If one considers no longer the mode of copulation but the apparatus itself, with the male part, penis, and the female part, vagina, one sees clearly that these extremely particular organs are hardly found well designed save in two great branchings where the intelligence is most developed: mammifera and the arthropodes. There might be, perhaps, a certain correlation between complete and profound copulation and the development of the brain.
[CHAPTER IX]
THE MECHANISM OF LOVE
1. Copulation: vertebrates.—Its very numerous varieties and its specific fixity.—The apparent immorality of Nature.—Sexual ethnography.—Human mechanism.—Cavalage.—The form and duration of coupling in divers mammifers.—Aberrations of sexual surgery, the ampallang.—Pain as a bridle on sex.—Maidenhead.—The mole.—Passivity of the female.—The ovule, psychological figure of the female.—Mania of attributing human virtues to animals.—The modesty of elephants.—Coupling mechanism in whales, seals, tortoises.—In certain ophidians and in certain fish.
1. COPULATION: VERTEBRATES.—Forberg's "Figuræ Veneris" exhausts in forty-eight illustrations the manners of coupling accessible to the human species; the erotic manuals of India imagine certain further variants and voluptuous perfectionings, but many of these juxtapositions are unfavourable to fecundation, and a majority of them have only been invented in order to escape too logical and too material a result. Animals surely, the most liberated as well as the most stupid, are ignorant of all modes of conjugal fraud; needless to say no dissociation can be made in their rudimentary minds between the sexual sensation and the maternal, between sexual and paternal sensation, much less. The ingenuity of each specie is small, but the universal ingenuity of total fauna is immense, and there are few human imaginings among those which we term perverse and even monstrous which are not the right and the norm in one or another region of animal empire. Practices very analogous to (although very different in aim from) divers onanist practices, to spermatophagia, even to sadism are imposed on innocent beasts and represent for them familial virtue and chastity. A physician, who has not obtained much glory thereby, invented or proposed artificial fecundation: he was imitating spiders and dragon-flies; M. de Sade liked to imagine ruttings where blood and sperm flowed simultaneously; mere kindergarten manual (Berquinade) if one contemplate, not without bewilderment, the habits of an ingenious orthopter, the praying mantis, the insect which prays to God, la prego-Diou as the Provençals call her, the prophetess as the Greek said! Baudelaire's verses ridiculing those who wish
"aux choses de l'amour mêler l'honnêteté"
Mix seemliness into affairs of Love
have a value not only moral but scientific. In love everything is just, everything is noble, as soon as, among the maddest animals, it is a play moved by the desire of creating. It is more difficult doubtless to justify fantasies which are merely for the purpose of avoiding trouble, especially if one allow oneself to be blinded by the idea of specific finality; one may however affirm, and one will say nothing more about the matter, that animals are not ignorant either of sodomy or of onanism and that they cede to them by necessity, in the absence of females. Sénancour has written wise and bold pages upon these practices among humans.
Sexual ethnography hardly exists. The scattered data on this subject, though extremely important, have not been co-ordinated. That would be a small matter. They have not even been verified. One knows nothing of coital practices save what life teaches one, questions of this sort being difficult to ask, and answers being always equivocal. There is here an entire science which has been corrupted by Christian prudery. An order was issued long ago and is still obeyed; one has concealed all that unites, sexually, man and animal, everything that proves the unity of origin for all that lives and feels. Physicians who have studied this question have known only the abnormal, the malady: it would be imprudent to base conclusions on general practices from their observations. The best source, at least for Europeans, is still the casuist writings. From the enumeration of sins against chastity gathered by professional confessors, one could, after some study, deduce the secret sexual habits of civilized humanity. But one must take care not to retain either the old idea of sin, or the idea of the same under modern cloak, of fault, crime or error. Practices common to an entire ethnic group can not be judged to be other than normal, it matters little whether they have been stigmatized by the apologists of right living. What is good is what is and what will continue to be. It is known that bimanes and quadrumanes are very libertine, and that this is in accord with their physical suppleness and their intelligence. It is a fact undeniable and insurmountable, even if annoying. The human couple has drawn from this tendency a thousand erotic fantasies, which, in being disciplined have ended in the creation of a veritable sexual method, be it disinterested pleasure, be it preservation against fecundity; is this of no importance? How can one lecture about depopulation if one lose sight of this primordial fact? What can normal or patriotic reasoning do against an instinct which has become or rebecome an intelligent and conscious practice, bound to what is deepest in human sensibility? It is very difficult, especially when dealing with man, to distinguish between normal and abnormal. What is the normal; what the natural? Nature ignores this adjective, and one has dragged out of her bosom many illusions, perhaps in irony, perhaps in ignorance.