[CHAPTER VIII]
LOVE-ORGANS
Sexual dimorphism and parallelism.—Sexual organs of man and of woman.—Constancy of sexual parallelism in the animal series.—External sexual organs of placentary mammifera.—Form and position of the penis.—The penial bone.—The clitoris.—The vagina.—The teats.—Forked prong of marsupials.—Sexual organs of reptiles.—Fish and birds with a penial organ—Genital organs of arthropodes.—Attempt to classify animals according to the disposition, presence, absence of exterior organs for reproduction.
Sexual dimorphism, physic as well as psychic, has evidently one sole cause, sex; nevertheless the organs which differ least from male and female among species which differ most, are precisely the sexual organs. That is, they are rigorously made the one for the other, and the accord in this case must be not only harmonic, but mechanical and mathematical. They are cog-wheels which must bite one on the other with exactitude, be it, as in birds, that there is but an exact superposition of two orifices, be it, as in mammals that the key must enter the keyhole. There is a dimorphism, but it is that of the mould to the cast, of the scabbard to the blade; for the parts where the contact is less strict, the parallelism is nevertheless quite sensible and quite apparent. This similitude in difference has struck philosophers as well as anatomists in all ages from the logical insinuations of Aristotle to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's theory of analogies. Galien had already noted certain analogies, more or less exact: greater labia, and foreskin, ovaries and testicles, scrotum and matrice. He says, textually: "All parts of man are found in woman; there is but one point of difference, woman's parts are interior, man's exterior, parting from the perineal region. Imagine those which first present themselves to mind, no matter which, unfold woman's or fold man's inward and you will find either a replica of the other. Suppose first man's organs pushed into him and extending interiorly between the rectum and the vessie; in this supposition the scrotum would occupy the place of the matrice, with the testicles placed at each side of the exterior orifice. The prong of the male would become the throat of the cavity thus produced, and the skin of the prong's extremity, called the foreskin would form the vagina. Suppose, inversely, that the matrice should turn inside out and fall outside, would not its testicles (ovaries) of necessity, find themselves inside its cavity and would not it envelop them as a scrotum? Would not the throat, hidden up to the perineum, become the male member, and the vagina, which is but a cutaneous appendix of the throat, the foreskin?" This is the passage which Diderot has transposed and put au courant with science in his Rêve d'Alembert. This page of literary anatomy retains its expressive value: "Woman has all man's parts, the sole difference is like that between a purse hanging outside and a purse stuffed inside; a female foetus resembles a male foetus, so as to deceive anyone; the part which occasions the error, sinks in the female foetus in measure as the purse extends inward; it is never obliterated to the point of losing its primitive form; it also is the mover of pleasure, it has its gland, its foreskin, and one notes at its extremity a point which appears to have been the orifice of a urinary canal which has closed; there is in man from the anus to the scrotum, the interval called the perinæum, and from the scrotum to the end of the prong, a seam which looks like the resewing of a basted vulva; women with excessive clitoris, have beards, eunuchs have not, their thighs increase, their hips widen, their knees round out, and in losing the characteristic organization of one sex they seem to return to the characteristic conformity of the other...." In terms less literary, one considers as homologous, in man and woman, the ovary and the testicle, lesser labia, clitoridian cap and sheath, the hanging foreskin; the greater labia and the envelope of the scrotum; clitoris and penis; the vagina and the prostatic utricle. One will find the details of these analogies in special works, they can not be given here with scientific precision. The sole point to hold on to is that the two sexes not only in man, and not only in mammifers, but in nearly all the animal and vegetable series, are but a repetition of the same creature with specialization of function. This specialization may extend to functions other than sexual, to work (bees, ants) to war (termites). The soldier termite is extraordinary; he is not more so than the male.
The sexual parallelism is constant among nearly all vertebrates and arthropodes; it extends to identity among hermaphrodite mollusks if one then compare not two sexes but two individuals. It extends, for each sex considered separately, along the whole zoölogical chain. Parting from link animals which separate into two parts, one sees the sexual organs design themselves in the form wherein they arrive in higher animals of great complexity, such that, in acquiring differences of form and position they retain a remarkable stability of structure; one would say almost of identity in marsupials, reptiles, fish, birds. For clarity one must proceed from the known to the unknown; man is the figure to whom one may compare necessarily the observations on other animals.
There is no lack of point in knowing the normal love-mechanism, since moralists pretend to regulate its movements. Ignorance is tyrannic; the inventors of natural ethics knew very little of nature: this permitted them to be severe; for no definite piece of knowledge interfered with the certitude of their gestures. One becomes more discreet when one contemplates the prodigious picture of the erotic habits of the animal world, and even entirely incompetent to decide flatly, yes or no, whether a fact is natural or unnatural.
Man is a placentary mammifer: by this title his genital organs and their mode of employ are common to him and to all hairy animals having teats and an umbilicus. He is not normally covered all over with hair, but there is hardly a spot on his body where hairs may not sprout, and both sexes are hairy often with extreme abundance in pubis and arm-pits. The male and active organ of mammifers is the penis, usually completed exteriorily by the testicles. The penis is, at once, the excreting conductor of urine and sperm; an analogous relation exists in the female, and it is with exactitude that these mingled organs have been called genito-urinary or more recently, uro-genital; it is the same in all the animal series, the urethra opens exteriorily or it ends, as in birds, in a cloaca, vestibule, for all the excretions.
The penis of two-handed (bimanous) creatures descends freely, it hangs before the pubis in quadrumanes, and in chiroptera (bats). The bat is strangely like man, and like primates in general: five fingers to the hand, one a thumb, five fingers on the foot, pectoral teats, mensual flux, free penis; it is a little caricature of man, abrupt and frightened in its evening flight about houses. Among flesh-eaters, ruminants, pachyderms, solipedes and several other families of mammals, the penis is sheathed in a scabbard which stretches along the belly; thus preserved against accidents and insect stings, while its sensibility is maintained intact. Voyagers, according to Buffon, have seen Patagonians trying to get like results by tying the 'foreskin above the gland, like a bag with a cord. Thus man's hand permits him to improve or mutilate his body. Mutilation and sexual deformations, circumcision among Semites and savages, excision of Russian illuminati, transversal perforation of the gland, surgical flattening of the prong, are very frequent. The hand of the chiroptera is shackled, that of quadrumanes has only one sexual rôle, masturbation. It may also serve as a shield against external danger; many quadrumanes, better protected, make the same use of their tail when they curl it between their legs, this is sometimes a psychological gesture, female modesty or refusal, sometimes a gesture of preservation. The movements of Venus modest, of man coming naked from his bath, have no other origin. Monkeys when they stop moving about, place their hands on their sexual parts. The Polynesians, before Christianity, had the custom when standing upright, of holding their scrotum in both hands with the prong hanging between the fingers: the posture of the wild dandy. Certain species lack scrotum as Pliny had already remarked: Testes elephanto occulti. In camels the testicles roll beneath the skin of the groin; rats' testicles are internal, but emerge in the rutting season and assume an enormous development. Apes often have the pouch-skin blue, red or green, like the other bald parts of their bodies.