Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/43

 circles of human thought with which we are put into startling and bewildered warfare. During a long succession of centuries, including especially those influenced by Jewish and Christian theological systems of morals and law, has been affirmed and re-affirmed, has been asserted in public literature and in private conversation, has been held as as a basal truth, that a man should love, should be sexually drawn to, a woman only; never to another man. In like manner, that a woman should love, should be attracted sexually, only to a man; never to another woman.

We have been assured, peremptorily, argumentatively, for at least a couple of thousand years, that if a man do not feel his sexual nature going out toward a woman, then something is distinctly minus in his body or in his temperament. But if he goes a step farther, and not only feels no sexual attraction to woman, but by some mysterious psychologic processes finds himself sexually attracted toward men, feels an admiring physical desire for them and their beauty, feels concurrent yearning to surrender himself physically to a man, youthful or elder, then he is a diseased abnormality, a shocking degenerate from manhood, a monster or a maniac. During long centuries the statute-books of the majority of European nations have expressly recognized such a man only as a monster and anomaly: and in respect of his working-out his sexual impulses of the kind, he ranks legally as a felon, in even many countries to-day.

Similar has been the popular ethical attitude of mind toward those mysterious, ungovernable impulses by which a certain equally large proportion of women are, contrary to the generality of the sex, drawn toward other women by sexual love, often along with complete sexual coldness toward men.