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But she has confessed to me that men both attract and repel her. Sex-antagonism, I think the moderns call it a desire to tease, to attract, to excite, to destroy. She uses every art to play her game. It is her life. If any man conquered her she would be miserable. A strange creature, you will say, but " "Strange, unnatural, horrible!" She smiled at my sober tone.
Surveying the pages that are past, I am almost inclined to regret that, the plan of the book notwithstanding, a special chapter was not devoted to Sex-Antagonism and to a demonstration on biological grounds of its wickedness and pestilence wherever it be found, and whatever plausible case for it may anywhere be made.
But if this be granted and I have never heard it granted by the men who deplore sex-antagonism as if only women displayed it we must none the less recognize that this spirit injures both sexes, and that it is necessarily false, since none can question that Nature devised the sexes for mutual aid to her end. By this first principle sex-antagonism is therefore condemned.
It is just because our scheme and our objects are natural that they require no support from and lend no warrant to that accursed spirit of sex-antagonism which many well-meaning women now display doubtless by a natural reflex, because it is the spirit of the worst men everywhere.
Fourthly, we have everywhere seen cause to condemn sex-antagonism, and it is my hope that no page or line or word of this book can be accused of illustrating or justifying or inciting to or even attempting to palliate either form of this wholly abominable spirit of the pit. If such places there be, there assuredly is misdirection and falsity. This spirit is one of the great enemies of mankind.
Draper's highly spiced comments on life and folk, her young friend made not the slightest attempt to cope with them or even to understand them. The alluring mistress of the house might talk of sex-antagonism and the hatefulness of the puritanical elements of American life as much as she pleased.
Propriety had been outraged on every hand; matters, heretofore deemed unmentionable, rushed into the forefront of knowledge and conversation; yet never had they actually enjoyed themselves so greatly. The sense of being a storm centre inasmuch as they harboured the viper assassin produced in them an unexampled militancy. Latent sex-antagonism revealed itself.
Before we criticise sex-antagonism in women, let us be honest about it in men; and before we sneer at the type of women who most display it, let us realize fully the worthlessness of the types of men who display it.
He turns from love to hatred with a change of front as swift as a drunkard's. He is the Mad Mullah of all the sex-antagonism that has ever troubled men since they began to think of woman as a temptress. He was the most enthusiastic modern exponent of the point-of-view of that Adam who explained: "The woman tempted me."
But that was trifling compared with the present feeling. In this completed creation she no more existed than the fly which rested for a moment upon the painted canvas. His creation had nothing whatsoever to do with her. And something deeper than egotism, far deeper than jealousy, rose from the depths of her nature in antagonism a sex-antagonism to the whole affair.
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