Our Dark Side (9 page)

The psychiatrist paints a sordid picture of this vast array of parallel and infamous lives, and describes all their metamorphoses with a combination of compassion and ridicule. The characters he describes never have any genealogy or ancestry, and the only reason for their deviations is that assigned them by science. They are a collection of things that have been reduced to insignificance: ‘Ring fetishism. X … nineteen years, neuropathic father but family quite healthy in other respects, has a rachitic skull, nervous since childhood and neurasthenic since puberty … At age of eleven, developed an interest in rings, but only in large rings of solid gold … When puts an appropriate ring on his finger, he feels an electric thrill and ejaculates, etc.' (Krafft-Ebing 1969: 381).
¹⁴

On reading such a book, it is impossible not to think that the terrible admissions collected in it are describing acts that are as perverse as the discourse that claims to be classifying them. There is little difference between the various catalogues of perversions drawn up by the perverse, who are anxious to assert themselves as a community of the chosen, and the descriptive syntheses of the representatives of mental medicine. As time passes and as sexology acquires a greater resonance, both the actors and the voyeurs become experts representing a powerful desire to domesticate sexual madness.

Despite their differences, the sexologists of the nineteenth century therefore had a passion for classifying perversions, but they were also interested in the sufferings, confessions and practices of the perverse. But they immediately realized that homosexuality could not be given the same status as the other perversions in the discourse of science. While the sexual perversions were described under the auspices of the grotesque and the monstrous, their descriptions of homosexuality were very different. The psychiatrists were all the more divided as to how it should be described in that they all agreed that it was common among the greatest men that civilization had produced: Socrates, Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Pope Julius II, Henri III, Cambacérès, and many others. Throughout this century of science, homosexuality was therefore a perversion apart, or rather the darkest side of perversion.

For progressive sexologists such as Ulrichs, Westphal and Hirschfeld, who were in favour of homosexual emancipation, homosexuality was no more than one orientation among others, and it was a product of nature: the soul of a woman in the brain of a man, or the brain of a man in the body of a woman.
¹⁵
It therefore had to be normalized in the name of the new biological order. For the rest, it remained the worst of perversions because there was no visible clinical sign to signal its presence. The homosexual did not in fact need any particular fetish, bodily trace of mutilation or behavioural anomaly in order to love someone of the same sex. In short, the homosexual was not mad. He was therefore
ontologically perverse
because he made a mockery of the laws of procreation by decking himself out with the most flamboyant signs of art and human creativity. In that respect, he had to be defined as civilization's Pervert, or as the embodiment of the essence of perversion – a new Sade – whereas other perverse subjects were simply ill and afflicted by a pathology.

At this time, the body was becoming the only witness doctors could turn to in order to detect traces of an evil that refused to speak its own name, the bodily orifices through which the venom was spread therefore had to be carefully examined in order to define homosexuality as a sexual perversion. Both the legal discourse and the discourse of medicine insisted that inverts had to be tracked down in their debauched haunts. When caught
in flagrante
and examined, their bodies would reveal their hidden vice to both science and society. In order to unmask homosexuals, medico-legal discourse deliberately confused them, in other words, with transvestites, pornographers, fetishists or, in a word, insane and criminal sexual perverts.

The famous French doctor Ambroise Tardieu was probably the most perverse representative of mental medicine's positivist discourse. Medicine's stated objective was to describe all the damaging effects of a ‘deviant' sexuality against which the democratic state wanted to protect itself.

In his
Etude médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs
,
¹⁶
Tardieu describes the male homosexual in entomological detail: excessive development of the buttocks, which are broad and prominent, deformation of the funnel-shaped anus, relaxation of the sphincter, extreme dilation of the anal orifice, spindly or voluminous penis, with the glans narrowing like a dog's muzzle, twisted mouth, short teeth, thick lips. Such, in his view, are the anomalies that can be detected on the body of these hidden perverts: ‘Is this really a man? His hair, parted in the centre, falls over his cheeks like that of a coquettish girl […] He has languid eyes, a heart-shaped mouth and sways on his hips like a Spanish dancer. When arrested, he had a pot of vermillion in his pocket. He puts his hand together with a hypocritical air and simpers in what would be a laughable fashion if it were not so disgusting' (Tardieu 1995: 130).

This discourse, which is inspired by hygienics, already reveals the principle that would provide the whole basis for a criminal science that made it possible to distinguish between a supposedly ‘good' race and a supposedly ‘bad' race. The people of the perverse could then be stigmatized in the same way as ‘inferior' races. And the homosexual was the most perverse of all because he was biologically perverse.

In the nineteenth century, homosexuals were stigmatized only when they tried to live as their vice told them to live, and to avoid the laws of procreation. The same applied to the devotees of solitary sex. Both inversion and onanism represented a challenge to the family order. And just as homosexuals came to be persecuted, attempts were made to protect children from taking their pleasure on their own, for fear that they would become sterile or inverted.

Children therefore had their place in this vast catalogue of perversions as they ceased to be likened, as they once had been, to either innocent souls or mere objects of
jouissance
. Having become sexed beings in their own right, they seemed to be possessed by a boundless auto-eroticism even before Freud (1905) described them as ‘polymorphously perverse'. They were half way between the man of the future and the savage who was still displayed simian attitudes.

Childhood became the territory of the representatives of medical science. Even children who had not yet been exposed to the harmful effects of education were suspected of being perverted. The doctors began by defining the new pathological category of infantile madness, and then tried to understand its genesis in order to find ways of treating and curing it. Observing that a child could be born perverse, if not mad, they immediately deduced that the symptom of this particular madness was a particular sexual practice – masturbation – whose harmful effects had previously gone unnoticed. Placing their faith in the progress of the rapidly expanding art of surgery, they prescribed remedies to prevent a pathology that they themselves had invented: the excision or cauterization of the clitoris for girls, and circumcision for boys.

It had of course long been known that a child could be mad or half mad, but psychiatry ruled that real mental illness could not develop until after puberty. ‘A child can certainly be imbecilic, but not mad', claimed Friedrich August Carus in 1808, echoing Ésquirols' famous declaration, three years earlier: ‘Childhood is spared that terrible illness.'

The only explanation for madness in children was, it was said, that it was an illness of the brain. This perpetuated the idea that children could be exempt from any trace of psychical illness. But things were not as simple as that because psychiatric discourse still compared the mad with children, or in other words beings who could not be responsible for their actions.
¹⁷

While children therefore could not be declared mad, they could be described as perverse, or in other words as half mad. The notion of childhood innocence could therefore be demolished by psychiatric discourse, which put forward several contradictory theses. If one adopted a Darwinian perspective, it was, for example, possible to argue that, although born without any humanity, the child bore within him, in his body and genital organs, vestigial traces of an animality that had yet to be overcome. But it was also possible to take the view that children were perverse because of their souls, or in other words because of a vice inherent in humanity itself.

It was at this point that masturbation came to be seen as the main cause of certain forms of delirium that could be observed not only in children but also, at a later stage, in all so-called hysterical or half-mad subjects. Both were identified as being sexually ill, children because they indulged in the practice of solitary sex, and the others – and especially women – because of their childhood experience of sexual traumas identical to those induced by onanism (abuse, seduction, rape …).

Before Freud began to look into the question, the hysterical woman was therefore regarded as a perverse figure to the extent that the madness affecting her body excluded her from the procreative order. What André Breton called her convulsive beauty indicated the extent to which female sexuality – or rather the sex of women – could lead to excesses of all kinds.

Although we have always known about masturbation and although it has always met with disapproval because it has nothing to do with procreation, it was only at the beginning of the eighteenth century that it became an object of terror in the West. In 1712, an English doctor, surgeon and pornographer published a book entitled
Onania
. He claimed to be looking for a remedy for ‘That unnatural practice by which persons of either sex may defile their own bodies, without the assistance of others. While yielding to filthy imagination, they endeavour to imitate and procure for themselves that sensation which God has ordered to attend the carnal commerce of the two sexes for the continuation of our species' (cited Laqueur 2003: 14).

The term onanism comes from an episode in the Bible. Onan, as we know, refused to father children in the body of his dead brother's wife, as the so-called law of levirate required him to do. According to that law, the younger brother in the family had a duty to father children in his dead brother's place, and thus became the guardian of his own biological children, who were not regarded as his because the elder brother, although dead, was still their father.

Rebelling against this law, Onan defied God by spilling his seed outside the body of the wife he had been given. His punishment was death. As we have seen, his case did not involve masturbatory action for the sake of solitary pleasure. Yet the word ‘onanism' became the scientific term for an unhealthy or perverse practice, or in other words a vice and a defiance of divine sovereignty.

In 1760, Samuel August David Tissot, an Enlightenment doctor, took up the same theme in a work that was to cause quite a stir for over one hundred years:
L'Onanisme, Dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation
.
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Convinced that the practice gave rise to organic diseases that were much more serious than smallpox – he was an eminent specialist – Tissot helped to transform masturbation into a drug or a form of self-prostitution that scientific medicine had to fight in the same way that it fought the scourges of plague or cholera. This is his description (1766: 25) of this new evil; it is of a man who is dying, he says, of masturbation-induced insanity:

The idea was beginning to emerge that, in the name of Enlightenment, modern states had a duty to govern all sexual practices by separating the norm from the pathological in the same way that religion had tried to make a distinction between vice and virtue. Policing bodies and biocracy; such was the programme implemented throughout the nineteenth century by a triumphant bourgeoisie that sought to impose upon society a sexual morality based upon the prevalence of the so-called sentimental or romantic family: the happiness of women lay in marriage and motherhood. This was an apologia for the father in his role as
pater familias
and protector of his children.

The idea that masturbation is dangerous is already there in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A famous passage in
Émile
(1762) warns against the ‘dangerous suppplement', as do the
Confessions
(Rousseau 1953: 108–9)
,
which were published posthumously in 1780:

Described as a ‘dangerous supplement' in the eighteenth century, masturbation, along with homosexuality, was still seen as the greatest of all perversions one hundred years later: it represented a dangerous exposure to madness and death. It was, in a word, a loss of substance designed to ‘cheat' nature, to act in its place and to establish a culture of sex that broke with the natural order of the living world (Derrida 1967). It followed, it was argued, that man alone was responsible for his self-seduction, thanks to his mania for auto-eroticism.