[65] I remind the reader that I refer here to the healthy, positive woman, all of whose bodily functions are a joy to her.
[66] See my more detailed discussion of this question in chapter VII of my Defence of Aristocracy.
[67] The letters correspond to those heading each objection in the body of the chapter.
[68] Such a man can be, and usually is, just as fond of open-air exercise and sports as the merely “manly” man.
[69] The fact that at present no stigma attaches to loss of function or failure to function in the human body, is one of the most conclusive proofs of the degeneration in taste and instinct that Christianity has brought about. It is interesting, however, to be told by a woman emphatically that “the incapacity of a mother to nourish the babe she has borne should be known for a mark of degeneracy—sign, too, that she was unfitted to have borne a child” (see Arabella Kenealy, Op. cit., p. 214).
CHAPTER VIII
Breaches of the Marriage Contract
and Divorce
(1) ANALYSIS OF THE MARRIED LIFE OF POSITIVE PEOPLE
In the chapter on Marriage we saw that the married state is a difficult one for both parties, but that monogamy is more tolerable to the woman than to the man, provided always that children are born regularly. It was there seen that woman must not be falsely likened to man in the claims she makes on monogamy for a perfect sexual life. The coitus is relatively so unimportant to her, that the man himself, her husband, holds only a secondary or tertiary place in her life. That which chiefly matters to the healthy positive woman is that, at stated intervals, her body should be allowed to experience the whole female cycle of sex, from the coitus to the weaning of the child.
Indeed, woman’s unconscious demand for the experience of this whole cycle is so persistent and clamorous that they may be excused who, like Schopenhauer, perceive in it the importunate voice of the Will of the Species (Wille der Gattung) resolutely demanding Life, and ever more and more guarantees of its survival.[70]
It is owing to the secondary, tertiary, or, at any rate, minor position of importance that her husband occupies in the life of a woman who is bearing him children at regular intervals, that his individual characteristics do not really require to be very striking in order to prove satisfactory to her. It is for this reason that he must be a brute indeed, or a drunken sot, or a maniac, if he is to provoke her active hatred while child-bearing continues. Finding, as she does, her principal pleasure in the experiences of motherhood—provided that he behaves with average decency and earns a comfortable living—she asks but little more.[71]