‘It is because this striking difference between the sexes can only be explained through biology that the WLM passes over it in silence. Indeed, the “Y” male chromosome generates a greater genetic variety at all stages of human growth; the development of males is thus slower, allowing more time for variations to surface’.
In his Psychanalyse de l’Amérique615 (Stock, 1930), Hermann von Keyserling,616 for whom ‘a human being’s masculinity or femininity is far deeper a matter than the general quality of being human’, makes use of the same objections: ‘When considering things from the psychological point of view of instincts and elementary impulses, one may label man as mankind’s individualistic and therefore egotistical and egoistic element, whereas women represent its altruistic, disinterested and social component’.
‘Every single initiative, invention and variation presupposes a predominance of the self-affirmation element; on the other hand, every act of preservation and continuity within the dimensions of simultaneity and succession presupposes a predominance of the altruistic impulse. Both impulses are equally necessary for the continuation and progress of life. In the absence of self-affirmation, mankind could never endure on Earth; nor could there ever be any kind of progress. On the other hand, without self-forgetfulness as a dominant force, war would be the only normal relationship between human beings’.
There is, therefore, a certain complementarity between the two temperaments: masculine ‘individualism’ and feminine ‘altruism’ are both equally necessary for mankind to progress. (Incidentally, von Keyserling has no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating the fact that altruism can sometimes act as a domination tool.)
He goes on to add: ‘There is no doubt, however, that women are essentially imitative; they yield and submit, and should they come to love a man, their greatest happiness lies in merging their personality with their beloved’s. It is nonetheless at this very point that a factor proving that it is actually women who represent the stronger sex comes into play. No matter how submissive and imitative a woman may be, nothing can hinder nor prevent her from achieving her own development, for such an attitude is natural for her. As confirmed by our entire human history, woman have, on the contrary, always attained maximal development and perfection when surrendering to an ideal, regardless of whether the ideal itself is a god or a man. This implies that no matter how much men dominate, they could never rob women of their intrinsic power as long as the latter master their womanly skills’.
Women’s ‘passivity’ and ‘receptiveness’ (mentioned by countless authors yet defined as mere ‘myth’ by the WLM) are both part of a natural structure whose essential aim lies in preservation.
Neo-feminists are wrong to reject this ‘passivity’ for being humiliating. In the long run, such unrelenting receptiveness turns out to be far more advantageous that activity, which, by definition, is an event that is destined to end. ‘Among two essentially equal partners, it is the one who keeps his head down and lies in wait that will not only drive the other to eventually exert his strength, but even exhaust the latter’ (Keyserling). Women’s endurance is a quality that corresponds to men’s intensity, but it is in a desire to idealise duration that man, in his thirst for eternity, created religion.
A State of Dependence
The WLM also denounces the situation of ‘material dependence’ in which a large number of women find themselves in relation to their male partners. However, the very notion that women lose their own liberty when in a state of economic dependence is not only synonymous with implicitly considering material factors to be, in the absolute, more significant than any other ones, but also (and above all) with turning a blind eye to the fact that women have traditionally compensated for their own material dependence through an array of psychological and emotional influences that have often resulted in men’s mental dependence.
It is a fact that most women find it easier to do without any interactions with men than the other way around. It is also a fact that women’s influence upon men is more widespread and more durable than that of men on women. This is specifically due to the fact that among men, inhibitions geared towards preservation are not as clearly marked. For the very same reason, men find it more difficult to reclaim their former identity once released from external influence. By contrast, as indicated by Keyserling, ‘a woman finds it very easy to adopt the psychology of the man she loves or admires, since it is in her very nature to give herself over to others. On the other hand, however, she does revert to her original self from one moment to the other, in harmony with the changes in her emotional disposition’.
Ever an ‘idealist’, man puts woman into a state of material dependence. Being ‘materialists’, women, on the other hand, place men into a state of mental dependence. It is hardly certain that, of the two, it is the former that is decisive. Keyserling also writes that ‘a person’s superior or inferior situation depends on the psychological influence they exert, regardless of whether they are a man or a woman. On its own, material power itself is of no use, unless the decision is rendered through brute force, a rare exception in civilised communities. It only becomes supreme when people believe it to be a decisive element’ (op. cit.).
And yet, as Keyserling adds, ‘Europe has never believed in financial power as a last recourse. The reign of this bizarre conviction belongs to the original aspects of the US. In America, people genuinely believe that the rich are, due to their sole affluence, superior; for in the US, the fact of giving money actually creates moral rights’.
It is highly remarkable that, following the Women’s Lib’ Movement, neo-feminism originated specifically from the other side of the Atlantic, from this North America where the dominant role played by women could easily have led people to think that the latter were already fully ‘emancipated’.
This paradox is merely an apparent one. The predominance of the feminine element in the US, particularly impacted by the feminine traits of the American society (the power of the public opinion, the importance of polls that reveal whether one is ‘loved or not’, the tendency of the state to fulfil demands instead of determining them, the particular focus on the acquisition of goods, etc.), is directly connected to the inhibition of the masculine state of mind, and especially that of the authoritarian principle, whose relinquishment is inherent in the very institution of the American system (in this respect, every democracy is of a feminine essence). This inhibition of masculine values is, among men, partially compensated for through traits such as the hypertrophy of the gaming instinct, an excessive hunger for economic return, and so on. The resulting dismay among women is all the greater, not only due to the absolute priority bestowed upon material and financial criteria, all of which impose a certain economic dependence on women without any countervailing aspect (thus rendering it unbearable), but also because the complementarity of the sexes has been disrupted, a development that is most acutely felt by women, whether consciously or not.
Other recent scientific works have enabled us to establish a narrow connection between the differences in the aptitude of the sexes and the latter’s brain structures. The fact that girls are, on average, much more successful in verbal ability tests than in non-verbal ones (those where spatial aptitude is tested, for instance), with the very opposite applying in the case of boys, is therefore attributable to a more precocious and more pronounced lateralisation of the cerebral functions.
The Foundations of Sexual Dimorphism
Mrs Stassinopoulos writes that upon reaching adulthood, ‘women continue to excel in verbal activities and men in non-verbal ones. Men prove to be superior in the logical handling of concepts and connections, regardless of whether the focus is on numbers, words, programmes or special relations, whereas women have the upper hand in matters of verbal expression and execution’.
‘There are, on average, no differences in the intelligence of the sexes. They are just differently gifted’.
The fact that the sexes complement each other is fundamental. Men are in
need of women just as much as women require men, which is not only true from a sexual point of view, but also from a psychological and mental perspective; they need each other so that they can construct themselves through antagonism by acknowledging the basic differences that act as the most visible sign of universal diversity. Women represent mankind’s ‘earthly’ aspect and men its ‘celestial’ one. Women have a deeper commitment to the biological side of things, to nature and the continuous; men, on the other hand, are more profoundly committed to everything that is symbolic, institutional and discontinuous. It is this very fruitful dialectical complementarity, one which results in the existence of children, that endows the need for mutual difference with emotional foundations and establishes the practice of parental functions in the shape of two mutually interactive poles within the field of education. It is through this complementarity that men and women find themselves in spiritual correlation and take advantage of the latter to overcome their original aspects and, should they be capable of doing so, attain a superior synthetical type. (In this regard, the relation between the people and the state is no different from that between the masculine and feminine elements. They are driven by an equal need for one another so as to produce a ‘child’ that will act as their continuation.)
The symbolic image of gender complementarity is found in the dialectic established by the Greeks between the Logos spermatikos, or fertilising spirit, and the Eros kosmogonos, or love of the world (see also the connection between the creative masculine Yang and the conceptual feminine Yin in Chinese philosophy).
‘It is as fundamentally ridiculous to speak of the superiority of men or women as it is to refer to the superiority of the positive or negative electrical polarity’ (Keyserling).
Consequently, one could say that each of the sexes is, on a different level, the object upon which the other leaves its mark and through which it simultaneously shapes itself. Each sex thus becomes a function of the other, so much so that any degradation suffered by one inevitably triggers that of the other.
Since mankind is, on the whole, comprised of two sexes, the absence of creativity in either one results in the same kind of lack in the other. This is what happens particularly when one of the sexes no longer perceives itself as such and seeks to become identical to its counterpart, thus creating an imbalance in the elemental structure: the more a woman progresses by way of the masculine principle, the more she is robbed of the inspirational power that embodies the very prerogative of femininity (and the less creative her man becomes).
Keyserling writes: ‘This brings us back to the specific issue faced by the United States. America is currently the most education-obsessed and least creative country in the world. The two phenomena are closely linked: wherever the feminine principle holds sway in absolute terms, the masculine one is, in the event that it exists at all, doomed to lose its own vitality or possibly remain hidden or otherwise ineffective’ (op. cit.).
Sexual dimorphism, meaning the differentiation between the sexes, thus turns out to be a fundamental fact in living systems, and especially human ones.
Soviet psychiatrist Mr Aron Isaakovich Belkin, head of the endocrinology laboratory at the Psychiatric Institute of Moscow, explains: ‘Biological evolution has led numerous species to divide into two sexes, a division that offers enormous advantages with regard to their ability to adapt to their surroundings and their aptitude for survival. This phenomenon does not merely take place on the genetic level, but also that of attitudes. Since each sex has evolved separately, clear differences in the constitution, behavioural patterns and traits eventually surfaced. Today, it is as impossible to arbitrarily or unrestrictedly modify the characteristics that define the role of each sex as it was in the past; indeed, these roles are based on biological foundations that could never be neglected without incurring truly unfortunate consequences’ (UNESCO courier, August–September 1975).
Indeed, behavioural ‘desexualisation’ can only lead to the ‘I’s’ impoverishment. As specified by Mr Belkin, ‘modern science has gathered a sufficient amount of trustworthy data on the topic to allow us to state with utter certainty that our sense of sexual belonging is an indispensable component of the human personality. Every individual that lacks this sense is thus incapable of leading a normal social existence’ (ibid.).
In the course of the 1920s, the USSR was actually one of the lands in which utopian feminism enjoyed a rather trendy position; and it is a Soviet, Mr Belkin, who has declared: ‘Those who loudly advocate the “identity of men and women”, “sexual revolution” and the right to sever one’s ties to “conventions” are perhaps solely driven by the egoistical and rash desire to exempt themselves from the function which both nature and society have assigned to each one of us’.
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The Female Woman, an essay by Arianna Stassinopoulos. Laffont, 225 pages.
Le malentendu du deuxième sexe,617 an essay by Suzanne Lilar. PUF, 306 pages.
Little Girls: Social Conditioning and Its Effects on the Stereotyped Role of Women During Infancy, an essay by Elena Gianini Belotti. Ed. des Femmes, 196 pages.
La fonction érotique,618 a two-volume essay by Gérard Zwang. Laffont, 478 and 678 pages respectively.
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In his Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter, published by Braumüller, Leipzig), Otto Weininger619 had, at the end of the 19th century, defined one’s superior aptitude to treat the not-self620 in an objective manner as the foremost characteristic of the masculine temperament in comparison with the feminine one. Weininger claimed that women were trapped in their own subjectivity more than men, and that this accounted for the fact that the public sphere, i.e. the administration of not-selves, had always been a primarily masculine domain.
Weininger went as far as to define men as ‘beings of Ideas’. Women, he said, were merely ‘beings of nature’ — they were individuals, but never managed to become a person. ‘Ideas are foreign to a woman; she neither affirms nor denies them. She is, furthermore, neither moral nor antimoral. She knows no signs that would allow her to speak the language of mathematics and remains purposeless’. Whereas men are endowed with unconditional and timeless intelligence capable of generating autonomous conceptual thoughts, women are forever dominated by nature. Their only essential thought relates to the continuity of the human species. This is the reason why from their perspective, copulation always retains a positive importance (‘The coital instinct is an instinct centred around the indeterminate preservation of life’). In a woman’s eyes, supreme good is to be found in flesh, and she longs to fulfil this ideal wherever she is and at all times. Weininger writes: ‘Just as the sexual organs lie, from a physical point of view, at the very centre of a woman’s body, so does the sexual idea lie at the very centre of her mental nature’.
Weininger draws a connection between women’s lesser aptitude to embrace the unlimited (or unconditional) and their elective affinities. He views their relative inability to establish a fundamental relationship with things themselves (and thus to envision the thing itself simultaneously in terms of distance and self-definition) as the cause of an instinctive rejection of the very notion of order. Women, he declares, are inclined to adhere to all doctrines that perceive society as a mere agglomeration of individuals, and not as a group of people endowed with their own individual autonomy (socialism, pacifism, etc.). Due to this fact, women are ‘condemned to revolve around reality without ever accessing it’.
For Weininger, there is also a direct connection between the advent of liberal democracies and the commencing reign of feminine values. He takes the view that ‘our age is the most feminine one. We live in an age when art is content to remain unadventurous, seeking its inspiration in the games of animals; an age of spiritual anarchy that has lost all sense of justice and statehood; an age of communist morality, of the most insane historical views: an age that bestows upon history a materialistic interpretation; a time of capitalism and Marxism; a time when history, life and science find t
hemselves incapable of rising above political economics and technical education; a time when ingeniousness is perceived as a form of madness; a time devoid of great artists and great philosophers; a time that lacks any and all originality, but is still tormented by the most maddening desire for originality…’
Here is his conclusion: ‘A choice must be made: a choice between the female and the male, between “business” and culture, between the ignorance and acknowledgment of values, between mundane life and the highest possible earthly life, between negation and an affirmation that makes one akin to God’.
The excessive and systematic aspects of this doctrine quickly become apparent; it is a doctrine that leads us towards a virtually complete denial of the complementarity of the sexes. In his desire to oppose feminism, Weininger has rejected one excess only to espouse another. Admittedly, he himself was, at the time, experiencing an identity crisis. Having been born into a Jewish Austrian family, he chose to convert to Christianity, yet failed to attain what he so desperately sought. He committed suicide in 1902, at the age of twenty-three. His book did, however, exert considerable influence upon his readers’ minds.
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The Western Woman
If it were truly consistent in its convictions, feminism would, on certain levels, be indistinguishable from the defence of European culture and values. For it is in Europe, and nowhere else, that women have always been considered to be persons and not things. A simple comparison between the ancient European civilisation and that of the Near-East clearly demonstrates this fact.
In a thick book in which he displays the same mental independence as in his previous works (Haro sur la démocracie,621 among others, immediately springs to mind), Mr Julien Cheverny, a forty-eight-year-old member of the French Socialist Party (PS) who, under a different name, acts as advisor to the French Court of Auditors, proceeds to bitterly criticise a ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation whose ability to reconcile the sexual with the eugenic has always been restricted to not mentioning the matter at all’.
Systems and Debates Page 32
