Page 177 - beyond-good-and-evil

ner, and to imitate all the stupidities from which ‘man’ in
Europe, European ‘manliness,’ suffers,—who would like
to lower woman to ‘general culture,’ indeed even to news-
paper reading and meddling with politics. Here and there
they wish even to make women into free spirits and liter-
ary workers: as though a woman without piety would not
be something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a pro-
found and godless man;—almost everywhere her nerves
are being ruined by the most morbid and dangerous kind
of music (our latest German music), and she is daily being
made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her
first and last function, that of bearing robust children. They
wish to ‘cultivate’ her in general still more, and intend, as
they say, to make the ‘weaker sex’ STRONG by culture: as if
history did not teach in the most emphatic manner that the
‘cultivating’ of mankind and his weakening—that is to say,
the weakening, dissipating, and languishing of his FORCE
OF WILL—have always kept pace with one another, and
that the most powerful and influential women in the world
(and lastly, the mother of Napoleon) had just to thank their
force of will—and not their schoolmasters—for their power
and ascendancy over men. That which inspires respect in
woman, and often enough fear also, is her NATURE, which
is more ‘natural’ than that of man, her genuine, carnivora-
like, cunning flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the glove,
her NAIVETE in egoism, her untrainableness and innate
wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation
of her desires and virtues. That which, in spite of fear, ex-
cites one’s sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat,

1 Beyond Good and Evil