THE FIELD OF sexual pseudo-science is understandably vast and grotesque. Hardly an aspect of sex has escaped the theorizing of eccentric biologists.
Consider, for instance, the problem of how the sexes came into being. Theosophists and anthroposophists believe that early “root races” were hermaphroditic, the male and female united in each individual (a kind of modern occult version of the theory defended by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium). A strongly contrary theory is suggested by the title of an obscure book published in 1927 by William H. Smyth, the British engineer who invented technocracy. It is called Did Man and Woman Descend from Different Animals?
Arabella Kenealy, the well-known English anti-feminist, tackled the problem in 1934 in her book, The Human Gyroscope. The subtitle reads, “A consideration of the gyroscopic rotation of earth as a mechanism of the evolution of terrestrial living forms, explaining the phenomenon of sex: its origin and development and its significance in the evolutionary process.”
Miss Kenealy’s marathon opening sentence states her thesis as follows: “In presenting the consideration that, as plastic clay on the rotary disc of little potter’s wheel of industry is shapen and moulded in varieties of symmetrical three-dimensional form, increasingly uprising in the vertical, so upon the rotating surface of the great terrestrial potter’s wheel of Creative Evolution, the plastic matter of terrestrial organisms has been shapen and moulded in the countless diversities of increasingly complex, structurally differentiated three-dimensional forms of living species, progressively uprising in the vertical in the terms of increasingly complex elevated posture—I have ventured to base my argument upon the Gravitation of great Newton, instead of on the later Einstein theory.”
The cosmos, according to Kenealy, exhibits a dual male-female aspect from the lowly atom to the lofty galaxy. Maleness and femaleness are, in fact, the warp and weft in the fabric of creation. She also thinks that northern races are masculine and southern races feminine (owing somehow to the earth’s rotary movements), and that the right side of everyone’s body is more masculine than the left. Her book contains excellent photographs of a giraffe, fish, dog, camel, spiral nebula, crab, and gyroscope, and an interesting section on her experiences with telepathy. “During my marriage engagement, years ago,” she writes, “to a man to whom I was deeply attached, we were in continual telepathic communication with one another. It was as natural as breathing.”
Curious books and articles about the relative superiority of the sexes form another interesting body of literature. It ranges all the way from early works that prove the innate inferiority of women (smaller brain capacity and the like) to an article by anthropologist Ashley Montagu, in the March 1, 1952, Saturday Review, which proves innate female- superiority.1 The question of whether the fair sex is improving or deteriorating as a result of efforts to achieve equality with men has likewise produced many unusual volumes, beginning with Arabella Kenealy’s famous attack on feminism, Feminism and Sex Extinction, 1920, and continuing down to more recent studies.
Another branch of sexual pseudo-science worth looking into concerns methods of determining the sex of children before they are conceived. Folk superstitions on this matter have linked the sex of unborn infants to almost everything—weather, phases of the moon, diet, relative ages of parents, position during coitus, and so on—many of these theories having been the subject of learned treatises. Aristotle thought the direction of winds had something to do with it. Aquinas stated his belief that if there had been no Fall, parents would have been able to produce a child of whatever sex they desired, but he did not elaborate on the method by which this might be accomplished. In more recent times, the theory that eggs on one side of a woman’s body produce males, and those on the other side, females, prompted considerable European laboratory work, later found unreliable.
One German sexologist maintained that the right testicle and right ovary were male, and the left testicle and ovary female, but did not specify what resulted when a sperm from the right testicle united with a left ovum.2 Bernarr Macfadden, who has eight children of whom six are girls, favors another German theory that children tend to be of the sex opposite that of the parent with the greatest passion and virility. Other authorities, who fathered mostly sons, have vigorously defended the view that children are of the same sex as the more vigorous parent. There is also the theory that a telepathic influence tends to produce offspring of a sex contrary to that most firmly desired by the father.
Methods for overcoming impotence have likewise been the object of considerable quasi-scientific investigation. An authority can be found for almost every folk belief about the sexually stimulating qualities of certain foods—in most cases, foods of an uncommon variety which are somehow associated with sex. Eggs and caviar (fish eggs), for example; or foods which suggest or resemble sex organs (asparagus, celery, onions, clams, oysters, and so forth). Hundreds of quack medicines and devices have been devoted to stimulating potency. In London, in the mid-eighteenth century, John Graham, O.W.L. (the initials stood for “Oh Wonderful Love!”) made a fortune charging couples for the privilege of sleeping on his “celestial bed.” The bed had curious coils attached to it, soft music was played, incense burned, and colored lights bathed the sleeper.
The subject of rejuvenation has a long, insane history. In spite of the fact that there is not the faintest evidence that goat glands, or the glands of any other animal, can be transplanted successfully into a human male, “Doctor” John R. Brinkley of Kansas, became a millionaire during the twenties performing such operations on thousands of innocent oldsters. His clinic at Milford, Kansas, charged a minimum fee of $750, but the glands of a very young goat cost as high as $1,500. Even the late E. Haldeman-Julius, the publisher of Little Blue Books, was fooled by Brinkley. For several years the publisher ran Brinkley’s advertisements and favorable pieces on the doctor in a periodical devoted chiefly to debunking American life. Later, however, Haldeman-Julius realized his mistake and publicly apologized.
After the license of Brinkley’s radio station was taken from him, the doctor bought a station in Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio. There he pretended to perform prostate operations, and hawked a medicine which contained nothing but a blue dye and a little hydrochloric acid. The doctor had four cars, several yachts, and a private plane in which he flew back and forth between Del Rio and Little Rock, Arkansas. He had founded a hospital in Little Rock, in 1937, shortly before his death. Alf Landon narrowly defeated him on one of the three occasions when the doctor ran for governor of Kansas. Brinkley polled thousands of write-in votes in adjacent Oklahoma where he was not even on the ballot. This is even more frightening in light of the fact that the doctor contributed funds to William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, a native fascist organization. In Milford, a touching inscription on the Brinkley Memorial Church reads: Erected to God and His Son Jesus in appreciation of the many blessings conferred upon me, by J. R. Brinkley.
Pseudo-scientific writing on the subject of homosexuality is voluminous and varied, especially the German crank literature which is larger than that of any other country. In many ways it parallels the literature of racism. Writers who for one psychological reason or another were violently prejudiced against homosexuals have produced books in which inversion is regarded as a form of evil degeneracy. Other sex authorities, themselves homosexual, have argued that inversion is a superior way of life—that most of the world’s great men and women were inverts, and that cultural heights were achieved only by societies in which inversion was prominent.
Eccentric theories of homosexuality range all the way from those of the occultists who think a male soul becomes incarnated in a female body, or vice versa, to more scientific authorities who find “homosexual centers” in the brain. The American writer Charles G. Leland produced a curious book in 1904, The Alternate Sex, which argued that the subconscious mind was always of the opposite gender. Leland had frequent dreams in which he imagined he was a woman, and from this, made his generalization. One of the strangest of all homosexual theories was advanced by Sir Richard Burton. He thought there was a geographical strip circling the globe, called the “Sotadic zone,” in which inversion was concentrated.
Odd sexual theories, without factual foundation, turn up where you least expect them.3 In Ideal Marriage, by the Dutch gynecologist T. H. Van de Velde, you will learn that celery is an aphrodisiac, and that there is a semen odor in a woman’s breath after coitus. Frank Harris, who considered himself one of the world’s foremost lovers and sex authorities, reveals, in the first volume of his notorious My Life and Loves, an astonishing amount of misinformation. Among other things, he believed that a woman’s “safe” period was exactly midway between menstruations, that there was no danger of impregnation from second and third repetitions of the sex act, that a water douche would kill sperm, and that nocturnal emissions were debilitating. As a young man, he once “cured” himself of such emissions by a piece of string, tightly tied. I have not yet read Harris’ second volume, which promises to reveal love secrets of Europe and the Orient.
Of many strange theories relating to the sexual act, few have been stranger than the view of Congregationalist John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community. Noyes graduated from Dartmouth in 1830, and studied for a time in the Yale Divinity School. There he became convinced that Christ had returned in 70 A.D., with the Fall of Jerusalem, and since that time expected moral “perfection” of all his followers. Had the Lord not said, “Be ye perfect”? Noyes returned to his birthplace in Vermont, and in 1843, founded at the village of Putney a society called the Putney Corporation of Perfectionists. The group’s views aroused so much local opposition, however, that in 1848 they moved to Oneida Creek, in Madison County, New York. In a few years the colony grew to several hundred members.
“Bible Communism” was Noyes’ term for the colony’s organization, in which all property was communally owned. The group’s sex life was governed by two principles—Male Continence and Complex Marriage. It was the founder’s belief that every member of the colony should love every other member equally, and that marital fidelity was a sin of selfishness. Sex relations were permitted, therefore, between any man and woman who mutually desired them. On the other hand, births were strictly regulated in accord with eugenic laws designed to improve the community’s stock. This was before the word “eugenics” had been coined. Noyes called it “stirpiculture,” and apparently his colony was the world’s first practical experiment in applied eugenics. In this respect, Noyes perhaps deserves the high praise bestowed upon him by Havelock Ellis and George Bernard Shaw. Noyes’ pamphlet, Male Continence, was certainly one of the earliest recognitions of the fact that the pleasures of sex and the bearing of children were events which might be separated in the interests of the community.
Noyes is mentioned here, however, because of his unique views concerning the best manner of accomplishing this separation. His method, later termed coitus reservatus, involved the complete withholding of male orgasm. After the woman had achieved climax, the man permitted a gradual subsidence of desire. It seems to have worked out fairly well, without apparent injury to the men. It was, in fact, Noyes’ curious belief that this practice conserved male energy and led to increased health and virility.
Boys were initiated into the art of reservatus at puberty by older women of the colony. Girls were similarly instructed, though at a slightly later age, by the older men. Children were permitted to carefully chosen couples and were raised by the community (instead of by the parents) in the manner first proposed by Plato. This was to promote equality and to prevent what Noyes called the “idolatrous love of mother and child.” A system of “mutual criticism,” in which each member was publicly criticized by others, took the place of trials and punishments.
The community thrived for some thirty years, issuing a huge amount of propaganda in the form of books, pamphlets, and periodicals, and deriving its income chiefly from the manufacture of high-quality steel hunting traps. Later, the plating of silver flourished as a business enterprise, growing eventually into the now famous Community Plate industry. The colony finally split into factions, and Noyes was forced to flee to Canada. The experiment came to a formal end in 1879.
The view that coitus reservatus energizes and prolongs male life has since been held by a number of religious cults and defended by several writers—notably Mrs. Alice Bunker Stockham, an American physician. She called it “Karezza” in a book with that title which she published in 1896. According to Mrs. Stockham, an “exquisite exaltation” is experienced by a couple when the sex act is limited to a “quiet motion,” and the climax avoided by both parties (unless, of course, they wish children). “In the course of an hour,” she writes, “the physical tension subsides, the spiritual exaltation increases, and not uncommonly visions of a transcendent life are seen and consciousness of new powers experienced.”
Mrs. Stockham thought there should be an interval of two to three weeks between performances, and added, “. . . Many find that even three or four months afford a greater impetus to power and growth as well as more personal satisfaction; during the interval the thousand and one lover-like attentions give reciprocal delight, and are an anticipating prophecy of the ultimate union.” The book was very popular with women readers, and ran through many editions.
Almost all modern sex authorities are opposed to Karezza, though some for reasons almost as curious. Dr. Marie Stopes, the famous British promoter of birth-control, held that when the fluid from the male prostate was absorbed by the woman, it had a tonic, health-giving effect.4 Joseph Yahuda, in a recently published English work, New Biology and Medicine, 1951, carries this view one step further, and asserts that the male likewise acquires and absorbs health-promoting secretions—a kind of mutual “grafting” process, he terms it.5 Dr. Alfred Kinsey, in his famed report, takes the view that it is “normal” for a healthy male to reach climax in an extremely short period of time. His reason for thinking this is that chimpanzees ejaculate in ten to twenty seconds. “It would be difficult to find another situation,” the doctor writes, “in which an individual who was quick and intense in his responses was labeled anything but superior, and that in most instances is exactly what the rapidly ejaculating male probably is, however inconvenient and unfortunate his qualities may be from the standpoint of the wife in the relationship.” Dr. Kinsey makes no attempt to explain how or why evolution would produce such a tragic disparity.
Another modern sex authority, now living in the United States, whose views are even more violently opposed to Karezza, is the German psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich. In Reich’s thinking, the orgasm (for both sexes) assumes a more central and greater importance than in the thinking of any other authority. No neurotic, according to Reich, is capable of experiencing a full and normal orgasm. “. . . There is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients,” he writes in his best known work, The Function of the Orgasm, “the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction.” (Italics his.) From this point of view, the orgasm becomes the best index of a patient’s mental health, and consequently the achievement of a true “Reichian orgasm,” as some of his followers call it, is one of the main objectives of Reichian therapy.
In view of the fact that Reich has in recent years acquired a devoted band of disciples, chiefly in avant garde literary and art circles6 in New York and California, his theories are worth a more extended treatment. The next chapter will discuss some of his remarkable discoveries.