Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/132

 away with its occupants—two ladies. One of them was the slighted Venus, the other a lady-friend who also felt aggrieved against the uranistic gentleman. L— was taken to the residence of the friend. There he was literally ravished to exhaustion! Towards morning he was conveyed to one of the remoter spots of the Campolide, and left, still bound and gagged, on a bench, where he was found by a watchman and taken home. The affair was the talk of the Portuguese clubs for weeks. The heroine left Lisbon, with her establishment and friend, the same day.

The antipathy of a completely uranistic man to bodily contact with a woman, not merely his physical insensibility, or his aesthetic coldness cannot be "explained" or "reasoned away". Not more can we explain many primary instincts in human nature, by argument. But one element of the sub-conscious kind in this aversion, in multitudes of cases is the Uranian's sense of a woman as physically a sort of unclean thing. She seems to the Uranian far less wholesome, than a man. Her embrace and reception seems to him full of secret impurity; even if he knows her to be most attentive to all manner of toilette-processes; absolutely free of disease. He feels, too, a disgust at the sexual periods of women. Her pregnancy is a repulsion. There is the dread of venereal diseases. Not inappropriately may here be mentioned the theory of many Uranians that their intercourse is a valuable check against the over-population of the globe. The uranian sexualism has thus a theoretic connection with the malthusian doctrines. Many homosexuals claim that for this end similisexual relations should be encouraged; just as we have seen that under the Mosaic Code, and facing the problem of the increase of the Jews against the Canaanites, it was a felony because more or less a hindrance to the desired census.