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