Despite social egalitarianism and the growing economic independence of women, and despite her sexual and economic emancipation, women need men more than the converse. For reasons that are probably genetic, woman is less able to bear the solitude of celibacy than man. She needs to be surrounded. This explains why women may choose to remain with disagreeable men they do not need, and why others set up house with men they despise and who become unbearable, simply so as not to be left alone. NB: these statements obviously do not concern all women, but are statistical generalisations.
Women suffer more from separation than men. Male emotions are often frustrated; evolution has programmed him for egoism. Man bears solitude better than woman (we see this even in the animal world: solitary males among the primates, canids, felids, delphinids, and so on).
* * *
A neighboring phenomenon is the attraction of many women to manly and indeed brutal men, even those with weak intellectual capacity and whose company is not very rewarding. People are often amazed that women who get beaten stay with their companion and do not dare leave him. ‘I still love him; I’m going to give him another chance and hope he won’t start again.’ Such is the stupid leitmotif of battered women one hears so often in media reports.
In a similar vein, people are surprised by intelligent women who succumb to the charms of men gifted only with physical qualities, with a strong appearance but often lacking in other areas, including financial.[3] It is remarkable that even if the man has no other quality except ‘virility’ in the most superficial sense of the term, even if he turns out to be stupid and disagreeable and, indeed, physically unsatisfying, his virility, his overt brutality will attract a number of women like larks attracted by a mirror. Beauty and the beast?
The propensity of many women to accept male brutality, to let themselves be taken in by one superficially virile and without conjugal interest in her, to accept the authority of rather pathetic men, can perhaps be explained phylogenetically. Over the course of evolution, for millions of years, undoubtedly before the passage of hominids to Homo sapiens, it was inscribed in female genes that she must be protected by a strong man, a man able to hunt.
Romantic attachment is certainly more sincere in women than in men due to a simple atavistic necessity of dependence. The female principle of love is receptive, passive, attentive but also self-giving, as opposed to the egotistical masculine romantic principle. Romantic suffering, like the concept of love itself, is not really masculine. But take careful note: all this cuts both ways, for there is a constant interpenetration (mathematicians would speak of an interference of statistical areas) of feminine and masculine psychologies.
* * *
The submission of women to men is not a subject that can be passed off with a remark such as: ‘it’s just a passing cultural phase.’ Something deeper, something atavistic must be at work. In a television program broadcast on the France 3 network (‘High-Risk Love: Can Love Be Dangerous?’) viewers were treated to amazing testimonials by young women who had taken up with and had children by murderers, violent and stupid men, fugitives from justice, psychopaths who beat and despised them. Yet they continued to defend these men and say that they ‘loved’ them. These women did not come from backward classes but from the educated middle-class.
It is also noteworthy that well-publicised criminals given heavy punishments for murder, serial rape, large-scale banditry, and so on get letters from fascinated women who want to meet them and become their companions. Is this attraction to brutality phylogenetic?
It is absolutely fascinating to see how far educated, intelligent, self-proclaimed feminist women end up submitting to the authority of psychotic and mediocre men. It is as if these highly evolved women struggled intellectually with machismo but, in their daily life, end up submitting to a man. Women who have been beaten, even raped, forgive their attackers. One must ask whether they do not love them because of their brutality.
Cases of men submitting to women exist, but are far more rare. What is extraordinary is that many of these submissive women who allow their lives to be degraded are economically independent and have no need of a man. The explanation of female submission by violence or economic dependence (as in traditional societies) does not hold water, since mistreated women today could easily take off. One explanation could be that women tolerate loneliness less well than men, and that they end, even after a free and emancipated youth, by needing a guardian — even if a disagreeable and hateful one. One often gets the impression that the idea of freedom is less important for women than the fear of loneliness.
* * *
Among the observations I have made in meeting people, I have always been struck by the following type of case, which I have observed a number of times: 1) a woman beaten and mistreated by her husband, sometimes turned into a sex object in orgies, who is on a higher intellectual level than him and who could perfectly well be economically independent after leaving him, does not rebel and remains submissive; 2) a woman, harassed by a man, often insulted, who has a foreboding that her life with him will be a living hell, ends by giving in and agrees to marry him; when she sees her mistake, it is too late (in reality, she saw her mistake from the beginning but suppressed her own perception of the situation); 3) a man admits that by being harsh and dominating with his wife he benefits from more gentleness on her part than when he shows himself amenable, friendly, and nice with her; 4) a woman harassed by a man, even one whom she does not like, ends up taking pity on him or succumbing to a sort of authority she cannot explain.
It is sad to say, but there also exist a certain number of women who can go to bed with a man at his order, by persuasion, and even without any interest in him, by mere insistence on the man’s part, who uses every strategy imaginable. The woman finally ‘cracks’ under the pressure.
These cases have many interesting aspects: even when mistreated, women often forgive. Women are less likely than me to hold a grudge. One might speak of blindness. The naïveté of even intelligent women in the face of the seductive verbiage of men — especially when they insist — has been noted by all the best observers from Juvenal[4] to Sacha Guitry[5] by way of Mme de Staël.[6] Let us not forget to quote Erasmus’ Praise of Folly: ‘Women chase fools; they avoid sensible men like poisonous animals.’ We might also mention this eighteenth century: ‘a woman may resist the love she feels but not that she inspires’, meaning that women are more sensitive to flattery than to their own personal choices, like the crow in the fable.[7]
Everything happens as if, in the end, women do not know how to say no. A man harassing a woman has ten times the chance of succeeding as a woman who harasses a man if she fails to attract him sexually. Women’s power of resistance is rather weak. Even those who most proclaim themselves to be feminists remain basically afraid of men. I have known women who would shack up with a man on Friday and call him every name in the book on Monday. I’ve known others, smart and with good taste, who will jump into bed with brutes and who will unceasingly complain about but continue to put up with them.
The upshot of all this cannot be simply ‘culture’, especially in environments soaked in the idea of equality between women and men. There is indeed, inscribed in our genes, an atavistic feeling of submission by women towards men, towards the one who shouts the loudest. One might regret it but, in my opinion, this is how things are. Only a few exceptional women do not fit this rule. But we must add, as we shall see further on, that women (outside the couple) can react infinitely more courageously and with greater intrepidity in dangerous situations than men.
Questions on Male Superiority and the ‘Dominant Male’
I am by no means defending male superiority as an incorruptible essence; all I want to do is observe and pose some questions. NB: What I advance does not come from dogma, but from observation and investigation. Let us calmly look at the arguments of those who maintain that there is a certai
n kind of superiority of men (especially White men) over women.
Only in the rarest cases have there been female Nobel Laureates. The overwhelming majority of basic inventions have not been the work of women. No great female composer or conductor, very few great scholars or philosophers, and only a small minority of poets of whom we have any trace. In the novel, even if women devote themselves fervently to the form, it is dominated by men. The same goes for all of literature, painting, sculpture, and the plastic or cinematic arts, despite such notable exceptions as Colette, Camille Claudel, George Sand, Anaïs Nin, and so on and so forth. It is as if creativity and genius were mostly masculine....
If one draws up a statistical balance for the past two thousand years, in every creative domain (arts, sciences, literature, politics, philosophy, theology, technology, etc.), male domination would be staggering. And not merely in the area of European civilisation but in all other civilisations. This was already remarked upon by Spinoza.[8] Is it so certain that this masculine preponderance has a purely ‘cultural’ origin and is merely the fruit of ‘oppression’?[9] Later on I shall try to answer this troublesome question.
Without wanting to, even the defenders of the absolute equality of women fall into the trap of this idea of feminine inferiority. For example, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, 8 March 2008, then-president Sarkozy organised a reception at the Élysée Palace for ‘150 exceptional women’, that is, a selection of women who had performed as well as men in a variety of domains. But by an inadvertent semantic glitch, the very title of the event let slip that these ‘exceptional women’ are precisely that: an exception; in other words, it is only by exception that women elevate themselves to the level of the best men.... This was a dreadful lapse which the brilliant ‘communications advisors’ of the Élysée Palace never noticed.
* * *
But may one conclude from this a definitive superiority of men to women in the domain of culture and civilisation? The question deserves to be posed this time when we have been witnessing a slow but steady rise of women since the beginning of the twentieth century.
The superiority of men in the creative domain, or rather their near-monopoly of this domain, is often explained by the fact (a more than classic feminist argument) that women have always until recently been oppressed — apart from exceptions among the very highest social classes over the course of history.
The counter-argument consists in saying that whoever concretely dominates is necessarily superior whatever the contingent social facts, since these latter come down in the last analysis to an unsurpassable relation; thus, discrimination against women can only be the product of a relation of strength (even intellectual strength) favourable to men, and that whatever artificial help is granted to women, they can never be (statistically) as creative as men.
It is as if the female were statistically confined to reproduction and the upkeep of the home and nurturance of offspring, while men were restricted to external activities. How can we explain that, statistically, in all domains this rule of male dominance has never known an exception? The fact that this rule has increasingly been bent since the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in the West, gives us the first hint of an explanation.
In actual fact, it would seem that it is not any congenital incapacity of the female brain to correctly carry out certain functions that is at issue, but the fact that women, being ever less hindered by maternity, have gradually set out to conquer masculine roles, most of the time successfully.
In any case, male and female performance is quite variable depending on civilisation and race. Among Africans, for example, or in many Arab and Middle Eastern populations which have mixed theirs with African blood, women on the whole have qualities superior to those of men, especially moral qualities and qualities of character. This can be observed in immigrant populations in Europe where girls have superior capabilities to boys. This is not the case in European populations.
The global domination of men over women in all civilisations is due to the physical and muscular strength of men. This superior physical strength has occasioned male social domination. Women, constrained by nature to devote themselves to the tasks of maternity, have not been able to develop their mental qualities. But it would be absurd to think they could not do so.
There is no difference in intelligence between men and women, only psychological differences, namely differences of character. It is not possible, however, for us to say that women are more sensitive than men, or more sensual, or work harder, and so forth. Only that this sensuality, this hard work, this sensitivity is applied differently according to sex, for genetic reasons. However, we must pose two questions, concerning which various schools of applied psychology have argued for more than a century: Statistically speaking, are women more emotional than men — something which could obviously be a handicap; and are not men better predisposed to inventiveness? The only profound study of this question on the basis of tests involving large samples is that of J P Reynolds, and seems to conclude in the affirmative.
Inventiveness and curiosity are more common among males. This is not a matter of intellectual ability, but of character traits. The male more often than the female is ‘externally’ oriented: eager to create, eager for novelty, recognition, and glory. He more frequently uses his intellect for competition, innovation, research, and discovery.
Still, in many domains where people try to draw boundaries between feminine and masculine psychology (for example, possessiveness, jealousy, sensuality, depression, irascibility, gullibility, and so forth) the results are not convincing. On the other hand, in the areas of aggression, competitiveness, vanity, libido, cruelty, narcissistic delusions, murderous impulse, dogmatism, resistance to submission, and inventive curiosity, the balance seems to tilt in favour of men. As for honesty, emotional fidelity, submissiveness, cleanliness, prudence, temperance, as foresight, these characteristics are more often appropriated to women.
* * *
Machismo, that is to say, the belief in the biological and social superiority of men over women, and in a kind of legitimate and innate dominion over the latter, is a detestable and ridiculous position proper to less evolved civilisations.
We must mention those men (including ‘progressive’ politicians) who make themselves out to be women’s best friends, who make grand professions of feminist faith and who go as far as to claim that women are superior to men, but who, in their daily lives — both professional and private — prove to be cynical machistes[10] who fundamentally despise women and treat them as second-rate human beings. I am thinking especially of sexual blackmail in hiring and promotion which is a widespread reality — especially in prestigious and managerial professions. We should also mention the massive return of machismo (which I shall speak of later) due to Muslim immigration which, with stupefying hypocrisy, is perfectly tolerated (or, at least, not talked about) in progressive and Leftist milieus.
For a long time we were asked to believe that the Right was for the subjection of women and the Left for their liberation, emancipation, and equality. Things are a great deal more complicated than that. The tendency to machismo is, broadly speaking, more pronounced in southern civilisations and ethnic areas than in the north. In general, it can be said that the least macho societies are those of Scandinavian, Germanic, and Celtic origin — and, by extension, those of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Effeminisation and Devirilisation of Society
The parallel and concomitant effeminisation and devirilisation visible in society over the last several decades corresponds to the rise in timid, consensus-values of pacification, protection, therapy, and mothering. This was seen in the ‘feminist’ campaign of Ségolène Royal[11] in 2007, who portrayed herself as a nurse for the French — a protective and pacifying Big Mother.
This need for security and protection is obviously the counterpart to an increasingly viole
nt, wild, brutal, and neo-primitivist society falling apart into egoistic and antagonistic communities. This need is expressed by neo-feminist political ideology incarnated by Ségolène Royal and also by Martine Aubry,[12] namely the ideology of maternal foresight, the motherly resolution of all conflicts based on classic Leftist naïveté (of clearly Christian origin), and belief in the goodness of human nature. On the other hand, we see a shame-faced nostalgia for the virile return of the father and his authority (the image Sarkozy wanted to project), for the return of the repressive order of common sense and discipline far removed from feminist/teary-eyed maternal emotionalism.
The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk,[13] in an interview for Point (April, 2007), declared: ‘The feminisation of society goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of political system towards the primacy of therapeutic functions. While Sarkozy identifies with the demand for security of the post-democratic age — and the fight against the rabble[14] requires this — Ségolène Royal is not a socialist but a feminist. For her, feminism is a timeless norm; the social order is not just unless it is imposed by women.’ But, things not being so simple, her image wavers between that of the gentle Virgin Mary, the vengeful Joan of Arc and... the castrating mother.
* * *
The feminisation of society and especially of its political values does not necessarily mean the breakthrough of women into political life — despite the absurd policy of ‘parity’[15] — but the shift in public preoccupations and political discourse toward commiseration, protection, empathy, and everything ‘social’ to the point of absurdity (with all the hypocrisy this involves). We should bear in mind, however, that feminised men dispense these values as much as or more than women.
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