Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German EditionWeininger, Otto
Philosophy
Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition
Weininger, Otto
Character; Sex; Sex (Psychology); Sexual ethics
anticipating any discovery of the future (it is plain already, however,
that the specific phenomena of living matter are not going to be
referred to chemistry and physics), it may be taken for granted that
individual cells possess sexuality in different degrees quite apart from
the sexuality of the whole body. Womanish men usually have the skin
softer, and in them the cells of the male organs have a lessened power
of division upon which depends directly the poorer development of the
male macroscopic characters.
The distribution of sexual characters affords an important proof of the
appearance of sexuality in different degrees. Such characters (at least
in the animal kingdom) may be arranged according to the strength of
their exciting influence on the opposite sex. To avoid confusion, I
shall make use of John Hunter’s terms for classifying sexual characters.
The primordial sexual characters are the male and female genital glands
(testes and epididymis, ovaries and epoophoron); the primary sexual
characters are the internal appendages of the sexual glands (vasa
deferentia vesiculæ seminales, oviducts and uterus), which may have
sexual characters quite distinct from those of the glands and the
external sexual organs, according to which alone the sex of human beings
is reckoned at birth (sometimes quite erroneously, as I shall show) and
their consequent fate in life decided. After the primary, come all those
sexual characters not directly necessary to reproduction. Such secondary
sexual characters are best defined as those which begin to appear at
puberty, and which cannot be developed except under the influence on the
system of the internal secretions of the genital glands. Examples of
these are the beards in men, the luxuriant growth of hair in women, the
development of the mammary glands, the character of the voice. As a
convenient mode of treatment, and for practical rather than theoretical
reasons, certain inherited characters, such as the development of
muscular strength or of mental obstinacy may be reckoned as tertiary
sexual characters. Under the designation “quaternary sexual characters”
may be placed such accessories as relative social position, difference
in habit, mode of livelihood, the smoking and drinking habit in man, and
the domestic duties of women. All these characters possess a potent and
direct sexual influence, and in my opinion often may be reckoned with
the tertiary characters or even with the secondary. This classification
of sexual characters must not be taken as implying a definite chain of
sequence, nor must it be assumed that the mental sexual characters
either determine the bodily characters or are determined by them in some
causal nexus. The classification relates only to the strength of the
exciting influence on the other sex, to the order in time in which this
influence is exerted, and to the degree of certainty with which the
extent of the influence may be predicted.
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