To suggest that man can go on modifying his material conditions, piling luxury on luxury, and yet need not adapt himself and his sexual life to these conditions, but can remain primitive brute beast, is wilfully to blind oneself to facts, and such blindness, if it were common, would indeed be the cause of race suicide. So long as either sex preys upon the other, or enslaves the other, we are in danger of finding that man, having conquered the world, becomes his own victim.
In the writings of reactionaries on this subject there is to be found an extraordinary contradiction. Their plea for the subjection of women and for the entire dedication of women to the sexual life has to be based upon the supposed truth of the assertion that, in women, sex is the predominant factor, nay, the only factor of importance. It ought to be, they think; and it is, they assert; whereas, to man, sex is only a passing gratification, and he goes on his way and forgets all about it. Yet if it be suggested that, in the interests of the race, men might learn to control their impulses,—have, in fact, to a certain extent done so,—and that they have all the beauty and work of the world to fill their minds, these same reactionaries fill the air with cries at the sufferings and damage which such self-restraint will impose upon men. Mr. Heape himself asserts that disuse does not impair men’s sexual powers, and that it does impair those of women; yet his conclusion appears to be that men alone are not to be required to exercise self-control. Now, if sex is so tremendously strong in women, it cannot be necessary artificially to nurse it and to render all other activities impossible; if it is not so predominant after all, but women are whole human beings, just as men are, with all sorts of capacities, then it is cruel to endeavour to restrict them against their nature, and must, in the long-run, be injurious to them and to the whole of society. It is not consonant with the dignity of the Human that either male or female should be treated as a thing. Primitive men may treat women as “conveniences”; primitive women may exploit men for their own purposes; so long as they act in this primitive manner there will exist a state of war. The hope for the race lies in the Human growing up. Adult man will abandon the Great Illusion.
With regard to the supposed absence of personal feeling on the part of the woman, the supposition is altogether out of accord with the facts of life as one knows it. Women fall in love quite as whole-heartedly as men, and when a woman falls in love with a man, the sentiments that fill her being are not in the first instance consciously racial; they are personal. She desires union with her lover, just as he desires union with her, and the completest union has no use for compulsion in any form whatsoever. Those who personify vital forces are very fond of saying that “Nature” uses the love of man and woman “to further her purposes” (meaning the reproduction of the species), and there is often a sort of half-suggestion that man and woman are in reality helpless puppets whom “Nature” deludes with the mirage of love. Nothing is more misleading than these personifications of forces. Love is no delusion at all; it is the one condition under which personal appetite and racial purpose become fused into the force most productive of joy and health and beauty. Scientific men who try to reduce the relations of the sexes to mere animal appetite, and leave out of account the passion of love and the sentiment of affection are in truth less scientific than the merest girl. The growth of love is the one security for the adaptation of the Human to his environment.
Perhaps some people would say, “You talk of love, but men will not love the progressive women. It is no use arguing that they should; they don’t, as a matter of fact, and they never will.” It is true that one does not love because one should. Nothing kills love more surely than compulsion, and that is the basis of my whole plea for liberty. I have no fear whatever that women will cease to attract men, but women should not have to rely upon their power of sexual attraction for a free and varied existence. I often marvel at the lack of pride and of self-confidence in the men who advocate what amounts to starving women into sexual relations. If there are women who are unlovable, the proper penalty is to leave them unloved; it is not the proper penalty to starve them. If some women are unlovable, so, in truth, are some men, and coercion will not help them. On the contrary; what might be good comradeship is turned into hatred by coercion. And it is not only the injured person who hates; there is no hate like that of the tyrant for the object of his repression, and the literature of the world is full of this strange and terrible hatred of men for women. The early fathers of the Christian Church forgot their Master in the most scurrilous attacks on that half of humanity to which Jesus most fully revealed Himself. The gibbering fear of women showed itself in the witch trials and in the monstrous inventions of perverted monks. In recent times a little anthology entitled, Come learn of Me what Woman is, and a still more recent one by Mr. W. H. Beveridge, entitled John and Irene, show a record of literature of abuse by men which has no counterpart whatever in the writings and speeches of women. In their desperate seeking for safety there is no doubt that primitive women had to defend themselves by any device they could invent; and since men made a wicked mystery of them, they would mystify men as far as they could, for their own purposes. One sees women still doing this, and sees the traces of the old fear in the less civilised modern man’s shoulder-shrug at the incalculable female.
Men have done a vast amount of speculation and theorising about women, and have remained for the most part quite remote from the reality, which is very much simpler than all their inventions. The fact is that many of those who have poured out their venom upon women have been men whose unregulated appetites have led them to consort with women either naturally or artificially adapted to them, and they have then proceeded to expound the eternal feminine in terms of the prostitute. Many of the theories about Woman, of which we hear so much just now, are really based upon a more or less intimate acquaintance with prostitutes, and it is one of the ugliest sides of this ugly traffic that the men who buy the women seem to hate and despise them so, and they then proceed to generalise about all women on the data of the hated and despised ones. Progressive women do not hate the prostitute, but they recognise that, by weakness or by choice, she has committed a great sin against the spirit, and they rightly resent generalising about all women from knowledge (and only the most partial knowledge) of these unhappiest. Reading Schopenhauer, or Weininger, or Strindberg, one can only exclaim, “What company have these men kept!” They and a few scientific specialists appear to be the modern descendants of the authors of Malleus Maleficarum.
Owing to sex-obsession, some of these men are permanently unable to understand women, and their way of treating women is vitiated by this incapacity. It may be admitted, with reserves, that the characteristic of the love passion in woman is receptivity, but this is by no means the characteristic of woman in all relations. If one takes only the maternal impulses in women, who would deny that they were active, nay, even sometimes belligerent, if it comes to defending their children? And the coolness towards all men except the one with whom she is in love makes a woman not only peculiarly capable of friendship, but also makes her extremely intolerant of sentimental appeals to the passivity which is associated with the love passion. Women are moved by sexual impulses towards particular men, not towards men as a whole, and men will never understand women so long as they do not recognise this.
This does not mean, of course, that women feel the same towards men as they do towards each other. The differences of mind and life and outlook between men and women make the society of each vastly stimulating to the other, provided always that the women are not artificially cramped, and make a mixed society far wider and humaner than the society of either sex alone. Men scarcely yet know the extent to which they impoverish their own lives by denying a full life to women, and thereby dulling and stupefying women.
And consider, too, how hopelessly unfit man has proved himself for a judicial attitude towards woman! He has allowed his own sex-impulses entirely to obscure his judgment about women. If he is much too hard on the good women, he tries to propitiate his feminine critics by pointing out how much too lenient he is with the bad ones. He makes the law (I speak of England); he is judge and advocate and jury, policeman and jailer. When a woman is arraigned for soliciting his custom, he imprisons her, and keeps his own share of the transaction secret. When, in her despair, she abandons the child he too has abandoned, he again punishes her.
Who set man in judgment over woman?