ABSTRACT
In 1903 Otto Weininger, twenty-three, Viennese, Jewish, and a~ imminent suicide, published his misogynist manifesta Sex and Character and created an international sensation. "One began," reporteda contemporary, "to hear in the men' s clubs of England and in the cafes of France and Germanyone began to hear singular mutterings among men. Even in the United States where men never talk about women, certain w hispers might be heard. The idea was that a new gospel had appeared."1 Weininger' s new gospel tied the spiritual progress of the human race to the repudiation of its female half. Women, said Weininger, are purely material beings, mindless, sensuous, animalistic, and amoral; lacking individuality, they act only at the behest of a "universalized, generalized, impersonal" sexual instinct.2 For humanity to achieve its spiritual destin y, men-particular ly "Aryan" men, who had not suffered a racial degeneracy that made the task impossiblemust achieve the individualistic supremacy first revealed by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In order to do this, they must both rid themselves of the femininity within them and reject their sexual desires for the wo men around them.
