Sexual Cripples and Moral Degenerates: Fin-de-siècle Austrian Women Writers on Male Sexuality and Masculinity

Sexuality was one of the most debated topics of the European fin de siècle, and Austria was no exception. Vienna provided one of the most exciting breeding grounds for controversial discussions and theories of sexuality. The prevailing sexual practices were based on a moral double standard, a heterosexual standard that allowed men of the middle and upper classes to experience sexual freedom before and even during marriage. Female sexuality, on the other hand, was suppressed, as women’s sexual purity was crucial in determining their value on the marriage market (cf. Frevert 198). While such sexual standards were very much a reflection of society’s fundamental values, they started to be challenged and criticized by feminist activists as well as some male and numerous female writers. Sexual standards, norms, and identities began to vacillate in the process of a general questioning of cultural and social values. As the first women’s movement was pushing for changes and thus contributing to making the first breaches for women into areas previously closed to them (such as the bastions of higher education and the medical profession), a feeling of crisis regarding what constituted normative femininity and masculinity became more and more apparent.

A change to the existing sexual norms was one of the major goals of the emerging bourgeois women’s movement. Feminists attacked the moral double standard and what they saw as its worst outcome – prostitution. Parallel to the women’s movement and to the theoretical texts produced by feminists on the topic of sexuality, women writers made the same topic a major theme of their fiction. Women around 1900 thus began to overturn the centuries-old status quo, in which their sex had been used as “Projektionsfläche” (Fischer 211). Instead, women actively took part in the debate surrounding the concepts of male and female sexuality and the standards of femininity and masculinity. While reflecting on the female condition, they also projected their own ideas and desires onto men. The writings of Grete Meisel-Hess, Rosa Mayreder, Helene von Druskowitz, and Elsa Asenijeff reflect this debate and highlight various aspects and manifestations of male sexuality and masculinity. These authors analyze negative expressions of masculinity, and they criticize the consequences such masculinity has for women’s lives and society in general. Their texts thus implicitly and explicitly challenge antiquated patriarchal structures.

Scholars of the fin-de-siècle era generally agree that the man of modernity experienced a crisis with regards to his masculinity. The causes of this crisis are seen by some scholars, such as Gerald N. Izenberg, as being rooted in changes that industrialization had brought about. The “warrior ethos of aristocratic manliness” (Izenberg 6) and its values of “courage, honour, military prowess, loyalty and chivalry” (5), though still present in bourgeois masculinity, were giving way to what contemporaneous sexual pathology labelled “‘degeneracy’ – the supposed weakening of the physical and mental constitution of men because of the rapid pace of modern life and its ever greater demands on human energy” (10). Fear and hatred of women and the feminine were the most blatant consequences of this “degeneracy,” but it also manifested itself in a yearning for the ideal feminine. This controversial and polarized attitude towards masculinity and femininity led, for many, to a glorification of and nostalgia for the warrior and, ultimately, to the war itself (Koschorke 145), a war that feminists did not tire of opposing. Feminists and women writers such as Meisel-Hess, Mayreder, Druskowitz, and Asenijeff, brought their own views and definitions into the debate about the origins and consequences of degenerate masculinity. Some of them, like Meisel-Hess, did adopt as well as adapt some of the vocabulary of the time with its Nietzschean cult of vitality and will.

Meisel-Hess was born in Prague in 1879 and died in Berlin in 1922. She lived and studied philosophy in Vienna (as one of the first women to be admitted to the that university) and later settled in Berlin, where she wrote many of her works. She was also, together with Helene Stöcker...