Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/146

 beauty as a sexual feeling, and a coldness or horror as to the man's sexual embraces. There are the jealousies, the struggles, the despairs, the vengeances, the emotional nuances, social dramas of every kind. The physical rapports of Uraniadism, as contrasted with male similisexual relations, do not allow the bodily satisfactions of the Uraniad to be organically so vivid as the man's. Man's seminal system and its ejaculative process make his pleasure more acutely physical. Again, the Uranian embraces are not necessarily at all dangerous to his nervous system. But the nervous demands on the Uraniad frequently make the gratification of her desires pernicious; disturbing gravely her intellectual and nervous poise.

As the law and society, concern themselves so much less, hardly at all, with feminine similisexualism than with the masculine, the Uraniad need not be so solicitous about the hiding of her nature. Men are not curious. Normal women are not aware or keen. Even daily undercurrents of such a sexual instinct escape observation, far more than Can the Uranian's predicaments and practices. Indeed, similisexuality is the unseen basis of hundreds of close friendships among women around us. Marriage often intervenes to end it. The Uraniad shows here a distinction of her nature. For unless "inborn" to her unfortunate instinct, she is much more likely to lose it with maturity and marriage than is the Uranian to lose his. Her abnormalism often declines, even if it has been extremely vehement, after she marries. She ceases to be of the Third Sex. The man is her best physician, in such fortunate cases of "cure". But there must not be the too-confident notion that she can be so transformed and normalized. For her marriage can be as dark a tragedy, as melancholy a failure, as for her brother in misfortune, the Uranian. For the Uraniad of high nature and pure life, not given to professional sexuality, it can be often a perfect renovator.