2. THE WAR BETWEEN THE SEXES
II
6. How Marriages are Arranged
I have said that women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit
mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation.
The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are
is itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be brought
up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to a few
obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite the
vast accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.
Turn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come most
constantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits of
mind are most clearly contrasted--to the field, to wit, of
monogamous marriage. Surely no long argument is needed to
demonstrate the superior competence and effectiveness of women
here, and therewith their greater self-possession, their
saner weighing of considerations, their higher power of resisting emotional
suggestion. The very fact that marriages occur at all is a proof,
indeed, that they are more cool-headed than men, and more adept in
employing their intellectual resources, for it is plainly to a man's
interest to avoid marriage as long as possible, and as plainly to a
woman's interest to make a favourable marriage as soon as she can.
The efforts of the two sexes are thus directed, in one of the capital
concerns of life, to diametrically antagonistic ends. Which side
commonly prevails? I leave the verdict to the jury. All normal men
fight the thing off; some men are successful for relatively long
periods; a few extraordinarily intelligent and courageous men (or
perhaps lucky ones) escape altogether. But, taking one generation
with another, as every one knows, the average man is duly married
and the average woman gets a husband. Thus the great majority of
women, in this clear-cut and endless conflict, make manifest their
substantial superiority to the great majority of men.
Not many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value by
marriage, at least as the
institution is now met with in Christendom.
Even assessing its benefits at their most inflated worth, they are
plainly overborne by crushing disadvantages. When a man marries
it is no more than a sign that the feminine talent for persuasion and
intimidation--i.e., the feminine talent for survival in a world of
clashing concepts and desires, the feminine competence and
intelligence--has forced him into a more or less abhorrent
compromise with his own honest inclinations and best interests.
Whether that compromise be a sign of his relative stupidity or of his
relative cowardice it is all one: the two things, in their symptoms
and effects, are almost identical. In the first case he marries because
he has been clearly bowled over in a combat of wits; in the second
he resigns himself to marriage as the safest form of liaison. In both
cases his inherent sentimentality is the chief weapon in the hand of
his opponent. It makes him [caroche] the fiction of his enterprise,
and even of his daring, in the midst of the most crude and obvious
operations against him. It makes him accept as real the bold
play-acting that women always excel at, and at no time more than
when stalking a man. It makes him,
above all, see a glamour of
romance in a transaction which, even at its best, contains almost as
much gross trafficking, at bottom, as the sale of a mule.
A man in full possession of the modest faculties that nature
commonly apportions to him is at least far enough above idiocy to
realize that marriages a bargain in which he gets the worse of it,
even when, in some detail or other, he makes a visible gain. He
never, I believe, wants all that the thing offers and implies. He
wants, at most, no more than certain parts. He may desire, let us
say, a housekeeper to protect his goods and entertain his
friends--but he may shrink from the thought of sharing his bathtub
with anyone, and home cooking may be downright poisonous to
him. He may yearn for a son to pray at his tomb--and yet suffer
acutely at the me reapproach of relatives-in-law. He may dream of
a beautiful and complaisant mistress, less exigent and mercurial than
any a bachelor may hope to discover--and stand aghast at admitting
her to his bank-book, his family-tree and his secret ambitions. He
may want company and not intimacy, or intimacy
and not company. He may want a cook and not a partner in his business, or
a partner in his business and not a cook. But in order to get the
precise thing or things that he wants, he has to take a lot of other
things that he doesn't want--that no sane man, in truth, could
imaginably want--and it is to the enterprise of forcing him into this
almost Armenian bargain that the woman of his "choice"addresses
herself. Once the game is fairly set, she searches out his weaknesses
with the utmost delicacy and accuracy, and plays upon them with all
her superior resources. He carries a handicap from the start. His
sentimental and unintelligent belief in theories that she knows quite
well are not true--e.g., the theory that she shrinks from him, and is
modestly appalled by the banal carnalities of marriage itself--gives
her a weapon against him which she drives home with instinctive
and compelling art. The moment she discerns this sentimentality
bubbling within him--that is, The moment his oafish smirks and eye
rollings signify that he has achieved the intellectual disaster that is
called falling in love--he is hers to do with as she will. Save for
acts of God, he is forthwith as good as married.
7. The Feminine Attitude
This sentimentality in marriage is seldom, if ever, observed in
women. For reasons that we shall examine later, they have much
more to gain by the business than men, and so they are prompted by
their cooler sagacity tenter upon it on the most favourable terms
possible, and with the minimum admixture of disarming emotion.
Men almost invariably get their mates by the process called falling in
love; save among the aristocracies of the North and Latin men, the
marriage of convenience is relatively rare; a hundred men marry
"beneath" them to every woman who perpetrates the same folly.
And what is meant by this so-called falling in love? What is meant
by it is a procedure whereby a man accounts for the fact of his
marriage, after feminine initiative and generalship have made it
inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze of romance--in brief,
by setting up the doctrine that an obviously self-possessed and
mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most important
adventure of her life, and with the
keenest understanding of its
utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost
disembodied creature, enchanted and made perfect by a passion that
has stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not
acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death. By this
preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man is
made glorious, and even gifted with a touch of flattering
naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his wooing has assailed and
overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in his arms; he has
been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will upon her.
Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles proudly,
and divert the judicious with their boastful shouts.
Women, it is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious
about embracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation.
They never acknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase
is, until the man has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off
his retreat; to do otherwise would be to bring down upon their heads
the mocking and contumely of all their sisters. With them, falling in
love thus appears in the light of an afterthought, or,
perhaps more accurately, in the light of a contagion. The theory, it would
seem, is that the love of the man, laboriously avowed, has inspired it
instantly, and by some unintelligible magic; that it was non-existent
until the heat of his own flames set it off. This theory, it must be
acknowledged, has a certain element of fact in it. A woman seldom
allows herself to be swayed by emotion while the principal business
is yet afoot and its issue still in doubt; to do so would be to expose a
degree of imbecility that is confined only to the half-wits of the sex.
But once the man is definitely committed, she frequently unbends a
bit, if only as a relief from the strain of a fixed purpose, and so,
throwing off her customary inhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury
of a more or less forced and mawkish sentiment. It is, however,
almost unheard of for her to permit herself this relaxation before the
sentimental intoxication of the man is assured. To do
otherwise--that is, to confess, even post facto, to an anterior
descent,--would expose her, as I have said, to the scorn of all other
women. Such a confession would be an admission that emotion had
got the better of her at a critical intellectual moment, and in the
eyes of women, as in the eyes of the small minority of genuinely
intelligent men, no treason to the higher cerebral centres could be
more disgraceful.
8. The Male Beauty
This disdain of sentimental weakness, even in those higher reaches
where it is mellowed by aesthetic sensibility, is well revealed by the
fact that women are seldom bemused by mere beauty in men. Save
on the stage, the handsome fellow has no appreciable advantage in
amour over his more Gothic brother. In real life, indeed, he is
viewed with the utmost suspicion by all women save the most
stupid. In him the vanity native to his sex is seen to mount to a
degree that is positively intolerable. It not only irritates by its very
nature; it also throws about him a sort of unnatural armour, and so
makes him resistant to the ordinary approaches. For this reason, the
matrimonial enterprises of the more reflective and analytical sort of
women are almost always directed to men whose lack of pulchritude
makes them easier to bring down, and, what is more important still,
easier to hold
down. The weight of opinion among women is
decidedly against the woman who falls in love with an Apollo. She
is regarded, at best, as flighty creature, and at worst, as one pushing
bad taste to the verge of indecency. Such weaknesses are resigned
to women approaching senility, and to the more ignoble variety of
women labourers. A shop girl, perhaps, may plausibly fall in love
with a moving-picture actor, and a half-idiotic old widow may
succumb to a youth with shoulders like the Parthenon, but no
woman of poise and self-respect, even supposing her to be
transiently flustered by a lovely buck, would yield to that madness
for an instant, or confess it to her dearest friend. Women know
how little such purely superficial values are worth. The voice of
their order, the first taboo of their freemasonry, is firmly against
making a sentimental debauch of the serious business of marriage.
This disdain of the pretty fellow is often accounted for by amateur
psychologists on the ground that women are anesthetic to
beauty--that they lack the quick and delicate responsiveness of man.
Nothing could be more absurd. Women, in point of fact,
commonly
have a far keener aesthetic sense than men. Beauty
is more important to them; they give more thought to it; they crave
more of it in their immediate surroundings. The average man, at
least in England and America, takes a sort of bovine pride in his
anaesthesia to the arts; he can think of them only as sources of
tawdry and somewhat discreditable amusement; one seldom hears of
him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful thing that his wife
displays in the presence, of a fine fabric, an effective colour, or a
graceful form, say in millinery. The, truth is that women are
resistant to so-called beauty in men for the simple and sufficient
reason that such beauty is chiefly imaginary. A truly beautiful man,
indeed, is as rare as a truly beautiful piece of jewelry. What men
mistake for beauty in themselves is usually nothing save a certain
hollow gaudiness, a revolting flashiness, the superficial splendour of
a prancing animal. The most lovely moving picture actor,
considered in the light of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a
piece of vulgarity; his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or
among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo
clocks and
hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction
room. All women, save the least intelligent, penetrate this imposture
with sharp eyes. They know that the human body, except for a
brief time in infancy, is not a beautiful thing, buta hideous thing.
Their own bodies give them no delight; it is their constant effort to
disguise and conceal them; they never expose them aesthetically, but
only as an act of the grossest sexual provocation. If it were
advertised that a troupe of men of easy virtue were to appear
half-clothed upon a public stage, exposing their chests, thighs, arms
and calves, the only women who would go to the entertainment
would be a few delayed adolescents, a psychopathic old maid or
two, and a guard of indignant members of the parish Ladies Aid
Society.
9. Men as Aesthetes
Men show no such sagacious apprehension of the relatively feeble
loveliness of the human frame. The most effective lure that a
woman can hold out to a man is the lure of what he fatuously
conceives to be her beauty. This so-called beauty, of course, is
almost always a pure illusion. The female body, even at its best, is
very defective in form; it has harsh curves and very clumsily
distributed masses; compared to it the average milk-jug, or even
cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent and gratifying design--in brief, an
objet d'art. The fact was curiously (and humorously) display during
the late war, when great numbers of women in all the belligerent
countries began putting on uniforms. Instantly they appeared in
public in their grotesque burlesques of the official garb of aviators,
elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards, and so on, their
deplorable deficiency in design was unescapably revealed. A man,
save he be fat, i.e., of womanish contours, usually looks better in
uniform than in mufti; the tight lines set off his figure. But a
woman is at once given away: she look like a dumbbell run over by
an express train. Below the neck by the bow and below the waist
astern there are two masses that simply refuse to fit into a balanced
composition. Viewed from the side, she presents an exaggerated S
bisected by an imperfect straight line, and so she inevitably suggests
a drunken dollar-mark. Her ordinary clothing cunningly conceals
this fundamental imperfection. It swathes those impossible masses
in draperies soothingly uncertain of outline. But putting her into
uniform is like stripping her. Instantly all her alleged beauty
vanishes.
Moreover, it is extremely rare to find a woman who shows even the
modest sightliness that her sex is theoretically capable of; it is only
the rare beauty who is even tolerable. The average woman, until art
comes to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and
crudely articulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she
is almost sure to be bow-legged. If she has good legs, she is almost
sure to have bad teeth. If she has good teeth, she is almost sure to
have scrawny hands, or muddy eyes, or hair like oakum, or no chin.
A woman who meets fair tests all 'round is so uncommon that she
becomes a sort of marvel, and usually gains a livelihood by
exhibiting herself as such, either on the stage, in the half-world, or
as the private jewel of some wealthy connoisseur.
But this lack of genuine beauty in women lays on them no practical
disadvantage in the primary business of their sex, for its effects are
more than overborne by the emotional suggestibility, the herculean
capacity for illusion, the almost total absence of critical sense of
men.
Men do not demand genuine beauty, even in the most
modest doses; they are quite content with the mere appearance of
beauty. That is to say, they show no talent whatever for
differentiating between the artificial and the real. A film of face
powder, skilfully applied, is as satisfying to them as an epidermis of
damask. The hair of a dead Chinaman, artfully dressed and dyed,
gives them as much delight as the authentic tresses of Venus. A
false hip intrigues them as effectively as the soundest one of living
fascia. A pretty frock fetches them quite as surely and securely as
lovely legs, shoulders, hands or eyes. In brief, they estimate
women, and hence acquire their wives, by reckoning up purely
superficial aspects, which is just as intelligent as estimating an egg
by purely superficial aspects. They never go behind the returns; it
never occurs to them to analyze the impressions they receive. The
result is that many a man, deceived by such paltry sophistications,
never really sees his wife--that if, as God is supposed to see, her,
and as the embalmer will see her--until they have been married for
years. All the tricks may be infantile and obvious, but in the face of
so naive a spectator the temptation to continue
practising them
is irresistible. A trained nurse tells me that even when undergoing
the extreme discomforts of parturition the great majority of women
continue to modify their complexions with pulverized talcs, and to
give thought to the arrangement of their hair. Such transparent
devices, to be sure, reduce the psychologist to a sour sort of mirth,
and yet it must be plain that they suffice to entrap and make fools of
men, even the most discreet. I know of no man, indeed, who is
wholly resistant to female beauty, and I know of no man, even
among those engaged professionally by aesthetic problems, who
habitually and automatically distinguishes the genuine, from the
imitation. He may doit now and then; he may even preen himself
upon is on unusual discrimination; but given the right woman and
the right stage setting, and he will be deceived almost as readily as a
yokel fresh from the cabbage-field.
10. The Process of Delusion
Such poor fools, rolling their eyes in appraisement of such meagre
female beauty as is on display in Christendom, bring to their
judgments a capacity but slightly greater than that a cow would
bring to the estimation of epistemologies. They are so unfitted for
the business that they are even unable to agree upon its elements.
Let one such man succumb to the plaster charms of some prancing
miss, and all his friends will wonder what is the matter with him.
No two are in accord as to which is the most beautiful woman in
their own town or street. Turn six of them loose in millinery shop
or the parlour of a bordello, and there will be no dispute
whatsoever; each will offer the crown of love and beauty to a
different girl.
And what aesthetic deafness, dumbness and blindness thus open the
way for, vanity instantly reinforces. That is to say, once a normal
man has succumbed to the meretricious charms of a definite fair one
(or, more accurately, once a definite fair one has marked him out
and grabbed him by the nose), he defends his choice with all the
heat and steadfastness appertaining to the defense of a point of the
deepest honour. To tell a man flatly that his wife is not beautiful, or
even that his stenographer or manicurist is not beautiful, is so harsh
and intolerable an insult to his taste that even an
enemy seldom
ventures upon it. One would offend him far less by arguing that his
wife is an idiot. One would relatively speaking, almost caress him
by spitting into his eye. The ego of the male is simply unable to
stomach such an affront. It is a weapon as discreditable as the
poison of the Borgias.
Thus, on humane grounds, a conspiracy of silence surrounds the
delusion of female beauty, and so its victim is permitted to get quite
as much delight out of it as if it were sound. The baits he swallows
most are not edible and nourishing baits, but simply bright and
gaudy ones. He succumbs to a pair of well-managed eyes, a
graceful twist of the body, a synthetic complexion or a skilful
display of ankles without giving the slightest thought to the fact that
a whole woman is there, and that within the cranial cavity of the
woman lies a brain, and that the idiosyncrasies of that brain are of
vastly more importance than all imaginable physical stigmata
combined. Those idiosyncrasies may make for amicable relations in
the complex and difficult bondage called marriage; they may, on the
contrary, make for joustings of a downright impossible character.
But not many men, lost
in the emotional maze preceding, are
capable of any very clear examination of such facts. The truth is
that they dodge the facts, even when they are favourable, and lay all
stress upon the surrounding and concealing superficialities. The
average stupid and sentimental man, if he has a noticeably sensible
wife, is almost apologetic about it. The ideal of his sex is always a
pretty wife, and the vanity and coquetry that so often go with
prettiness are erected into charms. In other words, men play the
love game so unintelligently that they often esteem a woman in
proportion as she seems to disdain and make a mock of her
intelligence. Women seldom, if ever, make that blunder. What they
commonly value in a man is not mere showiness, whether physical
or spiritual, but that compound of small capacities which makes up
masculine efficiency and passes for masculine intelligence. This
intelligence, at its highest, has a human value substantially equal to
that of their own. In a man's world it at least gets its definite
rewards; it guarantees security, position, a livelihood; it is a
commodity that is merchantable. Women thus accord it a certain
respect, and esteem it in their husbands, and so seek it out.
11. Biological Considerations
So far as I can make out by experiments on laboratory animals and
by such discreet vivisections as are possible under our laws, there is
no biological necessity for the superior acumen and circumspection
of women. That is to say, it does not lie in any anatomical or
physiological advantage. The essential feminine machine is no
better than the essential masculine machine; both are monuments to
the maladroitness of a much over-praised Creator. Women, it
would seem, actually have smaller brains than men, though perhaps
not in proportion to weight. Their nervous responses, if anything,
are a bit duller than those of men; their muscular coordinations are
surely no prompter. One finds quite as many obvious botches
among them; they have as many bodily blemishes; they are infested
by the same microscopic parasites; their senses are as obtuse; their
ears stand out as absurdly. Even assuming that their special malaises
are wholly offset by the effects of alcoholism in the male, they
suffer patently from the same adenoids, gastritis, cholelithiasis,
nephritis, tuberculosis,
carcinoma, arthritis and so on--in short,
from the same disturbances of colloidal equilibrium that produce
religion, delusions of grandeur, democracy, pyaemia, night sweats,
the yearning to save humanity, and all other such distempers in men.
They have, at bottom, the same weaknesses and appetites. They
react in substantially the same way to all chemical and mechanical
agents. A dose of hydrocyanic acid, administered per ora to the
most sagacious woman imaginable, affects her just as swiftly and
just as deleteriously as it affects a tragedian, a crossing-sweeper, or
an ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of
Cte Rtie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional
woman shows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man
shows, and is as maudlin and idiotic as he is.
Nay; the superior acumen and self-possession of women is not
inherent in any peculiarity of their constitutions, and above all, not
in any advantage of a purely physical character. Its springs are
rather to be sought in a physical disadvantage--that is, in the
mechanical inferiority of their frames, their relative lack of tractive
capacity, their deficiency as brute engines. That deficiency, as every
one knows, is partly a
direct heritage from those females of
the Pongo pygmaeus who were their probable fore-runners in the
world; the same thing is to be observed in the females of almost all
other species of mammals. But it is also partly due to the effects of
use under civilization, and, above all, to what evolutionists call
sexual selection. In other words, women were already measurably
weaker than men at the dawn of human history, and that relative
weakness has been progressively augmented in the interval by the
conditions of human life. For one thing, the process of bringing
forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinement has
replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of them in
infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of cultural
complexity has made education more intricate, that the two
functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the strength and
attention of a woman than they lay upon the strength and attention
of any other female. And for another thing, the consequent
disability and need of physical protection, by feeding and inflaming
the already large vanity of man, have caused him to attach a concept
of attractiveness to feminine weakness, so
that he has come to
esteem his woman, not in proportion as she is self-sufficient as a
social animal but in proportion as she is dependent. In this vicious
circle of influences women have been caught, and as a result their
chief physical character today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift
as much as a man. She cannot walk as far. She cannot exert as
much mechanical energy in any other way. Even her alleged
superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has demonstrated in "Man
and Woman," is almost wholly mythical; she cannot, in point of
fact, stand nearly so much hardship as aman can stand, and so the
law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of
observation in its assumption that, whenever husband and wife are
exposed alike to fatal suffering, say in a shipwreck, the wife dies
first.
So far we have been among platitudes. There is less of overt
platitude in the doctrine that it is precisely this physical frailty that
has given women their peculiar nimbleness and effectiveness on the
intellectual side. Nevertheless, it is equally true. What they have
done is what every healthy and elastic organism does in like case;
they have sought compensation for
their impotence in one field
by employing their resources in another field to the utmost, and out
of that constant and maximum use has come a marked enlargement
of those resources. On the one hand the sum of them present in a
given woman has been enormously increased by natural selection,
so that every woman, so to speak, inherits a certain extra-masculine
mental dexterity as a mere function of her femaleness. And on the
other hand every woman, over and above this almost unescapable
legacy from her actual grandmothers, also inherits admission to that
traditional wisdom which constitutes the esoteric philosophy of
woman as a whole. The virgin at adolescence is thus in the position
of an unusually fortunate apprentice, for she is not only naturally
gifted but also apprenticed to extraordinarily competent masters.
While a boy at the same period is learning from his elders little more
than a few empty technical tricks, a few paltry vices and a few
degrading enthusiasms, his sister is under instruction in all those
higher exercises of the wits that her special deficiencies make
necessary to her security, and in particular in all those exercises
which aim at
overcoming the physical, and hence social and
economic superiority of man by attacks upon his inferior capacity
for clear reasoning, uncorrupted by illusion and sentimentality.
12. Honour
Here, it is obvious, the process of intellectual development takes
colour from the Sklavenmoral, and is, in a sense, a product of it.
The Jews, as Nietzsche has demonstrated, got their unusual
intelligence by the same process; a contrary process is working in
the case of the English and the Americans, and has begun to show
itself in the case of the French and Germans. The sum of feminine
wisdom that I have just mentioned--the body of feminine devices
and competences that is handed down from generation to generation
of women--is, in fact, made up very largely of doctrines and
expedients that infallibly appear to the average sentimental man,
helpless as he is before them, as cynical and immoral. He
commonly puts this aversion into the theory that women have no
sense of honour. The criticism, of course, is characteristically banal.
Honour is a concept
too tangled to be analyzed here, but it may
be sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling of
absolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man and
woman out of which rises most of man's complaint of its
absence--to wit, the conflict culminating in marriage, already
described--the security of the woman is not something that is in
actual being, but something that she is striving with all arms to
attain. In such a conflict it must be manifest that honor can have no
place. An animal fighting for its very existence uses all possible
means of offence and defence, however foul. Even man, for all his
boasting about honor, seldom displays it when he has anything of
the first value at hazard. He is honorable, perhaps, in gambling, for
gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for him to be
honorable in business, for business is bread and butter. He is
honorable (so long as the stake is trivial) in his sports, but he seldom
permits honor to interfere with his perjuries in a lawsuit, or with
hitting below the belt in any other sort of combat that is in earnest.
The history of all his wars is a history of mutual allegations of
dishonorable practices, and such allegations are
nearly always
well grounded. The best imitation of honor that he ever actually
achieves in them is a highly self-conscious sentimentality which
prompts him to be humane to the opponent who has been wounded,
or disarmed, or otherwise made innocuous. Even here his so-called
honor is little more than a form of playacting, both maudlin and
dishonest. In the actual death-struggle he invariably bites.
Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact
that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized.
In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge
them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine
woman ever gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way
of her private interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H.
G. Wells calls a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily
cried up by sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its
disadvantages. Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men.
Its perfect symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is
simply that man who has been most successful in caging and
harnessing his honest and natural instincts-that is, the man
who has done most cruel violence to his own ego in the interest of the
commonweal. The value of this commonweal is always
overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the greatest good to
the greatest number--of petty rogues, ignoramuses and poltroons.
The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under
this cheese-monger's civilization is far more marked in men than in
women, and far more in inferior men than in men of the higher
categories. It must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a
university professor of history that very few of the genuinely
first-rate men of the race have been, wholly civilized, in the sense
that the term is employed in newspapers and in the pulpit. Think of
Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther, Frederick the Great, Cromwell,
Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar, Hannibal, Alexander, and to come
down to our own time, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Bismarck,
Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes.
13. Women and the Emotions
The fact that women have a greater capacity than men for
controlling and concealing their
emotions is not an indication
that they are more civilized, but a proof that they are less civilized.
This capacity, so rare today, and withal so valuable and worthy of
respect, is a characteristic of savages, not of civilized men, and its
loss is one of the penalties that the race has paid for the tawdry boon
of civilization. Your true savage, reserved, dignified, and courteous,
knows how to mask his feelings, even in the face of the most
desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding
to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and
hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a
mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by
an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are
no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging
dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the
effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a
mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine
fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to
reduce the
noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and
the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of
a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting
and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of
nobles and knights and into the, hands of mob-orators,
money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers. To recreate one's self with
war in the grand manner, as Prince Eugene, Marlborough and the
Old Dessauer knew it, one must now go among barbarian peoples.
Women are nearly always against war in modern times, for the
reasons brought forward to justify it are usually either transparently
dishonest or childishly sentimental, and hence provoke their scorn.
But once the business is begun, they commonly favour its conduct
outrance, and are thus in accord with the theory of the great
captains of more spacious days. In Germany, during the late war,
the protests against the Schrecklichkeit practised by the imperial
army and navy did not come from women, but from sentimental
men; in England and the United States there is no record that any
woman ever raised her voice against the blockade
which destroyed hundreds of thousands of German children. I was on
both sides of the bloody chasm during the war, and I cannot recall
meeting a single woman who subscribed to the puerile doctrine that,
in so vast a combat between nations, there could still be categories
of non-combatants, with aright of asylum on armed ships and in
garrisoned towns. This imbecility was maintained only by men,
large numbers of whom simultaneously took part in wholesale
massacres of such non-combatants. The women were superior to
such hypocrisy. They recognized the nature of modern war
instantly and accurately, and advocated no disingenuous efforts to
conceal it.
14. Pseudo-Anaesthesia
The feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largely
responsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid
of passion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with
something akin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by
the fact that very few masculine observers, on the occasions when
they give attention to the matter, are in a
state of mind conducive
to exact observation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely
no reason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that
the minority of women who unquestionably are is of formidable
dimensions. To be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in
the Northern countries, makes them place a high value upon the
virginal type of woman, and so this type tends to grow more
common by sexual selection, but despite that fact, it has by no
means superseded the normal type, so realistically described by the
theologians and publicists of the Middle Ages. It would, however,
be rash to assert that this long continued sexual selection has not
made itself felt, even in the normal type. Its chief effect, perhaps, is
to make it measurably easier for a woman to conquer and conceal
emotion than it is for a man. But this is a mere reinforcement of a
native quality or, at all events, a quality long antedating the rise of
the curious preference just mentioned. That preference obviously
owes its origin to the concept of private property and is most evident
in those countries in which the largest proportion of males are
property owners, i.e.,in which the
property-owning caste
reaches down into the lowest conceivable strata of bounders and
ignoramuses. The low-caste man is never quite sure of his wife
unless he is convinced that she is entirely devoid of amorous
susceptibility. Thus he grows uneasy whenever she shows any sign
of responding in kind to his own elephantine emotions, and is apt to
be suspicious of even so trivial a thing as a hearty response to a
connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of such suspicions,
there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer
books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good deal
less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the domestic hearth.
I have a feeling that the husband of this sort--he is very common in
the United States, and almost as common among the middle classes
of England, Germany and Scandinavia--does himself a serious
disservice, and that he is uneasily conscious of it. Having got
himself a wife to his austere taste, he finds that she is rather
depressing--that his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her
emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and
hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly delights a
man, when
some, woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery of yielding
to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast between her
reserve in the presence of other men and her enchanting
complaisance in the presence of himself. Here his vanity is
enormously tickled. To the world in general she seems remote and
unapproachable; to him she is docile, fluttering, gurgling, even a bit
abandoned. It is as if some great magnifico male, some inordinate
czar or kaiser, should step down from the throne to play dominoes
with him behind the door. The greater the contrast between the
lady's two fronts, the greater his satisfaction-up to, of course, the
point where his suspicions are aroused. Let her diminish that
contrast ever so little on the public side--by smiling at a handsome
actor, by saying a word too many to an attentive head-waiter, by
holding the hand of the rector of the parish, by winking amiably at
his brother or at her sister'husband--and at once the poor fellow
begins to look for clandestine notes, to employ private inquiry
agents, and to scrutinize the eyes, ears, noses and hair of his
children with shameful doubts. This explains many domestic
catastrophes.
15. Mythical Anthropophagi
The man-hating woman, like the cold woman, is largely imaginary.
One often encounters references to her in literature, but who has
ever met hex in real life? As for me, I doubt that such a monster has
ever actually existed. There are, of course, women who spend a
great deal of time denouncing and reviling men, but these are
certainly not genuine man-haters; they are simply women who have
done their utmost to snare men, and failed. Of such sort are the
majority of inflammatory suffragettes of the sex-hygiene and
birth-control species. The rigid limitation of offspring, in fact, is
chiefly advocated by women who run no more risk of having
unwilling motherhood forced upon them than so many mummies of
the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in such noisome
matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attract the
attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises that
are difficult or forbidden. But certainly the enterprise of dissuading
such a propagandist from her gospel would not be difficult, and I
know of no law forbidding it.
I'll begin to believe in the man-hater the day I am introduced to
a woman who has definitely and finally refused a chance of
marriage to aman who is of her own station in life, able to support
her, unafflicted by any loathsome disease, and of reasonably decent
aspect and manners--in brief a man who is thoroughly eligible. I
doubt that any such woman breathes the air of Christendom.
Whenever one comes to confidential terms with an unmarried
woman, of course, she favours one with a long chronicle of the men
she has refused to marry, greatly to their grief. But unsentimental
cross-examination, at least in my experience, always develops the
fact that every one of these suffered from some obvious and
intolerable disqualification. Either he had a wife already and was
vague about his ability to get rid of her, or he was drunk when he
was brought to his proposal and repudiated it or forgot it the next
day, or he was a bankrupt, or he was old and decrepit, or he was
young and plainly idiotic, or he had diabetes or a bad heart, or his
relatives were impossible, or he believed in spiritualism, or
democracy, or the Baconian theory, or some other such nonsense.
Restricting the thing to
men palpably eligible, I believe
thoroughly that no sane woman has ever actually muffed a chance.
Now and then, perhaps, a miraculously fortunate girl has two
victims on the mat simultaneously, and has to lose one. But they are
seldom, if ever, both
good chances; one is nearly always a duffer,
thrown in in the telling to make the bourgeoisie marvel.
16. A Conspiracy of Silence
The reason why all this has to be stated here is simply that women,
who could state it much better, have almost unanimously refrained
from discussing such matters at all. One finds, indeed, a sort of
general conspiracy, infinitely alert and jealous, against the
publication of the esoteric wisdom of the sex, and even against the
acknowledgment that any such body of erudition exists at all. Men,
having more vanity and less discretion, area good deal less cautious.
There is, in fact, a whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging
from Machiavelli's appalling confession of political theory to the
egoistic confidences of such men as Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, Benvenuto
Cellini, Napoleon
Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield. But it is very rarely that a Marie
Bashkirtsev or Margot Asquith lets down the veils which conceal the
acroamatic doctrine of the other sex. It is transmitted from mother
to daughter, so to speak, behind the door. One observes its practical
workings, but hears little about its principles. The causes of this
secrecy are obvious. Women, in the last analysis, can prevail against
men in the great struggle for power and security only by keeping
them disarmed, and, in the main, unwarned. In a pitched battle,
with the devil taking the hindmost, their physical and economic
inferiority would inevitably bring them to disaster. Thus they have
to apply their peculiar talents warily, and with due regard to the
danger of arousing the foe. He must be attached without any formal
challenge, and even without any suspicion of challenge. This
strategy lies at the heart of what Nietzsche called the slave
morality--in brief, a morality based upon a concealment of egoistic
purpose, a code of ethics having for its foremost character a bold
denial of its actual aim.
