Title: Pathologizing Male Desire: Satyriasis, Masculinity, and Modern Civilization at the Fin de Siècle
Abstract: O n 9 n O v e m b e r 1888 p O l i c e in the Whitechapel quarter of London’s East End discovered the body of Mary Kelly. She was the fifth victim of the killer whom the press had already dubbed Jack the Ripper, and her disfigured corpse showed that his brutality was escalating. After murdering Kelly, the Ripper spent two hours mutilating her body. Desperate for clues, police called in Dr. Thomas Bond to perform an autopsy. Bond, however, also offered police a psychological profile of the killer. He was likely a “quiet, inoffensive looking man” who was “neatly and respectably dressed.” His acquaintances might suspect that he was “not quite right in his mind at times,” but otherwise they would have had no inkling of his sadistic nature. Bond also speculated about the origins of the Ripper’s murderous insanity. One possibility was a form of religious mania, another a “revengeful and brooding” cast of mind. The most likely cause, however, was a violent sexual pathology to which some men were susceptible and that, Bond informed police, “may be called satyriasis.” Satyriasis had long been familiar to physicians as, in very rough terms, the male equivalent of nymphomania. The name of the condition evoked the satyr, the half-beast and half-human figure of Greek mythology famed for lustfulness and promiscuity. In a book written in the first century AD, Aretaeus of Cappadocia defined satyriasis as a condition of excessive desire in men that, by inducing a state of severe sexual frustration, would lead to sickness and death. For Renaissance writers, satyriasis was characterized by excessive and unrequited passion for another. In his Treatise on Lovesickness
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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