though you reverse the sexual polarity, the flow between the sexes,
still the difference is the same. The _apparent_ mutual understanding,
in companionship between a man and a woman, is always an illusion,
and always breaks down in the end.

Woman can polarize her consciousness upwards. She can obtain a hand
even over her sex receptivity. She can divert even the electric spasm
of coition into her upper consciousness: it was the trick which the
snake and the apple between them taught her. The snake, whose
consciousness is _only_ dynamic, and non-cerebral. The snake, who has
no mental life, but only an intensely vivid dynamic mind, he envied
the human race its mental consciousness. And he knew, this intensely
wise snake, that the one way to make humanity pay more than the price
of mental consciousness was to pervert woman into mentality: to
stimulate her into the upper flow of consciousness.

For the true polarity of consciousness in woman is downwards. Her
deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. Even when perverted,
it is so. The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to
the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet. Pervert
this, and make a false flow upwards, to the breast and head, and you
get a race of "intelligent" women, delightful companions, tricky
courtesans, clever prostitutes, noble idealists, devoted friends,
interesting mistresses, efficient workers, brilliant managers, women
as good as men at all the manly tricks: and better, because they are
so very headlong once they go in for men's tricks. But then, after a
while, pop it all goes. The moment woman has got man's ideals and
tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly
world--there's an end of it. She's had enough. She's had more than
enough. She hates the thing she has embraced. She becomes absolutely
perverse, and her one end is to prostitute herself and her ideals to
sex. Which is her business at the present moment.

We bruise the serpent's head: his flat and brainless head. But his
revenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through which
the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed
with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes
us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid
beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The
serpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslaved
g