“In the modern world, man becomes a slave to... the feminine principle, seduced by images and illusions created by emotion and fantasy—decadent forms of eros.” —Julius Evola, Metaphysics of Sex The modern cult of equality has fixed its gaze upon the sexes. What had once been regarded as the polarity of man and woman, grounded in nature and consecrated by tradition, has been lowered to a counterfeit of sameness. Evola returned often to this inversion, discerning in it the same anti-hierarchical impulse that has disfigured every other sphere of life, and which, under the guise of liberation, has stripped both sexes of the dignity proper to their stations. What the age heralds as emancipation he judged to be a degradation, for feminism does not raise woman to her station but strips her of it, compelling her to abandon her essence in order to imitate man, while man himself, bereft of his higher path, sinks into a condition at once impoverished and grotesque. For Evola, culture was the victory of form over chaos, the conquest of the shapeless by order and measure. The city and the empire arose from the recognition of limits, of distinctions, of the rightful ranking of beings. Man attained his true stature as warrior and ascetic; woman realized her dignity as lover and mother. These types were not adversaries but counterparts, separate yet joined, each consecrated to the same principle of transcendence, each charged with its own path of heroism. In the sharpening of these forms, in the intensification of the masculine and the feminine, Europe attained its strength, and love retained its ancient dignity as a force at once generative and cosmic. There is also a beauty in the truth of form, for what is bound to nature and consecrated by tradition does not merely endure but shines. When the polarity of man and woman is clarified, when each fulfills the path proper to its essence, the result is not only strength but radiance. Beauty arises when limit is embraced, when form gives shape to matter, when order compels chaos into harmony. To behold such clarity is to glimpse truth itself, for truth and beauty are of one lineage, both testifying to the higher law that governs being. The modern age has broken this harmony. Bolshevism in the East proclaimed the equality of the sexes in the name of the collective. America in the West proclaimed the same in the name of emancipation. Beneath the opposing banners the result was alike: in one case, a promiscuous communality in which difference was dissolved, in the other, the masculinized woman of the factories and the salons. The poles collapsed, the bond was neutralized, eros was reduced to sterile companionship or the fleeting diversions of appetite. Evola named this impulse a radical pessimism, for beneath the assertion of equality lies the confession that woman, as woman, has no worth. She is compelled to take on the guise of man in order to claim value, and in so doing she forfeits the possibility of fulfillment. Man, in turn, is brutalized into a creature of appetite and utility, stripped of the higher forms once embodied in the ascetic and the warrior. Love itself, which depends upon polarity as fire depends upon the tension of elements, is extinguished, and with it the very possibility of renewal. What rises in its place is the gray world of neuter beings, uniform and without grandeur. Woman no longer appears as lover or as mother, but is driven into labor, into agitation, into pale imitations of intellectual life. Man no longer ascends as ascetic or warrior, but sinks into the tradesman, the showman, the brute. Thus the order of life is betrayed in its most intimate relation, and what once gave depth and height to being is consumed in the twilight of sameness. To revolt against this perversion is not to diminish woman but to restore her to her dignity. It is to affirm that difference and hierarchy are the ground of order, that polarity is the essence of love, that the higher destiny of mankind rests upon the distinction of the sexes. In defending this truth one does not merely preserve a passing custom, but upholds the principle of form itself. For in the bond of man and woman is mirrored the eternal strife of order with chaos, and in that strife the fate of the world is decided.show more
