Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/94

82 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.

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."

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