The detraction of woman, which recurs so constantly in Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan religious writings and usages, undoubtedly has this psychological impulse, behind it. The medieval disputes as to whether woman had a soul, or, indeed, whether she was really a human being at all; the hideous persecution and burning of women as witches and vampires, which was participated in by church, state and populace,—all of these practices had behind them in some degree a neurotic fear of woman as the sexual partner. Man feared his inferiority, and he compensated for that fear by subjecting, and often eliminating, the object of his phobia. By this irrational gesture, he symbolically raised himself to a position of greater security.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), a brilliant and learned man and able legal official of Hanover, Germany, for many years expounded and defended homosexual love. He was himself an invert, and made many attempts to secure a revision of the legal position of the sexual invert in Germany.
Ulrichs formulated an elaborate classification of human types, with an interesting nomenclature, which despite its elaborateness has been found serviceable.
Among males, he classifies the normal man as the "Dioning," and the invert as the "Urning."[1] Urnings are subdivided into several groups. First, those who are thoroughly manly in appearance and mental habit and
- ↑ From Uranos, heaven; his idea being that the Uranian love was of a higher order than the normal attachment.
