In the union of the sexes each alike contributes to the common end, but in different ways.  From this diversity springs the first difference which may be observed between man and woman in their moral relations.  The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; the one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance.

When this principle is admitted, it follows that woman is specially made for man’s delight.  If man in his turn ought to be pleasing in her eyes, the necessity is less urgent, his virtue is in his strength, he pleases because he is strong.  I grant you this is not the law of love, but it is the law of nature, which is older than love itself.

If woman is made to please and to be in subjection to man, she ought to make herself pleasing in his eyes and not provoke him to anger; her strength is in her charms, by their means she should compel him to discover and use his strength.  The surest way of arousing this strength is to make it necessary by resistance.  Thus pride comes to the help of desire and each exults in the other’s victory.  This is the origin of attack and defence, of the boldness of one sex and the timidity of the other, and even of the shame and modesty with which nature has armed the weak for the conquest of the strong.

Who can possibly suppose that nature has prescribed the same advances to the one sex as to the other, or that the first to feel desire should be the first to show it?  What strange depravity of judgment!  The consequences of the act being so different for the two sexes, is it natural that they should enter upon it with equal boldness?  How can any one fail to see that when the share of each is so unequal, if the one were not controlled by modesty as the other is controlled by nature, the result would be the destruction of both, and the human race would perish through the very means ordained for its continuance?

Women so easily stir a man’s senses and fan the ashes of a dying passion, that if philosophy ever succeeded in introducing this custom into any unlucky country, especially if it were a warm country where more women are born than men, the men, tyrannised over by the women, would at last become their victims, and would be dragged to their death without the least chance of escape.

Female animals are without this sense of shame, but what of that?  Are their desires as boundless as those of women, which are curbed by this shame?  The desires of the animals are the result of necessity, and when the need is satisfied, the desire ceases; they no longer make a feint of repulsing the male, they do it in earnest.  Their seasons of complaisance are short and soon over.  Impulse and restraint are alike the work of nature.  But what would take the place of this negative instinct in women if you rob them of their modesty?