26
MALE AND
FEMALE PRIDE: A beautiful woman is usually delighted by the admiring attentions
of the good-looking men she happens to encounter in life. She takes much of her pride and happiness
from the fact that such men find her attractive and therefore worthy of their
admiration. Her face often betrays her
self-satisfaction, the knowledge that she is desirable. Thus her pride is direct; it is rooted in herself and requires no external props - other, of course,
than the necessary or desired means of adorning her body.
Not so, however, with a man! As a rule, he is not so
proud of himself as a kind of 'thing-in-itself', but mostly in relation to what
he represents, to the kind of work he does and the degree of respect or
recognition (if any) he can expect from that.
Take away his work and you automatically deprive him of the chief means
whereby he can feel admirable to himself.
His pride isn't centred, like that of an attractive woman, directly upon
himself but only indirectly, through the medium of what he has achieved and
continues to achieve in life. If he is
to be admired, it will be as a musician, lawyer, sportsman, soldier, doctor,
builder, disc jockey, politician, manager, painter, writer, etc., according to
the nature of his temperament, talents, and social position.
But if he is without work, then there is
very little that he can be genuinely proud of; he is not encouraged, by nature,
to regard himself as admirable in himself to anything like the same extent as
an attractive woman, and so he is inevitably at a
distinct disadvantage to such a woman in the same predicament. For men and women are, and will remain,
fundamentally different creatures.