first years of the 20th century. Both Alfred Ploetz of Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftbiologie, the journal for the widely respected Society for Race Hygiene, and Max Marcuse of the sexologist journal Sexual-Probleme, endorsed Ehrenfels's plans for a new society. Social Darwinism and racism were part of the intellectual mainstream in the West, as was the widespread belief that white men were starting to become "soft", and if white men continued to lose their masculine "hardness" inevitably this would lead to process of "racial degeneration", which would end with the whites becoming enslaved to the "Yellow Peril". The early 20th century saw what the historian Jonathan Katz called the "invention of heterosexuality", by which he meant that the ideal of romantic "true love" was discarded in popular discourse for the first time by a new discourse that celebrated sexuality and carnal pleasure as the objectives of relationships. Ehrnefels's opposition to romantic love and his unabashed celebration of sexual pleasure as part of the evolutionary duties of racial improvement fitted in well to the new age. Katz noted that those who saw sexual desires as the core of relationships between men and women almost always justified this with reference to human "need", "drive" or "instinct" to pass on their genes. Opposition However, Ehrenfels's ideas did meet with disagreement. In December 1908, Sigmund Freud invited Ehrenfels to give a lecture on his proposed new society. The audience generally offered polite dissent from Ehrenfels with one participant calling his new society an "adolescent sexual fantasy". Ehrenfels's proposed new society earned him criticism from the Catholic Church which objected to his attacks on Christian monogamy; from feminists who were offended by his idea that women should be kept essentially as chattels and treated as sex objects by men; and from the romantics everywhere who were upset about his plans to abolish romantic love. The German feminist Helene Stöcker protested against Ehrenfels's plans, albeit from the same social Darwinian viewpoint, writing: "A sexual ethic that does not rest on the development of women as a personality, but instead regards her merely as an object of male lust, is absolutely counter-evolutionary". The American historian Edward Ross Dickinson wrote the "pieces" of Ehrenfels's thinking were all mainstream, but the way he brought them together was "idiosyncratic". Dickinson suggested that these ideas were rooted in Ehrenfels's own tormented sexuality as he was both fascinated/repulsed by sex. Ehrenfels had been