tative. So that the male acts as the passive, or recipient pole
of attraction, the female as the active, positive, exertive pole, in
human relations. Which is a reversal of the old flow. The woman is now
the initiator, man the responder. They seem to play each other's
parts. But man is purely male, playing woman's part, and woman is
purely female, however manly. The gulf between Heliogabalus, or the
most womanly man on earth, and the most manly woman, is just the same
as ever: just the same old gulf between the sexes. The man is male,
the woman is female. Only they are playing one another's parts, as
they must at certain periods. The dynamic polarity has swung around.

If we look a little closer, we can define this positive and negative
business better. As a matter of fact, positive and negative, passive
and active cuts both ways. If the man, as thinker and doer, is active,
or positive, and the woman negative, then, on the other hand, as the
initiator of emotion, of feeling, and of sympathetic understanding the
woman is positive, the man negative. The man may be the initiator in
action, but the woman is initiator in emotion. The man has the
initiative as far as voluntary activity goes, and the woman the
initiative as far as sympathetic activity goes. In love, it is the
woman naturally who loves, the man who is loved. In love, woman is the
positive, man the negative. It is woman who asks, in love, and man who
answers. In life, the reverse is the case. In knowing and in doing,
man is positive and woman negative: man initiates, and woman lives up
to it.

Naturally this nicely arranged order of things may be reversed. Action
and utterance, which are male, are polarized against feeling, emotion,
which are female. And which is positive, which negative? Was man, the
eternal protagonist, born of woman, from her womb of fathomless
emotion? Or was woman, with her deep womb of emotion, born from the
rib of active man, the first created? Man, the doer, the knower, the
original in _being_, is he lord of life? Or is woman, the great
Mother, who bore us from the womb of love, is she the supreme Goddess?

This is the question of all time. And as long as man and woman endure,
so will the answer be given, first one way, then the other. Man, as
the utterer, usually claims that Eve was created out of his spare rib:
from the field of the creative, upper dynamic consciousness, that is.
But woman, as soon as she gets a word in, points to th