There are, further, some facts of observation which, even if they have
not yet been fully analysed by experiment, still throw light on the
matter. Although many of the most familiar birds--fowls, pheasant,
peacock, duck, finches, and so forth--have bright-coloured males and
drab females, with marked difference of behaviour between the sexes,
there are, as we have seen, many others, such as herons, divers, swans,
grebes, moorhens, and auks, in which the sexes are alike in plumage
and furthermore show what may be called a “mutual” courtship in which
both male and female play similar rôles. In this latter class it seems
clear that the secretions of the male and female reproductive organs
must be more alike than in the markedly dimorphic species: and this
is borne out by some strange facts regarding not merely the courtship
but the actions concerned with pairing itself. In the crested grebe
and the little grebe, for example, close observation has shown that
either member of the pair may assume the passive “female” attitude or
the active “male” attitude in pairing: and in the moorhen we meet with
the still more extraordinary phenomenon of double pairing, in which an
act of pairing with male and female in normal position is immediately
followed by a second act in which the normal position is reversed.[35]
It would appear in such cases that the similarity of male and female
internal secretion is so great that quite slight changes in nervous or
metabolic activity can cause the nervous centres for the opposite sex’s
mode of behaviour to become activated.
In human beings we are confronted with various grades of sexual
organization and behaviour besides the typically feminine and the
typically masculine. In the first place it is matter of common
knowledge that many women, who so far as their physical reproductive
capacity goes are perfectly normal, show various mental traits which
are more characteristic of men, and vice versa. What is more, the
“masculinoid” woman (to use the current jargon) tends physically
also to be less feminine, to have the feminine secondary sexual
characteristics in stature, form of skeleton, distribution of fat,
breasts, etc.--less strongly developed than normal, while the
“feminoid” man shows the reverse tendency.[36]
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