What should feminism be? Is there any good likely to come of embracing an overtly partisan interest? It seems that feminism should be, nothing more nor less, advocacy for the love of the feminine. Increasing the degree to which women and their femininity is valued. But feminism seems to mean something else. Hatred of the masculine. Perhaps even hatred of the traditionally feminine. Partisan social and political power brokering for women, in the barest sense. Women as a bloc, as a class, as an oppositional identity.

That’s a very different concept than feminism, the way of the female. Femininity is something we belong to, rather than possess. It is a transhuman abstraction. It is embodied in women, all women, in varying ways and to different degrees. But because it is not itself a person, not a being with individual interests, but rather belongs to the realm of spirit and essence, it can only demand what is appropriate to such an entity. And you can only render to it what is fitting for such a spirit.

And the appropriate response to femininity is understanding, appreciation, love, perhaps even need, as the child needs its mother, or desire, as the lover desires his beloved. We can embrace and inhabit femininity, live within it, as a woman, as a devotee and avatar; or we can embrace and inhabit femininity as a child or as a lover, as a man. You cannot possess Venus, and you cannot give her the goods of mortal life. She doesn’t need them and cannot use them. The only true good she requires and deserves is your worship.

There is no good man, possessed of masculinity, who could not love this feminism, who would not be driven toward it by his very being and by his very masculinity. To love the feminine is the great calling of men. I won’t say that it’s not a struggle. Women often struggle to appreciate men and masculinity, just as men struggle with femininity. We’re not always sure what to do with it, and we’re not always sure we wouldn’t be better off without the other.

But it is inherent to both sexes, not only to be what they are and to love and appreciate themselves (and to find it hard, therefore, to understand and embrace that which is not like ourselves) to seek and love that which is different. Attraction between the sexes is as fundamental a law of the natural world as the laws of magnetism. The two exist as differences to find their completion in one another. That is the purpose of sex, it is why we have it.

Masculinity and femininity are both fundamentally incomplete. That is part of the human condition, a fracturing of the species we are unable to face or solve or recover from except by making the choice and compromise to return to one another. That is a painful reality to face. But the survival of our species has been made conditional on our ability to accept it. That’s a pretty forceful inducement. I won’t comment on the ethics of such existential blackmail, except to observe that you won’t escape it by resenting it or refusing it.

So long as we are caught within such a trap, we may as well learn to love and worship Venus. She is part of the world we cannot escape. As is Mars. And Venus and Mars, though they are two of the most dangerous and unpredictable of all the gods, are the parents of Concordia. The marriage of the sexes in a stable society. Harmonia, as she was known in Greek, held in her hands the caduceus and the cornucopia, peace and prosperity. But her opposite was Eris, or Discordia. The Greeks were wise enough to build no temples to Eris and give her no devotion, no worship. But I am not so sure that we are so sensible.