A Mythical Dare-Devil


The truth is that the picture of male carnality that such women
conjure up belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already
observed in dealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt
Gamble, a paralogist on a somewhat higher plane. As they
depict him in their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white-slave
trading and ophthalmia neonatorum, the average male adult of the
Christian and cultured countries leads a life of gaudy lubricity,
rolling magnificently from one liaison to another, and with an almost
endless queue of ruined milliners, dancers, charwomen,
parlour-maids and waitresses behind him, all dying of poison and
despair. The life of man, as these furiously envious ones see it, is
the life of a leading actor in a boulevard revue. He is a polygamous,
multigamous, myriadigamous; an insatiable and unconscionable
debauche, a monster of promiscuity; prodigiously unfaithful to his
wife, and even to his friends' wives; fathomlessly libidinous and
superbly happy.


Needless to say, this picture bears no more relation to the facts than
a dissertation on major strategy by a military "expert" promoted
from dramatic critic. If the chief suffragette scare mongers (I speak
without any embarrassing naming of names) were attractive enough
to men to get near enough to enough men to know enough about
them for their purpose they would paralexia the Dorcas societies
with no such cajoling libels. As a matter of sober fact, the average
man of our time and race is quite incapable of all these incandescent