masculine role. In study of about 600 children, only 4% of boys show marked feminine preferences. Girls in grades 1-4 show strong preference for masculine role-afterwards shifting strongly to feminine. (It's important, with figures like this, to know how determination of "feminine" and "masculine" preferences were arrived at.)

On lecture tour, Meyer Levin, author of COMPULSION, recent Leopold-Loebish novel, has been saying such a murder probably would not happen today-or if it should, would be treated differently. Today, he feels, psychotherapy would quickly fix up Loeb before a Bobby Franks could be murdered. Mr. Levin's sanguine faith in psychotherapy is hardly justified by reading the papers. Maybe Mr. Levin doesn't do that any more.

Dr. Alvarez' newspaper column recently noted growing evidence that schizophrenia, and perhaps other psychological deviations may be correlated with chemical factors (possibly causative) in blood, and predicted end of "weird sexual theories of causation of psychosis and neurosis ... What is happening is that real scientists, studying with technical methods the physiology of the brain, in health and disease, are now leaving the analysts to amuse themselves with their theories. . . As a sample of the theorizing of these men, I was just reading the weird and most improbably statements of one of them

that of late there has been a tremendous increase in homosexuality owing to the fact that when Kinsey wrote his book, in which he showed how common homosexuality is, thousands of homosexuals rushed to see Dr. Kinsey, and in some yet unexplained way, became more homosexual than they had

been before!"

own

A few weeks earlier, in a column headed "WHY CODDLE SEX OFFENDER?", Dr. Alvarez suggested since some men are born for lives of sex (or other) crime, they ought, for society's protection, all be segregated for life on some big island-"pick-pockets, petty thieves, burglars, alcoholics, dope peddlers and weak people who haven't the strength of character to live in a world full of designing persons," and of course, rapists and sex murderers, where they could be given simple manufacturing jobs and where there would be no temptations of any sort. Those who persisted in being nuisances would be sent on to smaller, stricter island. He noted that some sex offenders were really harmless, and ended with plea to abandon medieval ways of thinking about these problems. Dr. Alvarez should follow his recommendations. The presumption that such a segregation colony could be without any sort of temptation is fantastic nonsense. Dr. Alvarez still does not distinguish clearly between sex offenses which really harm society or individuals and those which are only technically "offenses" to outmoded laws. His theory that crimes are caused by chemical conditions (yet somehow apparently incurable) is far short of proven. His logic leads easily to the conclusion of an eminent French biologist who predicted that within a very few years, every infant could be chemically tested for "likeliness to conform" and could be chemically treated or mercifully disposed of if it didn't seem the type that would spontaneously adjust to society's demands. The benefits of the "perfectly adjusted society" are, I think, open to considerable question.

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