The Third Sex

Introduction

Introduction Louis Estève Recently, I found the following statement whose banality leads to troubling concern . It was written by one of our fellow authors, whom Willy will undoubtedly relegate to the category of pompous critics of moral values: “There are eras of veritable social hermaphroditism in history during which men become effeminate and women become manly. When these fusions against nature are produced, it is always to upset the normal order of life. The female absorbs the male, until there are no longer any males or females present, but some unknown sort of neuter individuals.”1 I think it is a disciple of Galen2 who speaks to us solemnly of the sexus medius, or interjectus. Our medieval chronicles tell of the memorable deeds of people from the Auvergne “who are neither men nor women.” Nowadays, Carpenter and Leland have initiated us into arcane psychophysics, one about the intermediate sex, the other about the alternate sex.3 I’ll skip over many other theoreticians of digamy. What should we in fact understand by the slightly enigmatic words the third sex?4 Von Valzogen is the one who can lay claim to having invented the expression , but he created it merely to buttress his considerations about economic anthropogenesis.5 According to him, the evolution of the means of existence will certainly create a “heterogynous” human race in the near future, similar to insect colonies. Mr. C. Spiess6 is from a completely different school: this curious mythosophist has just recently reminded us of that, while discussing my Énigme de l’androgyne [Enigma of the Androgyne] in the Free Tribunal of Women and at the University of the Parthenon.7 For him, the third sex symbolizes a notion of advanced anthropology, based on his theory of sexuality, which would be psychological before being anatomical. For Willy, as for Mr. Georges-Anquetil,8 moreover, who uses the expression with cutting relevance on an important page of Satan conduit le bal [Satan Leads the Dance], third sex takes on, quite simply, the meaning of gallant ephebism, with a nuanced degradation, more ironic in one case, sharper in the other, that stigmatizes and deprecates these intermasculine “gallantries” with good reason: are they not one of the factors that insidiously cause the breakdown of the psychosocial structure of our civilization? “More and more,” the latter author tells us, “sapphism and pederasty are spreading with cynical brazenness in public and penetrate the once austere and severely protected homes of the upper middle classes” (op. cit., p. 23). Numerous sociologists and specialists in mental pathology have already revealed the most prominent acts of inversion. But, whether abusively moralizing or too learned, their writing has not attracted the attention of the public at large. It is thus undoubtedly up to the first author of the Claudine series9 to dare to take on this dangerous subject, the work of popularization—in the good sense—having become a pressing necessity. He has accomplished this with complete truthfulness, without deviating one bit—castigans ridendo mores10—from the very personal facetious humor and ironic irreverence that are among the most important reasons for his worldwide popularity. The “panoramic” view, so to speak, that he gives us in this book, of pederastic wanderings among so many peoples and in so many climates, the sparkling anecdotes with which he seasons the studies he invites us to examine, the erudition , so far from any pedantry, with which he adorns his chat as an instructor of erotic sociology: everything, including his skillful plays on words (for which he has the knack), makes him—and more appropriately than his predecessors whose uneasiness had already sounded the alarm about the increasing tide of homosexuality—the true Dr. Cabanès of pederasty.11 V As far as my modest contribution to this synthesis of ethical erotopathology, as I was already wont to call it in 1903, is concerned—a synthesis finally realized today—I had noted the intense fascination that this “androgynous love” had on our generation of madly novelistic neuropaths. And I drew the attention of my newly formed intellectual clientele to the dangerous democratization of the “noble vice” that we would shortly be seeing. Everything led me to predict it, and the event has only confirmed my clairvoyance too well. Eighteen years later, in April 1922, in the first issue of Bon Plaisir,12 limiting myself this time to the aesthetico-ideological realm, I indicated the “pandemic androgynomania” that was sneaky at first and then soon quite daring and...