The ovaries cease producing their eggs and so shrivel as a storage battery atrophies when it dries up. An important member of the endocrine board of directors thus drops out, and so a rearrangement of gland activities, a new régime, becomes necessary. If a balance of power is established quickly and equitably, very little happens. Quickly the woman passes on to the next plane of her existence. But if some endocrine proves recalcitrant, and takes advantage of the situation to make itself dominant, trouble and maladjustment, and their psychic echoes, come. Anterior pituitary control will mean a relative masculinization, with hair on the face and aggressive attitudes. Post-pituitary most often refuses to settle down, and expressing its ambition as headaches, flushes, obesity and hysteria, may cause extreme misery and unhappiness to its possessor. Sooner or later, if the harmonious equilibrium of the normal life is to be revived, all the glands must regress, thyroid, pituitary and adrenals.
With the waning of the ovarian function, the thyroid type will also exhibit its particular flare. If there is thyroid excess the woman will be excitable and irritable, the thyroid deficient will be depressed and dull, the thyroid unstable (that is swinging between excess and deficiency) will have a cyclic up and down alternation of mood and temperament. The adrenal centered will have a high blood pressure and masculinoid traits, the adrenal inferior will have a low blood pressure and suffer from a constant weakness and fatigability. So each form of reaction to the critical ages is individualized according to the predominating glandular influence in the constitution of the woman. When the womb has atrophied, and the breasts have shrunk, the typical tan complexion, and the angular masculinoid figure, face and psyche follow, and the transfiguration has been completed.
Man has his critical age of sex cell deterioration as well as woman. The age period swings between forty-five and fifty-five. Here enters upon the scene that organ of external and internal secretion, the prostate, the most important of the accessory sex glands in the male. Experiments with its extract upon growing tadpoles have demonstrated it to have the same differentiating effects as thyroid, but without the poisoning effects. Furthermore, the microscope reveals cyclic changes in its cells comparable to the menstrual phenomena of the uterus. Indeed it is accepted as the homologue or male representative of the uterus. Small and undeveloped during childhood, its growth at puberty parallels that of the other reproductive organs. Its secretion has been shown to be necessary to the vitality of the sperm cells. The regression of the prostate, its retirement from the field of sex competition, is the central episode of the male climacteric. Accompanying its shrinking are prominent an irritable weakness, despondency, and melancholia, which may emerge at any time if there is disease or disturbance of it. The influence of the prostate upon man's mental condition, and its contribution to the sex index, still remains to be investigated in detail.
SEX CRISES
At the periods of interstitial cell hyperactivity, when a wave of radicalism in the blood sweeps through the tissues, the other endocrines are tested, and their latent stability or instability is made manifest. Even before puberty, cyclic variations of health and conduct may be observed in boys and girls which undoubtedly depend upon currents among the internal secretions. Children, who, in the best of circumstances, habitually are attacked by a wanderlust and run away from home, or suffer from fits of naughtiness, are samples of such endocrine lability. Children specialists have found that at about the end of the second year their charges begin to individuate. In a certain percentage, sex traits appear pretty early. But the fact of the matter is that it is rather the minority of girls who spontaneously exhibit the traditional stigmata of the natural girl. The doll-cherishing, housekeeping imitator of mother is another story.
At puberty arise the most exquisite cases of life crisis dependent upon hormonic crisis. The boy becomes restless, irritable and quick-tempered when his thyroid and adrenals respond to the call of the interstitial cells. If they do not, he will become dull, heavy, lazy and listless. The girl correspondingly is transformed into a vivacious, gay, nervous and apprehensive butterfly, or a sedate, dreamy, bashful, or even morose moth. It is interesting to note that poise, mental equilibrium, is not established until physical growth ceases, marked by a cessation of growth of the long bones known as ossification of the epiphyses. Poise seems to be controlled by the ante-pituitary. The growth of the long bones is also dominated by the ante-pituitary. It would seem as if, its secretion dedicated to the one function, could not be available for the other. So it happens that those in whom growth ceases early (probably because of an earlier and more vigorous invasion of the internal secretion system by the interstitial cell product), develop mental maturity more rapidly and possess more of it than those in whom growth continues. The acumen and salacity of certain dwarfs is proverbial. The puberty phenomena teach that sex crises of every sort are dependent fundamentally upon fluctuations, periodic or aperiodic, of the sex index, as we have defined it.
THE DETERMINING FACTORS OF SEX LIFE
The material summarized in the preceding paragraphs furnish some slight inkling of the vast dominion of Sex, in all its relations, somatic and spiritual, over which the glands of internal secretions rule. The founder of modern pathology, Virchow, said that woman is woman because of her ovaries. He meant that woman is a woman, the sort of woman she specifically is, because of her internal secretions. But no divine decree has laid down a line of cleavage between man and woman. There are fundamental constitutional differences between man and woman. But it is just as true that man is man because of his internal secretions.
We have seen that the concepts of Man and Woman are the end-points of a curve including variations of every possible combination that are embraced in the construction of a sex index. This sex index is not an absolute constant, although its range of fluctuation is pretty well fixed at birth. It varies from day to day, year to year, depending upon the influences that have been brought to bear upon it. But it determines the character of the three planes of sex: the endocrine, the vegetative, and the psychic. The endocrine is concerned with the fundamental chemistry of sex, the internal secretions, which determine the chemical reactions that provide the free energy for the sex process. Upon the vegetative plane occur those transformations, tensions, and relaxations, in the viscera, which are controlled in part by the endocrines and in part by the experiences of the individual as registered in his subconscious. Upon the psychic, conscious planes appear the echoes and reflections of the occurrences upon the other two planes, as well as reactions arising in the brain from the necessity of the organism reacting as a whole to isolated episodes. Accompanying is a self-awareness of the organism as a unit. The three planes are not like separate plates of glass one raised above the other, the usual idea picture of planes. They are nebulae, swirling into each other, influencing and being influenced continually. The reactions among these three complexes of sex create the milieu for the variations and aberrations of tendency, character and conduct which stamp his unique quality upon the individual. Sex morale is likewise so influenced. The fundamentals of sex ethics will, in due time, be revised in accordance with these conceptions.