Woman and the masculine protest

The contrast between the potent, aggressive male and the impotent female is so widespread that when anything gives a male a sense of weakness, inadequacy, or incompleteness, he seizes upon the contrast and begins to suspect that he is lacking in virility, a thing so unendurably disgraceful that his whole life becomes one intense, unremitting effort to prove to himself and all the world that this is not so. That is the and when one is obsessed with it, he soon develops the neurotic constitution--always determined to be the superior male, always tense and overbearing except when he is exhausted, and, of course, always subject to the physical symptoms that such a purgatorial life involves. When suspicion or accusation of inferiority leads to a protest in women, it is by no means always a masculine protest. An uncomfortable sense of inferiority is very common, indeed, with women. Its victims attribute it to a variety of causes. They care about all kinds of social relations; they want to be like other girls they admire; and their self-respect is not so steeped in thoughts of worthy masculinity that it is marked. The dominant thoughts and impulses of youthful human beings are more social than sexual, and their social ambitions are not all couched in terms of brute force. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

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• Recent studies in sex differences

  C N Allen•Psychological Bulletin•1930

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