Man and woman can love with the same force, but they will never love in the same manner, since to the altar of their passion they bring a vastly different nature, even apart from the unlike genetic mission assigned to each. As long as there shall be a man and woman on our planet, they will eternally exchange and re-exchange this innocent reproach: ‘Ah, you do not love me as I love you!’ And the lament will be forever true, because woman will never love like man, and man can never love like woman. A complete monography of the assimilated psychology of the two sexes could mark the distinctive characteristics of virile and of feminine love, and who knows but one day I will try it; here it is sufficient for me to indicate the two phases of a passion unique in its essence, but rendered so very unlike by the two different natures called Adam and Eve.
Let us listen to two spontaneous cries, from two distant races, and we will find the first lines of a physiology of the sexual character of love. The Munda-Kolhs of Chota Nagpore have some popular songs in which they express the psychical difference of man and woman. The women sing:
‘Singbonga from the beginning has made us smaller than you, therefore we obey you. Even if it were not so from the beginning, you would still have overburdened us with work; our strength is not equal to yours. To you God has given two hands, to us but one.’
And the men sing to the women:
‘As God has given us two hands, so he has made us greater than you. Are we great of ourselves? He himself has separated us into great and small. If now you do not obey the word of man, you certainly disobey the word of God. He himself has made us greater than you.’57
Here is a Kabila song in which a chorus of young women alternate with a chorus of sturdy youths.
The women: ‘He who would be loved by woman always goes armed; puts the butt-end of the gun to his cheek and cries, ‘Come to me, O maiden!’
The men: ‘You do well to love us. God sends us war and we die, and there remains at least the memory of the happiness that we have given you.’
Rising from the Munda-Kolhs and the Kabils to the higher and more civilized races, we always find a remnant of this savage cry of nature, in which man proclaims his strength or imposes it, or woman yields to or invokes it. Hence the very unequal part of joys and sorrows, of rights and duties, that man concedes to his companion in the world of love; hence an ever increasing usurpation of joys and rights on the part of the strong, the lower we descend in the human scale; hence a continual aspiration of civilized people to make a more equal division of good and evil between the two sexes, that still share so diversely and so unjustly light and darkness, joys and sorrows.
Where muscular strength is the criterion of the hierarchy, where it constitutes the first of human forces, the difference between man and woman in the rights and joys of love is immense, and woman becomes little more than a domestic animal, which is bought, sold, or killed according to the necessity of the moment. Polygamy originates there where morality is uncertain, where lechery is ardent; and woman, guarded as a treasure of voluptuousness, falls morally lower than in a wandering tribe of naked but monogamous savages, where woman is the companion of the labours and joys of man. It is for this, perhaps, that Solomon in his harem cried out, ‘And who will find me a strong woman?’ Even among us, woman does not play the part in love that nature has assigned her, and here also she can rank herself without scruple among the oppressed who await their jacquerie58 or their statute; here too she is a legitimate pretender, who by means of right or strength will one day or other attain her proper place in the world.
But of rights I will speak in another chapter; here we must remain in the confines of physiology, which still is, or should be, the legitimate mother of every human legislation. If anthropology would place at our disposal all the moral and intellectual elements that separate man from woman, science could with surety insert in its laws and customs a rightful place for each.
Nature has allotted to woman the greater part of love, and if this difference could be expressed in figures, I would say that to us there has been conceded but a fifth, a quarter at the most, of the amorous territory.59 No civilization, no caprices of tyrants, no omnipotence of genius has been able to modify this immutable law. In the rancid, fetid hut of the Eskimo or in the palace of the prince, woman gives her entire self to man, first as daughter, then as sweetheart, wife, mother; she is the great receptacle of the living, the bosom from which we draw blood, voluptuousness, love: every pleasure that inspires us with love, every heat that animates us. Woe to us if with a bastard education we poison the source of human life! Woe to us if we deny to Eve the holiest of rights, that of loving and being loved! For woman, love is the first necessity, that which rises pre-eminently over all others; her entire organism and psychology are bent and formed by the influence of love. Van Helmont brutally asserts, ‘Tota mulier in utero,’60 but thinkers of all times applaud the aphorism of the Dutch physician. Woman physically desires and possesses very long, and she can enjoy attainment every day, every hour, and make of it a warm and perfumed atmosphere in which she lives as in a nest; woman cradles in her viscera an angel that desires ardently and continually and does not quench in her the affection for her companion; she forms, nourishes, and fondles man, and every year she can see herself, her flesh, and her loves transformed into a host of little angels, who are pieces of her heart, rose petals fallen from the flower of her beauty, and who all softly call her ‘mamma,’ that is to say, receptacle of life. From the eager embrace of the man she loves, she passes to the caresses of her children; voluptuousness does not weary her, heat parch her, nor passion disgust her; from her head to her feet she is entirely absorbed by love, and this is the sap that circulates in every vein and moistens every fibre; so that when it is taken from her she resembles the tree torn up by the whirlwind and which sees every leaf wither and every flower fall. The love of man is a lightning that flashes and passes; the love of woman is a ray of the sun that descends slow and warm into the heart and fecundates it; and she absorbs it gradually and voluptuously; every root of sentiment, joy, or thought is nourished, so that, even when the sun is set, its fecundating rays still remain concealed in the soil it warmed.
Many have contradicted my opinion, advanced about twenty-eight years ago in my Physiology of Pleasure, that to woman nature conceded a larger bowl to drink from at the inexhaustible fount of love’s voluptuousness; and as until now joy has never been measured nor weighed, the problem will still remain a long time in discussion. Eve can thirst longer than we to renew the battles of love, and realize the blessed dream of a voluptuousness that, changing form, is eternally renewed, so that weariness remains unknown. But if for many men voluptuousness is the whole of love, for woman it is only a sweet episode, even for the most lecherous of sensual women. And if you do not believe this audacious affirmation, send heralds throughout the civilized world, call together all men and women and invite them to a strange tournament of love; ask each if they would accept a lasting, faithful love without voluptuousness in exchange for a voluptuousness without love: a hundred women would vote for love; perhaps ten, perhaps five men would join in the sublime refusal of the embrace.
O all you who have studied the heart of woman in the street or in the house of ill fame, and think to make your companion happy with lechery, gold, and fine dress, remember that, above all, woman desires to love, to feel herself warmed by the breath of a man, to lean entirely on the faithful arm of a man, to feel herself necessary to a companion of whom she would be proud; she wants to be the first for somebody. You behold one The Physiology of Love 223 woman unhappy in the midst of luxury’s splendour, fondled by a kind husband, her every wish gratified; and you see another happy though surrounded by misery, oppressed by the brutal caprices of a lover.
Mysteries of the heart, you say; most natural things, I assert. The first does not love her husband, the second loves her lover. And this is another essential difference between the loves of man and woman; man wants to be loved, woman desires above all to love. The sentiment that consumes her is more active and more expansive than in us; she requires little from her companion, because she is too rich and her affection is too strong to require the aid of selfishness in fighting the battles of life. Certainly, perfect love is the sum of these two beautiful things: ‘I love – I am loved’; but for woman it is often sufficient to be able to exclaim, ‘I love,’ while man is generally satisfied to repeat, ‘I am loved.’
Never ask a woman why she loves: she sometimes loves a creature so ugly, so poor, so deformed as to fill us with surprise and terror. Provided that creature is entirely hers, she will know how to adorn him with the flowers of fancy, illuminate him with the bright light that emanates from the heart. When woman loves she always believes herself to be loved in return. Did Caesar ever doubt that he would win a battle? Did Napoleon ever doubt that he was immortal? So it is with the love of woman; it will cringe like a reptile at the feet of her companion or roar like a lion that demands what it needs, it will be the rabbit caressed in the lap of a child or the eagle that mounts with its prey. The eager faith of the neophyte, the proud faith of infallibility, the boundless impatience of the fortunate conqueror are virtues common to the loves of woman, very rare among men.
For woman to love it is enough to find genius, strength, even crime in him whom she would make her own; she can love the ugliest, the vilest, the most deformed among men. She elevates every man she touches; she believes herself capable of heating even ice. Man prefers the beautiful to everything else, and pardons the rest; man often abases even the most exalted loves. Woman bears even lechery to the high regions of sentiment; man sinks even affection in the mire of lust. Pardon the cynical phrase, but do not reject it, because it is only too true: man in his loves is much more beast than angel; woman is more angel than man. And now let us take from the breast of two lovers the bleeding, hot, palpitating hearts, and let us analyse them with the needles and pincers of anatomy; many sexual differences of love will appear clear to us, which until now have not been apparent.
And let this be a poor essay of assimilated physiology of the two sexes. Every thought, every word, every gesture of the man and woman who love receives the stamp of sex; and when the characters are inverted, we find ourselves before a caricature, a monster, or even a crime. Sometimes, however, women of a virile temperament love manfully, and men of gentle fibre manifest in their loves tenderness, weakness, and sublime pictures which should be observed only in woman. We are still in the field of pathology; but the psychical forms, through the unusual intermingling of figures and strange colouring, can have an aesthetic element which rouses our amazement and invites us to meditate.
However varied may be the sexual elements of love, our modern civilization is guilty of a grave sin, because to woman, the true and great priestess of love we concede only a poor and wretched tribute. We have ambition, glory, science, and the mad thirst for gain; we have refined every nourishment of the heart and mind, demonstrating that she must only love. After having usurped almost the entire field of human activity, we have left her the garden of love as her only possession, her only comfort. And when this poor prisoner, with all the eager curiosity of her nature, begins to cull the flowers and scented herbs of her dominion, when she would cultivate the garden in her own way, we interfere even there, planting the placards of our restrictive regulations and the palisades of our laws. That flower bed is reserved, you must not pluck that flower, and do not walk over that path. Even the selection of flowers to be cultivated must be made by us, who possess the field, the meadow, the forest, the ice of the Alps and the wave of the ocean. Thus, we have a slave who murmurs and conspires against us; we ourselves have unleafed the garden in which a proud and noble chatelaine would have been able to receive us and quiet us after our glorious labours; thus, instead of being welcomed to halls resplendent with gold and gems, we have a prisoner or a slave who places her head upon our knees and weeps. We have measured out to her the bread and wine of life, as the jailer measures for the thief; and, tyrants even in love, we have assigned ourselves the part of the lion in voluptuousness as in the free choice of the sovereign affection. But every injustice is repaid, as every rupture of equilibrium is settled again; and the continual and often justified betrayals of our slaves, the plots of the seraglio, the conspiracies of the palace, assure us daily that we build on a false foundation the edifice of the family, and they cry out to us in a loud voice that it will soon be imperative to give to woman that which belongs to woman: the free choice of loves, equality of rights in affection as in the family.