Sexism; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
The reform-monging suffragists seem to be equally devoid of the more
caressing gifts. They may be filled with altruistic passion, but they
certainly have bad complexions, and not many of them know how to dress
their hair. Nine-tenths of them advocate reforms aimed at the alleged
lubricity of the male-the single standard, medical certificates for
bridegrooms, birth-control, and so on. The motive here, I believe, is
mere rage and jealousy. The woman who is not pursued sets up the
doctrine that pursuit is offensive to her sex, and wants to make it a
felony. No genuinely attractive woman has any such desire. She likes
masculine admiration, however violently expressed, and is quite able to
take care of herself. More, she is well aware that very few men are
bold enough to offer it without a plain invitation, and this awareness
makes her extremely cynical of all women who complain of being
harassed, beset, storied, and seduced. All the more intelligent women
that I know, indeed, are unanimously of the opinion that no girl in her
right senses has ever been actually seduced since the world began;
whenever they hear of a case, they sympathize with the man. Yet more,
the normal woman of lively charms, roving about among men, always tries
to draw the admiration of those who have previously admired elsewhere;
she prefers the professional to the amateur, and estimates her skill by
the attractiveness of the huntresses who have hitherto stalked it. The
iron-faced suffragist propagandist, if she gets a man at all, must get
one wholly without sentimental experience. If he has any, her crude
manoeuvres make him laugh and he is repelled by her lack of pulchritude
and amiability. All such suffragists (save a few miraculous beauties)
marry ninth-rate men when they marry at all. They have to put up with
the sort of castoffs who are almost ready to fall in love with lady
physicists, embryologists, and embalmers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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