CHAPTER XII

THE NATURE OF WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE IN THE UNIVERSE

“Erst Mann und Weib zusammen

Machen den Menschen aus.”--KANT.

The further we go in the analysis of woman’s claim to esteem the more we

must deny her of what is lofty and noble, great and beautiful. As this

chapter is about to take the deciding and most extreme step in that

direction, I should like to make a few remarks as to my position. The

last thing I wish to advocate is the Asiatic standpoint with regard to

the treatment of women. Those who have carefully followed my remarks as

to the injustice that all forms of sexuality and erotics visit on woman

will surely see that this work is not meant to plead for the harem. But

it is quite possible to desire the legal equality of men and women

without believing in their moral and intellectual equality, just as in

condemning to the utmost any harshness in the male treatment of the

female sex, one does not overlook the tremendous, cosmic, contrast and

organic differences between them. There are no men in whom there is no

trace of the transcendent, who are altogether bad; and there is no woman

of whom that could truly be said. However degraded a man may be, he is

immeasurably above the most superior woman, so much so that comparison

and classification of the two are impossible; but even so, no one has

any right to denounce or defame woman, however inferior she must be

considered. A true adjustment of the claims for legal equality can be

undertaken on no other basis than the recognition of a complete,

deep-seated polar opposition of the sexes. I trust that I may escape

confusion of my views as to woman with the superficial doctrine of P. J.

Möbius--a doctrine only interesting as a brave reaction against the

general tendency. Women are not “physiologically weak-minded,” and I

cannot share the view that women of conspicuous ability are to be

regarded as morbid specimens.

From a moral point of view one should only be glad to recognise in these

women (who are always more masculine than the rest) the exact opposite

of degeneration, that is to say, it must be acknowledged that they have

made a step forward and gained a victory over themselves; from the

biological standpoint they are just as little or as much phenomena of

degeneration as are womanish men (unethically considered). Intermediate

sexual forms are normal, not pathological phenomena, in all classes of

organisms, and their appearance is no proof of physical decadence.

Woman is neither high-minded nor low-minded, strong-minded nor

weak-minded. She is the opposite of all these. Mind cannot be predicated

of her at all; she is mindless. That, however, does not imply

weak-mindedness in the ordinary sense of the term, the absence of the

capacity to “get her bearings” in ordinary everyday life. Cunning,

calculation, “cleverness,” are much more usual and constant in the woman

than in the man, if there be a personal selfish end in view. A woman is

never so stupid as a man can be.

But has woman no meaning at all? Has she no general purpose in the

scheme of the world? Has she not a destiny; and, in spite of all her

senselessness and emptiness, a significance in the universe?

Has she a mission, or is her existence an accident and an absurdity?

In order to understand her meaning, it is necessary to start from a

phenomenon which, although old and well recognised, has never received

its proper meed of consideration. It is from nothing more nor less than

the phenomenon of _match-making_ from which we may be able to infer

most correctly the real nature of woman.

Its analysis shows it to be the force which brings together and helps

forward two people in their knowledge of one another, which helps them

to a sexual union, whether in the form of marriage or not. This desire

to bring about an understanding between two people is possessed by all

women from their earliest childhood; the very youngest girls are always

ready to act as messengers for their sisters’ lovers. And if the

instinct of match-making can be indulged in only after the particular

woman in question has brought about her own consummation in marriage, it

is none the less present before that time, and the only things which are

at work against it are her jealousy of her contemporaries, and her

anxiety about their chances with regard to her lover, until she has

finally secured him by reason of her money, her social position, and so

forth.

As soon as women have got rid of their own case by their own marriage,

they hasten to help the sons and daughters of their acquaintances to

marry. The fact that older women, in whom the desire for sexual

satisfaction has died out, are such match-makers is so fully recognised

that the idea has wrongly spread that they are the only real

match-makers.

They urge not only women but men to marry, a man’s own mother often

being the most active and persistent advocate of his marriage. It is the

desire and purpose of every mother to see her son married, without any

thought of his individual taste; a wish which some have been blind

enough to regard as another charm in maternal love, of which such a poor

account was given in an earlier chapter. It is possible that many

mothers may hope that their sons should obtain permanent happiness

through marriage, however unfit they may be for it; but undoubtedly this

hope is absent with the majority, and in any case it is the match-making

instinct, the sheer objection to bachelordom, which is the strongest

motive of all.

It is clear that women obey a purely instinctive, inherent impulse,

when they try to get their daughters married.

It is certainly not for logical, and only in a small degree for material

reasons, that they go to such lengths to attain their ends, and it is

certainly not because of any desire expressed by their daughters (very

often it is in direct opposition to the girl’s choice); and since the

match-making instinct is not confined to the members of a woman’s own

family, it is impossible to speak of it as being part of the

“altruistic” or “moral” attitude of maternal love; although most women

if they were charged with match-making projects would undoubtedly answer

“that it is their duty to think of the future welfare of their dear

children.”

A mother makes no difference in arranging a marriage for her own

daughter and for any other girl, and is just as glad to do it for the

latter if it does not interfere with the interests of her own family; it

is the same thing, match-making throughout, and there is no

psychological difference in making a match for her own daughter and

doing the same thing for a stranger. I would even go so far as to say

that a mother is not inconsolable if a stranger, however common and

undesirable, desires and seduces her daughter.

The attitude of one sex to certain traits of the other can often be

applied as a criterion as to how far certain peculiarities of character

are exclusively the property of the one sex or are shared by the other.

So far, we have had to deny to women many characters which they would

gladly claim, but which are exclusively masculine; in match-making,

however, we have a characteristic which is really and exclusively

feminine, the exceptions being either in the case of very womanish men

or else special instances which will be fully dealt with later on, in

chap. xiii. Every real man will have nothing to do with this instinct in

his wife, even when his own daughters, whom he would gladly see settled

in life, are concerned; he dislikes and despises the whole business, and

leaves it entirely to his wife, as being altogether in her province.

This is a striking instance of a purely feminine psychical

characteristic, being not only unattractive to a man, but even

repulsive to him when he is aware of it: while the male characteristics

in themselves are sufficient to please the female, man has to denude

woman of hers before he can love her.

But the match-making instinct exerts a much deeper and more important

influence on the nature of woman than can be gathered from the little I

have said on this subject. I wish now to draw attention to woman’s

attitude at a play: she is always waiting to see if the hero and

heroine, the lovers in the piece, will quarrel. This is nothing but

match-making, and psychologically does not differ a hair from it: it is

the ever present desire to see the man and woman united. But that is not

all; the tremendous excitement with which women await the crucial point

in a decent or indecent book is due to nothing less than the desire to

see the sexual union of the principal characters, and is coupled with an

actual excitation at the thought, and positive appreciation of the force

which is behind sexual union. It is not possible to state this formally

and logically, the only thing is to try and understand how it is that

the two things are psychologically one with women. The mother’s

excitement on her daughter’s wedding-day is of the same quality as that

engendered by reading a story by Prévost, or Sudermann’s “Katzensteg.”

It is quite true that men are very interested by novels which end in

sexual union, but in quite a different way from women; they thoroughly

appreciate the sexual act in imagination, but they do not follow the

gradual approach of the two people concerned from the very beginning;

and their interest does not grow, as woman’s does, in constant

proportion to the reciprocal value which the two people have for one

another.

The breathless pleasure with which the various obstacles are overcome,

the feeling of disappointment at each thwarting of the sexual purpose,

is altogether womanish and unmanly; but it is always present with woman.

She is continually on the watch for sexual developments, whether in real

life or in literature. Has no one ever wondered why women are so keen

and “disinterested” about bringing other men and women together? The

satisfaction they derive from it arises from a personal stimulus at the

thought of the sexual union of others.

But the full extent to which match-making influences the point of view

of all women is not yet fully grasped. On a summer evening when lovers

may be seen in dark corners of public places, or on the seats and banks

round about, it is always the women who wilfully and curiously try to

see what is happening, whilst men who have to pass that way do so

unwillingly, looking the other way, because of a sense of intrusion.

Just in the same way it is women who turn in the streets to look at

nearly every couple they meet, and gaze after them. This espionage and

turning round are none the less “match-making,” because they are

sub-conscious acts. If a man does not want to see a thing he turns his

back on it, and does not look round; but women are glad to see two

people in love with one another, and take pleasure in surprising them in

their love-making, because of their innate and super-personal desire

that sexual union should occur.

But man, as was seen much further back, only cares for that which has a

positive value. A woman when she sees two lovers together is always

awaiting developments, that is to say, she expects, anticipates, hopes,

and desires an outcome. I know an elderly married woman who listened

expectantly at the door for some time, when a servant of hers had

allowed her sweetheart to come into her room, before she walked in and

gave her notice.

The idea of union is always eagerly grasped and never repelled whatever

form it may take (even where animals are concerned).[18] She experiences

no disgust at the nauseating details of the subject, and makes no

attempt to think of anything pleasanter. This accounts for a great deal

of what is so apparently mysterious in the psychic life of woman. Her

wish for the activity of her own sexual life is her strongest impulse,

but it is only a special case of her deep, her only vital interest, the

interest that sexual unions shall take place; the wish that as much of

it as possible shall occur, in all cases, places, and times.

[18] The one apparent exception to this rule is fully discussed in

this chapter.

This universal desire may either be concentrated on the act itself or on

the (possible) child; in the first case, the woman is of the prostitute

type and participates merely for the sake of the act; in the second, she

is of the mother type, but not merely with the idea of bearing children

herself; she desires that every marriage she knows of or has helped to

bring about should be fruitful, and the nearer she is to the absolute

mother the more conspicuous is this idea; the real mother is also the

real grandmother (even if she remains a virgin; Johann Tesman’s

marvellous portrayal of “Tante Jule” in Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” is an

example of what I mean). Every real mother has the same purpose, that of

helping on matrimony; she is the mother of all mankind; she welcomes

every pregnancy.

The prostitute does not want other women to be with child, but to be

prostitutes like herself.

A woman’s relations with married men show how she subordinates her own

sexuality to her match-making instinct, the latter being the dominant

power.

Woman objects more strongly to bachelordom than anything else, because

she is altogether a match-maker, and this makes her try to get men to

marry; but if a man is already married she at once loses most of her

interest in him, however much she liked him before. If the woman herself

is already married, that is to say, when each man she meets is not a

possible solution to her own fate, one would not imagine that a married

man would find less favour with her because he was married than when he

was a bachelor if the woman herself is unfaithful; but women seldom

carry on an intrigue with another woman’s husband, except when they wish

to triumph over her by making him neglect her. This shows that the

disposition of woman is towards the fact of pairing; when men are

already paired she seldom attempts to make them unfaithful, for the fact

of their being paired has satisfied her instinct.

This match-making is the most common characteristic of the human female;

the wish to become a mother-in-law is much more general than even the

desire to become a mother, the intensity and extent of which is usually

over-rated.

My readers may possibly not understand the emphasis I have laid on a

phenomenon which is usually looked upon as amusing as it is disgusting;

and it may be thought that I have given undue importance to it.

But let us see why I have done so. Match-making is essentially the

phenomenon of all others which gives us the key to the nature of woman,

and we must not, as has always been the case, merely acknowledge the

fact and pass on, but we should try to analyse and explain it. One of

our commonest phrases runs: “Every woman is a bit of a match-maker.”

But we must remember that in this, and nothing else, lies the actual

essence of woman. After mature consideration of the most varied types of

women and with due regard to the special classes besides those which I

have discussed, I am of opinion that the only positively general female

characteristic is that of match-making, that is, her uniform willingness

to further the idea of sexual union.

Any definition of the nature of woman which goes no further than to

declare that she has the strong instinct for her own union would be too

narrow; any definition that would link her instincts to the child or to

the husband, or to both, would be too wide. The most general and

comprehensive statement of the nature of woman is that it is completely

adapted and disposed for the special mission of aiding and abetting the

bodily union of the sexes. All women are match-makers, and this property

of the woman to be the advocate of the idea of pairing is the only one

which is found in women of all ages, in young girls, in adults, and in

the aged. The old woman is no longer interested in her own union, but

she devotes herself to the pairing of others. This habit of the old

woman is nothing new, it is only the continuance of her enduring

instinct surviving the complications that were caused when her personal

interests came into conflict with her general desire; it is the now

unselfish pursuit of the impersonal idea.

It is convenient to recapitulate at this point what my investigation has

shown as to the sexuality of women. I have shown that woman is engrossed

exclusively by sexuality, not intermittently, but throughout her life;

that her whole being, bodily and mental, is nothing but sexuality

itself. I added, moreover, that she was so constituted that her whole

body and being continually were in sexual relations with her

environment, and that just as the sexual organs were the centre of woman

physically, so the sexual idea was the centre of her mental nature. The

idea of pairing is the only conception which has positive worth for

women. The woman is the bearer of the thought of the continuity of the

species. The high value which she attaches to the idea of pairing is not

selfish and individual, it is super-individual, and, if I may be

forgiven the desecration of the phrase, it is the transcendental

function of woman. And just as femaleness is no more than the embodiment

of the idea of pairing, so is it sexuality in the abstract. Pairing is

the supreme good for the woman; she seeks to effect it always and

everywhere. Her personal sexuality is only a special case of this

universal, generalised, impersonal instinct.

The effort of woman to realise this idea of pairing is so fundamentally

opposed to that conception of innocence and purity, the higher virginity

which man’s erotic nature has demanded from women, that not all his

erotic incense would have obscured her real nature but for one factor. I

have now to explain this factor which has veiled from man the true

nature of woman, and which in itself is one of the deepest problems of

woman, I mean her absolute duplicity. Her pairing instinct and her

duplicity, the latter so great as to conceal even from woman herself

what is the real essence of her nature, must be explained together.

All that may have seemed like clear gain is now again called into

question. Self-observation was found lacking in women, and yet there

certainly are women who observe very closely all that happens to them.

They were denied the love of truth, and yet one knows many women who

would not tell a lie for anything. It has been said that they are

lacking in consciousness of guilt; but there are many women who reproach

themselves bitterly for most trifling matters, besides “penitents” who

mortify their flesh. Modesty was left to man, but what is to be said of

the womanly modesty, that bashfulness, which, according to Hamerling,

only women have? Is there no foundation for the way in which the idea

has grown and found such acceptance? And then again: Can religion be

absent, in spite of so many “professing” women? Are we to exclude all

women from the moral purity, all the womanly virtues, which poets and

historians have ascribed to her? Are we to say that woman is merely

sexual, that sexuality only receives its proper due from her when it is

so well known that women are shocked at the slightest allusion to sexual

matters, that instead of giving way to it they are often irritated and

disgusted at the idea of impurity, and quite often detest sexual union

for themselves and regard it just as many men do?

It is, of course, manifest that one and the same point is bound up in

all these antitheses, and on the answer given to them depends the final

and decisive judgment on woman. And it is clear that if only one single

female creature were really asexual, or could be shown to have a real

relationship to the idea of personal moral worth, everything that I have

said about woman, its general value as psychically characteristic of the

sex, would be irretrievably demolished, and the whole position which

this book has taken up would be shattered at one blow.

These apparently contradictory phenomena must be satisfactorily

explained, and it must be shown that what is at the bottom of it all and

makes it seem so equivocal arises from the very nature of woman which I

have been trying to explain all along.

In order to understand these fallacious contradictions one must first of

all remember the tremendous “accessibility,” to use another word, the

“impressionability,” of women. Their extraordinary aptitude for anything

new, and their easy acceptance of other people’s views have not yet been

sufficiently emphasised in this book.

As a rule, the woman adapts herself to the man, his views become hers,

his likes and dislikes are shared by her, every word he says is an

incentive to her, and the stronger his sexual influence on her the more

this is so. Woman does not perceive that this influence which man has on

her causes her to deviate from the line of her own development; she does

not look upon it as a sort of unwarrantable intrusion; she does not try

to shake off what is really an invasion of her private life; she is not

ashamed of being receptive; on the contrary, she is really pleased when

she can be so, and prefers man to mould her mentally. She rejoices in

being dependent, and her expectations from man resolve themselves into

the moment when she may be perfectly passive.

But it is not only from her lover (although she would like that best),

but also from her father and mother, uncles and aunts, brothers and

sisters, near relations and distant acquaintances, that a woman takes

what she thinks and believes, being only too glad to get her opinions

“ready made.”

It is not only inexperienced girls but even elderly and married women

who copy each other in everything, from the nice new dress or pretty

coiffure down to the places where they get their things, and the very

recipes by which they cook.

And it never seems to occur to them that they are doing something

derogatory on their part, as it ought to do if they possessed an

individuality of their own and strove to work out their own salvation. A

woman’s thoughts and actions have no definite, independent relations to

things in themselves; they are not the result of the reaction of her

individuality to the world. They accept what is imposed on them gladly,

and adhere to it with the greatest firmness. That is why woman is so

intolerant when there has been a breach of conventional laws. I must

quote an amusing instance, bearing on this side of woman’s character,

from Herbert Spencer. It is the custom in various tribes of Indians in

North and South America for the men to hunt and fight and leave all the

laborious and menial tasks to their wives. The Dakotan women are so

imbued with the idea of the reasonableness and fitness of this

arrangement that, instead of feeling injured by it, the greatest insult

that one of these women can offer to another would be implied in some

such words as follows: “You disgraceful creature.... I saw your husband

carrying home wood for the fires. What was his wife doing that he had to

demean himself by doing woman’s work?”

The extraordinary way in which woman can be influenced by external

agencies is similar in its nature to her suggestibility, which is far

greater and more general than man’s; they are both in accordance with

woman’s desire to play the passive and never the active part in the

sexual act and all that leads to it.[19]

[19] The quiescent, inactive, large egg-cells are sought out by the

mobile, active, and slender spermatozoa.

It is the universal passivity of woman’s nature which makes her accept

and assume man’s valuations of things, although these are utterly at

variance with her nature. The way in which woman can be impregnated with

the masculine point of view, the saturation of her innermost thoughts

with a foreign element, her false recognition of morality, which cannot

be called hypocrisy because it does not conceal anything anti-moral, her

assumption and practise of things which in themselves are not in her

realm, are all very well if the woman does not try to use her own

judgment, and they succeed in keeping up the fiction of her superior

morality. Complications first arise when these acquired valuations come

into collision with the only inborn, genuine, and universally feminine

valuation, the supreme value she sets on pairing.

Woman’s acceptance of pairing as the supreme good is quite unconscious

on her part. As she has no sense of individuality she has nothing to

contrast with pairing; and so, unlike man, she cannot realise its

significance, or even notice the presence in herself of this instinct.

No woman knows, or ever has known, or ever will know, what she does when

she enters into association with man. Femaleness is identical with

pairing, and a woman would have to get outside herself in order to see

and understand that she pairs. Thus it is that the deepest desire of

woman, all that she means, and all that she is, remain unrecognised by

her. There is nothing, then, to prevent the male negative valuation of

pairing overshadowing the female positive valuation of it in the

consciousness of the woman. The susceptibility of woman is so great that

she can even act in opposition to what she is, to the one thing on which

she really sets a positive value!

But the imposture which she enacts when she allows herself to be

incorporated with man’s opinions of sexuality and shamelessness, even of

the imposture itself, and when she uses the masculine standard for her

actions, is such a colossal fraud that she is never conscious of it; she

has acquired a second nature, without even guessing that it is not her

real one; she takes herself seriously, believes she is something and

that she believes in something; she is convinced of the sincerity and

originality of her moralisings and opinions; the lie is as deeply rooted

as that; it is organic. I cannot do better than speak of the ontological

untruthfulness of woman.

Wolfram von Eschenbach says of his hero:

“... So keusch und rein

Ruht’ er bei seiner Königin,

Dass kein Genügen fänd’ darin

So manches Weib beim lieben Mann.

Dass doch so manche in Gedanken

Zur Üppigkeit will überschwanken,

Die sonst sich spröde zeigen kann!

Vor Fremden züchtig sie erscheinen,

Doch ist des Herzens tiefstes Meinen

Das Widerspiel vom äussern Schein.”

Wolfram indicates clearly enough what is at the bottom of woman’s

heart, but he does not say all that is to be said. Women deceive

themselves as well as others on this point. One cannot artificially

suppress and supplant one’s real nature, the physical as well as the

other side, without something happening. The hygienic penalty that must

be paid for woman’s denial of her real nature is hysteria.

Of all the neurotic and psychic phenomena, those of hysteria are the

most fascinating for psychologists; they represent a far more difficult

and, therefore, a more interesting study than those observed in

melancholia or in simple paranoia.

The majority of psychiatrists have a distrust of psychological analyses

which it is not easy for them to shake off; every statement of

pathological alteration of tissues or intoxication by certain means is

for them _a limine_ credible; it is only in psychical matters that they

refuse to recognise a primary cause. But since no reason has so far been

given why psychical phenomena should be of importance secondary to

physical phenomena, it is quite justifiable to disregard such

prejudices.

It is quite possible--there is nothing to prevent it being so--that a

very great deal, perhaps everything, may depend on the proper

interpretation of the “psychical mechanism” of hysteria. That this is so

is proved by the fact that the few conclusions of any value with

reference to hysteria so far discovered have been arrived at in this

way; the investigations carried out by Pierre Janet, Oskar Vogt, and

particularly by J. Breuer and S. Freud, show what I mean. All good work

on hysteria will undoubtedly follow the lines these men have worked on;

that is to say, by investigation of the psychological processes which

led up to the disease.

I believe myself that what may be called a psychological sexual

traumatism is at the root of hysteria. The typical picture of a

hysterical case is not very different from the following: A woman has

always accepted the male views on sexual matters; they are in reality

totally foreign to her nature, and sometime, by some chance, out of the

conflict between what her nature asserts to be true and what she has

always accepted as true and believed to be true, there comes what may be

called a “wounding of the mind.” It is thus possible for the person

affected to declare a sexual desire to be an “extraneous body in her

consciousness,” a sensation which she _thinks_ she detests, but which in

reality has its origin in her own nature. The tremendous intensity with

which she endeavours to suppress the desire (and which only serves to

increase it) so that she may the more vehemently and indignantly reject

the thought--these are the alternations which are seen in hysteria. And

the chronic untruthfulness of woman becomes acute if the woman has ever

allowed herself to be imbued with man’s ethically negative valuation of

sexuality. It is well known that hysterical women manifest the strongest

suggestibility with men. Hysteria is the organic crisis of the organic

untruthfulness of woman.

I do not deny that there are hysterical men, but these are comparatively

few; and since man’s psychic possibilities are endless, that of becoming

“female” is amongst them, and, therefore, he can be hysterical. There

are undoubtedly many untruthful men, but in them the crisis takes a

different form, man’s untruthfulness being of a different kind and never

so hopeless in character as woman’s.

This examination into the organic untruthfulness of woman, into her

inability to be honest about herself which alone makes it possible for

her to think that she thinks what is really totally opposed to her

nature, appears to me to offer a satisfactory explanation of those

difficulties which the ætiology of hysteria present.

Hysteria shows that untruthfulness, however far it may reach, cannot

suppress everything. By education or environment woman adopts a whole

system of ideas and valuations which are foreign to her, or, rather, has

patiently submitted to have them impressed on her; and it would need a

tremendous shock to get rid of this strongly-rooted psychical

complexity, and to transplant woman to that condition of intellectual

helplessness which is so characteristic of hysteria.

An extraordinary shock suffices to destroy the artificial structure, and

to place woman in the arena to undertake a fight between her

unconscious, oppressed nature, and her certainly conscious but unnatural

mind. The see-sawing which now begins between the two explains the

unusual psychic discontinuity during the hysterical phase, the continual

changes of mood, none of which are subject to the control of a dominant,

central, controlling nucleus of individuality. It is extraordinary how

many contradictions can co-exist in the hysterical. Sometimes they are

highly intelligent and able to judge correctly and keenly oppose

hypnotism and so forth. Then, again, they are excited by most trivial

causes, and are most subject to hypnotic trances. Sometimes they are

abnormally chaste, at other times extremely sensual.

All this is no longer difficult to explain. The absolute sincerity, the

painful love of truth, the avoidance of everything sexual, the careful

judgment, and the strength of will--all these form part of that spurious

personality which woman in her passivity has taken upon herself to

exhibit to herself and to the world at large. Everything that belongs to

her original temperament and her real sense form that “other self,” that

“unconscious mind” which can delight in obscurities and which is so open

to suggestion.

It has been endeavoured to show that in what is known as the “duplex”

and “multiplex personality,” the “double conscience,” the “dual ego,”

lies one of the strongest arguments against the belief in the soul. As a

matter of fact, these phenomena are the very reasons why we ought to

believe in a soul. The “dividing up of the personality” is only possible

when there never has been a personality, as with woman. All the

celebrated cases which Janet has described in his book, “L’Automatisme

Psychologique,” concern women, not in a single instance man. It is only

woman who, minus soul or an intelligible ego, has not the power to

become conscious of what is in her; who cannot throw the light of truth

on her inmost self; who can by her completely passive inundation by a

consciousness belonging to another, allow what is in her own nature to

be suppressed by an extraneous element; who can display the hysterical

phenomena described by Janet. Hysteria is the bankruptcy of this

superficial sham self which has been put on, and the woman becomes for

the time being a _tabula rasa_, whilst the working in her of her own

genuine nature appears to her as something coming from without. This

apparent “secondary personality,” this “foreign body in the

consciousness,” this false self, is, in reality, the true female nature,

sexuality itself appearing, and a proper understanding of this fact, and

of the complications that must ensue from the ebbings and flowings of

the false, supposed to be true, and the true supposed to be false, lie

at the root of the most difficult phenomena of hysteria.

Woman’s incapacity for truth--which I hold to be consequent on her lack

of free will with regard to the truth, in accordance with Kant’s

“Indeterminism”--conditions her falsity. Any one who has had anything to

do with women knows how often they give offhand quite patently untrue

reasons for what they have said or done, under the momentary necessity

of answering a question. It is, however, hysterical subjects who are

most careful to avoid unveracity (in a most marked and premeditated way

before strangers); but however paradoxical it may sound it is exactly in

this that their untruthfulness lies! They do not know that this desire

for truth has come to them from outside and is no part of their real

nature.

They have slavishly accepted the postulate of morality, and, therefore,

wish to show at every opportunity, like a good servant, how faithfully

they follow instructions.

It is always suspicious when a man is frequently spoken of as

exceptionally trustworthy: he must have gone out of his way to let

people know it, and it would be safe to wager that in reality he is a

rogue. No confidence must be placed in the genuineness of hysterical

morality, which doctors (no doubt in good faith) often emphasise by

remarks as to the high moral position of their patients.

I repeat: hysterical patients do not consciously simulate. It can only

be made clear to them by suggestion that they actually have been

simulating, and all the “confessions” of the dissimulation can only be

explained in the same way. Otherwise they believe in their own natural

honesty and morality. Neither are the various things which torture them

imaginary; it is much more likely that in the fact that they feel them,

and that the symptoms first disappear with what Breuer calls “catharsis”

(the successive bringing to their consciousness of the true causes of

their illness by hypnotism), lies the proof of their organic

untruthfulness.

The self-accusations which hysterical people are so full of are nothing

but unconscious dissimulation. The sense of guilt, which is equally

poignant in great and most trifling things, cannot be genuine; if the

hysterical self-torturers possessed a standard of morality for

themselves and others they would not be so indiscriminate in their

self-accusations, and not cast as much blame on themselves for a slight

error as for real wrong-doing.

The most distinguishing character of the unconscious untruthfulness of

their self-reproaches is their habit of telling others how wicked they

are, what terrible things they have done, and then they ask if they (the

hysterical) are not hopelessly abandoned sort of people. No one who

really feels remorse could talk in such a way. The fallacy of

representing the hysterical as being eminently moral is one which even

Breuer and Freud have shared. The hysterical simply become imbued with

moral ideas which are foreign to them in their normal state. They

subordinate themselves to this code, they cease to prove things for

themselves, they no longer exercise their own judgment.

Probably these hysterical subjects approach more closely than any other

natures to the moral ideal of the social and utilitarian ethics which

regard a lie as moral if it is for the good of society or of the race.

Hysterical women realise that ideal ontogenetically inasmuch as their

standard of morality comes from without, not from within, and

practically as they appear to act most readily from altruistic motives.

For them duty towards others is not merely a special application of duty

towards oneself.

The untruthfulness of the hysterical is proportional to their belief in

their own accuracy. From their complete inability to attain personal

truth, to be honest about themselves--the hysterical never think for

themselves, they want other people to think about them, they want to

arouse the interest of others--it follows that the hysterical are the

best mediums for hypnotic purposes. But any one who allows him or

herself to be hypnotised is doing the most immoral thing possible. It is

yielding to complete slavery; it is a renunciation of the will and

consciousness; it means allowing another person to do what he likes with

the subject. Hypnosis shows how all possibility of truth depends upon

the wish to be truthful, but it must be the real wish of the person

concerned: when a hypnotised person is told to do something, he does it

when he comes out of the trance, and if asked his reasons will give a

plausible motive on the spot, not only before others, but he will

justify his action to himself by quite fanciful reasons. In this we

have, so to speak, an experimental proof of Kant’s “Ethical Code.”

All women can be hypnotised and like being hypnotised, but this

proclivity is exaggerated in hysterical women. Even the memory of

definite events in their life can be destroyed by the mere suggestion of

the hypnotiser. Breuer’s experiments on hypnotised patients show clearly

that the consciousness of guilt in them is not deeply seated, as

otherwise it could not be got rid of at the mere suggestion of the

hypnotiser. But the sham conviction of responsibility, so readily

exhibited by women of hysterical constitution, rapidly disappears at the

moment when nature, the sexual impulse, appears to drive through the

superficial restraints. In the hysterical paroxysm what happens is that

the woman, while no longer believing it altogether herself, asseverates

more and more loudly: “I do not want that at all, some one not really me

is forcing it on me, but I do not want it at all.” Every stimulation

from outside will now be brought into relation with that demand, which

as she partly believes, is being forced on her, but which, in reality,

corresponds with the deepest wish of her nature. That is why women in a

hysterical attack are so easily seduced. The “attitudes passionelles” of

the hysterical are merely passionate repudiations of sexual desire,

which are loud merely because they are not real, and are more plaintive

than at other times because the danger is greater. It is easy to

understand why the sexual experiences of the time preceding puberty play

so large a part in acute hysteria. The influence of extraneous moral

views can be imposed comparatively easily on the child, as they have

little to overcome in the almost unawakened state of the sexual

inclinations. But, later on, the suppressed, although not wholly

vanquished, nature lays hold of these old experiences, reinterprets them

in the light of the new contents of consciousness, and the crisis takes

place. The different forms that the paroxysms assume and their shifting

nature are due very largely to the fact that the subject does not admit

the true cause, the presence of a sexual desire, any consciousness of it

being attributed by her to some extraneous influence, some self that is

not her “real self.”

Medical observation or interpretation of hysteria is wrong; it allows

itself to be deceived by the patients, who in turn deceive themselves.

It is not the rejecting ego but the rejected which is the true and

original nature of the hysterical patients, however much they pretend to

themselves and others that it is foreign to them.

If the rejecting ego were really their natural ego they could act in

opposition to the disturbing element which they say is foreign to them,

and be fully conscious of it, and differentiate and recognise it in

their memory. But the fraud is evident, because the rejecting ego is

only borrowed, and they lack the courage to look their own desire in the

face, although something seems to say that it is the real, inborn, and

only powerful one they have. Even the desire itself has no real

identity, for it is not seated in a real individual, and, as it is

suppressed, leaps, so to speak, from one part of the body to the other.

It may be that my attempt at an explanation will be thought fanciful,

but at least it appears to be true that the various forms of hysteria

are one and the same thing. This one thing is what the hysterical

patient will not admit is part of her, although it is what is pressing

on her. If she were able to ascribe it to herself and criticise it in

the way in which she admits trivial matters of another kind, she would

be in a measure outside and above her own experiences. The frantic rage

of hysterical women at what they say is imposed on them by some strange

will, whilst it in reality is their own will, shows that they are just

as much under the domination of sexuality as are non-hysterical women,

are just as subject to their destiny and incapable of averting it, since

they, too, are without any intelligible, free ego.

But it may be asked, with reason, why all women are not hysterical,

since all women are liars? This brings us to a necessary inquiry as to

the hysterical constitution. If my theory has been on the right lines,

it ought to be able to give an answer in accordance with facts.

According to it, the hysterical woman is one who has passively accepted

in entirety the masculine and conventional valuations instead of

allowing her own mental character its proper play. The woman who is not

to be led is the antithesis of the hysterical woman. I must not delay

over this point; it really belongs to special female characterology. The

hysterical woman is hysterical because she is servile; mentally she is

identical with the maid-servant. Her opposite (who does not really

exist) is the shrewish dame. So that women may be subdivided into the

maid who serves, and the woman who commands.[20]

[20] We may find the analogy to this in men: there are masculine

“servants” who are so by nature, and there is the masculine form of

the shrew--_e.g._, the policeman. It is a noticeable fact that a

policeman usually finds his sexual complement in the housemaid.

The servant is born and not made, and there are many women in good

circumstances who are “born servants,” although they never need to put

their rightful position to the test! The servant and the mistress are a

sort of “complete woman” when considered as a “whole.”[21]

[21] A real dame would never dream of asking her husband what she was

to do, what she is to give him for dinner, &c.; the hysterical woman,

on the contrary, is always lacking in ideas, and wants suggestions

from others. This is a rough way of indicating the two types.

The consequences of this theory are fully borne out by experience. The

Xanthippe is the woman who has the least resemblance to the hysterical

type. She vents her spleen (which is really the outcome of unsatisfied

sexual desires) on others, whereas the hysterical woman visits hers on

herself. The “shrew” detests other women, the “servant” detests herself.

The drudge weeps out her woes alone, without really feeling

lonely--loneliness is identical with morality, and a condition which

implies true duality or manifoldness; the shrew hates to be alone

because she must have some one to scold, whilst hysterical women vent

their passion on themselves. The shrew lies openly and boldly but

without knowing it, because it is her nature to think herself always in

the right, and she insults those who contradict her. The servant submits

wonderingly to the demands made of her which are so foreign to her

nature: the hypocrisy of this pliant acquiescence is apparent in her

hysterical attacks when the conflict with her own sexual emotions

begins. It is because of this receptivity and susceptibility that

hysteria and the hysterical type of woman are so leniently dealt with:

it is this type, and not the shrewish type, that will be cited in

opposition to my views.[22]

[22] It is the “yielding type” and not the virago type of woman that

men think capable of love. Such a woman’s love is only the mental

sense of satisfaction aroused by the maleness of some particular man,

and, therefore, it is only possible with the hysterical; it has

nothing to do with her individual power of loving, and can have

nothing to do with it. The bashfulness of woman is also due to her

“obsession” by one man; this also causes her neglect of all other men.

Untruthfulness, organic untruthfulness, characterises both types, and

accordingly all women. It is quite wrong to say that women lie. That

would imply that they sometimes speak the truth. Sincerity, _pro foro

interno et externo_, is the virtue of all others of which women are

absolutely incapable, which is impossible for them!

The point I am urging is that woman is never genuine at any period of

her life, not even when she, in hysteria, slavishly accepts the aspect

of truth laid on her by another, and apparently speaks in accordance

with those demands.

A woman can laugh, cry, blush, or even look wicked at will: the shrew,

when she has some object in view; the “maid,” when she has to make a

decision for herself. Men have not the organic and physiological

qualifications for such dissimulation.

If we are able to show that the supposed love of truth in these types of

woman is no more than their natural hypocrisy in a mask, it is only to

be expected that all the other qualities for which woman has been

praised will suffer under analysis. Her modesty, her self-respect, and

her religious fervour are loudly acclaimed. Womanly modesty, none the

less, is nothing but prudery, _i.e._, an extravagant denial and

rejection of her natural immodesty. Whenever a woman evinces any trace

of what could really be called modesty, hysteria is certainly answerable

for it. The woman who is absolutely unhysterical and not to be

influenced, _i.e._, the absolute shrew, will not be ashamed of any

reproaches her husband may shower on her, however just; incipient

hysteria is present when a woman blushes under her husband’s direct

censure; but hysteria in its most marked form is present when a woman

blushes when she is quite alone: it is only then that she may be said to

be fully impregnated with the masculine standard of values.

The women who most nearly approximate to what has been called sexual

anæsthesia or frigidity are always hysterical, as Paul Solliers, with

whom I entirely agree, discovered. Sexual anæsthesia is merely one of

the many hysterical, that is to say, unreal, simulated forms of

anæsthesia. Oskar Vogt, in particular (and general observation has

confirmed him), proved that such anæsthesia does not involve a real

lack of sensation, but is simply due to an inhibition which keeps

certain sensations in check, and excludes them from the consciousness.

If the anæsthetised arm of a hypnotised subject is pricked a certain

number of times, and the medium is told to say how many times he has

been pricked, he is able to do so, although otherwise he would not have

perceived them. So also with sexual frigidity; it is an order given by

the controlling force of the super-imposed asexual ideas; but this, like

all other forms of anæsthesia, can be counteracted by a sufficiently

strong “order.”

The repulsion to sexuality in general shown by the hysterical woman

corresponds in its nature with her insensibility to sexual matters in

her own case. Such a repulsion, an intense disinclination for everything

sexual, is really present in many women, and this may be urged as an

exception to my generalisation as to the universality in woman of the

match-making tendency. But women who are made ill by discovering two

people in sexual intercourse are always hysterical. In this we have a

special justification of the theory which holds match-making to be the

true nature of woman, and which looks upon her own sexuality as merely a

special case of it. A woman may be made hysterical not only by a sexual

suggestion to herself which she outwardly resists whilst inwardly

assenting to it, but may be just as much so by the sight of two people

in sexual intercourse, for, though she thinks the matter has no value

for her, her inborn assent to it forces itself through all outward and

artificial barriers, and overcomes the super-imposed and incorporated

method of thought in which she usually lives. That is to say, she feels

herself involved in the sexual union of others.

Something similar takes place in the hysterical “consciousness of

guilt,” which has already been spoken about. The absolute shrew never

feels herself really in the wrong; the woman who is slightly hysterical

only feels so in the presence of men; the woman who is thoroughly

hysterical feels it in the presence of the particular man who dominates

her. One cannot prove the existence of a sense of guilt in woman by the

mortifications to which “devotees” and “penitents” subject themselves.

It is these extreme cases of self-discipline which make one suspicious.

Doing penance proves, in most cases, that the doer has not overcome his

fault, that the sense of guilt has not really entered consciousness; it

appears really to be much rather an attempt to force repentance from the

outside, to make up for not really feeling it.

The difference between the conviction of guilt in hysterical women and

in men, and the origin of the self-reproaches of the former, are of some

importance. When the hysterical woman realises that she has done or

thought something immoral, she tries to rectify it by some code which

she seeks to obey and to substitute in her mind in place of the immoral

thought. She does not really get rid of the thought which is too deeply

rooted in her nature; she does not really face it, try to understand it,

and so purge herself of it. She simply, from point to point, case by

case, tries to adhere to the moral code without ever transforming

herself, reforming her idea. The moral character in the woman is

elaborated bit by bit; in the male right conduct comes from moral

character. The vow remodels the whole man; the change takes place in the

only possible way, from within outwards, and leads to a real morality

which is not only a justification by works. The morality of the woman is

merely superficial and is not real morality.

The current opinion that woman is religious is equally erroneous. Female

mysticism, when it is anything more than mere superstition, is either

thinly veiled sexuality (the identification of the Deity and the lover

has been frequently discussed, as, for instance, in Maupassant’s

“Bel-Ami,” or in Hauptmann’s “Hannele’s Himmelfahrt”) as in numberless

spiritualists and theosophists, or it is a mere passive and unconscious

acceptance of man’s religious views which are clung to the more firmly

because of woman’s natural disinclination for them. The lover is readily

transformed into a Saviour; very readily (as is well known to be the

case with many nuns) the Saviour becomes the lover. All the great women

visionaries known to history were hysterical; the most famous, Santa

Teresa, was not misnamed “the patron saint of hysteria.” At any rate, if

woman’s religiousness were genuine, and if it proceeded from her own

nature, she would have done something great in the religious world; but

she never has done anything of any importance. I should like to put

shortly what I take to be the difference between the masculine and

feminine creeds; man’s religion consists in a supreme belief in himself,

woman’s in a supreme belief in other people.

There is left to consider the self-respect which is often described as

being so highly developed in the hysterical. That it is only man’s

self-respect which has been so thoroughly forced into woman, is clear

from its nature and the way it shows itself, as Vogt, who extended and

verified experiments first made by Freud, discovered from self-respect

under hypnotism. The extraneous masculine will creates by its influence

a “self-respecting” subject in the hypnotised woman by inducing a

limitation of the field of the unhypnotised state. Apart from

suggestion, in the ordinary life of the hysterical it is only the man

with whom they are “impregnated” who is respected in them. Any knowledge

of human nature which women have comes from their absorption of the

right sort of man. In the paroxysms of hysteria this artificial

self-respect disappears with the revolt of oppressed nature.

This is quite parallel to the clairvoyance of hysterical mediums, which

is undoubted, but has as little to do with “occult” spiritism as the

ordinary hypnotic phenomena. Just as Vogt’s patients made strenuous

efforts to observe themselves carefully under the powerful will of the

suggestor, the clairvoyante, under the influence of the dominating voice

of the man who is imposing his will on her, is capable of telepathic

performances, and at his command can, blindfolded, read communications

held by people unknown to her at a great distance away; this I saw

happen at München under circumstances which precluded any chance of

fraud.

In woman there are not strong passions opposed to the desire for the

good and true as is the case with man. The masculine will has more power

over woman than over the man himself; it can realise something in women

which, in his own case, has to encounter too many obstacles. He himself

has to battle with an anti-moral and anti-logical opposition in himself.

The masculine will can obtain such power over woman’s mind that he makes

her, in a sense, clairvoyant, and breaks down her limitations of

mentality.

Thus it comes about that woman is more telepathic than man, can appear

more innocent, and can accomplish more as a “seer,” and it is only when

she becomes a medium, _i.e._, the object, that she realises in herself

most easily and surely the masculine will for the good and true. Wala

can be made to understand, but not until Dotan subdues her. She meets

him half-way, for her one desire is to be conquered.

The subject of hysteria, so far as the purposes of this book are

concerned, is now exhausted.

The women who are uniformly quoted as proofs of female morality are

always of the hysterical type, and it is the very observance of

morality, in doing things according to the moral law as if this moral

law were a law of their personality instead of being only an acquired

habit, that the unreality, the immorality of this morality is shown.

The hysterical diathesis is an absurd imitation of the masculine mind, a

parody of free will which woman parades at the very moment when she is

most under a masculine influence.

Woman is not a free agent; she is altogether subject to her desire to be

under man’s influence, herself and all others: she is under the sway of

the phallus, and irretrievably succumbs to her destiny, even if it leads

to actively developed sexuality. At the most a woman can reach an

indistinct feeling of her un-freedom, a cloudy idea of the possibility

of controlling her destiny--manifestly only a flickering spark of the

free, intelligible subject, the scanty remains of inherited maleness in

her, which, by contrast, gives her even this slight comprehension. It is

also impossible for a woman to have a clear idea of her destiny, or of

the forces within her: it is only he who is free who can discern fate,

because he is not chained by necessity; part of his personality, at

least, places him in the position of spectator and a combatant outside

his own fate and makes him so far superior to it. One of the most

conclusive proofs of human freedom is contained in the fact that man has

been able to create the idea of causality. Women consider themselves

most free when they are most bound; and they are not troubled by the

passions, because they are simply the embodiment of them. It is only a

man who can talk of the “dira necessitas” within him; it is only he

could have created the idea of destiny, because it is only he who, in

addition to the empirical, conditioned existence, possesses a free,

intelligible ego.

As I have shown, woman can reach no more than a vague half-consciousness

of the fact that she is a conditioned being, and so she is unable to

overcome the sexuality that binds her. Hysteria is the only attempt on

her part to overcome it, and, as I have shown, it is not a genuine

attempt. The hysteria itself is what the hysterical woman tries to

resist, and the falsity of this effort against slavery is the measure of

its hopelessness. The most notable examples of the sex (I have in mind

Hebbel’s Judith and Wagner’s Kundry) may feel that is because they wish

it that servitude is a necessity for them, but this realisation does not

give them power to resist it; at the last moment they will kiss the man

who ravishes them, and succumb with pleasure to those whom they have

been resisting violently. It is as if woman were under a curse. At times

she feels the weight of it, but she never flees from it. Her shrieks and

ravings are not really genuine, and she succumbs to her fate at the

moment when it has seemed most repulsive to her.

After a long analysis, then, it has been found that there is no

exception to the complete absence in women of any true, inalienable

relation to worth. Even what is covered by such current terms as

“womanly love,” “womanly virtue,” “womanly devoutness,” “womanly

modesty,” has failed to invalidate my conclusions. I have maintained my

ground in face of the strongest opposition, even including that which

comes from woman’s hysterical imitations of the male morality.

Woman, the normal receptive woman of whom I am speaking, is impregnated

by the man not only physically (and I set down the astonishing mental

alteration in women after marriage to a physical phenomenon akin to

telegony), but at every age of her life, by man’s consciousness and by

man’s social arrangements. Thus it comes about that although woman lacks

all the characters of the male sex, she can assume them so cleverly and

so slavishly that it is possible to make mistakes such as the idea of

the higher morality of women.

But this astounding receptivity of woman is not isolated, and must be

brought into practical and theoretical connection with the other

positive and negative characteristics of woman.

What has the match-making instinct in woman to do with her plasticity?

What connection is there between her untruthfulness and her sexuality?

How does it come about that there is such a strange mixture of all these

things in woman?

This brings us to ask the reason why women can assimilate everything.

Whence does she derive the falsity which makes it possible for her to

prefer to believe only what others have told her, to have only what they

(choose to) give her, to be merely what they make her?

In order to give the right answer to these questions we must turn once

more, for the last time, from the actual point. It was found that the

power of recognition which animals possess, and which is the psychical

equivalent of universal organic response to repeated stimuli, was

curiously like and unlike human memory; both signify an equally lasting

influence of an impression which was limited to a definite period; but

memory is differentiated from mere passive recognition by its power of

actively reproducing the past.

Later on, it was seen that mere individuation, the characteristic of all

organic differentiation, and individuality, man’s possession, are

different. And finally it was found that it was necessary to distinguish

carefully between love, peculiar to man, and the sexual instinct, shared

by the animals. The two are allied inasmuch as they are both efforts at

immortality.

The desire for worth was referred to as a human character, absent in the

animals where there is only a desire for satisfaction. The two are

analogous, and yet fundamentally different. Pleasure is craved; worth is

what we feel we ought to crave. The two have been confused, with the

worst results for psychology and ethics. There has been a similar

confusion between personality and persons, between recognition and

memory, sexuality and love.

All these antitheses have been continually confused, and, what is even

more striking, almost always by men with the same views and theories,

and with the same object--that of trying to obliterate the difference

between man and the lower animals.

There are other less known distinctions which have been equally

neglected. Limited consciousness is an animal trait; the active power of

noticing is a purely human one. It is evident that there is something in

common in the two facts, but still they are very different. Desire, or

impulse, and will are nearly always spoken of as if they were identical.

The former is common to all living creatures, but man has, in addition,

a will, which is free, and no factor of psychology, because it is the

foundation of all psychological experiences. The identification of

impulse and will is not solely due to Darwin; it occurred also in

Schopenhauer’s conception of the will, which was sometimes biological,

sometimes purely philosophical.

I may group the two sets of factors as follows:

Common to men and animals, Limited to mankind, and in

fundamentally organic. particular to the males of

mankind.

Individuation. Individuality.

Recognition. Memory.

Pleasure. Sense of worth or value.

Sexual desire. Love.

Limitation of the field of Faculty of “taking

consciousness. notice.”

Impulse. Will.

The series shows that man possesses not only each character which is

found in all living things, but also an analogous and higher character

peculiar to himself. The old tendency at once to identify the two series

and to contrast them seems to show the existence of something binding

together the two series, and at the same time separating them. One may

recall in this connection the Buddhistic conception of there being in

man a superstructure added to the characters of lower existences. It is

as if man possessed all the properties of the beasts, with, in each

case, some special quality added. What is this that has been added? How

far does it resemble, and in what respects does it differ from, the more

primitive set?

The terms in the left-hand row are fundamental characteristics of all

animal and vegetable life. All such life is individual life, not the

life of undivided masses; it manifests itself as the impulse to satisfy

needs, as sexual impulse for the purpose of reproduction. Individuality,

memory, will, love, are those qualities of a second life, which,

although related to organic life to a certain extent, are _toto cœlo_

different from it.

This brings us face to face with the religious idea of the eternal,

higher, _new_ life, and especially with the Christian form of it.

As well as a share in organic life, man shares another life, the ζωη

αιωνιος of the New Dispensation. Just as all earthly life is sustained

by earthly food, this other life requires spiritual sustenance

(symbolised in the communion service). The birth and death of the former

have their counterparts in the latter--the moral re-birth of man, the

“regeneration”--and the end: the final loss of the soul through error or

crime. The one is determined from without by the bonds of natural

causation; the other is ruled by the moral imperative from within. The

one is limited and confined to a definite purpose; the other is

unlimited, eternal and moral. The characters which are in the left row

are common to all forms of lower life; those in the right-hand column

are the corresponding presages of eternal life, manifestations of a

higher existence in which man, and only man, has a share. The perpetual

intermingling and the fresh complications which arise between the higher

and lower natures are the making of all history of the human mind; this

is the plot of the history of the universe.

It is possible that some may perceive in this second life something

which in man might have been derived from the other lower characters;

such a possibility dismiss at once.

A clearer grasp of this sensuous, impressionable lower life will make it

clear that, as I have explained in earlier chapters, the case is

reversed; the lower life is merely a projection of the higher on the

world of the senses, a reflection of it in the sphere of necessity, as a

degradation of it, or its Fall. And the great problem is how the

eternal, lofty idea came to be bound with earth. This problem is the

guilt of the world. My investigation is now on the threshold of what

cannot be investigated; of a problem that so far no one has dared to

answer, and that never will be answered by any human being. It is the

riddle of the universe and of life; the binding of the unlimited in the

bonds of space, of the eternal in time, of the spirit in matter. It is

the relation of freedom to necessity, of something to nothing, of God to

the devil. The dualism of the world is beyond comprehension; it is the

plot of the story of man’s Fall, the primitive riddle. It is the binding

of eternal life in a perishable being, of the innocent in the guilty.

But it is evident that neither I nor any other man can understand this.

I can understand sin only when I cease to commit it, and the moment I

understand it I cease to commit it. So also I can never comprehend life

while I am still alive. There is no moment of my life when I am not

bound down by this sham existence, and it must be impossible for me to

understand the bond until I am free from it. When I understand a thing I

am already outside it; I cannot comprehend my sinfulness while I am

still sinful.

As the absolute female has no trace of individuality and will, no sense

of worth or of love, she can have no part in the higher, transcendental

life. The intelligible, hyperempirical existence of the male transcends

matter, space, and time. He is certainly mortal, but he is immortal as

well. And so he has the power to choose between the two, between the

life which is lost with death and the life to which death is only a

stepping-stone. The deepest will of man is towards this perfect,

timeless existence; he is compact of the desire for immortality. That

the woman has no craving for perpetual life is too apparent; there is

nothing in her of that eternal which man tries to interpose and must

interpose between his real self and his projected, empirical self. Some

sort of relation to the idea of supreme value, to the idea of the

absolute, that perfect freedom which he has not yet attained, because he

is bound by necessity, but which he can attain because mind is superior

to matter; such a relation to the purpose of things generally, or to the

divine, every man has. And although his life on earth is accompanied by

separation and detachment from the absolute, his mind is always longing

to be free from the taint of original sin.

Just as the love of his parents was not pure in purpose, but sought more

or less a physical embodiment, the son, who is the outcome of that love,

will possess his share of mortal life as well as of eternal: we are

horrified at the thought of death, we fight against it, cling to this

mortal life, and prove from that that we were anxious to be born as we

were born, and that we still desire to be born of this world.

But since every male has a relation to the idea of the highest value,

and would be incomplete without it, no male is really ever happy. It is

only women who are happy. No man is happy, because he has a relation to

freedom, and yet during his earthly life he is always bound in some way.

None but a perfectly passive being, such as the absolute female, or a

universally active being, like the divine, can be happy. Happiness is

the sense of perfect consummation, and this feeling a man can never

have; but there are women who fancy themselves perfect. The male always

has problems behind him and efforts before him: all problems originate

in the past; the future is the sphere for efforts. Time has no

objective, no meaning, for woman; no woman questions herself as to the

reason of her existence; and yet the sole purpose of time is to give

expression to the fact that this life can and must mean something.

Happiness for the male! That would imply wholly independent activity,

complete freedom; he is always bound, although not with the heaviest

bonds, and his sense of guilt increases the further he is removed from

the idea of freedom.

Mortal life is a calamity, and must remain so whilst mankind is a

passive victim of sensation; so long as he remains not form, but merely

the matter on which form is impressed. Every man, however, has some

glimmer of higher things; the genius most certainly and most directly.

This trace of light, however, does not come from his perceptions; so far

as he is ruled by these, man is merely a passive victim of surrounding

things. His spontaneity, his freedom, come from his power of judging as

to values, and his highest approach to absolute spontaneity and freedom

comes from love and from artistic or philosophical creation. Through

these he obtains some faint sense of what happiness might be.

Woman can really never be quite unhappy, for happiness is an empty word

for her, a word created by unhappy men. Women never mind letting others

see their unhappiness, as it is not real; behind it there lies no

consciousness of guilt, no sense of the sin of the world.

The last and absolute proof of the thoroughly negative character of

woman’s life, of her complete want of a higher existence, is derived

from the way in which women commit suicide.

Such suicides are accompanied practically always by thoughts of other

people, what they will think, how they will mourn over them, how

grieved--or angry--they will be. Every woman is convinced that her

unhappiness is undeserved at the time she kills herself; she pities

herself exceedingly with the sort of self-compassion which is only a

“weeping with others when they weep.”

How is it possible for a woman to look upon her unhappiness as personal

when she possesses no idea of a destiny? The most appallingly decisive

proof of the emptiness and nullity of women is that they never once

succeed in knowing the problem of their own lives, and death leaves them

ignorant of it, because they are unable to realise the higher life of

personality.

I am now ready to answer the question which I put forward as the chief

object of this portion of my book, the question as to the significance

of the male and female in the universe. Women have no existence and no

essence; they are not, they are nothing. Mankind occurs as male or

female, as something or nothing. Woman has no share in ontological

reality, no relation to the thing-in-itself, which, in the deepest

interpretation, is the absolute, is God. Man in his highest form, the

genius, has such a relation, and for him the absolute is either the

conception of the highest worth of existence, in which case he is a

philosopher; or it is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of

absolute beauty, and then he is an artist. But both views mean the same.

Woman has no relation to the idea, she neither affirms nor denies it;

she is neither moral nor anti-moral; mathematically speaking, she has no

sign; she is purposeless, neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil,

never egoistical (and therefore has often been said to be altruistic);

she is as non-moral as she is non-logical. But all existence is moral

and logical existence. So woman has no existence.

Woman is untruthful. An animal has just as little metaphysical reality

as the actual woman, but it cannot speak, and consequently it does not

lie. In order to speak the truth one must _be_ something; truth is

dependent on an existence, and only that can have a relation to an

existence which is in itself something. Man desires truth all the time;

that is to say, he all along desires only to be something. The

cognition-impulse is in the end identical with the desire for

immortality. Any one who objects to a statement without ever having

realised it; any one who gives outward acquiescence without the inner

affirmation, such persons, like woman, have no real existence and must

of necessity lie. So that woman always lies, even if, objectively, she

speaks the truth.

Woman is the great emissary of pairing. The living units of the lower

forms of life are individuals, organisms; the living units of the higher

forms of life are individualities, souls, monads, “meta-organisms,” a

term which Hellenbach uses and which is not without point.

Each monad, however, is differentiated from every other monad, and is as

distinct from it as only two things can be. Monads have no windows, but,

instead, have the universe in themselves. Man as monad, as a potential

or actual individuality, that is, as having genius, has in addition

differentiation and distinction, individuation and discrimination; the

simple undifferentiated unit is exclusively female. Each monad creates

for itself a detached entity, a whole; but it looks upon every other ego

as a perfect totality also, and never intrudes upon it. Man has limits,

and accepts them and desires them; woman, who does not recognise her own

entity, is not in a position to regard or perceive the privacy of those

around her, and neither respects, nor honours, nor leaves it alone: as

there is no such thing as one-ness for her there can be no plurality,

only an indistinct state of fusion with others. Because there is no “I”

in woman she cannot grasp the “thou”; according to her perception the I

and thou are just a pair, an undifferentiated one; this makes it

possible for woman to bring people together, to match-make. The object

of her love is that of her sympathy--the community, the blending of

everything.[23]

[23] All individuality is an enemy of the community. This is seen most

markedly in men of genius, but it is just the same with regard to the

sexes.

Woman has no limits to her ego which could be broken through, and which

she would have to guard.

The chief difference between man’s and woman’s friendship is referable

to this fact. Man’s friendship is an attempt to see eye to eye with

those who individually and collectively are striving after the same

idea; woman’s friendship is a combination for the purpose of

match-making. It is the only kind of intimate and unreserved intercourse

possible between women, when they are not merely anxious to meet each

other for the purpose of gossiping or discussing every day affairs.[24]

[24] Men’s friendships avoid breaking down their friends’ personal

reserve. Women expect intimacy from their friends.

If, for instance, one of two girls or women is much prettier than the

other, the plainer of the two experiences a certain sexual satisfaction

at the admiration which the other receives. The principal condition of

all friendship between women is the exclusion of rivalry; every woman

compares herself physically with every woman she gets to know. In cases

where one is more beautiful than the other, the plainer of the two will

idolise the other, because, though neither of them is in the least

conscious of it, the next best thing to her own sexual satisfaction for

the one is the success of the other; it is always the same; woman

participates in every sexual union. The completely impersonal existence

of women, as well as the super-individual nature of their sexuality,

clearly shows match-making to be the fundamental trait of their beings.

The least that even the ugliest woman demands, and from which she

derives a certain amount of pleasure, is that any one of her sex should

be admired and desired.

It follows from the absorbing and absorbable nature of woman’s life

that women can never feel really jealous. However ignoble jealousy and

the spirit of revenge may be, they both contain an element of greatness,

of which women, whether for good or evil, are incapable. In jealousy

there lies a despairing claim to an assumed right, and the idea of

justice is out of woman’s reach. But that is not the chief reason why a

woman can never be really jealous of any man. If a man, even if he were

the man she was madly in love with, were sitting in the next room making

love to another woman, the thoughts that would be aroused in her breast

would be so sexually exciting that they would leave no room for

jealousy. To a man, such a scene, if he knew of it, would be absolutely

repulsive, and it would be nauseous to him to be near it; woman would

feverishly follow each detail, or she would become hysterical if it

dawned on her what she was doing.

A man is never really affected by the idea of the pairing of others: he

is outside and above any such circumstance which has no meaning for him;

a woman, however, would be scarcely responsible for her interest in the

process, she would be in a state of feverish excitement and as if

spellbound by the thought of her proximity to it.

A man’s interest in his fellow men, who are problems for him, may extend

to their sexual affairs; but the curiosity which is specially for these

things is peculiar to woman, whether with regard to men or women. It is

the love affairs of a man which, from first to last, interest women; and

a man is only intellectually mysterious and charming to a woman so long

as she is not clear as to these.

From all this it is again manifest that femaleness and match-making are

identical; even a superficial study of the case would have resulted in

the same conclusions. But I had a much wider purpose, and I hope I have

clearly shown the connection between woman positive as match-maker, and

woman negative as utterly lacking in the higher life. Woman has but one

idea, an idea she cannot be conscious of, as it is her sole idea, and

that is absolutely opposed to the spiritual idea. Whether as a mother

seeking reputable matrimony, or the Bacchante of the Venusberg, whether

she wishes to be the foundress of a family, or is content to be lost in

the maze of pleasure-seekers, she always is in relation to the general

idea of the race as a whole of which she is an inseparable part, and she

follows the instinct which most of all makes for community.

She, as the missionary of union, must be a creature without limits or

individuality. I have prolonged this side of my investigation because

its important result has been omitted from all earlier characterology.

At this stage it well may be asked if women are really to be considered

human beings at all, or if my theory does not unite them with plants and

animals? For, according to the theory, women, just as little as plants

and animals, have any real existence, any relation to the intelligible

whole. Man alone is a microcosm, a mirror of the universe.

In Ibsen’s “Little Eyolf” there is a beautiful and apposite passage.

“Rita. ‘After all, we are only human beings.’

“Allmers. ‘But we have some kinship with the sky and the sea, Rita.’

“Rita. ‘You, perhaps; not me.’”

Woman, according to the poet, according to Buddha, and in my

interpretation, has no relation to the all, to the world whole, to God.

Is she then human, or an animal, or a plant?

Anatomists will find the question ridiculous, and will at once dismiss

the philosophy which could lead up to such a possibility. For them woman

is the female of _Homo sapiens_, differentiated from all other living

beings, and occupying the same position with regard to the human male

that the females of other species occupy with regard to their males. And

he will not allow the philosopher to say, “What has the anatomist to do

with me? Let him mind his own business.”

As a matter of fact, women are sisters of the flowers, and are in close

relationship with the animals. Many of their sexual perversities and

affections for animals (Pasiphäe myth and Leda myth) indicate this. But

they are human beings. Even the absolute woman, whom we think of as

without any trace of intelligible ego, is still the complement of man.

And there is no doubt that the fact of the special sexual and erotic

completion of the human male by the human female, even if it is not the

moral phenomenon which advocates of marriage would have us believe, is

still of tremendous importance to the woman problem. Animals are mere

individuals; women are persons, although they are not personalities.

An appearance of discriminative power, though not the reality, language,

though not conversation, memory, though it has no continuity or unity of

consciousness--must all be granted to them.

They possess counterfeits of everything masculine, and thus are subject

to those transformations which the defenders of womanliness are so fond

of quoting. The result of this is a sort of amphi-sexuality of many

ideas (honour, shame, love, imagination, fear, sensibility, and so on),

which have both a masculine and feminine significance.

There now remains to discuss the real meaning of the contrast between

the sexes.

The parts played by the male and female principles in the animal and

vegetable kingdoms are not now under consideration; we are dealing

solely with humanity.

That such principles of maleness and femaleness must be accepted as

theoretical conceptions, and not as metaphysical ideas, was the point of

this investigation from the beginning. The whole object of the book has

been to settle the question, in man at least, of the really important

differences between man and woman, quite apart from the mere

physiological-sexual differentiation. Furthermore, the view which sees

nothing more in the fact of the dualism of the sexes than an arrangement

for physiological division of labour--an idea for which, I believe, the

zoologist, Milne-Edwards, is responsible--appears, according to this

work, quite untenable; and it is useless to waste time discussing such a

superficial and intellectually complacent view.

Darwinism, indeed, is responsible for making popular the view that

sexually differentiated organisms have been derived from earlier stages

in which there was no sexual dimorphism; but long before Darwin, Gustav

Theodor Fechner had already shown that the sexes could not be supposed

to have arisen from an undifferentiated stage by any principle such as

division of labour, adaptation to the struggle for existence, and so

forth.

The ideas “man” and “woman” cannot be investigated separately; their

significance can be found out only by placing them side by side and

contrasting them. The key to their natures must be found in their

relations to each other. In attempting to discover the nature of erotics

I went a little way into this subject. The relation of man to woman is

simply that of subject to object. Woman seeks her consummation as the

object. She is the plaything of husband or child, and, however we may

try to hide it, she is anxious to be nothing but such a chattel.

No one misunderstands so thoroughly what a woman wants as he who tries

to find out what is passing within her, endeavouring to share her

feelings and hopes, her experiences and her real nature.

Woman does not wish to be treated as an active agent; she wants to

remain always and throughout--this is just her womanhood--purely

passive, to feel herself under another’s will. She demands only to be

desired physically, to be taken possession of, like a new property.

Just as mere sensation only attains reality when it is apprehended,

_i.e._, when it becomes objective, so a woman is brought to a sense of

her existence only by her husband or children--by these as subjects to

whom she is the object--so obtaining the gift of an existence.

The contrast between the subject and the object in the theory of

knowledge corresponds ontologically to the contrast between form and

matter. It is no more than a translation of this distinction from the

theory of experience to metaphysics. Matter, which in itself is

absolutely unindividualised and so can assume any form, of itself has

no definite and lasting qualities, and has as little essence as mere

perception, the matter of experience, has in itself any existence. If

the Platonic conception is followed out, it will be apparent that that

great thinker asserted to be nothing what the ordinary Philistine

regards as the highest form of reality. According to Plato, the negation

of existence is no other than matter. Form is the only real existence.

Aristotle carried the Platonic conception into the regions of biology.

For Plato form is the parent and creator of all reality. For Aristotle,

in the sexual process the male principle is the active, formative agent,

the female principle the passive matter on which the form is impressed.

In my view, the significance of woman in humanity is explained by the

Platonic and Aristotelian conception. Woman is the material on which man

acts. Man as the microcosm is compounded of the lower and higher life.

Woman is matter, is nothing. This knowledge gives us the keystone to our

structure, and it makes everything clear that was indistinct, it gives

things a coherent form. Woman’s sexual part depends on contact; it is

the absorbing and not the liberating impulse. It coincides with this,

that the keenest sense woman has, and the only one she has more highly

developed than man, is the sense of touch. The eye and the ear lead to

the unlimited and give glimpses of infinity; the sense of touch

necessitates physical limitations to our own actions: one is affected by

what one feels; it is the eminently sordid sense, and suited to the

physical requirements of an earth-bound being.

Man is form, woman is matter: if that is so it must find expression in

the relations between their respective psychic experiences.

The summing up of the connected nature of man’s mental life, as opposed

to the inarticulate and chaotic condition of woman’s, illustrates the

above antithesis of form and matter.

Matter needs to be formed: and thus woman demands that man should clear

her confusion of thought, give meaning to her henid ideas. Women are

matter, which can assume any shape. Those experiments which ascribe to

girls a better memory for learning by rote than boys are explained in

this way: they are due to the nullity and inanity of women, who can be

saturated with anything and everything, whilst man only retains what has

an interest for him, forgetting all else.

This accounts for what has been called woman’s submissiveness, the way

she is influenced by the opinions of others, her suggestibility, the way

in which man moulds her formless nature. Woman is nothing; therefore,

and only therefore, she can become everything, whilst man can only

remain what he is. A man can make what he likes of a woman: the most a

woman can do is to help a man to achieve what he wants.

A man’s real nature is never altered by education: woman, on the other

hand, by external influences, can be taught to suppress her most

characteristic self, the real value she sets on sexuality.

Woman can appear everything and deny everything, but in reality she is

never anything.

Women have neither this nor that characteristic; their peculiarity

consists in having no characteristics at all; the complexity and

terrible mystery about women come to this; it is this which makes them

above and beyond man’s understanding--man, who always wants to get to

the heart of things.

It may be said, even by those who may wish to agree with the foregoing

arguments, that they have not indicated what man really is. Has he any

special male characteristics, like match-making and want of character in

women? Is there a definite idea of what man is, as there is of woman,

and can this idea be similarly formulated?

Here is the answer: The idea of maleness consists in the fact of an

individuality, of an essential monad, and is covered by it. Each monad,

however, is as different as possible from every other monad, and

therefore cannot be classified in one comprehensive idea common to many

other monads. Man is the microcosm; he contains all kinds of

possibilities. This must not be confused with the universal

susceptibility of woman who becomes all without _being_ anything, whilst

man is all, as much or as little, according to his gifts, as he will.

Man contains woman, for he contains matter, and he can allow this part

of his nature to develop itself, _i.e._, to thrive and enervate him; or

he can recognise and fight against it--so that he, and he alone, can get

at the truth about woman. But woman cannot develop except through man.

The meaning of man and woman is first arrived at when we examine their

mutual sexual and erotic relations. Woman’s deepest desire is to be

formed by man, and so to receive her being. Woman desires that man

should impart opinions to her quite different to those she held before,

she is content to let herself be turned by him from what she had till

then thought right. She wishes to be taken to pieces as a whole, so that

he may build her up again.

Woman is first created by man’s will--he dominates her and changes her

whole being (hypnotism). Here is the explanation of the relation of the

psychical to the physical in man and woman. Man assumes a reciprocal

action of body and mind, in the sense rather that the dominant mind

creates the body, than that the mind merely projects itself on

phenomena, whilst the woman accepts both mental and psychical phenomena

empirically. None the less, even in the woman there is some reciprocal

action. However, whilst in the man, as Schopenhauer truly taught, the

human being is his own creation, his own will makes and re-makes the

body, the woman is bodily influenced and changed by an alien will

(suggestion).

Man not only forms himself, but woman also--a far easier matter. The

myths of the book of Genesis and other cosmogonies, which teach that

woman was created out of man, are nearer the truth than the biological

theories of descent, according to which males have been evolved from

females.

We have now to come to the question left open in chap. ix., as to how

woman, who is herself without soul or will, is yet able to realise to

what extent a man may be endowed with them; and we may now endeavour to

answer it. Of this one must be certain, that what woman notices, that

for which she has a sense, is not the special nature of man, but only

the general fact and possibly the grade of his maleness. It is quite

erroneous to suppose that woman has an innate capacity to understand the

individuality of a man. The lover, who is so easily fooled by the

unconscious simulation of a deeper comprehension on the part of his

sweetheart, may believe that he understands himself through a girl; but

those who are less easily satisfied cannot help seeing that women only

possess a sense of the fact not of the individuality of the soul, only

for the formal general fact, not for the differentiation of the

personality. In order to perceive and apperceive the special form,

matter must not itself be formless; woman’s relation to man, however, is

nothing but that of matter to form, and her comprehension of him nothing

but willingness to be as much formed as possible by him; the instinct of

those without existence for existence. Furthermore, this “comprehension”

is not theoretical, it is not sympathetic, it is only a desire to be

sympathetic; it is importunate and egoistical. Woman has no relation to

man and no sense of man, but only for maleness; and if she is to be

considered as more sexual than man, this greater claim is nothing but

the intense desire for the fullest and most definite formation, it is

the demand for the greatest possible quantity of existence.

And, finally, match-making is nothing else than this. The sexuality of

women is super-individual, because they are not limited, formed,

individualised entities, in the higher sense of the word.

The supremest moment in a woman’s life, when her original nature, her

natural desire manifests itself, is that in which her own sexual union

takes place. She embraces the man passionately and presses him to her;

it is the greatest joy of passivity, stronger even than the contented

feeling of a hypnotised person, the desire of matter which has just been

formed, and wishes to keep that form for ever. That is why a woman is so

grateful to her possessor, even if the gratitude is limited to the

moment, as in the case of prostitutes with no memory, or, if it lasts

longer, as in the case of more highly differentiated women.

This endless striving of the poor to attach themselves to riches, the

altogether formless and therefore super-individual striving of the

inarticulate to obtain form by contact, to keep it indefinitely and so

gain an existence, is the deepest motive in pairing.

Pairing is only possible because woman is not a monad, and has no sense

of individuality; it is the endless striving of nothing to be something.

It is thus that the duality of man and woman has gradually developed

into complete dualism, to the dualism of the higher and lower lives, of

subject and object, of form and matter, something and nothing. All

metaphysical, all transcendental existence is logical and moral

existence; woman is non-logical and non-moral. She has no dislike for

what is logical and moral, she is not anti-logical, she is not

anti-moral. She is not the negation, she is, rather, nothing. She is

neither the affirmation nor the denial. A man has in himself the

possibility of being the absolute something or the absolute nothing, and

therefore his actions are directed towards the one or the other; woman

does not sin, for she herself is the sin which is a possibility in man.

The abstract male is the image of God, the absolute something; the

female, and the female element in the male, is the symbol of nothing;

that is the significance of the woman in the universe, and in this way

male and female complete and condition one another. Woman has a meaning

and a function in the universe as the opposite of man; and as the human

male surpasses the animal male, so the human female surpasses the female

of zoology. It is not that limited existence and limited negation (as in

the animal kingdom) are at war in humanity; what there stand in

opposition are unlimited existence and unlimited negation. And so male

and female make up humanity.

The meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She represents negation, the

opposite pole from the Godhead, the other possibility of humanity. And

so nothing is so despicable as a man become female, and such a person

will be regarded as the supreme criminal even by himself. And so also is

to be explained the deepest fear of man; the fear of the woman, which is

the fear of unconsciousness, the alluring abyss of annihilation.

An old woman manifests once for all what woman really is. The beauty of

woman, as may be experimentally proved, is only created by love of a

man; a woman becomes more beautiful when a man loves her because she is

passively responding to the will which is in her lover; however deep

this may sound, it is only a matter of everyday experience.

All the qualities of woman depend on her non-existence, on her want of

character; because she has no true, permanent, but only a mortal life,

in her character as the advocate of pairing she furthers the sexual part

of life, and is fundamentally transformed by and susceptible to the man

who has a physical influence over her.

Thus the three fundamental characters of woman with which this chapter

has dealt come together in the conception of her as the non-existent.

Her instability and untruthfulness are only negative deductions from the

premiss of her non-existence. Her only positive character, the

conception of her as the pairing agent, comes from it by a simple

process of analysis. The nature of woman is no more than pairing, no

more than super-individual sexuality.

If we turn to the table of the two kinds of life given earlier in this

chapter, it will be apparent that every inclination from the higher to

the lower is a crime against oneself. Immorality is the will towards

negation, the craving to change the formed into the formless, the wish

for destruction. And from this comes the intimate relation between

femaleness and crime. There is a close relation between the immoral and

the non-moral. It is only when man accepts his own sexuality, denies the

absolute in him, turns to the lower, that he gives woman existence. The

acceptance of the Phallus is immoral. It has always been thought of as

hateful; it has been the image of Satan, and Dante made it the central

pillar of hell.

Thus comes about the domination of the male sexuality over the female.

It is only when man is sexual that woman has existence and meaning.

Her existence is bound up with the Phallus, and so that is her supreme

lord and welcome master.

Sex, in the form of man, is woman’s fate; the Don Juan is the only type

of man who has complete power over her.

The curse, which was said to be heavy on woman, is the evil will of man:

nothing is only a tool in the hand of the will for nothing. The early

Fathers expressed it pathetically when they called woman the handmaid of

the devil. For matter in itself is nothing, it can only obtain existence

through form. The fall of “form” is the corruption that takes place when

form endeavours to relapse into the formless. When man became sexual he

formed woman. That woman is at all has happened simply because man has

accepted his sexuality. Woman is merely the result of this affirmation;

she is sexuality itself. Woman’s existence is dependent on man; when

man, as man, in contradistinction to woman, is sexual, he is giving

woman form, calling her into existence. Therefore woman’s one object

must be to keep man sexual. She desires man as Phallus, and for this she

is the advocate of pairing. She is incapable of making use of any

creature except as a means to an end, the end being pairing; and she has

but one purpose, that of continuing the guilt of man, for she would

disappear the moment man had overcome his sexuality.

Man created woman, and will always create her afresh, as long as he is

sexual. Just as he gives woman consciousness, so he gives her existence.

Woman is the sin of man.

He tries to pay the debt by love. Here we have the explanation of what

seemed like an obscure myth at the end of the previous chapter. Now we

see what was hidden in it: that woman is nothing before man’s fall, nor

without it; that he does not rob her of anything she had before. The

crime man has committed in creating woman, and still commits in

assenting to her purpose, he excuses to woman by his eroticism.

Whence otherwise would come the generosity of love, which can never be

satisfied by giving? How is it that love is so anxious to endow woman

with a soul, and not any other creature? Whence comes it that a child

cannot love until love coincides with sexuality, the stage of puberty,

with the repeated forming of woman, with the renewing of sin? Woman is

nothing but man’s expression and projection of his own sexuality. Every

man creates himself a woman, in which he embodies himself and his own

guilt.

But woman is not herself guilty; she is made so by the guilt of others,

and everything for which woman is blamed should be laid at man’s door.

Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it; it elevates woman

instead of nullifying her. The “something” folds the “nothing” in its

arms, and thinks thus to free the universe of negation and drown all

objections; whereas the nothing would only disappear if the something

put it away.

Since man’s hatred for woman is not conscious hatred of his own

sexuality, his love is his most intense effort to save woman as woman,

instead of desiring to nullify her in himself. And the consciousness of

guilt comes from the fact that the object of guilt is coveted instead of

being annihilated.

Woman alone, then, is guilt; and is so through man’s fault. And if

femaleness signifies pairing, it is only because all guilt endeavours to

increase its circle. What woman, always unconsciously, accomplishes, she

does because she cannot help it; it is her reason for being, her whole

nature. She is only a part of man, his other, ineradicable, his lower

part. So matter appears to be as inexplicable a riddle as form; woman as

unending as man, negation as eternal as existence; but this eternity is

only the eternity of guilt.