true, asceticism, of which humanity alone is capable, is one
of the means which may lift us above animality; but by itself it is
insufficient to do this; by itself it is good for nothing, save perhaps
to excite sterile pride; one must add to it an active exercise of the
intelligence. It remains to know whether asceticism, which deprives the
sensibility of one of its healthiest and most stimulating nutriments is
favourable to the exercise of the intelligence. As it is not the least
necessary to answer this question here, we will say nothing save this,
provisorily: one need not scorn chastity nor disdain asceticism.
Is modesty an aberration? Indulgent observers have believed that they
noticed it in elephants as well as in rabbits. The modesty of the
elephant is a popular maxim which makes right-minded women cast sheep's
eyes, in circuses, at the great beast who hides for her amours. During
copulation, says a celebrated rabbit-raiser[1] "the male and female
should be alone, in demi-obscurity. This solitude and obscurity are
more necessary in view of the fact that certain females show signs of
modesty." The modesty of animals is a fancy. Like modesty among humans,
it is merely the mask of fear, the crystallization of timorous habits,
necessitated by the animals being unarmed during coupling. This is very
well known and needs no explanation. But the need of reproduction is so
tyrannic that, even among the most timid animals, it does not always
leave them presence of mind enough to hide themselves during the amour.
The most domesticated of animals, one knows it only too well, shows at
this moment neither fear nor shame.
In man, among the civilized and among the uncivilized, sexual fear,
shame, has taken a thousand forms which, for the most part, seem to
have no longer any relation to the original feeling whence they are
derived. One notices however that if the milieu where the couple finds
itself is such that no attack, no ridicule is to be feared, shame
vanishes, in part, or entirely, according to the degree of security,
and the degree of excitement. For a crowd of populace on a fete night
there is hardly any modesty save "legal modesty"; the example of one
bolder couple is enough, if there is no authority to be feared, to set
loose all the appetites, and one then sees clearly that man who does
not hide in order to eat, only hides to make love under pressure of
usage.
From the genital act, modesty is stretched over the exterior sexual
organs by a mechanism very simple and very logical. But here, I think,
one must distinguish between genital modesty bred from the custom of
clothing the whole body, and that which has led men to cover only a
particular part. Heat, cold, rain, insects explain clothing, but not
the savage's cotton drawers or the fig leaf; especially when the leaf,
imposed on married women, for example, is forbidden to virgins, or
when this symbolic leaf is so reduced that it serves no purpose, save
that of a sign. In this last case, it has not even any direct relation
to genital modesty; it is only a matrimonial ornament, analogous to
the ring or the collar, a sign, indeed indicating a condition. It is
possible also, that among certain peoples where the men go entirely
naked, the women wear an apron merely to keep off flies, gad-flies,
rather as a peasant drapes his horse's muzzle with grass and leaves.
Quite often, however, one is forced to recognize in these customs,
the proof of a particular genital sensibility, analogous to civilized
modesty. An English sailor, at the time of the first explorations got
himself rejected by the Maori women not because he appeared without
clothing, a state which custom required, but because he appeared with
his organ unsheathed. This detail shocked them extremely. A curious
example of the localization of shame: all parts of the body could and
should show themselves, all save this small surface. On reflection,
the modesty of Europeans at a ball or on the beach is almost as absurd
as that of the Maoris, or as that of the fellaheen women who at the
approach of a stranger remove their shirts, their sole garments, in
order to cover their faces.
Sexual modesty, as one observes it today, among the most various
peoples, is utterly artificial. Livingstone assures us that he
developed modesty in little Kaffir girls by clothing them. Surprised
in neglige, they covered their breasts--and this in a race where the
women go wholly naked, save for a string round the middle, from which
another string hangs. Clothing is only one of the causes of modesty, or
of customs which give us the illusion of it, and the sentiment of fear
associated with the sexual act does not explain all the rest. There is
a shame particular to the female, an ensemble of movements, which one
can assimilate to nothing, which one can attach to nothing. The gesture
of Venus modest is not purely a woman's gesture; nearly all females,
especially mammifers, have it; the female, who refuses, lowers her tail
and clamps it between her legs; there is here, evidently, the origin of
one of the particular forms of modesty. We have given characteristic
examples in an earlier chapter.
Man is un-get-at-able; the slightest of his habitual sentiments has
multiple and contradictory roots in a sensibility variable and always
excessive. He is the least poised and the least reasonable of all
animals, although the only one who has been able to construct for
himself an idea of reason; he is an animal lunatic, that is to say one
who flows out on all sides, who unravels everything in theory, and
tangles up everything in fact, who desires and wills so many things,
who throws his muscles into so many divers activities that his acts are
at once the most sensible and the most absurd, the most conforming and
the most opposed to the logical development of life. But he profits
even by error, especially by the error fatal to all animals, and that
constitutes his originality, as Pascal noted, and as Nietzsche repeats.
If the word modesty (_pudeur_) is not exact, when applied to animals,
although one finds in their habits the distant origin of this complex
and refined sentiment, the word cruelty, is not so either, when applied
to their natural acts of defence or nutrition. Human cruelty is often
an aberration; the cruelty of beasts is a necessity, a normal fact,
often the very condition of their existence. An anarchist philosopher,
ardent and naive disciple of Jean-Jacques believed that he traced
an universal altruism in nature; he has redone with other words
and another spirit, and a few new examples, the infantile works of
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and has abused, under pretext of inclining
mankind to kindness, the right which one has to promenade about nature
without seeing and without understanding her. Nature is neither good,
nor evil, nor altruist, nor egoist; she is an ensemble of forces
whereof none cedes save under superior pressure. Her conscience is that
of a balance; being of a perfect indifference, it is of an absolute
equity. But the sensibility of a balance is of a single order, single
dimension; the sensibility of nature is infinite, to all actions and
reactions. Whether the strong devour the weak, or the weak the strong,
there is no compensation save in our human illusion; in reality one
life is enlarged at the expense of another life, in one case as in the
other, the total energy has been neither diminished nor augmented.
There is neither strong, nor weak, there is a level which tends to
remain constant. Our sentimentalism makes us see dramas where nothing
occurs more disturbing than the general facts of nutrition. One may
however look at these facts a little more closely, and then the parity
of animal organism and the human organism will lead us to qualify as
cruel, certain acts which would deserve this title if committed by man.
One must say cruelty in order to understand it oneself; it is also
necessary to remember that this cruelty is unconscious, that it is not
felt by the devouring animal, that no element of ill-will enters into
its act, and that man himself, the judge, in no way deprives himself of
eating live creatures when they are better raw than cooked, living than
dead.
A philanthe, sort of wasp, catches a bee to feed its larvæ; while
carrying the prey to his nest, he presses the belly, sucks the bee,
empties it of all its honey. But at the entrance of the nest a mantis
is waiting, its double-saw of an arm is unfolded, the philanthe is
nipped in passing. And one sees the mantis gnawing the belly of the
philanthe while the philanthe continues sucking the bee's belly. And
the mantis is so voracious that you can cut her in two without making
her let go; a chain, truly, of carnage.
The larvæ of the sphex, another wasp, are fed on live crickets that
have been paralyzed by a stab. As soon as it hatches the larva attacks
the cricket in the belly at the chosen spot where the egg has been
layed. The poor insect protests by feeble movements of antennæ, and
mandibles: in vain; he is eaten alive, fibre by fibre, by a great worm
which gnaws his entrails, and with so great a skill that it begins on
the parts not essential to life, and thus keeps the prey fresh and
tasty to the last. Such is the gentleness of nature, the good mother.
The carabes are fine coleoptera, violet, purple, and golden. They feed
only on living prey, which they chew slowly, beginning at the belly,
and boring slowly into the palpitating cavity. Helices, and slugs are
thus tom apart by bands of carabes who dig them up and dissect them in
a boiling of saliva.
Such are theft and murder, in nature. These are the normal acts.
Herbivorous species alone are innocent perhaps from imbecility; always
occupied in eating, because their food is so unsubstantial, they have
not time to develop their powers: they are the inevitable prey, a sort
of superior grass which will be browsed at the first opportunity.
But the carnivora are in the same way eaten by their stronger and
more adroit fellow-boarders. Very few beasts have a quiet death. The
geotrupes, scarabs, necrophores their work finished, the egg-laying
accomplished, devour each other to pass the time, perhaps, to lend a
little gaiety to their last moments. Animals are of but two sorts,
hunters and game, but there is scarcely a hunter who is not game in
his turn. One does not find in nature the purely human invention of
breeding for slaughter, or the more extraordinary one of breeding for
hunting. Ants know how to milk their cows, the plant-lice, or their
goats the staphylins; they do not know how to fatten them and to slit
their gullets.
A hundred other signs of animal cruelty are scattered through this
book. One may collect many others, and this might form a work edifying
in this era of sentimentalism. Not because one wishes--quite the
contrary--to offer them to men as so many examples; but because this
might teach them that the first duty of a living being is to live,
and that all life is nothing but a sum sufficient of murders. Men or
tigers, sphex or carabes are under the same necessity: to kill or to
die, or to shed blood or eat grass. But to eat grass, is not much
better than suicide: ask the lambkins.
[1] Mariot-Didieux, Guide pratique de l'éducateur de lapins.
Bibliothèque des professions industrielles et agricoles, série H. No.
17.