Their Fastidiousness.
If women are not inhibited by moral law from what men deem wrong-doing, they often are by their fastidiousness—namely, when wrong-doing is at the same time gross and ugly (which is not nearly always the case). They have a genuine and profound appreciation of fineness, suavity and perfection. Neither is this, as men often assume, equivalent to the mere love of luxury. An indigent girl yields to a wealthy Don Juan not because he surrounds her with the comforts of riches but because he surrounds her with smoothness. She obtains a quite different and much finer satisfaction than he from his spacious silent motor car and from the polished restaurants to which he takes her. There is something hypnotic to her in the charm of elegance. The setting means a great deal to women, far more than men recognize. For while it does not matter so very much to them what they do, it matters tremendously how they do it. In this love of perfect setting they are undoubtedly right and centuries in advance of men. An act in itself—any act—is a bare and meagre thing; done fittingly, at the proper time, in a perfectly right setting, it draws upon the richness of a thousand seemly associations. Man’s world is the barren childish world of an African savage; it is hard to understand how women, who are civilized and grown-up, can endure it.
Their Maturity.
It is banal to say that men never grow up, but one should not be afraid to make a banal remark if it also happens to be true, and this, alas, is true without qualification. Men are hopeless babies. Not only do they delight in primitive things, but their whole attitude toward life is immature and absurd. They expect a great deal from life, and are hurt when they do not get it. You see them looking out at life with wide pained eyes, in precisely the same way a child looks out of the window at the rain that is spoiling his holiday.
Women expect a great deal less from life—once they have passed their spoiled girlhood, when they expect to receive everything and give nothing. They become disillusioned very early—as soon, in fact, as they have recognized men’s essential blundering stupidity and weakness. How else could it be with them, who know that they depend on men, yet know what men are? How can a woman look up to some one who, instead, looks up to her in the most infantile manner? The cave-man ideal is a very young girl’s ideal; the cave-man at home must be as helpless a baby as any other man. If a man has a canker on his tongue he fancies it a cancer; if he has catarrh from over-smoking he fancies it tuberculosis; if some little thing goes wrong with his house it appears to him an international catastrophe. Respect creatures of this sort? Lean on them? Broken reeds! Be kind to them, indulge them, pet them back into equanimity, yes; lean on them, no.
However, the disillusionment induced by a perception of men’s sorry nature is not sufficient to account for women’s mature attitude toward life. Indeed, one would expect it to result in their becoming embittered, soured, exasperated; whereas all civilized women are mellow, amazingly tolerant and—oh, just grown-up! I think this is because they do not start with ideals, see them go smash, and try wretchedly to build up other ideals from the fragments; because they do not believe in abstractions but only in facts. A man rejects the innumerable facts that will not fit into his abstractions; a woman rejects no facts at all. This makes her world far richer than his. And if it is not glorified, neither is it falsified, by the radiance of an ideal. A woman, in short, since she accepts everything, comes to know a vast deal more about life than a man. At the same time she is calmer about it. She does not credit this mass of material with any hidden meaning, and therefore does not worry herself irascible by trying helplessly to find one. Some scraps of the material are pleasant, some disagreeable, and it is all very interesting, so the more of it the better—only there is nothing to get excited about. I confess to admiring this attitude extremely. Theoretically it may be less noble than the masculine attitude, but it gets far better results, even on character, since it cultivates kindliness, tolerance and sympathy, grown-up virtues rare to find among idealists.
This matter (now, I trust, clear) of the respective youth and maturity of the sexes reveals a number of gross popular misconceptions. For example: a good many elderly women are attracted to young men, and all elderly men are attracted to young girls (though some of them conceal it). The former phenomenon is popularly considered ludicrous and pathetic, the latter something satyr-like, disgusting and corrupt. As a matter of fact, the two judgments should be reversed. There is, if just as much, no more sensuality in an elderly man’s feeling for a young girl than in a young man’s. He simply feels what he has always felt. He is still the callow sentimentalist that he was at twenty; he has not grown up. On the other hand, an elderly woman’s feeling for a young man is a thrilling incestuous combination of sensuality and motherliness.
The Unanswerable Riddle.
It has always pleased men, who are simply incorrigible, to find women (of whom they are apt to speak as ‘woman’) mysterious. I once knew a man who asserted that there was nothing more mysterious about women than about men (and God knew there was nothing mysterious about them!) except that every once in a while they went temporarily mad, at which moments no sensible man would pay any attention to them, insanity being without interest. There is something to be said for this simple estimate; still, women do seem to me to have one profound secret of which no explanation appears. Puzzled, I return to it again and again. How, in heaven’s name, can they put up with men—and why do they?
They do not need to. By now, vast multitudes of women have demonstrated that even in an economic world organized exclusively by men they can hold their own with the latter, and they have stripped from the puerile business of making money much of the silly hieratic pretence of importance with which men surrounded it. Almost any competent stenographer is dispassionately aware that she could run her employer’s business quite as well as he runs it, frequently better. And yet women continue to marry. Why do they? Any one who has tried both, knows that it is far easier, as well as more agreeable, to go to a nice, clean, quiet office for the day than to run a house, even with the supposed assistance of a servant or two; while, as for having a home, a woman could have one quite as well without a man, since she must make it in any case.