SEXUAL DIMORPHISM AND FEMINISM
_Inferiority and superiority of the female
as shown in animal species.--Influence of
feeding on the production of sexes.--The female
would have sufficed.--Feminism absolute, and
moderate.--Pipe-dreams: elimination of the male and
human parthenogenesis._
Only after serious study of sexual dimorphism in the animal series
may one venture a few reflections on feminism. One has noticed, in
certain species, the female more beautiful, stronger, more active,
more intelligent; and one has noticed the opposite. One has seen the
male larger, or smaller; one has seen and will see him parasite, or
provider, permanent master of the couple or the group, fugitive lover,
a slave sacrificed by the female after the completion of her pleasure.
All attitudes, and the same ones, are attributed by nature to either of
the sexes; there is not, apart from the specific functions, a male or a
female rôle. Both or either according to the decalogue of their specie
put on the same costume, don the same mask, wield the same boar-spear,
tool or sabre without one's being able to discover, at least not
without going back to the beginning of things and digesting the
archives of life, which of them is disguised and which acts "according
to nature."
The abundance of food, especially nitrogenized (? azotized) will
produce a greater number of females. With certain animals at
transformation one may act directly on individuals: tadpoles gorged
on mixed food, vegetables, larvæ, chopped meat, have given an excess
of females approaching totality (95 females to 5 males). On the other
hand over-feeding tends to abolish stamens in plants, the stamens turn
into petals, suralimentation even moults the petals into leaves and
the buds into shoots. Richness of means, well-being, intensive feeding
abolish sex, but the last to be affected is the female, which in sum,
perseveres obscurely in the unsexed plant, forced back to its primitive
means of reproduction, or to reproduction by slip cutting. If excessive
alimentation tends to suppress the male, it would then appear that the
separation into two sexes is a means of diminishing the costs of the
total being. The monoic type is a step toward this simplification of
labour; the female at a given moment eliminates her male organ, refuses
to feed it, frees herself from the burden which has only a momentary
utility. And, following this, provided in herself with an overabundance
of all that maintains life, she divests herself of the specialized
sexual apparatus, unsexes herself, that is to say, the identity of
contraries being here evident, she is sexed throughout all her parts:
_tota femina sexus_.
The male is an accident: the female would have sufficed. Brilliant as
are, in certain animal species, the destinies of the male, the female
is primordial. In civilized humanity she is born in proportion greater
as the civilization approaches a greater plenitude; and this very
plenitude diminishes, proportionately, the general fecundity: whether
we treat of man or of apple-trees, the male element in- or de-creases
according to famine or abundance of nourishment. But the human race is
not sufficiently plastic for the variation of births to be ever very
great between the two sexes; and no warm-blooded animal is sufficiently
plastic for this cause, so active among vegetables, ever to lead to
the dissolution of the male. There are no natural laws, there are
tendencies, there are limits: the fields of oscillation are determined
by the pasts of species, trenches curving into cloisters which close,
in nearly all directions, the alleys of the future.
It is a fact, from henceforth hereditary, that the male of the human
species has centralized in himself most of the activities independent
of the sexual motor. He alone is capable of disinterested works, that
is to say of aims unconnected with the physical conservation of the
race, but without which civilization would be impossible, or at least
very different from what it is and from the idea which we have of its
future. Doubtless in humanity, as in the rest of nature, the female
represents the important sex. In utter need, as with the mason bee, she
could serve for the absolutely necessary work, to build the shelter,
to gather the food, and the male might, without essential damage be
reduced to the rôle of mere fecundating apparatus. The number of males
could, and even should in such case, diminish with due rapidity, but
then human society would in- or decline toward the type represented
by that of social bees: continual labour being incompatible with
the periods of maternity, the feminine sex would atrophy, a single
female would be elevated to the dignity of queen and mother, the
rest of the population would work stupidly for an ideal exterior to
its own sensibility. Even more radical transformations would not be
anti-natural. Virgin-birth might establish itself: certain males could
be born in each century, as happens in the intellectual order, and they
could fecundate the generation of loins, as genius fecundates the
generation of minds. But humanity, by the richness of its intelligence,
is less than other animal species submitted to causal necessity; by
constant squirming in its nets, it has managed to displace a cord here
and there, and makes now and again the unexpected movement. The coming
of males once in a century would be unnecessary if some mechanical
device were found for exciting the life of woman's eggs, as one excites
those of the sea-anemone. If a few males were born from time to time, by
an atavistic quirk of nature, they could be exhibited as curiosities,
as we now exhibit hermaphrodites.
The feminist ideal leads us to these pipe-dreams. But if it comes
to destroying the couple and not to re-forming it, if it comes to
establishing a vast social promiscuity, if feminism resolves itself
into the formula: free-woman in free-love, it is even more chimerical
than all the chimzera which have at least their analogy in the
diversity of animal habits. Human parthenogenesis is less absurd: it
offers an order, and promiscuity is a disorder. But social promiscuity
is impossible by the further reason that woman, the more feeble,
would be crushed by it. She struggles against man only, thanks to the
privileges which man concedes her, when troubled by sexual inebriety,
intoxicated and drowsy with the fumes of desire. The factitious
equality which she claims would re-establish her ancient slavery, on
the day when most or all women wish to enjoy it: that is still another
possible solution of the feminist crisis. However one looks at it, one
sees the human couple re-establish itself ineluctably.
It is very difficult, from the standpoint of natural logic, to
sympathize with moderate feminism, one could more easily accept
feminism in excess. For if there are in nature numerous examples of
feminism, there are very few of an equality of the sexes.