Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

No young virgin who craves for children, or for a child of her own, is really sincere. Such a desire never reaches consciousness from the body. In fact the girls that make the best mothers are frequently absurdly impatient with and intolerant of other people’s children. My mother always told me that before she had her first child she took no keen interest in children whatsoever. A positive girl may be fond of children, and kind to children; but she is consciously positive to man only. It is only natural that she should be so. The body knows of no royal road to the love and possession of offspring save through the portals of sexual life. Very often, however, a very positive girl will, from mere bashfulness or decency, express her strong desire for man by what she conceives to be a more polite and more euphemistic way of revealing it, and will tell you that she longs for a child. This should deceive no one. It is either a pose on her part, or a very transparent disguise of her genuine feeling.

Although, therefore, we may again be deceived, and frequently are deceived, by Woman’s double life—the unconscious life her body leads with all its determined aspirations and desires constantly directing her footsteps, and the mental or conscious life she leads, which frequently has not the smallest bearing on the true aims of the body, and as often misinterprets these aims—we cannot help admitting, notwithstanding, that positive Woman, though she appears to be, and will declare she is, positive to man and the sexual union alone, must unconsciously be positive to the whole cycle constituting the female sexual experience, including particularly those long months spent with the child alone.

The prostitute, therefore, is merely a positive woman whom unfortunate circumstances have conspired to petrify and confirm in her misunderstanding of her true needs and desires.

The important bearing this admission has on the subsequent chapters of this book, emboldens me to urge the reader to bear it well in mind from now onwards; for, simple as it seems in its baldest statement, it clears up so many of the apparent complications of practical sexual life, that unless it be properly grasped and remembered now it may in itself appear complicated before my task is done.

I have but one more remark to make on positive Woman’s attitude to the sexual act, and with it I shall draw this necessary but delicate discussion to a close.

After admitting that she, or rather her body, pronounces it, alone, inadequate, insufficient, why do I assume that though she consciously craves for it alone, she unconsciously craves for the whole cycle?

As I have pointed out, it is possible for man to recognize the limits, the full extent of his momentary participation in the business of procreation. It is short, intense, tangible. But think of the host of accidents, unexpected joys and pains that may attend an experience lasting eighteen to twenty months! How could that possibly be grasped by the body, let alone the mind, as a definite desire! Prophetic power would have to enter into consciousness as well as into the body, in order to distil from this panorama of events anything so delicate and unequivocal as a desire for a pleasurable experience! It is impossible for the young girl consciously to desire all the events of these fateful eighteen to twenty months, however much her body may insist upon having them, and complain and murmur if it does not get them.

Personally I am convinced, from my knowledge of the healthy well-built and positive mothers I have known, that once the joys of these eighteen to twenty months have been experienced, they are consciously desired again. As, however, such mothers are, as a rule, not very communicative concerning the precise nature and degree of these joys, but secretly hug them all through their lives as something precious and private that elevates them and differentiates them from the rest of mankind, a girl can scarcely be expected to know about them secondhand, nor can she be blamed for not finding out about them.

Have you ever injured or harmed, even by accident, a child that its mother had reared at the breast? Have you ever experienced the fierce love that immediately flashes out of the mother in the form of the heartiest and most unjust indignation at your unintentional trespass? If you know all this, like myself you can entertain no doubts concerning the untold joys that Woman’s life, alone with the child, can and often does bring her. To regard her relationship to man (without its natural consequences) as her sexual consummation, or even as her sexual pleasure, is, therefore, simply the most crass and most hopeless form of primitive barbarism.

It is true that, in order to rule man and to get a hold over him, also with the view of providing herself with an ever-ready means for creating in him a guilty conscience about her, Woman, in Europe at least, has grossly misrepresented her attitude to motherhood, and by concealing its joys and exaggerating its pains as much as possible, has at last succeeded in making maternity appear a sort of voluntary self-martyrdom. It should never be forgotten, however, that with stupid and ill-informed men, woman finds it easy to obtain power and mastery in this manner; for, if her man be foolish enough to believe her, it is the best means she has for cowing him. In making him believe that he gets all the joy and she all the suffering from the sexual life, she gives him a constant sense of guilt or at least of indebtedness which makes him submissive. But the whole attitude is of course pure misrepresentation and fraud. For the very idea that the performance of a natural function should be so painful as to amount to an act of “self-sacrifice,” is obvious nonsense. Certainly, when disease or malformation is present (as it is now in the majority of cases), maternity is nothing less than a torment; but in such circumstances, disease or malformation should be pleaded, and not maternity or matrimony, as the cause of the trouble. A man coupled to a wife who moans and groans over maternity, should realize that he has been guilty of a fundamental mistake in taste, that he has chosen an inferior woman, and should blame himself, his upbringing, and his general notions about life, for the trouble maternity brings into his household. But he should not let himself be persuaded that because his inferior woman suffers over a perfectly normal function, that therefore all maternity is “self-sacrifice” and “unselfishness.” There could not be a grosser misunderstanding. Only the sick or badly-formed woman has any honest right to complain of motherhood; but she has no right to motherhood at all. Motherhood is only “unselfish,” therefore, when it is unpleasant (i.e. when abnormal conditions prevail); and those English philosophers who derive altruism from the maternal instinct are guilty of taking the abnormal as the norm for the basis of their values.