“In the province of the physical, about which no doubt is possible, the development towards ‘homologous monosexuality,’ towards the unconditional sexual differentiation of individuals, constitutes the most desirable aim. Every divergence from the normal renders the individual an imperfect being; physical hermaphroditism is repulsive because it represents a state of insufficiency, an inadequate and malformed structure. It appertains to the qualities of beautiful and healthy human beings that the body should be that of an entire man or an entire woman, just as it is desirable that the body should be intact in all other respects”
—she has at the same time expressed a judgment regarding the value of psychical bisexuality which must ever be a rudiment merely in the “entire man” or the “entire woman,” and can never attain the transcendent importance, can never represent the progress towards higher altitudes, which the author, in her singular misunderstanding of the true relations, wishes to ascribe to that condition. We may admit that the bisexual character is more or less strongly developed in the individual male or female, without thereby abandoning the fundamental natural difference between man and woman, which involves not merely the physical, but also the psychical sphere.
I disbelieve, therefore, in Rosa Mayreder’s “synthetic human being,” who is “subordinate alike to the conditions of the masculine and the feminine” but I do believe, as I have already stated in earlier writings, in an individualization of love, in an ennobling and deepening of the relationship between the sexes, such as is possible only to free personalities. This is easily attainable in conjunction with the retention of all bodily and mental peculiarities, as these have developed during the process of sexual differentiation between man and woman.
There can be no possible doubt that psychically woman is a different creature from man. And quite rightly Mantegazza declares the opinion of Mirabeau, that the soul has no sex, but only the body, to be a great blunder.
Let us now return to the directly visible elementary phenomenon of love, to the process of coalescence of the spermatozoon and the ovum. From our study of other natural processes we feel we are justified by analogy in drawing the conclusion that the observed kinetic difference between the spermatozoon and the ovum is the expression also of different psychical processes. Georg Hirth draws attention to these remarkable differences in respect of their modes of energy between spermatozoa and ova.[25] He also infers from the greater variability of the spermatozoa in the different animal species, as compared with the usual spherical form of the ova, that to the spermatozoon is allotted the most important kinetic function in the process of reproduction, to which opinion its aggressive mobility would also lead us, whereas the ovum rather represents potential energy.
“We can indeed hardly believe that anywhere in the entire organic world is there anything, of the same minute size, endowed with like energy and enterprise as these so-called spermatozoa (‘little sperm animals’), which are indeed not animals, and which yet prepare for us more joy and more sorrow than any animal does. There everything is busy. With what turbulence they hurry along until they attain their ardently desired goal, and having attained it, thrust themselves head first into the interior of the ovum! In this we have a drama for the gods. To doubt the energy of these structures would be preposterous.”
Spermatozoa and ova are the original representatives of the respective spiritual natures of man and woman. Disregarding all further differentiation and individualization, the fundamental lineaments of the masculine and feminine natures harmonize with the demeanour of the reproductive cells; and we are able to recognize that for each is provided a different task, and yet that the task of each is no less important than that of the other. Quite rightly Rosa Mayreder points out, that the male sex stands biologically no higher than the female from the reproductive and procreative point of view; that in the continued reproduction of life male and female have equal share.
No less true, on the other hand, is the remark of Havelock Ellis, whose position in relation to the woman question is throughout objective:
“As long as women are distinguished from men by primary sexual characters—as long, that is to say, as they conceive and bear—so long will they remain unequal to man in the highest psychical processes” (“Man and Woman,” p. 21).
The nature of man is aggressive, progressive, variable; that of woman is receptive, more susceptible to stimuli, simpler.