When we remember that besides the three types of women with whom they had sexual relations, many and among them some of the greatest men of those times, indulged in homosexual unions with young men of feminine appearance, we must draw two conclusions: first, that those men must have been sexual supermen, as they were at times mental supermen, second, that love as we understand it at the present day, can only have had very little to do with their sexual life.
Modern love as we shall see in Chapter XXXI means mutual love, the equal gratification of the mates thru the rites of sex communion.
=Plural Love=, be it of the ancient Greek type, of the Oriental or mormon type, means varietism for the male, scanty gratification for the female. At best a mild form of sexual slavery, most humiliating to the woman and possible only under a social system debarring woman from financial independence.
Only a man suffering from priapism could gratify the eroticism of a large number of wives and the latest or youngest wife would naturally receive a larger share of physical attention than the earlier and older mates. The jealousy and hatred thus engendered are in no way minimised by the fact that the custom of certain lands countenances such arrangements.
=Polyandry= as it existed in ancient times and still exsists in Tibet, where a woman marries several men (generally brothers) may be more satisfactory for the primitive female. Owing to her physiological make up, and also to her passive rôle in love, woman can gratify several men and receive gratification from them. The neurotic disturbances which may arise as a result of a woman's lack of sexual gratification are avoided by the polyandric scheme of union. But this is the only superiority which polyandry has over polygamy.
Both polygamous and polyandric nations and civilisations have gradually receded as far as numerical importance and world prestige go and both institutions are bound to disappear.
The development of the human ego, both in men and women, will not permit much longer of the enslavement of one sex to gratify the pleasures of the other. Nor can any group, male or female, enforce its domination over individuals of the opposite sex and make them accept the dogma of an inferior sex by embodying that dogma in any religious creed of the mormon or mohammedan type.