"(5) Within the Sotadic Zone the vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically, amid the opprobrium of their fellows, who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation, and look upon it with the liveliest disgust."
This is a curious and interesting generalisation, though it does not account for what history has transmitted regarding the customs of the Kelts, Scythians, Bulgars, Tartars, Normans, and for the acknowledged leniency of modern Slavs to this form of vice.
Burton advances an explanation of its origin. "The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me, and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperament, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically."[47] So far as it goes, this suggestion rests upon ground admitted to be empirically sound by the medical writers we have already examined, and vehemently declared to be indisputable as a fact of physiology by Ulrichs, whom I shall presently introduce to my readers. But Burton makes no effort to account for the occurrence of this crasis of masculine and feminine temperaments in the Sotadic Zone at large, and for its sporadic appearance in other regions. Would it not be more philosophical to conjecture that the crasis, if that exists at all, takes place universally; but that the consequences are only tolerated in certain parts of the globe, which he defines as the Sotadic Zone? Ancient Greece and Rome permitted them. Modern Greece and Italy have excluded them to the same extent as Northern European nations. North and South America, before the Conquest, saw no harm in them. Since its colonisation by Europeans they have been discountenanced. The phenomenon cannot therefore be regarded as specifically geographical and climatic. Besides, there is one fact mentioned by Burton which ought to make him doubt his geographical theory. He says that, after the conquest of Algiers, the French troops were infected to an enormous extent by the habits they had acquired there, and from them it spread so far and wide into civilian society that "the vice may be said to have been democratised in cities and large towns."[48] This surely proves that north of the Sotadic Zone males are neither physically incapable of the acts involved in abnormal passion, nor gifted with an insuperable disgust for them. Law, and the public opinion generated by law and religious teaching, have been deterrent causes in those regions. The problem is therefore not geographical and climatic, but social. Again, may it not be suggested that the absence of "the Vice" among the negroes and negroid races of South Africa, noticed by Burton,[49] is due to their excellent customs of sexual initiation and education at the age of puberty—customs which it is the shame of modern civilisation to have left unimitated?
However this may be, Burton regards the instinct as natural, not contre nature, and says that its patients "deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist."[50]
Another distinguished anthropologist, Paolo Mantegazza, has devoted special attention to the physiology and psychology of what he calls "I pervertimenti dell'amore."[51] Starting with the vulgar error that all sexual inversion implies the unmentionable act of coition (for which, by the way, he is severely rebuked by Krafft-Ebing, Psy. Sex., p. 92), he explains anomalous passions by supposing that the nerves of pleasurable sensation, which ought to be carried to the genital organs, are in some cases carried to the rectum.[52] This malformation makes its subject desire coitum per anum. That an intimate connection exists between the nerves of the reproductive organs and the nerves of the rectum is known to anatomists and is felt by everybody. Probably some cinædi are excited voluptuously in the mode suggested. Seneca, in his Epistles, records such cases; and it is difficult in any other way to account for the transports felt by male prostitutes of the Weibling type. Finally, writers upon female prostitution mention women who are incapable of deriving pleasure from any sexual act except aversa venus.
Mantegazza's observation deserves to be remembered, and ought to be tested by investigation. But, it is obvious, he pushes the corollary he draws from it, as to the prevalence of sexual inversion, too far.
He distinguishes three classes of sodomy: (1) Perpheric or anatomical, caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves passing from the spine to the reproductive organs and the rectum; (2) psychical, which he describes as "specific to intelligent men, cultivated, and frequently neurotic," but which he does not attempt to elucidate, though he calls it "not a vice, but a passion"; (3) luxurious or lustful, when the aversa venus is deliberately chosen on account of what Mantegazza terms "la desolante larghezza" of the female.[53]
Mantegazza winds up, like Burton, by observing that "sodomy, studied with the pitying and indulgent eye of the physician and the physiologist, is consequently a disease which claims to be cured, and can in many cases be cured."[54]
After perusing what physicians, historians, and anthropologists have to say about sexual inversion, there is good reason for us to feel uneasy as to the present condition of our laws. And yet it might be argued that anomalous desires are not always maladies, not always congenital, not always psychical passions. In some cases they must surely be vices deliberately adopted out of lustfulness, wanton curiosity, and seeking after sensual refinements. The difficult question still remains then—how to repress vice, without acting unjustly toward the naturally abnormal, the unfortunate, and the irresponsible.
I pass now to the polemical writings of a man who maintains that homosexual passions, even in their vicious aspects, ought not to be punished except in the same degree and under the same conditions as the normal passions of the majority.