Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/657

 other lads, or with mature men, provided he be robust, sexually precocious—and if there be no excess. This fact is attested by even professional male prostitutes, younger or older. The Uranian has a marked tendency to longevity.

On the contrary, as already been pointed out, female similisexualism, the pratique of the Uraniad, seems to be unfavourable to her physical and mental well-being, first and last, in comparison with the effects of Uranian passion. Her relation to it is covertly dangerous, either as girl or mature woman; and it frequently grows patently very harmful.

Contraction of sexual diseases, such as syphilis, in homosexualism though occasionally transmitted by similisexual intercourse, is relatively rare and relatively of lighter form. The nature of the sexual contacts between homosexuals is considerably a deterrent.

The absurdity (so common) of fancying that masculine similisexualism demands hermaphroditism or an abnormality of the physique for its origin and satisfaction, has been pointed out. The continuous practice of certain forms of homosexualism, including especially anal coition, does sometimes produce more or less important bodily disorders—enlargements of the anus, atrophied organs, inelastic muscles, weakened tissues, etc. But this is not a necessary consequence even of the most persistent habits of a passive kind.

The fact that in masculine or feminine similisexual ism there is no haunting dread of procreation, of pregnancy to come, has undoubtedly an emotional influence in the acts. The physic and psychic "surrenders" are the more complete.

The arguments that similisexual love and its satisfactions are a natural or "unnatural" violation of existence, because heterosexual congress is associated with propreation; that homosexuality is a criminal waste of precious sexual feeling and material, etc., are of the least logical. One might as well say that men were to eat only when they need nourishment, as the end in view; or must not drink save when the body requires fluids; must not walk, talk, think, smell a perfume, or do much else, except when utility primarily is their motive. Sexual intercourse of normal sort, even between the married, is only fractionally for procreating; nor is there any wisdom in saying that it should become so. Nature is not a niggardly mother. She willingly gives man much more of appetite, material and occasion for his pleasures than she expects him to return. Furthermore, an old query may well be repeated: if similisexuality may not have a perceptible relation to the great modern problem of over-population of the civilized globe, at least in great racial centers.