them, there does rise a psychic difference that is real and wide. Alike in
the sports of puppydom and the non-sexual activities of adult age; alike in
the possession of the initial sexual instinct which draws the sex to the
sex, the moment active sexual reproduction is concerned, there is opened to
the female a certain world of sensations and experiences, from which her
male companion is for ever excluded.

So also is our human world: alike in the sports, and joys, and sorrows of
infancy; alike in the non-sexual labours of life; alike even in the
possession of that initial instinct which draws sex to sex, and which,
differing slightly in its forms of manifestation is of corresponding
intensity in both; the moment actual reproduction begins to take place, the
man and the woman enter spheres of sensation, perception, emotion, desire,
and knowledge which are not, and cannot be, absolutely identical. Between
the man who, in an instant of light-hearted enjoyment, begets the infant
(who may even beget it in a state of half-drunken unconsciousness, and may
easily know nothing of its existence for months or years after it is born,
or never at all; and who under no circumstances can have any direct
sensational knowledge of its relation to himself) and the woman who bears
it continuously for months within her body, and who gives birth to it in
pain, and who, if it is to live, is compelled, or was in primitive times,
to nourish it for months from the blood of her own being--between these,
there exists of necessity, towards a limited but all-important body of
human interests and phenomena, a certain distinct psychic attitude. At
this one point, the two great halves of humanity stand confronting certain
great elements in human existence, from angles that are not identical.
From the moment the universal initial attraction of sex to sex becomes
incarnate in the first concrete sexual act till the developed offspring
attains maturity, no step in the reproductive journey, or in their relation
to their offspring, has been quite identical for the man and the woman.