These misinterpretations, particularly in England and America, usually take one or all of the following forms:
(1) Miss A, the negative spinster in question, may regard herself, and be regarded by others, as above the ordinary impulses of her positive sister, so that she and others may draw a moral from her condition, and argue that, by means of exercising sufficient self-control, and preoccupying the mind sufficiently with “elevated” thoughts, the sex-impulse is easily overcome without any dire results whatsoever.
(2) Miss A may regard herself, and be regarded by others, as too “pure” for sexual impulses, so that, far from needing to repress or suppress the fleshy “demons” within her, she soars to an altitude too lofty to be reached by them.
(3) Miss A may regard herself, and be regarded by others, as indifferent to men, so that she is able to assume an attitude of philosophical detachment towards the main stream of Life, which she contemplates from a distance as a mildly amused and sometimes scoffing spectator.
(4) Miss A may convince herself, and convince others, that sex-impulses, because they do not happen to be noticeable in her, are a pure—or rather, an impure illusion. She may argue, and induce others to argue with her, that the power of these impulses is absurdly exaggerated by modern psychology, and that she herself is the best proof of this absurd exaggeration.
As I have pointed out, these misinterpretations are gross, and they are also dangerous. They are gross, in the first place, because they take no cognizance of the fact that Miss A is a different creature from her positive sister, an inferior and a less tonic creature, and secondly because they give what is really a lamentable condition a falsely enviable character by concealing its true nature beneath a number of high-falutin’ euphemisms.
This procedure is dangerous for the following reasons:
(a) The Miss A’s of this world, particularly of this English world, are increasing at such an alarming rate that very soon Miss A will be the normal woman, and by being held up as the normal woman and the normal ideal, will mislead the ignorant regarding the most valuable type of woman.
(b) To regard a person as above a normal human passion, when she is constitutionally and congenitally beneath it, is to lend a power and an influence to degenerates which must contaminate the national outlook on all that is desirable in life.
(c) To be deceived into imagining that Miss A has achieved by self-control what her inferior physique has made inevitable is again to grant her a quality which, by becoming associated with her type, loses all its instructional worth, besides attributing to her a spurious value.