To me, therefore, Weininger’s classification “Male” and “Female” woman seems superfluous; it serves no useful purpose—because almost all the secondary sexual characteristics of the male are rudimentary in woman and come into prominence when her sex is in abeyance, either through negativeness, immaturity (childhood), or at the climacteric (late middle age); besides, even Weininger himself admits that he has “never yet seen a single woman who was not fundamentally feminine,”[20] and scores of cases could, moreover, be adduced which show that certain races have reared women approaching as closely as possible to the male—the squaw, for instance—without having produced feminine males to couple with them.
How Weininger, by the by, reconciles the opinion just quoted with his other view, it is not incumbent upon me to say. His book is so full of shallow conclusions, contradictions and superficial judgments, that it is difficult to understand how it was ever taken seriously.
The relation of the unhealthy woman to Life, then, is rather that of the renegade, of the atheist, of the infidel, towards his native religion. She will not hanker after the business of Life and its multiplication. Her Will will not reside in her reproductive instinct. And this is what goes on in her mind:
(We are now inside the unhealthy woman’s brain.) Messages are being received from all corners of her body. Her trunk with all its intricate mechanism for reproduction sends constant signals of no urgency at all—mere small talk! “We are quite content to be left alone; we are quite happy sitting still; we are not anxious to have our lot altered in the least.” The brain misinterprets all this straight away and transmits these signals to consciousness as follows: “Man and my supposed fatal relationship to him do not interest me in the least. I am above sex. I do not even feel a thrill in the presence of the most virile, most positive male. All this talk about my lot on earth being the business of Life and its multiplication, is simply nonsense multiplied ad infinitum! I am born for higher things; I have the instinct of higher things.”
As if there could be anything higher than the purpose of human life!—Unless, of course, one is of the opinion of Schopenhauer, Weininger and the rest of that ilk, and disbelieves in the desirability of prolonging human life on earth.
To us, then, who are positive to Life, and to whom sterility is therefore a thing to be regretted, deplored, and not admired, as Weininger admired it; to us, who loathe the infertility of prostitution and particularly of homosexuality, and who regard such a statement as that of Weininger’s in regard to the last-named vice[21] as sufficient not only to condemn a whole book, but a whole man as well: the unhealthy or negative woman, despite all her superior and overweening claims, is a subject of repulsion and disgust; and we would give her a place in society where all her misinterpretations of her condition would be rendered non-infectious and innocuous.
Unfortunately, what with the influence of Puritanism and its hostility to sex and to sex-expression, what with the depressing foods and drinks it has introduced,[22] or whose use it has fostered in the nation, vitality even among creatures so positive and so vigorously positive as women, has been greatly reduced and frequently hopelessly impaired; and particularly in England, negative women, asexual women abound.
If, however, we keep strictly to our positive tenet: “that all that is good which is favourable to the best kind of life and its multiplication,” we shall have no difficulty in deciding whether this increase of asexual women is a good or a bad thing; and our judgment may be accordingly both definite and severe.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] The statistics showing that more women than men commit suicide and go mad through disappointed love, prove that the importance attached by women to this rebuff is much greater than that attached to it by men. See Lombroso and Ferrero’s La Femme Criminelle et la Prostituée, pp. 515 and 517.