§ 50
In our competitive economic social structure of yesterday and today the egoistic-social factor has been stressed to the utmost, almost, indeed, to the breaking point for all civilized people, quite to the breaking point with many of them. This egoistic tendency has evidently changed if not perverted much of the pure love instinct. It has, for instance, caused woman to judge man by his success in economic competition and also to adopt for herself a competitive modus which has spread itself over so much of her activities as in many cases to make her his rival in the activities in which for the time he happens to be engaged.
No work that has to be done in the world is any more peculiarly or properly the work of one sex than that of the other. All work, implying as it does duty, is egoistic-social. No work is erotic; and nothing erotic should be work and so have in it the effort that is connected with duty. Anything looking like work that enters into the erotic sphere is just so much egoistic-social activity. Erotism is the play side of life. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” needs to be reworded into “all egoistic-social strivings and no erotic living makes Everyman (and Everywoman for that matter) an emotional moron.”
Ships are not ordinarily navigated by women, but women could probably navigate quite as well as men if they had equal experience. Some women evidently think they are magnifying their own ego if they take up any occupation simply because it is or has been generally known as man’s work. Yet no man presumably seeks to magnify his ego by becoming a chef or a maker of women’s clothing.
It is strange that we should continue to make financial success an aim for all young men, when innumerable experiences have taught us beyond a doubt that happiness comes not from material success, but rather material success from happiness.
No man can develop the egoistic sphere of his personality to the limit of its potentiality if his erotic sphere is rotten to the core. And it is rotten in many men. No man can feel right toward the outside world or any part of it if his love impulse, the very core of his being and prime mover of all his acts, is so overgrown with egoistic or social fears that he cannot give expression to the most essential part of himself.