Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
So it is with Human traits and faculties. The balance of The Normal is
the way alone of health and happiness and progress.
There is great boast now-a-days of friendship and comradeship between
the sexes. Yet though friendship and comradeship are good allies of
love, they are but sterile, uninspiring substitutes for the profounder,
higher, vital and undying emotions of the true love-passion.
On the other hand, attachments between men and men, and between women
and women, are strengthening and intensifying; absorbing the emotion and
devotion formerly and normally bestowed on members of the opposite sex.
While attraction between persons of opposite sex becomes ever lighter
and triter in sentiment; serving more and more for brief distraction and
provocative pastime rather than for a living and abiding bond.
This misplaced affection for members of the same sex arises from the
attraction of traits of the opposite sex unduly developed in them. While
indifference to members of the opposite sex results from lack in these
of the characteristics of their sex, normally accentuated. Thus a woman
is more drawn to one of her own sex possessing virile characteristics,
physical or mental, than she is drawn to a weak-brained, emasculate man.
Masculine women are attracted likewise by the womanly graces and quality
of feminine women.
While men find in some members of their own sex, feminine traits of
sympathy and sentiment absent in women of male-proclivity. All is an
expression of the law of the Attraction of Opposites, which (normally)
causes persons of opposite sex to be strongly drawn to one another.
On the other hand, the development in himself, or in herself, of the
characteristics of the opposite sex makes members of either sex
independent of and indifferent to members of the other, by supplying
them with a spurious counterfeit of qualities it is natural to seek in
those others.
VII
Professor Drummond, from whom I quote frequently, as being one of those
biologists on the side of the angels, writes thus beautifully:
"Sex is a paradox; it is that which separates in order to unite....
There is no instance in Nature of Division of Labour being brought
to such extreme specialisation. The two sexes were not only set
apart to perform different halves of the same function, but each so
entirely lost the power of performing the whole function that even
with so great a thing at stake as the continuance of the species
_one_ could not discharge it.
"It is important to notice this absence of necessity for Sex having
been created--the absence of any known necessity, from the merely
physiological standpoint.
"Is it inconceivable that Nature should sometimes do things with an
ulterior object, an ethical one, for instance? To no one with any
acquaintance with Nature's ways, will it be possible to conceive of
such a purpose as the sole purpose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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