Sex & Character: Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition — John Shaqi
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
An analogy with the sexual friendship of youth may be traced in the case
of old men, when, for instance, with the involution following old age,
the latent amphisexuality of man appears. This may be the reason why so
many men of fifty years and upwards are guilty of indecency.
Homo-sexuality has been observed amongst animals to a considerable
extent. F. Karsch has made a wide, if not complete, compilation from
other authors. Unfortunately, practically no observations were made as
to the grades of maleness or femaleness to be observed in such cases.
But we may be reasonably certain that the law holds good in the animal
world. If bulls are kept apart from cows for a considerable time,
homo-sexual acts occur amongst them; the most female are the first to
become corrupted, the others later, some perhaps never. (It is amongst
cattle that the greatest number of sexually intermediate forms have been
recorded.) This shows that the tendency was latent in them, but that at
other times the sexual demand was satisfied in normal fashion. Cattle in
captivity behave precisely as prisoners and convicts in these matters.
Animals exhibit not merely onanism (which is known to them as to human
beings), but also homo-sexuality; and this fact, together with the fact
that sexually intermediate forms are known to occur amongst them, I
regard as strong evidence for my law of sexual attraction.
Inverted sexual attraction, then, is no exception to my law of sexual
attraction, but is merely a special case of it. An individual who is
half-man, half-woman, requires as sexual complement a being similarly
equipped with a share of both sexes in order to fulfil the requirements
of the law. This explains the fact that sexual inverts usually associate
only with persons of similar character, and rarely admit to intimacy
those who are normal. The sexual attraction is mutual, and this explains
why sexual inverts so readily recognise each other. This being so, the
normal element in human society has very little idea of the extent to
which homo-sexuality is practised, and when a case becomes public
property, every normal young profligate thinks that he has a right to
condemn such “atrocities.” So recently as the year 1900 a professor of
psychiatry in a German university urged that those who practised
homo-sexuality should be castrated.
The therapeutical remedies which have been used to combat
homo-sexuality, in cases where such treatment has been attempted, are
certainly less radical than the advice of the professor; but they serve
to show only how little the nature of homo-sexuality was understood. The
method used at present is hypnotism, and this can rest only on the
theory that homo-sexuality is an acquired character. By suggesting the
idea of the female form and of normal congress, it is sought to accustom
those under treatment to normal relations. But the acknowledged results
are very few.
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