SEXUAL DIMORPHISM
_III. Vertebrates (continued).--Man and
woman.--Characteristics and limits of human
dimorphism.--Effects of civilization.--Psychologic
dimorphism.--The insect world and the human.--Modern
dimorphism, basis of the pair.--Solidarity of the
human pair.--Dimorphism and polygamy.--The pair
favours the female.--Sexual æsthetics.--Causes of the
superiority of feminine beauty._
III. Vertebrates (_continued_)--_Man and woman_.-- Among primates
sexual dimorphism is but little accentuated, especially when the male
and female live the same life in the open air and share the same
labours. The male gorilla, very strong and very pig-headed, flees from
no enemy; the female on the contrary is almost timid: when surprised
in company with the male, she cries out, gives the alarm and escapes.
But attacked when alone with her offspring, she resists. One can easily
distinguish the male and female orang-outang, the male is larger with
longer more bristling hair, he alone has a Horace Greeley beard; in the
female the patches of bald skin are much less callous. But the great
difference between the sexes in gorilla and orang-outang is in the
males having vocal sacks descending over the chest to the arm-pits.
Thanks to these air-reservoirs, these bag-pipe bags, inflatable at
will, the male can howl for a very long time and with great violence;
the females' sacks are very small. Other monkeys, notably howling
apes, are provided with these air-chambers, as are also certain other
mammifers well known for the extravagance of their cries: polecats and
pigs. Birds and batrachians have analogous organs.
Dimorphism of men and women varies according to race or rather
according to species. Very feeble in most blacks and reds it is
accentuated among Semites, Aryans, and Finns. But in man as in all
animals of separate sexes one must differentiate between the primary
dimorphism, which is necessary and produced by the specialization of
sexual organs, and the secondary dimorphism with which the relation
of sex is less evident or wholly uncertain. Limited to the non-sexual
elements, human dimorphism is very feeble. Almost null in infancy, it
develops with approaching puberty, is maintained during the genital
period, and diminishes, sometimes almost to vanishing point, in
old age. It varies individually, even during the years of greatest
reproductivity, in males feebly sexed and in women heavily sexed: that
is to say there are men and women whose type closely approaches the
type-ideal formed by the fusion of sexes; neither one nor the other
escapes the radical dimorphism imposed by the difference of sexual
organs.
Leaving aside exceptions, one observes a mediocre and constant
dimorphism between men and women, which may be expressed as follows,
taking the male for type: the female is smaller and has less muscular
force, she has longer head hair, but in contrast the hair-system
is very little developed over the rest of her body, excepting in
the armpits and pubis; aside from the teats, belly and hips, whose
form is sexual, she is normally fatter than the male, and in direct
consequence of this, her skin is finer; her skull-capacity is
inferior by about 15% (man=100; woman=85) and her intelligence, less
spontaneous, inclines in general to activities entirely practical.
There is hardly any difference in the male and female skulls of every
inferior human species, the contrary is true of civilized races.
Civilization has certainly accentuated the initial dimorphism of man
and woman--at least unless one of the very conditions of civilizations
be not precisely a notable difference, morphologic and psychologic,
between the two sexes. In that case civilization has but accentuated
a native dimorphism. This is more probable, for one does not see how
civilization could have caused the dimorphism, not at least unless it
had already existed as a very strong tendency. Identical work, the
same utilization of instinctive activities have managed greatly to
reduce dimorphism of forms, for example, in dogs and horses, but this
has had no influence on the psychologic dimorphism. Cultivation of
instinct has never been able to efface, in the most specialized breeds
of dogs, the peculiar tonality which instinct receives from sex. It is
improbable that intellectual culture could fashion women in such a way
as to rid them of the characteristic colour which sex imparts to their
intelligence.
One uses the words instinct and intelligence to flatter prejudiced
people. Instinct is merely a mode of intelligence.
Dimorphism is a constant fact in the animal series. Favourable to
the male, favourable to the female, indifferent, it starts always
from sexual necessity. There is a job to be done: nature divides it
equally, or not, between male and female. She knows neither justice
nor equality, and lays heavy burdens upon some, even to mutilation
and premature death, while she gives to others liberty, leisures, and
long hours of pleasant life. It is necessary that the couple reproduce
a certain number of beings, equals of the unities of which itself is
formed: all means are good which attain this end, and which attain
it most speedily and most surely. Nature who is pitiless, is also
in a hurry. Her imagination, always active, invents, ceaselessly,
new forms which she casts into life, in measure as the earlier born
finish their cycle. In superior mammals, and particularly in human
species, division of labour is the means used by nature to insure the
perpetuity of types. The female insect (leaving aside for the moment
social hymenoptera) is provided at once with the organs of her sex and
with tools of her trade, with arms for guarding the race; the female
human has ceded to man the tools and weapons, here merged in the one
instrument, muscle. Or rather, keeping her rights to the instrument,
she gives up the use of it. She is neither warrior, huntress, nor
mason, nor butcher; she is the female, and the male is the rest. The
division of labour supposes community. In order that the female may
cede the cares for subsistence and defence to the male, the couple
must be established and permanent. The male osmie (sort of solitary
bee) sees the light before his female; he could prepare the nest,
or at least choose its situation, guide the female to it, work or
watch; but he belongs to a series of animals in which the males are
merely male organs, and all his rôle is contained in the gestures of
mating. The couple is not yet formed. When it is formed, as in other
kinds of insects, scarabs, copris, sisyphs, geotrupes, the work is
equally shared between the two sexes. Here the parallel ends, for the
social evolution of the insect has led to functional differentiations
extremely complicated, and if not unknown, at least abnormal, to
humanity. Bee society has the female for base, human society has the
couple. They are organisms so different that no comparison of them is
possible, or even useful. Only in ignorance of them, can one envy bees;
a community without sexual relations is really without attraction for a
member of the human community. The hive is not a society but a hatchery.
The couple is only possible with a dimorphism, real but moderate.
There must be a difference, especially of strength, in order for
there to be a true union, that is to say subordination. A couple
formed of equal elements, like a society of equal elements, would be
in a state of permanent anarchy; two creatures suffice for anarchy,
as for war. A couple formed of elements too unequal, would, by the
crushing of the weaker, find itself reduced to tyrannized unity. Man
and woman, as is the case with other primates and the carnivora (for
most herbivora are polygamous) represent two sexes made to live united
and to share jointly in the cares for their offspring. The state of
couple, demanding a certain dimorphism, assures by it, its perpetuity.
When the couple is dissolved, be it by polygamy or by promiscuity,
as has happened among Mohammedans, and among Christians (a religion,
long powerful, functions both as race and as milieu) the dimorphism is
accentuated, each of the elements escapes, in some measure, the strict
influence of the other sex. Likewise if, in consequence of identical
education, the psychologic dimorphism is attenuated, even slightly--it
never is attenuated more than slightly--or if physical games reduce a
little the physical differences, the couple is less easily formed and
grows less stable: hence adultery, divorces, excess of prostitution.
In all monogamous society, prostitution is the strict consequence: it
diminishes more or less in polygamous societies where the free women
are rarer, it would only disappear completely in promiscuity, that is
to say in universal prostitution.
Polygamy, apart from its indirect influence, has, by the internment
of women, a direct one on the dimorphism. Set apart from the active
life of the outer world, and even from the air and light, the female
of the male polygamous human becomes whiter, whatever may have been
her initial colour, fatter, heavier, and also more stupid and more
addicted to all sorts of onanism. Among Indian Mussulmen the man and
woman appear to belong to different species, the man being so tanned,
and the woman so colourless. Shut-in prostitutes of the Occident also
lose colour, and one would with difficulty recognize two sisters in
the soft, bleached whore and the sun-reddened, hardy cow-girl. Woman's
liberty also accentuates the dimorphism but by another process. Freed
from the bridle of necessity, from the need of pleasing, woman escaped
from the couple, exaggerates her feminism, she becomes again the female
in excess, since it is in being more and more female that she has most
chances of seducing the male, who is insensible to all other merit.
And, inversely, a woman having man's education is, given equal beauty,
less than any other a seductress.
Thus, while the disintegration of the couple augments the feminine
dimorphism, the diminution of the natural dimorphism renders the
transformation of the couple more uneasy and more precarious. The
human couple is an harmony difficult to realize, very easy to destroy,
but in measure as one destroys it one frees the elements which will,
necessarily, re-create it. (We will return later to polygamy, human
and animal; but must here examine its relation to dimorphism. All the
questions treated in this book are, moreover, so interlocked, that it
will be difficult to prevent one or other of them from cropping up
apropos no matter what other. If the method is less clear it is perhaps
more loyal. Far from wishing to impart human logic to nature, one
attempts here to introduce a little natural logic into the old classic
logic.)
The sole aim of the couple is to free the female from all care that is
not purely sexual, to permit her the most perfect accomplishment of her
most important function. The couple favours the female, but it favours
also the race. It is fully beneficial when the woman has acquired the
right of maternal laziness. There is another reason for believing in
the legitimacy of such a sharing of useful work between the two members
of the couple, it is that masculine work diminishes its femininity,
while feminine work feminizes the males. In order that the necessary
and moderate dimorphism persist it would be necessary if the woman is
to take up male exercises that the male should assume all the accessory
labours of maternity. This would not be contrary to supple natural
logic; there are examples of it among batrachians and among birds. But
one does not see clearly either the utility or the possibility of such
a reversal of rôles in the human species. The duty of a being is to
persevere in its being and even to augment the characteristics which
specialize it. The duty of woman is to keep and to accentuate her
æsthetic and her psychologic dimorphism. The æsthetic viewpoint obliges
one for the thousandth time to put, but, happily, not to resolve the
agreeable question of woman's beauty. One may judge when it is a matter
of shape, of muscular energy, of respiratory amplitude: these can be
measured and set down in figures. When it comes to beauty, it is a
matter of feeling, that is to say of what is at once deepest and most
personal in each one of us, and which is most variable between one man
and another. However, the sexual element which enters into the idea
of beauty, being here at its very root, since it is the question of
woman, the opinion of men is nearly unanimous: in the human couple, it
is woman who represents beauty. All contrary opinion will be for ever
considered as a paradox or as the most boring of sexual aberrations. A
feeling does not adduce its reasons, it has none. It has to have them
lent to it. The superiority of feminine beauty is real, it has a sole
cause, the unity of line. What makes woman the more beautiful is the
invisibility of her genital organs. The male organ, which is sometimes
an advantage, is always a load, and always a blemish; it is made for
the race, not for the individual. In the male human, and precisely
because of its erect attitude, the sex is the sensitive point par
excellence, and the visible point, it is the point of attack in hand to
hand struggle, point of aim for the jet, obstacle for the eye, be it as
a roughness of surface, be it as a break in the middle of the line. The
harmony of the female body is then geometrically, much more perfect,
especially if one consider the male and the female at the very hour
of desire, at the moment, that is, when they present the most intense
and most natural expression of life. In the woman, all movements are
interior, or visible only in the undulation of her curves, conserving
thus her full æsthetic value, while the man, seeming at once to recede
toward the primitive states of animality, appears reduced, putting off
all beauty, to the bare and simple condition of genital organ. Man,
it is true, has his æsthetic compensation during pregnancy and its
deformations.
One must admit also that the human form has grave defects of
proportion, and that they are more accentuated in the female than in
the male. In general the trunk is too long, and the legs, consequently,
too short. One says that there are two æsthetic types in Aryan
races: one with long limbs and one with short limbs. Both types are
indeed, easy enough to distinguish, but they rarely present their
characteristics with sufficient distinction, moreover the first
is rather rare: it is the one which sculptors have vulgarized by
amelioration. Compare a series of photographs of art with a series of
photos from the nude, and you have proof enough that the beauty of the
human body is an ideologic creation. Take away the egoistic sentiment
of the race, and the sexual delirium, and man would appear very
inferior in harmonic plentitude to most of the mammifers; the monkey,
his brother, is, frankly, inæsthetic.