l party, woman the positive and active. Man begins to show
strong signs of the peculiarly strong passive sex desire, the desire
to be taken, which is considered characteristic of woman. Man begins
to have all the feelings of woman--or all the feelings which he
attributed to woman. He becomes more feminine than woman ever was, and
worships his own femininity, calling it the highest. In short, he
begins to exhibit all signs of sexual complexity. He begins to imagine
he really is half female. And certainly woman seems very male. So the
hermaphrodite fallacy revives again.

But it is all a fallacy. Man, in the midst of all his effeminacy, is
still male and nothing but male. And woman, though she harangue in
Parliament or patrol the streets with a helmet on her head, is still
completely female. They are only playing each other's roles, because
the poles have swung into reversion. The compass is reversed. But that
doesn't mean that the north pole has become the south pole, or that
each is a bit of both.

Of course a woman should stick to her own natural emotional
positivity. But then man must stick to his own positivity of _being_,
of action, _disinterested, non-domestic, male_ action, which is not
devoted to the increase of the female. Once man vacates his camp of
sincere, passionate positivity in disinterested being, his supreme
responsibility to fulfill his own profoundest impulses, with reference
to none but God or his own soul, not taking woman into count at all,
in this primary responsibility to his own deepest soul; once man
vacates this strong citadel of his own genuine, not spurious,
divinity; then in comes woman, picks up the scepter and begins to
conduct a rag-time band.

Man remains man, however he may put on wistfulness and tenderness like
petticoats, and sensibilities like pearl ornaments. Your sensitive
little big-eyed boy, so much more gentle and loving than his harder
sister, is male for all that, believe me. Perhaps evilly male, so
mothers may learn to their cost: and wives still more.

Of course there should be a great balance between the sexes. Man, in
the daytime, must follow his own soul's greatest impulse, and give
himself to life-work and risk himself to death. It is not woman who
claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that
drives him on beyond woman, to his supreme activity. For his highest,
man is responsible to God alone. He may not pause to remember that he
has a life to l