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Nerina Milletti, 1996. "Tribadi & socie:la sessualità femminile non conforme nei termini e nelle definizioni". In: Rivista di Scienze Sessuologiche, 9(1-2): 19-36.

Troviamo questo appellativo in Sir Richard Francis Burton, "Terminal Essay: Section D: Pederasty ", nella sua traduzione de Le mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights, 1885) (2)

In lingua italiana ad esempio in "La contessa d'Amalfi" II cap (Le novelle della Pescara, 1902) (3) e ne Il piacere, 1889 (4)

1 "Ac ne me foliis ideo breuioribus ornes,
quod timui mutare modos et carminis artem:
temperat Archilochi musam pede mascula Sappho,
temperat Alcaeus, sed rebus et ordine dispar,
nec socerum quaerit, quem uersibus oblinat atris,
nec sponsae laqueum famoso carmine nectit".

2 "The only physical cause for the practice which suggests itself to me and that must be owned to be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments, a crasis which elsewhere occurs only sporadically. Hence the male féminisme whereby the man becomes patiens as well as agens, and the woman a tribade, a votary of mascula Sappho [*], Queen of Frictrices or Rubbers[**]. Prof. Mantegazza claims to have discovered the cause of this pathological love, this perversion of the erotic sense, one of the marvellous list of amorous vagaries which deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist. According to him the nerves of the rectum and the genitalia, in all cases closely connected, are abnormally so in the pathic who obtains, by intromission, the venereal orgasm which is usually sought through the sexual organs. So amongst women there are tribads who can procure no pleasure except by foreign objects introduced a posteriori. Hence his threefold distribution of sodomy; 1) Periphic or anatomical, caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves and their hyperaesthesia; 2) Luxurious, when love a tergo is preferred on account of the narrowness of the passage; and 3) the Psychical. But this is evidently superficial: the question is what causes this neuropathy, this abnormal distribution and condition of the nerves [***].
-----
* 'Mascula,' from the priapiscus, the over-development of clitoris (the veretrum muliebre, in Arabic Abu Tartur, habens cristam) which enabled her to play the man. Sappho (nat. 612 B.C.) has been retoillée like Mary Stuart, La Brinvilliers, Marie Antoinette and a host of feminine names which have a savour not of sanctity. Maximus of Tyre (Dissert. xxiv.) declares that the Eros of Sappho was Socratic and that Gyrinna and Atthis were as Alcibiades and Chermides to Socrates: Ovid, who could consult documents now lost, takes the same view in the Letter of Sappho to Phaon and in Tristia ii. 265
--- Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?
Suidas supports Ovid. Longinus eulogises the erotike mania (a term applied only to carnal love) of the far-famed Ode to Atthis
---Ille mî par esse Deo videtur . . .
---Heureux! qui près de toi pour toi seule soupire
---(Blest as th' immortal gods is he, etc )
By its love symptoms, suggesting that possession is the sole cure for passion Erasistratus discovered the love of Antiochus for Stratonice. Mure (Hist. of Greek Literature, 1850) speaks of the Ode to Aphrodite (Frag. 1) as 'one in which the whole volume of Greek literature offers the most powerful concentration into one brilliant focus of the modes in which amatory concupiscence can display itself.' But Bernhardy, Bode, Richter, K. O. Muller and esp. Welcker have made Sappho a model of purity, much like some of our dull wits who have converted Shakespeare, that most debauched genius, into a good British bourgeois.
** The Arabic Sahhákah, the Tractatrix of Subigitatrix, who has been noticed in vol. iv. 134. Hence to Lesbianise (lesbizein) and tribassare (tríbesthai) the former applied to the love of woman for woman and the latter to its mécanique: this is either natural, as friction of the labia and insertion of the clitoris when unusually developed; or artificial by means of the fascinum, the artificial penis (the Persian 'Mayájang'); the patte de chat, the banana-fruit and a multitude of other succedanea. As this feminine perversion is only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly enlarge upon the subject.
*** Plato (Symp.) is probably mystical when he accounts for such passions by there being in the beginning three species of humanity, men, women and men-women or androgynes. When the latter were destroyed by Zeus for rebellion, the two others were individually divided into equal parts. Hence each division seeks its other half in the same sex; the primitive man prefers men and the primitive woman women. C'est beau, but - is it true? The idea was probably derived from Egypt which supplied the Hebrews with androgynic humanity and thence it passed to extreme India, where Shiva as Ardhanarl was male on one side and female on the other side of the body, combining paternal and maternal qualities and functions. The first creation of humans (Gen. i. 27) was hermaphrodite (= Hermes and Venus) masculum et foeminam creavit eos -- male and female created He them - on the sixth day, with the command to increase and multiply (ibid. v. 28) while Eve the woman was created subsequently. Meanwhile, say certain Talmudists, Adam carnally copulated with all races of animals. See L'Anandryne in Mirabeau's Erotika Biblion, where Antoinette Bourgnon laments the undoubling which disfigured the work of God, producing monsters incapable of independent self-reproduction like the vegetable kingdom.

3 "Su le tribune raggiava una corona di signore e di signorine gloriosissima. Teodolinda Pomàrici, la filodrammatica sentimentale e linfatica, sedeva accanto a Fermina Memma la mascula. Le Fusilli, venute da Castellammare, grandi fanciulle dagli occhi nerissimi, vestite di una eguale stoffa rosea, tutte con i capelli stretti in treccia giù per la schiena, ridevano forte e gesticolavano. Emilia d'Annunzio volgeva attorno i belli occhi lionati con un'aria di tedio infinito. Mariannina Cortese faceva segni col ventaglio a Donna Rachele Profeta che stava di fronte. Donna Rachele Bucci con Donna Rachele Carabba ragionava di tavolini parlanti e di apparizioni. Le maestre Del Gado, vestite tutt'e due di seta cangiante, con mantellette di moda antichissima e con certe cuffie luccicanti di pagliuzze d'acciaio, tacevano, compunte, forse stordite dalla novità del caso, forse pentite d'esser venute a uno spettacolo profano. Costanza Lesbii tossiva continuamente, rabbrividendo sotto lo scialle rosso; bianca bianca, bionda bionda, sottile sottile".

4 "E Donna Bianca si dileguò. E vennero altre, talvolta in coppia: Barbarella Viti, la mascula, che aveva una superba testa di giovinetto, tutta quanta dorata e fulgente come certe teste giudee del Rembrandt; la contessa di Lùcoli, la dama delle turchesi, una Circe di Dosso Dossi, con due bellissimi occhi pieni di perfidia, varianti come i mari d'autunno, grigi, azzurri, risplendenti di quella prodigiosa carnagione, composta di luce, di rose e di latte, che han soltanto i babies delle grandi famiglie inglesi nelle tele del Reynolds, del Gainsborough e del Lawrences; la marchesa Du Deffand, una bellezza del Direttorio, una Récamier, dal lungo e puro ovale, dal collo di cigno, dalle mammelle saglienti, dalle braccia bacchiche; Donna Isotta Cellesi, la dama degli smeraldi, che volgeva con una lenta maestà divina la sua testa d'imperatrice tra lo scintillio delle enormi gemme ereditarie; la principessa Kalliwoda, la dama senza gioielli, che nella fragilità delle sue forme chiudeva nervi d'acciaio per il piacere, e su la cerea delicatezza dei suoi lineamenti apriva due voraci occhi leonini, gli occhi d'uno Scita. Ciascuno di questi amori portò a lui una degradazione novella..".