The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Krafft-Ebing for Kicks

Sex nerds know his name; psychology students study him; his life is outrageously amusing and strangely puzzling to anyone who pays very close attention. He’s late-nineteenth-century German-Austrian psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, he kicked around from 1840-1922, and though he studied a wide variety of psychiatric subjects, his studies of human sexuality will forever be his most profound legacy. The book he’s most remembered for is the legendary Psychopathia Sexualis, a book on sexual perversion which provides, as one of my pervy friends puts it, “Some of the best jerkoff material you’ll ever find.”

First published in 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis was the result of Krafft-Ebing’s studies in mental institutions where he discovered a choice datum or two — for example, that psychokillers, rapists and other lunatics jerk off — and drew some bizarre conclusions — for instance, that psychokillers, rapists and other lunatics are such precisely because they jerk off.

The book differentiates between four different types of pathological sexual desire, some of them a whole lot more fun than others. First there’s paradoxia sexual desire at the wrong time of life, when one is too young (a child) or too old (too old to make a baby, which was a big deal in Krafft-Ebing’s way of thinking). Then there’s anesthesia, insufficient desire (sleepy-girl fetishists would doubtless take issue), hyperesthesia, excessive desire (eg, not putting that thing away when Krafft-Ebing wished you would put it away), and my favorite — and, I’m guessing, yours — paraesthesia, sexual desire for the wrong reason, or directed at the wrong thing — that magnificent pair of six-inch stilettos, for example, or that little six-inch silicone number that’s been flirting with you, or the handsome trucker in a muscle shirt if you happen to also be a handsome trucker in a muscle shirt. Krafft-Ebing’s paraesthesia, you see, includes homosexuality, which was a criminal offense in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, assuming there were dongs involved — lesbianism wasn’t against the law, though for his part Krafft-Ebing certainly didn’t give the lesbos a thumbs-up — Psychopathia includes a nastygram to them as well.

What’s most fascinating to me about Krafft-Ebing’s definition of perversion is that it included anything that interfered with procreation or derived pleasure from non-procreative sex — but excluded any behaviors that could get somebody knocked up.

My favorite example is male masochism and/or submission: to Krafft-Ebing, that was freaky. A guy wanting to be tied up was definitely a perversion, because it could interfere with procreation, whereas female masochism was not, because a bound woman can still be impregnated, hooray! (No need to talk about his conflation of bondage-bottoms and masochists . . . that’s seriously the least of our worries with Krafft-Ebing). Similarly, rape might be a crime and a psychological problem — but it was not a perversion, because it did not interfere with procreation.

Krafft-Ebing was well aware that the general public would be fascinated by his work, and he gave it a Latin title — and wrote the book’s more salacious passages in Latin — to discourage non-academic study of the text . . . which is a nice way of saying he didn’t want Johann Blöw getting the pages all sticky. (My friend who proclaims Psychopathia the best jerkoff material around, incidentally, happens to read Latin.)

Subsequent publishers have translated both the German and the Latin passages. Like most Victorian psychiatric texts, it’s dull as hell. However, the real meat of the book, and the part that does make pretty perverse reading, is to be found in the case studies of sexual deviance, which read like they were either heavily embellished or completely made up. When I was a kid, my school was visisted by an LAPD narc who regaled us with tales of people who dropped acid for the first time and killed and ate their pets with hollandaise sauce, then cut their own faces off and jump out a 5th-floor window thinking they can fly. The case studies in Psychopathia read kind of like that, only infinitely more stodgy.

Atlanta filmmaker Bret Wood used these case studies as the source material for his 2006 film Psychopathia Sexualis. This bizarre film, which was pretty much ignored by the critics (who, I believe, didn’t get that it was both a satire and a phenomenally complicated in-joke) dramatizes a selection of Krafft-Ebing’s case studies with a poker face that has to be seen to be believed. Rendered in an agonizingly serious tone, the flick is (intentionally) one of the funniest damn things a pervert will ever see, and desperately needs to play midnight at the Castro on Halloween.

I think I’ll dress up as Krafft-Ebing himself; you’ll find me way up on the balcony, sucking on a stilletto heel and fervently interfering with procreation.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 16 October 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.