We have had concerning sex not knowledge, but a series of attitudes, the attitude of virtue, the attitude of pruriency, the attitude of good taste, the attitude of the theoretic libertine, the attitude of the satyr’s vulgarity.  All these poses, of course, have supplied not an iota to an understanding of the foundations of the problems of sex, biologically considered.  Thus, a masculine master has coined that immortal phrase, the Eternal Feminine.  And in a matriarchate we should undoubtedly hear of the Eternal Masculine.  Each leaves one as unenlightened as the other.  A rough and ready code of life attributes certain grossly characteristic qualities of mind and body to each sex.  This is supposed to be enough for common sense.  Beyond that the mystery has been wrapped in cotton wool.  That perhaps explains the enormous popularity of contemporary pornographic and so-called sex literature.

There are bound up with sex feeling and sex knowledge many customs, beliefs and habits, many legal statutes and social institutions, in the complex that is called sentiment, to which science looms as the sacrilegious ogre who devours romance.  Without spending space upon the ravages of the sentimental idealist, certainly responsible for as much human disaster as the brutal realist, it is manifest that a revolution in sex standards and relations is inevitable as soon as the new doctrines filter down as matters of fact to the levels of the common intelligence.  And surely, nothing else could be wished for in the world desired by all of us, the world ruled by intelligence, and intelligent good will.

SEX CHEMISTRY

A few general statements may be put down outright as material to go upon before we proceed to details.

1.  Femininity and masculinity have a definite chemical basis in the reactions of the internal secretions of which they are the expression.  That is to say, that just as a precipitate of chalk is formed when one throws some carbonate of soda into lime water, so the masculine and the feminine are to be looked upon as precipitates and crystallizations of a long series of linked chemical reactions in the fluids of the body, in which the internal secretions play a determining part.

2.  Femininity and masculinity are expressions of the interplay of all the internal secretions.  It used to be said by smart cats and accepted by the tabby cats, that a woman was a woman because of her ovaries alone.  It is being said by some great discoverers of the day that man is a man because of his testes alone.  Neither of these dogmas is true.  There are individuals with ovaries who show every deviation from the feminine and there are individuals with testes who exhibit every variation from the masculine.  The other endocrine glands are of equal importance.