will soon learn to understand her husband as he is, and thus achieve the ability to love him in all of his uniqueness and individuality.
The central characteristic of the male, and the one that most clearly differentiates him from the female, is his aggressiveness.
In the sexual sphere this shows itself most clearly in the fact that the man takes, for the most part, the initiative in wooing. He it is who is the pursuer, the girl the pursued; he it is who proposes and he it is who initiates sex.
An analogy to this fundamentally aggressive activity of the male in relationship to the female is seen, in a primordial biological form, by the function of his sperm. As you may know, the individual spermatozoon is an individual cell which is propelled by a microscopic tail. After the deposit of spermatozoa in the vagina, the individual sperm actively seeks out and joins the ova, which has been passively waiting for it. This physiological metaphor, according to certain leading theoreticians, well expresses the fundamentally aggressive nature of man in relationship to woman, psychologically as well as sexually.
The male's aggressiveness is, in general, directed to mastery of the outside world. It shows in him from his earliest years. The sports that he selects have to do with physical aggression almost exclusively (of course some girls also like certain aggressive sports at an early age, but most give them up in puberty). He likes the sports in which he has to run hard, to charge, to tackle, throw, and hit. In his adolescence he will spend years in mastering skills that concern such aggressive activity. A component of this aggressive desire for mastery is his competitiveness with other boys. He wishes to be as good or better than they are, to make his mastery known to the outside world.
In the mental sphere, too, this basic aggressiveness is
