Sex & Character / Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition

by Otto Weininger

Womanish men are usually extremely anxious to marry, at least (I mention this to prevent misconception) if a sufficiently brilliant opportunity offers itself. When it is possible, they nearly always marry whilst they are still quite young. It is especially gratifying to them to get as wives famous women, artists or poets, or singers and actresses.

Womanish men are physically lazier than other men in proportion to the degree of their womanishness. There are “men” who go out walking with the sole object of displaying their faces like the faces of women, hoping that they will be admired, after which they return contentedly home. The ancient “Narcissus” was a prototype of such persons. These people are naturally fastidious about the dressing of their hair, their apparel, shoes, and linen; they are concerned as to their personal appearance at all times, and about the minutest details of their toilet. They are conscious of every glance thrown on them by other men, and because of the female element in them, they are coquettish in gait and demeanour. Viragoes, on the other hand, frequently are careless about their toilet, and even about the personal care of their bodies; they take less time in dressing than many womanish men. The dandyism of men on the one hand, and much of what is called the emancipation of women, are due to the increase in the numbers of these epicene creatures, and not merely to a passing fashion.

Indeed, if one inquires why anything becomes the fashion it will be found that there is a true cause for it.

The more femaleness a woman possesses the less will she understand a man, and the sexual characters of a man will have the greater influence on her. This is more than a mere application of the law of sexual attraction, as I have already stated it. So also the more manly a man is the less will he understand women, but the more readily be influenced by them as women. Those men who claim to understand women are themselves very nearly women. Womanish men often know how to treat women much better than manly men. Manly men, except in most rare cases, learn how to deal with women only after long experience, and even then most imperfectly.

Although I have been touching here in a most superficial way on what are no more than tertiary sexual characters, I wish to point out an application of my conclusions to pedagogy. I am convinced that the more these views are understood the more certainly will they lead to an individual treatment in education. At the present time shoemakers, who make shoes to measure, deal more rationally with individuals than our teachers and schoolmasters in their application of moral principles. At present the sexually intermediate forms of individuals (especially on the female side) are treated exactly as if they were good examples of the ideal male or female types. There is wanted an “orthopædic” treatment of the soul instead of the torture caused by the application of ready-made conventional shapes. The present system stamps out much that is original, uproots much that is truly natural, and distorts much into artificial and unnatural forms.

From time immemorial there have been only two systems of education; one for those who come into the world designated by one set of characters as males, and another for those who are similarly assumed to be females. Almost at once the “boys” and the “girls” are dressed differently, learn to play different games, go through different courses of instruction, the girls being put to stitching and so forth. The intermediate individuals are placed at a great disadvantage. And yet the instincts natural to their condition reveal themselves quickly enough, often even before puberty. There are boys who like to play with dolls, who learn to knit and sew with their sisters, and who are pleased to be given girls’ names. There are girls who delight in the noisier sports of their brothers, and who make chums and playmates of them. After puberty, there is a still stronger display of the innate differences. Manlike women wear their hair short, affect manly dress, study, drink, smoke, are fond of mountaineering, or devote themselves passionately to sport. Womanish men grow their hair long, wear corsets, are experts in the toilet devices of women, and show the greatest readiness to become friendly and intimate with them, preferring their society to that of men.

Later on, the different laws and customs to which the so-called sexes are subjected press them as by a vice into distinctive moulds. The proposals which should follow from my conclusions will encounter more passive resistance, I fear, in the case of girls than in that of boys. I must here contradict, in the most positive fashion, a dogma that is authoritatively and widely maintained at the present time, the idea that all women are alike, that no individuals exist amongst women. It is true that amongst those individuals whose constitutions lie nearer the female side than the male side, the differences and possibilities are not so great as amongst those on the male side; the greater variability of males is true not only for the human race but for the living world, and is related to the principles established by Darwin. None the less, there are plenty of differences amongst women. The psychological origin of this common error depends chiefly on a fact that I explained in chap. iii., the fact that every man in his life becomes intimate only with a group of women defined by his own constitution, and so naturally he finds them much alike. For the same reason, and in the same way, one may often hear a woman say that all men are alike. And the narrow uniform view about men, displayed by most of the leaders of the women’s rights movement depends on precisely the same cause.

It is clear that the principle of the existence of innumerable individual proportions of the male and female principles is a basis of the study of character which must be applied in any rational scheme of pedagogy.

The science of character must be associated with some form of psychology that takes into account some theory of the real existence of mental phenomena in the same fashion that anatomy is related to physiology. And so it is necessary, quite apart from theoretical reasons, to attempt to pursue a psychology of individual differences. This attempt will be readily enough followed by those who believe in the parallelism between mind and matter, for they will see in psychology no more than the physiology of the central nervous system, and will readily admit that the science of character must be a sister of morphology. As a matter of fact there is great hope that in future characterology and morphology will each greatly help the other. The principle of sexually intermediate forms, and still more the parallelism between characterology and morphology in the widest application, make us look forward to the time when physiognomy will take its honourable place amongst the sciences, a place which so many have attempted to gain for it but as yet unsuccessfully.

The problem of physiognomy is the problem of the relation between the static mental forces and the static bodily forces, just as the problem of physiological psychology deals with the dynamic aspect of the same relations. It is a great error in method, and in fact, to treat the study of physiognomy, because of its difficulty, as impracticable. And yet this is the attitude of contemporary scientific circles, unconsciously perhaps rather than consciously, but occasionally becoming obvious as for instance in the case of the attempt of von Möbius to pursue the work of Gall with regard to the physiognomy of those with a natural aptitude for mathematics. If it be possible, and many have shown that it is possible, to judge correctly much of the character of an individual merely from the examination of his external appearance, without the aid of cross-examination or guessing, it cannot be impossible to reduce such modes of observation to an exact method. There is little more required than an exact study of the expression of the characteristic emotions and the tracking (to use a rough analogy) of the routes of the cables passing to the speech centres.