The Role of Eroticism in Male Society: Volume II, Woman, Family, Male Bonds, and the Männerbund

In the second volume of The Role of Eroticism in Male Society, Hans Blüher turns from the psychological foundations of inversion and male society to the family, woman, marriage, prostitution, the women’s movement, and the male bonds. The book begins with woman and the family: male spouse-choice, the distinction between wife and free woman, the meaning of female servitude and freedom, and the conflict between bourgeois marriage and Eros. The second half develops Blüher’s theory of male society and the Männerbund. Against purely economic or spiritual accounts of human association, Blüher argues that state-formation requires a second sociological pole beyond the family: male society, organized around male-male Eros, leadership, comradeship, youth bonds, and the figure of the male hero. The result is a strange and ambitious work of sexual theory, sociology, gender theory, and political anthropology.