The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    69/546 page 39
    SUPPOSED FEMALE ALTRUISM The verdict of Life and Nature is, therefore, against the so-called “ unselfish ” action. Nature has made all the actions on which her economy depends “ selfish ” actions. People, like Spencer, who see altruism in a mother’s care for her young, are self-deceivers, and betray the century of their origin by propagating such errors. 1 To see altruism or “ unselfishness ” in the exercise of a function for which a creature is equipped from head to foot, and who realizes her life-destiny, who secures her health and normal life- processes by having and suckling young, is almost as sensible as to see altruism in sweating, growing hair, or eating. Even the fact that many women now lose their lives and suffer the tortures of the damned in childbirth does not make mother hood an altruistic undertaking. The breakdown or morbidity of a “ selfish ” function does not make it an “ unselfish ” function. The whole idea is, therefore, the most arrant nonsense, and based upon a foolish masculine view of womanhood. It was, however, largely reinforced as a superstition by the belief current in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that women not only derived no pleasure from sex, 2 but also that if they did, it was not decent or politic to admit it. Fichte, one of the most influential exponents of these ideas, writing about the end of the eighteenth century, said : “ Only one sex is active in procreation. The other, however, is simply passive. 3 ... It is, therefore, not unreasonable for the first sex [the male] to be bent on gratifying their sexual instinct . . . ; but it is absolutely unreasonable for the second sex to be bent on gratifying their sexual instinct, because that would mean that they were making suffering an object to be striven after. 4 . . . Man can without loss of dignity, acknowledge his sexual instinct and seek its gratification. . . . But woman may not so acknowledge her sexual needs.” 5 Scores of minor voices intoned the same chant, and the belief that the female sex-cycle is one long trial in “ unselfishness ” endures in thousands of unenlightened minds to this day. 1 See B.M., p. 33, where Keyserling, who is often tiresomely early Victorian, says: Woman “ is the primarily altruistic element in humanity.” Such a phrase is meaningless ; but it betrays a prejudice and a generation. 2 This led many thinkers, including Lecky, to regard woman as the virtuous and moral sex. For, if you believed motherhood was self-sacrifice, it must be “ unselfish ” and therefore virtuous. 3 Sämtliche Werke (Berlin, 1845, II, Sect. 2, p. 329). 4 Ibid., I, Sect. 2, p. 307. 6 Ibid., p. 309.
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