Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/28

 granted. Does Nature so often stand up and say of her normal, usual male product, "This is a man!?" The achieved male, whether as to his bodily structure, or his mental and moral and temperamental equipment appears suddenly to grow vague. Yet we have not been searching for ideals, for extraordinary assemblages of distinctive male qualities. We are only trying to find a well-rounded consistency, measured by accepted tests the world over.

Let me anticipate a probable comment here: that an effeminated man, one effeminated mentally, morally, temperamentally and in his body, is never uncommon. But the reader must not confuse such distinctively, offensively effeminated types of man with a merely inconsistent one, as to this or that standard of male attributes. The man who in his physique, his intellect, his temperament, his tastes, his mannerisms and so on, peculiarly differs from the truer male standard, presenting obviously a general dissent, is not the personality meant here. We are dealing with one that departs more subtly from a true man-type. Effeminacy in the male, as usually depicted and understood, we may regard as an extreme. It is likely to be particularly associated with the outward man, embodied in his physique, to plain observation. We are dealing more with the psychologic failure of a man to be adequately virile. For that matter, we need not yet bring specially concrete examples into our analysis.

Suppose that we now turn from the masculine to the feminine. Let us think of woman as she is typified and realized, either past or present, in commonplace life. We cannot fail to remark the same sort of divergence from what we call essential womanliness, in one respect or in another. Our study puts woman after woman more or less out of measure with the feminine symmetry we have a right to expect.