As a rule, when an androgyne reaches the middle thirties, the instinct to dress and pose as a mademoiselle gradually becomes feeble. Age sobers many and they become practically asexual. I have observed the same thing in ultra-virile men during my twelve years career as their mignon. Their craze for the opposite sex is strongest from twenty to twenty-five (just at the time when Christian custom interdicts the propensity) after which it gradually declines. It is the same with animals. Poulterers cut off the heads of all but “adolescent” roosters. I have myself been a Guinea pig fancier. I discovered that the males gradually lose their virility at middle age.
Indeed I have observed that as androgynes approach fifty, they sometimes become more masculine than they ever were, and will even marry. It seems that in rare cases mild virility supplants sexual |“Change of Life” (Climacteric).| passivity as fifty is approached. On the other hand, I have heard of mildly virile men marrying in their twenties, begetting children, and only after reaching middle age, becoming somewhat sissified, acquiring horror feminæ, like ultra-androgynes, and finally seeking the latter’s sexual role.
These changes in ultra-androgynes and in the mildly virile are like menopause in woman. There is a turning point in the sex life. The hitherto passive ultra-androgyne occasionally becomes active. The mildly virile occasionally develops a quasi-feminine leaning. The latter class were possibly mildly androgynous by birth, but the idiosyncrasies did not come to the front of the mental life until the climacteric corresponding to menopause.
In my Autobiography of an Androgyne, I said nothing about my personal “menopause” because it came at about the close of my writing that book, and I did not recognize it as such until after the latter’s publication. On page 197, I described how, at the age of forty-two, my weight, stripped, within six weeks, jumped from 133 to 160. For ten years, it had been stationary at 133. For the following five years, it has been stationary at 160. I now attribute the change to “menopause.” Moreover, a few months after the increase in weight, I kept company with a young lady for half-a-year. I drifted into it almost unconsciously and involuntarily. I paid her gallantries immeasurably beyond any other incident of my life. I even regarded a Platonic marriage as a possibility, though not a probability.
But I was too extreme an androgyne, in addition to my having been castrated. The virility that occasionally |My Personal Menopause.| for the first time surges up in ultra-androgynes at “the change of life” could not go very far with me. After six months, I renounced the pseudo-courtship entirely, with disgust at the feminine sex, but particularly with the young female who had done her best to rope me in as her husband. For she did most of the courting. I merely let myself almost fall into her trap.
Even in my twenty-second year—the period when I belonged to the Cercle Hermaphroditos—I had already written a brief Autobiography. But the bigotry of cultured man made me wait twenty-three years for publication. Already—because I happened to be an ultra-androgyne myself—I had selected androgynism as my special field in science and literature. I therefore desired to collect all the data possible, although not yet having acquired the habit of note-making.
In order to draw out atypic individuals—particularly androgynes—I made it a practice first to reveal my own secrets. This frankness generally led them to confide to me what they never breathed to another—people in general, and particularly cultured androgynes, having an absurd reluctance to discuss the sexual side of their lives. (Androgynes for fear of persecution and prosecution, not by reason of prudery.) And the human race has suffered so greatly as a result of this obsession!
When God created human nature, his handiwork was so horrible that mankind, as soon as they reached the stage of civilization, have thrown a blanket over their own nature, after the example of Shem and |Man Ashamed of His Nature.| Japheth with their father Noah’s drunken nakedness. Cultured man has interdicted human nature’s coming out into the light of day because of its inexpressible ugliness.
Even in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world, next to nothing is known about human sexuality. At least with the exception of a handful of sexologists. Each individual simply knows his own sexual life, refuses to divulge it because of its “nastiness,” and is unable to overcome his shame to inquire whether other humans (men and women, respectively) are of like passions with himself. He assumes yes. But the truth of the matter is that on the sexual side of life, every individual is sui generis. And if a man or woman does chance to discover that an associate is different “from me,” right away he or she is crazy to murder the associate for daring to be different! On no side of life is charity so much needed as on the sexual.