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.