And the pity of the whole thing is that the critics who keep lecturing us on our oversexedness don't realize that what they're really trying to get at is our poverty of spirit, our emotional incapacities, our vanities, our pettinesses--any number of qualities which spring from anything but too much sex. Nothing is safer than to say that the man or woman of strong sex equipment is rarely vain or petty or mean or unintelligent. But as a result of all this vague bickering, "sex" continues to shoulder the blame for all kinds of shortcomings, and the real root of the trouble goes untreated--even undiagnosed. One thing is certain: until we become conscious that there's something very wrong with our attitude toward sex, we'll never get rid of the hard, tight, anæmic, metallic woman who flourishes in America as nowhere else in the world. This doesn't mean the old Puritan type, to whom sex was a rotten, unmentionable thing; nor does it mean the Victorian, who recognizes the sex impulse only as a means to an end. They belong to the past too definitely to be harmful. It means two newer types than these: the woman who looks upon sex as something to be endured and forgiven, and the woman who doesn't feel at all. The first type has a great (and by no means a secret) pride in her spiritual superiority to the coarse creature she married, and a never-dying hope that she can lead him up to her level. She talks a lot about spirituality; she has her standards, and she knows how to classify what she calls "sensuality"; she's convinced that she has married the best man in the world, but--well, all men have this failing in common, and the only thing one can do is to rise above it magnificently, with that air of spiritual isolation which is her most effective weapon. Shaw has hit her off on occasion, but he ought to devote a whole three acts to her undoing; or perhaps an Ibsen would do it better, because tragedy follows her path like some sinister shadow, as inevitably as those other "ghosts" of his. The second type has no more capacity for love or sex than she has for music or poetry--which is none at all. Like a polished glass vase, empty and beautiful, she lures the man who loves her to a kind of supreme nothingness. She will always tell you that marriage is "wonderful"; and she urges all her friends to marry as quickly as possible, for that's the only way to be perfectly happy. Marriage is "wonderful" to her just as birth is "wonderful" in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's satire: