But it is neither agreement nor disagreement with, but rather the denial and overcoming of her womanishness that a woman should aim at. If a woman really were to wish, for instance, for man’s chastity, it would mean that she had conquered the woman in her, it would mean that pairing was no longer of supreme importance to her and that her aim was no longer to further it. But here is the trouble: such pretensions must not be accepted as genuine, even although here and there they are actually put forward. For a woman who longed for man’s purity is, apart from her hysteria, so stupid and so incapable of truthfulness that she is unable to perceive that she is in this way negating herself, making herself absolutely worthless, without existence! It is difficult to decide which is preferable: the unlimited hypocrisy which can appropriate the thing that is most foreign to it, _i.e._, the ascetic ideal, or the ingenuous admiration for the reformed rake, the complacent devotion to him. The principal problem of the woman question lies in the fact that in each case woman’s one desire is to put all responsibility on man, and in this it is identical with the problem of mankind. Friedrich Nietzsche says in one of his books: “To underestimate the real difficulties of the man and woman problem, to fail to admit the abysmal antagonism and the inevitable nature of the constant strain between the two, to dream of equal rights, education, responsibilities and duties, is the mark of the superficial observer, and any thinker who has been found shallow in these difficult places--shallow by nature--should be looked upon as untrustworthy, as a useless and treacherous guide; he will, no doubt, be one of those who ‘briefly deal with’ all the real problems of life, death and eternity--who never gets to the bottom of things. But the man who is not superficial, who has depth of thought as well as of purpose, the depth which not only makes him desire right but endows him with determination and strength to do right, must always look on woman from the oriental standpoint:--as a possession, as private property, as something born to serve and be dependent on him--he must see the marvellous reasonableness of the Asiatic instinct of superiority over women, as the Greeks of old saw it, those worthy successors and disciples of the Eastern school. It was an attitude towards woman which, as is well known, from Homer’s time till that of Pericles, grew with the growth of culture, and increased in strength step by step, and gradually became quite oriental. What a necessary, logical, desirable growth for mankind! if we could only attain to it ourselves!”