may be read as the story of struggles between forms of sexuality and the divergent codes of taboos men have instituted as a control upon others." European societies have oscillated between two moral attitudes, politically and socially at profound odds with one-another, by which the controlling elite resolved the Oedipus Complex through identification with the father (17th and 19th Centuries), or through identification with the mother (18th and 20th centuries). The "Patrists" impose upon society a series of attitudes corresponding to their idea of masculinity: condemnation of sexual liberties, conservatism, a taste for authoritarian regimes, contempt for womankind, dread of homosexuality. The "Matrists", quite to the contrary, by their identification with the mother, tend to react unfavorably toward paternalistic authority, ex: hibit a liberalism in sexual matters, progressive thought and the like, and lend the support to science and the arts.

Rattray Taylor examines the consequences of the introduction of "Patrist" morals into pre-Christian, "Matrist" Europe: "The medieval church was obsessed by the sex-problem to a point we should today consider flatly pathological. It imposed upon the peoples of Europe a harshly rigid code of morality, and if it did not succeed altogether in stamping out feeling, it leveled sufficient constraint upon the people to give rise to an extraordinary incidence of mental illness" ... and, "dementias of a sexual genesis", which swiftly gave birth to a wave of sorcery and the like and blew hot the flame for the butcheries of the inquisition. "In Spain, Torquemada personally sent 10,220 victims to the executioner and 97,371 to the galleys." Now, the inquisitors are not every-one dead: "The American Government apes the Church when it dismisses Communists and homosexuals in virtually the same breath, thus equating sexual irregularity with political heresy. And the Sociologist sums up: "For want of a way to change society's attitude on sex, we are daily governed, in this field, by the morals of the dead."

After the Biologist and Sociologist, we inquire of the Psychologist. Rene Nelli, author of the recent book Love and the Myths of the Heart, summarizes the key contention of his work: "Mankind is split double, masculine and feminine, and divided against itself. But it is not in the 'Battle of the Sexes' that this antagonism is most outright, it is in the core of each sexual type. There is no doubt that nature intended anthropological femininity to manifest itself above all

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in woman. But it is evident that the virile element has tried for ages to rub out its inborn feminine traits, to isolate them solely in the opposite sex, bringing about the submissive 'man's woman'. Perhaps this explains why the first accomplishment of women of this century in raising themselves socially and economically has been to scrap that very form of femininity which had been imposed upon them." Recall the views, now, of Stekel: the sexually-normal individual is bisexual, he has an innate interest equally in both sexes. To the Psychologist, homosexuality is neither a queer happenstance nor the fruit of a racked mind.

"Obscenity is that which chances to shock some old and ignorant moralist"said Bertrand Russell recently. I must hope that the ignorance factor is less rampant now than formerly. For the remainder-neither Biology nor Sociology nor Psychology will avail their moral righteousness regarding homosexuality. They are cut adrift.

A final objection is pointed up in the pages of L'Unique of Dec., 1953. An interesting letter from Andrew Longson discloses several pieces by the English socialist writer, Kingsley Martin, appearing in the New Statesman and Nation some while ago. Mr. Martin is "indignant at the disgraceful treatment accorded homosexuals." However-and this is the objection-"the homosexual, despite the degree of individuality and character he is able to attain, remains unsatisfied, repressed, more perturbed, more anxious than other men." Longson justly replies: "Isn't this the result of a situation which compels it, at least as much as of the individual's makeup?"

Krafft-Ebing provides an excellent example. It is found in his Case-observation No. 256, which deals with a combination of homosexuality, masochism, and coprolangia: "X considers that he has an innate uranism, but he holds his morbid fantasies to be largely the result of moral and legal interdicts, which insist he abstain from his natural satisfactions, and he goes on to say, 'I've become half-mad on this account, this utter barring of love from my life.' He believes that his recourse to masochism has been directly abetted by the intense, tragic suppression of his uranist (homosexual) nature. Satisfaction is refused the uranist as much by ridicule and resistances as by the restrictions of the law; it is precisely from the lot of these that masochistic tendencies have sprung" (Psychopathia Sexualis).

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