I believe it to be true that the education and outlook of men is more
old-fashioned than that of women reared in the freedom of feminist
traditions. Men have not yet realized how women’s outlook is changing,
nor attempted very seriously to adapt themselves to the change. They
will do so, of a certainty; for, true as it may be that above all
desires in woman is that to be pleasing to men, it is still truer that
the desire of desires in man is to be pleasing to women. I believe that
Puritanism or asceticism, of which they accuse us, is very strong in
them. One of the compliments or insults that has been hurled during the
sex-war is that the feminine mind is pervaded by the physical harmony
of the feminine body. One may perhaps retort that the dualism of mind
and matter is a very masculine philosophy; and one which, moreover, men
have translated into their everyday lives by the sharp division they
like to make between fighters and thinkers, games-playing idiots and
thin intellectuals. Too often a woman of vitality and intelligence must
choose between a soldier-gentleman and Chaucer’s clerk.[15] Should she
choose the former, she takes a plunge into the past. This man exults in
murder, whether of animals or of his fellow-creatures; deep down within
him he is still convinced that women are divided into good and bad――and
both require the handling of a master. His wife must beware how she
responds to his advances; she may be thought forward or impure. Decency
must above all things be preserved. Though games and the classics may
have taught the English gentleman the beauty of paganism and the joy
of the naked body where man is concerned, he is still stuffy in his
approach to sex. He rarely brings the freshness of the morning and the
joy of the open skies to the love of mistress or of wife. Plush, gilt
and silk stockings express the one; pipe, the armchair at the fireside,
dinner, and a coldly furnished bedroom, the other. Conversation is
a masculine monologue, punctuated by assent. He will be good to his
children, provided they are not odd, and will protect his wife. He will
never lift her to rapture. She fears, and will probably deceive him.
[15] A clerk ther was of Oxenford also
That unto logyk hadde longe y-go.
As leene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake,
* * * * *
And him was lever have at his beddes heed
Twenty bokes clad in black or reed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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