Krafft-Ebing does not contend that wherever hereditary taint and onanism
concur, the result will be sexual inversion; but rather that wherever we
have diagnosed an acquired form of sexual inversion, we shall discover
hereditary taint and onanism. Considering the frequency of both
hereditary taint and onanism in our civilisation, this is not risking
much. Those factors are discoverable in a large percentage of male
persons. What seems unwarranted by facts is the suggestion that
inherited neuropathy is an indispensable condition and the fundamental
cause of homosexual instincts. The evidence of ancient Greece, schools,
prisons, and sotadic races, compels us to believe that normally healthy
people are often born with these instincts or else acquire them by the
way of custom. Again, his insinuation that onanism, regarded as the main
exciting cause, is more frequent among young people of abnormal
inclinations than among their normal brethren, will not bear the test of
common observation and of facts communicated in the autobiographies of
professed onanists and confessed Urnings.
The problem is too delicate, too complicated, also too natural and
simple, to be solved by hereditary disease and self-abuse. When we shift
the ground of argument from acquired to inborn sexual inversion, its
puzzling character will become still more apparent. We shall hardly be
able to resist the conclusion that theories of disease are incompetent
to explain the phenomenon in modern Europe. Medical writers abandon the
phenomenon in savage races, in classical antiquity, and in the sotadic
zone. They strive to isolate it as an abnormal and specifically morbid
exception in our civilisation. But facts tend to show that it is a
recurring impulse of humanity, natural to some people, adopted by
others, and in the majority of cases compatible with an otherwise normal
and healthy temperament.
Krafft-Ebing calls attention to the phenomenon of permanent
_effeminatio_, in males unsexed by constant riding and the exhaustion of
their virility by friction of the genitals--a phenomenon observed by
Herodotus among Scythians, and prevalent among some nomadic races of the
Caucasus at the present day.[27] He claims this in support of his theory
of masturbation; and within due limits, he has the right to do so. The
destruction of the male apparatus for reproduction, whether it be by
castration after puberty, or by an accident to the parts, or by a lesion
of the spine, or by excessive equitation, as appears proved from the
history of nomad tribes, causes men to approximate physically to the
female type, and to affect feminine occupations and habits. In
proportion as the masculine functions are interfered with, masculine
characteristics tend to disappear; and it is curious to notice that the
same result is reached upon so many divers ways.
Next he discusses a few cases in which it seems that sexual inversion
displays itself episodically under the conditions of a psychopathical
disturbance.[28] That is to say, three persons, two women and one man,
have been observed by him, under conditions approaching mental
alienation, to exchange their normal sexual inclination for abnormal
appetite. In the analysis of the problem these cases cannot be regarded
as wholly insignificant. The details show that the subjects were clearly
morbid. Therefore they have their value for the building up of a theory
of sexual inversion upon the basis of inherited and active disease.
(B) Ultimately, Krafft-Ebing attacks the problem of what he calls "the
innate morbid phenomenon" of sexual inversion.[29] While giving a
general description of the subjects of this class, he remarks that the
males display a pronounced sexual antipathy for women, and a strongly
accentuated sympathy for men. Their reproductive organs are perfectly
differentiated on the masculine type; but they desire men instinctively,
and are inclined to express their bias by assuming characters of
femininity. Women infected by a like inversion, exhibit corresponding
anomalies.
Casper, continues Krafft-Ebing, thoroughly diagnosed the phenomenon.
Griesinger referred it to hereditary affliction. Westphal defined it as
"a congenital inversion of the sexual feeling, together with a
consciousness of its morbidity." Ulrichs explained it by the presence of
a feminine soul in a male body, and gave the name _Urning_[30] to its
subjects. Gley suggested that a female brain was combined with
masculine glands of sex. Magnan hypothesised a woman's brain in a man's
body.
Krafft-Ebing asserts that hardly any of these Urnings are conscious of
morbidity. They look upon themselves as unfortunate mainly because law
and social prejudices stand in the way of their natural indulgence.[31]
He also takes for proved, together with all the authorities he cites,
that the abnormal sexual appetite is constitutional and inborn.
Krafft-Ebing, as might have been expected, refers the phenomenon to
functional degeneration, dependent upon neuropathical conditions in the
patient, which are mainly derived from hereditary affliction.
He confirms the account reported above from Casper as to the platonic or
semi-platonic relations of the Urning with the men he likes, his
abhorrence of coition, and his sexual gratification through acts of
mutual embracement. The number of Urnings in the world, he says, is far
greater than we can form the least conception of from present means of
calculation.
At this point he begins to subdivide the subjects of congenital
inversion. The first class he constitutes are called by him "Psychical
Hermaphrodites." Born with a predominant inclination towards persons of
their own sex, they possess rudimentary feelings of a semi-sexual nature
for the opposite. These people not unfrequently marry; and Krafft-Ebing
supposes that many cases of frigidity in matrimony, unhappy unions, and
so forth, are attributable to the peculiar diathesis of the male--or it
may be, of the female--in these marriages. They are distinguished from
his previous class of "acquired" inversion by the fact that the latter
start with instincts for the other sex, which are gradually obliterated;
whereas the psychical hermaphrodites commence life with an attraction
towards their own sex, which they attempt to overcome by making demands
upon their rudimentary normal instincts. Five cases are given of such
persons.[32]
In the next place he comes to true homosexual individuals, or Urnings in
the strict sense of that phrase. With them there is no rudimentary
appetite for the other sex apparent. They present a "grotesque" parallel
to normal men and women, inverting or caricaturing natural appetites.
The male of this class shrinks from the female, and the female from the
male.[33] Each is vehemently attracted from earliest childhood to
persons of the same sex. But they, in their turn, have to be subdivided
into two sub-species. In the first of these, the sexual life alone is
implicate; the persons who compose it do not differ in any marked or
external characteristics from the type of their own sex; their habits
and outward appearance remain unchanged. With the second sub-species the
case is different. Here the character, the mental constitution, the
habits, and the occupations of the subject have been altered by his or
her predominant sexual inversion; so that a male addicts himself to a
woman's work, assumes female clothes, acquires a shriller key of voice,
and expresses the inversion of his sexual instinct in every act and
gesture of his daily life.
It appears from Krafft-Ebing's recorded cases that the first of these
sub-species yields nearly the largest number of individuals. He
presents eleven detailed autobiographies of male Urnings, in whom the
_vita sexualis_ alone is abnormal, and who are differentiated to common
observation from normal men by nothing but the nature of their amorous
proclivities. The class includes powerfully developed masculine beings,
who are unsexed in no particular except that they possess an inordinate
appetite for males, and will not look at females.
As regards the family history of the eleven selected cases, five could
show a clear bill of health, some were decidedly bad, a small minority
were uncertain.
One of these Urnings, a physician, informed Krafft-Ebing that he had
consorted with at least six hundred men of his own stamp; many of them
in high positions of respectability. In none had he observed an abnormal
formation of the sexual organs; but frequently some approximation to the
feminine type of body--hair sparingly distributed[34], tender
complexion, and high tone of voice. About ten per cent. eventually
adopted love for women. Not ten per cent. exhibited any sign of the
_habitus muliebris_ in their occupations, dress, and so forth. A large
majority felt like men in their relations to men, and were even inclined
toward active pæderasty. From the unmentionable act they were deterred
by æsthetical repulsion and fear of the law.
The second of these sub-species embraces the individuals with whom the
reader of Carlier is familiar, and whom Ulrichs calls Weiblinge. In
their boyhood they exhibited a marked disinclination for the games of
their school-fellows, and preferred to consort with girls. They helped
their mothers in the household, learned to sew and knit, caught at every
opportunity of dressing up in female clothes. Later on, they began to
call themselves by names of women, avoided the society of normal
comrades, hated sport and physical exercise, were averse to smoking and
drinking, could not whistle. Whether they refrained from swearing is not
recorded. Many of them developed a taste for music, and prided
themselves upon their culture. Eventually, when they became unclassed,
they occupied themselves with toilette, scandal, tea, and talk about
their lovers--dressed as far as possible in female clothes, painted,
perfumed and curled their hair--addressed each other in the feminine
gender, adopted pseudonyms of Countess or of Princess, and lived the
life of women of a dubious demi-monde.[35]
Yet they remained in their physical configuration males. Unlike the
preceding sub-species, they did not feel as men feel towards their
sweethearts, but on the contrary like women. They had no impulse toward
active pæderasty, no inclination for blooming adolescents. What they
wanted was a robust adult; and to him they submitted themselves with
self-abandonment. Like all Urnings, they shrank from the act of coition
for the most part, and preferred embracements which produced a brief
and pleasurable orgasm. But some developed a peculiar liking for the
passive act of sodomy or the anomalous act of fellatio.
In this characterisation I have overpassed the limits of the fifteen
cases presented by Krafft-Ebing. In order to constitute the type, I have
drawn upon one reliable, because sympathetic, source in Ulrichs, and on
another reliable, because antipathetic, source in Carlier.
Sexual inversion, in persons of the third main species, has reached its
final development. Descending, if we follow Krafft-Ebing's categories,
from acquired to innate inversion, dividing the latter into psychopathic
hermaphrodites and Urnings, subdividing Urnings into those who retain
their masculine habit and those who develop a habit analogous to that of
females, we come in this last class to the most striking phenomenon of
inverted sex. Here the soul which is doomed to love a man, and is
nevertheless imprisoned in a male body, strives to convert that body to
feminine uses so entirely that the marks of sex, except in the
determined organs of sex, shall be obliterated. And sometimes it appears
that the singular operation of nature, with which we are occupied in
this Essay, goes even further. The inverted bias given to the sexual
appetite, as part of the spiritual nature of the man, can never quite
transmute male organs into female organs of procreation. But it modifies
the bony structure of the body, the form of the face, the fleshly and
muscular integuments to such an obvious extent that Krafft-Ebing thinks
himself justified in placing a separate class of androgynous beings
(with their gynandrous correspondents) at the end of the extraordinary
process.
At this point it will be well to present a scheme of his analysis under
the form of a table.
{ Persistent.
{ Acquired {
{ { Episodical.
{
Sexual Inversion { { Psychopathic Hemaphrodites.
{ {
{ { { Male Habitus
{ { { (Mannlinge).
{ Congenital { Urnings {
{ { Female Habitus
{ { (Weiblinge).
{
{ Androgyni.
What is the rational explanation of the facts presented to us by the
analysis which I have formulated in this table cannot as yet be
thoroughly determined. We do not know enough about the law of sex in
human beings to advance a theory. Krafft-Ebing and writers of his school
are at present inclined to refer them all to diseases of the nervous
centres, inherited, congenital, excited by early habits of self-abuse.
The inadequacy of this method I have already attempted to set forth; and
I have also called attention to the fact that it does not sufficiently
account for phenomena known to us through history and through every-day
experience.
Presently we shall be introduced to a theory (that of Ulrichs) which is
based upon a somewhat grotesque and metaphysical conception of nature,
and which dispenses with the hypothesis of hereditary disease. I am not
sure whether this theory, unsound as it may seem to medical specialists,
does not square better with ascertained facts than that of inherited
disorder in the nervous centres.
However that may be, the physicians, as represented by Krafft-Ebing,
absolve all subjects of inverted sexuality from crime. They represent
them to us as the subjects of ancestral malady. And this alters their
position face to face with vulgar error, theological rancour, and the
stringent indifference of legislators. A strong claim has been advanced
for their treatment henceforth, not as delinquents, but as subjects of
congenital depravity in the brain centres, over which they have no
adequate control.
The fourth medical author, with whom we are about to be occupied,
includes sexual inversion in his general survey of human crime, and
connects it less with anomalies of the nervous centres than with
atavistic reversion to the state of nature and savagery. In the end, it
will be seen, he accepts a concordat with the hypothesis of "moral
insanity."
_Cesare Lombroso._ "_Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer, Aerztlicher
und Juristischer Beziehung._"
This famous book, which has contributed no little to a revolution of
opinion regarding crime and its punishment in Italy, contains a
searching inquiry into the psychological nature, physical peculiarities,
habits, and previous history of criminals.[36] It is, in fact, a study
of the criminal temperament. Lombroso deals in the main, as is natural,
with murder, theft, rape, cruelty, and their allied species. But he
includes sexual inversion in the category of crimes, and regards the
abnormal appetites as signs of that morbid condition into which he
eventually revolves the criminal impulse.
Wishing to base his doctrine on a sound foundation, Lombroso begins with
what may be termed the embryology of crime. He finds unnatural vices
frequent among horses, donkeys, cattle, insects, fowls, dogs, ants. The
phenomenon, he says, is usually observable in cases where the male
animal has been excluded from intercourse with females. Having
established his general position that what we call crimes of violence,
robbery, murder, cruelty, blood-thirst, cannibalism, unnatural lust, and
so forth, exist among the brutes--in fact, that most of these crimes
form the rule and not the exception in their lives--he passes on to the
consideration of the savage man. In following his analysis, I shall
confine myself to what he says about abnormal sexual passion.
He points out that in New Caledonia the male savages meet together at
night in huts for the purpose of promiscuous intercourse (p. 42). The
same occurs in Tahiti, where the practice is placed under the protection
of a god. Next he alludes to the ancient Mexicans; and then proceeds to
Hellas and Rome, where this phase of savage immorality survived and
became a recognised factor in social life (p. 43). At Rome, he says, the
Venus of the sodomites received the title of Castina (p. 38).
Lombroso's treatment of sexual inversion regarded as a survival from
prehistoric times is by no means exhaustive. It might be supplemented
and confirmed by what we know about the manners of the Kelts, as
reported by Aristotle (Pol. ii. 6. 5.)--Tartars, Persians, Afghans,
North American Indians, &c. Diodorus Siculus, writing upon the morals of
the Gauls, deserves attention in this respect.[37] It is also singular
to find that the Norman marauders of the tenth century carried unnatural
vices wherever they appeared in Europe.[38] The Abbot of Clairvaux, as
quoted by Lombroso (p. 43), accused them of spreading their brutal
habits through society. People accustomed to look upon these vices as a
form of corruption in great cities will perhaps be surprised to find
them prevalent among nomadic and warlike tribes. But, in addition to
survival from half-savage periods of social life, the necessities of
warriors thrown together with an insufficiency of women must be
considered. I have already suggested that Greek love grew into a custom
during the Dorian migration and the conquest of Crete and Peloponnesus
by bands of soldiers.
Cannibalism, Lombroso points out (p. 68), originated in necessity,
became consecrated by religion, and finally remained as custom and a
form of gluttony. The same process of reasoning, when applied to sexual
aberrations, helps us to understand how a non-ethical habit, based on
scarcity of women, survived as a social and chivalrous institution among
the civilised Hellenes.
Lombroso traces the growth of justice in criminal affairs, and the
establishment of pains and penalties, up to the instinct of revenge and
the despotic selfishness of chiefs in whom the whole property of savage
tribes, including women, was vested. This section of his work concludes
with the following remarkable sentence (p. 96): "The universal diffusion
of crime which we have demonstrated at a certain remote epoch, and its
gradual disappearance as a consequence of new crimes springing up,
traces of which are still discoverable in our penal codes [he means
revenge, the egotism of princes, and ecclesiastical rapacity], are
calculated even more than the criminality of brutes to make us doubt of
what metaphysicians call eternal justice, and indicate the real cause of
the perpetual reappearance of crime among civilised races, namely
atavism."
Having established this principle, Lombroso proceeds to trace the
atavism of criminality in children. He shows that just as the human
embryo passes through all forms of lower lives, so men and women in
their infancy exactly reproduce the moral type of savages. Ungovernable
rage, revengeful instincts, jealousy, envy, lying, stealing, cruelty,
laziness, vanity, sexual proclivities, imperfect family affections, a
general bluntness of the ethical sense, are common qualities of
children, which the parent and the teacher strive to control or to
eradicate by training. "The child, considered as a human being devoid of
moral sense, presents a perfect picture of what doctors call moral
insanity, and I prefer to classify as inborn crime" (p. 97). "All
species of anomalous sexual appetite, with the exception of those
dependent upon senile decadence, make their appearance in childhood,
together with the other criminal tendencies" (p. 117).
Lombroso arrives, then, at the conclusion that what civilised humanity
calls crime and punishes, is the law of nature in brutes, persists as a
normal condition among savages, and displays itself in the habits and
instincts of children. The moral instinct is therefore slowly elaborated
out of crime in the course of generations by whole races, and in the
course of infancy and adolescence in the individual. The habitual
criminal, who remains a criminal in his maturity, in whom crime is
inborn and ineradicable, who cannot develop a moral sense, he explains
at first by atavism. A large section of his volume (pp. 124-136,
137-253) is devoted to anthropometrical observations upon the physical
structure, the cranial and cerebral development, and the physiognomy of
such criminals. Into this part of his work we need not enter. Nor is it
necessary to follow his interesting researches in the biology and
psychology of "born criminals"--chapters on tattooing, ways of thinking
and feeling, passions, tendencies to suicide, religious sentiment,
intelligence and culture, capacity of self-control, liability to
relapse, and so forth. Many curious facts relating to sexual inversion
are treated in the course of these enquiries; and one passage describing
the general characteristics of pæderasts (p. 376) ought to be alluded
to. Considering this subject solely as a phase of crime, Lombroso
reveals a superficial conception of its perplexity.
It is more important to reflect upon his theory of crime in general.
Having started with the hypothesis of atavism, and adopted the term
"born criminal," he later on identifies "innate crime" with "moral
insanity," and illustrates both by the phenomena of epilepsy.[39] This
introduces a certain confusion and incoherence into his speculative
system; for he frankly admits that he has only gradually and tardily
been led to recognise the identity of what is called crime and what is
called moral insanity. Criminal atavism might be defined as the sporadic
reversion to savagery in certain individuals. It has nothing logically
to connect it with distortion or disease--unless we assume that all our
savage ancestors were malformed or diseased, and that the Greeks, in
whom one form of Lombroso's criminal atavism became established, were as
a nation morally insane. The appearance of structural defects in
habitual criminals points less to atavistic reversion than to radical
divergence from the normal type of humanity. In like manner the
invocation of heredity as a principle (p. 135) involves a similar
confusion. Hereditary taint is a thing different not in degree but in
kind from savage atavism prolonged from childhood into manhood.