it: that woman is nothing before man's fall, nor without it; that he does not rob her of anything she had before. The crime man has committed in creating woman, and still commits in assenting to her purpose, he excuses to woman by his eroticism.
Whence otherwise would come the generosity of love, which can never be satisfied by giving? How is it that love is so anxious to endow woman with a soul, and not any other creature? Whence comes it that a child cannot love until love coincides with sexuality, the stage of puberty, with the repeated forming of woman, with the renewing of sin? Woman is nothing but man's expression and projection of his own sexuality. Every man creates himself a woman, in which he embodies himself and his own guilt. But woman is not herself guilty; she is made so by the guilt of others, and everything for which woman is blamed should be laid at man's door.
Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it; it elevates woman instead of nullifying her. The "something" folds the "nothing" in its arms, and thinks thus to free the universe of negation and drown all objections; whereas the nothing would only disappear if the something put it away.
Since man's hatred for woman is not conscious hatred of his own sexuality, his love is his most intense effort to save woman as woman, instead of desiring to nullify her in himself. And the consciousness of guilt comes from the fact that the object of guilt is coveted instead of being annihilated.
Woman alone, then, is guilt; and is so through man's fault. And if femaleness signifies pairing, it is only because all guilt endeavours to increase its circle. What woman, always unconsciously, accomplishes, she does because she cannot help it; it is her reason for being, her whole nature. She is only a part of man, his other, ineradicable, his lower part. So matter appears to be as inexplicable a riddle as form; woman as unending as man, negation as eternal as existence; but this eternity is only the eternity of guilt.
