Acceptance may be both passive and violently active, and to the demon (or it may be god) of anger we say the same thing as to depression and pain, “Go ahead as much as you like, do your worst and make it a good worst.” No one completely identified with his anger could ever say that, for the capacity to accept always implies a certain differentiation between the ego and the visiting demon, and thus is never the same thing as blind “possession.” Only when there is possession can we call anger or passion in a certain sense immoral. But there may not always be an outward manifestation of the emotion, for here again we see that the very feeling of being free to be as angry as you like is generally sufficient release of itself. Sometimes, however, it is useful to produce an outward manifestation for the sake of effect!
False Masculinity
But here we have to face the prejudice that it is weak and effeminate to give so free a rein to the demons of emotion, for there is still a powerful element of Stoicism in our civilization, especially in the male mentality. Men are particularly averse to displaying any of the more “feminine” emotions, which, according to their version, include emotional reactions to pain and sorrow such as crying, screaming, and suffering “turns of the stomach” at unpleasant sights. Personally, I should be the last to condemn the male dislike of being “sissy,” although, when carried to extremes, this dislike produces an acute “constipation” of the feeling nature which is a common complaint among men in America. For among certain large sections of American manhood this dislike is extended to include all interest in religious, cultural, and aesthetic matters, and I know many whose avoidance of these things is the purest affectation.
Inwardly this part of their being demands expression, and they deny it to their cost, for not only do they miss much that makes life more worth living; they also bring psychological ills upon themselves, the most serious of which is an abysmal failure to understand women. There is hardly another country in the world where there is so great a lack of real understanding between husbands and wives as in the United States. This is no mere empty generalization; thousands of women’s clubs and sewing circles testify to the fact, for there would be no need whatever for women to herd together in this way if their homelife were truly satisfactory. But the reason is an utterly false conception of manliness. When a man denies his feeling nature he not only drives his wife to seek “culture” in women’s clubs; he also drives her to seek sexual satisfaction in religion or in other men. Any primitive man would consider inability to give sexual satisfaction to his wife the greatest possible shame; but it is quite impossible to do this when one’s feeling nature is wholly repressed and when “manliness” demands that one’s breath smell constantly of whiskey and cigars, that one is able to make love only with phlegmatic grunts and to approach the sexual act with a directness and haste which cannot even be called bestial; it is simply thoughtless and futile, and as regards sexual relations is actually nothing more than masturbation.
To be a man at all, man has to recognize the female element in himself, for a man is no man unless he is able to give woman what she demands and needs. And she needs not just a breadwinner and a male body; she needs above all things a companion who can to some extent feel as she feels. This requires that the man combine in himself masculine strength and feminine grace. In this respect modern man could solve many problems of domestic life by taking a lesson from the Hindu “book of marriage,” the Kama Sutra.13 The art of Kama, the use of the senses, is an essential part of the old-fashioned Hindu education, but we fail almost completely to teach young men anything that will be of use in married life, quite apart from the art of sexuality. We cannot be strict Stoics without being celibate. But the Stoic philosophy does not recognize that control of the emotions is in no sense being without emotions; controlling an automobile is not keeping it locked up in the garage. You cannot begin to control emotions unless you first let yourself be free to use them, and the difficulty of keeping them within reasonable bounds is increased by merely repressive control. For this reason there are thousands of supposedly well-educated people who behave worse than children when moved by powerful emotion, having no understanding and above all no love for the feminine in themselves. Small wonder, then, that modern man has to become reconciled to his unconscious under the form of the feminine anima! His psychological problem is primarily to make a successful marriage within himself—a marriage between ego and anima, between conscious reason and unconscious nature, in which there must be love, companionship, and understanding. Failure to realize this inner relationship is always reflected outwardly in the divided home where man is man and woman is woman “and never the twain shall meet.” They have separate friends, separate interests, separate bedrooms, and separate souls; this is not marriage; it is a business partnership for manufacturing children.
Woman Unsatisfied
The problem for modern woman is rather different. There is a powerful male element in her, and the danger is not that she may repress it but that she may be possessed by it. For the result of our current lack of relationship between the sexes is not, as one might expect, that men become increasingly manly and women increasingly womanly. Both tend to become neuter, but in different ways. When men have no real use for femininity women forget their arts; they cultivate one another’s company to the virtual exclusion of men, and this can only be done safely by those who have fulfilled their life with men and by children. The result is masculinity among women, feminism (a gross misnomer), a tendency to intellectualism, competition with men in business, and that hard-boiled bridge-playing, cocktail-drinking mentality which is only golf, whiskey, and cigars wearing skirts. Thus the drift in both sexes is to a false masculinity for which absence of feeling among men is very much to blame; and absence of feeling is simply the lack of recognizing one’s own gods and demons. When conscious reason is predominant all values become strictly “practical” and intellectual, while feeling is degraded to mere sensation. It would not be so bad, however, if this cult of the “practical” and intellectual were what it tries to be. But when women try to be practical in this new sense they lose their inborn reason which, in the past, has always kept men with their feet on the earth and made them realize their responsibilities to their homes and their children.
Indeed, we call the unconscious irrational, but really it is so-called reason that is crazy. The fault is not with reason in itself but with the conscious, intellectual idea of what reason ought to be, namely a mathematical operation which excludes feeling and the demands of physical being. True woman understands these things; if she did not the children would never be fed (much less the husband) and the home would never be habitable—which may be proved by visiting the homes of those “practical” wives who go into business, socialism, cultural ideals, and other idealistic, theoretical, and nebulous matters. The curious thing is that such behavior never achieves the desired result, and it is not uncommon that real women converse far more intelligently about literature, music, the arts, politics, religion, and all cultural affairs than their home-neglecting sisters who go out to acquire these very things. They are so busy trying to be clever that they have no time simply to be clever.