according to the particular stage of the dominating masculine ideal of
woman which their partner chanced to have reached. But that is an attitude
equally unsatisfactory to themselves and to their lovers, even when the
latter have not sufficient insight to see through its unreality. It is an
attitude so unnatural and artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a
real coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true that women whose
instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold. Far
from it. But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and
the insight and skill of the right man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks
nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the
higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act
of love. Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's. For the
biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human
range, are the erotic rights of women.

The social claims of women, their economic claims, their political claims,
have long been before the world. Women themselves have actively asserted
them, and they are all in process of realisation. The erotic claims of
women, which are at least as fundamental, are not publicly voiced, and
women themselves would be the last to assert them. It is easy to
understand why that should be so. The natural and acquired qualities of
women, even the qualities developed in the art of courtship, have all been
utilised in building up the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on
feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal has been based, so
that women have been helpless to protest against it. Moreover, even if
that were not so, to formulate such rights is to raise the question
whether there so much as exists anything that can be called "erotic
rights." The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims
the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box. A human being's erotic
aptitudes can only be developed where the right atmosphere for them