The Assault on Gender and the Family: Jewish Sexology and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School, Part One

“Sexual morality — as society, in its extreme form, the American, defines it — seems to me very contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.”                                                                                        Sigmund Freud, 1908.

“There will be other forms in addition to our classic marriage…We will experience a broader spectrum of socially accepted forms of sexual life.”                                                                                                           Volkmar Sigusch, 2015.

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Volkmar Sigusch

Volkmar Sigusch (1940- ) may not be a familiar name to TOO readers, but for those concerned about the modern assault on traditional attitudes to gender and sexuality it should be. You might have encountered the term ‘cisgender,’ a Sigusch creation that is rapidly gaining traction in common speech. For those unfamiliar with it, it has come to replace “normal” and even the more deviant-friendly term ‘heterosexual.’ Specifically, the term refers to those “who feel there is a match between their assigned sex and the gender they feel themselves to be. You are cisgender if your birth certificate says you’re male and you identify yourself as a man.” The goal behind inventing such a bizarre and convoluted label for that which is natural and healthy is, of course, to further dilute the identity of the present and coming generations, and convince us all that there is no “normal,” only different positions within an ever more colorful spectrum.

By undermining the meaning of what it is to be male and female, one undermines the healthy concept of the family. And when the healthy concept of the family possessed by a given group is undermined, that group is pushed ever closer to genocide via (using the United Nations lexicon) “deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births.” The bumper crop of terms like ‘cisgender’, cooked up with alarming frequency by the “sexologists,” helps reduce marriage between a man and a woman and the raising of children within that union, to a mere “option” on a veritable menu of possible sexualities, gender identities, and family structures. In this brave new world there is no “normal” or “ideal” since all “models” are allegedly valid and equal.

This ideology, militant in both theory and execution, stands in opposition to the fact that healthy sexual relationships between males and females stand so far above the other “options” as to represent a gulf, rather than a spectrum, in human behavior. As F. Roger Devlin has so incisively pointed out, heterosexuality is “the natural life cycle of our species” (and all other species) while homosexuality is merely “a way for a few people with exotic tastes to achieve orgasm.” Any argument of equivalence must necessarily be preoccupied with endless abstractions, particularly abstractions surrounding the nature of romantic love, in order to push the debate away from this all-consuming biological fact.

In the same way that we witnessed the tremendous push for “marriage equality,” we have also witnessed the recent championing of those individuals who suffer from the unfortunate delusion that they have been born into the wrong body. While “transgenderism” is a severe mental illness by any definition of the term, the healthy and the normal are now lowered to the same level as these, and other, extremely dysfunctional people. Cultural relativism, once tactically deployed within the West in order to create an artificial parity between Western greatness and the meagre achievements of less advanced races and cultures, is now being deployed within our race and culture to create an artificial parity between the healthy, and the lifestyles of the degenerate and the insane. Much as in the promotion of degenerate art, the end result in both instances is the lowering of the healthy and the superior, and the raising up of the deformed, the sick, and the demented.

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The image on the left is that of a pregnant woman suffering from the delusion that she is male. This “family” of the future is intended to achieve parity with, if not superiority over, the healthy family unit of old pictured on the right — the very key to our existence.

But who precisely is introducing these terms and ideas, and thus engineering dramatic change in Western society? In our attempt to answer this question, we might first return to Volkmar Sigusch. Sigusch, a German, is a self-described “sexologist,” physician and sociologist. As founder and co-editor of Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung (Journal for Sexual Research), and Director of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) at the Goethe University in Frankfurt from 1973 to 2006, Sigusch has been described by Der Spiegel as “one of the main thinkers behind the sexual revolution of the 1960s.” The reasons why the young would-be physician evolved into a cultural radical are quite easy to surmise. After fleeing East Germany, Sigusch studied medicine, psychology and philosophy at Frankfurt. I posit the argument that it was the latter discipline that truly shaped Sigusch and did most to determine his future work. I argue this because he studied philosophy under none other than Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, both of whom had by that date returned from the United States and re-established the notorious Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Sigusch, a pioneer in the ongoing sexual revolution, is a Frankfurt School protégé.

The following analysis is concerned with the ongoing role of the Jewish-dominated “Culture of Critique” in advancing theories and trends designed to atomize our society. In particular it focusses on Jewish intellectual and political support for the sexually abnormal and explains it as an extension and product of the Frankfurt School’s view that “the unique role of Judaism in world history was to vindicate the concept of difference against the homogenizing forces thought to represent the essence of Western civilization. (My emphasis) ”[1] Kevin MacDonald has noted that the Frankfurt School categorized healthy Western norms, nationalisms, and close family relationships as an indication of psychiatric disorder. By contrast, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century Jewish intellectuals began championing Western society’s outcasts and non-conformers. Using these outcasts, Jewish intellectuals could fight a proxy war against Western homogeneity, and wage a clandestine campaign for the acceptance of pluralism.

By subtly supporting the position of the socially and sexually deviant, these Jewish figures could gain acceptance or inconspicuousness in the newly atomized society, while simultaneously undermining the very health of the homogenous nation.  As MacDonald has noted, the Frankfurt School offered one major prescription for the sick Western world: “radical individualism and the acceptance of pluralism. People have an inherent right to be different from others and to be accepted by others as different. Indeed, to become differentiated from others is to achieve the highest level of humanity.”[2] Following from this, in a society that has succumbed to Frankfurt School ideology one would expect to find endless terms for endless identities, genders, lifestyle choices, cliques and subcultures.

An excellent example of this nightmare becoming reality is one of the latest terms concocted within our atomized society:  Otherkin. According to Google, Otherkin are people who identify as partially or entirely non-human. Some say that they are, in spirit if not in body, not human. In any normal, healthy society this nonsense would be regarded as puerile or insane, and it certainly wouldn’t be indulged. But today, in the wake of Frankfurt School victory, the Otherkin community is just one of several growing realms for the bizarre.

Equally, in a society that has succumbed to Frankfurt School ideology one would expect to find that those most markedly different from the normal and healthy would be held up as alleged examples of the best of humanity. In this regard we need only point to the astonishing and gratuitous plaudits heaped upon Bruce Jenner, and his selection as “Woman of the Year” by Glamour magazine. These developments should rightly be seen as the triumph of the Frankfurt School. However, alongside, and running through, the Frankfurt School were several other Jewish intellectual currents. Among the most important were Freudian psychoanalysis and Jewish sexology. It is to the twisted and complex history of the latter that we now turn our attention, and we will follow its path from its deepest origins to the activities of Volkmar “Cisgender” Sugusch in the present. It is the history of the engineered decomposition of a once healthy society.

Sexology: Its Non-Jewish Currents

As with several Frankfurt school protégés, Volkmar Sigusch found himself being steered into precociously high positions from a young age. In 1972, he became the then-youngest German professor of medicine at the University of Frankfurt, when he was awarded the first-ever professorship in “sexology.” The “discipline” of sexology itself deserves some discussion. Firstly, it cannot be described as a “Jewish discipline” in the same way that psychoanalysis can be. Rather, it was a discipline that started with both Jewish and non-Jewish roots, being eventually fully co-opted by Jews and used for the furtherance of Jewish interests. The first serious academic study involving sexual pathology and psychiatry is generally attributed to the Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). In this work, Krafft-Ebing classified homosexuality as a perversion and “most sexologists following his lead judged it pathological.”[3] One of those following Krafft-Ebing’s lead, and consequently one of the founders of modern sexology was the Englishman Havelock Ellis (1859–1939).

Havelock Ellis

Havelock Ellis pioneered the non-Jewish strand of sexology by building on the roots of the earliest German-language writing on sexual behavior among humans. Among the most crucial of these early writings was that of von Krafft-Ebing. In Psychopathia Sexualis the German set the tone and structure for non-Jewish investigations into homosexuality by arguing that there were essentially four stages of “sexual inversion,” his term for homosexuality.[4] The first stage is a simple perversion of the sexual instinct, which results in no deformity of the personality itself. As an example of this type we might point to contemporaries like Douglas Murray or Jack Donovan who exhibit no noticeably unusual character traits beyond the inversion of their sexual instinct. The second stage involves defeminatio in which the whole personality of the individual undergoes a change of disposition in harmony with the changed sexual instinct. In these cases we see the effeminate, conspicuously perverted, types who are the main vectors of sexually transmitted diseases among inverts. The third stage involves a transition to metamorphosis sexualis paranoica, in which the subject at times suffers from the delusion that there has been an actual change of sex. Finally, von Krafft-Ebing argued that the fourth stage was full-blown metamorphosis sexualis paranoica, involving systematic delusions as to change in sex. In this category we may place the now much-celebrated Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.

What united the early German scholars and the slightly later English-language pioneers of similar studies was the categorization of these behaviors as psychological disorders. Additionally, these studies were carried out during periods when birth rates were declining and, as such, the field merged more than a little with that of eugenics. Havelock Ellis himself was Vice-President of the Eugenics Education Society, the forerunner of the Galton Institute. Ellis took von Krafft-Ebing’s work further in his own Sexual Inversion (1901), in which he argued that homosexuals and those experiencing metamorphosis sexualis paranoica were (v) “congenital subjects of abnormality,” and “suffering intensely from abnormal organization.” Ellis concurred with von Krafft-Ebing (37) that such a disorder was “a functional sign of degeneration, as a partial manifestation of a neuropathic and psychopathic state.”

Ellis also went further than von Krafft-Ebing by attempting to explain why efforts should be undertaken by the state to prevent such behaviors becoming accepted and thus more commonplace. In other words, he opposed the public culture of homosexuality that has become increasingly pre-dominant since the 1960s counter-cultural revolution. Like many modern-day conservative commentators, and indeed the state of Russia today, Ellis argued that sexual inversion was “organic” only in very few cases but that its prevalence could be exacerbated in a given society due to environmental factors, particularly propaganda indicating to the otherwise normal, young, and impressionable that such behaviors and lifestyles are fashionable. One of these factors was urban life itself which (30) “renders easier the exhibition and satisfaction of this as of all other forms of perversion.” Also, although both Parmenides and Aristotle argued that heredity played a large role in the homosexuality of the Greeks, and more especially the Dorians, Ellis argued that the prevalence of sexual inversion in Greek society was rooted more in the human “herd instinct” and was due more (29) to a “state of social feeling that, however it originated, induced a large proportion of the ordinary population to adopt homosexuality as a fashion.” Once a society adopted this fashion, it contributed (239) to the “demoralizing of the manhood of a nation,” and was a sign of impending national or civilizational collapse into decadence and despondency. The goal was thus to avoid a situation in which such behaviors were “normalized” and, more crucially, to prevent the behaviors associated with these psychological disorders from becoming fashionable.

Ellis’ approach to the abnormality of sexual inversion was far from totalitarian. He argued (193) that little could be done to help the congenital invert but that “sound social hygiene should render difficult the acquisition of homosexual perversity.” Homosexuals should be prevented from coming into close contact with children since his studies showed (199) that this reduced the incidence of “acquired perversity in others” via abuse and ensuing psychological disturbance. Adhering even to just this measure would act rapidly to reduce “artificial homosexuality among the general population.” Ellis argued that it was both cruel and undesirable for society to make congenital inverts act like those around them, and especially undesirable for them to be encouraged to procreate. Ellis collected data showing (198) that the descendants of sexual inverts tended to constitute families of “neurotic and failing stock.” Rather Ellis believed (198) that occurrences of sexual inversion may be a way for Nature to begin closing a faulty branch of the family tree: “The tendency to sexual inversion in eccentric and neurotic families seems merely to be Nature’s merciful method of winding up a concern which, from her point of view, has ceased to be profitable.” For sexual inverts, according to Ellis, “the inadvisability of parenthood remains.”

For Ellis, debates about the tolerance of homosexual behavior should be lifted from the moral and religious sphere and placed squarely in the sphere of demographics and national health. However, he noted that the two spheres (206) overlapped in times of demographic crisis:

Wherever the enlargement of the population becomes a strongly-felt social need — as it was among the Jews in their exaltation of family-life, and as it was when the European nations were constituted, — there homosexuality has been regarded as a crime, even punishable with death. The Incas of ancient Peru, in the fury of their devastation, even destroyed a whole town where sodomy had once been detected. [5]

Particularly relevant to our contemporary society, Ellis also astutely pointed out (206) that “there seems to be a certain relationship between the social reaction against homosexuality and against infanticide. Where the one is regarded leniently and favorably, there generally the other is also; where the one is stamped out, the other is usually stamped out.” Ellis’ astute remarks on the context behind the Jewish outlawing of homosexuality, and the use of violence against it by ancient cultures such as the Peruvians, bear further reflection. This is particularly the case given that there is a strain of inverts within our movement who propagandize their cause by weakly arguing that antipathy towards sexual inversion is due to the influence of “Judeo-Christian morals” rather than ethnically universal concerns around demographic health.

This demographic concern was vital to the interpretations and views of non-Jewish sexologists. Since homosexuality, permitted to spread via fashion, leading to “acquired perversion” in the young, is socially linked to acceptance of abortion and infanticide, it acts to “check the population” and should thus be controlled and quarantined in a state that wishes to improve its demographic health.

The means of quarantine suggested by Ellis were not harsh or unreasonable. Society should refrain (215) from crushing the subject of abnormality with shame but, in an eerie premonition of the “Pride parades,” he argued that society should never allow the invert to “flout his perversion in its face and assume that he is of finer clay than the vulgar herd.” Since the genetic dead-end facing inverts was, in Ellis’ view, penalty enough, society should confine its approach to the sexually abnormal to the “protection of the helpless member of society against the invert.” Essentially, Ellis’ advice was to decriminalize the behavior of inverts and end societal shame surrounding it, but also to prevent inverts from flouting their abnormality, and from having physical, pedagogical or ideological access to children. Such was the approach of a broad swathe of opinion in mainstream (non-Jewish) sexology up to Weimar period. And this is largely the position taken by the Russian state today.

The research and theories on homosexuality initiated by Kraft-Ebbing and Ellis are more than a century old, so there is no reason to take them as gospel truth. However, this strain of research, had it retained its dominance, may well have perpetuated an adaptive public culture that privileged heterosexuality, male-female bonding, and the rearing of children.

There was, however, another strain of thought within the embryonic field of sexology, and it is to this strain that the modern toleration and promotion of sexual delinquency owes its most significant debt. This strain can be identified as a Jewish intellectual concoction because its four key thinkers and ethnic activists were the nineteenth-century German-Jewish psychiatrists Albert Moll, Iwan Bloch, Magnus Hirschfeld and Albert Eulenberg, with able support from other Jewish figures like Hermann Joseph Lowenstein, Julius Wolf, Max Marcuse, and Eduard Bernstein. Despite some occasional minor disagreements between them, these Jewish sexologists and social commentators were united in advancing theories of sexual inversion that moved away from interpretations involving themes like degeneration, demographic decline and biological reality, and instead towards Talmudic abstractions involving the nature of romantic love and the allegedly fluid nature of gender and sex. As one might predict, running through all of their works is a clear preoccupation with the need for “tolerance” and social pluralism, the denial of human difference, and a fanatical opposition towards non-Jewish attempts to develop racial science. It is to the specific theories and machinations of these individuals that we now turn our attention.

Go to Part II.


[1][1] K. MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth Century Intellectual and Political Movements (2002), 161.
[2] Ibid, 164.
[3] E. Mancini, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 7.
[4] R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (Eighth Edition, 1893), 188.
[5] For Ellis as an evolutionist, a good indication of the pathology of homosexuality is that it is a reproductive dead end. Homosexuality has always been a puzzle to evolutionary biologists given that same-sex attraction would tend to lower reproductive success. However, since homosexuality has generally been stigmatized in historical societies, men with homosexual tendencies often married and procreated in order to avoid the penalties of being publicly homosexual — Ellis’ example of Orthodox Judaism being a case in point given the very intense pressures to have children combined with official condemnation of homosexuality in traditional Jewish society. This would tend to keep genes for homosexuality in the population, and perhaps even result in high levels of homosexuality, as some observers have noted to the case among Jews. In the contemporary world where homosexuality has become far more accepted, pressures for marriage and family are greatly lessened, constituting a selection pressure against genes predisposing for homosexuality. Ironically therefore, the public culture of homosexuality actually results in selection against genes predisposing for homosexuality, even while (if Ellis is correct) encouraging some to be homosexual who would not be so inclined if the culture retained sanctions against homosexuality.

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