Christopher Turner > Quotes

“In 1919, the year women were first able to vote in Austria, Weininger's ideas on the "emancipation question" were being newly debated; the Christian Socials feared that the polls would be overrun with radicals, while less activist women, more likely to vote conservative, would stay away (they proposed that voting should be obligatory). Weininger thought that women were passive, purely sexual beings - even though they weren't fully conscious of their sexuality - who longed to be dominated. They were therefore not fully in possession of their reason, and not worthy of the vote. He believed that only men were capable of rationality and genius. By transcending sexuality and the body, exercising sexual restraint that women were incapable, men were able to allow these energies to be sublimated into the disinterested realms of art and politics. "Man possesses the penis," Weininger explained, in an aphorism that was to become popular, "but the vagina possesses the woman".”
― Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America