Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 · Chapter 16Chapter III.—Sexual Inversion in Men. (7)
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"About my feelings toward my child there is not much to say, as they are not very strong. I believe I carry him and help bathe and attend to him as much as most fathers, and when he is a few years older I hope I may find him very companionable. But he has brought me no real joy, though I see other men look at him almost with affection. But he has brought added happiness to his mother."
The next case is interesting as showing the mental and emotional development in a very radical case of sexual inversion.
HISTORY XX.—Englishman, of independent means, aged 49. His father and his father's family were robust, healthy, and prolific. On his mother's side, phthisis, insanity, and eccentricity are traceable. He belongs to a large family, some of whom died in early childhood and at birth, while others are normal. He himself was a weakly and highly nervous child, subject to night-terrors and somnambulism, excessive shyness and religious disquietude.
Sexual consciousness awoke before the age of 8, when his attention was directed to his own penis. His nurse, while out walking with him one day, told him that when little boys grow' up their penes fall off. The nursery-maid sniggered, and he felt that there must be something peculiar about the penis. He suffered from; irritability of the prepuce, and the nurse powdered it before he went to sleep. There was no transition from this to self-abuse.
About the same time he became subject to curious half-waking dreams. In these he imagined himself the servant of several adult naked sailors; he crouched between their thighs and called himself their dirty pig, and by their orders he performed services for their genitals and buttocks, which he contemplated and handled with relish. At about the same period, when these visions began to come to him, he casually heard that a man used to come and expose his person before the window of a room where the maids sat; this troubled him vaguely. Between the age of 8 and 11 he twice took the penis of a cousin into his mouth, after they had slept together; the feeling of the penis pleased him. When sleeping with another cousin, they used to lie with hands outstretched to cover each other's penis or nates. He preferred the nates, but his cousin the penis. Neither of these cousins was homosexual, and there was no attempt at mutual masturbation. He was in the habit of playing with five male cousins. One of these boys was unpopular with the others, and they invented a method of punishing him for supposed offenses. They sat around the room on chairs, each with his penis exposed, and the boy to be punished went around the room on his knees and took each penis into his mouth in turn. This was supposed to humiliate him. It did not lead to masturbation. On one occasion the child accidentally observed a boy who sat next to him in school playing with his penis and caressing it. This gave him a powerful, uneasy sensation. With regard to all these points the subject observes that none of the boys with whom he was connected at this period, and who were exposed to precisely the same influences, became homosexual.
He was himself, from the first, indifferent to the opposite sex. In early childhood, and up to the age of 13, he had frequent opportunities of closely inspecting the sexual organs of girls, his playfellows. These roused no sexual excitement. On the contrary, the smell of the female parts affected him disagreeably. When he once saw a schoolfellow copulating with a little girl, it gave him a sense of mystical horror. Nor did the sight of the male organs arouse any particular sensations. He is, however, of opinion that, living with his sisters in childhood, he felt more curious about his own sex as being more remote from him. He showed no effeminacy in his preferences for games or work.
He went to a public school. Here he was provoked by boy friends to masturbate, but, though he often saw the act in process, it only inspired him with a sense of indecency. In his fifteenth year puberty commenced with nocturnal emissions, and, at the same time, he began to masturbate, and continued to do so about once a week, or once a fortnight, during a period of eight months; always with a feeling that that was a poor satisfaction and repulsive. His thoughts were not directed either to males or females while masturbating. He spoke to his father about these signs of puberty, and by his father's advice he entirely abandoned onanism; he only resumed the practice, to some extent, after the age of 30, when he was without male comradeship.
The nocturnal emissions, after he had abandoned self-abuse, became very frequent and exhausting. They were medically treated by tonics such as quinine and strychnine. He thinks this treatment exaggerated his neurosis.
All this time, no kind of sexual feeling for girls made itself felt. He could not understand what his schoolfellows found in women, or the stories they told about wantonness and delight of coitus.
His old dreams about the sailors had disappeared. But now he enjoyed visions of beautiful young men and exquisite statues; he often shed tears when he thought of them. These dreams persisted for years. But another kind gradually usurped their place to some extent. These second visions took the form of the large, erect organs of naked young grooms or peasants. These gross visions offended his taste and hurt him, though, at the same time, they evoked a strong, active desire for possession; he took a strange, poetic pleasure in the ideal form. But the seminal losses which accompanied both kinds of dreams were a perpetual source of misery to him.
There is no doubt that at this time—that is, between the fifteenth and seventeenth years—a homosexual diathesis had become established. He never frequented loose women, though he sometimes thought that would be the best way of combating his growing inclination for males. And he thinks that he might have brought himself to indulge freely in purely sexual pleasure with women if he made their first acquaintance in a male costume, as débardeuses, Cherubino, court-pages, young halberdiers, as it is only when so clothed that women on the stage or in the ball-room have excited him.
His ideal of morality and fear of venereal infection, more than physical incapacity, kept him what is called chaste. He never dreamed of women, never sought their society, never felt the slightest sexual excitement in their presence, never idealized them. Esthetically, he thought them far less beautiful than men. Statues and pictures of naked women had no attraction for him, while all objects of art which represented handsome males deeply stirred him.
It was in his eighteenth year that an event occurred which he regards as decisive in his development. He read Plato. A new world opened, and he felt that his own nature had been revealed. Next year he formed a passionate, but pure, friendship with a boy of 15. Personal contact with the boy caused erection, extreme agitation, and aching pleasure, but not ejaculation. Through four years he never saw the boy naked or touched him pruriently. Only twice he kissed him. He says that these two kisses were the most perfect joys he ever felt.
His father now became seriously anxious both about his health and his reputation. He warned him of the social and legal dangers attending his temperament. But he did not encourage him to try coitus with women. He himself thinks that his own sense of danger might have made this method successful, or that, at all events, the habit of intercourse with women might have lessened neurosis and diverted his mind to some extent from homosexual thoughts.
A period of great pain and anxiety now opened for him. But his neurasthenia increased; he suffered from insomnia, obscure cerebral discomfort, stammering, chronic conjunctivitis, inability to concentrate his attention, and dejection. Meanwhile his homosexual emotions strengthened, and assumed a more sensual character. He abstained from indulging them, as also from onanism, but he was often forced, with shame and reluctance, to frequent places—baths, urinaries, and so forth—where there were opportunities of seeing naked men.
Having no passion for women, it was easy to avoid them. Yet they inspired him with no exact horror. He used to dream of finding an exit from his painful situation by cohabitation with some coarse, boyish girl of the people; but his dread of syphilis stood in the way. He felt, however, that he must conquer himself by efforts of will, and by a persistent direction of his thoughts to heterosexual images. He sought the society of distinguished women. Once he coaxed up a romantic affection for a young girl of 15, which came to nothing, probably because the girl felt the want of absolute passion in his wooing. She excited his imagination, and he really loved her; but she did not, even in the closest contact, stimulate his sexual appetite. Once, when he kissed her just after she had risen from bed in the morning, a curious physical repugnance came over him, attended with a sad feeling of disappointment.
He was strongly advised to marry by physicians. At last he did so. He found that he was potent, and begot several children, but he also found, to his disappointment, that the tyranny of the male genital organs on his fancy increased. Owing to this cause his physical, mental, and moral discomfort became acute. His health gave way.
At about the age of 30, unable to endure his position any longer, he at last yielded to his sexual inclinations. As he began to do this, he also began to regain calm and comparative health. He formed a close alliance with a youth of 19. This liaison was largely sentimental, and marked by a kind of etherealized sensuality. It involved no sexual acts beyond kissing, naked contact, and rare involuntary emissions. About the age of 36 he began freely to follow homosexual inclinations. After this he rapidly recovered his health. The neurotic disturbances subsided.
He has always loved men younger than himself. At about the age of 27 he had begun to admire young soldiers. Since he yielded freely to his inclinations the men he has sought are invariably persons of a lower social rank than his own. He carried on one liaison continuously for twelve years; it began without passion on the friend's side, but gradually grew to nearly equal strength on both sides. He is not attracted by uniforms, but seeks some uncontaminated child of nature.
The methods of satisfaction have varied with the phases of his passion. At first they were romantic and Platonic, when a hand-touch, a rare kiss, or mere presence sufficed. In the second period sleeping side by side, inspection of the naked body of the loved man, embracements, and occasional emissions after prolonged contact. In the third period the gratification became more frankly sensual. It took every shape: mutual masturbation, intercrural coitus, fellatio, irrumatio, and occasionally active pedicatio; always according to the inclination or concession of the beloved male.
He himself always plays the active, masculine part. He never yields himself to the other, and he asserts that he never has the joy of finding himself desired with ardor equal to his own. He does not shrink from passive pedicatio; but it is never demanded of him. Coitus with males, as above described, always seems to him healthy and natural; it leaves a deep sense of well-being, and has cemented durable friendships. He has always sought to form permanent ties with the men whom he has adored so excessively.
He is of medium height, not robust, but with great nervous energy, with strong power of will and self-control, able to resist fatigue and changes of external circumstances.
In boyhood he had no liking for female occupations, or for the society of girls, preferring study and solitude. He avoided games and the noisy occupations of boys, but was only non-masculine in his indifference to sport, was never feminine in dress or habit. He never succeeded in his attempts to whistle. He is a great smoker, and has at times drunk much. He likes riding, skating, and climbing, but is a poor horseman, and is clumsy with his hands. He has no capacity for the fine arts and music, though much interested in them, and is a prolific author.
He has suffered extremely throughout life, owing to his sense of the difference between himself and normal human beings. No pleasure he has enjoyed, he declares, can equal a thousandth part of the pain caused by the internal consciousness of pariahdom. The utmost he can plead in his own defense, he admits, is irresponsibility, for he acknowledges that his impulse may be morbid. But he feels absolutely certain that in early life his health was ruined and his moral repose destroyed owing to the perpetual conflict with his own inborn nature, and that relief and strength came with indulgence. Although he always has before him the terror of discovery, he is convinced that his sexual dealings with men have been thoroughly wholesome to himself, largely increasing his physical, moral, and intellectual energy, and not injurious to others. He has no sense whatever of moral wrong in his actions, and he regards the attitude of society toward those in his position as utterly unjust and founded on false principles.
The next case is, like the foregoing, that of a successful man of letters who also passed through a long period of mental conflict before he became reconciled to his homosexual instincts. He belongs to a family who are all healthy and have shown marked ability in different intellectual departments. He feels certain that one of his brothers is as absolute an invert as himself and that another is attracted to both sexes. I am indebted to him for the following detailed narrative, describing his emotions and experiences in childhood, which I regard as of very great interest, not only as a contribution to the psychology of inversion, but to the embryology of the sexual emotions generally. We here see described, in an unduly precocious and hyperesthetic form, ideas and feelings which, in a slighter and more fragmentary shape, may be paralleled in the early experiences of many normal men and women. But it must be rare to find so many points in sexual psychology so definitely illustrated in a single child. It may be added that the narrative is also not without interest as a study in the evolution of a man of letters; a child whose imagination was thus early exercised and developed was predestined for a literary career.
HISTORY XXI.—"Almost the earliest recollection I have is of a dream, which, from my vivid recollection of its details, must have repeated itself, I think, more than once, unless my waking thoughts unconsciously added definition. From this dream dated my consciousness of the attraction to me of my own sex, which has ever since dominated my life. The dream, suggested in part, I think, by a picture in an illustrated newspaper of a mob murdering a church dignitary, took this form: I dreamed that I saw my own father murdered by a gang of ruffians, but I do not remember that I felt any grief, though I was actually an exceedingly affectionate child. The body was then stripped of its clothing and eviscerated. I had at the time no notion of anatomical details; but the particulars remain distinct to my mind's eye, of entrails uniformly brown, the color of dung, and there was no accompaniment of blood. When the abdomen had been emptied, the incident in which I became an active participant occurred. I was seized (and the fact that I was overpowered contributed to the agony of delight it afforded me) and was laid between the thighs of my murdered parent; and from there I had presently crawled my way into the evacuated, abdomen. The act, so far as I can decide of a dream at an age when emission was out of the question, caused in me extreme organic excitement. At all events, I used afterward definitely to recur to it in the waking moments before sleep for the purpose of gaining a state of erection. The dream had no outcome; it seemed to reach its goal in the excitement it caused. I was at that time between 3 and 4 years old. (I have been told that erections occurred when I was only 2 years old. It was between 3 and 4 that I used to induce, at all events, the sensation of an erection. But I was nearer 5 when, sitting on my bed and waiting to be dressed, I got an involuntary erection and called my nurse's attention to it, asking what it meant. The appearance must, therefore, have been usual to me at that date, but certainly the sensation was not.)
"At that time I was totally ignorant of the conditions, of puberty, which afterward, when I discovered them, so powerfully affected me. I could not even visualize the private organs of a man; I made no deductions from myself. The only naked bodies I had seen then—I judge from circumstances, not from any actual memory of the facts—were those of my own sisters. In the waking dreams which I began to construct, though I recurred often to the one already narrated, the goal of my desire was generally to nestle between the thighs or to have my face pressed against the hinder parts of the object of my worship. But for a time my first dream so engrossed me that I did not indulge in any promiscuity. Gradually, however, my horizon enlarged, and took in, besides the first mentioned, three others: a cousin very much my elder, an uncle, and the curate of the parish.
"At this stage I began to invent circumstances for the indulgence of my passion. One of the earliest was to imagine myself in a tank with my three lovers floating in the water above me. From this position I visited their limbs in turn; the attraction rested in the thighs and buttocks only. I fancy this limitation of the charm to the lower parts only lasted until actual experience of a more complete embrace made me as much a lover of the arms and breast; indeed, later I became more emotionally enamored of these parts than of all the rest. At the beginning of things I simply loved best what my mind could first get hold of.
"Quite early in my experience, when I was not more than 5, I awoke earlier than usual, and saw my nurse standing in complete nudity, commencing her toilet. She seemed to me a gross, coarse, and meaningless object; the hair under her armpits displeased me, and still more that on the lower part of her body. In the case of men, directly I came to have cognizance of the same thing on their bodies, the effect was exactly the opposite. It so happened that about this time the gardener had received some injury to his leg, and in showing the bruise to another exhibited before my eyes a skin completely shagged over with dark hair. Though the sight of the bruise repulsed me, my pleasure was intense, and the vision of the gardener's legs was in my bed every night for a week afterward. My point is that the sight of my nurse was liable to rouse interest just as much as the far more prosaic display of the gardener's wounded leg, but my nature made it impossible.
"It was about this time, if not before, that an enormous sense of shyness with regard to all my private duties began to afflict me. So great was it that I could endure from no hand except my mother's or my nurse's the necessary assistance in the buttoning and unbuttoning of my garments, always excepting those who were about my own age, toward whom I felt no privacy whatever.
"When I was a little more than 5 I formed a friendship with a young clerk, a youth of about 15, though he seemed to me a grown-up person. One day, as he sat at his desk writing, I sat down and began playing with his feet, investigating the height to which his socks went under his trousers; in this way I obtained six inches of bare leg. Conscious of my courage I fell to kissing it. My friend laughed, but left me to my devotions in peace. This was the first time in which a feeling of romance mixed itself in my dreams; the physical excitement was less, but the pleasure was greater. I cannot understand why I never repeated the experience. He remained to me an object of very special and tender consideration.
"In the next episode I have to relate the ideal was totally absent, and the part I played was passive rather than active. I was put to sleep with a boy considerably my senior. His initiation led to a physical familiarity between us which was not warm or kind, and I was allowed no scope for my own instinctive desires for a warmer kind of contact; if I sought it under cover of my companion's slumbers I found myself kicked away. Only on one occasion did I find a few moments of supreme charm, while his sleep remained sound, by discovering in the recesses of the sheet an exposed surface of flesh against which I pressed my face in an abandonment of joy. For the rest I was a passive participant, his pleasure seeming to end in the mere handling of the fleshy portions of my body. For this purpose I usually lay face downward across his knees. So far as I can remember, this intimacy led to a decrease in my pursuit of imaginative pleasures; for about a year no further development took place.
"At about this date I was circumcised on account of the prepuce being too long.
"Between the 6th and 7th years a change of environment brought me into contact with a new set of faces. I had then a bed to myself, and once more my imagination awoke to life. It was at this time that I found myself constructing from men's faces suppositions as to the rest of their bodies: a brown face led me to suppose a uniformly brown body, a pale face a pale body. This idea of variety began to charm me. I now made definite choice in my reveries whether I would go to sleep between white thighs, or red thighs, or brown thighs. Going to sleep definitely describes the goal of the method to which I had addicted myself. As soon as I entered my bed I abandoned myself to the construction of an amour and retained it as long as I had consciousness. I may say that I was not conscious of any emissions under these circumstances (until some years later, when I brought it about by my own act), but the pleasure was fairly acute.
"All this time there were secret meetings, with my bedfellow of the year before. But they now took place by day, in various hiding-places, with little unclothing or exposure, and my companion was cold and fastidious and repelled any warmth on my part; it became to me a dry sort of ritual. I had an idea at that time that the whole thing was so much an original invention of his and mine that there was no likelihood of it being practised by anyone else in the world. But this consideration did not restrain me in constructing love scenes with all those whose appearance attracted me. At this period nearly every man with whom I came in contact won at least my transient desire; only the quite old and deformed lay outside the scope of my wishes. Many of my amours developed in church; the men who sat near me were the objects of my attention, and the clergyman, whose sermon I did not listen to, supplied me with an occasion for reverie on the charms his person would have for me under other circumstances. It must have been at this time that I began to elaborate ideas of a serried rank of congregated thighs across which I lay and was dragged. I would arrange them in definite order and then imagine myself drawn across from one to the other somewhat forcibly. Admiration of strength was beginning at this time to have a definite part in my conceptions, but anything of the nature of cruelty had not then appealed to me. (I except the original dream of my childhood, which seems to me still to stand fantastically apart.) In the inventions to which I now gave myself the sense of being passed across limbs of different texture and color was subtle and pleasurable. I think the note of constructive cruelty which now followed arose from an imagined rivalry among my lovers for possession of me; the idea that I was desired made me soon take a delight in imagining myself torn and snatched about by the contending parties. Presently out of this I began constructing definite scenes of violence. I was able in imagination to lie in the thick and stress of conglomerated deliciousness of thighs struggling to hold me; I was able to imagine at least six bodies encircling me with passionate contact. At the same time I had an ingrained feeling of my own physical smallness in relation to the limbs whose contact threw me into such paroxysms of delight. A new and sufficiently ludicrous invention took possession of me; I imagined myself strapped to the thigh (always, I think, the right one) of the man on whom I chose, for the time, to concentrate my desires, and so to be worn by him during his day's work, hidden beneath his garments. I was not conscious of any difficulty due to my size. The charm of bondage and compulsion was here, again, in the ascendant. I fancy that it was in this connection that I first anticipated whipping as the delightful climax to my emotions, administered when my possessor, at the end of his day's work, unclothed himself for rest.
"Up to this stage my attraction to the male organ of generation had been slight and vague. Two things now contributed to bring thought of it into prominence. On two or three occasions when I accompanied farm laborers to their occupations I saw them pause by the way to relieve nature. My extreme shyness as regards such matters in my own person made this performance in my presence like an outrage on my modesty; it had about it the suggestion of an indecent solicitation to one whose inclination was to headlong and delirious surrender. I stood rooted and flushing with downcast eyes till the act was over and was conscious for a considerable time of stammering speech and bewildered faculties. When I afterward reviewed the circumstances they had the same attraction for me that amorous cruelty was just then beginning to exercise on my imagination. My mind secretly embraced the fearful sweetness of the newly discovered sensation, surrounding the performance of the function with all sorts of atrocious and bizarre inventions. For a time my intellect hung back from accepting this as the central and most fiery secret of the male attraction; but shortly afterward, when out walking with my father, I saw him perform the same act; I was overwhelmed with emotion and could barely drag my feet from the spot or my eyes from the damp herbage where he had deposited the waters of secrecy. Even today, when my mind has been long accustomed to the knowledge of generative facts, I cannot dissociate myself from the shuddering charm that moment had for me. The attraction my father's person had always had for me was now increased tenfold by the performance I had witnessed (though I had not seen the penis in any of these cases).
"For a considerable time only those lovers were dominant in my imagination whom I had witnessed in the act that had so poignantly affected me. My delight now took the form of imagining myself strapped to the thighs of the person while this function was in progress.
"By this time I must have been 8 years old. The cold and secret relationship of which I have given an account had continued without instructing me in any of the ardent possibilities it might have suggested; no force or cruelty was used upon me, no warmth was lavished. It made little difference that my companion had now discovered the act of masturbation; it had no meaning to me, since it led to no warmth of embrace. His method was to avert himself from me; I had to fawn upon him from the rear and also to invent indecent stories to stimulate his imagination. I felt myself a despised instrument, the mere spectator of an act which, if directed toward me with any warmth, would have aroused the liveliest appetite. At this time, as I have since seen, my companion was gaining knowledge from the ancient classics. For a time some charm was imparted by his instructing me to adopt a superincumbent face-to-face embrace. The beginning of his puberty was enormously attractive to me; had he been less cold-blooded I could have responded passionately to his endearments; but he always insisted on rigorous passivity on my part, and he explained nothing. One day, by a small gratuity, he induced me to offer him my mouth, though I still had no comprehension of the result I was helping to attain. Once the orgasm occurred, and the effect was extremely nauseous; after that he was more careful. My companion was approaching manhood, and his demands became more frequent, his exactions more humiliating.