18.


The Process of Courtship


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: