An analogy to this fundamentally aggressive activity of the male in relationship to the female is seen, in a primordial biological form, by the function of his sperm. As you may know, the individual spermatozoon is an individual cell which is propelled by a microscopic tail. After the deposit of spermatozoa in the vagina, the individual sperm actively seeks out and joins the ova, which has been passively waiting for it. This physiological metaphor, according to certain leading theoreticians, well expresses the fundamentally aggressive nature of man in relationship to woman, psychologically as well as sexually.
The male’s aggressiveness is, in general, directed to mastery of the outside world. It shows in him from his earliest years. The sports that he selects have to do with physical aggression almost exclusively (of course some girls also like certain aggressive sports at an early age, but most give them up in puberty). He likes the sports in which he has to run hard, to charge, to tackle, throw, and hit. In his adolescence he will spend years in mastering skills that concern such aggressive activity. A component of this aggressive desire for mastery is his competitiveness with other boys. He wishes to be as good or better than they are, to make his mastery known to the outside world.
In the mental sphere, too, this basic aggressiveness is clearly displayed. His chief passion is in mastering the outward environment that surrounds him, in, to use a phrase from football, “throwing it for a loss.” This desire leads him to become a scientist to control-through-knowing some aspect of the world or even of the universe. Or it leads him to become a businessman, wresting a living from the competitive market place. Or it may lead him to become a philosopher, aggressively probing the “why” of the world. Whatever role he plays in life, he must use his aggression to master the environment he selects as his province.
Because of this basic thrusting aggression which largely defines his role in life, a boy is generally given a larger amount of freedom than a girl is. One reason for this is that the male role in life will demand a great deal of self-reliance in the individual, and this has been recognized by society. Men need the protection of the childhood home for a much less protracted period than women do.
In contrast to men, women have a much smaller store of aggression directed toward the outside world. Their activity is largely directed inward. Psychologically speaking, woman is, in a very real sense, conditioned by her final biological function. At the very center of her nature she is preparing herself for motherhood, and this fact determines the main direction of her psychic energy. Her childhood interests show this clearly. She plays with dolls, she plays house, loves to be around Mother, fantasies marriage, is enormously curious about all of her internal functions. She has, of course, a certain store of interest and aggression which she can direct outward, but this characteristic becomes very secondary to her when inward or outward circumstances do not force her to use it.
Intellectually woman is also basically inward. Her most potent faculty is her great intuition, her almost magical ability to understand another person by consulting her own inward nature. This is contrasted to man’s objective “intellectual” type of understanding.
In describing the essential characterological structure of the male and contrasting it with the female I am describing absolute types, not people as they are. In actuality most men have a certain store of passivity, of inwardness; and normal women have a certain amount of aggression. However, the normal male will be preponderantly outgoing and aggressive; the normal female’s psychic energies will be preponderantly directed inward.
As a direct or indirect result of man’s aggression and his commitment to the outside world, in maturity he develops certain behavioristic patterns that are diametrically opposite to female characteristics. Inevitably the frigid woman will use his attributes to show that her man has no interest in her, or is weak, or is withdrawn, or is cruel and wishes to exploit her. Having no objectivity about men, she will find in his differences from her further cause for estrangement, fear, and hostility.
Let me give some instances of these behavioristic differences in everyday life.
To the woman, the bearer of children and the nest-maker, the home and everything in it are all-important. She invests her home with a great deal of pride. She loves clean sinks, clean windows, clean floors. She wants things in her nest to be neat and orderly; she has made them that way and she wants them to stay that way.