Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future - EILFE

Our virtues
in any sort of Eternal or Necessary Feminine; to dissuade men, emphatically
and at length, from thinking that women must by kept, cared for,
protected, and looked after like gentle, strangely wild and often pleasant
house pets; to collect together, in an inept and indignant manner, everything
slavish and serflike that was and still is intrinsic to the position of
women in the present social order (as if slavery were a counter-argument
and not rather a condition of any higher culture, any elevation of culture):
– what does all this mean except a crumbling away of feminine
instincts, a defeminization Of course, there are plenty of idiotic friends
and corrupters of women among the scholarly asses of the male sex who
recommend that women defeminize themselves like this and copy all the
stupidities that the “man” in Europe, that European “manliness” suffers
from, – who would like to bring women down to the level of “general
education,” and maybe even of reading the newspapers and taking part
in politics. Every now and then, people even want to make free spirits
and literati out of women: as if a woman without piety were anything
other than absolutely repugnant or ludicrous to a profound and godless
man –. Almost everywhere, women’s nerves are being ruined by the most
pathological and dangerous of all types of music (our most recent German
music) and women are being made more hysterical by the day, and less
capable of performing their first and last profession, the bearing of strong
children. People want women to be more “cultivated” in general and want,
as they say, to make the “weaker sex” strong through culture: as if history
did not teach as vividly as possible that “cultivating” human beings and
weakening – in particular, weakening, dissipating, afflicting the strength
of the will – have always kept pace with each other, and that the most
powerful and influential women in the world (recently even Napoleon’s
mother) owed their power and their dominance over men precisely to the
strength of their will – and not to schoolteachers! What inspires respect
and, often enough, fear of women is their nature (which is “more natural”
than that of men), their truly predatory and cunning agility, their
tiger’s claws inside their glove, the naiveté of their egoism, their inner
wildness and inability to be trained, the incomprehensibility, expanse,
and rambling character of their desires and virtues ...What inspires pity,
in spite of all the fear, for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman” is
that she seems to suffer more, be more vulnerable, need more love, and
be condemned to more disappointments than any animal. Fear and pity:
these are the feelings with which men have stood before women so far,
129