LOVE IN SEX
Man and woman can love with the same degree of force, but they will
never love in the same manner, since to the altar of their passion they
carry two greatly different natures beside their different genetic
missions. As long as there shall live on our planet a man and a woman,
they will eternally exchange and counterchange this innocent reproach:
"Ah, you do not love me as I love you!" And the lament will be forever
true, because woman will never love like man, and man will never be
capable of loving like woman. In a complete essay on the comparative
psychology of the two sexes we could delineate the distinctive
characteristics of virile love and feminine love, and I may try it some
day; be it sufficient for me here to sketch in a general way the two
figures of passion, one in essence, but rendered so variform by the two
different natures called Adam and Eve.
Listen to two spontaneous cries, uttered by two nations very distant and
well-nigh uncivilized, and you will find the first lines of a physiology
of the sexual characters of love. The Munda-Kols of Chota Nagpur have
some popular songs which express the psychical difference between man
and woman. The women sing:
"Singbonga from the beginning has made us smaller than you,
therefore we obey you. Even if it were not so and from the
beginning we had overburdened you with work, still we would not be
your equals. To you God has given with two hands, to us with one;
and for this we do not plough the ground."
And the men sing to the women:
"As God has given us with two hands, so has He made us bigger than
you. Have we made ourselves big? He Himself has divided us into
big and small. If you do not obey now the word of man, you
certainly disobey the word of God. He himself has made us bigger
than you."
And flying to a very distant land, we find a Kabyle song, in which a
chorus of young women alternates with a chorus of sturdy youths.
_The women_: "Let him who wants to be loved by a woman march with
his weapons; let him put the butt-end of the gun to his cheek and
cry: 'Come to me, O maidens!'"
_The men_: "You do well to love us. God sends us war and we will
die, and keep at least the memory of the happiness that you have
given us."
Rising from the Munda-Kols and the Kabyles to the higher and more
civilized races, we always find, however, an echo of this wild cry of
nature, in which man proclaims his strength or imposes it, and woman
acquiesces in or invokes it. Hence the very unequal part of joys and
sorrows, of rights and duties, which man allows his companion in the
world of love; hence an ever increasing usurpation of joys and rights by
the strong as we descend to the lower strata of humanity; hence
civilized nations continually struggling to divide good and evil in a
more equitable proportion between the two sexes, which still so unfairly
share light and darkness, joys and sorrows.
Where muscular strength is the criterion of hierarchies, where it
constitutes the first of human forces, the difference between man and
woman in the rights and joys of love is immense, and woman becomes
little more than a domestic animal which is bought, sold or killed
according to the necessity of the moment. Setting civilization aside,
polygamy exists where morality is uncertain and lust is ardent; and
woman, guarded as a treasure of voluptuousness, falls morally lower than
in a wandering tribe of nude but monogamous savages, where woman is the
companion of the labors and joys of man. For this, perhaps, Solomon used
to cry out in his harem: "And who will find me a strong woman?" Among
us, also, woman does not play in love the part assigned to her by
nature; and here also she can without scruple class herself among the
oppressed who await their "jacquerie" or their constitution; here also
she is a legitimate pretender who, by right or might, will have some day
to conquer her place in the sun.
But I will speak of rights in another chapter; here we must remain
within the confines of physiology, which still is, or should be, the
legitimate mother of every human legislation. If anthropology should put
in our hands all the moral and intellectual elements which separate man
from woman, then science could most safely establish in its laws and
customs the right place for each sex, without any danger of usurpation,
abuse or imposition from any quarter.
Nature has given woman the greatest part of love, and if this difference
could be expressed with figures, I would say that we were allotted one
fifth, or one fourth at most, of love's territory. Only a woman could
write Mme. de Staël's sublime words: "Undoubtedly, in the mysteries of
nature, to love and still to love is what we have retained of our
celestial inheritance." Neither civilization in any of its most varied
phases, nor customs in their numberless forms, nor impositions of
tyrants, nor power of genius could alter this immutable law. In the rank
and fetid hut of the Eskimo, or in the palace of the prince, woman gives
all of herself to man, first as daughter, then as lover, as wife, as
mother. She is the great placenta of human beings, the bosom from which
we draw blood, voluptuousness, love, every delight of our soul, every
heat that warms us. Woe to us, if we should poison the source of human
life with a pseudo-education; woe to us, if we should deny Eve the most
sacred of rights! For woman, love is the first, the uppermost necessity,
and all her organism and her psychology are softened and moulded by the
influence of love. Van Helmont said too rudely, "_Tota mulier in
utero_," but thinkers of all epochs applauded the aphorism of the Dutch
physician. Woman physically desires for long time; she possesses for
long time and can enjoy her conquest every day, every hour, and turn it
into a warm and scented atmosphere in which she lives as in a nest;
woman nurses in her bosom an angel who always ardently desires and who
does not quench in her the affection for her companion; she moulds the
man, nourishes and caresses him, and as the years pass she sees herself,
her flesh, her loves transformed into a group of little angels who dance
around her, who are bits of her heart, petals of a rose fallen from the
flower of her beauty, all calling her "mother," which has the meaning of
"placenta of life." From the ardent embrace of the man whom she loves
she flits to the endearments of her little children; voluptuousness does
not fatigue, nor ardor wither, nor passion weary her; she is all, from
her hair to her feet, imbued with love, the fluid that flows in her
through every vein and moistens every fiber; so that when she is
deprived of it she is like the tree shattered by the hurricane and which
sees every leaf wither, every flower fall. The love of man is a
lightning that flashes, thunders and vanishes; the love of woman is a
ray of sun which, slow and warm, penetrates her heart and fecundates
her; and she absorbs it, languidly and voluptuously, and every little
root of her sentiments, her joys, her thoughts imbibes and feasts upon
it; so that, even after the sun has disappeared, its fruitful rays
remain, hidden in the earth which it has warmed.
Many have contradicted my opinion, which I expressed several years ago
in my "Physiology of Pleasure," that woman has received from nature a
larger cup to drink at the inexhaustible spring of the voluptuousness of
love; and inasmuch as joy cannot be measured or weighed yet, the problem
must wait for its solution a long time still. Nobody, however, can deny
that, lasciviousness and sensibility being equal in both sexes, Eve can
thirst much longer than man, and, without experiencing fatigue, realize
the happy dream of a voluptuousness which, changing its form, is
eternally renewed. But while for many men voluptuousness is all that is
in love, for a woman, be she the most libertine among the sensual women,
it is only a sweet episode. And if you do not believe such a bold
assertion, send heralds through the whole civilized world and assemble
all those, men and women, who can love and invite them to a singular
love tournament; ask them whether they would accept an eternal and most
faithful love without voluptuousness in exchange for voluptuousness
without love. For every hundred women who will vote for love, ten,
perhaps five, men will decide for the sublime refusal of the embrace.
O you, all of you who have studied the heart of woman in the most abject
places and believe that you are making your companion happy because you
give her luxuriousness and gold and dresses, remember that woman wants
to love above all, to be warmed by the spirit of man, to lean all upon
the faithful arm of man, to feel that she is needed by a companion of
whom she wants to be proud; she wants to be the first for someone. You
may behold a woman unhappy amid the splendors of luxury, caressed by the
sweet affection of a husband, satisfied in all her desires; and you may
see another happy in poverty, amid the storms of life, oppressed by the
brutal whims of a lover. "Mysteries of the heart," you say. "A very
natural thing," I say. The first woman does not love her husband; the
second loves her lover. This is another essential difference between
man's and woman's loves: man wants to be loved; woman wants, above all,
to love. The sentiment which burns in her is more active, more expansive
than in man. Little she demands of her companion, because she is too
rich and her affection is too strong to need the support of self-esteem
to fight the battles of life. Certain it is that perfect love is the sum
of these two most beautiful things, "I love--I am loved"; but often
woman is satisfied when able to exclaim, "I love," while man needs only
to expand his chest and say, "I am loved."
Do not ask woman why she loves. She can love such ugly, poor, deformed
creatures as to astonish and horrify us. If that creature can only be
hers, she will know how to adorn him with the flowers of imagination,
illumine him with the brilliant light which comes from her heart. When
woman loves she almost never doubts of being loved. Has Cæsar ever
doubted of winning a battle? Has Napoleon ever doubted of being
immortal? So it is with woman's love; she will creep like a reptile at
the feet of her companion, or roar like a lion which wants what it
wants; she will be a pet rabbit caressed in the bosom of a child, or an
eagle that carries aloft the prey in its claws; but her love will be
reciprocated. The ardent faith of the neophyte, the proud faith of
infallibility, the immeasurable arrogance of the fortunate conqueror,
are virtues that are more frequently found in woman's loves, more rarely
in man's.
In order to love, woman needs only find talent, strength and even crime
in the man she wants to have for herself; she can love the ugliest, most
wicked, most deformed of men. She elevates every man she touches; she
believes she can heat even the ice. Man loves the beautiful above all
and pardons everything else; man often lowers even the highest loves.
Woman carries even luxuriousness aloft into the big regions of
sentiment; man lowers even affection into the mire of lasciviousness.
Pardon my cynical phrase, but do not reject it, because it is too true:
man in his loves is more of a brute than of an angel; woman is more of
an angel than of a human being.
An essay on the comparative psychology of love cannot be written unless
based upon a complete physiology of the two sexes. Every thought, every
word, every gesture of man or woman in love receives the imprint of the
sex; and when the characters are inverted a most disgusting spectacle
takes place and we behold a caricature, a monster, or even a crime. At
times, however, women of manly inclinations love manly, and men of
docile disposition manifest in their loves sublime tenderness, softness
and sentiments which should be found in woman only. We are again in the
domain of pathology, but the psychical forms may, from the unusual
combination of figures and strange coloring, derive an esthetic element
which astonishes us and invites us to meditation.
However variform the sexual elements of love may be, our modern
civilization is stained by a most heinous sin because we allow woman,
who is the true and great priestess of love, but a small tribute and a
trivial part. We have for ourselves ambition, glory, science, the morbid
thirst for gain; we have granted to man all the energies of sentiment,
all the conquests of genius, all the victories of passion; to woman we
have refused every nourishment of heart and thought, representing to her
that she must only love. After having robbed her of nearly every field
of human activity, we have left the garden of love to her as her only
possession, her only solace. And when this poor prisoner, with all the
ardent curiosity of her nature, wished to pick the flowers and the
scented herbs of her garden, when she proceeded to cultivate the garden
in her own way, we interfered there, too, setting up the posters of our
restrictive regulations and erecting the fences of our laws: "That
flower-bed is reserved; that flower must not be picked. No
thoroughfare." The selection of the plants to cultivate must also be
made by us,--by us, who possess the orchard and the field, the meadow
and the forest, the ice-fields of the Alps and the water of the ocean.
Thus we have a woman slave who murmurs and conspires against us; thus we
have made sterile and barren the garden where a proud and noble lady
would have splendidly received us, where we could rest from our glorious
labors; thus, instead of being welcomed by a lady of our station, in
gilded halls, brilliantly decorated with gems, we have a woman prisoner
or slave who reclines her head on our knees and weeps. We have measured
the bread and wine of her life as the jailer does with the thief; and,
tyrants in love as well, we have kept the lion's share both in
voluptuousness and in the free choice of the sovereign affection. But
every injustice must be paid for, just as the equilibrium is
reëstablished every time it has been disturbed; and the continual
deceptions, only too well justified, of our slaves, seraglio
conspiracies and palace plots, are every day evidence that we erect upon
a false foundation the edifice of family, and loudly proclaim that it
will soon be necessary to give woman what belongs to her, the free
choice of loves, the equality of rights in the affections as well as in
the family.