Above and Below. A series of comparisons has established itself in the human mind, owing to the enslavement of the female by the male, starting with the antithesis: male-female: good and bad, right and left, HIGH, and LOW, ABOVE and BELOW.
In every female neurotic, according to Adler, there is a refusal to be a female, that is, to be BELOW (socially as well as sexually).
The female who is inferior in looks or intelligence or position and cannot either compensate for that inferiority by displaying superiority in some other way (artistic or scientific accomplishment), or reconcile herself to her inferior position, wishes consciously and unconsciously to be a man. Consciously she makes herself as masculine as possible. Unconsciously, she dreams herself into a male personality, physically, mentally, socially AND sexually. Her wish to be ABOVE makes her play a man's part in love as well as in the world's life.
A Way Out. Homosexualism is, like every neurotic symptom, a way out of life's difficulties.
A male homosexual I treated associated the idea of woman with "trouble, sickness, expense, lack of freedom." "Every" woman was to him a "leg puller," a "gold digger," a liar, insatiable in her demands, spying on her husband, constantly suffering from "female trouble."
This man had never been married and his only sexual experiences, which were of the most ephemeral type, had been gained in the few hours of his life which he spent with a woman much older than himself, a cabaret singer and a prostitute. Yet, he was convinced that "women are too much trouble."
An unconsciously homosexual male who is married, and quite potent and who consulted me after a serious "breakdown," had a dream in which he saw himself at the top of a mountain in Africa (flight from reality and his present environment). Six large negroes (powerful male sexuality) carried away his wife's coffin, (flight from the sexual partner). A long line of negroes then walked past him and he felt that as long as he would be on friendly terms with them, he would not want for anything (line of least effort).
Female homosexuals who had never had any normal heterosexual experience ranted along the same line of thought: "A husband is too much trouble." "The idea of submitting to a brute of a man," "I don't wish to be a slave to a man," etc.
All this voices what Adler terms the "masculine protest."