"It is absurd
to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and
masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a
genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch
only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of
femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being.
Any
exclusively virile individual is just a brute animal; any exclusively feminine
individual is only a female.
It is the
same way with any collectivity and any moment in humanity, just as it is with
individuals. The fecund periods, when the most heroes and geniuses come forth
from the terrain of culture in all its ebullience, are rich in masculinity and
femininity.
Those
periods that had only wars, with few representative heroes because the epic
breath flattened them out, were exclusively virile periods; those that denied
the heroic instinct and, turning toward the past, annihilated themselves in
dreams of peace, were periods in which femininity was dominant.
We are
living at the end of one of these periods. What is most lacking in women as in
men is virility.
That is why
Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right.
To restore
some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them in
virility even to the point of brute animality. But we have to impose on
everyone, men and women who are equally weak, a new dogma of energy in order to
arrive at a period of superior humanity.
Every woman
ought to possess not only feminine virtues but virile ones, without which she
is just a female. Any man who has only male strength without intuition is only
a brute animal. But in the period of femininity in which we are living, only
the contrary exaggeration is healthy: we have to take the brute animal for a
model.
Enough of
those women whose “arms with twining flowers resting on their laps on the
morning of departure” should be feared by soldiers; women as nurses
perpetuating weakness and age, domesticating men for their personal pleasures
or their material needs! … Enough women who create children just for
themselves, keeping them from any danger or adventure, that is, any joy;
keeping their daughter from love and their son from war! … Enough of those
women, the octopuses of the hearth, whose tentacles exhaust men’s blood and
make children anemic, women in carnal love who wear out every desire so it
cannot be renewed!
Women are
Furies, Amazons, Semiramis, Joans of Arc, Jeanne Hachettes, Judith and
Charlotte Cordays, Cleopatras, and Messalinas: combative women who fight more
ferociously than males, lovers who arouse, destroyers who break down the
weakest and help select through pride or despair, “despair through which the
heart yields its fullest return:’Let the next wars bring forth heroines like
that magnificent Catherine Sforza, who, during the sack of her city, watching
from the ramparts as her enemy threatened the life of her son to force her
surrender, heroically pointing to her sexual organ, cried loudly: “Kill him, I
still have the mold to make some more!”"
(tjek også Valeries futuristiske Begærsmanifest)!
