Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

We should readily acknowledge that a certain supernormal sexuality might exist in men of the Mark Antony type, in which the reproductive instinct prevailed over all others; but we should be forced to conclude that as a general rule there would be every chance, even in the healthiest and most normal man, either of the self-preservative or of the social instinct obtaining the upper hand.

And this indeed is what we find constantly occurs in real life—at least sufficiently often for us to recognize that the reproductive or sexual obsession in Man is more or less an exception, or an abnormality.

From the correlation of his bodily parts, then, we cannot deduce a predominance of the reproductive instinct in Man.

What do we know of his racial memory? What have his ancestors done and been doing all these years? If we can posit anything absolutely certain about them it is this, that they have been almost incessantly concerned with the mastering of Life, and the organization of Man’s life as a social being. Nothing is more certain than that. Nothing can be read more clearly in the pages of history. Whereas the reproductive instinct has formed but a recurring leit-motif of man’s life, his social instinct, with all that it entailed in the mastery of Nature and the concomitant organization of man’s life, as a social being, has constituted the unremitting and endless harmony of his existence.

Whereas, therefore, a woman cannot be positive without being paramountly sexual, a man who would be paramountly sexual would be negative to a most important part of his being—his relationship to Nature, to the mastery of Nature, and therefore to the ordering and organization of Life, including himself as a social being.

A paramountly sexual man, therefore, is as hostile to Life as the asexual woman, and just as useless.

When a positive man faces Life with his social instinct keenly sharpened, his ordering mind becomes creative and his creation is society. He feels himself above Nature and bends it to his will which is governed by his social instinct. The stylobate of the ancient Greek temple, the elevation above the ground of the foundation of the Chêteau de Versailles—these things are but instances of the unconscious tokens Man has given all through his career as a rational being, of his feeling of difference, of distance, from rude uncultured Life. When he faces Woman, he also faces Life pure and simple, and in exactly the same spirit. But here his body obtains the mastery, and the creation is the child.

Nature and Woman, being both different forms of Life unordered and unarranged, yield to Man’s ordering mastery. They understand it and follow it, always provided it understands them; for, obviously, the gardener who sought to turn the rose-tree upside down, the cattle farmer who sought to make the sheep carnivorous, or the social gardener who sought to convert woman into a sort of non-productive asexual worker, might certainly come within an ace of success, but would be equally certain of having consummated the wretchedness if not the death both of the rose-tree, the sheep and woman respectively.

But when nature is understood it yields cheerfully and eagerly to Man’s ordering power, although it does so dumbly and inarticulately. Woman, on the other hand, who is simply nature, Life itself, become articulate, does so admiringly, cheerfully, happily and consciously.

The positive man, therefore, is positive to three things; Society, self-preservation, and Woman. He cannot be wholly positive if he lack any one of these attitudes; and those men who have maintained all these attitudes with dignity and creative success, have been the only truly great men of history. Others are simply specialists, cripples, deformities or nonentities. Of course, for a man to be positive to Woman it is not necessary that he should actually have had a child from her. Circumstances may have been hostile to this consummating proof of his sexuality. This is only documentary proof, so to speak, and its absence does not necessarily argue against his having maintained a strictly positive attitude towards her and sex all his life.