SEX HORMONES IN HUMAN EROTICISM 



1397 



parents remained basically unconvinced 

 that they had a son, or a daughter. In some 

 instances there had been also a reassignment 

 of sex. Neighbors remembered and talked 

 about the boy who turned into a girl, and 

 playmates made verbal ammunition of the 

 accusation of being half boy, half girl, or 

 a freak. Even before school age, clear evi- 

 dence might emerge of a child's personal 

 conviction that everyone was making a mis- 

 take and that it was time to begin immedi- 

 ate rehearsals for living as a member of the 

 opposite sex. 



It may well be that homosexuality, and 

 other behavioral disorders of sex, are funda- 

 mentally disorders of cognitional eroticism, 

 early established and deeply ingrained, their 

 relation to other variables of sex being pe- 

 ripheral at most. 



It may be also that disorders of cog- 

 nitional eroticism should be regarded as 

 imprinting phenomena (chapter by the 

 Hampsons; Fletcher, 1957; Schiller, 1957), 

 imprints that are actually misprints. In ac- 

 cordance with the principles of imprinting, 

 it would be the case that these misprint dis- 

 orders can be established only at a specified 

 critical period in the life history. The early 

 age, betw^een 18 months and 3 years, after 

 which it becomes psychologically hazardous 

 to make sex reassignments of hermaphro- 

 dites suggests that the critical period for the 

 imprinting of gender role and orientation 

 corresponds with the critical period for the 

 establishment of native language. There 

 may conceivably be another critical period 

 for limited modification of gender imprints 

 at the time of puberty. 



The phenomenon of the critical imprint- 

 ing period allows an explanation of the fact 

 that, in the case of homosexuality, a person 

 can engage in a homosexual act when safely 

 past the critical period without becoming a 

 chronic homosexual. Effectively imprinted 

 at the critical period to respond to homo- 

 sexual stimuli, however, a person becomes 

 a chronic homosexual. Effective stimuli may 

 be extremely specific, and variable from 

 ])erson to person, which may account for 

 the varieties of homosexual preference. 



The phenomenon of the critical imprint- 

 ing period allows an explanation not only 

 of disorders of cognitional eroticism, but 

 also of normal and healthy cognitional erot- 



icism. Just as nonhealthy eroticism may be- 

 come indelibly imprinted, so also may 

 healthy eroticism, masculine and feminine. 

 Indeed, so fixed is masculinity and femi- 

 ninity of outlook in healthy men and 

 women, respectively, that it has always 

 been assumed that sexual orientation must 

 be determined in some automatic fashion 

 utterly independent of life experience, for 

 example, by genes or hormones. Now it be- 

 comes necessary to allow that erotic out- 

 look and orientation is an autonomous psy- 

 chologic phenomenon independent of genes 

 and hormones and, moreover, a permanent 

 and ineradicable one as well. 



The idea of a psychologic phenomenon 

 being autonomous is not new in psychologic 

 theory, but the idea that a psychologic phe- 

 nomenon may be permanent and ineradica- 

 bly imprinted is not always hospitably re- 

 ceived in the company of present day 

 theories. It is a challenging concept, and 

 one worthy of extensive research within 

 and beyond its application to sex. 



The stimuli that bring eroticism to ex- 

 pression remain to be discussed. Are these, 

 too, purely perceptual and learned or do the 

 sex hormones automatically trigger behav- 

 ior in man as they may do in the lower ani- 

 mals? From the histories of the patients 

 listed in Table 22.1 and the reports herein 

 cited, it is clear that certain changes in be- 

 havior are associated with hormone ad- 

 ministration: the increased sexual activity 

 of the hypogonadal men who received an- 

 drogen therapy, the diminution in sexual 

 activity they reported in periods when treat- 

 ment was discontinued, the increased sexual 

 desire in women following androgen ther- 

 apy. 



Some writers have suggested that psycho- 

 logic stimuli are sufficient, that in man there 

 has been an emancipation from hormonal 

 control. If it is true, however, as a number 

 of the same writers have postulated, that 

 the sex hormones have a direct effect on the 

 genitalia, maintaining them erotically func- 

 tional, and on the generation of genitopelvic 

 tactile and somesthetic signals that are re- 

 layed to the brain, the role of sex hormones 

 in erotic arousal cannot properly be claimed 

 to have been completely replaced by psy- 

 chologic stimuli, for indeed the two are not 

 mutually separable. 



