tion there has been based by
many a fixed standard for the supposed natural relation between man
and woman--he active and seeking, she passive and receiving.

But is this really a fair statement of the reproduction process? The
hunger-driven male-cell certainly seeks the female--but what happens
then? The female cellule, the ovule, _preserves its individuality and
absorbs the masculine cellule, or is impregnated by it_. Thus, to use
the term "passive" in this connection is surely curiously misleading;
as well call the snake passive when, waiting motionless, it charms and
draws towards it the victim it will devour. Illustrations are apt to
mislead, nevertheless they do help us to see straight, and until we
have come to find the truth here we shall be fumbling for the grounds
of any safe conclusion as to the natural relationship of the female
and the male. I think we must take a wider view of the sexual
relationship, and conclude that the passivity of the female is not
real, but only an apparent passivity. We may even go so far as to say
that the female element has from the very first to play the more
complex and difficult, the more important part. Herein, at the very
start of life, is typified in a manner at once simple and convincing
that differentiation which divides so sharply the sexual activity of
the female from that of the male. The serious part in sex belongs to
the one who gives life, while in comparison the activity of the male
can almost be regarded as trifling. And I believe that this view will
be found to be amply supported by facts if we turn now to consider the
later and human relation of the sexes. In all cases it is the same,
the serious business in sex belongs to the woman. As it was in the
beginning, so, it seems to me, it continues to the end--it is woman
who really leads, she who in sex absorbs and uses the male.

"The passivity of the female in love," it has been said wisely by
Marro in his fine work _La Puberta_, "is the passivity of the magnet,
which in its apparent immobility is drawing the iron towards it. An
intense energy lies behind such passivity, an absorbed pre-occupation
in the end to be attained."[313] In the examples we have studied of
the courtships of birds we saw that it is by no means a universal law
that the male is eager and the female coy. I need only recall the
instance noted by Darwin[314] in which a wild duck forced her love on
a male pintail, and such cases, as is well known