[AU] Timidity may cause actual shrinkage of the penis to half the size of its ordinary flaccid condition.
[AV] In small doses alcohol is stimulating to the desires and is creating power, but chronic alcoholism causes loss of desire and power. Acute alcoholic intoxication also often paralyses the nerves of erection.
[AW] Without this instinct, tumescence is impossible, and tumescence must be obtained in men for erection and in women for orgasm, before detumescence is possible. Hence coition must be in some slight degree desired by the man, or it cannot take place at all. The potency of man’s voluptas is, therefore, a condition sine qua non for copulation. Not so in woman, she may submit without desire or excitement and allow the man to enjoy complete satisfaction. But a man’s pleasurable excitement is the necessary condition of woman’s sexual gratification. The male potencies of voluptas and of erection are the conditions of copulation even for the woman, but the reverse is not the case.
[AX] The Romans distinguished four different kinds of castrates and designated them by four different names. (1) Castrati, in whom testicles and penis have been removed, (2) Spadones, in whom the testicles only have been removed, (3) Thlibiae, in whom the testicles were only crushed but not removed, (4) Thlasiae, in whom the spermatic cord was simply cut.
[AY] These signs may easily be suppressed by the strong-willed wife, who wishes to make her husband believe that her sexual activity is a continual sacrifice to his sensual desires and that she herself has no feeling whatsoever during the act. By this trick she tries to rule him and generally succeeds, especially when the husband is somewhat sensual by nature. This stratagem is also responsible for men’s general belief in women’s frigidity. In their youth men associate with venal women who are naturally anaesthetic in their activities for hire. Later on they are tricked by their wives. Even great writers are deceived in this respect by their fair partners.
[AZ] The word frigidity is used by the best writers in an ambiguous sense. Both, impotence of voluptas and impotence of libido, are designated by frigidity, especially by the lay-writers. By right only the woman suffering from impotence of voluptas is really cold and frigid. She is the one who does not care for the other sex at all. The patient suffering from impotence of libido is not at all cold or frigid toward the other sex. On the contrary, she is very passionate, but she has no use for coition because it does not bring her satisfaction. She is only anaesthetic for a certain kind of stimuli, i. e., coition.
[BA] Vide Talmey, N. Y. Med. Jour., May 24, 1913.
[BB] It is nowadays the fashion of sex-determinism to attribute every human emotion or its anomalies to sex. Thus not only cruelty connected with sexual activity is termed sadism, but every kind of cruelty is imputed to sadistic emotions. When the Spanish nations in Europe or America love to see bull-fights and thus enjoy cruelty, inflicted upon animals, these sex-determinists at once attribute this love of cruelty to the sadistic nature of the Latin and his descendants. This averment has as much right to make claim upon our credulity as the assertion that when an infant falls back satisfied after nursing at its mother’s breast, this satisfaction is of libidinous sexual nature. These singular saints see sex everywhere, nothing but sex. No wonder that such claims are repudiated by the logical mind. It is such exaggerations which tend to bring the best teachings and theories into discredit.
[BC] This Platonic explanation of homosexuality, attributing the anomaly to the influence of a deity, is not quite modern, but it served its purpose at that time. All the modern theories do not do any more. For instance, the theory that men afflicted with an inverted sexual instinct have a female brain and male sexual glands, “anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa,” is, as far as a theory goes, a good enough working theory, but as far as a real explanation of the causes of the homosexual anomaly is concerned, it does not contribute one iota (nor does any other theory the author is acquainted with) to the etiology of the abnormal emotion.
The reason is plain. We can never hope to find the cause of the abnormal emotion before we have first gained absolute knowledge of the nature of normal sex-attraction. Why does the Chilodon need conjugation at definite periods? Why does it not go on dividing and multiplying indefinitely without conjugation? The answer “protoplasmatic” hunger or “erotic chemotropismus” (erotic chemotropismus is not always the cause of sex-attraction; this clearly shows the infatuation, sometimes met with, of a normal woman with a girl masquerading as a boy, where no spermatozoa enter into the play; on the other hand, normally no chemotropismus seems to exist between the ova and spermatozoa of sister and brother who have been brought up together, while brother and sister do sometimes fall in love with each other if they are ignorant of their relationship) only begs the question. Whence comes this protoplasmatic hunger, whence this erotic chemotropismus? Do these beautiful high-sounding phrases say more than, e. g., a physician’s diagnosis “colonic stasis,” when the patient complains of constipation. Telling a homosexual man that he has a female brain is telling him what he already knows.