No. 6. Woman’s _Sensuality_ will be stoutly denied, not only by women themselves, but by all sentimental and women-ridden men. Owing to the lies told by the writers of the J. S. Mill type, most modern Anglo-Saxons have got it into their heads that woman has acted as a moralizing influence on man, and has thus led to a curbing and taming of the sensual impulses of humanity; in fact that civilization is largely her work.[226] With such false doctrines in their minds, it is naturally difficult to convince such people that woman is sensual; for, with cerulean-eyed innocence they exclaim: “How can sensuality moralize mankind?” True enough, it cannot; but the mistake is to suppose anything so fatuous and absurd as that women ever advanced morality by a hair’s breadth. I think I have shown sufficiently cogently that when they do exercise any influence “out of their proper bounds” it is only in order to spread their bad taste and their vulgarity. How then could their effect on humanity’s civilization and cultivation have been anything but a retarding one? The truth is that woman’s direct influence in most civilizations has been but small, and where this direct influence has been felt, whether acutely or insignificantly, it is always unfavourable. But let us not suppose that on that account sensuality is an evil.—On the contrary, it is one of the greatest mainstays of life. Without sensuality we could not advance from one generation to another; without a love of the flesh and its joys human nature and the animal creation would come to an end in half a century. In this sense, seeing that to-day we are all Puritans—if not in deed, at least in thought—I have the best possible proof of how little woman has influenced civilization for the good. For woman is chiefly sensual. If then she had influenced civilization for the good, she must have checked Puritanism. Because even if we admit, as we must, that her sensuality must be kept within proper bounds by man, we are forced to inquire how it is that the whole of Western Europe, and all countries like it, are Puritan to-day, if woman has exercised any influence on the evolution of society, and that influence has been a good influence. The reader may reply that this proves that woman is _not_ sensual. But I invite him to consider the process of bearing and rearing children. Surely it is from start to finish—from the coitus to the weaning—a sensuous process; and in that sense woman’s sensuality is entirely laudable. When once this sensuous process ceases from being pleasant in all its stages, disease is present, and the species is in danger of extermination.[227] This danger may be remote, but it must be recognized. Now, how can we expect a creature to find pleasure in a sensuous process lasting over such a long period of time unless sensuality plays a great part in her constitution?