Edward Carpenter of England has advanced the theory that there is
a third sex, which is hermaphroditic, or bi-sexual. He would place
this sex as midway between man and woman and having some of the same
characteristics of both. This does not mean that the third sex is
physically hermaphroditic. While such people exist, they are relatively
rare. It merely means men who have much of the woman in them, and women
who have much of the masculine. However, often this shows in some
physical characteristic, as an effeminate voice in a man, a growth of
hair on a woman’s chin, a manner of walking, etc.
Edward Carpenter believes that this third sex was the one which,
because it could not follow the beaten path, gave birth to philosophy,
religion, art, law and invention. As he pictures it, in the savage
tribe there would be a man who felt himself so different from the
rest of the men and so much more akin to the women, that he would
evade in every manner joining in the masculine occupations of hunting
and fighting. He would stay home with the women and justify this by
becoming the shaman or medicine-man, the first doctor and mystic.
Thus he would have time for brooding, and in this way cultivate his
imagination, and bring forth new theory and new arts.
That there is some basis for this theory is obvious. The founders of
religion are usually pictured as more or less hermaphroditic in nature.
Jesus, for instance, is shown as not only aggressive, courageous and
self-assertive in the true masculine way, but also as gentle, loving,
forgiving, merciful or feminine. He speaks of himself as the hen who
would have gathered its brood under its protecting wings; and he tells
his disciples to eat of his body in the form of the bread. (It is the
mother who gives her body to her child to eat.)
We find, too, this hermaphroditic quality in some of the great artists
and poets. Walt Whitman, our American poet, is a good example. He was
powerfully built, robust, healthy and overflowing with vitality, so
masculine that it is related that Lincoln said of him, “There goes a
man”; yet he was as tender as a woman. He nursed personally thousands
of soldiers in the Civil War, and their feeling was that he gave them a
kind of mother love.
But there have been other great men, not artists or religious leaders,
who were similar. Lincoln, for instance, had the brooding tenderness
and the deep sympathy which we associate with the mother.
However, the implication in Carpenter’s theory is that it isn’t just
a matter of mental qualities, but also sexual; that the third sex has
some of the sexual feeling and need of both sexes, and that this is an
explanation of the cause of homosexuality.
The facts, however, are against the Carpenter theory. One finds, in
practice, that there are homosexual men aggressively masculine, and
with hardly a trace of the feminine about them; and, on the other hand,
more or less effeminate men whose sexuality is absolutely normal.
Moreover, there is a deeper explanation for the man who couldn’t go out
and fight and hunt with the other men, and for the woman who hated the
agricultural and house duties of other women. According to Jung, there
are two great types, the extraverted and the introverted.
These types appear, he believes, as differentiations of the two
basic and primary instincts, that of self-preservation and that of
race-propagation, or, in other words, the ego-instinct and the sexual.
We are, evidently, born into the one type or the other, just as we are
born into the one sex or the other.
The sexual instinct, unconsciously, of course, leads toward the
propagation of the species; the urge of nature is for reproduction so
that the race can go on. And hence this instinct leads to marriage, the
establishment of the family, and finally that of the tribe and nation.
And it leads too to all the activities connected with these things. The
men must fight to protect their women and children or to bring them
more prosperity and power; they must hunt to bring food. The women must
bring up the children, make and preserve the home, engage in activities
like cooking, spinning, weaving, agriculture.
The sexual instinct leads them to activities, to the general run
of common life; and in its higher development to the ideal of the
brotherhood of man, democracy, etc.
The ego-instinct leads to contrary things. It is the opposite to the
sexual instinct. Both instincts are natural and exist in everyone: for
if it is natural to mate and to seek the good of others, it is equally
natural to defend and develop oneself. However, the opposing types
arise, according to Jung, because we are born with one instinct or the
other predominant.
The ego-instinct makes one think of oneself. And while this
self-concentration appears first as selfishness, as egotism, as setting
oneself above and against others; in its development it leads further.
It leads to withdrawing from others, in order to brood, to study, to
develop the imagination. It leads to introverting, going into oneself.
It was this type then that produced the first shaman and medicine-man.
For in order to give birth to art, or philosophy, or discovery and
invention, one must seclude oneself from others, and enter the world
of the imagination. Naturally, the introvert in the savage tribe felt
himself different from others. He was not concerned with activity, with
hunting, fighting, mating, having children; he was concerned with his
own ideas and emotions, with the pictures that loomed up in his mind
and which he felt compelled to scratch out on stone or bone; with an
unseen world which he saw as one of gods and demons; with religion and
invention.
The tribe doubtless thought him strange and abnormal; but not
necessarily effeminate. He secured his place by the results he
produced, so that, in the common mind, he became linked with the
supernatural. In fact, up to very recent years, the world held as more
or less sacred its religious leaders and artists, its doctors and great
students.
The introvert dreams the future which the extravert lives. Our whole
structure of civilization, with its sciences, its arts, its inventions,
and even its manners and habits, was built up by extraverts who made
use of the great discoveries of introverts.
It may be seen at a glance that the problem of sexuality differs for
the two types. If the extraverted, or active, type is rooted in the
sexual-instinct, naturally it is the more sexual type; whereas the
introverted type, rooted in the ego-instinct, is less so. However, we
must remember that the types are rarely pure; both instincts exist in
every one of us, only in the extravert the one is accented, in the
introvert, the other.
But quite aside from the problem of type, there is the problem of
bi-sexuality. To Jung this is a mental and emotional matter, rather
than a physical. In other words, just as in all of us exist the ego and
sexual instincts, just so there exist in all of us the masculine and
feminine _principles_.
In the recent fight for Women’s Rights, there were those women who
enlightened us by saying that men and women are fundamentally alike,
that there must be a single standard of morality or immorality, that
women could do the work of men, etc. On the other hand, the so-called
he-men of America are fond of affirming that they are red-blooded and
masculine through and through. Neither of these statements can bear
much scrutiny.
According to Jung, the masculine and feminine are not only opposing
physical structures, but opposing principles.
The masculine tendency is to _spend_, the feminine to _retain_. This
may be seen in the sexual act itself.
Man, in his true nature, is the gambler, the adventurer, the one who
strays to new fields, who fights, who is more or less reckless, and who
tends, therefore, toward the new and the radical. Men have been our
great pioneers whether along extraverted or introverted lines, whether
in giving us great new ideas or arts, or in exploration, tearing down
and rebuilding, leading peoples to new forms of government, etc.
Woman, on the other hand, in her true nature is cautious, wants to keep
things as they are, looks for safety. A woman who had been radical
in her youth told a friend of mine that getting children made her a
conservative. This was natural. All the womanly qualities of patience,
love, loyalty and devotion are necessary in bringing up children; and
naturally she wants that security and rock of changelessness that
her task may not be broken up. Woman tends, therefore, to be the
conservative. While man rushes out to grasp the new, she safeguards the
heritage of the past.
It is not curious, therefore, that just a few days before the general
strike broke out in England, one of the most radical acts that nation
has known, there was a great parade of women of every rank protesting
against strikes--or, in other words, a demand that the vast problem be
worked out along conservative and safe lines.
However, while these two principles of the masculine and feminine are
mutually opposed, we find on close study that they co-exist in each one
of us. It would seem as if each human being had in him the whole of
human nature, and that whole is not only the qualities of aggression,
of self-assertion, of recklessness and courage, but also the qualities
of tenderness, devotion, patience, etc. Put differently, while the
bodies of man and woman differ from each other sexually, they are
fundamentally the same body; so, too, while a man is more masculine
than a woman, and she more feminine than a man, each has, though in
less degree, the traits of the other.
This is one explanation of how men and women attract each other. A man
who was, say, sixty percent masculine and forty feminine, would be apt
to be attracted by his opposite, a woman sixty percent feminine and
forty masculine. A man extremely feminine would seek a woman extremely
masculine, and so on. And obviously enough, the percentage of either
principle in a man or woman would have some effect on the sexuality. A
more feminine man would lack aggressiveness and assertiveness, and be
more passive; a more masculine woman would want to take the upper hand.
With this understanding of the mixed natures of man and woman we may
better comprehend the art of love.