[19] I have already done this in my Defence of Aristocracy; but as the standpoint is comparatively new, it will bear being related here in fresh terms.
[21] Op. cit., p. [66]: “In the second part of my book, however, I shall show reasons in favour of the possibility that homosexuality is a higher form than hetero-sexuality.” See also p. [226], where Weininger says: “Her position outside the mere preservation of the race, the fact that she is not merely the channel and the indifferent protector of the chain of beings that pass through her, place the prostitute, in a sense, above the mother.”
[22] See my Defence of Aristocracy, chapter V.
CHAPTER IV
The Positive Man and the
Positive Woman
I have spoken about the positive child and its Yea-saying attitude to Life generally. Now I am going to turn to two creatures, a man and a girl, who have been fortunate enough to succeed, despite the negative influence of the age, in growing up to manhood and mature girlhood without having lost the positive attitude to Life.
Let us consider the positive male first. And I refer to him only because no book on Woman is complete without a more than passing reference to her counterpart—Man.
First of all examine his body! It is clear that Life and its business of multiplication have not nearly so strong, so complete, a hold over him as they have over Woman. The sphere the business of reproduction, alone, occupies in his body is limited, comparatively small, and confined. The part he plays in this business is, moreover, incidental, transitory, spasmodic. As I have already said, he is an amputation from Life rather than Life itself; and he returns to Life only at certain intervals in order, as it were, to pay tribute to her, to enable her to carry on her grand scheme. When he has paid this tribute at stated intervals, the fact that he willingly renounces any further concern in the matter, in fact, with some discontent and sense of surfeit, turns away as one who does not want to have anything more to do with it, is proof enough of the relatively small part he plays. For while he turns away and refreshes his resources by indulging for a space his two other instincts only—the self-preservative and the social—Woman’s reproductive work goes silently on and may be truly said never to cease.
In Man, therefore, we must not confound the attitude of positiveness or yea-saying to Life with positiveness or yea-saying to sex. In Woman they amount practically to the same thing. Her reproductive instinct and her yea to Life are inextricably involved. They merge; they are simply different ways of expressing the same attitude. But in Man there is a positiveness to sex which is smaller, more fitful, more irregular than his positiveness to Life. For the latter may last uninterruptedly throughout his whole existence, whereas the former, as we have seen, unless he be a mere beast, is moody, transient, intermittent.
Looking upon men from the outside, therefore, we should no more expect to find their reproductive instinct universally predominant in them, than the vice of kicking is universally predominant in horses.