14.


Pseudo-Anaesthesia


The feminine talent for concealing emotion is probably largely
responsible for the common masculine belief that women are devoid
of passion, and contemplate its manifestations in the male with
something akin to trembling. Here the talent itself is helped out by
the fact that very few masculine observers, on the occasions when
they give attention to the matter, are in a state of mind conducive
to exact observation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely
no reason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that
the minority of women who unquestionably are is of formidable
dimensions. To be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in
the Northern countries, makes them place a high value upon the
virginal type of woman, and so this type tends to grow more
common by sexual selection, but despite that fact, it has by no
means superseded the normal type, so realistically described by the
theologians and publicists of the Middle Ages. It would, however,
be rash to assert that this long continued sexual selection has not
made itself felt, even in the normal type. Its chief effect, perhaps, is
to make it measurably easier for a woman to conquer and conceal
emotion than it is for a man. But this is a mere reinforcement of a
native quality or, at all events, a quality long antedating the rise of
the curious preference just mentioned. That preference obviously
owes its origin to the concept of private property and is most evident
in those countries in which the largest proportion of males are