# The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life/Chapter III

CHAPTER III.
Alterosexual Love and Friendship: Similisexual Love and Friendship.
Love Defined.
Love, as distinguished from other human emotions, particularly as distinguished from friendship, is the attraction exerted on one human being over another through the quality of our aesthetic sensitiveness; the quality of our sentiment, more or less refined, for beauty. The feeling includes distinctively our wish to possess the object that we love by physical connection with ourselves. We desire to unite ourselves to the being that we love, as closely as possible by a physical nearness. At the same time, we seek often to give ourselves up, in an inevitable personal surrender. The two impulses, the wish to possess, and the impulse to surrender, are inextricably blent in real love, and as a rule cannot be parted. The seeking for possession, the impulse to give ourselves as we achieve it, must be both physical and psychical, if one wishes to feel the fullest mystery of love as a passion. If the sentiment be only physical it is not perfect love, though it is a love. If it be only psychologic, if we do not demand so much the physical possession, nor feel the wish to surrender ourselves as a matter of course in ​attaining it, then again we do not fully love. There must be the duality of feeling.
Friendship as Distinguished from Love.
Similisexual Friendship: Heterosexual Friendships.
Love Must Include Desire.
"Natural Affec- tions.
Similisexual Love.
"Similisexual Love not admitted as Legitimate in Man.
We have been assured, peremptorily, argumentatively, for at least a couple of thousand years, that if a man do not feel his sexual nature going out toward a woman, then something is distinctly minus in his body or in his temperament. But if he goes a step farther, and not only feels no sexual attraction to woman, but by some mysterious psychologic processes finds himself sexually attracted toward men, feels an admiring physical desire for them and their beauty, feels concurrent yearning to surrender himself physically to a man, youthful or elder, then he is a diseased abnormality, a shocking degenerate from manhood, a monster or a maniac. During long centuries the statute-books of the majority of European nations have expressly recognized such a man only as a monster and anomaly: and in respect of his working-out his sexual impulses of the kind, he ranks legally as a felon, in even many countries to-day.
Similar has been the popular ethical attitude of mind toward those mysterious, ungovernable impulses by which a certain equally large proportion of women are, contrary to the generality of the sex, drawn toward other women by sexual love, often along with complete sexual coldness toward men.
Woman's Simi- lisexual Love Less Rebunked by Society and Law.
Established In- tolerance of the Modern World toward Similisex- ual Love.
Certain More In- telligent Lib- eralized Admiss- ions and Ideas on the Topic.
Similisexual Love Especially Declared Con- trary to Christian Morals.
Salient Aspects of Masculine Friendships.
In the deep, often unaccountable, friendships between men, whether historic or commonplace, whether observed in the instances of others or in our own personal experience, has the reader never questioned if there be not some warmer, often more obscure and irresistible impulse promoting the sentiment? Certainly the need of referring-back many intensely intimate, passionate and "reasonless" homosexual friendships, so-called, to some sexual mystery often impresses itself on the psychologist. Various traits in such relationships quicken our suspicion. Constantly, disconcertingly occurs a new version of the old school-boy rhyme about Dr. Fell: we do not know, after all, why we like Jack or Harry, we only know that we do like them. Much opposes our sentiment often. But nothing conquers it.
The Seeming "Contrariness of Types" in Male Friendships Oft- en makes Sim- ilisexual Friend- ship a Puzzle to Observers.
The word "passionate" was written a moment ago, in speaking of the intenser and more concentrated ardours of male homosexual friendships. With that quality we reach what sharply engages the attention of the explorer into psychology of the affections. For, ever and ever again, in these warm, profound, apparently normal homosexual friendships, can be divined, or else is outspoken, the relative incapability of any woman to be an important sentimental and sexual influence over such preoccupied natures. The men concerned, or one of them, may present the type of the firm "holder-off" from any relations to women except what are relatively secondary, even apathetic. That is, to woman as a sex. She seems to have no power over the deepest emotional nature, in such men. She plays only a superficial, tolerated, casual rôle in their lives from day to day. Such men seem to say of love for a woman:
"It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty and observance. ....................And so am I for—no woman!”
Men Classed According to their Standpoint toward Women: the Woman-Ha- ter, the Woman- Tolerator, and the Woman-Wor- shipper.
The same statement is more clearly true of the second-named class, the woman-tolerators. Their attitude—civil, graceful, reticent, dispassionate toward women-acquaintances protects them from critical rebuke from women about them: but includes no real homage to woman as an indispensable factor in the mental or physical well-being of such males. This attitude is not of the sort to bring reproach on such men as generally selfish or aesthetically unimpressionable. Often they are nothing of the sort.
The So-called Woman Hater.
Observation of Donnay.
"I have had commerce, that's the word, with different womenkind. Rut I 've never loved any of them!… My dear fellow, its all very simple. The Orientals, they have perfectly understood woman; they have put her in the place where she belongs. We don't live in the Orient but in the Occident; so of course it isn't a matter of making our women wear veils, of keeping them shut up between four walls and eunuchs; but there is the necessity for us of shutting up the moukère morally, intellectually, in a harem. That is to say, we must not permit her to go wandering around in the domain of our thoughts, any more than in the avenues of our hearts the streets of our occupations. You understand?… Oh yes, you ask what is to be done if she deceives us? as is inevitable, for she will bore herself to death in the moral harem. Let her deceive! Ho you think I am bothering about mere contingencies? No, no, the thing is that in such conditions woman does not trouble a man any more that is the essential! Her power over a man is curiously reduced; then when she gives herself, whether to you or to your neighbour, you can put the fact down to real value, and not to a factitious value, the result of our prejudices, our pride, our fancies … You suppress idle gallantry, you suppress paying your court, jealousy, all such things which take up an enormous amount of time, when even they do not take up a man's entire life! Look at the sort of man who at twenty-five years of age is still influenced by women! He can do nothing really useful, serious, in life. How old are you, Vétheuil? I don't know—thirty-four perhaps. What have you done with your time? You've lost it in women's bedrooms, till now you are fairly isolated under the skirts of the women, sunk in the middle of the, ocean of the world, like a diver under his glass bell, as Jean-Haul Richter says. Ah, my dear fellow! there are more interesting things to do, more interesting problems to solve, in any science you please!"
Historic Types of Deep Friendships Between Men of Various Tempe- raments and Attitudes toward Woman.
Nor are impressive and fine homosexual and similisexual "friendships" the property of cultivated natures only. The humblest circles of a country village, the rudest regiment of foot-soldiery, the ship, the factory, the shop, the prison-pen and the chain-gang, tell the same tale of one man's heart meeting another's heart, with a regard that the Scriptural words long ago ranked truthfully as "passing the love of women." And in natures otherwise immature we find striking examples of a ripened and profound sentiment. Between mere lads, youths in schools and colleges, are evolved sex-dramas of tragical force; the child the father of the man in this, as in other things.
The Illusive Ele- ment of Many Profound "Friendships" so- called: and cer- tainty of Dispute.
The "Sexual Germ in Friend- ships.
The "Instinctive- ly" Conservative Attitude toward Women on the Part of Many Men: Its Un- changed Presen- ce Subconscious- ly.
"A ruddy drop of manly blood The surging sea outweighs. The world uncertain comes and goes, The lover, rooted, stays.
"O, friend," my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, Through thee, the rose is red! All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth; And is the mill-round of our fate, A sun-path in thy worth! Me, too, thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friendship fair."