In itself, however, pleasure is neither moral nor immoral. It is only when the desire for pleasure conquers the desire for worthiness that a human being has fallen.
Coitus is immoral because there is no man who does not use woman at such times as a means to an end; for whom pleasure does not, in his own as well as her being, during that time represent the value of mankind.
During coitus a man forgets all about everything, he forgets the woman; she has no longer a psychic but only a physical existence for him. He either desires a child by her or the satisfaction of his own passion; in neither case does he use her as an end in herself, but for an outside cause. This and this alone makes coitus immoral.
There is no doubt that woman is the missionary of sexual union, and that she looks upon herself, as on everything else, merely as a means to its ends. She wants a man to satisfy her passion or to obtain children; she is willing to be used by man as a tool, as a thing, as an object, to be treated as his property, to be changed and modelled according to his good pleasure. But we should not allow ourselves to be used by others as means to an end.
Kundry appealed often to Parsifal’s compassion for her yearnings: but here we see the weakness of sympathetic morality, which attempts to grant every desire of those around, however wrong such wishes may be. Ethics and morality based on sympathy are equally absurd, since they make the “ought” dependent on the “will,” (whether it be the will of oneself, or of others, or of society, it is all the same,) instead of making the “will” dependent on the “ought”; they take as a standard of morality concrete cases of human history, concrete cases of human happiness, concrete moments in life instead of the idea.
But the question is: how ought man to treat woman? As she herself desires to be treated or as the moral idea would dictate?
If he is going to treat her as she wishes, he must have intercourse with her, for she desires it; he must beat her, for she likes to be hurt; he must hypnotise her, since she wishes to be hypnotised; he must prove to her by his attentions how little he thinks of himself, for she likes compliments, and has no desire to be respected for herself.
If he is going to treat her as the moral idea demands, he must try to see in her the concept of mankind and endeavour to respect her. Even although woman is only a function of man, a function he can degrade or raise at will, and women do not wish to be more or anything else than what man makes them, it is no more a moral arrangement than the suttee of Indian widows, which, even though it be voluntary and insisted upon by them, is none the less terrible barbarity.
The emancipation of woman is analogous to the emancipation of Jews and negroes. Undoubtedly the principal reason why these people have been treated as slaves and inferiors is to be found in their servile dispositions; their desire for freedom is not nearly so strong as that of the Indo-Germans. And even although the whites in America at the present day find it necessary to keep themselves quite aloof from the negro population because they make such a bad use of their freedom, yet in the war of the Northern States against the Federals, which resulted in the freedom of the slaves, right was entirely on the side of the emancipators.
Although the humanity of Jews, negroes, and still more of women, is weighed down by many immoral impulses; although in these cases there is so much more to fight against than in the case of Aryan men, still we must try to respect mankind, and to venerate the idea of humanity (by which I do not mean the human community, but the being, man, the soul as part of the spiritual world). No matter how degraded a criminal may be, no one ought to arrogate to himself the functions of the law; no man has the right to lynch such an offender.