The Fraud of Feminism 15

The Fraud of Feminism 15

it is not the dogma of Biblical infallibility that he is concerned

to defend, but a more modern dogma, that of female equality, so dear

to the heart of the Modern Feminist. Mr Ellis’s efforts to evade the

consequences of the scientific truths he honestly proclaims are almost

pathetic. One cannot help noticing, after his exposition of some fact

that goes dead against the sex-equality theory as contended for by

Feminists, the eagerness with which he hastens to add some qualifying

statement tending to show that after all it is not so incompatible with

the Feminist dogma as it might appear at first sight.

 

The _pièce de résistance_, however, of Mr Havelock Ellis is contained

in his “conclusion.” The author has for his problem to get over

the obvious incompatibility of the truth he has himself abundantly

demonstrated in the course of his book, that the woman-type, in every

respect, physiological and psychological, approaches the child-type,

while the man-type, in its proper progress towards maturity,

increasingly diverges from it. The obvious implication of this fact is

surely plain, on the principle of the development of the individual

being a shorthand reproduction of the evolution of the species, or,

to express it in scientific phraseology, of _ontogeny_ being the

abbreviated recapitulation of the stages presented by _philogeny_. If

we proceed on this well-accredited and otherwise universally accepted

principle of biology, the inference is clear enough—to wit, that woman

is, as Herbert Spencer and others have pointed out, simply “undeveloped

man”—in other words, that Woman represents a lower stage of evolution

than Man. Now this would obviously not at all suit the book of Mr

Ellis’s Feminism. Explained away it has to be in some fashion or other.

So our author is driven to the daring expedient of throwing overboard

one of the best established generalisations of modern biology, and

boldly declaring that the principle contained therein is reversed

(we suppose “for this occasion only”) in the case of Man. In this

way he is enabled to postulate a theory consoling to the Feminist

soul, which affirms that adult man is nearer in point of development

to his pre-human ancestor than either the child or the woman! The

physiological and psychological analogies observable between the child

and the savage, and even, especially in early childhood, between the

child and the lower mammalian types—analogies which, notably in

the life of instinct and passion, are traceable readily also in the

human female—all these count for nothing; they are not dreamt of in

Mr Ellis’s Feminist philosophy. The Modern Feminist dogma requires

that woman should be recognised as equal in every respect (except in

muscular strength) with man, and if possible, as rather superior to

him. If Nature has not worked on Feminist lines, as common observation

and scientific research alike testify on the face of things, naughty

Nature must be “corrected,” in theory, at least, by the ingenuity of

Feminist savants of the degraded male persuasion. To this end we must

square our scientific hypotheses!

 

The startling theory of Mr Havelock Ellis, which must seem, one

would think, to all impartial persons, so out of accord with all the

acknowledged laws and facts of biological science, appears to the

present writer, it must be confessed, the very _reductio ad absurdum_

of Feminist controversial perversity.

 

I will conclude this chapter on Feminist Lies and Fallacies with a

fallacy of false analogy or false illustration, according as we

may choose to term it. This quasi-argument was recently put forward

in a defence speech by one of the prisoners in a suffragette trial

and was subsequently repeated by George Bernard Shaw in a letter

to _The Times_. Put briefly, the point attempted to be made is as

follows:—Apostrophising men, it is said: “How would you like it if

the historical relations of the sexes were reversed, if the making and

the administrating of the laws and the whole power of the State were

in the hands of women? Would not you revolt in such a condition of

affairs?” Now to this quasi-argument the reply is sufficiently clear.

The moral intended to be conveyed in the hypothetical question put, is

that women have just as much right to object to men’s domination, as

men would have to object to women’s domination. But it is plain that

the point of the whole question resides in a _petitio principie_—to

wit, in the assumption that those challenged admit equal intellectual

capacity and equal moral stability as between the average woman and the

average man. Failing this assumption the challenge becomes senseless

and futile. If we ignore mental and moral differences it is only a

question of degree as to when we are landed in obvious absurdity. In

“Gulliver’s Travels” we have a picture of society in which horses ruled

the roost, and lorded it over human beings. In this satire Swift in

effect put the question: “How would you humans like to be treated by

horses as inferiors, just as horses are treated by you to-day?” I am,

be it remembered, not instituting any comparison between the two cases,

beyond pointing out that the argument as an argument is intrinsically

the same in both.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VII

 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE MOVEMENT

 

 

We have already spoken of two strains in Modern Feminism which,

although commonly found together, are nevertheless intrinsically

distinguishable. The first I have termed Sentimental Feminism and the

second Political Feminism. Sentimental Feminism is in the main an

extension and emotional elaboration of the old notion of chivalry, a

notion which in the period when it was supposed to have been at its

zenith, certainly played a very much smaller part in human affairs

than it does in its extended and metamorphosed form in the present

day. We have already analysed in a former chapter the notion of

chivalry. Taken in its most general and barest form it represents

the consideration for weakness which is very apt to degenerate into

a worship of mere weakness. _La faiblesse prime le droit_ is not

necessarily nearer justice than _la force prime le droit_; although to

hear much of the talk in the present day one would imagine that the

inherent right of the weak to oppress the strong were a first principle

of eternal rectitude. But the theory of chivalry is scarcely invoked

in the present day save in the interests of one particular form of

weakness—viz. the woman as the muscularly weaker sex, and here it has

acquired an utterly different character.[141:1]

 

[141:1] As regards this point it should be remarked that

mediæval chivalry tolerated (as Wharton expressed it in his

“History of Poetry”) “the grossest indecencies and obscenities

between the sexes,” such things as modern puritanism would

stigmatise with such words as “unchivalrous,” “unmanly” and

the like. The resemblance between the modern worship of women

and the relations of the mediæval knight to the female sex is

very thin indeed. Modern claims to immunity for women from the

criminal law and mediæval chivalry are quite different things.

 

Chivalry, as understood by Modern Sentimental Feminism, means unlimited

licence for women in their relations with men, and unlimited coercion

for men in their relations with women. To men all duties and no rights,

to women all rights and no duties, is the basic principle underlying

Modern Feminism, Suffragism, and the bastard chivalry it is so fond of

invoking. The most insistent female shrieker for equality between the

sexes among Political Feminists, it is interesting to observe, will, in

most cases, on occasion be found an equally insistent advocate of the

claims of Sentimental Feminism, based on modern metamorphosed notions

of chivalry. It never seems to strike anyone that the muscular weakness

of woman has been forged by Modern Feminists into an abominable weapon

of tyranny. Under cover of the notion of chivalry, as understood by

Modern Feminism, Political and Sentimental Feminists alike would

deprive men of the most elementary rights of self-defence against women

and would exonerate the latter practically from all punishment for the

most dastardly crimes against men. They know they can rely upon the

support of the sentimental section of public opinion with some such

parrot cry of “What! Hit a woman!”

 

Why not, if she molests you?

 

“Treat a woman in this way!” “Shame!” responds automatically the crowd

of Sentimental Feminist idiots, oblivious of the fact that the real

shame lies in their endorsement of an iniquitous sex privilege. If the

same crowd were prepared to condemn any special form of punishment

or mode of treatment as inhumane for both sexes alike, there would,

of course, be nothing to be said. But it is not so. The most savage

cruelty and vindictive animosity towards men leaves them comparatively

cold, at most evoking a mild remonstrance as against the inflated

manifestation of sentimental horror and frothy indignation produced by

any slight hardship inflicted by way of punishment (let us say) on a

female offender.

 

The psychology of Sentimental Feminism generally is intimately bound up

with the curious phenomenon of the hatred of men by their own sex as

such. With women, in spite of what is sometimes alleged, one does not

find this phenomenon of anti-sex. On the contrary, nowadays we are in

presence of a powerful female sex-solidarity indicating the beginnings

of a strong sex-league of women against men. But with men, as already

said, in all cases of conflict between the sexes, we are met with a

callous indifference, alternating with positive hostility towards

their fellow-men, which seems at times to kill in them all sense of

justice. This is complemented on the other side by an imbecile softness

towards the female sex in general which reminds one of nothing so much

as of the maudlin _bonhomie_ of the amiable drunkard. This besotted

indulgence, as before noted, is proof even against the outraged sense

of injury to property.

 

As we all know, offences against property, as a rule, are those the

average bourgeois is least inclined to condone, yet we have recently

seen a campaign of deliberate wanton destruction by arson and other

means, directed expressly against private property, which nevertheless

the respectable propertied bourgeois, the man of law and order, has

taken pretty much “lying down.” Let us suppose another case. Let us

imagine an anarchist agitation, with a known centre and known leaders,

a centre from which daily outrages were deliberately planned by these

leaders and carried out by their emissaries, all, _bien entendu_, of

the male persuasion.