Benedikt Friedlander, in his "Renaissance des Eros Uranios" suggests
"bringing ancient and modern culture into harmony with each other by
reviving the Greek Eros and overthrowing the monopoly which woman has,
of being loved and beautiful."
Removing the legal penalties which punish overt homosexual acts is one
thing. Recognising homosexualism is an entirely different proposition.
Punishing a typhoid fever patient would be absurd, but typhoid fever
sufferers should not be allowed to remain at large without treatment.
Homosexualism is a neurotic trait which should be eradicated, if
possible, by analytic treatment. Hopeless cases, on the other hand
should be protected against their instincts by a form of confinement
which would be neither punitive nor more humiliating than the
confinement imposed upon sufferers from contagious diseases.
=Homosexualism and the War.= Homosexualism has been on the increase
since the war. Stekel reports many gruesome cases of husbands who,
until they went to the barracks and the trenches, where their
unconscious homosexualism found an unusual stimulation, were normal in
their attitude to their wives, and who returned after the armistice
absolutely inverted and unable to give or receive normal gratification.
The bobbed hair craze has many good excuses. Bobbed hair is kept tidy
more easily than long tresses and can be dried quicker after a shampoo.
At the same time, when we consider that the boyish type of women
became fashionable about the same time when short hair did, and that
soon after the war, advertising boards were covered with the praise
of devices enabling women to conceal their natural curves, we must
consider both fashions as symptomatic of an increase in homosexualism.
We might also mention another fashion detail: while dressmakers were
trying their best to obliterate their customers breasts, they would
bare entirely their backs. Anyone familiar with the symbolism and
dreams of homosexuals will understand the import of that style of
dresses.
=Is Homosexualism Necessary?= Dr. Otto Gross, without openly
countenancing homosexualism, holds that a certain proportion of it is
necessary in man's makeup for a mutual understanding of both sexes.
"We can only understand," he writes, "what we have experienced. Unless
a man has a decided feminine trend, he is not likely to understand a
woman, or to live with her harmoniously and vice versa."
A consideration of the purely physical side of love lends a slight
plausibility to that view. Unless a man can clearly imagine love's
pleasure as experienced by a woman, he may not be able to vouchsafe her
complete gratification.
The progress of civilisation certainly demands that men become less
masculine (translate: boorish) and women less feminine (meaning: silly).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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