The artistic Rose-Croix salons, organised by Joséphin Péladan, are the object of a great number of caricatures which feed numerous undertakings in demystification linking the productions of the symbolists with the defence of a variety of erotic disorders liable to result in masculine effeminacy. The emergence of a rhetoric of degeneracy, which makes fertile use of the treatises on psychopathology from the period, thus tends to split the difference in sexual genre, while the symbolists themselves tend to put forward other models, based on a refusal of sexuality and an ideal of the “artist”. From this opposition emerges the denunciation of these small spiritualist groups, which results from a confusion between mysticism, aestheticism, and homosexuality, and in passing reveals the masculine fear of submitting to feminine suggestion.