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06-25-2007, 04:28 AM
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0253344719
W is nothing but sexuality, M is sexual and something else beyond. This shows particularly clearly in the entirely different ways in which Man and Woman experience their entry into the period of sexual maturity. In the case of a man the time of puberty is always a time of crisis, when he feels that something alien enters his existence, something is added to his thoughts and feelings, without his wanting it. It is the physiological erection, over which the will has no power; the first erection is therefore felt to be mysterious and unsettling by every man, and many men remember the particular circumstances with the greatest accuracy all their life. A woman, on the other hand, not only comes to terms with puberty easily, but feels that her existence has, as it were, been raised to a higher power, her own importance infinitely increased. Man, as a boy, feels no need whatsoever for sexual maturity. Woman, already as a quite young girl, expects everything from that time. In a man the symptoms of his physical maturity are accompanied by unpleasant, even hostile and anxious feelings. A woman observes her somatic development during puberty with the greatest suspense, with the most feverish, impatient expectation. This proves that Man's sexuality is not situated along the straight line of his development, while in Woman puberty only brings an enormous intensification of her previous form of existence. There are not many boys of that age who do not find the idea that they will fall in love or marry (marry in a general sense, not with regard to one girl in particular) extremely ridiculous and who do not reject it with indignation, while the youngest girls already seem to be keen on love and marriage as the fulfillment of their existence. That is why Woman attributes a positive value only to the time of sexual maturity, both in herself and in others, and has no real relationship with either childhood or old age. To her the recollection of her childhood is only a recollection of her stupidity, and the prospect of her old age fills her with fear and loathing. From her childhood her memory singles out the sexual moments alone by means of a positive evaluation, and even those are at a disadvantage against the incomparably greater later intensifications of her life -- which is precisely a sexual life. Finally, the wedding night, the moment of defloration, is the most important, I would say, the half-way point of the whole life of Woman. In Man's life the first sexual intercourse plays absolutely no part compared to the significance that it possessed for the opposite sex.
Woman is only sexual, Man is also sexual: this difference can be further developed in terms of both space and time. In Man's body those points from which he can be sexually aroused are few in number and strictly localized. Woman's sexuality is spread diffusely over her whole body, and every touch, at whatever point, arouses her sexually. Therefore the assertion, in the second chapter of the first part, that the whole male as well as the whole female body is sexually determined should not be understood to mean that both Man and Woman can undergo a uniform sexual stimulation from every point. In Woman's capacity for arousal there are also some local differences, but there is no sharp division, as there is in Man, between the genital tract and all the other areas of the body.
The morphological protrusion of the male genitals from Man's body could, again, be regarded as a symbol of this situation.
Just as the sexuality of Man stands out spatially against the asexual elements in him, the same inequality also marks his behavior at different times. Woman is constantly, Man only intermittently sexual. In Woman the sex drive is always present (the apparent exceptions that are always brought up by those who would deny the sexuality of Woman will be discussed in considerable detail later), in Man is always rests for longer or shorter periods. This also explains the eruptive nature of the male sex drive, which makes it appear so much more striking than the female, and which has contributed to the proliferation of the error that Man's sex drive is more intensive than Woman's. The real difference is that for M the sex drive is, as it were, an itch with intervals, for W an incessant tickle.
[...]
The profound falseness of Woman, which can already be seen to follow from her inability to understand the idea of truth, and indeed to understand any values at all, will be discussed at length later, but first I will highlight some other aspects. In so doing exceptional ingenuity and extreme caution are constantly called for, because there are so many imitations of ethical behavior, such seemingly accurate copies of morality, that women will probably always be regarded by many as being more moral than men. I have already emphasized the necessity of distinguishing between a-moral and anti-moral behavior, and I repeat that where genuine Woman is concerned there can only be a question of the former, which involves neither a sense of morality nor even a tendency toward it. It is well known, both from the statistics of crime and from everyday life, that incomparably fewer crimes are committed by women than by men. It is this fact that the busy apologists of the moral purity of women always invoke in the support of their case.
But in trying to solve the problem of female morality the crucial issue is not where a person has objectively sinned against the idea, but only whether he has a subjective core that could have formed a relationship with the idea, and the value of which he has called into question by committing a crime. A male criminal is certainly born with his criminal urges, but he feels, despite all the theories of "moral insanity," that by his deed he has forfeited his own value and his right to live. All criminals are cowards and there is none whose pride and self-respect would have been enhanced rather than diminished by his evil deed, and who would take on the responsibility of justifying it.
The male criminal has the same innate appreciation of the idea of value as a man who almost completely lacks the criminal urges that dominated the former. Woman, on the other hand, often claims to be entirely in the right even if she is guilty of the meanest imaginable deed. While a genuine male criminal responds to all accusations with vacant silence, a woman may indignantly voice her surprise and resentment at any doubts cast on her perfect right to act as she pleases. Women are convinced of their "rights" without ever sitting in judgment over themselves. The male criminal does not take stock of himself either, but rather than demanding his rights he hastens to avoid thinking of the idea of right, because doing so would remind him of his guilt. This also proves that he once had a relationship with the idea and does not want to be reminded of his infidelity to his better self. No male criminal has ever believed that his punishment was unjust. A woman, on the other hand, is convinced of the malice of her accusers, and nobody will be able to prove to her against her will that she has done anything wrong. If an attempt is made to persuade her, she will often burst into tears, ask for forgiveness, "recognize her wrong" and indeed sincerely believe that she feels it, but only when she is in the mood and because dissolving into tears gives her a certain sensual pleasure. The male criminal is obdurate and cannot be turned round as promptly as a woman whose spurious defiance can give way to an equally spurious sense of guilt, the torture of sitting on her bed, crying and wishing to die of shame over the disgrace she has brought upon herself, and an apparent exception (the penitent woman, the devotee who chastises her body) will also show in due course that a woman only ever feels sinful if she is in company.
Therefore I am not saying that Woman is evil and anti-moral. I maintain that, on the contrary, she can never be evil, but is only amoral and mean.
Female compassion and female modesty are two other phenomena generally cited by the champions of female virtue. Female kindness and female sympathy above all have given rise to the beautiful myth of woman's soul, and the ultimate argument to which any belief in the higher morality of Woman resorts is Woman as a nurse, as a sister of mercy. I do not enjoy mentioning this point and I would not have raised it, but I am forced to do so by an objection that has been made to me orally and that will probably be followed by others.
It is short-sighted to regard women's nursing as a proof of their compassion, because it indicates the precise opposite. A man would never be able to watch the torments of the sick. He would be so worn down by suffering with them that he would be totally unable to care for the. If one observes female nurses one is astonished to see how calm and "gentle" they remain, even when faced with the most terrible spasms of the dying, and this is just as well, because men, who cannot stand pain and death, would make bad nurses. A man would want to alleviate the agony, delay death, in a word, help. Where no help is possible he has no place: that is where nursing comes into its own, and for nursing only women are suitable. Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong to appreciate the activities of women in this area from any point of view other than a utilitarian one.
There is the further fact that for Woman the problem of solitude and society simply does not exist. She is particularly well suited to being a companion (a reader, a nurse) because she never finds herself in a position of having to step out of solitude into company. For a man solitude and company will always be a problem, even though often only one of the two will be a possibility. A woman does not give up any solitude in order to nurse a patient, as she would have to do if her action were really to be called moral: for a woman is never solitary, she knows neither the love nor the fear of solitude. This is one proof of the fact that she is no monad, because all monads have boundaries. Women by nature are boundless, but not boundless in the same way as a genius, whose boundaries are at the same time the boundaries of the world. Rather, they are never separated by anything real either from nature or from human beings.
This fusion is an eminently sexual one, and accordingly all female compassion manifests itself in physical contact with the object of her compassion. It is an animal tenderness, which needs to stroke and to comfort. Here we have another proof of the absence of the sharp line which always separates two personalities. Woman does not honor the suffering of her fellow-human by being silent, but believes that she can put an end to it by talking: so strong is her sense of a bond between them as natural, not spiritual, beings. Where sexuality has ceased to exist all compassion is absent: in an old woman there is not even a spark of that alleged kindness, and thus the old age of Woman indirectly proves that all her compassion was only a form of sexual fusion, even when it concerned a person of the same sex.
Living in fusion,, one of the most important and most far-reaching facts of female existence, is also the reason for the sentimentality of all women, their vulgar and shameless readiness to shed tears with the greatest ease. It is not for nothing that there are only female professional mourners and that a man who cries in company is not thought of very highly. If some people cry, Woman will cry with them; if others laugh, except at her, she will laugh with them; and this takes care of a very large part of female compassion.
Only Woman really directly her laments and her tears at others, demanding their pity. This is one of the most conclusive proofs of the psychic shamelessness of Woman. Woman provokes the pity of strangers in order to be able to cry with them and to pity herself even more than she has done already. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Woman, even when she is crying alone, always cries with others, to whom she tells her woes in her mind, and greatly moves herself in the process. "Self-pity" is an eminently female attribute: first a woman joins the ranks of the others in making herself the object of the others' pity, and then, deeply moved, begins to cry with them about the "poor woman," that is, herself. For the same reason a man may never be more ashamed than when he catches himself in the act of being impelled toward self-pity, in which the subject actually becomes an object.
Female compassion, in which even Schopenhauer believed, is sobbing and wailing for its own sake, at the slightest provocation and without the slightest attempt to suppress the impulse out of shame. Like all suffering, true compassion, which is a suffering with others, must be modest, if it is real suffering: in fact no suffering can be as modest as compassion and love, because these two impulses make us conscious of the insurmountable boundaries of any individuality most powerfully. Love and its modesty will be discussed later, but in compassion, in genuine male empathy, there is always shame and a sense of guilt, because my plight is not as bad as that of the other man, because I am not he but a separate being, who is also kept apart from him by external circumstances. Male sympathy is the principium individuationis blushing at itself: that is why all female compassion is intrusive, while male sympathy hides from view.
This has partly uncovered the nature of women's modesty. The rest can only be discussed later in connection with hysteria. Given the naive zeal with which all women wear low-cut dresses, wherever social conventions allow, it is hard to see how anybody can still believe in the virtue of an innate internal modesty in the female sex. One is or one is not modest, and a modesty that is regularly dispensed with at certain moments is no modesty.
The absolute proof of a women's shamelessness (and an indication of where the demand for external modesty, which women often observe so scrupulously, may come from) is the fact that women among themselves always undress completely without any embarrassment, while men always try to hide their nakedness from each other. When women are alone they eagerly compare each other's charms, and all those present are often subjected, not without a certain lasciviousness, to a precise and thorough examination, with the man consideration unconsciously always remaining the value that a man will attach to this or that attraction. A male individual is not interested in the nakedness of any other male individual, while every woman always undresses every other woman in her mind and thus demonstrates the general inter-individual shamelessness of the sex. A man finds it embarrassing and unpleasant to imagine the sexuality of his fellow-man. A woman searches in her mind for the sexual relations that another woman may be having, as soon as she meets her. Indeed she evaluates the other woman exclusively in terms of her sexual partner.
W is nothing but sexuality, M is sexual and something else beyond. This shows particularly clearly in the entirely different ways in which Man and Woman experience their entry into the period of sexual maturity. In the case of a man the time of puberty is always a time of crisis, when he feels that something alien enters his existence, something is added to his thoughts and feelings, without his wanting it. It is the physiological erection, over which the will has no power; the first erection is therefore felt to be mysterious and unsettling by every man, and many men remember the particular circumstances with the greatest accuracy all their life. A woman, on the other hand, not only comes to terms with puberty easily, but feels that her existence has, as it were, been raised to a higher power, her own importance infinitely increased. Man, as a boy, feels no need whatsoever for sexual maturity. Woman, already as a quite young girl, expects everything from that time. In a man the symptoms of his physical maturity are accompanied by unpleasant, even hostile and anxious feelings. A woman observes her somatic development during puberty with the greatest suspense, with the most feverish, impatient expectation. This proves that Man's sexuality is not situated along the straight line of his development, while in Woman puberty only brings an enormous intensification of her previous form of existence. There are not many boys of that age who do not find the idea that they will fall in love or marry (marry in a general sense, not with regard to one girl in particular) extremely ridiculous and who do not reject it with indignation, while the youngest girls already seem to be keen on love and marriage as the fulfillment of their existence. That is why Woman attributes a positive value only to the time of sexual maturity, both in herself and in others, and has no real relationship with either childhood or old age. To her the recollection of her childhood is only a recollection of her stupidity, and the prospect of her old age fills her with fear and loathing. From her childhood her memory singles out the sexual moments alone by means of a positive evaluation, and even those are at a disadvantage against the incomparably greater later intensifications of her life -- which is precisely a sexual life. Finally, the wedding night, the moment of defloration, is the most important, I would say, the half-way point of the whole life of Woman. In Man's life the first sexual intercourse plays absolutely no part compared to the significance that it possessed for the opposite sex.
Woman is only sexual, Man is also sexual: this difference can be further developed in terms of both space and time. In Man's body those points from which he can be sexually aroused are few in number and strictly localized. Woman's sexuality is spread diffusely over her whole body, and every touch, at whatever point, arouses her sexually. Therefore the assertion, in the second chapter of the first part, that the whole male as well as the whole female body is sexually determined should not be understood to mean that both Man and Woman can undergo a uniform sexual stimulation from every point. In Woman's capacity for arousal there are also some local differences, but there is no sharp division, as there is in Man, between the genital tract and all the other areas of the body.
The morphological protrusion of the male genitals from Man's body could, again, be regarded as a symbol of this situation.
Just as the sexuality of Man stands out spatially against the asexual elements in him, the same inequality also marks his behavior at different times. Woman is constantly, Man only intermittently sexual. In Woman the sex drive is always present (the apparent exceptions that are always brought up by those who would deny the sexuality of Woman will be discussed in considerable detail later), in Man is always rests for longer or shorter periods. This also explains the eruptive nature of the male sex drive, which makes it appear so much more striking than the female, and which has contributed to the proliferation of the error that Man's sex drive is more intensive than Woman's. The real difference is that for M the sex drive is, as it were, an itch with intervals, for W an incessant tickle.
[...]
The profound falseness of Woman, which can already be seen to follow from her inability to understand the idea of truth, and indeed to understand any values at all, will be discussed at length later, but first I will highlight some other aspects. In so doing exceptional ingenuity and extreme caution are constantly called for, because there are so many imitations of ethical behavior, such seemingly accurate copies of morality, that women will probably always be regarded by many as being more moral than men. I have already emphasized the necessity of distinguishing between a-moral and anti-moral behavior, and I repeat that where genuine Woman is concerned there can only be a question of the former, which involves neither a sense of morality nor even a tendency toward it. It is well known, both from the statistics of crime and from everyday life, that incomparably fewer crimes are committed by women than by men. It is this fact that the busy apologists of the moral purity of women always invoke in the support of their case.
But in trying to solve the problem of female morality the crucial issue is not where a person has objectively sinned against the idea, but only whether he has a subjective core that could have formed a relationship with the idea, and the value of which he has called into question by committing a crime. A male criminal is certainly born with his criminal urges, but he feels, despite all the theories of "moral insanity," that by his deed he has forfeited his own value and his right to live. All criminals are cowards and there is none whose pride and self-respect would have been enhanced rather than diminished by his evil deed, and who would take on the responsibility of justifying it.
The male criminal has the same innate appreciation of the idea of value as a man who almost completely lacks the criminal urges that dominated the former. Woman, on the other hand, often claims to be entirely in the right even if she is guilty of the meanest imaginable deed. While a genuine male criminal responds to all accusations with vacant silence, a woman may indignantly voice her surprise and resentment at any doubts cast on her perfect right to act as she pleases. Women are convinced of their "rights" without ever sitting in judgment over themselves. The male criminal does not take stock of himself either, but rather than demanding his rights he hastens to avoid thinking of the idea of right, because doing so would remind him of his guilt. This also proves that he once had a relationship with the idea and does not want to be reminded of his infidelity to his better self. No male criminal has ever believed that his punishment was unjust. A woman, on the other hand, is convinced of the malice of her accusers, and nobody will be able to prove to her against her will that she has done anything wrong. If an attempt is made to persuade her, she will often burst into tears, ask for forgiveness, "recognize her wrong" and indeed sincerely believe that she feels it, but only when she is in the mood and because dissolving into tears gives her a certain sensual pleasure. The male criminal is obdurate and cannot be turned round as promptly as a woman whose spurious defiance can give way to an equally spurious sense of guilt, the torture of sitting on her bed, crying and wishing to die of shame over the disgrace she has brought upon herself, and an apparent exception (the penitent woman, the devotee who chastises her body) will also show in due course that a woman only ever feels sinful if she is in company.
Therefore I am not saying that Woman is evil and anti-moral. I maintain that, on the contrary, she can never be evil, but is only amoral and mean.
Female compassion and female modesty are two other phenomena generally cited by the champions of female virtue. Female kindness and female sympathy above all have given rise to the beautiful myth of woman's soul, and the ultimate argument to which any belief in the higher morality of Woman resorts is Woman as a nurse, as a sister of mercy. I do not enjoy mentioning this point and I would not have raised it, but I am forced to do so by an objection that has been made to me orally and that will probably be followed by others.
It is short-sighted to regard women's nursing as a proof of their compassion, because it indicates the precise opposite. A man would never be able to watch the torments of the sick. He would be so worn down by suffering with them that he would be totally unable to care for the. If one observes female nurses one is astonished to see how calm and "gentle" they remain, even when faced with the most terrible spasms of the dying, and this is just as well, because men, who cannot stand pain and death, would make bad nurses. A man would want to alleviate the agony, delay death, in a word, help. Where no help is possible he has no place: that is where nursing comes into its own, and for nursing only women are suitable. Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong to appreciate the activities of women in this area from any point of view other than a utilitarian one.
There is the further fact that for Woman the problem of solitude and society simply does not exist. She is particularly well suited to being a companion (a reader, a nurse) because she never finds herself in a position of having to step out of solitude into company. For a man solitude and company will always be a problem, even though often only one of the two will be a possibility. A woman does not give up any solitude in order to nurse a patient, as she would have to do if her action were really to be called moral: for a woman is never solitary, she knows neither the love nor the fear of solitude. This is one proof of the fact that she is no monad, because all monads have boundaries. Women by nature are boundless, but not boundless in the same way as a genius, whose boundaries are at the same time the boundaries of the world. Rather, they are never separated by anything real either from nature or from human beings.
This fusion is an eminently sexual one, and accordingly all female compassion manifests itself in physical contact with the object of her compassion. It is an animal tenderness, which needs to stroke and to comfort. Here we have another proof of the absence of the sharp line which always separates two personalities. Woman does not honor the suffering of her fellow-human by being silent, but believes that she can put an end to it by talking: so strong is her sense of a bond between them as natural, not spiritual, beings. Where sexuality has ceased to exist all compassion is absent: in an old woman there is not even a spark of that alleged kindness, and thus the old age of Woman indirectly proves that all her compassion was only a form of sexual fusion, even when it concerned a person of the same sex.
Living in fusion,, one of the most important and most far-reaching facts of female existence, is also the reason for the sentimentality of all women, their vulgar and shameless readiness to shed tears with the greatest ease. It is not for nothing that there are only female professional mourners and that a man who cries in company is not thought of very highly. If some people cry, Woman will cry with them; if others laugh, except at her, she will laugh with them; and this takes care of a very large part of female compassion.
Only Woman really directly her laments and her tears at others, demanding their pity. This is one of the most conclusive proofs of the psychic shamelessness of Woman. Woman provokes the pity of strangers in order to be able to cry with them and to pity herself even more than she has done already. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Woman, even when she is crying alone, always cries with others, to whom she tells her woes in her mind, and greatly moves herself in the process. "Self-pity" is an eminently female attribute: first a woman joins the ranks of the others in making herself the object of the others' pity, and then, deeply moved, begins to cry with them about the "poor woman," that is, herself. For the same reason a man may never be more ashamed than when he catches himself in the act of being impelled toward self-pity, in which the subject actually becomes an object.
Female compassion, in which even Schopenhauer believed, is sobbing and wailing for its own sake, at the slightest provocation and without the slightest attempt to suppress the impulse out of shame. Like all suffering, true compassion, which is a suffering with others, must be modest, if it is real suffering: in fact no suffering can be as modest as compassion and love, because these two impulses make us conscious of the insurmountable boundaries of any individuality most powerfully. Love and its modesty will be discussed later, but in compassion, in genuine male empathy, there is always shame and a sense of guilt, because my plight is not as bad as that of the other man, because I am not he but a separate being, who is also kept apart from him by external circumstances. Male sympathy is the principium individuationis blushing at itself: that is why all female compassion is intrusive, while male sympathy hides from view.
This has partly uncovered the nature of women's modesty. The rest can only be discussed later in connection with hysteria. Given the naive zeal with which all women wear low-cut dresses, wherever social conventions allow, it is hard to see how anybody can still believe in the virtue of an innate internal modesty in the female sex. One is or one is not modest, and a modesty that is regularly dispensed with at certain moments is no modesty.
The absolute proof of a women's shamelessness (and an indication of where the demand for external modesty, which women often observe so scrupulously, may come from) is the fact that women among themselves always undress completely without any embarrassment, while men always try to hide their nakedness from each other. When women are alone they eagerly compare each other's charms, and all those present are often subjected, not without a certain lasciviousness, to a precise and thorough examination, with the man consideration unconsciously always remaining the value that a man will attach to this or that attraction. A male individual is not interested in the nakedness of any other male individual, while every woman always undresses every other woman in her mind and thus demonstrates the general inter-individual shamelessness of the sex. A man finds it embarrassing and unpleasant to imagine the sexuality of his fellow-man. A woman searches in her mind for the sexual relations that another woman may be having, as soon as she meets her. Indeed she evaluates the other woman exclusively in terms of her sexual partner.