A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and JuristsSymonds, John Addington
Philosophy
A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists
Symonds, John Addington
Homosexuality
In the next place he comes to true homosexual individuals, or Urnings in
the strict sense of that phrase. With them there is no rudimentary
appetite for the other sex apparent. They present a "grotesque" parallel
to normal men and women, inverting or caricaturing natural appetites.
The male of this class shrinks from the female, and the female from the
male.[33] Each is vehemently attracted from earliest childhood to
persons of the same sex. But they, in their turn, have to be subdivided
into two sub-species. In the first of these, the sexual life alone is
implicate; the persons who compose it do not differ in any marked or
external characteristics from the type of their own sex; their habits
and outward appearance remain unchanged. With the second sub-species the
case is different. Here the character, the mental constitution, the
habits, and the occupations of the subject have been altered by his or
her predominant sexual inversion; so that a male addicts himself to a
woman's work, assumes female clothes, acquires a shriller key of voice,
and expresses the inversion of his sexual instinct in every act and
gesture of his daily life.
It appears from Krafft-Ebing's recorded cases that the first of these
sub-species yields nearly the largest number of individuals. He
presents eleven detailed autobiographies of male Urnings, in whom the
_vita sexualis_ alone is abnormal, and who are differentiated to common
observation from normal men by nothing but the nature of their amorous
proclivities. The class includes powerfully developed masculine beings,
who are unsexed in no particular except that they possess an inordinate
appetite for males, and will not look at females.
As regards the family history of the eleven selected cases, five could
show a clear bill of health, some were decidedly bad, a small minority
were uncertain.
One of these Urnings, a physician, informed Krafft-Ebing that he had
consorted with at least six hundred men of his own stamp; many of them
in high positions of respectability. In none had he observed an abnormal
formation of the sexual organs; but frequently some approximation to the
feminine type of body--hair sparingly distributed[34], tender
complexion, and high tone of voice. About ten per cent. eventually
adopted love for women. Not ten per cent. exhibited any sign of the
_habitus muliebris_ in their occupations, dress, and so forth. A large
majority felt like men in their relations to men, and were even inclined
toward active pæderasty. From the unmentionable act they were deterred
by æsthetical repulsion and fear of the law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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