Life would be liberated. An instinct that continually is hindered and denied cannot easily develop for health; and often, owing to these hindrances, the sexual life is stunted; then later the right and simple impulse to the performance of the sex act and its final consummation and enjoyment may be interfered with for ever and even prevented. Will you think what this means. In plain words, we are, by our false ideals and the wrong attitude towards the sexual life which conditions our system of education for girls, doing all that we can to prevent them from being women. I am not exaggerating; I am trying to make you see what it is that is wrong with life. Every one who refuses to blink facts knows that the vast majority of marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. It is certain that sexual anæsthesia to-day is present in many women, and there would seem, indeed, to be an increasing diminution of the strength of the sexual impulse. Any number of women are unable to give themselves up to the sex act in such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the gladness and health that it should give. This is a very grave matter. The evil would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule they do marry. It is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold are sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women, probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to the man. Men are persistently blind in these matters. They want response to their own desire in their wives, but most of them are very much afraid of any woman who possesses the strong passion to enable them to give such response. The woman gains her fulfilment from the man when he gives her his child, but when she turns from him she leaves him unsatisfied.[104] The drama and the novel are burdened with this problem, which, indeed, intrudes itself on every hand. We are, by our wrong ideals, inducing an entirely perverted view, which regards physical desire as something of which women should be ashamed, and the sex act as a thing in itself degrading and even disgusting—the nasty side of love; something to be submitted to, indeed, in order to bear children, or for the sake of the loved man, whose passions must be allowed, but not for the health and desire, the delight and perfectment of the woman herself. This false view, I affirm again, is the blight that has been, and still is, the destroyer of woman, and through her, equally the destroyer of man.