Sexism; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
Fortunately for the human race, the campaigns of these indignant
viragoes will come to naught. Men will keep on pursuing women until
hell freezes over, and women will keep luring them on. If the latter
enterprise were abandoned, in fact, the whole game of love would play
out, for not many men take any notice of women spontaneously. Nine men
out of ten would be quite happy, I believe, if there were no women in
the world, once they had grown accustomed to the quiet. Practically all
men are their happiest when they are engaged upon activities—for
example, drinking, gambling, hunting, business, adventure—to which
women are not ordinarily admitted. It is women who seduce them from
such celibate doings. The hare postures and gyrates in front of the
hound. The way to put an end to the gaudy crimes that the suffragist
alarmists talk about is to shave the heads of all the pretty girls in
the world, and pluck out their eyebrows, and pull their teeth, and put
them in khaki, and forbid them to wriggle on dance-floors, or to wear
scents, or to use lip-sticks, or to roll their eyes. Reform, as usual,
mistakes the fish for the fly.
33. A Glance Into the Future
The present public prosperity of the ex-suffragettes is chiefly due to
the fact that the old-time male politicians, being naturally very
stupid, mistake them for spokesmen for the whole body of women, and so
show them politeness. But soon or late—and probably disconcertingly
soon—the great mass of sensible and agnostic women will turn upon them
and depose them, and thereafter the woman vote will be no longer at the
disposal of bogus Great Thinkers and messiahs. If the suffragettes
continue to fill the newspapers with nonsense, once that change has
been effected, it will be only as a minority sect of tolerated idiots,
like the Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, Seventh Day Adventists
and other such fanatics of today. This was the history of the extension
of the suffrage in all of the American states that made it before the
national enfranchisement of women and it will be repeated in the nation
at large, and in Great Britain and on the Continent. Women are not
taken in by quackery as readily as men are; the hardness of their shell
of logic makes it difficult to penetrate to their emotions. For one
woman who testifies publicly that she has been cured of cancer by some
swindling patent medicine, there are at least twenty masculine
witnesses. Even such frauds as the favourite American elixir, Lydia
Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which are ostensibly remedies for
specifically feminine ills, anatomically impossible in the male, are
chiefly swallowed, so an intelligent druggist tells me, by men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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