One of the conditions that this harmony become as perfect as possible
is that woman in life as in literature shall begin to be more honest and
man more eager to listen when she reveals to him something of her own
nature. Men have desired and justly that women should learn from their
confessions in regard to the conflict between man and woman. But woman
because of the conventional conception of womanly purity has been
intimidated from conceding to man a deep insight into her erotic life
experiences.
Only when women begin to tell the truth about themselves will literature
universally illuminate the still unknown depths of woman's erotic
temperament. To the present time it has been almost exclusively men
poets who have made revelations about women. The nearer these poets have
approached life, the more surely have they seen the highest expression
of the eternal feminine as the great women poets also saw it: in erotic
love and in mother love. And it was the completeness of her consecration
which was in their eyes a woman's supreme chastity.
It is the great poets who have taught and have continued to teach youth
to revere the "all powerful Eros."
This is the only "morality" which has a future. Only by conforming to
this shall we gradually succeed in preventing the erotic feeling from
appearing sometimes as a brutal instinct or marriage from being founded
upon a fleeting attraction.
An ideal of negative purity--even incarnated in the person of
Jesus--cannot inflame youth and therefore cannot in the long run protect
him. That alone which has the power not only to restrain but also to
transform the brutal instinct is a conception of the existence of a
higher feeling which belongs to the same sphere of life as the instinct
itself.
To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of
fire--that is to give him a real moral strength. Thus there springs up
in man the ineradicable, invincible instinct that an erotic relation can
exist only as the expression of a reciprocal all comprehensive love.
Thus will youth learn to consider the love-marriage as the central life
relation, the center of life, and he will be inflamed with the desire to
develop and to conserve body and soul for the entrance into this most
holy thing in nature, wherein man and woman find their happiness in
creating a new race for happiness. Thus will young men and women in
increasing numbers understand that their own happiness, as well as that
of the coming generation will be the greater the more completely they
can give their personality to love. Boys and girls, young men and
maidens, men and women by coeducation, by joint labor and comradeship
will develop in one another that mutual understanding which will remove
the enmity between the sexes, in which modern individualization--and the
therewith increasing demands of the personality--has so far found its
expression.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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