Thus, while the disintegration of the couple augments the feminine dimorphism, the diminution of the natural dimorphism renders the transformation of the couple more uneasy and more precarious. The human couple is an harmony difficult to realize, very easy to destroy, but in measure as one destroys it one frees the elements which will, necessarily, re-create it. (We will return later to polygamy, human and animal; but must here examine its relation to dimorphism. All the questions treated in this book are, moreover, so interlocked, that it will be difficult to prevent one or other of them from cropping up apropos no matter what other. If the method is less clear it is perhaps more loyal. Far from wishing to impart human logic to nature, one attempts here to introduce a little natural logic into the old classic logic.)
The sole aim of the couple is to free the female from all care that is not purely sexual, to permit her the most perfect accomplishment of her most important function. The couple favours the female, but it favours also the race. It is fully beneficial when the woman has acquired the right of maternal laziness. There is another reason for believing in the legitimacy of such a sharing of useful work between the two members of the couple, it is that masculine work diminishes its femininity, while feminine work feminizes the males. In order that the necessary and moderate dimorphism persist it would be necessary if the woman is to take up male exercises that the male should assume all the accessory labours of maternity. This would not be contrary to supple natural logic; there are examples of it among batrachians and among birds. But one does not see clearly either the utility or the possibility of such a reversal of rôles in the human species. The duty of a being is to persevere in its being and even to augment the characteristics which specialize it. The duty of woman is to keep and to accentuate her æsthetic and her psychologic dimorphism. The æsthetic viewpoint obliges one for the thousandth time to put, but, happily, not to resolve the agreeable question of woman's beauty. One may judge when it is a matter of shape, of muscular energy, of respiratory amplitude: these can be measured and set down in figures. When it comes to beauty, it is a matter of feeling, that is to say of what is at once deepest and most personal in each one of us, and which is most variable between one man and another. However, the sexual element which enters into the idea of beauty, being here at its very root, since it is the question of woman, the opinion of men is nearly unanimous: in the human couple, it is woman who represents beauty. All contrary opinion will be for ever considered as a paradox or as the most boring of sexual aberrations. A feeling does not adduce its reasons, it has none. It has to have them lent to it. The superiority of feminine beauty is real, it has a sole cause, the unity of line. What makes woman the more beautiful is the invisibility of her genital organs. The male organ, which is sometimes an advantage, is always a load, and always a blemish; it is made for the race, not for the individual. In the male human, and precisely because of its erect attitude, the sex is the sensitive point par excellence, and the visible point, it is the point of attack in hand to hand struggle, point of aim for the jet, obstacle for the eye, be it as a roughness of surface, be it as a break in the middle of the line. The harmony of the female body is then geometrically, much more perfect, especially if one consider the male and the female at the very hour of desire, at the moment, that is, when they present the most intense and most natural expression of life. In the woman, all movements are interior, or visible only in the undulation of her curves, conserving thus her full æsthetic value, while the man, seeming at once to recede toward the primitive states of animality, appears reduced, putting off all beauty, to the bare and simple condition of genital organ. Man, it is true, has his æsthetic compensation during pregnancy and its deformations.