Now, if this case had been reversed and a young schoolgirl had been the victim of a male relative, I am fairly confident the fact would not have been concealed. Girls, even if not wholly innocent, almost always will tell, because it has at all times been allowed to them to blame the man. They thus can count on sympathy. This means much more than usually is reckoned with.
Let me give a less tragic instance of a different and humourous character. A schoolboy, about seventeen years old, was waiting for a motor-bus in which he was going home. He was a dreamy boy and a bus came up and, lost in his thoughts, he did not take it. He was brought back to reality by a girl accosting him. “I waited, too,” she said. “You, are glad arn’t you? You would like me to go in the bus with you.”
She smiled up at him: but he was not to be caught.
“I don’t care, the hell, what you do as long as you don’t expect me to pay your fare!”
That silenced her and sent her away. But how easily, had the boy been a less confident type, the incident might have taken a different course. And then, if disaster had followed, the boy would be blamed, the girl would be pitied. There is an enormous amount of sex unfairness.
I could recount many further cases in proof of how almost always it is the girl (or the woman) who takes the first steps in forming these friendships. Men, at least, will know that I speak the truth. And yet this fiction of the greater virtue of the woman is persistently maintained: while the man is condemned as being nearer the devil and the beast.
I know that the many horrible cases of criminal assault upon children will be quoted against me, in proof of the justice of this heavy condemnation of men. Please do not think that I am in any way unaware of the awfulness of these crimes. The protection of little children is the one matter on which I feel most deeply. But there can be no fair comparison between this class of crime and the ordinary cases of seduction, whether we believe it is the man who seduces the woman, or the other way round, the woman who tempts and excites the boy or the man. In the one case an unhappy and terrible degenerate is passion-driven into the commission of an atrocity, in the other there is, and, indeed, must be to some extent, a mutual purpose, usually with some calculation and a certain deliberate choice.
That is why it is so false to reality to regard the one partner as a helpless victim. It is really a position that is impossible and ridiculous. Are we to believe that all women are impotent and imbecile weaklings incapable of resisting men? The truth is that in slandering men we only slander women with the backward swing of the same blow.