Chapter XII · THE NATURE OF WOMAN AND HER SIGNIFICANCE IN THE UNIVERSE (continued 2)

The abstract male is the image of God, the absolute something; the female, and the female element in the male, is the symbol of nothing; that is the significance of the woman in the universe, and in this way male and female complete and condition one another. Woman has a meaning and a function in the universe as the opposite of man; and as the human male surpasses the animal male, so the human female surpasses the female of zoology. It is not that limited existence and limited negation (as in the animal kingdom) are at war in humanity; what there stand in opposition are unlimited existence and unlimited negation. And so male and female make up humanity.

The meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She represents negation, the opposite pole from the Godhead, the other possibility of humanity. And so nothing is so despicable as a man become female, and such a person will be regarded as the supreme criminal even by himself. And so also is to be explained the deepest fear of man; the fear of the woman, which is the fear of unconsciousness, the alluring abyss of annihilation.

An old woman manifests once for all what woman really is. The beauty of woman, as may be experimentally proved, is only created by love of a man; a woman becomes more beautiful when a man loves her because she is passively responding to the will which is in her lover; however deep this may sound, it is only a matter of everyday experience.

All the qualities of woman depend on her non-existence, on her want of character; because she has no true, permanent, but only a mortal life, in her character as the advocate of pairing she furthers the sexual part of life, and is fundamentally transformed by and susceptible to the man who has a physical influence over her.

Thus the three fundamental characters of woman with which this chapter has dealt come together in the conception of her as the non-existent. Her instability and untruthfulness are only negative deductions from the premiss of her non-existence. Her only positive character, the conception of her as the pairing agent, comes from it by a simple process of analysis. The nature of woman is no more than pairing, no more than super-individual sexuality.

If we turn to the table of the two kinds of life given earlier in this chapter, it will be apparent that every inclination from the higher to the lower is a crime against oneself. Immorality is the will towards negation, the craving to change the formed into the formless, the wish for destruction. And from this comes the intimate relation between femaleness and crime. There is a close relation between the immoral and the non-moral. It is only when man accepts his own sexuality, denies the absolute in him, turns to the lower, that he gives woman existence. The acceptance of the Phallus is immoral. It has always been thought of as hateful; it has been the image of Satan, and Dante made it the central pillar of hell.

Thus comes about the domination of the male sexuality over the female. It is only when man is sexual that woman has existence and meaning.

Her existence is bound up with the Phallus, and so that is her supreme lord and welcome master.

Sex, in the form of man, is woman’s fate; the Don Juan is the only type of man who has complete power over her.

The curse, which was said to be heavy on woman, is the evil will of man: nothing is only a tool in the hand of the will for nothing. The early Fathers expressed it pathetically when they called woman the handmaid of the devil. For matter in itself is nothing, it can only obtain existence through form. The fall of “form” is the corruption that takes place when form endeavours to relapse into the formless. When man became sexual he formed woman. That woman is at all has happened simply because man has accepted his sexuality. Woman is merely the result of this affirmation; she is sexuality itself. Woman’s existence is dependent on man; when man, as man, in contradistinction to woman, is sexual, he is giving woman form, calling her into existence. Therefore woman’s one object must be to keep man sexual. She desires man as Phallus, and for this she is the advocate of pairing. She is incapable of making use of any creature except as a means to an end, the end being pairing; and she has but one purpose, that of continuing the guilt of man, for she would disappear the moment man had overcome his sexuality.

Man created woman, and will always create her afresh, as long as he is sexual. Just as he gives woman consciousness, so he gives her existence. Woman is the sin of man.

He tries to pay the debt by love. Here we have the explanation of what seemed like an obscure myth at the end of the previous chapter. Now we see what was hidden in it: that woman is nothing before man’s fall, nor without it; that he does not rob her of anything she had before. The crime man has committed in creating woman, and still commits in assenting to her purpose, he excuses to woman by his eroticism.

Whence otherwise would come the generosity of love, which can never be satisfied by giving? How is it that love is so anxious to endow woman with a soul, and not any other creature? Whence comes it that a child cannot love until love coincides with sexuality, the stage of puberty, with the repeated forming of woman, with the renewing of sin? Woman is nothing but man’s expression and projection of his own sexuality. Every man creates himself a woman, in which he embodies himself and his own guilt.

But woman is not herself guilty; she is made so by the guilt of others, and everything for which woman is blamed should be laid at man’s door.

Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it; it elevates woman instead of nullifying her. The “something” folds the “nothing” in its arms, and thinks thus to free the universe of negation and drown all objections; whereas the nothing would only disappear if the something put it away.

Since man’s hatred for woman is not conscious hatred of his own sexuality, his love is his most intense effort to save woman as woman, instead of desiring to nullify her in himself. And the consciousness of guilt comes from the fact that the object of guilt is coveted instead of being annihilated.

Woman alone, then, is guilt; and is so through man’s fault. And if femaleness signifies pairing, it is only because all guilt endeavours to increase its circle. What woman, always unconsciously, accomplishes, she does because she cannot help it; it is her reason for being, her whole nature. She is only a part of man, his other, ineradicable, his lower part. So matter appears to be as inexplicable a riddle as form; woman as unending as man, negation as eternal as existence; but this eternity is only the eternity of guilt.