Hypatia

Before we pass on to an attempt at a summary and conclusion of the argument, it may be as well to re-state briefly what is the matter with men. Certainly they are not such fierce tyrants as when first we fought them; certainly they have some grounds to complain of the feminine arrogance which, not content with proving equality, wants to go on and prove women the superior sex. We might, on grounds of science perhaps, advance this claim, urging that, since a female being needs one more chromosome for its creation than a male, it must, therefore, be of higher importance. Should we do so, and seek to live alone on the planet, producing our children by parthenogenesis, our pride would be doomed to a fall. Such children, there is reason to believe, would all be males. At least, that is what happens when the experiment is tried by sea-urchins. Men, on the other hand, like to pretend that our assumption of intelligence and independence is but a momentary spurt in a race which must end in masculine victory and feminine submission. They admit that the great development of our freedom in body and mind has given us a serious advantage, and the more discerning among them urge their fellows to press on and catch us up. Others trundle the golden apples beseechingly, but still Atalanta runs.

I believe it to be true that the education and outlook of men is more old-fashioned than that of women reared in the freedom of feminist traditions. Men have not yet realized how women’s outlook is changing, nor attempted very seriously to adapt themselves to the change. They will do so, of a certainty; for, true as it may be that above all desires in woman is that to be pleasing to men, it is still truer that the desire of desires in man is to be pleasing to women. I believe that Puritanism or asceticism, of which they accuse us, is very strong in them. One of the compliments or insults that has been hurled during the sex-war is that the feminine mind is pervaded by the physical harmony of the feminine body. One may perhaps retort that the dualism of mind and matter is a very masculine philosophy; and one which, moreover, men have translated into their everyday lives by the sharp division they like to make between fighters and thinkers, games-playing idiots and thin intellectuals. Too often a woman of vitality and intelligence must choose between a soldier-gentleman and Chaucer’s clerk.[15] Should she choose the former, she takes a plunge into the past. This man exults in murder, whether of animals or of his fellow-creatures; deep down within him he is still convinced that women are divided into good and bad—and both require the handling of a master. His wife must beware how she responds to his advances; she may be thought forward or impure. Decency must above all things be preserved. Though games and the classics may have taught the English gentleman the beauty of paganism and the joy of the naked body where man is concerned, he is still stuffy in his approach to sex. He rarely brings the freshness of the morning and the joy of the open skies to the love of mistress or of wife. Plush, gilt and silk stockings express the one; pipe, the armchair at the fireside, dinner, and a coldly furnished bedroom, the other. Conversation is a masculine monologue, punctuated by assent. He will be good to his children, provided they are not odd, and will protect his wife. He will never lift her to rapture. She fears, and will probably deceive him.

The intellectual—perhaps by reason of the monastic tradition of learning, perhaps because he finds Jason so revolting—does all that he can to forget the needs of the body. Woman counts as one of them. She is a burden, a responsibility, a distraction, an incursion of the material into a world of contemplation. As for children and domestic life, they would make an end to all thought, to all art. An instinctive life—so he thinks—is possible only in spasm, if at all, for a man with serious mental work to accomplish. If woman persists in keeping him company, then she must shoulder the burdens, tend him and care for him, and leave him alone when he doesn’t want her. It is this contempt for the natural play of instinct which eats the heart out of life for many intellectuals, men and women, of to-day. They dread the gift of themselves, the loss of independence which passion would bring, and therefore they never give freely. In part, they are cherishing the medieval tradition that to be worthy of spiritual or mental labour man and woman must go aside and renounce; in part, they are inspired by a tight conception of materialism, in which individuals are hurled like lumps of matter by dynamic forces through space, unable to do more than come near, but never mingle one with another. This view of life and the medieval are combining to destroy our world in lovelessness and despair.

The old-fashioned mind clings to spiritual duties and consolations and the framework of Church discipline, as a bulwark against personal licence; the more modern mind is dominated by mechanism—which is, after all, no more than the rational control of matter—and seeks in an intelligent organization of the State, a framework within which each individual is to perform the duties for which he is best fitted. To neither conception is love between individuals, or sex-love between man and woman, important. In effect, personal relationships do not matter. The Christian doctrine of all-embracing love was once potent, but fails to-day because of the foundation of God, dogma, and Church on which it is built and which modern people cannot accept. “To love thy neighbour as thyself” is also inadequate without knowledge and understanding. But the rational materialists’ attitude—such, for instance, is that of the Bolsheviks—to human relationships, in particular to women and sex, is as lacking in the sense of human dignity as the Christian. Monogamy and undiscriminating licence rest upon a common basis of contempt for love and personality, both asserting that the desire of a man is for a woman, of a woman for a man, but no matter whom. Dualism, as ever, is the culprit. Sex-love is to be no more than a physical need—no part of the serious business of life. Science has brought a more modern attitude to matter which by its effect upon the imagination may change our conception of personality and sex. Force, struggle, solidity, contact, may yield to gentleness, non-resistance, intermingling and uniting—not by an ethical change, but by a change in scientific thought. We shall no longer think of mind and matter as wronging or thwarting one another, because they are not different forces; and we shall no longer be able to separate physical from mental virtue or depravity. We shall no longer value a love that suppresses or disregards the union of personality.

Taboos and superstitions, struggling dynamic individuals or States—how may we set up a new vision? Perhaps what I have written above seems far-fetched to the reader, but I do not think our life can be cut up into compartments. Philosophy and sex are more important in politics than General Elections. The revolt against the all-powerful Christian State began in the assertion of certain people that their love of good fruit and wine or their enjoyment of sex were not worthy of hell-fire. On personal conduct, on our standards of personal relationship, man to woman, parents to children, are built the customs and laws of States and ultimately their national and international policy. It is here, then, with man and woman, that we must begin. I have in mind, as I write, a piece of Chinese porcelain, on which the sage or poet sits with his book and long pipe; a lovely and elegant lady peeps over his shoulder, and close at hand plays an impish child. I do not think that the Chinese who conceived it expected that poet to write bad verses, or, if a sage, to compose worthless philosophy. On the contrary, to love with devotion, to be learned, to have children, are ideas which have shaped the harmony of Chinese life. As compared with their generous acceptance of instinct our Christian dread of sex and horror of the body are obscene.

If we are to make peace between man and woman, and by their unity and partnership change the ideas that govern our politics and our outlook on the world, it is essential that men should make a more determined attempt to understand what feminists are seeking. It is useless to go on abusing, or pretending that this is a matter of minor importance. It is essential also that women should think clearly and continue in courage and honesty of word and action, neither abandoning all for the pursuit of pleasure nor glorying in opportunities for an oppressive morality belonging to past ages. First and foremost, man or woman, we are human beings. There is a great deal of the work in the community which we can each do with equal ability, given equal training and opportunity. There are other tasks which we must agree to delegate to one another, and neither despise the other for performing them. Life and harmony, generosity and peace are the ideals which the best thought of feminism has set before us. We believe that States and individuals can put them into practice. Will man not pause to understand before he continues on the path of destruction and strife, cupidity and war? Can we not persuade Jason from barbarity and Admetus to the abandonment of his fears? To live with vigour, body and mind and imagination, without fear or shame or dread of death; to drive these baser passions from the hold they have upon our morality and our politics—this is what we ask of modern men and women. They can come to it only in a reckless love of one another, a passion that gives again and again without fear of hurt or exhaustion. It is not an abandonment to nature and to instinct that we need. Pure and barbaric instinct is no more. Our bodies are too much impregnated by inherited habit and knowledge, too much surrounded in their growth by the findings of science. Men and women are not creatures of clay, nor disembodied spirits; but things of fire intertwining in understanding, torrents leaping to join in a cascade of mutual ecstacy. There is nothing in life to compare with this uniting of minds and bodies in men and women who have laid aside hostility and fear and seek in love the fullest understanding of themselves and of the universe. You cannot measure it in inches, nor turn it on and off like a tap. You cannot stay it now and indulge it another time. You cannot come to it by religion or by unaided reason, or by the brute courage of sheer physical vitality. Jealousy is death. Dualism is nonsense, compartments unavailing. You must have in you the thought that is creation; life’s spring, and the daring of its unconquered waters—so may you transform the world and people it with gods who know no more the hates and littleness of men.