Sex variant women in literature : $b A historical and quantitative surveyFoster, Jeannette H. (Jeannette Howard)
General
Sex variant women in literature : $b A historical and quantitative survey
Foster, Jeannette H. (Jeannette Howard)
Lesbians in literature; Sex in literature; Women in literature
To bring scientific opinion on homosexuality up to date, attention must
be given to four further attacks upon the problem. Most closely in line
with early search for physical causation are accumulations of exact
somatic measurements by such different agents as the so-called Harvard
group in their _Explorations in Personality—a clinical ... study of
fifty men of college age_ (only a partial publication of their
findings), and G. W. Henry in his _Sex Variants_. Neither of these
studies has, so far as published material indicates, established
significant correlations between homosexuality and any somatic factor or
group of factors measured.
A statistical study limited to genetics was made in Germany during World
War II by Theodor Lang.[3] On the ground that the offspring of a large
group of parents should by the law of probability be equally divided
between the two sexes, he made a statistical count of the siblings of
several thousand homosexual men. He found a greater proportion of males
among these than among siblings of a control group of heterosexuals.
From this he argued that the homosexuals, though somatically male,
possessed more than the average number of female genes, their brothers
having in the aggregate more of the male determinants. Like all such
studies this has been attacked on the grounds of its statistical
soundness, but it has not been discredited. More conclusive in the same
field is J. F. Kallman’s study of twins, _Heredity in Health and Mental
Disorder_ (1953). Dr. Kallman compared, among other things, the
incidence of homosexuality in identical and non-identical twins.
Identical twins showed an enormously larger percent of similar sexual
behavior than the latter, and his evidence is conclusive that “a
genetically oriented ‘imbalance’ theory ... can no longer be regarded as
an implausible explanation for certain groups of ... homosexuals.”[4]
In the psychoanalytic field such dissenters from the so-called
pan-sexualism of Freud as Jung, Adler, Horney and others have assembled
evidence that sex is not always the prime cause of neurosis. Freud found
it to be so, they say, because in his day social taboo made it the most
common cause of insupportable tension. Now that sexual standards are
less rigid (thanks in part to Freud’s work), other factors such as the
thwarting of the ego or long-continued insecurity appear of almost equal
importance. To account for the homosexual, these later psychoanalysts
suggest such causal factors as early social humiliation resulting in
withdrawal from heterosexual competition, acute anxiety with regard to
childbearing, or reluctance to assume responsibility for a family. Still
regarding homosexuality as a neurosis, that is, an abnormal way of
escaping an untenable situation, they leave unanswered the question as
to what predisposes an individual to the choice of this particular
solution of his difficulties.[5]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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