Now all kinds of possibilities of conflict emerge. The child is still a bisexual, growing into a mixed sex type, depending upon the nature and amount of its internal secretions. The influencing adult of the family, the most important of the external factors encouraging or depressing the tendencies of the child, possesses a fairly fixed ideal of monosexuality which he or she, generally quite unconsciously, seeks to impose upon it. A doting feminine mother will make her son as much as possible like her husband: if she dislikes her husband, as much as possible like her father or grandfather. A masculinized mother will tend to make a sex object out of the son, however, which means his feminization. But, on the internal secretion side, the boy may be definitely masculine. That is, after adolescence he would be strongly masculine, if the vegetative-endocrine mechanisms created by the mother's personality had not slipped into the inside track, so to speak. As a consequence, continual subconscious conflict between the two sets of sex reaction will, sooner or later, disturb, perhaps disrupt and ruin his life.
So an infant may start life with a fairly balanced endocrine equipment, with its wake of a normal life (barring accidents and infections), and yet he may end as an inferior, insane, criminal, or failure directly because of establishment of conflict between himself as one sort of sex type, and his obligatory associates of another sort of mixed sex type. This applies also to the mother-daughter, the father-son, and the father-daughter relationship.
Male and female created He them, is a bald misstatement of the facts. Male and female emerge as final by-products of endocrine heredity, environmental treatment and adaptation. Often the male-female, the female-male, persist anatomically, or are forced to persist functionally. Society, constructed upon the Biblical dogmas of man as a fallen angel, and absolute sex, is responsible for much misery and suffering meted out to the functional hermaphrodite, as we shall see later in an analysis of the endocrine character of Oscar Wilde. The privileges and powers of sex relationship, marriage and parenthood, should be safeguarded for the mixed sex type, the man or woman with the variable sex index. For there are no tragedies in life more pitiful than those in which an aggressive masculinely built type is forced to assume a submissive, receptive, passive, feminine rôle and vice versa, the tragedy of compelled homosexuality, because of wrong associates.
MASOCHISM AND SADISM
The functional hermaphrodite enables us, too, to understand the phenomena of masochism and sadism, to a certain extent, on the chemical side. The masculine personality, the combination of masculine, e.g., adrenal cortex and gonad internal secretion predominance, is built for aggression. The feminine personality, the union of feminine, e.g. thyroid and ovarian superiority, is constructed for submission. Reverse the possibilities, or confuse them, as occurs in the functional hermaphrodite, and the attitudes become reversed or perverted. So a masculinoid personality in woman will make for sadism, a feminoid personality in a man for masochism. Variants and refinements of these perversions will often be found in the functional hermaphrodite who must satisfy two doubly flowing streams of visceral pressure within himself. Persistence of the thymus or pineal gland tends to a prolongation of the infantile and child types, that will be taken advantage of.
CHAPTER VII
THE RHYTHMS OF SEX
If one permits a drop of ink to fall into a glass of water, amazing figures and shapes, bizarre and chameleon, are born as the blue swirls and whirls through the resisting medium. Unseen forces and currents, tides and pressures, set up a seething and flowing, pulling and twisting of the drop of ink until it becomes a strange wraith created out of the molecules. A temporary individuality lives in the water.
So likewise the forces of sex, essentially the forces of the internal secretions, mould and sculpt and mould again the woman out of the flesh and blood. Adolescence—puberty—menstruation: the maid,—pregnancy—labor—lactation: the matron, thirty years of ups and downs of these processes around the idea of love or suppressed love, against an aesthetic background of some sort—and finally the loss of the stress and strain of sex, the menopause. All the landmarks of the life of woman, in their entirety, are erected and dominated by the tides and currents, the phases of concentration and dilution, of the different internal secretions in the endocrine mixture which is the blood.
Marvelous are all the manifestations of the reproductive necessity. Considering that reproduction was at first merely a form of growth, a discontinuous kind of growth, that seized upon sex as a splendid means to escape death, the chemical methods evolved arouse a sense of awe. A baby is born with her or his glands practically as fixed for her or him as the color of the eyes. Thymus and pineal keep him a child, keep him unsexed. Then at puberty, a new current is added to the calmly flowing river, and behold! a turmoil. Ovaries or testes actively functioning erupt upon the calm spectacle, and the girl is transfigured into the maid, the boy into the youth. After the ovaries, the corpus luteum: after the corpus luteum, the placenta: after the placenta, the mammary glands: after that the cycle begins again until the ovaries are exhausted and the chain is broken. Besides, all the other glands of internal secretion beat in rhythm, fluctuate in their activities, may divide prematurely the tides or dam them completely.