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A Problem in Modern Ethics

Each is vehemently attracted from earliest childhood to persons of the same sex. But they, in their turn, have to be subdivided into two sub-species. In the first of these, the sexual life alone is implicate; the persons who compose it do not differ in any marked or external characteristics from the type of their own sex; their habits and outward appearance remain unchanged. With the second sub-species the case is different. Here the character, the mental constitution, the habits, and the occupations of the subject have been altered by his or her predominant sexual inversion; so that a male addicts himself to a woman's work, assumes female clothes, acquires a shriller key of voice, and expresses the inversion of his sexual instinct in every act and gesture of his daily life.

It appears from Krafft-Ebing's recorded cases that the first of these sub-species yields nearly the largest

    the same stark frost set in, and my part was played out. I sent her away, deeply excited, with some moral remarks; and I have never tried the like experiments again. On all these occasions the specific odour of the female added to my horror." (2) "The proximity of wenches aroused in me qualms and nausea; in particular I could not bear to smell them." (3) "It seems to me absurd to set up the female form as the prototype of human beauty. I regard a woman's person as displeasing, the formation of her hips as ugly and unæsthetic. Dancing is therefore an abomination to me. I loathe the odour which the so-called fair sex exhales when heated by the dance." The disgust inspired in these three Urnings by the smell of the female is highly significant; since we know that the sense of smell acts powerfully upon the sexual appetite of normal individuals. It may be remarked that in all the instances of pronounced Urnings, sexual congress with women seems to have been followed with disgust, nervous exhaustion, and the sense of an unnatural act performed without pleasure. This is true even of those who have brought themselves to marriage.