We must be clear what sort of ‘femininity’ we are speaking of. For feminine values are not necessarily those of weakness, pity, forgiveness, or tolerance. The current feminisation of society is a caricature of feminine values assumed by unmanly men. In decadent societies it is often women who take up manly values once again, or, more exactly, who express the authoritarian side of femininity which substitutes itself for the failure of men. Just think of Margaret Thatcher.
The feminisation of political and social values is not the mechanical result of women acceding to various sorts of power, but of the divirilisation of European males in all domains. This divirilisation involves not merely the progress of male homosexuality but spreads through all social and political behaviour. There is no need to repeat here what I have demonstrated in several of my works. Signs of the divirilisation of the Western political, media, and intellectual classes, as well as of the elites, can be noticed (with a few exceptions) in the most diverse domains, with the most worrisome being the fascinated resignation in the face of the (virile) Islamic thrust and migration invasion, along with humanitarian and compassionate lachrymosity and, more generally, the lack of courage that can be noticed in all male behaviour. For example, among many Muslims one finds contempt for the decadent native Europeans because they let Muslims take their women.
In contemporary society, moreover, one can note a striking parallel between rising violent and barbaric behaviour, a collapse of social codes, and (in the discourse and ideology of the media) the rise of a syrupy humanitarianism. Barbaric ‘virtual violence’ (TV, video games, movies, and so on) becomes a counterpoint to real unmanly, fearful, cowardly behaviour and a grating humanitarian and moralising rhetoric. To speak colloquially, men have become pussies. Paradoxically, women are tending to become more manly than men. A swapping of roles? Possibly.
Different Ways the Sex Act Is Perceived Between Men and Women
Is male sexuality more frustrated than female sexuality? Is it more libidinal and less sensual?
For hormonal reasons, the male orgasm is distinctly weaker than that of the female. A man’s sexual pleasure resides above all in seduction and conquest rather than in fulfillment. When it comes to the sex act, the women experiences and undergoes a romantic fusion (that is to say, a confusion between emotion and physical pleasure) while men tend to dissociate sexual pleasure and emotion. This is the case purely because of evolutionary reasons: the sex act holds more gravity for a woman than for a man on account that it might make her pregnant.it might make her pregnant.
This psychology has endured despite the prevalence of birth control, since it is inscribed in the biological unconscious; the woman still invests more in copulation than the man. Some obvious consequences derive from this.
The first is that man has an inborn tendency to constantly seek sexual partners, that is to say, to cruise. The woman is more subtle: she tries harder to seduce, though without acting on it, in order to prove to herself that she is still desirable (even if she is married). Since the sexual act is less important to men, they try to multiply their partners in order to vary the sexual acts which never really satisfy them. This male sexual dissatisfaction explains why he cheats on his partner much more than women do. His need to copulate is more powerful than that of women because he feels less pleasure; he compensates for intensity with quantity.
The second consequence is that the rather weak pleasure that the male libido procures does not merely drive them to add new sexual relations in a risky search for the absolute orgasm, but also to experiment with other kinds of sexual relation. In fact, many men, frustrated with classical sexual relations which give them only a moderate orgasm, give themselves over to the most diverse, sordid, and ridiculous transgressions and perversions in order to awaken a declining libido, most notably paedophilia, of course, but also urination, bondage, sado-masochism, experiments with cross-dressing, and so on. These perversions are very rare among women.
The paradox is easy to explain: Woman, investing more in the sexual relationship and having stronger orgasms (resulting in a closer bond with her partner) feels less of a need to seek multiple or perverted sexual experiences. The case of prostitutes or semi-prostitutes who collect sexual relations is very different (I will speak of it in another chapter) since they rarely choose this activity for reasons of sexual pleasure as much as for economic reasons.
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The other great physiological difference between male and female sexuality is that the man must have an erection. Male sexuality is active, female sexuality passive. The male is thus much more fragile, since impotence always lies in wait for him. This explains why the human male, especially as he ages, needs ever more erotic excitement before he gets an erection.
The man does not get an erection out of love but out of excitement, and excitement does not necessarily correspond to the feelings he has for the woman he loves. A man can be excited by a woman he does not love and remain frustratingly without any desire for the woman who he does love. The converse can occurs, of course, but it is much rarer.
One widespread psychological phenomenon is the paralysis of one’s faculties in cases where they absolutely must be called upon: a sports team that chokes at the very moment it faces its most important game; a student who stresses out at the big exam and doesn’t perform as well as on the practice exam. In this vein, sexologists and matrimonial agencies[16] have noted that men can be struck by temporary impotence out of sheer anxiety over his virility when faced with an extremely beautiful and desirable woman or one who represents ‘high stakes’ for him, while he has no trouble with an ordinary woman or prostitute.
The emotional and romantic needs of women are greater than those of men. One must always distinguish between declared or displayed love from love felt. In this area, women are generally more sincere than men. Men feel much less guilt in committing adultery than women because for them copulation is not synonymous with emotional involvement. That female infidelity always (before the very recent phenomenon of contraception decided) involves a risk of unwanted pregnancy has created a stubborn situation which endures to this day: the sexual act is more important not only for the woman but also to society than it is to a man. A man’s sexual straying is considered a minor indiscretion, but a woman who partakes in such behaviour. .
The fact that, in the West over the past few decades, a certain sexual liberation of women has taken place (extended singlehood, multiple lovers, no expectation of virginity at marriage, and so on) does not change anything regarding the overall situation of humanity, which still endures, nor regarding the traditional sexual schema which still applies to most people.
The Rising Power of Women Today
In the current French school and university system, girls have a tendency to out-perform boys, and the trend is getting stronger. In literary and scientific domains, women continue to eat away at male roles, and the weak representation of women in managerial and higher roles is also changing quickly.
For a long time, women were prohibited from leaving behind their domestic duties and the care of the home. Virtually all civilisations practice this custom. Only exceptional women, like icons, played on the same court as men.
The emancipation of women was one of the great upheavals of the twentieth century, one repercussion of which is the risk that it leads to the belief in the illusion of absolute equivalence.
First of all, we should note that women are still undervalued. In France, women’s salaries are on average 25 percent lower than those of men. This is in part due to companies allowing themselves to pay women less (given equal competency and hours worked) and because women are less demanding than men. But the fact that women are more likely to choose part-time work than men and that management positions much more frequently go to men is not the result of discrimination (contrary to feminist complaints) but of a fear that women would become unavailable through matern
ity. However, this is changing with the continuing rise of women in the professions.
In any case, it is stupid to want to establish equality forcibly through legislation, as is being done now. It is France’s eternal failing to think that laws can take the place of mores and can correct them. ‘Parity’ laws, like all forced egalitarianism, can only have perverse effects.
It is estimated that a working woman with children works 50 percent more than a man, because she must do housework. Of course, a minority of men (especially in Nordic and Germanic cultures) accept doing a part of the housework. But we should not delude ourselves: on a global scale, the egalitarian idea of sharing housework and infant care between the sexes is utopian. For men are not biologically programmed for carrying out domestic and maternal tasks. This is the illusion of the equivalence of sexual roles.
Observing sex differences since the beginning of the twentieth century in the West (where women have departed from their strictly family role to go to work[17]) allows us to conclude that women are able to fulfill most traditionally masculine tasks while men are not able to fulfill half of the feminine tasks.
Another observation can be made since women have entered the working world. It would seem that women are more ‘devoted’ than men, work harder, and are more honest and more careful, both in managerial and subordinate jobs. Moreover, in all societies there is less delinquency, less socially harmful behaviour on the part of women. A society largely directed by women would function better than one mostly directed by men, in the opinion of many feminists. But will such a society become possible one day? Probably not.
This domination of men over women, insofar as it has weakened over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has gradually given way to a broadening of the social domains in which women are involved. The idea that women are mentally incapable of carrying out male tasks has shown itself to be a grave error. Women can carry out the same tasks, but do so differently, except in certain quite specific domains. But for women to be working makes any separation of sexual roles difficult. The mother of a family does not have the time to perform work like a man. She must play both roles, woman and man at once. Modern Western society tells women to be simultaneously women and men; androgynous, they must at once be housewife, mother, and worker. Contrary to a widespread notion, women have always worked, if only in agriculture when most of the population was of the peasant class. Even in Medieval villages women carried out numerous tasks. The difference from today was that feminine tasks were quite distinct from those of men, and that in more communitarian societies childcare was not necessarily the mother’s concern but that of grandparents and aunts.
The idea that ‘a woman’s place is at home’ does not correspond to historical reality. Women worked in all ancient societies except, of course, among the upper classes. Obviously, they worked mainly in subordinate positions. It was in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of the middle class, that housewives appeared in great numbers. The housewife is typical of the bourgeois family, before their numbers began declining once again in the twentieth century. It has only rarely been the lot of women to occupy their lives with leisure activities (otium in Latin); for even the housewife without public employment carries out useful tasks.
Women’s Revenge and the Possible Reversal of Sexual Polarity
But there are two cases in which men can never equal women nor women men, for they are deep matters of psychobiology. In what follows, there is no idea of inferiority of women or men in relation to each other, but simply of complementarity.
Women can succeed in all domains of male performance. But there is an area in which one might pose the question of women’s capacity, that of creativity. I return here to a point discussed earlier.
In all areas of intelligence — practical, cerebral, calculating, intuitive, applied, deductive, and comprehensive — women can perform as well as men. But in the area of imaginative projection they are less well furnished. Imaginative projection is the ability to detach oneself, to abstract from contingent reality, to imagine something else; and this in all domains, scientific or otherwise. Epic poetry, science fiction, pure imagination, fundamental research, and even the creation of religions are essentially masculine domains.
It was not in female brains that were born the idea of submarines, of space travel, of quantum physics, of grand philosophical systems, of grand political and economic theories, and of the immense majority of great scientific discoveries (apart from Marie Curie, the exception that proves the rule). Most discoverers have been men, and this is not because women have been held back, but because the female brain does not experience that need to abstract from the real, to imagine something else. Women’s dreams are different from those of men: they are practical, contingent, emotional, and attached to reality. Male dreams explore the impossible, absolute novelty, risk, and escape from immanent reality, whether of a scientific and technical or of a religious, poetic, or political nature. The epic or inventive mentality, that of discovery, of opening new land to cultivation, belongs (statistically) more to male psychology, while prudence and doubt are the preserve of women.
This does not at all mean a superiority of men or inferiority of women, but that needs, attractions, and appetites differ between the sexes for biological reasons.
Even in religion, the great prophets have been men: Jesus Christ, Muhammad, the Buddha.... Feminine psychology is not cut out for believing oneself the messenger or prophet of God. In all the world’s religions, monotheistic (Judaism, Islam), polytheistic (Hinduism, various forms of paganism), or henotheistic (Catholicism, Orthodoxy), the single or dominant God is masculine.
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So what is the central psycho-intellectual domain in which women perform better than men? It is that of foreseeing and understanding reality. Man is the dreamer: imaginative, inventive, but as a counterpart to this disposition, he is utopian and is not good at perceiving reality and the natural order. Women are bound to reality. They have better perception of situations than men, greater psychological acuity. Moreover, women understand men better than men understand women. Women are more realistic than men, less easily led into adventurism. Prudence and discretion, pragmatic observation, and resistance to fanaticism are more developed in women than in men.
Women have more social understanding and more temperance than men. Similarly, they break moral rules less often than men do (all this is statistical, of course); they resist deliria of all sorts, gratuitous violence, useless transgressions, artificial paradises, and so on. Women are also more pragmatic than men: they are hesitant to risk too much on a senseless project, to sacrifice a present reality for a foggy or fantastic future. They are reluctant to make ambitious plans. Woman’s nature is to preserve life, preserve and pursue it as it is. Women act to limit risks, men to take greater risks.
But to say the world would be better off if ruled by women would be just as false as saying that it would be better off if only ruled by men. Moreover, an increase in the number of women managers would be better than the effeminate men we endure today who combine the faults of both sexes without the virtues of either.
In any case, the question that faces European peoples today is as follows: How to reconcile female emancipation with a sufficient birth rate. Delayed first pregnancy poses a serious problem for fertility. The solution can only be found in an active policy of support for couples and young mothers. This would be better than funding illegal immigrants.
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Foreseeable techno-scientific upheavals may blur the borders between man and woman, between femininity and masculinity as well as everything else that relates to biology. (I expand on this in the final chapter.)
For example, when new technologies (only available to a minority of the higher classes of course) allow certain women to avoid pregnancy and childbirth, we shall see a transformation that cannot be foreseen today, one at least
as important as chemical contraception.
Similarly, the rising power of women’s roles in so-called developed societies may provoke a revolution, a change of course in relations between the sexes. No one can predict how current tendencies will play out. But we must bear in mind the contradictory double movement we are witnessing today: on the one hand, the continuation of female emancipation, and on the other, the return of machismo and subjection of women caused by massive Muslim immigration into the Western world. The genius of Western civilisation has always been to put feminine capital to use.
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It is worth reviewing the characteristics, faults, and positive qualities which the greatest authors have attributed to women in order to distinguish erroneous clichés from pertinent remarks. For Gandhi (in All Men Are Brothers[18]) women are more humane than men, since they are non-violent, and are humanity’s recourse for establishing peace on Earth. Gandhi is one of the great sources for ideological feminist arguments, though rarely acknowledged. A Chinese thinker and epigrammatic poet in the famous Book of Rites (written by order of the Imperial Court, where women had the upper hand) considered women talkative and superficial. Napoleon, in the Memorial of Saint Helena[19] and also in his correspondence, judged women to be schemers and thought they should be ‘relegated to the home’, far from political life. La Bruyère in his Characters, considered women ‘extreme — either better or worse than men’, which is a compliment. Molière in The Learned Women denied women all intellectual or literary ambition, which he considered ridiculous; this is all the more surprising given that the author was an enthusiastic defender of female emancipation, and was especially opposed to arranged marriage. Mme de Staël (in On Germany) develops the idea that ‘women should be excluded from public and civil affairs’, proving that feminists who appeal to her authority have not read her carefully. Alfred de Vigny in Les Destinées considers women born traitors, ‘sick children’, stricken with impurity, which returns to the position of the Church Fathers and the dogmas of the Qur’an. Voltaire in L’Ingénu develops the idea of the psychological superiority of women to men, the latter of whom are lead around by the nose. Racine, the great creator of dramatic heroines, almost always (and especially in Athalie) depicts them as wavering, hesitant, inconstant, but also more or less as sexual obsessives, in the style of the fortyish Phèdre in love with young Hippolyte. The whole of classic eighteenth century opera follows him in this respect. Conversely, Corneille always paints his heroines as more courageous than men, more constant, more determined, following Homer and Greek tragedy (Antigone, for instance). For La Rochefoucauld, women are more concerned with appearances and with their ‘reputations’, than men. They also take more care over their personal appearance, and this author of the Maximes slyly suggests that men who are overly concerned with their appearance (especially with their clothing) are not very masculine or trustworthy, inclined to dissimulation.
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