THE RHYTHMS OF SEX
If one permits a drop of ink to fall into a glass of water, amazing
figures and shapes, bizarre and chameleon, are born as the blue swirls
and whirls through the resisting medium. Unseen forces and currents,
tides and pressures, set up a seething and flowing, pulling and
twisting of the drop of ink until it becomes a strange wraith created
out of the molecules. A temporary individuality lives in the water.
So likewise the forces of sex, essentially the forces of the internal
secretions, mould and sculpt and mould again the woman out of
the flesh and blood. Adolescence--puberty--menstruation: the
maid,--pregnancy--labor--lactation: the matron, thirty years of ups
and downs of these processes around the idea of love or suppressed
love, against an aesthetic background of some sort--and finally the
loss of the stress and strain of sex, the menopause. All the landmarks
of the life of woman, in their entirety, are erected and dominated by
the tides and currents, the phases of concentration and dilution, of
the different internal secretions in the endocrine mixture which is
the blood.
Marvelous are all the manifestations of the reproductive necessity.
Considering that reproduction was at first merely a form of growth, a
discontinuous kind of growth, that seized upon sex as a splendid means
to escape death, the chemical methods evolved arouse a sense of awe.
A baby is born with her or his glands practically as fixed for her or
him as the color of the eyes. Thymus and pineal keep him a child, keep
him unsexed. Then at puberty, a new current is added to the calmly
flowing river, and behold! a turmoil. Ovaries or testes actively
functioning erupt upon the calm spectacle, and the girl is
transfigured into the maid, the boy into the youth. After the ovaries,
the corpus luteum: after the corpus luteum, the placenta: after the
placenta, the mammary glands: after that the cycle begins again until
the ovaries are exhausted and the chain is broken. Besides, all the
other glands of internal secretion beat in rhythm, fluctuate in their
activities, may divide prematurely the tides or dam them completely.
Innumerable varieties and combinations of interglandular action supply
us with the limitless types of adolescent girls. Some endocrine
cooperatives that make one girl stable and settled, will make others
unstable and unsettled. Alicia may be hyperthyroid, and so excitable,
nervous, restless, and subject to palpitation of heart and
sleeplessness. Bettina may have too much post-pituitary, and so will
menstruate early, tend to be short, blush easily, be sentimentally
suggestive and sexually accessible. Christina may be adrenal cortex
centred and so masculinoid: courageous, sporty, mannish in her tastes,
aggressive toward her companions. Dorothea may have a balanced thyroid
and pituitary and so lead the class as good-looking, studious, bright,
serene and mature. Florence, who has rather more thyroid than her
pituitary can balance, will be bright but flighty, gay but moody,
energetic, but not as persevering. And so on and so on.
Environment, habit-formation, training, education serve only to bring
out the internal secretion make-up of the girl, or to suppress
and distort and so spoil her. Adolescence will be peaceful, calm,
semi-conscious, or disturbing, revolutionary and obsessive according
to the reaction of the other endocrines to the rise of the ovaries.
Harmony, and so continued happiness of the mind and body, means
that they have been welcomed into the fold. Disharmony, ailments,
unhappiness, difficulties, mean that they are being treated as
intruders, or are acting as marauders. The after life, sexually the
period of maturity, barring accidents, diseases, and shocks, will bear
the same character. The kind of adolescence provides the clue to the
kind of maturity, for both are effects of the same endocrine factors.
THE SEX GLAND CHAIN
Furthermore, the activities of a normal woman involve a series of sex
glands. Since there function, in addition to the ovaries, the glands
of the uterus, the breasts or mammary glands, and the placental
gland (the secreting cells of the tissue which comes out as the
after-birth). Each of these contributes directly to the reproductive
life of the individual. To call the ova the sex glands is to confer
upon them a name which really belongs to a chain of glands.
All of the members of the sex chain, including those of the thyroid,
the adrenal and the pituitary, are necessary to the functions of
menstruation, impregnation, settlement of fertilized ovum in the wall
of the uterus, labor and lactation. A disturbance of one of them will
set up disturbances all along the line, and a resonance of distress
or compensation upon the part of all of them. As an interlocking
directorate over the sexual functions of the female, they are members
one of the other. So what helps or hurts one, helps or hurts all.
THE CYCLE OF MENSTRUATION
Essentially, the ovary is a collection of follicles, nests of
cells, acting as safe deposit vaults for the ova that are to become
candidates for fertilization. At birth, there are some 30,000 to
200,000 of these, of which a good many atrophy during childhood so
that there are no more than about 30,000 left at puberty. Of the
30,000, only an élite 400 actually mature between the ages of fifteen
and forty-five. About every twenty-eight days, one of the follicles
swells, becomes filled with liquid, pushes or is pushed to the surface
of the ovary, there to rupture and expel into the abdominal cavity the
tiny ripe ovum. The rest of the torn follicle makes itself over into
a peculiar yellowish body, the true corpus luteum, should pregnancy
occur. If pregnancy and the consequent placenta do not occur, it
shrinks and turns into a scar, the false corpus luteum. The true
corpus luteum resembles closely the adrenal cortex in make-up and
staining reactions. It seems as if, once successful impregnation has
been achieved, the feminine organism adrenalizes itself, makes itself
more masculine and less feminine, inhibiting the posterior pituitary
and the adrenal medulla, as well as the ovaries. Besides, the corpus
luteum stimulates the thyroid to prepare for the heavy demands to be
made upon it during pregnancy.
Before menstruation, there is a stage of preparation, a stir and
twittering of the endocrines, the premenstrual state. Currents of
communication flow between the different glands, messages and replies
pass to and fro. When these are properly balanced, so that all goes
well, the consciousness of the woman will be disturbed by no knowledge
of them. In some women abnormal sensations appear, a sense of fullness
in the breasts, or of weight in the back or pelvis, or pain in the
head. The last is probably due to swelling of the pituitary beyond
the capacity of its bony container. In a good many women, nervous
and mental phenomena herald the expected menstruation because of a
complete upset of the balance between the internal secretions, with
resulting disturbance of the nervous system. Irritability, depression,
excitability, melancholia, exaltations, restlessness, hysteria, loss
of self-control, or even more marked mental aberrations may appear.
Following them, and roughly paralleling them, may come various
abnormalities of menstruation itself. The character, extent and
duration of these furnish us the best clues to the endocrine stability
or instability of the particular feminine organism.
Menstruation is simply the uterus saying: well, not this time. As the
destined ovum within its nest, the follicle, grows, its fluid affects
the interstitial cells to send their specific stuff into the blood.
There it circulates, hits this gland and that, makes some more active,
others less, transforms the chemistry of the cells, and engorges the
mucous membranes, most of all those of the nose and of the uterus. It
is all to welcome the mature ovum and its possible impregnation, to
prepare a site for its landing and settlement, blood and food for its
nutrition, safety for its development. But it is not to be. No sperm
at hand, or effective enough to penetrate that wandering ovum. Love's
labour's lost. All must return to the so-called normal, really the
intermenstrual state. The womb must surrender some of that blood,
the glands return to their routine, and a sex diastole of the whole
organism succeeds. Until again, another follicle swells, another ovum
matures, and the premenstrual state of sex high tide cycles back.
Seven to ten days before menstruation we know that sex high tide is
beginning for that is when the blood pressure goes up. As this rise of
blood pressure is probably controlled by the posterior pituitary, we
have a clue to the reason for the rhythmic variations in the rate of
production of its secretion by the ovary. For, since menstruation is
so closely connected with the phases of the moon and the tides, the
rhythmicity of the posterior pituitary may be traced to the days when
the pineal was an eye at the top of the head, and in direct relation
with the pituitary.
Menstruation has been said to be a miniature labor. It is not that
as much as it is a miniature abortion. It is an effort of nature
still-born. But nature is quite used to its disappointments and
returns placidly to the daily grind. The four phases of a woman's
twenty-eight day cycle succeed each other as the premenstrual,
the menstrual, the postmenstrual and the intermenstrual, with the
precision of pistons moving in a motor, when no interfering factor
as disease, profound emotion or climate disturbances are present,
affecting the endocrines.
The sequence of events appears to be about as follows: The amount of
post-pituitary secretion reaches a certain concentration. This in turn
stimulates the thyroid and adrenal medulla. They in turn activate the
ovarian cells, which congest the uterine glands and lining membrane.
The follicle bursts, the ovum is discharged and wanders, the uterus
waits and wonders. Nothing happens, the curtain is lowered, the
scenery is removed, the actors revert to civilian clothes. That is the
story of menstruation, the central phenomenon of woman's pre-pregnancy
life. One sees it clearly as a play of an internal secretion
syndicate.
THE PREMENSTRUAL MOLIMINA
The premenstrual molimina is the traditional title accorded symptoms,
sensations, feelings, observations of women in the premenstrual phase.
In the light of endocrine analysis, they become exceedingly important
indicators of the underlying constitution of the individual concerned.
Indeed, the premenstrual period furnishes a direct clue to the
dominating internal secretion in a woman. Moreover, these premenstrual
phenomena are the shadows cast by coming events. For they mimic and
prophesy the events of the last crisis of feminine sex life,
the cessation of ovulation which goes by the name of menopause,
gonadopause, or change of sex life. The premenstrual phenomena provide
a positive film, so to speak, of the latent negative picture of the
endocrine system of the girl or woman.
Thus, there is the sub-pituitary or pituitary insufficient type, in
whom the excessive swelling of the gland causes headache, and a dull,
heavy, tired feeling, a definite depression. Drowsiness, sleepishness,
indifference to surroundings, general sluggishness of thought, feeling
and reaction, a phlegmatic frilosity, all go with it. It is due to
an overweighing of the pituitary, controller of good brain tone, and
alive wakefulness, by the demands of the organism.
On the other hand, the hyperthyroid type of woman reacts with an
exaggeration of her tendency. When the posterior pituitary begins to
secrete more in her its stimulation of the thyroid is enough to tip it
over the normal line. Such a woman in the premenstrual phase becomes
irritable and restless, does not know what to do with herself, cannot
concentrate on conversation, occupation or any single activity, may
become excited to the point of mania. Hot, tremulous, sleepless, or
sleeping badly, she has a much harder time of it than her pituitary
sister.
These samples of premenstrual internal secretion reaction are the
extremes of a vast number and variety of types. There are women in an
unstable quasi-premenstrual state for the greater part of their lives.
Sometimes an infectious disease or a psychic blow will put a woman
into this class. The significance of these cyclic changes has been
tremendously increased by the recent formal admission of women to
participation in public activities on a plane of equality with men.
Evidence exists that in man, too, there is some cyclic rhythmicity of
his endocrines, which sets up a fluctuation in his physical and mental
efficiency. The curves of these variations have still to be plotted,
and will doubtless contribute no little to our knowledge of the
control of human nature. One unexpurgated fact stands out: the
reproductive mechanism of woman has rendered her whole internal
secretion system, and so her nervous system, all her organs, her mind,
definitely and sharply more tidal in their currents, more zigzag in
their phases, more angular in their ups and downs of function, and so
less predictable, reliable and dependable.
THE MASCULINOID WOMAN
The masculinoid woman, as a functional hermaphrodite, exists first
as a congenital entity, with an inborn distribution of endocrine
predominances that make for masculinity. There are also numerous
acquired forms. The infections of childhood, measles, scarlet fever,
diphtheria, and above all mumps, may so damage the hormone system
that an inversion of sex type follows. However, the stimulative and
depressive effects of environment are even more significant. The
effects of environment in producing changes in an organism, the
changes the biologist sums up as adaptation, can be tracked in many
instances to responsive reactions of the glands of internal secretion
to demands made upon them by changed external conditions. So a cold
climate, which necessitates a more voluminous hair covering for an
animal, will evoke a hypertrophy of the adrenal cortex. Secondarily
other effects appear as by-products of the adaptation. The adrenal
cortex makes for pugnacity, temper, animal courage, irritability and
anger reactions. So a hairy animal will, in general (unless other
endocrines come in to defeat the primary effect), be more pugnacious,
courageous, irritable and combative. The same applies to woman. An
environment which tends to encourage the masculine traits in her, to
arouse repeatedly her pugnacity and combative decisions in the more
rapid give and take of the masculine world, will rouse the adrenal
cortex to greater activity, and so make her face hirsute, her
attitudes aggressive, and perhaps render her sterile. Concomitantly
there may be a disturbance of menstruation.
The presence or absence of sterility, natural or enforced, always
present, or say appearing after the birth of one child, must all be
donated a prominent place in studying the endocrine make-up of a
woman. When there is not enough ovarian secretion, the ovum may not be
able to burst through the ovary, a necessity before it may begin its
travels to the uterus. Next, the propulsive action of the genital
ducts may be insufficient because of defective corpus luteum. Or the
uterus may not have received enough posterior pituitary or thyroid to
make it fit soil for the ovum to plant itself in. Or there may be
too much of these, which cause the uterus to massage itself daily by
gentle contractions and so keep it well-toned. Excessive massage will
throw the ovum out. All these are factors in the sterility problem,
with its psychic resonances affecting the maternal instinct.
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
There have been created high odes to an unknown god, sensuous lyrics
of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion. But no
poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the maternal
instinct. Some contemporary clap-trap about sentimentalism will
perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an apotheosis of it. There
are some who deny its existence, and assert that maternity is forced
upon every woman. Reduced to its elements, such nonsense turns out the
absurd pose of the theorist desperate to épater le bourgeois or to
cover up hidden defects in his or her make-up.
Without the maternal instinct, without the hope of immortality through
somatic or spiritual posterity, we should all, who were sane enough,
have to condemn ourselves to the futilities of hedonism. So that the
criminal who was condemned to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to
see it roll down again, would have to thank his lucky stars for his
lighter punishment. The future, tomorrow, the Kingdom of Heaven on
Earth, or if you will, the Republic of Supermen, means to all of us
what the child means to the madonna. The cynical epicurean careerists
and careeristinas, and the depraved degenerates of a comfort-lusting
civilization may have suffered an absolute atrophy and castration of
that instinct. But they are pathologic specimens, and we are not for
the moment concerned with them.
The Freudians have set up a great hullaballoo about creative
activities as sublimations of the sex instinct, or as they would have
it, the libido. That is their obsession, the confusion of the sex
instinct, the instinct for sex life and satisfaction in the relation
of the male to the female, with the maternal instinct. The paternal
instinct bears the same relation to the maternal, as the breasts of
the male do to those of the female, i.e., a functional hermaphrodite
trait. The maternal instinct is the instinct to create, provide and
care for offspring.
The mother expresses the deep craving of protoplasm for immortality.
What drives her is the instinct of Life to preserve itself unto
eternity in infinite space and time. That separates it sharply from
the temporary needs of the sex instinct. The artist, the man of
science or letters, the statesman, craftsman and maker of every
sort is instigated by the maternal instinct. He creates for his own
pleasure, to be sure. But it is in its essence the pleasure of the
bird making its nest.
It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish between the sex instinct
and the maternal instinct. For different glands of internal secretion
have been found responsible for them. A distinct difference in the
quality and amount of the two instincts may be observed in the same
person. A strong maternal instinct may be seen again and again to
dominate a woman with but little or no sex urge or passion. Numerous
physiologically frigid women have lived successful and happy married
lives because of contented maternity. Other women, with normal or
exaggerated sex instinct who welcome and stimulate the sex life, may
have no wish for children, no functioning maternal instinct at all,
and if sterile, will accept their fate with indifference or even
exultation. These variations occur because of a difference in chemical
source and determination of the two instincts. While the ovary,
stimulated by the thyroid and the adrenal medulla, is the chief
determinant of the sex instinct, to the posterior pituitary must be
credited the chief hormone of the maternal instinct. The interactions
of the two glands, the ovary and the posterior pituitary, modified
by accessory influences, determine the relative intensity of the two
instincts. In a sense, the two glands may be said to be antagonistic
and yet one stimulates and complements the other.
THE TRANSFIGURATIONS OF CHILD-BEARING
Though what happens at puberty, what happens all through life through
the agencies of the endocrines is amazing enough, what occurs during
the period of child-bearing is perhaps the most amazing of all. As
emphasized, pregnancy is the time, among the internal secretions, of a
great uprooting and stirring, of fundamental and cataclysmic changes
in the most intimate chemistry of the cells. It is as if a dictator,
inspired by his country's danger, its enemies at the gates of its
capitol, were to draft and mobilize everyone, man woman and child from
everyday activities to the necessities of defense. Or rather it is
as if there appeared within the heart of our civilization a common
purpose and intelligence, now so palpably lacking, which magnetized
and drew to itself all the streams of individual self-aggrandizing
effort. Imagine that possibility and how it would change the face of
the earth and the entire basic constitution of human life and society.
So do the profound tides of the hormones, centering around the new
creature being made in the womb, transfigure the face and constitution
of the child-bearing woman.
During pregnancy, in consequence, the integrity of every structure
of the body is tested. A stern, relentless accountant goes over the
cells, counts up their reserves, establishes a balance, credits and
debits according to the demands of the growing parasite within them.
Follow changes in the skin, the bones, the nervous system and the
mind. That is, all the glands, subtle recorders, transmitters,
producers of the vibrations of change are influenced. But the most
influential are the most affected, as the most dominant personalities
in a community are most disturbed by a revolution.
In Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street," the best novel ever made about
America as a nation of villagers, the heroine, Carol Kennicott, has
this to say to someone sentimentalizing about maternity.
"I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogar. My complexion is rotten, and my
hair is coming out, and I look like a potato bag, and I think my
arches are falling,... and the whole business is a confounded nuisance
of a biological process."
The exploration of the internal secretions has brought us an
explanation and an understanding of why child-bearing is a nuisance.
We know now that if Carol Kennicott's complexion became rotten and
her hair fell out, it was because her thyroid was not adequate to the
demands of pregnancy, and that if her arches were falling, and her
figure acquiring a potato bag dumpiness, it was because her pituitary
was insufficient. In all probability she was a thymus-centered type,
which accounts for much of the material that goes to make up the
novel.
Different endocrine types react characteristically toward the
situations of pregnancy. The adrenal type may not be able to respond
with the necessary enlargement of its cortex which is normal for the
needs of gestation. So pigmentations, darkenings and discolorations of
the skin, especially of the face, the traditional chloasma develops.
The hyperthyroid type may become sharply exaggerated, almost to the
point of mania and psychosis. The subthyroid will suffer an emphasis
of her defect, and pass on, because of pregnancy, to the truly
diseased state of myxedema, the state of dull, slow, stupid,
semi-animal semi-idiocy. The pituitary type becomes more masculinized.
The face becomes more triangular and coarser, the chin and cheek-bones
more pronounced, and there is a growth of all the bones, so that she
is seen to grow visibly in height and breadth, and in the size of the
hands and feet. Concomitantly, there is a changed, a more matured and
steadier outlook upon life, all due to stimulation of the anterior
pituitary, controller of growth, physical and mental.
In general, the major endocrines, the pituitary, the adrenals, and the
thyroid should hypertrophy and hyperfunction during pregnancy.
Should they not, should adverse mechanical circumstances or chemical
malfunction prevent, dire effects may follow. A woman with the
closed-in type of pituitary, shut up in a small non-expansile sella
turcica, will suffer the most violent headaches, will become fat, will
frequently abort. One whose thyroid cannot rise to the demands of
gestation, because of previous disease (like typhoid or measles) which
injured her thyroid excessively, may be poisoned by the new elements
introduced into the blood by the growing fetus, as it is the job
par excellence of the thyroid to render innocuous these poisons.
Of adrenal insufficiency, failure of the adrenals to hypertrophy
sufficiently in pregnancy, little is known. Possibly the corpus
luteum, the endocrine formed of the torn egg nest in the ovary, makes
up for any deficiency in this respect. For there is the most curious
resemblance imaginable between the cells of the adrenal cortex and
those of the corpus luteum, some day to be completely explained.
THE PLACENTAL GLAND
The placenta, an organ and gland of internal secretion newly formed in
the uterus, when the fertilized ovum successfully imbeds itself within
it, must be considered in any analysis of the transfigurations of
child-bearing. Born with the pregnancy, its life is terminated with
the pregnancy, for it is expelled in labor as the after-birth. Its
importance and function as a gland of internal secretion has become
known only recently. Many still doubt and question the accordance of
that rank to it. But feeding experiments with it, in various endocrine
disturbances in human beings, have proved its right to the title.
The placenta is created by the fusion of the topmost enlarged cells
of the uterine surface and the most advanced cells constituting
the vanguard of the growing and multiplying ovum. These front line
invaders interact with the cells in contact with them to make a new
organ which serves as lung, stomach and kidney for the embryo, since
it is the medium of exchange of oxygen, foodstuffs and waste products
between the blood of the mother and the blood of the embryo.
Ultimately it acts, too, as a gland of internal secretion, influencing
the internal secretions of the mother, and also those of the embryo.
Settlement of the fertilized ovum in the womb introduces into the
system new secretions, new substances which are partly male in origin,
since the ovum contains within it the substance of the male sperm
which has penetrated it. This masculine element causes a rearrangement
of the balance of power between the endocrines towards the side of
masculinity. They push down the pan of the scale to inhibit the
post-pituitary. So menstruation, the menstrual wave which follows the
increasing tide of post-pituitary secretion, is postponed. For ten
lunar months, not another ovum breaks through the covering of the
ovary, and the uterus is left undisturbed. The placental secretion
plays a most important rôle as brake upon the post-pituitary, the most
active of the feminizing uterus-disturbing endocrines. Until at last
something happens that puts the placenta out of commission in this
function of restraint, and the long bottled up post-pituitary
secretion explodes the crisis apparent as the process of labor.
A condition of self-poisoning often occurs in pregnancy, with symptoms
orchestrating from mild notes like nausea and vomiting to the high
keys of convulsions and insanities. They represent what happens when
an unbalanced endocrine system is attacked by the placenta. Depending
upon where in the internal secretion chain the weak point, the
Achilles' heel spot, will be found, the nature of the reaction will
vary. And even after labor, after the explosive crisis, so much of the
reserve endocrine materials may be consumed, that an actual mania or a
chronic weakness may come in its wake.
Yet the placental secretion must not be looked upon as something
wholly evil in its potentialities. Without enough of it to hold the
uterus stimulating endocrines, particularly the post-pituitary, in
check, still-birth results. If there is enough, and not too much of
it, the woman will not feel ill at all, or perhaps only transiently,
but will be possessed of a curious feeling of drowsy content and
passive, relaxed happiness. Let there be relatively too much of it,
too little of the other glands, and the grosser transfigurations and
ailments of the child-bearing period follow.
THE MAMMARY GLANDS
Once pregnancy is terminated by labor, the placenta is expelled from
the body as the after-birth. The placenta removed, a new arrangement
of the balance of power among the endocrines becomes necessary. But a
new-comer appears upon the scene to take up the function left vacant
by the absent placenta. This new-comer is the secretion of the
activated breasts, the mammary glands. They make for a persistence
of the state of equilibrium among the endocrines attained during
pregnancy.
The mammary glands are typical glands of external secretion. They make
the milk and pour it out of the breasts through little canals into the
mouth of the suckling. Yet evidence forces us to conclude that they
are also glands of internal secretion, that their internal secretion
substitutes to a certain extent for the loss of that of the placenta
but not quite.
What seems to happen in fact, is this: the corpus luteum secretion
stimulates the dormant cells of the mammary glands, formed during
puberty, but latent until the advent of pregnancy. We know that
injection of corpus luteum will cause an hypertrophy of the breasts.
The same effect is produced regularly during the menstrual period,
with a consciousness of swelling of the breasts. Their atrophy at the
menopause coincides with the shrinkage of the ovaries that takes place
at that period. Activity of the breasts parallels indeed more or less
the activity of the corpus luteum.
With the prolonged activity of the corpus luteum during pregnancy,
prolonged stimulation of the breasts occurs. The secretion of the
post-pituitary would now cause the change from the internal cell
secretion to milk. But it is inhibited from so doing by the placenta.
When the placenta is removed, after labor, the post-pituitary can act,
and a free flow of milk is established. However, to counterbalance
this, and to prevent the post-pituitary from overacting, the breasts
secrete a hormone with an action like that of placenta, but not so
strong, which tends to inhibit the ovary. So is put off the imposition
of a pregnancy upon a period of lactation, obviously bad for mother,
infant, and embryo. We have here an exquisite sample of the checks and
compensations which make for a self-balancing of the whole endocrine
system.
CRITICAL AGES
The Dangerous Age is a phrase coined by a Scandinavian writer as a
more dramatic euphemism for the time of life when sex function ceases,
the climacteric. As a matter of fact, the age of adolescence is just
as much of a dangerous age as the age of deliquescence. The only
difference between them is that the dangers of the one have been
hushed up, the dangers of the other well boomed and advertised.
Both are dangerous to the individual, because both are periods of
instability and readjustment of the cells, particularly the brain
cells, to a deranged endocrine system and blood chemistry.
Moral attitudes differ at the two ages, not so much as an effect of
experience, as expressions of different visceral pressures produced
by newly dominant internal secretions. So in Eugene O'Neil's play,
"Diff'rent," we see the woman Emma Crosby as she is in her youth, when
her ovaries have budded and bloomed for only a few years, and her
other endocrine influences are still dormant. She breaks off her
engagement to Captain Caleb Williams on the eve of her wedding because
she is informed of the episodes of a sex affair he was involved in on
his last voyage, under circumstances not discreditable to him. The
next act shows her thirty years later when, as an elderly spinster,
she is passing through the climacteric, and is in the state of sexual
hyperesthesia some women are afflicted with before the menopause. It
is as if the ovaries and the accessory sex internal secretions erupt
into a sort of final geyser before they are exhausted. So the captain,
ever faithful, finds her, and discovers to his horror that she is a
thousand times more like other women than he has ever been like other
men. Because of his ignorance of the underlying chemical basis for
the transfiguration, tragedy follows. Critics may cackle about a sex
starved woman, who has repressed her natural desires, and hail the
play as a contribution to the Freudian clinics. As a matter of fact,
it is a study of libido variation, with endocrine variation, at two
stages of the inner chemical life of a woman.
The chain of events at the menopause, the acme and then ebb of the sex
tide, may be summed up something like this:
The ovaries cease producing their eggs and so shrivel as a storage
battery atrophies when it dries up. An important member of the
endocrine board of directors thus drops out, and so a rearrangement
of gland activities, a new régime, becomes necessary. If a balance
of power is established quickly and equitably, very little happens.
Quickly the woman passes on to the next plane of her existence. But
if some endocrine proves recalcitrant, and takes advantage of the
situation to make itself dominant, trouble and maladjustment, and
their psychic echoes, come. Anterior pituitary control will mean
a relative masculinization, with hair on the face and aggressive
attitudes. Post-pituitary most often refuses to settle down, and
expressing its ambition as headaches, flushes, obesity and hysteria,
may cause extreme misery and unhappiness to its possessor. Sooner
or later, if the harmonious equilibrium of the normal life is to be
revived, all the glands must regress, thyroid, pituitary and adrenals.
With the waning of the ovarian function, the thyroid type will also
exhibit its particular flare. If there is thyroid excess the woman
will be excitable and irritable, the thyroid deficient will be
depressed and dull, the thyroid unstable (that is swinging between
excess and deficiency) will have a cyclic up and down alternation of
mood and temperament. The adrenal centered will have a high blood
pressure and masculinoid traits, the adrenal inferior will have a low
blood pressure and suffer from a constant weakness and fatigability.
So each form of reaction to the critical ages is individualized
according to the predominating glandular influence in the constitution
of the woman. When the womb has atrophied, and the breasts have
shrunk, the typical tan complexion, and the angular masculinoid
figure, face and psyche follow, and the transfiguration has been
completed.
Man has his critical age of sex cell deterioration as well as woman.
The age period swings between forty-five and fifty-five. Here enters
upon the scene that organ of external and internal secretion, the
prostate, the most important of the accessory sex glands in the male.
Experiments with its extract upon growing tadpoles have demonstrated
it to have the same differentiating effects as thyroid, but without
the poisoning effects. Furthermore, the microscope reveals cyclic
changes in its cells comparable to the menstrual phenomena of the
uterus. Indeed it is accepted as the homologue or male representative
of the uterus. Small and undeveloped during childhood, its growth at
puberty parallels that of the other reproductive organs. Its secretion
has been shown to be necessary to the vitality of the sperm cells.
The regression of the prostate, its retirement from the field of
sex competition, is the central episode of the male climacteric.
Accompanying its shrinking are prominent an irritable weakness,
despondency, and melancholia, which may emerge at any time if there is
disease or disturbance of it. The influence of the prostate upon man's
mental condition, and its contribution to the sex index, still remains
to be investigated in detail.
SEX CRISES
At the periods of interstitial cell hyperactivity, when a wave
of radicalism in the blood sweeps through the tissues, the other
endocrines are tested, and their latent stability or instability is
made manifest. Even before puberty, cyclic variations of health and
conduct may be observed in boys and girls which undoubtedly depend
upon currents among the internal secretions. Children, who, in the
best of circumstances, habitually are attacked by a wanderlust and run
away from home, or suffer from fits of naughtiness, are samples of
such endocrine lability. Children specialists have found that at about
the end of the second year their charges begin to individuate. In a
certain percentage, sex traits appear pretty early. But the fact
of the matter is that it is rather the minority of girls who
spontaneously exhibit the traditional stigmata of the natural girl.
The doll-cherishing, housekeeping imitator of mother is another story.
At puberty arise the most exquisite cases of life crisis dependent
upon hormonic crisis. The boy becomes restless, irritable and
quick-tempered when his thyroid and adrenals respond to the call of
the interstitial cells. If they do not, he will become dull, heavy,
lazy and listless. The girl correspondingly is transformed into a
vivacious, gay, nervous and apprehensive butterfly, or a sedate,
dreamy, bashful, or even morose moth. It is interesting to note that
poise, mental equilibrium, is not established until physical growth
ceases, marked by a cessation of growth of the long bones known as
ossification of the epiphyses. Poise seems to be controlled by the
ante-pituitary. The growth of the long bones is also dominated by the
ante-pituitary. It would seem as if, its secretion dedicated to the
one function, could not be available for the other. So it happens that
those in whom growth ceases early (probably because of an earlier
and more vigorous invasion of the internal secretion system by the
interstitial cell product), develop mental maturity more rapidly and
possess more of it than those in whom growth continues. The acumen and
salacity of certain dwarfs is proverbial. The puberty phenomena
teach that sex crises of every sort are dependent fundamentally upon
fluctuations, periodic or aperiodic, of the sex index, as we have
defined it.
THE DETERMINING FACTORS OF SEX LIFE
The material summarized in the preceding paragraphs furnish some
slight inkling of the vast dominion of Sex, in all its relations,
somatic and spiritual, over which the glands of internal secretions
rule. The founder of modern pathology, Virchow, said that woman is
woman because of her ovaries. He meant that woman is a woman, the sort
of woman she specifically is, because of her internal secretions. But
no divine decree has laid down a line of cleavage between man and
woman. There are fundamental constitutional differences between man
and woman. But it is just as true that man is man because of _his_
internal secretions.
We have seen that the concepts of Man and Woman are the end-points of
a curve including variations of every possible combination that are
embraced in the construction of a sex index. This sex index is not an
absolute constant, although its range of fluctuation is pretty well
fixed at birth. It varies from day to day, year to year, depending
upon the influences that have been brought to bear upon it. But it
determines the character of the three planes of sex: the endocrine,
the vegetative, and the psychic. The endocrine is concerned with the
fundamental chemistry of sex, the internal secretions, which determine
the chemical reactions that provide the free energy for the sex
process. Upon the vegetative plane occur those transformations,
tensions, and relaxations, in the viscera, which are controlled
in part by the endocrines and in part by the experiences of the
individual as registered in his subconscious. Upon the psychic,
conscious planes appear the echoes and reflections of the occurrences
upon the other two planes, as well as reactions arising in the brain
from the necessity of the organism reacting as a whole to isolated
episodes. Accompanying is a self-awareness of the organism as a unit.
The three planes are not like separate plates of glass one raised
above the other, the usual idea picture of planes. They are
nebulae, swirling into each other, influencing and being influenced
continually. The reactions among these three complexes of sex create
the milieu for the variations and aberrations of tendency, character
and conduct which stamp his unique quality upon the individual. Sex
morale is likewise so influenced. The fundamentals of sex ethics will,
in due time, be revised in accordance with these conceptions.