Chapter 7 SEXUAL DIMORPHISM AND FEMINISM

Inferiority and superiority of the female as shown in animal species.-Influence of feeding on the production of sexes.-The female would have sufficed.-Feminism absolute, and moderate.-Pipe-dreams: elimination of the male and human parthenogenesis.

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Only after serious study of sexual dimorphism in the animal series may one venture a few reflections on feminism. One has noticed, in certain species, the female more beautiful, stronger, more active, more intelligent; and one has noticed the opposite. One has seen the male larger, or smaller; one has seen and will see him parasite, or provider, permanent master of the couple or the group, fugitive lover, a slave sacrificed by the female after the completion of her pleasure. All attitudes, and the same ones, are attributed by nature to either of the sexes; there is not, apart from the specific functions, a male or a female r?le. Both or either according to the decalogue of their specie put on the same costume, don the same mask, wield the same boar-spear, tool or sabre without one's being able to discover, at least not without going back to the beginning of things and digesting the archives of life, which of them is disguised and which acts "according to nature."

The abundance of food, especially nitrogenized (? azotized) will produce a greater number of females. With certain animals at transformation one may act directly on individuals: tadpoles gorged on mixed food, vegetables, larv?, chopped meat, have given an excess of females approaching totality (95 females to 5 males). On the other hand over-feeding tends to abolish stamens in plants, the stamens turn into petals, suralimentation even moults the petals into leaves and the buds into shoots. Richness of means, well-being, intensive feeding abolish sex, but the last to be affected is the female, which in sum, perseveres obscurely in the unsexed plant, forced back to its primitive means of reproduction, or to reproduction by slip cutting. If excessive alimentation tends to suppress the male, it would then appear that the separation into two sexes is a means of diminishing the costs of the total being. The monoic type is a step toward this simplification of labour; the female at a given moment eliminates her male organ, refuses to feed it, frees herself from the burden which has only a momentary utility. And, following this, provided in herself with an overabundance of all that maintains life, she divests herself of the specialized sexual apparatus, unsexes herself, that is to say, the identity of contraries being here evident, she is sexed throughout all her parts: tota femina sexus.

The male is an accident: the female would have sufficed. Brilliant as are, in certain animal species, the destinies of the male, the female is primordial. In civilized humanity she is born in proportion greater as the civilization approaches a greater plenitude; and this very plenitude diminishes, proportionately, the general fecundity: whether we treat of man or of apple-trees, the male element in- or de-creases according to famine or abundance of nourishment. But the human race is not sufficiently plastic for the variation of births to be ever very great between the two sexes; and no warm-blooded animal is sufficiently plastic for this cause, so active among vegetables, ever to lead to the dissolution of the male. There are no natural laws, there are tendencies, there are limits: the fields of oscillation are determined by the pasts of species, trenches curving into cloisters which close, in nearly all directions, the alleys of the future.

It is a fact, from henceforth hereditary, that the male of the human species has centralized in himself most of the activities independent of the sexual motor. He alone is capable of disinterested works, that is to say of aims unconnected with the physical conservation of the race, but without which civilization would be impossible, or at least very different from what it is and from the idea which we have of its future. Doubtless in humanity, as in the rest of nature, the female represents the important sex. In utter need, as with the mason bee, she could serve for the absolutely necessary work, to build the shelter, to gather the food, and the male might, without essential damage be reduced to the r?le of mere fecundating apparatus. The number of males could, and even should in such case, diminish with due rapidity, but then human society would in- or decline toward the type represented by that of social bees: continual labour being incompatible with the periods of maternity, the feminine sex would atrophy, a single female would be elevated to the dignity of queen and mother, the rest of the population would work stupidly for an ideal exterior to its own sensibility. Even more radical transformations would not be anti-natural. Virgin-birth might establish itself: certain males could be born in each century, as happens in the intellectual order, and they could fecundate the generation of loins, as genius fecundates the generation of minds. But humanity, by the richness of its intelligence, is less than other animal species submitted to causal necessity; by constant squirming in its nets, it has managed to displace a cord here and there, and makes now and again the unexpected movement. The coming of males once in a century would be unnecessary if some mechanical device were found for exciting the life of woman's eggs, as one excites those of the sea-anemone. If a few males were born from time to time, by an atavistic quirk of nature, they could be exhibited as curiosities, as we now exhibit hermaphrodites.

The feminist ideal leads us to these pipe-dreams. But if it comes to destroying the couple and not to re-forming it, if it comes to establishing a vast social promiscuity, if feminism resolves itself into the formula: free-woman in free-love, it is even more chimerical than all the chimzera which have at least their analogy in the diversity of animal habits. Human parthenogenesis is less absurd: it offers an order, and promiscuity is a disorder. But social promiscuity is impossible by the further reason that woman, the more feeble, would be crushed by it. She struggles against man only, thanks to the privileges which man concedes her, when troubled by sexual inebriety, intoxicated and drowsy with the fumes of desire. The factitious equality which she claims would re-establish her ancient slavery, on the day when most or all women wish to enjoy it: that is still another possible solution of the feminist crisis. However one looks at it, one sees the human couple re-establish itself ineluctably.

It is very difficult, from the standpoint of natural logic, to sympathize with moderate feminism, one could more easily accept feminism in excess. For if there are in nature numerous examples of feminism, there are very few of an equality of the sexes.

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