Our Androcentric Culture, or The Man Made World

d charge that there are no great women artists. Where one or two are proudly exhibited in evidence, they a

accepting, and explaining, the visible facts. What are the facts as to the relation of men and w

art, admire it, and wish to adorn themselves therewith; some do so-to later mortification. Early personal decoration consisted largely in direct mutilation of the body, and the hanging upon it, or fastening to it, of decorative objects. This we see among savages still, in its gross and primitive forms mono

part of personal decoration today; but the decorator is the man. In the decoration of objects, woman, as the originator of primitive industry, originated also the primitive arts; and in the pottery, basketry, leatherwork, needlework, weaving, with all beadwork, dyeing and embroideries of ancient peoples we see the work o

ho were idle pets in harems, or the women who worked hard as servants, were alike cut off from the joy of making things. Where constructive work remained to them, art remained, in its early

e-their lack of a civilized art sense. Not only in the childish and savage display upon their bodies,

women in their primitive environment making flowers of wax, and hair, and worsted; doing mottoes of perforated ca

ng their lives to the continuous pursuit of one line of service, have lifted our standard in aesthetic culture, as they have in other matters; but by refusing the

en at the level of domestic service, going on themselves to lonely heights of achievement, have found their efforts hampered and their attainments rendered barren and unsatisfactory by the amazing indifference of the world at large. A

et us consider once more the essential characteristics of maleness, and see how they have affected art, keeping always in mind the triune distinction betwee

inct, the innate eye-pleasure in regularity, symmetry, repetition, and alternation. Had this natural social instinct grown unchecked in us, it would have manifested itself in a certain proportion of specialists-artis

art, for instance: that wide and fluent medium of expression, the making of varied fabrics, the fashioning of garments and the decoration of them-all this i

gliness of our men's attire; the irritating variegated folly of our women's; the wa

sils, all our social products, would blossom into beauty as naturally as they still do in

of the social sacrifice. Of all the thousand ways by which humanity is specialized for inter-service, none is more exquisite than this; the evolution of the social Eye, or Ear, or Voice, the development of those whose work is wholly for others, and to whom the app

do we

cess carried on by an elect few who openly despise the unappreciative many. Art has become an occult profession req

his undesirable outcome is du

functions, he necessarily brought to that performance the advantages-and disadvanta

it is prominent in painting and music, almost monop

stinctions between the sexes, the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the universe. In the very nature of the sperm-cell and the germ-cell we find this difference: the one attracts, gathers, draws in; the other repels, scatters

may so incorporate beneficial changes in the race. It is his duty to thus express himself-an essentially masculine duty;

is a social process, a most distinctive social process, quite above the plane of sex. T

and the dancing crane, who swing and caper before their mates. Among early peoples we find it a common form of social expression in tribal dances of all sorts, religiou

phasized. As practiced by men alone dancing has become a mere display of physical agility, a form of exhibition common to all males. As practiced by men and

, joke shamefacedly about "the bald-headed row," and occasionally burst forth in shrill scandal over some dinner party where ladies clad in a veil and a bracelet dance on the table. Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found-

human, that we find less trace of excessive masculinity than in other arts. It meets our social demands, it expresses in lasting fo

child; yet the needs of woman and child are not expressed in our domestic architecture. The home is built on lin

aintain her in idleness. The house is the physical expression of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world with a small drab ugliness. A dwelli

te, the everlasting predominance of the commonplace in buildings, is the

e of study, has been indicated in our last chapter; the degradation of the human body, the vicious standards of sex-consciousness enforc

standards of beauty and of decorum which we can never have without

e woman's body as the highest human type. But in doing this, the artist, true to humanity and not biassed by sex, gives us a st

ine passion, partly by the general presence of egoism; that tendency to self-expression i

eature of human life as he imagines it; and other miles express his other feelings, with that ingenuous lack of reticence which i

e is room for fine historic study of the difference in s

for this study that it will have a chapter to itself; this one but t

too much masculinity is not so much in choice of subject as in method and spirit. The artist sees beauty of form and color where the ordinary observer does not; and paints the old and ug

conscious of how he feels, strives to make other people aware of these sensations. This is now so generally acce

f the narrowest importance. The ultra-masculine artist, extremely sensitive, necessarily, and full of the natural urge to expression of the sex, uses the medium of art as ingenuously

on, the more he sees for humanity, and expresses for humanity, a