Part 9
_Women I have forsworn for thee; so may deem me all men this day a shaveling friar._
“And yet another:--
_A boy of twice ten is fit for a King!_
“And yet another:--
_The penis smooth and round was made with anus best to match it: Had it been made for cunnus’ sake it had been formed like hatchet!_
“And yet another said:--
_My soul thy sacrifice! I chose thee out who art not menstruous or oviparous_:
_Did I with women mell, I should beget brats till the wide wide world grew strait for us._
“And yet another:--
_She saith_ (_sore hurt in sense the most acute, for she had proffered what did not besuit_):--
‘_Unless thou stroke as man should swive his wife, blame not when horns thy brow shall incornute!_
‘_Thy wand seems waxen, to a limpo grown: and more I palm it, softer grows the brute!_’
“And yet another:--
_Quoth she (for I to lie with her forbore), ‘O folly-following fool, O fool to core_:
‘_If thou my coynte for Kiblah[61] to thy coigne reject, we’ll show thee what shall please thee more._’[62]
[61] Note by Sir Richard Burton: Kiblah = the fronting place of prayer; Mecca for Moslems, Jerusalem for Jews and early Christians.
[62] Note by Sir Richard Burton: The Koran says (chap. 2): “Your wives are your tillage: go in therefore unto your tillage in what manner soever you will.” Usually this is understood as meaning in any posture, standing or sitting, lying, backwards or forwards. Yet there is a popular saying about the man whom the woman rides (vulg. _St. George_; in France, _le postillion_): “Cursed be he who maketh woman Heaven and himself earth!” Some hold the Koranic passage to have been revealed in confutation of the Jews, who pretended that if a man lay with his wife backwards, he would beget a cleverer child. Others again understood it of preposterous venery; which is absurd: every ancient law-giver framed his code to increase the true wealth of the people--population--and severely punished all processes, like onanism, which impeded it. The Persians utilise the hatred of women for such misuse when they would force a wife to demand a divorce and thus forfeit her claim to dowry; they convert them into catamites till, after a month or so, they lose all patience and leave the house. We do not propose to add to Sir Richard’s note, reserving our remarks on the subject for their proper place in a subsequent volume.
“And yet another:--
_She proffered me a tender coynte: Quoth I, ‘I will not roger thee!’_
_She drew back, saying, ‘From the Faith he turns, who’s turned by Heaven’s decree!_[63]
[63] Note by Sir Richard: Koran 51, 9, alluding, in the text, to the preposterous venery her lover demands.
_’And front-wise futtering, in one day, is obsolete persistency!’_
_Then swung she round and shining rump like silvern lump she showëd me!_
_I cried: ‘Well done, O mistress mine! No more am I in pain for thee;_
_’O thou of all that Allah oped[64] showest me fairest victory!’_
[64] Note by Sir Richard: Arab “Futùh,” meaning openings, and also victories, benefits. The lover congratulates her on her mortifying self in order to please him.
“And yet another:--
_Men craving pardon will uphold their hands; women pray pardon with their legs on high:_[65]
[65] _Vide_ note to _Excursus_ to this story, p. 100.
_Out on it for a pious, prayerful work! The Lord shall raise it in the depths to lie._”[66]
[66] Note by Sir Richard: “And the righteous work will be exalt.” (Koran 35, 11). Applied ironically.
When Kamar al-Zaman heard her quote this poetry, and was certified that there was no escaping compliance with what willed she, he said:
“O King of the age, if thou must needs have it so, make covenant with me that thou wilt do this thing with me but once, though it avail not to correct thy depraved appetite; and that thou wilt never again require this thing of me to the end of time; so perchance shall Allah purge me of the sin.”
She replied:
“I promise thee this same, hoping that Allah of His favour will relent toward us and blot out our mortal offence; for the girdle of Heaven’s forgiveness is not indeed so strait, but it may compass us around and absolve us of the excess of our heinous sins and bring us to the light of salvation out of the darkness of error; and indeed excellently well saith the poet:--
_Of evil thing the folk suspect us twain; and to this thought their hearts and souls are bent:_
_Come, dear! let’s justify and free their souls that wrong us; one good bout and then--repent!”_
Thereupon she made with him an agreement and a covenant and swore a solemn oath by Him who is Self-existent, that this thing should befall betwixt them but once and never again for all time, and that the desire of him was driving her to death and perdition. So he rose up with her, on this condition, and went with her to her own boudoir, that she might quench the lowe of her lust, saying:
“There is no Majesty, and there is no Might save in Allah, the Glorious, the Great! This is the fated decree of the All-powerful, the All-wise!”
And he doffed his bag-trousers, shameful and abashed, with the tears running from his eyes from stress of affright. Thereat she smiled and making him mount upon a couch with her, said to him:
“After this night, thou shalt see naught that will offend thee.”
Then she turned to him bussing and bosoming him and bending calf over calf, and said to him:
“Put thy hand between my thighs to the accustomed place; so haply it may stand up to prayer after prostration.”
He wept and cried:
“I am not good at aught of this.”
But she said:
“By my life, an thou do as I bid thee, it shall profit thee!”
So he put out his hand, with vitals afire for confusion, and found her thighs cooler than cream and softer than silk. The touching of them pleasured him and he moved his hand hither and thither, till it came to a dome abounding in good gifts and movements and shifts, and said in himself:
“Perhaps this King is an hermaphrodite,[67] neither man nor woman quite.”
[67] Note by Sir Richard: Easterns still believe in what Westerns know to be an impossibility, human beings with the parts and proportions of both sexes equally developed and capable of reproduction; and Al-Islam even provides special rules for them. ... The old Greeks dreamed, after their fashion, a beautiful poetic dream of a human animal uniting the contradictory beauties of man and woman. The duality of the generative organs seems an old Egyptian tradition; at least we find it in _Genesis_ (1.27), where the image of the Deity is created male and female, before man was formed out of the dust of the ground (2.7). The old tradition found its way to India (if the Hindus did not borrow the idea from the Greeks); and one of the forms of Mahadeva, the third person of their triad, is entitled “Ardhanári” = the Half-Woman, which has suggested to them some charming pictures. Europeans, seeing the left breast conspicuously feminine, have indulged in silly surmises about the “Amazons.”
So he said to her:
“O King, I cannot find that thou hast a tool like the tools of men; what then moved thee to do this deed?”
Then loudly laughed Queen Budur till she fell on her back,[68] and said:
[68] Note by Sir Richard: This is a mere phrase for our “dying of laughter”: the queen was on her back. And as Easterns sit on carpets, their falling back is very different from the same movement off a chair.
“O my dearling, how quickly thou hast forgotten the nights we have lain together!”
Then she made herself known to him, and he knew her for his wife, the Lady Budur, daughter of King al-Ghayur, Lord of the Isles and the Seas. So he embraced her and she embraced him, and he kissed her and she kissed him; then they lay down on the bed of pleasure voluptuous....
* * * * *
_Here we end our extract from the Tale of Kamar al-Zaman, although the story runs on for another forty odd pages in Sir Richard Burton’s translation. A situation similar to that just described occurs in another story in ‘The Nights,’ and we shall have occasion to quote from that in a subsequent volume._
_EXCURSUS_ to _THE TALE OF KAMAR AL-ZAMAN_.
“We are told that in the East there was once a woman named Moarbeda who was a philosopher and considered to be the wisest woman of her time. When Moarbeda was once asked: ‘In what part of a woman’s body does her mind reside?’ she replied: ‘Between her thighs.’”--Havelock Ellis: _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, Vol. 3: _The Sexual Impulse in Women_.[69]
[69] Havelock Ellis is quoting from _The Perfumed Garden of The Cheikh Nefzaoui_: Cosmopoli, 1886, printed for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares.
* * * * *
The amativeness of woman, as compared with that of man, is a question, of course, entirely beyond the scope of this note. We must be content with examining some of the most interesting and pertinent extracts from the works of those qualified to speak on the subject.
At the outset we are confronted with the striking fact that, while the ancients were prone to regard woman as generally amative, even lustful, modern thought has exactly reversed this opinion. “It seems to have been reserved for the nineteenth century,” says Havelock Ellis, (_op. cit. supra_), “to state that women are apt to be congenitally incapable of experiencing complete sexual satisfaction, and peculiarly liable to sexual anaesthesia. This idea appears to have been almost unknown to the eighteenth century....”
Thus we have two schools of thought, one attributing to woman an intense sexual impulse, even greater than in man, the other holding her sexually frigid by nature and erotic only by pretence or accident. We may helpfully quote again from our Havelock Ellis, who has summarised in masterly fashion the various authorities on both sides:--
“In the treatise _On Generation_, (chap. 5), which until recent times was commonly ascribed to Hippocrates,” he says, “it is stated that men have greater pleasure in coïtus than women, though the pleasure of women lasts longer, and this opinion, though not usually accepted, was treated with great respect by medical authors down to the end of the 17th century.... Gall had stated decisively that the sexual desires of men are stronger and more imperious than those of women. (_Fonctions du Cerveau_, 1825).... Raciborski declared that three-fourths of women merely endure the approaches of men. (_De la Puberté chez la Femme_).
“‘When the question is carefully inquired into and without prejudice,’ said Lawson Tait, ‘it is found that women have their sexual appetites far less developed than men.’ (Lawson Tait, _Provincial Medical Journal_, 1891). ‘The sexual instinct is very powerful in man and comparatively weak in women,’ he stated elsewhere. (_Diseases of Women_, 1889). Hammond stated that ... ‘it is doubtful if in one-tenth of the instances of intercourse they [women] experience the slightest pleasurable sensation from first to last.’ (Hammond, _Sexual Impotence_).
“Lombroso and Ferrero consider that sexual sensibility ... is less pronounced in women.... ‘Woman is naturally and organically frigid....’ (Lombroso and Ferrero, _La Donna Deliquente, la Prostituta, e la Donna Normale_, 1893). Krafft-Ebing was of opinion that women require less sexual satisfaction than men, being less sensual.... ‘The sensuality of men,’ Moll states, ‘is in my opinion very much greater than that of women.’
“Adler, who discusses the direction at some length, decides that the sexual needs of women are less than those of men, though in some cases the orgasm in quantity and quality greatly exceeds that of men. He believes, not only that the sexual impulse in women is absolutely less than in men, and requires stronger stimulation to arouse it, but that also it suffers from a latency due to inhibition, which acts like a foreign body in the brain ... and demands great skill in the man who is to awaken the woman to love.”
Here we have one side of the question--a side strangely at variance with ancient thought, romance and history. The supposed frigidity of women is characterised by Havelock Ellis as ‘an opinion of very recent growth ... confined, on the whole, to a few countries.’ (_Studies_, vol. 3, page 196). He goes on to quote Brierre de Boismont, who wrote: ‘Turn to history, and on every page you will be able to recognise the predominance of erotic ideas in women.’ It is the same to-day, he adds, and he attributes it to the fact that men are more easily able to gratify their sexual impulses. (_Des Hallucinations_, 1862).
“The laws of Manu,” continues Havelock Ellis, “attribute to women concupiscence and anger, the love of bed and of adornment. The Jews attribute to women greater sexual desire than to men. This is illustrated, according to Knobel (as quoted by Dillman), by _Genesis_, chapter 3, verse 16.[70]
[70] “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire _shall be to thy husband_, and he shall rule over thee.”
“In Greek antiquity, ... in love between men and women the latter were nearly always regarded as taking the more active part. In all Greek love-stories of early date the woman falls in love with the man, and never the reverse. Æschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. Euripides emphasised the importance of women. ‘The Euripidean woman who falls in love thinks first of all: “How can I seduce the man I love?”’ (E.F.M. Benecke: _Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry_, 1896).
“The most famous passage in Latin literature as to the question of whether men or women obtain greater pleasure from sexual intercourse is that in which Ovid relates the legend of Tiresias (_Metamorphoses_, 3, 317-333). Tiresias, having been both a man and a woman, decided in favour of women.... In a passage quoted from a lost work of Galen by the Arabian biographer, Abu-l-Faraj, that great physician says of the Christians ‘that they practice celibacy, that even many of their women do so.’ So that in Galen’s opinion it was more difficult for a woman than for a man to be continent. The same view is widely prevalent among Arabic authors, and there is an Arabic saying that ‘The longing of the woman for the penis is greater than that of the man for the vulva.’[71]
[71] _The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui_: Cosmopoli, 1886.
“The early Christian Fathers clearly show that they regard women as more inclined to sexual enjoyment than men. That was ... the opinion of Tertullian (_De Virginibus Velandis_), and it is clearly implied in some of St. Jerome’s epistles.
“Notwithstanding the influence of Christianity, among the vigorous barbarian races of mediæval Europe the existence of sexual appetite in women was not considered to be, as it later became, a matter to be concealed or denied. Thus in 1068 the ecclesiastical historian, Ordericus Vitalis (himself half Norman and half English), narrates that the wives of the Norman knights who had accompanied William the Conqueror to England two years earlier sent over to their husbands to say that they were consumed by the fierce flames of desire, and that if their husbands failed to return very shortly they proposed to take other husbands. It is added that this threat brought a few husbands back to their wanton ladies.
“During the mediæval period in Europe, largely in consequence, no doubt, of the predominance of ascetic ideals set up by men who naturally regarded women as the symbol of sex, the doctrine of the incontinence of woman became firmly fixed.... Humanism and the spread of the Renaissance movement brought in a spirit more sympathetic to women.... We begin to find attempts at analysing the sexual emotions. In the seventeenth century a book of this kind was written by Venette. In matters of love, Venette declared, ‘men are but children compared to women. In these matters women have a more lively imagination, and they usually have more leisure to think of love. Women are much more lascivious and amorous than men.’ In a subsequent chapter, dealing with the question whether men or women receive more pleasure from the sexual embrace, Venette concludes, after admitting the great difficulty of the question, that man’s pleasure is greater, but that woman’s lasts longer. (N. Venette, _De la Génération de l’Homme ou Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal_, 1688).”
These and similar quotations, all acknowledging or laying stress on the erotic appetite of women, might be continued indefinitely. Among the other supporters of the opinion quoted by Havelock Ellis are Montaigne (_Essais_), Schurig (_Parthenologia_), Plazzonus (_De Partibus Generationi Inservientibus_), Ferrand (_De la Maladie d’Amour_), Zacchia (_Quæstiones Medico-Legales_), Sinibaldus (_Geneanthropeia_), Senancour (_De l’Amour_), Busch, Guttceit,[72] Mantegazza (_Fisiologia del Piacere_), Forel (_The Sexual Question_), who believed that women are more erotic than men, and Bloch (_The Sexual Life of Our Time_), who says, “The sexual sensibility of women is certainly different from that of men, but in strength it is at least as great.”
[72] “In Russia at all events, a girl, as very many have acknowledged to me, cannot resist the ever-stronger impulses of sex beyond the twenty-second or twenty-third year. And if she cannot do so in natural ways she adopts artificial ways. The belief that the feminine sex feels the stimulus of sex less than the male is quite false.”--Guttceit, _Dreissig Jahre Praxis_, 1873.
For our part, we find it hard to ignore that overwhelming consensus of opinion among early writers as to the erotic nature of the average woman. Was not this feminine amativeness the theme upon which were built the undying _contes_ and _fabliaux_ of Boccaccio, Bandello, Masuccio, Straparola, La Fontaine, Poggio, Ser Giovanni, Chaucer, Brantôme and a host of others? Are we to label Casanova’s _Memoirs_ as worthless because his women seem, in our modern eyes, erotic beyond all belief? Turning to the literature of the East, where woman’s ‘thirst for coïtion is written between her eyes,’[73] are we to hold the feminine attributes therein described as peculiar to those peoples and times? Must we believe that all these writers fashioned women out of their own lascivious fancy, or that the sexual impulse in the women of those races has totally changed?
[73] _The Perfumed Garden._ As illustrating our subject, the Cheikh Nefzaoui tells a quaint story of a man who, owing to physical disability, was unable to satisfy the sexual needs of his wife. A wise man gives him a remedy whereby his member grows “long and thick.” The Cheikh continues: “When his wife saw it in that state she was surprised, but it came still better when he made her feel in the matter of enjoyment quite another thing than she had been accustomed to experience; he began in fact to work her with his tool in quite a remarkable manner, to such a point that she rattled and sighed and sobbed during the operation. As soon as the wife found in her husband such eminently good qualities, she gave him her fortune, and placed her person and all she had at his disposal.”
Without a doubt, time and custom are responsible for much that seems obscure and irreconcilable. Many of our authorities are writing of an age in which men and women spoke and acted in a manner which to-day seems coarse and inexcusably free. Because in the past woman more readily gave outward expression to her inward feeling, it does not follow now that, by reason of her greater reserve, she lacks these emotions.
History has shown us psychologists and investigators in plenty, but they were not the psychologists of to-day, recording the results of their investigations with meticulous care and detail. The sexually frigid woman, we can confidently assume, was by no means unknown to the ancients. She was, however, unusual, abnormal; and if a sexually frigid woman be accounted abnormal, it is not hard to see why a normal is deemed erotic.
In these times, when it is the fashion to dissect everyone and everything, we are prone to argue from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the peculiar to the general; sexual frigidity in woman, at first an anomaly, ends in being a trait; the exception becomes, does not prove, the rule.
Needless to say, a great psychologist like Havelock Ellis has a wealth of information to offer on the subject, and we commend our readers to his masterly handling of it. He has something to say on every aspect of the question, from the case of the woman who is cold almost to the point of sexlessness to that of the erotic wife who ‘becomes frenzied with excitement during intercourse and insensible to everything but the pleasure of it.’ In conclusion, he adjusts the scales with exquisite and scientific precision, holding that ‘the distribution of the sexual impulse between the two sexes is fairly balanced.’
Earlier on, however, he makes a point which we shall do well to bear in mind. ‘ ... Sexual impulse is by no means so weak in women as many would lead us to think. It would appear that, whereas in earlier ages there was generally a tendency to credit women with an unduly large share of the sexual impulse, there is now a tendency unduly to minimise the sexual impulse in women.’
We shall have frequent occasion in subsequent volumes of _Anthologica Rarissima_ to return to this subject, for, as the student of folk-lore, psychology and human life will readily agree, sexual impulse is perhaps the most powerful basic motive of our many daily acts and tasks.[74]
[74] Queen Budur’s remark that “Women pray pardon with their legs on high,” (p. 88 _ante_), finds an echo in Aristophanes’ _Lysistrata_ and _The Ecclesiazusæ_. In the former play, Athenian women promise Lysistrata that, if forced to intercourse by their husbands, _they will not lift their legs in the air_; in the latter, we have a woman saying: “How are we going to lift up our arms in the Assembly (_i.e._, vote), we, who only know how to lift our legs in the act of love?”