to love-making. Now, I am
very far from wishing to blame women; rather am I glad that what I have
asserted, for so long and against so much opposition, about the
elementary power of sex in women, has been vindicated by themselves.

Life for women so often has been wrong and discordant, and the
wretchedness has been greatly increased by the way we have left, in the
immediate past, the force of sex unregulated and unrecognized, thereby
causing much of the modern companionship of women with men, of girls
with boys, to be really a monstrous sham, maintained and made exciting
by false situations that often have closed around the two like a trap.

There are, and always have been, far more women and girls than we like
to acknowledge who are by their inclinations sexually promiscuous. It is
just conventional rot to talk of sex impulse being weaker and quite
different in women from men; of constancy as the special virtue of
women. Sometimes it is, but oftener it is not. It depends on the type of
woman. A great and possibly increasing number of girls to-day regard
love affairs in very much the same way as they are regarded by the
average sensual man, as enjoyable and exciting incidents of which they
are ashamed only when they are talked about and blamed. Such girls very
rarely give trouble to men or make scenes, they don't care enough; that,
I think, is why they always find lovers. It is also why it is easy for
them to have secret relations. With no sex-conscience, such girls, even
when quite young, exhibit a logic and a frankness that sometimes is
rather startling. They seem to have no modesty, though many of them are
prudes; they have no consciousness of responsibility; they feel no kind
of shame. Such libidinous temperaments have been common at all times
and in all societies, if in stricter periods so many women did not
follow their inclinations with the openness now so frequent, it was
simply out of fear; possibly they took more careful precautions against
discovery.

There are as well as these wantons, girls of a different type, who are
more contradictory and difficult because of a less simple sexuality, but
who are equally, even if not more, harmfully destructive in the utter
misery they often create. This is the type of girl who ripens to a
premature and too emotional sexuality, and who, though still keeping
herself physically intact, is spiritually corrupt. The spiritual
masochism of a woman may lead to depths of cruelt