"When I read it first it was like looking at a man in profile and finding him solid and satisfactory, and then afterwards when I thought it all over and looked for the particular things that really matter to me and tried to translate it into myself--nothing is of the slightest importance in the world that one cannot translate into oneself--then I began to realize just how amazingly deficient you are. It was like walking round that person in profile and finding his left side wasn't there--with everything perfect on the right, down to the buttons. A kind of intellectual Lorelei--sideways. You've planned out your understandings and tolerances and enquiries and clearings-up as if the world were all just men--or citizens--and nothing doing but racial and national and class prejudices and the exacting and shirking of labor, and you seem to ignore altogether that man is a sexual animal first--first, Stephen, first--that he has that in common with all the animals, that it made him indeed because he has it more than they have--and after that, a long way after that, he is the labor-economizing, war-and feud-making creature you make him out to be. A long way after that.... "Man is the most sexual of all the beasts, Stephen. Half of him, womankind, rather more than half, isn't simply human at all, it's specialized, specialized for the young, not only naturally and physically as animals are, but mentally and artificially. Womankind isn't human, it's reduced human. It's 'the sex' as the Victorians used to say, and from the point of view of the Lex Julia and the point of view of Mr. Malthus, and the point of view of biologists and saints and artists and everyone who deals in feeling and emotion--and from the point of view of all us poor specialists, smothered up in our clothes and restrictions--the future of the sex is the centre of the whole problem of the human future, about which you are concerned. All this great world-state of your man's imagination is going to be wrecked by us if you ignore us, we women are going to be the Goths and Huns of another Decline and Fall. We are going to sit in the conspicuous places of the world and _loot_ all your patient accumulations. We are going to abolish your offspring and turn the princes among you into undignified slaves. Because, you see, specialized as we are, we are not quite specialized, we are specialized under duress, and at the first glimpse of a chance we abandon our cradles and drop our pots and pans and go for the vast and elegant side possibilities--of our specialization. Out we come, looking for the fun the men are having. Dress us, feed us, play with us! We'll pay you in excitement,--tremendous excitement. The State indeed! All your little triumphs of science and economy, all your little accumulations of wealth that you think will presently make the struggle for life an old story and the millennium possible--_we spend_. And all your dreams of brotherhood!--we will set you by the ears. We hold