Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/44

 But in the case of such abnormal impulses on the part of women, it is important to observe that both socially and legally the matter is far lighter regarded. In fact, it is often smiled at as a feminine peccadillo of perverseness, a womanish weakness or sentimental excess, neglectable compared with what is called " unnatural " love in a man. The organic and bodily expression of a woman's sexual passion for another woman is less concrete than is the erotic embrace of the male. This too, affects the general social sentiment. A woman giving way to similisexual temperament is not a felon. Scarcely ever is her impulse spoken of by law-codes. The Mosaic Canon, so severe as to similisexual love between men, and made the basis of much of our modern system of ethical law, ignores women in its denunciations, wholly. The New Testament Canon, the continuation of the Mosaic system in large part, makes no references to female impulses of the sort, except in the Pauline pastoral to the Romans.

Such is a brief statement of similisexual love, and of its positive distinctions from friendships; whether heterosexual or similisexual. We are all of us familiar, from youth up, with the attitude of the world, intolerant, horrified, arbitrary, toward any mature phases of it. We have heard it mocked in our boyish school-days, often with boyish hypocrisy. We have grown to manhood and to womanhood, accepting it as a vice and perversion, rightfully opposed by law, by all sound social morality. We have turned marvelling from the examples incessantly coming to light, existing all the world over, of especially a man's sexual love for another man. We have also restrictedly, confused it with a phase of it that demands always a swift and a severe repression, the debauchery of immature and innocent youth. We have wondered