THE SEDUCTION OF MEN
Quite recently an action has been brought in the High Courts by a wife against a woman for the seduction of her husband. It is the first time a charge of this kind has been heard in an English court of law, though, I believe, such actions are not unknown in the newer lands of America and Canada.
The case is one of very special interest, and opens up many questions that go right down to the deepest problems of the relationships of men and women.
As we should expect, the action failed. It was held that the man had not been seduced. He was not enticed away from his wife by “the other woman,” rather, it was the other way round. The man, not the woman, must be held responsible; she had yielded to him only at his desire, after persuasion and against her will.
But is this true?
As already in the two previous essays I have emphasised, perhaps over-emphasised, the accepted, very sentimental and peculiar judgment in all these cases. The woman the victim: the man the seducer. He the active sinner: she the passive sufferer. All the blame to be heaped on to him: all the pity to be given to her.
Really it is difficult, as so frequently I have stated, to have patience at this shelving of the real facts. It seems to be forgotten entirely how tremendous is the power of the woman in all love relationships. Why a man under the influence of a woman he loves is as easily led and as devoid of all will-power as a young child. Indeed, he becomes the child of the woman, as soon as, and for as long as, he loves her. He is her’s to make or to destroy. She strengthens him enormously or irreparably injures and weakens his resistance. She can hold him to the hardest duty and keep him in the fine path of right doing. It is she leads him, not he who leads her, into the easier ways of love.
Yes, it is women who shape the souls of men as it is women who gave them birth.
That is why this view of the man’s responsibility in love being greater than the woman’s is so singularly untrue. If we inquire at all truthfully into this question of seduction, it is obvious that not the man but the woman is the more responsible. For one thing, she knows so much more about love, from the beginning, and without being taught, than a man ever knows. Most often it is the woman who takes the first step, breaks down the first barrier. Always there is the invitation which unceasingly she gives, whether consciously or unconsciously expressed—“Come and love me.”
Her dress, her movements—all invite love. To be provocative is however, little she knows it, the one fixed simple rule of her life. In the end, and indeed, sometimes very soon the position may be reversed, but at the start assuredly the woman holds the cards and can make the first move in the love-game. She is the pursuer, far more often and far more truly, than the pursued. Too often she directs a continuous attack.
Her relation to the man is comparable to that of a magnet to a heap of iron filings.
Love to a woman so often, when she is young, is less an affair of passion than of excitement. It gratifies her insatiable desire for power. The boy or the man more certainly is driven by love. This is his principal motive. While the girl often starts on the adventure for the sake of experiment and because she wants amusement. She pursues love almost as a game. Passion plays a part only in the second degree. Not infrequently, in the midst of love, the coldness of her heart is plainly apparent.
This may seem a hard saying. I believe it is true.
Seduction as the crime of the man alone cannot, I am convinced, be accepted, in any case without great caution. It is, as I have said several times already, so comfortable to place the sins of sex on men. But I doubt very much if any woman can be seduced against her will.
I must insist again that excitement and escape from dullness, as also the joy in receiving presents and having “a good time,” are the principal motives that first lead girls into illegal relations.
Sometimes it is worse than this.
Many women, seducers of men—women who draw men from their wives and their homes, and their duty, are nothing but cold experimentors. They are speculators in love. They do this for delight of power, in the same way as men are speculators in business.
Perhaps the position is unavoidable.
The subjection of man is a necessity to some women’s existence. Love is to them a similar feeling to love of the chase. They cannot keep from pursuing men. It is, as I have said, an expression of the ever increasing demand for excitement. Conquest in love gives to women the opportunities for the fulfilment of themselves, which men gain in many different departments of life.
But no man, I think, could satisfy completely the craving for dominion, which the delusive humility of his desire awakens in this type of woman. Then when she commits the error, from a womanly point of view, of hunting down her man; leading him on by helping him too much—seducing him, instead of waiting for him and drawing him slowly and unconsciously by her love, she awakens the same instinct for dominion and thirst for excitement in the man. It is then that the man becomes a seducer of other women. It is the lust to devour, to crush, quickened into being by suggestion. It explains, I believe, the cruelty of all wild love.