It would, of course, be absurd to censure woman too greatly for these frailties, and it would be very unjust to imply that all women share them.  Some women, in adapting themselves to the situation, follow apparently, a bent acquired in connection with the maternal instinct, and become true and devoted and grand to a degree hardly known by man.  Others, following a bent gotten along with coquetry in connection with the wooing instinct, and having no activity through which their behavior is standardized, become difficile, unreal, inefficient, exacting, unsatisfied, absurd.  And we have also the paradox that the same woman can be the two things at different times.  There is therefore a basis of truth in Pope’s hard saying that “Women have no characters at all.”  Because their problem is not to accommodate to the solid realities of the world of experience and sense, but to adjust themselves to the personality of men, it is not surprising that they should assume protean shapes.

Moreover, man is so affected by the charms of woman, and offers so easy a mark for her machinations, as to invite exploitation.  Having been evolved largely through the stimulus of the female presence, he continues to be more profoundly affected by her presence and behavior than by any other stimulus whatever, unless it be the various forms of combat.  From Samson and Odysseus down, history and story recognize the ease and frequency with which a woman makes a fool of a man.  The male protective and sentimental attitude is indeed incompatible with resistance.  To charm, pursue, court, and possess the female, involve a train of memories which color all after-relations with the whole sex.  In both animals and men there is an instinctive disposition to take a great deal off the female.  The male animal takes the assaults of the female complacently and shamefacedly, “just like folks.”  Peasants laugh at the hysterical outbreaks of their women, and the “bold, bad man” is as likely to be henpecked as any other.  Woman is a disturbing element in business and in school to a degree not usually apprehended.  In her presence a man instinctively assumes a different attitude.  He is, in fact, so susceptible as seemingly, almost, to want to be victimized, and, as Locke expressed the matter, “It is in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.”

This disposition of man and the detached condition of woman have much to do with the emergence of the adventuress and the sporting-woman.  Human nature was made for action; and perhaps the most distressing and disconcerting situation which confronts it is to be played on by stimulations without the ability to function.  The mere superinducing of passivity, as in the extreme case of solitary confinement, is sufficient to produce insanity; and the emotion of dread, or passive fear, is said to be the most painful of emotions, because there is no possibility of relief by action.  Modern woman is in a similar condition