Feminism and Sex-Extinction Part 15

Body and mind, after having been cramped between the covers of text-books, now are cramped within the narrow rules and rigid form of such miscalled "games," supervised by over-keen experts--the whole business exacting sustained muscular tension, temperamental excitement and compet.i.tive nervous strain. The powers are stretched to win some goal, in place of being unbent in leisure and in pleasure. True play is spontaneous enjoyment of the moment, not fierce concentration upon goals. This latter induces excitement, which may be pleasurable, but it entails its tax in reactionary exhaustion. Because of the spur of compet.i.tion in them, sports and games, as now rendered, act as powerful nerve-stimulants that deplete and waste the vital powers.

School-boys and school-girls live, for the most part, in alternating states of high tension in sports and reactionary languors from the heart and nervous strain resulting therefrom.

Since sports and athletics became a cult, heart-diseases have increased by 50 _per cent._ We complain that our young men are limp and unintelligent, lacking in initiative and enterprise. Apart from the serious circ.u.mstance that, mentally, they have been trained for cricket, not for life, most of them (to employ their own phrase) have "gone stale" in heart and brain, in consequence of forced athletics, long before they come to the momentous business of living. Even their muscles have wasted, in place of developing. With the result that instead of being finely-built and graceful, numbers of our youths are stiff, stoop-shouldered and abnormally attenuated.

Education should aim at keeping young persons fresh and unstrained; charged with vital energies for growth of mind and body, filled with zest and enthusiasm for the career before them.

Everywhere, mothers deplore bitterly that they can obtain neither duty, obedience, nor affection from their girls. Many will not mend their clothes even; refuse so slight a domestic concession as to arrange flowers for the home. Lacking the morbid excitement of compet.i.tive rough games, an abnormal craving for which has been artificially created, and home-tastes extinguished, at school, modern girls are bored and disaffected save when indulging in sports or in other excitements. The more delicate, sympathetic, and humanising amenities have no appeal for them.

All the subtler, vital and inspiring impulses of natural womanhood have been rudely smothered in tussles of big muscles, in sensational crazes for making hockey-goals, and similar crude aims, quite alien to natural girlhood. The recurring stimulus of such, in addition to over-developing male muscles and proclivities in them, creates both the habit and the craving for excitement; effects pernicious and demoralising as are those of all habitual strong nerve-excitants.

It is impossible to exaggerate the c.u.mulative effect of habit upon disposition--and this particularly upon the plastic, shaping dispositions of young girls.

Youth is at the mercy of its pastors and its masters, to spoil or to foster its best growth. We feed the bodies and cram the brains of our young people, while, in sending them away from the home which is their natural environment, we starve and dwarf their emotions and affections; giving these nothing to evoke, nothing to nurture them. The abnormal cold-heartedness and self-absorption latter-day mothers bewail in their girls are the inevitable outcome of their unnatural upbringing.

The spectacle of young women, with set jaws, eyes strained tensely on a ball, a fierce battle-look gripping their features, their hands clutching some or other implement, their arms engaged in striking and beating, their legs disposed in coa.r.s.e ungainly att.i.tudes, is an object-lesson in all that is ugly in action and unwomanly in mode. The so-called "tennis-grin," which on many women's faces does duty for smile, shows how the muscular tension of forceful effort permanently mars higher attribute. So too, the proverbial quarrelsomeness of tennis-playing women results from the combative habit of mind. Light and exhilarating, in place of strenuous compet.i.tive exercises, enable girls to develop their womanhood in healthy structure, efficient function, and beauty of body and mind. Dancing--the poetry of motion--particularly conduces to health and to grace. True dancing, that is, not the acrobatics of the professional dancer, which result in coa.r.s.ened ugly limbs and stilted action.

There is a well-known Girls college which makes pre-eminently for the cult of Mannishness.

And here are seen, absorbed in fierce contest during the exhausting heat of summer afternoons, grim-visaged maidens of sinewy build, hard and tough and set as working-women in the forties; some with brawny throats, square shoulders and stern loins that would do credit to a prize-ring.

All of which masculine developments are stigmata of abnormal s.e.x-transformation precisely similar in origin to male antlers in female-deer; namely, deterioration of important s.e.x-glands, with consequent obliteration of the secondary s.e.x-characteristics arising normally out of the functional efficiency of these.

It has been said that the "hardening" process for children succeeds in rearing st.u.r.dy families, by killing off those of more delicate (and higher) organisation. And this and other such latter-day schools earn a reputation for rearing amazons, by so breaking the health and const.i.tution of their more delicately-const.i.tuted members that these are compelled to withdraw. Following the rule that healthy bodies rebel in terms of illness against deteriorative conditions, it is the normal and healthfully-const.i.tuted girls who fail beneath such injurious strain.

While organisations less sound of const.i.tutional morale, in place of sustaining their typal ideals, conform to these deteriorative methods, and degenerate from higher to lower-grade standards of structure and function. Precisely as happens to minds when exposed to demoralising influences.

And to what end is it all? The training of modern young persons should fit them for Twentieth-Century existence in all its varied, complex and psychical developments. Yet now-a-days we train our girls as though their destiny were carpet-beating or the forge, rather than the higher human amenities. It is not surprising, therefore, that they frequently play hockey with the higher amenities. So impressionable and mimetic the s.e.x is, and such its bent toward extremes, that women trained to Sports comport themselves in after-life as though playing a compet.i.tive game. A mental warp which has been one of the sources of latter-day strenuousness, as too of that fierce social rivalry which is wrecking older and fairer ideals and methods of friends.h.i.+p and hospitality.

Over-development of the large and cruder muscles dwarfs those smaller and more delicate ones which adapt to the softer and subtler departments of faculty. And while despoiling these smaller muscles which subtend gentle and delicate artistries, the crude larger ones, hypertrophied by athletic activities, become alike a burden and a curse to their possessor. Because not only is their upkeep a continual and a superfluous tax upon her vital powers, but their hunger for continued function in further such crude activities afflicts her with turbulent impulses, for which the more civilised vocations supply no scope. The militant Feminist movement was as much an explosion of suppressed muscularity in young women deprived of other outlet for acc.u.mulated muscle-steam, as it was an ebullition of masculine mentality on the part of its leaders.

Hysteria and other neuroses, obsessing hobbies and crazes, are, more often than not, morbid and distressing consequences of habits acquired at school and college, of developing abnormal high-pressures of muscular and nervous energy. Masculine war-occupations have similarly evoked male muscularity and mentality in women. So that--War over--they find it well-nigh unendurable to return to the more refined and humanising womanly employments of their pre-war days. While on the other hand, employers are bewailing the rough and coa.r.s.ened manners, personality and speech, as too the clumsy movements and inept.i.tudes of domestic servants, nurses and others, de-s.e.xed by War-work in respect of the higher qualities and efficiencies of their s.e.x. Many of these st.u.r.dy motor-drivers, l.u.s.ty W.A.A.Cs. and strapping Land-girls have lost all taste as well as apt.i.tude for the finer arts of life and of the home.

Efficient in the handling of plough or gun or lorry, woe to the hapless babe or invalid subjected to their hard, forceful touch!

V

Language is scarcely emphatic enough to characterise the painful (and insane) exhibitions of Public-school and College "Sports," in which boys and young men, whose vital forces are needed beyond all things for development, may be seen with faces whereon is neither joy of action nor pride of achievement, but only the pained rigidity of supreme heart and nervous strain, as they strive for goals that are no test of true physical fitness, but, on the contrary, prove physical lopsidedness.

In confirmation whereof is the fact that many such athletes die young, and die suddenly. Or they live the years when men should be still in their prime--valetudinarian and hypochondriac. The secret of health and nervous power is the const.i.tutional capacity to _store reserves_ of vital energy, for expenditure as required. Exhausting sports in youth engender habits of _over-expenditure_ thereof.

Trials of skill and of strength are admirable spurs to development and self-discipline. But these should make for excellence in that fine poise of Mind and Muscle which is the hall-mark of human achievement, not for extremes of crude brute-force (muscle being the lowest grade of human powers) which strain the living mechanism; and, straining, leave inevitably weak and warped links, when not actually snapped ones therein. The human body is a marvellous and delicate psychological instrument, not a mere muscular implement. When the hearts of boys are "sounded" after compet.i.tive sports, "murmurs" are heard; showing valvular incompetency. Temporary in the majority of cases, but none the less indicative of gravely-weakened states which can but permanently injure the fine-spun valvular apparatus. "Dilated hearts" caused numbers of our "fine young athletes" to be rejected as unfit for military duty.

Young men "in training" suffer from alb.u.minuria, showing serious derangement of the kidney-function; derangement which inevitably entails such permanent structural deterioration as lapses readily, in after years, to grave disease.

The fallacy that the excitement of games distracts the attention of youth from the processes of s.e.x-development has been disproved. While all athletic boys are not vicious, it is now recognised that the most vicious are the athletic. The languors of body and mind reactionary upon the exciting strain of games are unwholesome languors; and breed unwholesome self-absorptions. A fresh and active imagination, to keep the mind interested at every turn, is the best of all safeguards. It is in the imagination, moreover, that higher moral and ideals arise.

It has been said that "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton." It was far more likely won in the pages of _Jack the Giant Killer_! Because in war, as in most other things, moral is more potent than muscle. There is, it is true, a moral of Games. But its outlook and its application are both contracted of range and artificial of form. Games are useful in forming habits and in exercising faculties of co-operation in concerted action. But being played in company with others, and played in obedience to rule and regulation, they allow no scope for the development of individualism in mind or character, initiative or resource--outside the narrow boundaries of cricket-pitch or football field.

By perpetual absorption of the powers in the movements of a ball, the mind becomes contracted and set in puerile mould, during years when it should be germinating and expanding in response to the countless varied and inspiring stimuli and factors of natural environment. Over-keenness in sports destroys the sense of beauty, love of art and love of Nature.

The grey matter of the brain--the medium of Mind--wherein arise imagination, inspiration and those n.o.ble talents and the n.o.ble dreams of enterprise which make for n.o.ble lives--this highest and most complex of the human tissue-cells becomes starved and atrophied from continued waste of brain-resources by those lower-grade cerebral motor-tracts which control and energise the muscles.

The popular impression, both lay and medical, that muscular exertion supplies rest to the brain and recuperation to the nervous system, is a sad delusion. One cannot raise a finger without expending brain and nervous force, the muscles being implements by way of which the brain transforms purpose into action--being _brain_-implements therefore. So that brains--and particularly young brains--unduly taxed by muscular activities are robbed of power to develop or to function in their intellectual and other higher departments.

If my hypothesis be true, and the right side of the body with its allied brain-hemisphere is the executive and expenditure side, while the left is the Life and a.s.set side, it is obvious that excessive brain-work, or Sports, for which the executive power is supplied by this right side and its allied brain half, must necessarily deplete and exhaust the left side, which is the power-house and reservoir of Life and Mind whence the executive half derives its mental, nervous and vital potential.

It goes without saying that such careful economy of the powers is superfluous in truly healthful and normally vigorous males. But latter-day stock has been, for the most part, so far depleted by generations of neglect of natural law as to require the strictest husbandry of its vital expenditure, in order to apportion its means to the best all-round advantage.

Object-lessons in such extremes of athleticism as destroy the normal balance of the counter-poising s.e.x-traits have been supplied by War.

The faces--as the natures--of some of our soldiers have become crude, coa.r.s.e and deteriorate in intelligence, others abnormally harsh and fierce; the softer human qualities having been trampled out of them by stress of militarism, some to degrees of brutalisation and criminality, even. While a very great number show lined and haggard from heart or nervous strain.

CHAPTER IV

THE WOMAN BRAIN: ITS POWERS AND DISABILITIES

"_My state is like the lightning's light-- Now it s.h.i.+nes forth, and now 'tis gone from sight.

At times, amid the heavens I find my seat; At others, I am lower than my feet._"

Sa'di (Persian poet).

I

Of what order is this Woman-half of Mind which Feminism seeks to extinguish?

The cerebral processes appreciable upon the Outer plane, and calculable by Science, represent no more than a t.i.the of brain-activities. They are but a single highly-specialised focus of brain-functioning.

Behind concrete Volition, Intellection, and Action, are the silent, ceaseless, inner and incalculable workings of innumerable brain-cells concerned with the mysterious const.i.tution and metabolism of Life, and its strange, potent relation and correlation with Mind and with environment; concerned with character and attribute and impulse; with ancestral vestiges and personal experience; with memories and instincts; with an infinitude of occulted and imperishable records of previous terrestrial existences, perhaps; concerned, in a word, with all the secret springs and complex potences of Individuality; which differentiates every thought, emotion and action of any human person from those of every other.

And in these recondite mysteries fructifying in a hundred million bi-s.e.xual brain-cells, it may be that the subtle counter and inter-operations of the Man and Woman-traits find their highest activities, and make for their supremest issues.

Every man and woman is to every other a Sealed Book, whereof no more than a few pages have been glimpsed--even by those nearest and dearest.

We are Sealed Books to ourselves, indeed, because we do not know the language we are written in. For of all the muted mysteries spinning ceaselessly within the silent-functioning cells of twin brain-hemispheres, Science affords us but the scantest and most sketchy information. That the grey matter coating the brain-convolutions is the site of mentality; that the higher the intelligence, the deeper and more intricate these convolutions are; that disease of a certain area destroys the power of speech; while disease of some other occasions paralysis of this or that group of muscles, loss of sensation in this or that tract of skin. Baldly it states that a portion of a certain convolution controls a certain movement of a hand. But the thousand and one emotions and incentives prompting such movement, and differentiating the resulting action across the extensive range between the n.o.blest benefaction and the blackest murder, baffle every scientific method.

The processes of Mind and Impulse occur on planes we have no means of penetrating, possess no appliances whereby to estimate the ethereal undulations thereof.

What are we? Who are we? Whence are we? Whither do we go?

All is locked within the occulted silence of our hundred million brain-cells; each of which holds and keeps its own intrinsic secret; each the mysterious record, it may be, of one of those countless experiences, forms and phases, ancestral or individual, whereof every living person is the last resultant. But the Twin-hemispheres, face to face within the skull, like opposite pages of a book, are key to one another; one page written in the mystical language of The Past and Future, the other in the concrete language of The Present.