CHAPTER XIV SEX-ANTAGONISM

(1) Man’s Part

“God said to Adam: Thou shalt have dominion over all beasts; and herein would seem to consist his advantage and superiority. Now, since man has dominion also over woman, who can be so mad as to deny that woman is rather a beast than a Man?

…

“I think I have shown by fifty irrefragable testimonies from Holy Writ that woman does not belong to the same species as man, and is therefore incapable of eternal life.”—Horatio Plata (quoted by W. H. Beveridge, in John and Irene).

In the last chapter it was asserted that the only sex-antagonism that really exists is that arising from the attempts of one sex to repress or get the better of the other. This is, in effect, to deny that the interests of the two sexes can be permanently opposed, and that, however much individuals, from the fallibility of human nature, may fall short of a proper treatment of each other, there is any excuse whatever for laws and institutions, which should be based on ethical considerations, being, as they still are, discriminative against one sex. So strong indeed is the notion still that[157] the interests of the sexes really are opposed, that any suggestion for legislation in the interests of women is met by the outcry that it is against men. The recent debates on the Maternity Benefit are admirable illustrations of this. When it was proposed that the thirty shillings, to be devoted to the care of the mother, should be given direct to the mother, there were some men who exclaimed that this was “interfering between husband and wife,” and others, that it was “legislating against men.” This shows an extraordinary confusion of mind; for the only men “legislated against” in such a provision are the bad men, who would, if they were given the chance, steal the woman’s benefit. No good husband would be aggrieved at his wife’s own money being given into her own hands. As why indeed should he? No woman feels aggrieved that her husband should have his wages paid into his own hands. If anyone thinks that the money is in reality his, because of the paltry fourpences that he has paid (and of which the working housewife has, by her work, contributed at least half), he should read the words of Medea—
“And then, forsooth, ’tis they that face the call
Of war, while we sit sheltered, hid from all
Peril!—False mocking! Sooner would I stand
Three times to face their battles, shield in hand,
Than bear one child.”

While civilisation is young, and human beings still scarcely conscious, it is natural for the stronger to have the illusion that he will be the gainer by using his strength, even tyrannically, against the[158] creature with whom his life is inextricably entwined. It is human to be selfish; women as well as men feel the temptation; but men, by their greater strength, have more often had the power to follow their impulses, even if they were injurious to women.

There is a queer kind of apologist for brutality, who suggests that “men are so,” and that nothing better need ever be expected of them, thereby showing himself blind to all the improvements which knowledge and intelligence have already made in men’s treatment of women. Does it not matter to men that women should be injured? To read a recent volume, entitled Sex Antagonism, by Walter Heape, F.R.S., one would indeed suppose that it did not. Seven chapters of this book are devoted to a criticism of Dr. Frazer’s theories on totemism and exogamy. These are matters for experts, and I do not propose to express an opinion upon them, further than to say that Mr. Heape has made out a very good case for his views on the origin of these two institutions of primitive man. He does not, however, make one wish to hand over the relations of the sexes in the world we live in to even the most expert of expert biologists, for his very concentration on particular points makes him unfit for a wide view. It is to Mr. Heape’s eighth and last chapter, on “Primitive and Modern Sex Antagonism,” that I wish to take exception, and this can be done without calling into question the greater part of the book, with which it has scarcely any necessary connection.

[159]

I need not quarrel with his assertion of the original difference between man and woman with regard to sexual relations. “I think,” he writes, “it cannot be denied that while sexual passions and sexual gratification are of far more moment to the Male, the idea of the family is, in its turn, essentially a Female sentiment. The former inculcates and stimulates the roving freedom which is characteristic of the Male, the latter consolidates the family, and for the first time establishes the Female as an essential part of a social structure.” (The last sentence is dark to me, but let it pass.) The statement may be taken as broadly true of primitive man. Further, it is quite clear that Mr. Heape is uttering almost a platitude, when he states (p. 195) that “The Male and Female are complementary; they are in no sense the same, and in no sense equal to one another; the accurate adjustment of society depends upon proper observance of this fact.” No one thinks Male and Female are “the same,” nor when people speak of “equality” do they in fact use the word in a mathematical sense. What people do wrap up, in confused and misleading terms, is, that although women are not the same as men, they have many of the same properties and therefore many of the same requirements. Shylock’s plea for the Jew has been quoted with much force by women and on behalf of women: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with[160] the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Men cannot deny that women need food, like men, and that women catch infectious diseases, like men, and that women, like men, need satisfaction for their sexual nature, although by their actions men sometimes do not demonstrate their knowledge. But there are other needs—of the human spirit—less demonstrable, which women have as much as men: the need for freedom and joy, for pride in themselves and their work, for consciousness that the sacrifices they make are willing, not enforced. And, when women demand “equality” with men, what they are asking is, that they shall have equal opportunities to do the things they feel able to do, and also that they should have for their peculiarly feminine work—the work which men cannot do—more help, more training, more expenditure of public money, and more scope altogether to do it in ways adapted to the modern world they live in.

We start out, then, with the recognition of the difference between men and women, and I wish I could see in Mr. Heape a recognition also of the likeness and of the common interests. But this is where he comes to grief so badly. He asserts (p. 199) that “increase of luxury tends to reduce[161] both the inclination to breed and the power of producing offspring among women, while it increases the sexual activity of men.” This is not the place to make an exhaustive analysis of this assertion, but stated roundly, like this, it seems to me to need considerable modification. If, however, we take it as proved, it would represent a serious state of things, requiring the most earnest consideration and determination on the part of all civilised men and women to face it in all its results for the whole human family. It would seem to thoughtful persons that any social condition leading to a marked widening between the reciprocal desires of the sexes was, by that very fact, a bad condition, and that if luxury really widens the breach between men and women and causes sex-antagonism, this is a very strong reason for discouraging luxury in a far more determined way than has ever been attempted. Mr. Heape has himself insisted that the female is concerned for the race and the male is only concerned for his appetitive satisfaction. His contribution to the difficult problem he has himself propounded is, to suggest that women (solely concerned for the race, mind you!) must be overridden by men; that what he calls the “errant male” should freely roam and satisfy his ever-growing appetites where and how he can; and that women should on no account be given “extended power” to face these difficulties together with men. In fact, having made out that the situation is infinitely more[162] difficult and extreme than it is, he does his little best to envenom and embitter it by passages of this kind: “Thus extended power given to women threatens to result in legislation for the advantage of that relatively small class of spinsters who are in reality but a superfluous portion of the population (italics mine); and since their interests are directly antagonistic to the interests of the woman who is concerned in the production of children, legislation enacted on their behalf will tend to be opposed to the interests of the mothers themselves.” This dark saying is nowhere explained or illustrated, and as I am quite unable to imagine what it means, I can only suppose that Mr. Heape is using the old device of trying to sow dissension in the enemy’s ranks. For there is no mistake at all about the fact that, to Mr. Heape, woman is the enemy. But he will find it hard to convince the women in the movement that the interests of maidens are opposed to the interests of wives. It will be even more difficult than to convince us that our interests are really opposed to those of men. We think that this is “The Great Illusion,” and the other is too patently absurd, since a maiden is liable at any moment to become a wife, and, in these days, it is becoming increasingly difficult to say at what age this liability ceases. Progressive women do not for one moment admit that marriage unsexes a woman, and that the moment she secures a husband she becomes hostile to the maidens, or ceases to understand them. If Mr. Heape would[163] look at the world he is actually living in, he would see that some of the needs of the mothers in the administration of the Insurance Act were more effectively put and urged by unmarried women than by married men. I knew a woman who had a very warm discussion with a man on sex questions, what time his wife sat silent by. The man constantly declaimed about “what women wanted, what women thought,” and still the wife never spoke. Later, when the two women were alone, the one expressed a hope that she had not spoken too strongly and offended the wife, who replied, “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you said what you did. You see, I can’t, because I’m his wife.”

Mr. Heape proceeds in this elegant style: “Those of us who are strongly in favour of gaining assistance from women who are qualified to give it may well be drastically opposed to the claims made by those who are responsible for the present agitation; for we are thus confronted with the probability that extended power given to women will result in the waste products of our Female population gaining power to order the habits and regulate the work of those women who are of real value to us as a nation” (italics mine). In the next paragraph he declares that he finds it difficult to “refer with equanimity” to the books and pamphlets of the women’s movement, and he mentions one odd publication, which he appears to attribute to feminists and which, he avers, holds up man to[164] execration as “the brute beast.” We are bound to believe that Mr. Heape has seen such a pamphlet, and that he did not write it himself, but the description he himself gives of man in his book would entirely warrant the use of such a term. Men in the mass are not what Mr. Heape makes them out to be,—lascivious animals with no regard for the State, the race, the child or the woman; it is a libel on manhood. But a writer who can speak of the unmarried women as “waste products” is in a queer position to protest against his own caricature of man being called a “brute beast.” That is precisely what Mr. Heape’s man is and what the real man is not. In fact, while progressive women are always being accused of abusing men, I have never heard a woman utter such slanders on mankind as those contained in this book. Another curious instance of how men will exceed anything women ever say in condemnation of men is to be found in a remark made by a magistrate at the Sandwich Quarter Sessions in October 1912, that criminal assault by adult men on baby girls was “just one of the things that the very best people in every class of life were apt in an unguarded moment to commit.” Mr. Heape describes women as having a nervous constitution ever on the verge of hysteria and impulsive insanity; but if we are to believe him, and the Sandwich magistrate, men are far more dangerous lunatics and should certainly be put under restraint.

Let us get out of this nightmare and come to[165] the real world as we know it. Certainly there are some blackguards and some lunatics of both sexes. Certainly there is, and perhaps always has been, some antagonism between the sexes. It is the most constant endeavour and the most firm faith of progressive men and women that this antagonism should cease. We do not believe it to be necessary and we do believe it to be altogether bad. A great deal too much is made of the differences between men and women under civilised conditions. Mr. Heape’s bogey-man is depicted as a sort of Saturn devouring his children, regardless of their welfare, desiring woman simply as the instrument of his pleasure, possessing no personal, national or racial love. Woman, on the other hand, is pictured to us as having no personal feelings towards her mate, desiring him only for the purpose of motherhood, and desiring even motherhood so faintly that the least thing will put her off it. It is difficult to have patience with a description so preposterously untrue to ordinary life. And Mr. Heape’s recommendations for dealing with this appalling condition are the most extraordinary part of the whole queer affair. For he would have us “rattle into barbarism” with open eyes. According to him, all civilisation, all the united efforts of persons to make a more endurable dwelling-place on earth, all care for the future of the race, is by origin womanly, and yet—and yet—the all-devouring male is to abandon this hardly acquired civilisation, to cease to learn of the woman, and once more[166] to roam the world and leave his squaw to take her chance with the papooses!

To suggest that man can go on modifying his material conditions, piling luxury on luxury, and yet need not adapt himself and his sexual life to these conditions, but can remain primitive brute beast, is wilfully to blind oneself to facts, and such blindness, if it were common, would indeed be the cause of race suicide. So long as either sex preys upon the other, or enslaves the other, we are in danger of finding that man, having conquered the world, becomes his own victim.

In the writings of reactionaries on this subject there is to be found an extraordinary contradiction. Their plea for the subjection of women and for the entire dedication of women to the sexual life has to be based upon the supposed truth of the assertion that, in women, sex is the predominant factor, nay, the only factor of importance. It ought to be, they think; and it is, they assert; whereas, to man, sex is only a passing gratification, and he goes on his way and forgets all about it. Yet if it be suggested that, in the interests of the race, men might learn to control their impulses,—have, in fact, to a certain extent done so,—and that they have all the beauty and work of the world to fill their minds, these same reactionaries fill the air with cries at the sufferings and damage which such self-restraint will impose upon men. Mr. Heape himself asserts that disuse does not impair men’s sexual powers, and that it does[167] impair those of women; yet his conclusion appears to be that men alone are not to be required to exercise self-control. Now, if sex is so tremendously strong in women, it cannot be necessary artificially to nurse it and to render all other activities impossible; if it is not so predominant after all, but women are whole human beings, just as men are, with all sorts of capacities, then it is cruel to endeavour to restrict them against their nature, and must, in the long-run, be injurious to them and to the whole of society. It is not consonant with the dignity of the Human that either male or female should be treated as a thing. Primitive men may treat women as “conveniences”; primitive women may exploit men for their own purposes; so long as they act in this primitive manner there will exist a state of war. The hope for the race lies in the Human growing up. Adult man will abandon the Great Illusion.

With regard to the supposed absence of personal feeling on the part of the woman, the supposition is altogether out of accord with the facts of life as one knows it. Women fall in love quite as whole-heartedly as men, and when a woman falls in love with a man, the sentiments that fill her being are not in the first instance consciously racial; they are personal. She desires union with her lover, just as he desires union with her, and the completest union has no use for compulsion in any form whatsoever. Those who personify vital forces are very fond of saying that “Nature” uses the love of man and[168] woman “to further her purposes” (meaning the reproduction of the species), and there is often a sort of half-suggestion that man and woman are in reality helpless puppets whom “Nature” deludes with the mirage of love. Nothing is more misleading than these personifications of forces. Love is no delusion at all; it is the one condition under which personal appetite and racial purpose become fused into the force most productive of joy and health and beauty. Scientific men who try to reduce the relations of the sexes to mere animal appetite, and leave out of account the passion of love and the sentiment of affection are in truth less scientific than the merest girl. The growth of love is the one security for the adaptation of the Human to his environment.

Perhaps some people would say, “You talk of love, but men will not love the progressive women. It is no use arguing that they should; they don’t, as a matter of fact, and they never will.” It is true that one does not love because one should. Nothing kills love more surely than compulsion, and that is the basis of my whole plea for liberty. I have no fear whatever that women will cease to attract men, but women should not have to rely upon their power of sexual attraction for a free and varied existence. I often marvel at the lack of pride and of self-confidence in the men who advocate what amounts to starving women into sexual relations. If there are women who are unlovable, the proper penalty is to leave them unloved; it is not the[169] proper penalty to starve them. If some women are unlovable, so, in truth, are some men, and coercion will not help them. On the contrary; what might be good comradeship is turned into hatred by coercion. And it is not only the injured person who hates; there is no hate like that of the tyrant for the object of his repression, and the literature of the world is full of this strange and terrible hatred of men for women. The early fathers of the Christian Church forgot their Master in the most scurrilous attacks on that half of humanity to which Jesus most fully revealed Himself. The gibbering fear of women showed itself in the witch trials and in the monstrous inventions of perverted monks. In recent times a little anthology entitled, Come learn of Me what Woman is, and a still more recent one by Mr. W. H. Beveridge, entitled John and Irene, show a record of literature of abuse by men which has no counterpart whatever in the writings and speeches of women. In their desperate seeking for safety there is no doubt that primitive women had to defend themselves by any device they could invent; and since men made a wicked mystery of them, they would mystify men as far as they could, for their own purposes. One sees women still doing this, and sees the traces of the old fear in the less civilised modern man’s shoulder-shrug at the incalculable female.

Men have done a vast amount of speculation and theorising about women, and have remained for the most part quite remote from the reality, which is[170] very much simpler than all their inventions. The fact is that many of those who have poured out their venom upon women have been men whose unregulated appetites have led them to consort with women either naturally or artificially adapted to them, and they have then proceeded to expound the eternal feminine in terms of the prostitute. Many of the theories about Woman, of which we hear so much just now, are really based upon a more or less intimate acquaintance with prostitutes, and it is one of the ugliest sides of this ugly traffic that the men who buy the women seem to hate and despise them so, and they then proceed to generalise about all women on the data of the hated and despised ones. Progressive women do not hate the prostitute, but they recognise that, by weakness or by choice, she has committed a great sin against the spirit, and they rightly resent generalising about all women from knowledge (and only the most partial knowledge) of these unhappiest. Reading Schopenhauer, or Weininger, or Strindberg, one can only exclaim, “What company have these men kept!” They and a few scientific specialists appear to be the modern descendants of the authors of Malleus Maleficarum.

Owing to sex-obsession, some of these men are permanently unable to understand women, and their way of treating women is vitiated by this incapacity. It may be admitted, with reserves, that the characteristic of the love passion in woman is receptivity, but this is by no means the characteristic[171] of woman in all relations. If one takes only the maternal impulses in women, who would deny that they were active, nay, even sometimes belligerent, if it comes to defending their children? And the coolness towards all men except the one with whom she is in love makes a woman not only peculiarly capable of friendship, but also makes her extremely intolerant of sentimental appeals to the passivity which is associated with the love passion. Women are moved by sexual impulses towards particular men, not towards men as a whole, and men will never understand women so long as they do not recognise this.

This does not mean, of course, that women feel the same towards men as they do towards each other. The differences of mind and life and outlook between men and women make the society of each vastly stimulating to the other, provided always that the women are not artificially cramped, and make a mixed society far wider and humaner than the society of either sex alone. Men scarcely yet know the extent to which they impoverish their own lives by denying a full life to women, and thereby dulling and stupefying women.

And consider, too, how hopelessly unfit man has proved himself for a judicial attitude towards woman! He has allowed his own sex-impulses entirely to obscure his judgment about women. If he is much too hard on the good women, he tries to propitiate his feminine critics by pointing out how much too lenient he is with the bad ones. He[172] makes the law (I speak of England); he is judge and advocate and jury, policeman and jailer. When a woman is arraigned for soliciting his custom, he imprisons her, and keeps his own share of the transaction secret. When, in her despair, she abandons the child he too has abandoned, he again punishes her.

Who set man in judgment over woman?