Chapter 6 SEXUAL DIMORPHISM No.6

III. Vertebrates (continued).-Man and woman.-Characteristics and limits of human dimorphism.-Effects of civilization.-Psychologic dimorphism.-The insect world and the human.-Modern dimorphism, basis of the pair.-Solidarity of the human pair.-Dimorphism and polygamy.-The pair favours the female.-Sexual ?sthetics.-Causes of the superiority of feminine beauty.

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III. Vertebrates (continued)-Man and woman.- Among primates sexual dimorphism is but little accentuated, especially when the male and female live the same life in the open air and share the same labours. The male gorilla, very strong and very pig-headed, flees from no enemy; the female on the contrary is almost timid: when surprised in company with the male, she cries out, gives the alarm and escapes. But attacked when alone with her offspring, she resists. One can easily distinguish the male and female orang-outang, the male is larger with longer more bristling hair, he alone has a Horace Greeley beard; in the female the patches of bald skin are much less callous. But the great difference between the sexes in gorilla and orang-outang is in the males having vocal sacks descending over the chest to the arm-pits.

Thanks to these air-reservoirs, these bag-pipe bags, inflatable at will, the male can howl for a very long time and with great violence; the females' sacks are very small. Other monkeys, notably howling apes, are provided with these air-chambers, as are also certain other mammifers well known for the extravagance of their cries: polecats and pigs. Birds and batrachians have analogous organs.

Dimorphism of men and women varies according to race or rather according to species. Very feeble in most blacks and reds it is accentuated among Semites, Aryans, and Finns. But in man as in all animals of separate sexes one must differentiate between the primary dimorphism, which is necessary and produced by the specialization of sexual organs, and the secondary dimorphism with which the relation of sex is less evident or wholly uncertain. Limited to the non-sexual elements, human dimorphism is very feeble. Almost null in infancy, it develops with approaching puberty, is maintained during the genital period, and diminishes, sometimes almost to vanishing point, in old age. It varies individually, even during the years of greatest reproductivity, in males feebly sexed and in women heavily sexed: that is to say there are men and women whose type closely approaches the type-ideal formed by the fusion of sexes; neither one nor the other escapes the radical dimorphism imposed by the difference of sexual organs.

Leaving aside exceptions, one observes a mediocre and constant dimorphism between men and women, which may be expressed as follows, taking the male for type: the female is smaller and has less muscular force, she has longer head hair, but in contrast the hair-system is very little developed over the rest of her body, excepting in the armpits and pubis; aside from the teats, belly and hips, whose form is sexual, she is normally fatter than the male, and in direct consequence of this, her skin is finer; her skull-capacity is inferior by about 15% (man=100; woman=85) and her intelligence, less spontaneous, inclines in general to activities entirely practical. There is hardly any difference in the male and female skulls of every inferior human species, the contrary is true of civilized races. Civilization has certainly accentuated the initial dimorphism of man and woman-at least unless one of the very conditions of civilizations be not precisely a notable difference, morphologic and psychologic, between the two sexes. In that case civilization has but accentuated a native dimorphism. This is more probable, for one does not see how civilization could have caused the dimorphism, not at least unless it had already existed as a very strong tendency. Identical work, the same utilization of instinctive activities have managed greatly to reduce dimorphism of forms, for example, in dogs and horses, but this has had no influence on the psychologic dimorphism. Cultivation of instinct has never been able to efface, in the most specialized breeds of dogs, the peculiar tonality which instinct receives from sex. It is improbable that intellectual culture could fashion women in such a way as to rid them of the characteristic colour which sex imparts to their intelligence.

One uses the words instinct and intelligence to flatter prejudiced people. Instinct is merely a mode of intelligence.

Dimorphism is a constant fact in the animal series. Favourable to the male, favourable to the female, indifferent, it starts always from sexual necessity. There is a job to be done: nature divides it equally, or not, between male and female. She knows neither justice nor equality, and lays heavy burdens upon some, even to mutilation and premature death, while she gives to others liberty, leisures, and long hours of pleasant life. It is necessary that the couple reproduce a certain number of beings, equals of the unities of which itself is formed: all means are good which attain this end, and which attain it most speedily and most surely. Nature who is pitiless, is also in a hurry. Her imagination, always active, invents, ceaselessly, new forms which she casts into life, in measure as the earlier born finish their cycle. In superior mammals, and particularly in human species, division of labour is the means used by nature to insure the perpetuity of types. The female insect (leaving aside for the moment social hymenoptera) is provided at once with the organs of her sex and with tools of her trade, with arms for guarding the race; the female human has ceded to man the tools and weapons, here merged in the one instrument, muscle. Or rather, keeping her rights to the instrument, she gives up the use of it. She is neither warrior, huntress, nor mason, nor butcher; she is the female, and the male is the rest. The division of labour supposes community. In order that the female may cede the cares for subsistence and defence to the male, the couple must be established and permanent. The male osmie (sort of solitary bee) sees the light before his female; he could prepare the nest, or at least choose its situation, guide the female to it, work or watch; but he belongs to a series of animals in which the males are merely male organs, and all his r?le is contained in the gestures of mating. The couple is not yet formed. When it is formed, as in other kinds of insects, scarabs, copris, sisyphs, geotrupes, the work is equally shared between the two sexes. Here the parallel ends, for the social evolution of the insect has led to functional differentiations extremely complicated, and if not unknown, at least abnormal, to humanity. Bee society has the female for base, human society has the couple. They are organisms so different that no comparison of them is possible, or even useful. Only in ignorance of them, can one envy bees; a community without sexual relations is really without attraction for a member of the human community. The hive is not a society but a hatchery.

The couple is only possible with a dimorphism, real but moderate. There must be a difference, especially of strength, in order for there to be a true union, that is to say subordination. A couple formed of equal elements, like a society of equal elements, would be in a state of permanent anarchy; two creatures suffice for anarchy, as for war. A couple formed of elements too unequal, would, by the crushing of the weaker, find itself reduced to tyrannized unity. Man and woman, as is the case with other primates and the carnivora (for most herbivora are polygamous) represent two sexes made to live united and to share jointly in the cares for their offspring. The state of couple, demanding a certain dimorphism, assures by it, its perpetuity. When the couple is dissolved, be it by polygamy or by promiscuity, as has happened among Mohammedans, and among Christians (a religion, long powerful, functions both as race and as milieu) the dimorphism is accentuated, each of the elements escapes, in some measure, the strict influence of the other sex. Likewise if, in consequence of identical education, the psychologic dimorphism is attenuated, even slightly-it never is attenuated more than slightly-or if physical games reduce a little the physical differences, the couple is less easily formed and grows less stable: hence adultery, divorces, excess of prostitution. In all monogamous society, prostitution is the strict consequence: it diminishes more or less in polygamous societies where the free women are rarer, it would only disappear completely in promiscuity, that is to say in universal prostitution.

Polygamy, apart from its indirect influence, has, by the internment of women, a direct one on the dimorphism. Set apart from the active life of the outer world, and even from the air and light, the female of the male polygamous human becomes whiter, whatever may have been her initial colour, fatter, heavier, and also more stupid and more addicted to all sorts of onanism. Among Indian Mussulmen the man and woman appear to belong to different species, the man being so tanned, and the woman so colourless. Shut-in prostitutes of the Occident also lose colour, and one would with difficulty recognize two sisters in the soft, bleached whore and the sun-reddened, hardy cow-girl. Woman's liberty also accentuates the dimorphism but by another process. Freed from the bridle of necessity, from the need of pleasing, woman escaped from the couple, exaggerates her feminism, she becomes again the female in excess, since it is in being more and more female that she has most chances of seducing the male, who is insensible to all other merit. And, inversely, a woman having man's education is, given equal beauty, less than any other a seductress.

Thus, while the disintegration of the couple augments the feminine dimorphism, the diminution of the natural dimorphism renders the transformation of the couple more uneasy and more precarious. The human couple is an harmony difficult to realize, very easy to destroy, but in measure as one destroys it one frees the elements which will, necessarily, re-create it. (We will return later to polygamy, human and animal; but must here examine its relation to dimorphism. All the questions treated in this book are, moreover, so interlocked, that it will be difficult to prevent one or other of them from cropping up apropos no matter what other. If the method is less clear it is perhaps more loyal. Far from wishing to impart human logic to nature, one attempts here to introduce a little natural logic into the old classic logic.)

The sole aim of the couple is to free the female from all care that is not purely sexual, to permit her the most perfect accomplishment of her most important function. The couple favours the female, but it favours also the race. It is fully beneficial when the woman has acquired the right of maternal laziness. There is another reason for believing in the legitimacy of such a sharing of useful work between the two members of the couple, it is that masculine work diminishes its femininity, while feminine work feminizes the males. In order that the necessary and moderate dimorphism persist it would be necessary if the woman is to take up male exercises that the male should assume all the accessory labours of maternity. This would not be contrary to supple natural logic; there are examples of it among batrachians and among birds. But one does not see clearly either the utility or the possibility of such a reversal of r?les in the human species. The duty of a being is to persevere in its being and even to augment the characteristics which specialize it. The duty of woman is to keep and to accentuate her ?sthetic and her psychologic dimorphism. The ?sthetic viewpoint obliges one for the thousandth time to put, but, happily, not to resolve the agreeable question of woman's beauty. One may judge when it is a matter of shape, of muscular energy, of respiratory amplitude: these can be measured and set down in figures. When it comes to beauty, it is a matter of feeling, that is to say of what is at once deepest and most personal in each one of us, and which is most variable between one man and another. However, the sexual element which enters into the idea of beauty, being here at its very root, since it is the question of woman, the opinion of men is nearly unanimous: in the human couple, it is woman who represents beauty. All contrary opinion will be for ever considered as a paradox or as the most boring of sexual aberrations. A feeling does not adduce its reasons, it has none. It has to have them lent to it. The superiority of feminine beauty is real, it has a sole cause, the unity of line. What makes woman the more beautiful is the invisibility of her genital organs. The male organ, which is sometimes an advantage, is always a load, and always a blemish; it is made for the race, not for the individual. In the male human, and precisely because of its erect attitude, the sex is the sensitive point par excellence, and the visible point, it is the point of attack in hand to hand struggle, point of aim for the jet, obstacle for the eye, be it as a roughness of surface, be it as a break in the middle of the line. The harmony of the female body is then geometrically, much more perfect, especially if one consider the male and the female at the very hour of desire, at the moment, that is, when they present the most intense and most natural expression of life. In the woman, all movements are interior, or visible only in the undulation of her curves, conserving thus her full ?sthetic value, while the man, seeming at once to recede toward the primitive states of animality, appears reduced, putting off all beauty, to the bare and simple condition of genital organ. Man, it is true, has his ?sthetic compensation during pregnancy and its deformations.

One must admit also that the human form has grave defects of proportion, and that they are more accentuated in the female than in the male. In general the trunk is too long, and the legs, consequently, too short. One says that there are two ?sthetic types in Aryan races: one with long limbs and one with short limbs. Both types are indeed, easy enough to distinguish, but they rarely present their characteristics with sufficient distinction, moreover the first is rather rare: it is the one which sculptors have vulgarized by amelioration. Compare a series of photographs of art with a series of photos from the nude, and you have proof enough that the beauty of the human body is an ideologic creation. Take away the egoistic sentiment of the race, and the sexual delirium, and man would appear very inferior in harmonic plentitude to most of the mammifers; the monkey, his brother, is, frankly, in?sthetic.

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