This bemusement of the typical woman by the notion of marriage has been
noted as self-evident by every literate student of the phenomena of
sex, from the early Christian fathers down to Nietzsche, Ellis and
Shaw. That it is denied by the current sentimentality of Christendom is
surely no evidence against it. What we have in this denial, as I have
said, is no more than a proof of woman’s talent for a high and sardonic
form of comedy and of man’s infinite vanity. “I wooed and won her,”
says Sganarelle of his wife. “I made him run,” says the hare of the
hound. When the thing is maintained, not as a mere windy
sentimentality, but with some notion of carrying it logically, the
result is invariably a display of paralogy so absurd that it becomes
pathetic. Such nonsense one looks for in the works of gyneophile
theorists with no experience of the world, and there is where one finds
it. It is almost always wedded to the astounding doctrine that sexual
frigidity, already disposed of, is normal in the female, and that the
approach of the male is made possible, not by its melting into passion,
but by a purely intellectual determination, inwardly revolting, to
avoid his ire by pandering to his gross appetites. Thus the thing is
stated in a book called “The Sexes in Science and History,” by Eliza
Burt Gamble, an American lady anthropologist:
The beautiful coloring of male birds and fishes, and the various
appendages acquired by males throughout the various orders below man,
and which, sofar as they themselves are concerned, serve no other
useful purpose than to aid them in securing the favours of the females,
have by the latter been turned to account in the processes of
reproduction. The female made the male beautiful _That She Might Endure
His Caresses_.
The italics are mine. From this premiss the learned doctor proceeds to
the classical sentimental argument that the males of all species,
including man, are little more than chronic seducers, and that their
chief energies are devoted to assaulting and breaking down the native
reluctance of the aesthetic and anesthetic females. In her own words:
“Regarding males, outside of the instinct for self-preservation, which,
by the way is often overshadowed by their great sexual eagerness, no
discriminating characters have been acquired and transmitted, other
than those which have been the result of passion, namely, pugnacity and
perseverance.” Again the italics are mine. What we have here is merely
the old, old delusion of masculine enterprise in amour—the concept of
man as a lascivious monster and of woman as his shrinking victim—in
brief, the Don Juan idea in fresh bib and tucker. In such bilge lie the
springs of many of the most vexatious delusions of the world, and of
some of its loudest farce no less. It is thus that fatuous old maids
are led to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out
that they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres,
and to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is
thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been
launched, with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms. And it is
thus, more importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have
been convinced that their children are monuments, not to a co-operation
in which their own share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary
libidinousness of their swinish and unconscionable husbands.
Dr. Gamble, of course, is speaking of the lower fauna in the time of
Noah. A literal application of her theory to man today is enough to
bring it to a reductio ad absurdum. Which sex of Homo sapiens actually
does the primping and parading that she describes? Which runs to
“beautiful coloring,” sartorial, hirsute, facial? Which encases itself
in vestments which “serve no other useful purpose than to aid in
securing the favours” of the other? The insecurity of the gifted
savante’s position is at once apparent. The more convincingly she
argues that the primeval mud-hens and she mackerel had to be
anesthetized with spectacular decorations in order to “endure the
caresses” of their beaux, the more she supports the thesis that men
have to be decoyed and bamboozled into love today. In other words, her
argument turns upon and destroys itself. Carried to its last
implication, it holds that women are all Donna Juanitas, and that if
they put off their millinery and cosmetics, and abandoned the shameless
sexual allurements of their scanty dress, men could not “endure their
caresses.”
To be sure, Dr. Gamble by no means draws this disconcerting conclusion
herself. To the contrary, she clings to the conventional theory that
the human female of today is no more than the plaything of the
concupiscent male, and that she must wait for the feminist millenium to
set her free from his abominable pawings. But she can reach this notion
only by standing her whole structure of reasoning on its head—in fact,
by knocking it over and repudiating it. On the one hand, she argues
that splendour of attire is merely a bait to overcome the reluctance of
the opposite sex, and on the other hand she argues, at least by fair
inference, that it is not. This grotesque switching of horses, however,
need not detain us. The facts are too plain to be disposed of by a lady
anthropologist’s theorizings. Those facts are supported, in the field
of animal behaviour, by the almost unanimous evidence of zoologists,
including that of Dr. Gamble herself. They are supported, in the field
of human behaviour, by a body of observation and experience so colossal
that it would be quite out of the question to dispose of it. Women, as
I have shown, have a more delicate aesthetic sense than men; in a world
wholly rid of men they would probably still array themselves with
vastly more care and thought of beauty than men would ever show in like
case. But with the world what it is, it must be obvious that their
display of finery—to say nothing of their display of epidermis—has the
conscious purpose of attracting the masculine eye. A normal woman,
indeed, never so much as buys a pair of shoes or has her teeth plugged
without considering, in the back of her mind, the effect upon some
unsuspecting candidate for her “reluctant” affections.