Sex & Character / Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition

by Otto Weininger

The prostitute does not want other women to be with child, but to be prostitutes like herself.

A woman’s relations with married men show how she subordinates her own sexuality to her match-making instinct, the latter being the dominant power.

Woman objects more strongly to bachelordom than anything else, because she is altogether a match-maker, and this makes her try to get men to marry; but if a man is already married she at once loses most of her interest in him, however much she liked him before. If the woman herself is already married, that is to say, when each man she meets is not a possible solution to her own fate, one would not imagine that a married man would find less favour with her because he was married than when he was a bachelor if the woman herself is unfaithful; but women seldom carry on an intrigue with another woman’s husband, except when they wish to triumph over her by making him neglect her. This shows that the disposition of woman is towards the fact of pairing; when men are already paired she seldom attempts to make them unfaithful, for the fact of their being paired has satisfied her instinct.

This match-making is the most common characteristic of the human female; the wish to become a mother-in-law is much more general than even the desire to become a mother, the intensity and extent of which is usually over-rated.

My readers may possibly not understand the emphasis I have laid on a phenomenon which is usually looked upon as amusing as it is disgusting; and it may be thought that I have given undue importance to it.

But let us see why I have done so. Match-making is essentially the phenomenon of all others which gives us the key to the nature of woman, and we must not, as has always been the case, merely acknowledge the fact and pass on, but we should try to analyse and explain it. One of our commonest phrases runs: “Every woman is a bit of a match-maker.”

But we must remember that in this, and nothing else, lies the actual essence of woman. After mature consideration of the most varied types of women and with due regard to the special classes besides those which I have discussed, I am of opinion that the only positively general female characteristic is that of match-making, that is, her uniform willingness to further the idea of sexual union.

Any definition of the nature of woman which goes no further than to declare that she has the strong instinct for her own union would be too narrow; any definition that would link her instincts to the child or to the husband, or to both, would be too wide. The most general and comprehensive statement of the nature of woman is that it is completely adapted and disposed for the special mission of aiding and abetting the bodily union of the sexes. All women are match-makers, and this property of the woman to be the advocate of the idea of pairing is the only one which is found in women of all ages, in young girls, in adults, and in the aged. The old woman is no longer interested in her own union, but she devotes herself to the pairing of others. This habit of the old woman is nothing new, it is only the continuance of her enduring instinct surviving the complications that were caused when her personal interests came into conflict with her general desire; it is the now unselfish pursuit of the impersonal idea.

It is convenient to recapitulate at this point what my investigation has shown as to the sexuality of women. I have shown that woman is engrossed exclusively by sexuality, not intermittently, but throughout her life; that her whole being, bodily and mental, is nothing but sexuality itself. I added, moreover, that she was so constituted that her whole body and being continually were in sexual relations with her environment, and that just as the sexual organs were the centre of woman physically, so the sexual idea was the centre of her mental nature. The idea of pairing is the only conception which has positive worth for women. The woman is the bearer of the thought of the continuity of the species. The high value which she attaches to the idea of pairing is not selfish and individual, it is super-individual, and, if I may be forgiven the desecration of the phrase, it is the transcendental function of woman. And just as femaleness is no more than the embodiment of the idea of pairing, so is it sexuality in the abstract. Pairing is the supreme good for the woman; she seeks to effect it always and everywhere. Her personal sexuality is only a special case of this universal, generalised, impersonal instinct.

The effort of woman to realise this idea of pairing is so fundamentally opposed to that conception of innocence and purity, the higher virginity which man’s erotic nature has demanded from women, that not all his erotic incense would have obscured her real nature but for one factor. I have now to explain this factor which has veiled from man the true nature of woman, and which in itself is one of the deepest problems of woman, I mean her absolute duplicity. Her pairing instinct and her duplicity, the latter so great as to conceal even from woman herself what is the real essence of her nature, must be explained together.