II. The Place of the Androgyne in the Male Sex Scale.
The Third Sex.
Throughout the ages that mankind have trod the earth, a broad and endless stream of masculinity has coursed along until swallowed in the ocean of eternity. In all streams—whether of water, lava, or manhood—the particles at the center flow most rapidly and the speed gradually decreases toward the banks. At occasional points along the latter, the particles are stationary, or there is even an eddy.
(1) The Tremendously Virile cause the surging rapids at the center of the masculine river. Their pre-eminent characteristic lies in excessive venery and excessive promiscuity. Sex holds by far the chief place in their thoughts. A large part of their waking hours is spent in the torture of unsatisfied longing. Their conversation with business intimates tends to sexual lines. They are the “black sheep” of families, never letting an opportunity go by without improving it. They are the seducers of girls under puberty. They are largely instrumental in securing a continuous flow of recruits to the rapidly decimating demimonde. Indeed the tremendously virile constitute the latter’s chief raison d’etre.
Their ambition being to be “the husbands of all women,” the tremendously virile, among Christian nations, often do not marry. If they do, a separation or divorce follows within a few years.
As a rule, only these free lances—as long as under thirty—appeal to androgynes as “heroes.” To them |The Tremendously Virile.| alone do these pseudo-men yearn to devote themselves as slaves.
As a rule, the tremendously virile are not gentlemen. For they possess not even a vestige of mild or semi-feminine traits. They are overbearing, quarrelsome, and pugnacious. They will not take a back seat for any one. They constitute the raw material for the roughest, rudest, and most death-defying occupations, as volunteer soldiers and sailors, pugilists, highwaymen, and burglars. They abhor prosaic work.
As a rule, the tremendously virile are men of only three interests in life: fighting (including the slaughter of dumb beasts, in their inability to give the same treatment to their fellow man); sport in the usual sense of that word; and the sexual instinct. But a mere handful, whom Nature endowed with unusual brain power, have been leaders in war and politics. In the United States, I dare instance only Mohammed, Henry the Eighth, Louis the Fourteenth, and Bismarck. But leaders of the American nation have belonged to this tremendously virile class. I dare not name them because cultured society, with their present mediæval ideas on sex, severely censure men of this class as “bestial.” But the latter are fundamentally irresponsible.
In absolute monarchies and aristocracies almost throughout history, the tremendously virile have been at the helm of the ship of state. Because they have been, by birth, the greatest fighters. They thus forged to the front and pre-empted for themselves and their posterity the best things of life. Their constituting themselves the ruling class has rendered history, for the most part, a record of wars. Tremendous virility, |The Ultra-Virile.| combined with unusual brain power, makes the born leader of men, before whose will the masses bow unquestioningly and they blindly turn themselves into “cannon fodder” at his beck and call. Only since the dawn of the nineteenth century have the mildly virile been coming into their own, and brain and science beginning to get the upper hand over brute force. The recent World War was the final resurgence of the tremendously virile as moulders of the destinies of nations, as well as the death blow to their ambitions in this direction.
As the status of peoples descends from the enlightened to the savage, the proportion that this class forms of the entire male sex gradually increases. Among enlightened nations, I estimate it at five per cent on the basis of my intimate mingling, in the role of a soubrette, with several thousand young bachelors belonging exclusively to either the tremendously or ultra-virile class, while nearly all my every-day associates have belonged to the mildly virile.
On the basis of my reading in anthropology, I estimate the proportion among savages at seventy-five per cent. Among the adult males, I have read that women constitute almost the sole topic of conversation. Fighting and sport fill up the rest of life. When an explorer has visited a savage or barbarous tribe, the outstanding hospitality is the provision of a bed-fellow belonging to the gentle sex.
(2) The Ultra-Virile, on either side of the sexually fastest flowing particles just described, take their less rapid course in the stream of masculinity. Sex occupies their thoughts to a much less extent. But, like the tremendously virile, they are naturally |Natural Polygamy.| polygamous. Only these two classes of males, together with ultra-androgynes and a small proportion of the mildly androgynous, sow wild oats, beginning in their later teens and ending usually in their later twenties. Prior to settling down in marriage, the ultra-virile secretly do not care a fig for the sexual mandates of Christian society. But for the sake of appearances, they hypocritically chime in with the regnant note and openly condemn in the harshest terms the least infraction of the conventions by another than themselves. After marriage, however, their infidelities are few and far between. Perhaps a score in a life-time, as compared with a thousand upward for the tremendously virile.
The ultra-virile make excellent husbands and divorce is rare. The wife, however, while herself occupying first place in the husband’s affections, has much cause for jealousy.
While the ultra-virile do not regularly choose an occupation free from prosaic toil and ministering to love of sport and adventure, they are usually averse to intellectual pursuits, favoring the manual. If possessing unusual brain power, the ultra-virile man heads some engineering or construction enterprise. The ultra-virile build our railroads, great bridges, leviathans, and sky-scrapers. A handful are distinguished by a knack for political leadership and have contributed the vast majority of such leaders.
Both the tremendously and the ultra-virile tend to excel in physique and comeliness. Some athletes, however, are only mildly virile. “Virility” refers only to sexual power. More than the ordinary erotic ardor, however, usually goes hand in hand with |The Mildly Virile.| brawn, just as intellectual tastes and spirituality do with brain. With the evolution of the race in culture, erotic ardor, together with the animal side of man’s nature in general, is declining. The goal for which the race is headed is the minimum of sexual consciousness, coitus for procreation only, just enough offspring to keep the number of the human race on earth stationary, lengthened life, and ever increasing expansion of the intellectual in man at the expense of the physical. With this evolution, the proportion of sterile bisexuals will also increase.
The fighting forces of a nation are almost entirely made up of the two more virile classes, although together constituting only about twenty-five per cent of the total manhood of civilized nations. It is dangerous for the world’s peace when these two classes get control of a great nation’s government. Of the five classes of males being described, these two alone love war and seek occasion for it.
(3) The Mildly Virile constitute, among so-called “Christian” nations, about seventy-five per cent of all males.[[3]] Only on rare occasions do thoughts |Natural Monogamy.| about sexual congress enter their minds. That is, if married, they desire it only about once a fortnight or so, and up to the date of marriage, the incentive is so weak that they never gratify it. Thus up to the bridal night, this class three have usually been as chaste as their better halves. They have usually never indulged even in masturbation, while the generality of classes one and two have indulged frequently from around the age of ten to the period in which opportunities cum femina or cum androgyna become plentiful. In the mildly virile man’s ignorance of the force of sex in classes one and two, however, he has been known to be obsessed with the delusion that sex in himself is strongly developed. The mildly virile always marry, although a few postpone it until much past thirty. Subsequently they have at most only negligible desires to drink water at a strange cistern. They are content to go to their graves having been absolutely faithful to the lawful wife, or several successive ones, that God gave them. Divorce is almost unknown, since its cause, in nearly every case, is de facto polygamy in the husband, or his excessive demands on the frigid wife—two faults absent from the psyche of the mildly virile.
The sexual life of the latter flows on gently and smoothly. It is called humdrum by the tremendously virile, continuously wafted up and down in a dizzy fashion in the rapids at the center of the masculine river. But what the mildly virile miss of the “pep” of life is more than compensated by the blissful peace that characterizes their earthly journey.
Their abhorrence of androgynism is many times as intense as in the case of the more virile. While not a single mildly virile man would ever succumb to |Anaphrodites.| androgyne allurements, I have ascertained through many years’ association with thousands of tremendously or ultra-virile that at least seventy-five per cent readily suffer capture providing their sexual needs are not already abundantly gratified. The chief reason for the bitter antagonism of the mildly virile is that they know androgynism only by hearsay. They have not, like the more virile—to whom alone androgynes gravitate—been eye-witnesses of the entirely innocent, innocuous, and even pitiable sexuality of these pseudo-men.
The mildly virile, constituting the vast majority of all males in “Christian” countries, seek to impose the dictates of their own sexual natures upon all men whatsoever. The sexual mandates of “Christian” society and of the New Testament express the sex feelings in part of the mildly virile, and in part of the anaphrodites. Whatever harmonizes with these feelings is right; whatever fails to, is “bestial.”
The mildly virile are inclined toward the less strenuous occupations, as agriculture, manufacturing, and trade. They also include ninety-five per cent of intellectuals.
(4) The cold Anaphrodites are the particles that cling immovably to the banks of the masculine river.[[4]] They neither progress nor regress. They number about one-half of one per cent of all adult males. Like the ultra-androgynes, they have a horror of women from the sex point of view. But unlike the |St. Paul’s Sex Teachings.| former, their minds are devoid of hero-worship and they shudder violently at the very thought of any kind of association grounded on sex differences. Their anaphroditism is either an after-effect of an illness in childhood or congenital.
For the most part, anaphrodites are intellectuals. The exquisite joys associated with courtship and marriage that they are predestined never to know are more than compensated by Providence in the way of extra allotment of intellectual enjoyment. Herbert Spencer is the shining example of anaphroditism of the nineteenth century.[[5]]
Since anaphrodites are not suffused with adoration for any type of human, the vast majority are the more inclined to lift their thoughts to their Creator. Some great religious leaders have been anaphrodites. St. Paul, in his epistles, shows little patience even with normal sex phenomena. He advises that every man imitate his own absolute celibacy. “But if they can not contain, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn [to lust].”
It is impossible for the tremendously or the ultra-sexed to live up to the sexual ideals of an anaphrodite. And yet St. Paul’s epistles bind them upon Christians. It is infinitely easier for an anaphrodite to be a saint than for the ultra-virile to be even decent. St. Paul’s sex teachings constitute the greatest stumbling block of the church. They have caused the human race a |Androgynes.| world of woe. Belief in St. Paul’s inerrancy makes it impossible to reconcile Christian ethics with the incontrovertible teachings of Nature. While, in respect to value to the human race, I give St. Paul’s epistles first place among all published documents (the woe they have occasioned being, a thousand times over, outweighed by the light they have given man on the greatest questions that puzzle his brain) I must, particularly because of their false sex doctrines, deny their inerrancy. If inerrant, the human race ought to have ceased existence eighteen hundred years ago.
Jesus made no such blunders in his sex teaching. He was the only biblical teacher apparently to recognize the existence of androgynes without thundering against them. As “eunuchs from their mother’s womb,” he may of course have had in mind only anaphrodites. But apparently he was aware of the existence of androgynes. St. John the Divine, apparently his favorite disciple, having possessed the earmarks, particularly “softness” of disposition.
(5) Androgynes are the eddies along the banks of the masculine river. Their movement is retrograde. They are instances of arrest of development. In the early fœtus sex is not apparent. Only later does differentiation begin. In more than ninety-nine out of a hundred humans, it is completed at puberty. But the individual androgyne or gynander remains, down to death, to a greater or less degree bisexual. Just as a mule is part horse and part donkey, so an androgyne or gynander is part man and part woman. To quote from Krafft-Ebing: “They [androgynes] are neither man nor woman: a mixture of both; with secondary |Acquired or Congenital?| psychic and physical characteristics of the one as well as the other sex.”[[6]]
Androgynes tend to occupations having to do with |Androgynes Are Aesthetes.| art—in the widest sense of that word. They are extreme æsthetes. I quote from Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age (published by Boni and Liveright) page 135, where he speaks of male urnings, called by myself “androgynes”: “At the bottom lies the artist-nature, with the artist’s sensibility and perception. Such a one is often a dreamer, of brooding reserved habits, often a musician, or a man of culture, ... almost always with a peculiar inborn refinement. De Joux ... says...: ‘They are enthusiastic for poetry and music, are often eminently skilful in the fine arts, and are overcome with emotion and sympathy at the least sad occurrence.... The nerve system of many an urning is the finest and the most complicated musical instrument in the service of the interior personality that can be imagined.’” (R. W.’s comment: An androgyne is usually a bundle of nerves.)
In my university course in æsthetics, the professor lamented that art tends to make its devotees immoral. He probably had in mind the notorious frequency of homosexuality among æsthetes. But he got the cart before the horse. The æsthetes affected were born bisexual and their devotion to art was a consequence.
Androgynes are clearly of two types, each of which, the author estimates, constitutes in the United States about one out of every three hundred humans possessing the male primary determinants:[[7]] (a) The |The Mildly Androgynous.| mildly androgynous, of whom Oscar Wilde is the best known of contemporaries; and (b) the ultra-androgynous, of whom the present writer is the most widely known of his generation.
(a) The anatomy of the mildly androgynous is not conspicuously feminine. Only a few feminine traits appear in the psyche. The mildly androgynous always mingle with full-fledged males and seek to pass as such themselves. As a cloak, they are prone to fabricate about excesses cum femina. But while secretly preferring homosexual romance, they are capable of espousing a woman and begetting children. |The Ultra-Androgynous.| Sexologists have therefore called them “psychic hermaphrodites.”
(b) In ultra-androgynes alone, the physique is noticeably feminesque, and the psyche predominantly feminine. As a rule, they alone have a craze to decorate themselves in feminine finery and spread paint and powder on their faces. They tend to avoid the society of full-fledged males except to display to a tremendously virile coterie—to whom they are generally incognito—their skill in female-impersonation.
Unless otherwise indicated I shall use the terms “androgyne” and “pseudo-man” only in reference to the ultra-androgynous. All my androgyne associates whom I shall portray in this book belong to this class, because with a few exceptions they alone are Female-Impersonators. In my Riddle of the Underworld I describe some mild androgynes.
There exists vast diversity in the anatomy and psyche of androgynes—just as, from the standpoint of size and shape of the genitalia and sexual tastes, any two full-fledged males or any two full-fledged females differ more or less. In one androgyne, the only conspicuous external feminine stigma may be absence of beardal growth; in another, mammary glands; in another, the complete skeleton or the complete muscular system of the female. The one physical feminine stigma that is indispensable to the possession of a decidedly feminine psyche and the quasi-female method of sexual expression is the female variety of brain protoplasm. For there have probably lived naturally beardless men, males possessing milk glands or sissie voices, etc., who have nevertheless not been at all homosexual. But such are exceptions to the rule.
A Medical Superstition.
While an earmark of ultra-androgynism is sexual passivity, the mildly androgynous may be active pederasts or mutual onanists. Only in the case of ultra-androgynes are the individual’s genitalia entirely divorced—as a rule—from the sexual life. For them, Nature has substituted other organs.
Ultra-androgynes are, by birth, practically identical with males castrated in early childhood, except that adult artificial eunuchs are usually overlarge. Adult ultra-androgynes tend merely to plumpness as a result of their dwarfed genitalia.
I have heard of ultra-androgynes, who, in their early twenties, on their physician’s advice, married a woman, when Nature intended they should marry a man. All high-minded “homosexualists,” soon after arrival at puberty, consult a medical man for a cure. From time immemorial it has been one of the profession’s superstitions that marriage would cure homosexual tendencies. Some unsophisticated adolescent androgynes put faith in their physician’s positive assurance that marriage is a sure cure. If, as a matter of conscience alone, the androgyne promises the physician to marry, he sometimes goes insane over the dread of it, or else commits suicide, either on the eve of marriage, or a few days afterward. But even if the marriage ceremony is performed, the consummation never takes place in the case of ultra-androgynes, and the wedded state proves very unhappy for both parties. At least in the case of the ultra-androgynes, such marriage possesses no curative value. Chronic and extreme homosexuality is congenital and incurable. It is monstrous to advise even a mild androgyne to marry, and thus contribute to propagating a line of |Hermaphrodites.| unhappy and unwelcome bisexuals down through the centuries.
The two classes of androgynes do not mix well. Just as the full-fledged man is averse to attendance at a ladies’ sewing-circle. Particularly the mildly androgynous fear suspicion of their secret if they associated with ultra-androgynes. Coteries of ultra-androgynes naturally form. Knowing their own nature, they readily recognize one another, although down to 1921 at least, the sexually full-fledged have usually been blind to the androgynism of daily associates, because they were never permitted to learn of their existence.
(6) Pseudo-Hermaphrodites are humans possessing in part both the male and the female genitalia, or else organs so deformed that even sexologists are unable to determine the sex until puberty. In half such cases, the physician then pronounces the individual to belong to the sex other than that with which he or she has identified him or herself. As a rule, they subsequently live and clothe themselves per prescription. But some, accustomed to the dress and usages of their first sex, choose to identify themselves with it throughout life.
Pseudo-hermaphrodites are the limit toward which the ultra-androgynous approach by slight gradations. Their frequency is not greater than one in a million to ten million humans.
(7) Full Human Hermaphrodites—possessing both complete male and complete female genitalia—have never been encountered. There exists in medical annals, however, a pseudo-hermaphrodite who so nearly approached full hermaphrodism that at one period he-she claimed to have lived as husband and father, |The Sex Scale.| and at a later, as wife and mother. This reputed transposition is in accord with the observed phenomenon[[8]] of an individual’s passing over from one sex class to another at the climacteric corresponding to menopause in woman.
I have a theory that the sex class of an individual male depends on the size, but particularly the vigor, of his physical reproductive apparatus. I have ascertained such variety to be practically infinite, and psychicly as well as physically.
There exist no sharp dividing lines among the six classes of males. While the bulk of a particular class correspond closely to the description, there are individuals on each side of such mode who constitute slight gradations over to the next class. Thus each class gradually and almost imperceptibly shades off into the next. There exists indeed a sex scale along which all human beings can be theoretically arranged. At one pole stands the tremendously virile man—for example, the rough volunteer common soldier, as a rule intensely polygamous; at the other the petite, cry-baby species of woman. Androgynes and gynanders occupy exactly the middle section, looking toward both the male and the female side.
It is quasi-instinctive with each sex class to scorn members of another class just because they happen to be built on a different plan. It is the same phenomenon prevalent in the religious domain in past centuries, when the Roman Catholic yearned to murder the Protestant and vice versa. Which intolerance the |Sex Animosity.| gradual conquest of human affairs by reason is pushing further and further into the background. But still in the twentieth century, reason is a nonentity in the domain of sex. There all is illogical instinct and bigotry. Each sex class still revels in calling the others bad names. The tremendously virile “fellow” bellows out at the mildly: “You milk-sop!” The latter calls back: “You rake!” The ultra-virile hisses through his teeth at the anaphrodite: “You dried tree!” The mildly virile points his finger at the androgyne: “Unclean! Unclean! Child of the devil! Monster!” And even if I do not say so here, the reader will conclude after finishing this book: The androgyne calls back at the mildly virile: “You hypocrite! You Pharisee!” For the outstanding earmark of the mildly virile is Phariseeism. They think they themselves are the only moral and God-fearing men in the world, and that all other men are sexually vile.
Is it right to chastise a horse because he prefers to munch hay out of a manger instead of walking into his owner’s dining-room; throwing himself backwards into an enormous chair; squeezing with difficulty a spoon between his two front hoofs; and with it carrying to his mouth ice-cream and French pastry? The average man (who is of the mildly virile type) says that the latter is, for every creature, the superior method of taking nourishment, and insists on all others conforming to what is right in his own eyes. If they do not, he ostracizes and even imprisons and murders those who dare to offend his æsthetic sense.
In general, man is a free agent. But his sex class is imposed by Providence. Just as he is not responsible for the face he has to carry through life.
Poultry Bisexuality.
Why should not every human be at liberty to live out his life in the way Nature ordains for him so far as he does not thereby transgress against any one else?[[9]]
Ancient Greek Statue of an Androgyne, Called “Hermaphroditos,” Now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy