Sex and Character/Part 1/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
“MALES” AND “FEMALES”
In the widest treatment of most living things, a blunt separation of them into males or females no longer suffices for the known facts. The limitations of these conceptions have been felt more or less by many writers. The first purpose of this work is to make this point clear.
I agree with other authors who, in a recent treatment of the facts connected with this subject, have taken as a starting-point what has been established by embryology regarding ing the existence in human beings, plants, and animals of an embryonic stage neutral as regards sex.
In the case of a human embryo of less than five weeks, for instance, the sex to which it would afterwards belong cannot be recognised. In the fifth week of fœtal life processes begin which, by the end of the fifth month of pregnancy, have turned the genital rudiments, at first alike in the sexes, into one sex and have determined the sex of the whole organism. The details of these processes need not be described more fully here. It can be shown that however ever distinctly unisexual an adult plant, animal or human being may be, there is always a certain persistence of the bisexual character, never a complete disappearance of the characters of the undeveloped sex. Sexual differentiation, in fact, is never complete. All the peculiarities of the male sex may be present in the female in some form, however weakly developed; and so also the sexual characteristics of the woman persist in the man, although perhaps they are not so completely rudimentary. The characters of the other sex occur in the one sex in a vestigial form. Thus, in the case of human beings, in which our interest is greatest, to take an example, it will be found that the most womanly woman has a growth of colourless hair, known as "lanugo" in the position of the male beard; and in the most manly man there are developed under the skin of the breast masses of glandular tissue connected with the nipples. This condition of things has been minutely investigated in the true genital organs and ducts, the region called the "urino-genital tract," and in each sex there has been found a complete but rudimentary set of parallels to the organs of the other sex.
These embryological conclusions can be brought into relation with another set of facts. Haeckel has used the word "gonochorism" for the separation of the sexes, and in different classes and groups of creatures different degrees of gonochorism may be noted. Different kinds of animals and plants may be distinguished by the extent to which the characters of one sex are rudimentary in the other. The most extreme case of sexual differentiation, the sharpest gonochorism, occurs in sexual dimorphism, that is to say, in that condition of affairs in which (as for instance in some water-fleas) the males and females of the same species differ as much or even more from each other as the members of different species, or genera. There is not so sharply marked gonochorism amongst vertebrates as in the case of Crustacea or insects. Amongst the former there does not exist a distinction between males and females so complete as to reach sexual dimorphism. A condition much more frequent amongst them is the occurrence of forms intermediate in regard to sex, what is called abnormal hermaphroditism; whilst in certain fishes hermaphroditism is the normal condition.
I must point out here that it must not be assumed that there exist only extreme males with scanty remnants of the female condition, extreme females with traces of the male, hermaphrodite or transitional forms, and wide gaps between these conditions. I am dealing specially with human beings, but what I have to say of them might be applied, with more or less modification, to nearly all creatures in which sexual reproduction takes place.
Amongst human beings the state of the case is as follows: There exist all sorts of intermediate conditions between male and female—sexual transitional forms. In physical inquiries an "ideal gas" is assumed, that is to say, a gas, the behaviour of which follows the law of Boyle-Guy-Lussac exactly, although, in fact, no such gas exists, and laws are deduced from this so that the deviations from the ideal laws may be established in the case of actually existing gases. In the same fashion we may suppose the existence of an ideal man, M, and of an ideal woman, W, as sexual types although these types do not actually exist. Such types not only can be constructed, but must be constructed. As in art so in science, the real purpose is to reach the type, the Platonic Idea. The science of physics investigates the behaviour of bodies that are absolutely rigid or absolutely elastic, in the full knowledge that neither the one nor the other actually exists. The intermediate conditions actually existing between the two absolute states of matter serve merely as a starting-point for investigation of the "types" and in the practical application of the theory are treated as mixtures and exhaustively analysed. So also there exist only the intermediate stages between absolute males and females, the absolute conditions never presenting themselves.
Let it be noted clearly that I am discussing the existence not merely of embryonic sexual neutrality, but of a permanent bisexual condition. Nor am I taking into consideration merely those intermediate sexual conditions, those bodily or psychical hermaphrodites upon which, up to the present, attention has been concentrated. In another respect my conception is new. Until now, in dealing with sexual intermediates, only hermaphrodites were considered; as if, to use a physical analogy, there were in between the two extremes a single group of intermediate forms, and not an intervening tract equally beset with stages in different degrees of transition.
The fact is that males and females are like two substances combined in different proportions, but with either element never wholly missing. We find, so to speak, never either a man or a woman, but only the male condition and the female condition. Any individual, “A” or “B,” is never to be designated merely as a man or a woman, but by a formula showing that it is a composite of male and female characters in different proportions, for instance, as follows:
always remembering that each of the factors α, α′, β, β′ must be greater than o and less than unity.
Further proofs of the validity of this conception are numerous, and I have already given, in the preface, a few of the most general. We may recall the existence of “men” with female pelves and female breasts, with narrow waists, overgrowth of the hair of the head; or of “women” with small hips and flat breasts, with deep bass voices and beards (the presence of hair on the chin is more common than is supposed, as women naturally are at pains to remove it; I am not speaking of the special growth that often appears on the faces of women who have reached middle age). All such peculiarities, many of them coinciding in the same individuals, are well known to doctors and anatomists, although their general significance has not been understood.
One of the most striking proofs of the view that I have been unfolding is presented by the great range of numerical variation to be found where sexual characters have been measured either by the same or by different anthropological or anatomical workers. The figures obtained by measuring female characters do not begin where those got from males leave off, but the two sets overlap. The more obvious this uncertainty in the theory of sexual intermediate forms may be, the more is it to be deplored in the interests of true science. Anatomists and anthropologists of the ordinary type have by no means striven against the scientific representation of the sexual types, but as for the most part they regarded measurements as the best indications, they were overwhelmed with the number of exceptions, and thus, so far, measurement has brought only vague and indefinite results.
The course of statistical science, which marks off our industrial age from earlier times, although perhaps on account of its distant relation to mathematics it has been regarded as specially scientific, has in reality hindered the progress of knowledge. It has dealt with averages, not with types. It has not been recognised that in pure, as opposed to applied, science it is the type that must be studied. And so those who are concerned with the type must turn their backs on the methods and conclusions of current morphology and physiology. The real measurements and investigations of details have yet to be made. Those that now exist are inapplicable to true science.
Knowledge must be obtained of male and female by means of a right construction of the ideal man and the ideal woman, using the word ideal in the sense of typical, excluding judgment as to value. When these types have been recognised and built up we shall be in a position to consider individual cases, and their analysis as mixtures in different proportions will be neither difficult not fruitless.
I shall now give a summary of the contents of this chapter. Living beings cannot be described bluntly as of one sex or the other. The real world from the point of view of sex may be regarded as swaying between two points, no actual individual being at either point, but somewhere between the two. The task of science is to define the position of any individual between these two points. The absolute conditions at the two extremes are not metaphysical abstractions above or outside the world of experience, but their construction is necessary as a philosophical and practical mode of describing the actual world.
A presentiment of this bisexuality of life (derived from the actual absence of complete sexual differentiation) is very old. Traces of it may be found in Chinese myths, but it became active in Greek thought. We may recall the mythical personification of bisexuality in the Hermaphroditos, the narrative of Aristophanes in the Platonic dialogue, or in later times the suggestion of a Gnostic sect (Theophites) that primitive man was a “man-woman.”