Thus the three fundamental characters of woman with which this chapter has dealt come together in the conception of her as the non-existent. Her instability and untruthfulness are only negative deductions from the premiss of her non-existence. Her only positive character, the conception of her as the pairing agent, comes from it by a simple process of analysis. The nature of woman is no more than pairing, no more than super-individual sexuality.
If we turn to the table of the two kinds of life given earlier in this chapter, it will be apparent that every inclination from the higher to the lower is a crime against oneself. Immorality is the will towards negation, the craving to change the formed into the formless, the wish for destruction. And from this comes the intimate relation between femaleness and crime. There is a close relation between the immoral and the non-moral. It is only when man accepts his own sexuality, denies the absolute in him, turns to the lower, that he gives woman existence. The acceptance of the Phallus is immoral. It has always been thought of as hateful; it has been the image of Satan, and Dante made it the central pillar of hell.
Thus comes about the domination of the male sexuality over the female. It is only when man is sexual that woman has existence and meaning.
Her existence is bound up with the Phallus, and so that is her supreme lord and welcome master.
Sex, in the form of man, is woman’s fate; the Don Juan is the only type of man who has complete power over her.
The curse, which was said to be heavy on woman, is the evil will of man: nothing is only a tool in the hand of the will for nothing. The early Fathers expressed it pathetically when they called woman the handmaid of the devil. For matter in itself is nothing, it can only obtain existence through form. The fall of “form” is the corruption that takes place when form endeavours to relapse into the formless. When man became sexual he formed woman. That woman is at all has happened simply because man has accepted his sexuality. Woman is merely the result of this affirmation; she is sexuality itself. Woman’s existence is dependent on man; when man, as man, in contradistinction to woman, is sexual, he is giving woman form, calling her into existence. Therefore woman’s one object must be to keep man sexual. She desires man as Phallus, and for this she is the advocate of pairing. She is incapable of making use of any creature except as a means to an end, the end being pairing; and she has but one purpose, that of continuing the guilt of man, for she would disappear the moment man had overcome his sexuality.
Man created woman, and will always create her afresh, as long as he is sexual. Just as he gives woman consciousness, so he gives her existence. Woman is the sin of man.
He tries to pay the debt by love. Here we have the explanation of what seemed like an obscure myth at the end of the previous chapter. Now we see what was hidden in it: that woman is nothing before man’s fall, nor without it; that he does not rob her of anything she had before. The crime man has committed in creating woman, and still commits in assenting to her purpose, he excuses to woman by his eroticism.
Whence otherwise would come the generosity of love, which can never be satisfied by giving? How is it that love is so anxious to endow woman with a soul, and not any other creature? Whence comes it that a child cannot love until love coincides with sexuality, the stage of puberty, with the repeated forming of woman, with the renewing of sin? Woman is nothing but man’s expression and projection of his own sexuality. Every man creates himself a woman, in which he embodies himself and his own guilt.
But woman is not herself guilty; she is made so by the guilt of others, and everything for which woman is blamed should be laid at man’s door.
Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it; it elevates woman instead of nullifying her. The “something” folds the “nothing” in its arms, and thinks thus to free the universe of negation and drown all objections; whereas the nothing would only disappear if the something put it away.
Since man’s hatred for woman is not conscious hatred of his own sexuality, his love is his most intense effort to save woman as woman, instead of desiring to nullify her in himself. And the consciousness of guilt comes from the fact that the object of guilt is coveted instead of being annihilated.
Woman alone, then, is guilt; and is so through man’s fault. And if femaleness signifies pairing, it is only because all guilt endeavours to increase its circle. What woman, always unconsciously, accomplishes, she does because she cannot help it; it is her reason for being, her whole nature. She is only a part of man, his other, ineradicable, his lower part. So matter appears to be as inexplicable a riddle as form; woman as unending as man, negation as eternal as existence; but this eternity is only the eternity of guilt.
CHAPTER XIII
JUDAISM
It would not be surprising if to many it should seem from the foregoing arguments that “men” have come out of them too well, and, as a collective body, have been placed on an exaggeratedly lofty pedestal. The conclusions drawn from these arguments, however surprised every Philistine and young simpleton would be to learn that in himself he comprises the whole world, cannot be opposed and confuted by cheap reasoning; yet the treatment of the male sex must not simply be considered too indulgent, or due to a direct tendency to omit all the repulsive and small side of manhood in order to favourably represent its best points.
The accusation would be unjustified. It does not enter the author’s mind to idealise man in order more easily to lower the estimation of woman. So much narrowness and so much coarseness often thrive beneath the empirical representation of manhood that it is a question of the better possibilities lying in every man, neglected by him or perceived either with painful clearness or dull animosity; possibilities which as such in woman neither actually nor meditatively ever come to any account. And here the author cannot in any wise really rely on the dissimilarities between men, however little he may impugn their importance. It is, therefore, a question of establishing what woman is not, and truly in her there is infinitely much wanting which is never quite missing even in the most mediocre and plebeian of men. That which is the positive attribute of the woman, in so far as a positive can be spoken of in regard to such a being, will constantly be found also in many men. There are, as has already often been demonstrated, men who have become women or have remained women; but there is no woman who has surpassed certain circumscribed, not particularly elevated moral and intellectual limits. And, therefore, I must again assert that the woman of the highest standard is immeasurably beneath the man of lowest standard.
These objections may go even further and touch a point where the ignoring of theory must assuredly become reprehensible. There are, to wit, nations and races whose men, though they can in no wise be regarded as intermediate forms of the sexes, are found to approach so slightly and so rarely to the ideal of manhood as set forth in my argument, that the principles, indeed the entire foundation on which this work rests, would seem to be severely shaken by their existence. What shall we make, for example, out of the Chinese, with their feminine freedom from internal cravings and their incapacity for every effort? One might feel tempted to believe in the complete effeminacy of the whole race. It can at least be no mere whim of the entire nation that the Chinaman habitually wears a pigtail, and that the growth of his beard is of the very thinnest. But how does the matter stand with the negroes? A genius has perhaps scarcely ever appeared amongst the negroes, and the standard of their morality is almost universally so low that it is beginning to be acknowledged in America that their emancipation was an act of imprudence.
If, consequently, the principle of the intermediate forms of the sexes may perhaps enjoy a prospect of becoming of importance to racial anthropology (since in some peoples a greater share of womanishness would seem to be generally disseminated), it must yet be conceded that the foregoing deductions refer above all to Aryan men and Aryan women. In how far, in the other great races of mankind, uniformity with the standard of the Aryan race may reign, or what has prevented and hindered this; to arrive more nearly at such knowledge would require in the first instance the most intense research into racial characteristics.
The Jewish race, which has been chosen by me as a subject of discussion, because, as will be shown, it presents the gravest and most formidable difficulties for my views, appears to possess a certain anthropological relationship with both negroes
