When girls in course of developing the maternal function, with all its attendant psychical implications, are strained by athletics, by over-culture or industrial exhaustion, the vital resources are so diverted from the evolution of this function as to cause incapacitation in them, partial or complete, for wifehood, and for the bearing of sound and fine offspring. Sterilisation, absolute or partial, is induced; with dwarfed structure, blighted emotions and warped instincts. Even in women who have developed normally, disease or atrophy of reproductive organs may follow constitutional strain or undue effort.
Toll to Life, in genesis of potential lives, is exacted likewise from the male. It is a reflex in him of the vital maternal function, inherent in his Woman-side. And this perpetual Life-tax upon his energies so reduces these as to temper his physical and nervous activities and his bent for individuation, and thus inhibits him from squandering his whole potential of Life-power in volitional output. Thus is preserved in him that normal proportion between Individuation and Perpetuation which Herbert Spencer describes as existing in inverse ratio to one another.
Thus also is preserved in him the normal mental balance between the Male and the Female departments of his dual brain. Men muscularly or intellectually overactive become lopsided and ineffective; restless and wasteful of their forces, chill and sterile of temperament; having lost that fine fructifying calm wherein creative potential is engendered for concrete achievement; having lost also that equipoise of faculty whereon mental and moral stability depend.
The Life-tax levied on the male is incomparably less, however, than that exacted of the female.
It is because of their _anabolic_ mode of tissue-cells, less wasteful upon the material plane, that girls and women normally require less food than boys and men do. Notwithstanding that their bodies are more highly nourished than are those of males. Healthy young women continue to be plump and pretty, healthful and active on bread-and-butter, fruits and sweetmeats. While mannish women, whose physiology has deteriorated to the _katabolic_, disruptive and forceful, male mode, possess frequently the hungry appetites of men; not only for food but for drink. And yet withal, they are lean and for the most part plain, and poorly nourished.