How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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demonstrating a spurious superiority over their partner of the opposite sex. For one woman who believes that she is the equivalent of a man in every sense, and lives her life as if she enjoyed all the prerogatives of womanhood to the fullest, we can find a dozen women who are discouraged by the pre¬ vailing patriarchal tradition, and stimulated by that discouragement either to imitate men and masculinity to the limits of their physiological capacity, or to demonstrate their weakness and dependence, thus enslaving men by their weakness and winning a sense of superiority by undermining the dominant male, rather than by an active attack on his prerogatives. In both cases, the masculine woman and the clinging-vine ” woman over-rate masculinity and under-rate femininity, the one by the flattery of imitation, the other by the indirect flattery of helplessness based on the alleged greater independence and resourcefulness of the male. Androtropism and Gynetropism Adler has called woman’s dissatisfaction with her feminine r6le the “ masculine protest ”, but this term is confusing, and we propose to substitute the term andro¬ tropism,, the turning toward the masculine sex, to designate that symptom-complex of psychological behaviour of a woman dissatisfied with being a woman and attempting to act “ as if ” she could become a man. Gynetropism is the parallel term used to describe the over-valuation of the feminine principle by the male, as we find it in certain male homosexuals. It is manifest that the love relationship and the marriage bed are the logical arenas for the “ play-off ” of this age- o d sexual competition. We may state it as a psychological law : happiness in a love relation is impossible if the sexual partner is being prostituted as a means of proving oneys own superiority. The sexual athletes we have described in a previous chapter, who enjoy their sexual relations only in proportion to the difficulty of the conquest of their sexual