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.