Woman : $b a vindicationLudovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Philosophy
Woman : $b a vindication
Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Sex; Women
We should readily acknowledge that a certain supernormal sexuality
might exist in men of the Mark Antony type, in which the reproductive
instinct prevailed over all others; but we should be forced to conclude
that as a general rule there would be every chance, even in the
healthiest and most normal man, either of the self-preservative or of
the social instinct obtaining the upper hand.
And this indeed is what we find constantly occurs in real life—at least
sufficiently often for us to recognize that the reproductive or sexual
obsession in Man is more or less an exception, or an abnormality.
From the correlation of his bodily parts, then, we cannot deduce a
predominance of the reproductive instinct in Man.
What do we know of his racial memory? What have his ancestors done
and been doing all these years? If we can posit anything absolutely
certain about them it is this, that they have been almost incessantly
concerned with the mastering of Life, and the organization of Man’s
life as a social being. Nothing is more certain than that. Nothing can
be read more clearly in the pages of history. Whereas the reproductive
instinct has formed but a recurring _leit-motif_ of man’s life, his
social instinct, with all that it entailed in the mastery of Nature
and the concomitant organization of man’s life, as a social being, has
constituted the unremitting and endless harmony of his existence.
Whereas, therefore, a woman cannot be positive without being
paramountly sexual, a man who would be paramountly sexual would be
negative to a most important part of his being—his relationship to
Nature, to the mastery of Nature, and therefore to the ordering and
organization of Life, including himself as a social being.
A paramountly sexual man, therefore, is as hostile to Life as the
asexual woman, and just as useless.
When a positive man faces Life with his social instinct keenly
sharpened, his ordering mind becomes creative and his creation is
society. He feels himself above Nature and bends it to his will which
is governed by his social instinct. The stylobate of the ancient Greek
temple, the elevation above the ground of the foundation of the Chêteau
de Versailles—these things are but instances of the unconscious tokens
Man has given all through his career as a rational being, of his
feeling of difference, of distance, from rude uncultured Life. When he
faces Woman, he also faces Life pure and simple, and in exactly the
same spirit. But here his body obtains the mastery, and the creation is
the child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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