But what is the reason why women cannot resist him? Let us first settle
the point as to why women are attracted to men. I will answer this
question briefly, and though my answer may appear dogmatical, it need
not therefore be wrong. Women know very little of man, but there is one
thing they feel with unfailing certainty, and that is whether their sex
is of great or of small significance to him. (I am only alluding to the
general effect of men on women, not to genuine personal love which is
always incommensurable.) The greater the importance a man attaches to
women, the more readily do they respond to his influence. They are
attracted by his erotic will, not by one or the other of his spiritual
or physical qualities. Women cannot resist a man to whom they mean much,
everything. It is as if they were compelled to throw themselves into the
chasm of his vacuity--every fresh victim with the fond hope of filling
it--but all of them perish. And yet, at the moment of their defeat they
are supremely happy, for they experience the full intensity of his
passion and the boundlessness of his longing. The erotic craving of a
man simply means that women are to him the most important thing in life.
Women instinctively yield to that man who most eagerly desires them. The
coarse sensualist, to whom all women are alike, attracts sensual women,
not exactly because they find in him the satisfaction of their craving,
but because they themselves act on him indiscriminately. But a woman
will adapt herself with the greatest ease to the needs of the
differentiated erotic (for instance, she will become really sentimental
to please the man who prefers sentimental women), for she loves to give
herself to the man who most desires her and as he desires her.
Don Juan, animated by illimitable erotic yearning, is therefore the
undisputed master of the other sex. He has the power of bestowing
absolute happiness, even if only for a brief hour, because in his
boundless love (which is projected on anything but her) a woman receives
the supreme value. Maybe he would be saved if a woman denied herself to
him--maybe he would cease to be a seeker of love and become a
worshipper, for he could not refuse to believe in the woman who
rejected him; but it is his fate that no woman he woos can resist him,
that all throw themselves into his arms without an exception and without
a struggle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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