Lysistrata

by Anthony M. Ludovici

The first values to be destroyed will be the body-despising values, and everything connected with them. We shall no longer condone ugliness or physiological depravity either in ourselves or in others. The fact that some bodily defect cannot be helped by the man who reveals it does not make him any the more desirable. We shall remember that, strictly speaking, moral depravity is no more voluntary than physiological depravity; and, since we refuse to accept the excuse mea non culpa for moral depravity, it is only logical and right to reject that same excuse for bodily depravity. Why is it important not to accept this excuse for bodily depravity? Because to condone is to overlook, to condone is to accept, and, above all, to condone is to become accustomed to. Where physiological depravity is a matter of custom, however, it very soon ceases, as we know, to be regarded as depravity; and mating, love-making, and procreation quickly become possible in spite of it. That is why it is more important to alter our values than to promote Eugenic legislation. For, if our values are altered and physiological depravity is no longer condoned, Eugenic legislation will become unnecessary, and will be anticipated by the taste of the people; whereas, if our body-despising values remain intact, Eugenic legislation will always be fighting an up-hill fight.

The most difficult feature connected with the task of suppressing our body-despising values is the duty it enjoins on each individual not only of condemning his neighbour but also of condemning himself, if he is physiologically depraved; but this each of us will learn to do. We shall feel the shame of bodily defects once more, and strive unremittingly to recover bodies complete anatomically beautiful, and no longer defective functionally. Even at the risk of great immediate suffering, we shall learn to eschew artificial aids of all kinds, and regard it as beneath our dignity to use them. Then, since very little is beyond the wit of man, other means will be found, and we shall recover our former bodily splendour.

We must bear in mind, however, that we are almost at the eleventh hour; that to-morrow may be too late; and that, if we wish to spare ourselves the great discovery of the desolate women-workers of the previous chapter, there is no time to lose.

Secondly, we shall destroy the value which makes it noble, virtuous, and desirable to sacrifice the greater for the less. This value also belongs to the group of values which Dean Inge supports, despite his apparent enthusiasm about Eugenics,[^[11]] and is among the greatest causes of modern degeneracy. When once you admit the principle that it is noble and virtuous to sacrifice the greater for the less, the desirable for the undesirable, the corn for the weeds, the god for the mob, you necessarily invite the condition which we find around us to-day. Everything that is best in the nation, all those elements on which the successful survival of our race depends, are being penalized and sacrificed for the sake of the defective, the lunatic, the crippled, the incurable, the half-witted, and the blind. Honours are acquired not for promoting the multiplication of the sound and hale, but for promoting the comfort, ease, and daily welfare of the physiologically and spiritually hopeless. This value must go. Its disappearance will clear the air. So long, however, as one sound family in England continues to be penalized even to the extent of only sixpence a year in order to support humanity’s wreckage and rubbish, we shall continue to be sacrificing the greater to the less. This absurd and degenerate value must be transvalued into the following: It is noble and virtuous to sacrifice the less for the greater, the rubbish for the precious. When once this transvaluation has been effected, we shall begin to ascend.

[11]. Another instance of his astonishing confusion of thought.

Thirdly, we shall recognize the error of our modern conception of masculinity. We shall try to forget the Great War, which at present tempts us to think highly of ourselves; and we shall endeavour to understand that to limit the notion of masculinity to proficiency in sports and bravery in war is to overlook a whole catalogue of masculine virtues without which degeneration can hardly fail to overtake us in spite of all our games and our feats of arms. This limitation of the idea of manliness to proficiency in sport and bravery in war is acceptable to women, because it makes for a breed of men who are easily led and still more easily misled; but it is fatal to civilization. We shall learn to expect of the manly man not only courage and proficiency in sport, but also will-power, leadership, mastery over the mysteries of life, and not Puritanical funk in their presence, intelligence sufficient to overshadow any female brain that is placed alongside of him (a feature notoriously absent both in the average soldier and in the average sportsman, or at least, if not absent in, not essential to), and clarity and decision regarding every problem that it concerns him to understand—in fact, a man whose presence alone makes the claim of sexual equality a manifest and transparent absurdity.

Nothing less should satisfy us; for we shall always remember that it was the man who possesses merely courage and proficiency at sport that is responsible not only for all our present muddle, but also for Feminism.

Here again, therefore, we shall recast our values, and, hard as it may seem, discipline ourselves to a new outlook. Nothing else can save the world and nothing else can put woman back in her place—which is only another way of saving the world. Every other remedy is quackery. The highest type of this kind of manly man is the ruler who gives us a new order and a new goal; while even the lowest type is the husband who fills a woman’s life and whom she finds it a joy to obey and no indignity, no hardship to serve. Without this kind of man in large numbers in our midst, the world cannot fail to go hopelessly astray, and it will be our principal object henceforth to discover not only how he can be restored to us, but how it is that, during the last hundred years, we have failed to produce him in England. This is the only kind of scientific research that can possibly be fruitful of good results at the present juncture, and it is the first direction in which we shall turn our remaining energy. Nor need we be deterred by the journalistic scoffers who will tell us that we are in search of that mythical monster the Superman, for we have no such highfalutin’ schemes. The men we wish to rear again have already been reared once before in these islands, and history records their lives. They are not a magic fantasy, but a possible reality. They are not demi-gods, but mortals. And we ourselves, who claim that they are indispensable for the salvation of modern humanity, do not hope for them as a race of Supermen, but merely as the leaders of a Masculine Renaissance.

With regard to the world these leaders will create, and to the position of women in that world, while we cannot safely foretell what they will do, we venture to suggest the following:

We may expect a total and complete exposure of the shallowness, impracticability, and danger to national survival of Democracy as we now understand it, and therefore the evanescence of democratic forms of government. The great suffering and chaos to which such forms of government lead will probably leave a deep impression upon the soul of humanity, and this impression will help the leaders of the Masculine Renaissance to remodel the national life without having recourse to the discredited and preposterous vote.